Obviously, there was a typo in the UN resolution approving NATO's operations in Libya. It was widely reported that the resolution authorized the establishment of a "no-fly" zone in Libya to protect civilians from being killed by military attack. However, it's clear now that what the international body really greenlighted was a "no-life" zone, designed to, er, kill people with, er, military attacks.

It's an easy mistake to make, really, transposing the "f" and "l" like that; a UN transcriptionist probably misheard the original intention, then mentally "corrected" it with the "y" to make it read in the more accustomed manner. Happens all the time.

In any case, a "no-life" zone is what we have in Libya, as the latest story of civilian casualties from NATO bombs makes clear. In this case, the slaughter was so open and egregious that NATO actually had to admit killing Libyan civilians for the first time; previously, we've been asked to believe that dumping tons of high explosives in the middle of a heavily populated city had not harmed the hair of a single innocent head.

(The three young grandchildren of Moamar Gadafy that were killed by NATO bombs last month obviously don't count - because, duh, they were kin to Gadafy! They bear the blood taint of evil. Stalin, who ruthlessly condemned family members of "enemies of the people," and Hitler, who killed anyone with the slightest tincture of Jewish blood in them, would no doubt be proud to see their rigorous standards of hygiene being adopted by the moral paragons of the "Western alliance.")

Yet even as the Nobel Peace Laureate and Constitutional law scholar continues a war in Libya that his own top legal advisers tell him is patently unlawful and unconstitutional, he is racheting up yet another illegal war that has already reaped a rich harvest of civilian deaths: in Yemen.

As Jason Ditz notes, the Peace Laureate is using the increasingly violent civil strife in Yemen as a cover for a vast expansion of his drone missile assassination program in that country. These attacks are ostensibly aimed at "eradicating" yet another handful of cranks calling themselves "al Qaeda;" the alleged involvement of this group in a couple of failed "terrorist actions" so ludicrous and inept (exploding underwear!) that a cynic might be tempted to say they were designed to fail is, evidently, a dire and imminent existential threat to the United States, requiring billions of dollars, thousands of missiles - and the lifeblood of hundreds of innocent people - to combat. So saith the Nobel Peace Prizewinner.

In the first half of June alone, the Peace Laureate killed at least 130 people in daily assaults with his big, bold, brave drone missiles, fired by big, bold, brave American operatives back in the States or at some other imperial installation hundreds or thousands of miles out of harm's way. Some of these attacks have been aimed at alleged members of the local AQ, including, of course, the American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been publicly condemned to death, without trial, for the crime of exercising his constitutional right to say stupid and hateful things. (Apply that stricture universally, and the entire American political class would be drone food.)

Other attacks have been aimed at - well, we don't know. We're not even sure if the CIA - the increasingly powerful and militarized Praetorian Guard in charge of this particular mass killing program - knows who most of the missiles are being aimed at. All we do know is that innocent people are being slaughtered in their dozens and hundreds by American missiles in Yemen.

Yet with that wise, far-seeing, 11th-dimensional chess brain that the Peace Laureate is famed for, he is already looking to the future. Now that the government upheaval in Yemen has deprived him of a reliable dictator to assist his illegal war of mass assassination, Obama has decided to build yet another secret base somewhere in the volatile region - at a cost of unknown secret billions - for the express purpose of escalating the Praetorian Guard's robotic killing spree.

There is no rhyme or reason to any of this. Regardless of the ever-shifting explanations our leaders offer - to the public, and, who knows, to themselves - the killing machine has long taken on a momentum of its own. They are now killing people - innocent people, around the world, every day - simply because they can do it. And because it's the only thing they know how to do, the only way they know how to maintain and extend the brutal domination of world affairs that the American ruling class believes is the sole purpose of our national existence. And because too many elites are making too much money from killing people. And because too many leaders are getting too much pleasure, and filling too many holes in their own crippled souls, from wielding an unaccountable power of life and death over the nations of the earth.

And no one will stop them because too many ordinary people, battered by too many years of the relentless class warfare that has hollowed out their lives and society, and by an endless tsunami of self-righteous, self-glorifying propaganda, have adopted the perverted values of the elite, and given up all notion of a common good or a common humanity, or else have been beaten and broken and driven into hopeless despair, as each turn of the political gyre makes things worse - more harsh, more brutal, more unfeeling, more insecure, more grating, more shallow, more hollow, more deadly, more corrupt.

Yet every day, at every turn, we are told by earnest progressives that we must support the leader of this system, a man who has entrenched and exacerbated its bloodiest and most brutal currents in almost every way. We must support, encourage, and enable assassination, slaughter, corruption and mass murder; we must, as I noted the other day, be prepared to tear small children into bloody pieces, day after day, for no other discernible reason than to preserve the unlawful, immoral domination of a bloodthirsty militarist elite. That's what it means to be a "progressive" today. (If you want to see this hideous argument demolished with remarkable power, eloquence and savage wit, read the latest posts from Arthur Silber here and here.) But there is nothing new in this. Even before the Peace Prizer was gifted with the laurel, his zeal, his love for the killing machine was evident. I'll close here with an excerpt from a piece written in September 2009 that describes where we were then - and, unfortunately, where we are now.

At some point earlier this month, Barack Obama took a moment out of his busy day to sign an "execute order." That is, he ordered American agents to kill a man without any legal procedure whatsoever: no arrest, no trial, no formal presentation - and disputation - of evidence, no defense and no warning. They killed him on the open road, in a sneak attack; he was not engaged in combat, he was not posing an imminent threat to anyone at the time, he had not been charged with any crime. This kind of thing is ordinarily regarded as murder. Certainly, if you or I killed someone in this way - or paid someone to do it - then we would find ourselves in the dock, facing life imprisonment or our own execution. But then, you and I are subject to the law; our leaders are not.

Let's say it again, just to let the reality of the situation sink in a bit further: at some point last week, Barack Obama ordered men in his employ to murder another human being. And not a single voice of protest was raised anywhere in the American political and media establishments. Churchmen did not thunder from the pulpits about this lawless action. The self-proclaimed patriots and liberty-lovers on the ever-more militant Right did not denounce this most extreme expression of state tyranny: the leader's arbitrary power to kill anyone he pleases. It is simply an accepted, undisputed fact of American life today that American leaders can and do - and should - murder people, anywhere in the world, if they see fit. When this supreme tyranny is noted at all, it is simply to celebrate the Leader for his toughness -- or perhaps chide him for not killing even more people in this fashion.

I wrote a great deal about this theme when George W. Bush was president. I began back in November 2001, after the Washington Post reported that Bush had signed an executive order giving himself the power to order the killing of anyone he arbitrarily designated a terrorist. Year after year, I wrote of how this murderous edict was put into practice around the world, and of its virulently corrosive effects on American society. Now Barack Obama is availing himself of these same powers. There is not one crumb, one atom, one photon of difference between Obama and Bush on this issue. They both believe that the president of the United States can have people killed outside of any semblance of a judicial process: murdered, in cold blood, in sneak attacks, with any "collateral damage" regarded as an acceptable by-product - just like the terrorists they claim to be fighting with these methods.

Nor does this doctrine of presidential murder make any distinction between American citizens and foreigner. Indeed, one of the first people known to have been killed in this way was an American citizen living in Yemen. So let us put the reality in its plainest terms: if the president of the United States decides to call you a terrorist and kill you, he can. He doesn't have to arrest you, he doesn't have to charge you, he doesn't have to put you on trial, he doesn't have to convict you, he doesn't have to sentence you, he doesn't have to allow you any appeals: he can just kill you. And no one in the American power structure will speak up for you or denounce your murder; they won't even see that it's wrong, they won't even consider it remarkable. It's just business as usual. It's just the way things are done. It's just the way we are now.

....The murder will also serve as lesson for would-be terrorists around the world - the same lesson that the War on Terror has been teaching day after day, year after year, from the day it was launched by George W. Bush to its continuance and expansion by Barack Obama today. That lesson is stark and simple: Murder works. Murder is the way to advance your agenda. Murder is what "serious" players on the world stage do. There is no law but the law of power; there is no way but the way of violence. There is no morality, there is no liberty, we share no common humanity.

This is the example that America now sets for the world. This is what we teach our children - and the children of our victims. This is what Barack Obama affirmed once again when he signed his "execute order."

"I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him," said Dr. Martin Luther King as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. These words will guide me and other passengers aboard the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, a fleet of nine boats scheduled to set sail for Gaza on June 25 from various Mediterranean ports. While the Israelis try to label us provocateurs, terrorists and Hamas supporters, we are simply nonviolent advocates following the teachings of Dr. King. We refuse to sit at the docks of history and watch the people of Gaza suffer.

The U.S. boat, which will carry 50 Americans, is called The Audacity of Hope. It is named after Obama's bestselling political autobiography in which he lauds our collective audacity of striving to become a better nation. But I prefer to think of our boat as part of Dr. King's legacy. He, too, talked about audacity, about his audacious faith in the future. "I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him," Dr. King said.

Our intrepid group has its moral compass aimed at the way things ought to be. Our cargo is not humanitarian aid, as some of the other ships are carrying, but thousands of letters from the U.S. people, letters of compassion, solidarity and hope written to people living in the Gaza Strip. We travel with what Dr. King called

"unarmed truth and unconditional love."

We focus on Gaza because since 2007 the Israeli government has enforced a crippling blockade on its 1.5 million residents. Inflicting collective punishment on civilians is morally wrong and is a gross violation of international humanitarian law under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Yet the world's democracies do nothing to stop Israel's extraordinarily cruel behavior, and in fact did nothing for 22 days in 2009 while the Israel military unleashed a tidal wave of carnage that left 1,400 Palestinians dead. They continue to sit by while the people of Gaza remain isolated and unable to secure access to building materials and basic living supplies, and while Israeli soldiers shoot at Gaza's farmers trying to till their land along the border and attack fisherman trying to make a living in waters off their shore. And in the case of the United States, our government is not simply sitting by, but supporting the Israeli military with $3 billion in military aid a year.

The Palestinians' plea for help has been ignored by world governments, but it has pricked the conscience of civil society. Caravans have crisscrossed Europe and Africa, carrying tons of aid. Boats have braved Israeli war ships and tried to dock in Gaza's ports. Over 1,000 people joined the Gaza Freedom March, an attempt to break the siege that was brutally stopped by Egyptian police during the rule of Hosni Mubarak.

In May, 2010, seven ships and nearly 700 passengers carrying humanitarian aid tried to breach Israel's naval blockade. The Israeli military violently intercepted the ships, killing nine passengers aboard the Turkish boat, including a 19-year-old American citizen. The rest of passengers were roughed up, arrested, thrown in Israeli prisons, and deported.

For a brief moment, this tragedy in international waters focused the world spotlight on Gaza. Israel said it would ease the draconian siege, allowing more goods to enter the beleaguered strip. But just this month, the health authorities in Gaza proclaimed a state of emergency due to an acute shortage of vital medicines and also this month, a report from the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, found unemployment in Gaza at a staggering 45.2 percent, among the highest in the world. UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said the number of abject poor living on just over one dollar a day has tripled to 300,000 since the blockade was imposed in 2007. "It is hard to understand the logic of a man-made policy which deliberately impoverishes so many and condemns hundreds of thousands of potentially productive people to a life of destitution," Gunness said.

Hopes inside Gaza were buoyed by the Egyptian revolution. A groundswell of grassroots solidarity by Egyptians pushed the new government to announce that it would open its border with Gaza. But that promise remains elusive, as thousands are still blocked from crossing, and all imports and exports must still pass through the Israeli side. Israel remains the warden for the world's largest open-air prison. It continues to decide what goods can enter, what exports can come out, and which people can get exit visas. It continues to control Gaza's electricity, water supply, airspace and access to the Mediterranean.

Although the Israelis know that our boats will not carry arms and we, the passengers, are committed to nonviolence, they have nonetheless vowed to stop us with a dizzying array of force-water cannons, commandos, border police, snipers, and attack dogs from the military's canine unit.

Equally astonishing is the U.S. government's reaction. Instead of demanding safe passage for unarmed U.S. citizens participating in what passenger and writer Alice Walker calls the Freedom Ride of our era," the State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner has labeled our actions "irresponsible and provocative" and the U.S. government has joined Israel in strong-arming countries in the Mediterranean to prevent us from sailing.

This pressure is having an impact. At the urging of the Turkish government, our flagship, the Mavi Marmara, the same ship that was so violently attacked last year, recently announced that it will not be joining the flotilla. The Mavi Marmara was going to carry 500 people; its absence cuts our numbers in half. And there may be more ships forced to drop out.

All this bullying, however, only strengthens our resolve. We may be fewer boats, we may have fewer passengers, we may be threatened with violence, but we will sail. And if the Israelis intercept our boats, we call on people around the world to gather at Israeli embassies and consulates to express their outrage.

As we know, President Obama and his team do not appear to be very effective negotiators when it comes to dealing with the Republicans in Congress. Last December, the Republicans forced the president to renew the Bush tax cuts for the rich. More recently, they got him to make $38 billion in cuts to the 2011 budget even though all his economists know that the economy actually needs more stimulus, which more means spending.

Since the president is having so much trouble dealing with the Republicans, the rest of us should lend him a hand. One way we can do this is by etching out what the end game looks like in the battle over raising the debt ceiling.

As it stands now, we are being told that the Republicans are insisting that there will be no increase in the debt ceiling without large cuts to the budget. Since the Republicans won't go along with any major cuts to the military budget, this means big cuts to the rest of the budget.

These cuts would have to include cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and possibly Social Security as well, since everything else in the non-military portion of the budget does not amount to much. According to this story, President Obama might be forced to make major cuts to the core social insurance programs in order to prevent the disaster of a debt default that would result from not raising the debt ceiling.

However the actual picture is a bit different. There is no doubt that the failure to raise the debt ceiling would be very bad news for the economy. If the government had to default on its debt, it would shake the financial markets even more than the collapse of Lehman in September of 2008. We would see a freeze-up of lending and companies would be forced to dump millions of workers, as they could no longer meet their payrolls.

But, even in this disaster scenario, there would still be a tomorrow. In other words, after the financial crisis, the economy would still be there. We would still have the same capital stock, infrastructure, skilled work force and state of technical knowledge as we did the day before the crisis. The government and the Federal Reserve Board would have the power to reflate the economy to get it back on its feet just as they did when they engaged in the massive spending needed to fight World War II.

While the country will still be left standing following a debt default, there is one important sector that will not be standing: Wall Street. A debt default would almost certainly make all the major banks insolvent as they would have to mark down the value of US government debt, which had been held as a completely safe asset. The loss of value would also apply to all the assets backed by the government, such as the mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Even when the economy revived, the US financial sector would never hold the same place in the world as it does today. Without the ironclad financial backing of the US government standing behind them, the Wall Street gang could never again be the dominant actor in international financial markets.

This fact is essential in understanding the endgame on the debt ceiling. Suppose that we get to the dates in August when the Treasury has reached the limit of its ability to shuffle accounts and literally can no longer pay its bills. Secretary Geithner will at that point make an announcement that in three days there is an X billion payment on Treasury bonds coming due. He will say that the government does not have the money in the bank and will, therefore, have to miss this payment.

The markets will then go into turmoil. We will see the same sort of plunge in the stock market that we saw when the House voted down the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) the first time back in September of 2008. At that point, the Wall Street boys will be screaming their heads off at Speaker Boehner and the rest of the Republican leadership. The news media would all be running clips with depression footage, telling us that another Great Depression looms just around the horizon.

In this context, the Republicans will do exactly what they did with the TARP. They will cut deals, make the threats and do whatever else is necessary to round up the votes needed to raise the debt ceiling.

When everyone remembers that this is what the endgame looks like, they will realize that there is no need to put essential programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the chopping block to get Republican support for raising the debt ceiling. The gun is pointed most directly at Wall Street's head, and this incredibly powerful lobby is not going to let Congress pull the trigger.

Tim DeChristopher is scheduled to be sentenced in a Salt Lake City courtroom by U.S. District Judge Dee Benson on July 26. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $750,000 fine for fraudulently bidding in December 2008 on parcels of land, including areas around eastern Utah's national parks, which were being sold off by the Bush administration to the oil and natural gas industry. As Bidder No. 70, he drove up the prices of some of the bids and won more than a dozen other parcels for $1.8 million. The government is asking Judge Benson to send DeChristopher to prison for four and a half years.

His prosecution is evidence that our moral order has been turned upside down. The bankers and swindlers who trashed the global economy and wiped out some $40 trillion in wealth amass obscene amounts of money, much of it provided by taxpayers. They do not go to jail. Regulatory agencies, compliant to the demands of corporations, refuse to impede the destruction unleashed by the coal, oil and natural gas companies as they turn the planet into a hothouse of pollutants, poisoned water, fouled air and contaminated soil in the frenzied quest for greater and greater profits. Those who manage and make fortunes from pre-emptive wars, embrace torture, carry out extrajudicial assassinations, deny habeas corpus and run up the largest deficits in human history are feted as patriots. But when a courageous citizen such as DeChristopher peacefully derails the corporate and governmental destruction of the ecosystem, he is sent to jail.

"The rules are written by those who profit from the status quo," DeChristopher said when I reached him by phone this weekend in Minneapolis. "If we want to change that status quo we have to step outside of those rules. We have to put pressure on those within the political system to choose one side or another."

DeChristopher, whose defense is being assisted by the website Peaceful Uprising, knew the government would be auctioning off public land in a sale in Salt Lake City, where he had gone to college. He knew it was wrong. He knew he had to do something. But he did not know what. So he did what all of us should begin to do. He showed up.

"I went there with the intention of standing in the way of the auction," he told me. "I had no idea what that would look like. I thought I might give a speech or yell something. It was right after the guy threw a shoe at Bush. That was on my mind. I went there and at the front desk they said, 'Would you like to be a bidder?' I said, 'Yes, I would.' I was still thinking when I signed up, 'OK, I'll sign up to be a bidder so I can get inside and make a speech.' It wasn't until I got inside the auction room that I saw I had a huge opportunity to stand in the way of the auction. I had been preparing myself over the course of 2008 in a general way to take that level of action. I had been building up that commitment. I was looking for the opportunity at that point. I was ready to capitalize on it. I had prepared myself for it."

But what he had not prepared himself for was the way the justice system would be stacked against him. It became clear during the selection of the jury that he did not stand a chance. As the prospective jurors entered the court, activists handed them a pamphlet printed by the Fully Informed Jury Association. It said that jurors had a right to come to any decision based on the evidence and their consciences.

"When the judge and the prosecutor found that out, the prosecutor, especially, flipped his shit," DeChristopher said. "He insisted that the judge tell the jurors that this information was not true. The judge pulled most of the jurors in[to] the chambers and questioned them one at a time. He talked about what was in the pamphlet. He said that regardless of what the pamphlet said it was not their job to decide if this is right or wrong, but to listen to what he said was the law and follow that even if they thought it was morally unjust. They were not allowed to use [their] conscience. They were told they would be violating their oath if they decided this on conscience rather than the evidence that he told them to listen to. I was sitting in that chamber and could see one person after another accept this notion. I could see it in their faces, that they had to do what they were told even if they thought it was morally unjust. That is a scary thing to witness in another human being. I saw it in one person after another brought in the courtroom, sitting at the end of a long table in front of the paternalistic figure of [the] judge with all the majesty around him. They accepted it. They did not question it. It gave me a really good understanding of how some of the great human atrocities happened with the consent of the population, that people can accept what is happening, that it is not their job to question whether any of this is right or wrong."

As the trial began, the judge refused to let DeChristopher's defense team inform the jury that the auction was later overturned and declared illegal. The judge also refused to let the defense team inform the jury that DeChristopher had raised the money for the initial payment and offered it to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which then refused to accept it.

"We weren't able to tell the jury either of those things,"he said. "They never knew that the auction was overturned. They never knew I offered the BLM the money. They were told over and over by the judge they were not allowed to use their conscience. When the verdict came it was not a surprise."

"When our Founding Fathers created the jury system they called it the best defense against legislative tyranny," he said. "They expected that if the government was passing laws that were out of line with the values of the community, then people would break those laws and take their case before a jury of their peers who would decide whether or not that person's actions were justified. That was the system our country was founded upon. That shifted radically as the role of the jury has been minimized in our criminal justice system. Juries are no longer given the opportunity to weigh all the factors of a case and are specifically told they are not allowed to use their conscience. It is not their job to decide if things are right or wrong. This is a drastic departure from the system that was originally created in this country."

When I asked DeChristopher why he did not work within the system, perhaps by backing a progressive Democrat, he answered that "if there was such a thing I might consider it."

"I don't see anyone in our political system advocating for significant change," he said. "I haven't ignored the political system. I paid attention when the Waxman-Markey [cap and trade] bill was being debated. I saw that there was a Republican amendment that if energy prices in any region of the country ever go up by more than 10 percent the whole bill is null and void. In other words, if the survival of our children ever costs more than about $300 a year per household, we are going to stop and give up. Both sides debated for over an hour whether it would or not ever cost $300. But there was no one who ever stood up and said maybe the cost was worth it, maybe that was too low a price to put on the heads of your children, maybe it was immoral to put any price on the heads of our children. There was no one standing up and addressing the severity of climate change."

DeChristopher helped organize a grass-roots campaign in an unsuccessful effort to unseat five-term U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson of Utah.

"I saw after the experience with the Waxman-Markey bill that our Blue Dog Democrats in Utah had to go," he said. He worked for candidate Claudia Wright in a campaign that split the delegate vote and forced a runoff primary.

"There is value in working within the democratic system, but first we need to create a democratic system," he said. "When we ran Claudia Wright it started with a Craig's List 'help wanted' ad for a 'Courageous Congressperson.' We pulled together a panel of longtime activists who were well respected in Utah representing various issues, from environmental issues to peace and justice to LGBT rights, labor, immigration rights and health care. That panel held public interviews at the Salt Lake City Library with all the people who had applied to the Craig's List ad. Everybody from the district was invited and got to vote in instant runoff voting. That is how we came up with that candidate. We started from scratch."

"If we were going to have a democracy, what would it look like? That was one experiment," he said. "Craig's List is probably not the ultimate answer. But we started from the acknowledgement that if we want to work within the democratic process we had to build it first."

DeChristopher, who is 29, admits he was "cautiously optimistic" during the 2008 presidential campaign.

"I saw that nothing Obama was saying was actually good enough in terms of the climate crisis," he said. "There was a faint hope in me that perhaps he was saying what he needed to say to get elected and then he would turn out to actually be a progressive."

He heard Naomi Klein give a talk shortly before the election. She told her listeners that if Barack Obama was a centrist and the center was not good enough to defend our survival then our job was to move the center.

"That resonated with me," DeChristopher said. "That was where my thinking at the time was. We as a movement had to move the center. That is another reason I turned to civil disobedience. I was looking to do something beyond what was considered acceptable to shift those boundaries, to create more space where people could be more aggressive without being on the radical edge."

"The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said what we do in the next two or three years will determine our future, and he said that in 2007 and we didn't do anything," he said. "A lot of folks like Jim Hansen admit it off the record, but won't say it publicly, that it is actually too late for any amount of emission reductions to prevent some sort of collapse of our industrial civilization. That certainly doesn't mean all is lost. It means we are in a position where we are definitely going to be navigating the most intense period of change humanity has ever seen. What that means for us is that it really matters who is in charge during that intense period of change. It means that things are going to be desperate."

"Generally in desperate times those in power do desperate things to hold on to their power in the name of order and security," he went on. "That is when things have gotten really ugly in the localized examples of collapse that we have in history, whether they were economically induced as in Germany in the 1930s or environmentally induced as in Darfur. Rather than an opportunity for mass reflection, which it could be, where we could say we had this coming because of fundamental flaws in the way we structured our society, that maybe greed and competition were not the best values to base everything off of, rather than doing that, it is much more common in those historical examples to say, 'Oh, it was because of those people.' A class of people was scapegoated. The powerful said, 'Those are the people who are causing our problems and if we take it out on them we can maintain order and security for the rest of us.' That is when things get really ugly and dehumanizing."

"We are starting to see hints of that already with the rather minor ripples that we have been having in the past few years with the economic situation," he said. "Rather than admit the fundamental flaws, many of those in power have said, 'Oh, it is because of those immigrants that are taking people's jobs, or those Arabs, or those unions, whoever the scapegoat is, to try and vilify someone. What we are on track for are much larger ripples than we have had in the past couple years with the economic problems. If we go into that collapse with our current power structure and a world run by corporations, where we have ignorant and apathetic people who are afraid of their own government and think their job is to do what they are told, even if they think it is immoral, that is when things can get really ugly. If we go into that collapse with an awakened and educated population that views it as their role to create the society they want and hold their government accountable then we have the opportunity, whatever hardships we might face, to actually build a better world on the ashes of this one."

"Our strategies must be to not only change our energy system and food system, but to change our power structures," he said. "We shouldn't be looking for the big corporations running the show to become a little greener and cleaner. We should be overthrowing those corporations running our government. Our job as a movement is not just to reduce emissions; while we still need to do that, we also have this other challenge of maintaining our humanity through whatever challenges lie ahead. This is much more abstract and foreign to this movement."

"Civil disobedience puts us in a vulnerable position," DeChristopher said. "It puts us in a position where we are refusing to be obedient to injustice. Civil disobedience puts us in a position where we are making a risk and possibly making a sacrifice to stand up against that injustice. It also puts us in a position where with that vulnerability we see how much we need other people. This is something I have experienced over the past few years as people have come out of nowhere to support me, to make actions more powerful and to help me personally get through this experience and grow from it. Appreciating these connections is one of the most important parts of resiliency. A lot of the unwillingness to take bold action is coming from a disempowerment that comes from a lack of connection. When we view ourselves as isolated individuals it does not make sense to stand up to a big powerful institution like a big corporation or big government. It is not until we gain the understanding that we are part of something much bigger that we feel empowered to take those necessary actions. This is a self-reinforcing cycle. The more we stick our neck out the more connected we become and the more empowered we become to do it again."

DeChristopher, who attends a Unitarian church in Salt Lake City, comes out of the religious left. This left, defined by Christian anarchists such as Dorothy Day, Philip Berrigan and his brother Father Daniel Berrigan, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King, takes a moral stance not because it is always effective but because it is right, because to live the moral life means that there is no alternative. This life demands a commitment to justice no matter how bleak the future appears. And what sustains DeChristopher is what sustained the religious radicals who went before him-faith.

"The connection to a religious community for me is a big part of the empowerment," he said. "From talking with a lot of the old Freedom Riders and other folks in the civil rights movement, it was in the church community that people found the strength and the faith that, no matter what happened to them when they sat at that lunch counter or got on that bus, there would be another wave of people coming behind them to take their place and another wave behind that and behind that. And that is part of what is missing from the progressive community today. Part of my belief system is an appreciation of our connectedness to the natural world, the interconnected web of life of which I am a part. I am not an isolated individual, and this understanding is what empowers me, but also in a more direct way in that I am connected to the church community who I knew would support me. Sitting in that auction when I was deciding to do this I was thinking about whether anyone would support me. The people I knew would have my back were in the church. That helped drive me to action."

And because of that he understands that any resistance can never succumb to the temptation of violence.

"Violence is the realm our current power structure is really good at," he said. "They are eager to play that game. Any opportunity we give them [to use violence], they will win. That is the game they win at. The history of social movements in this country shows that we are far more powerful with nonviolent civil disobedience than we are with what our audience considers to be violence."

Barack Obama's plan for a limited withdrawal from Afghanistan means tens of thousands of American troops will remain there, many of them fighting, for several years to come.MO< In his speech Wednesday night, the president announced he will reduce the U.S. fighting force in Afghanistan by 10,000 by the end of this year and a total of 33,000 by September 2012. After that, he said, "our troops will be coming home at a steady pace as Afghan Security Forces move into the lead. Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete."

Nowhere did he pledge that all the personnel would be brought home by that 2014 date.

Nor did he mention that 68,000 service personnel will remain in Afghanistan after September 2012. In addition, according to the Congressional Research Office, 18,919 "private security contractors" working for the Defense Department will also be serving in Afghanistan, performing duties seemingly indistinguishable from those done by servicemen and women.

That means that after the pullout more than 86,000 personnel will remain engaged in fighting or the vague "support" duties cited by the president. They will add to the human and economic toll of a war that has killed, according to the website iCasualties, 1,632 American troops and wounded 11,191. The financial cost is now more than $426 billion. With the Iraq War added in, the figure reaches $1.2 trillion.

Although Obama's speech was no cause for celebration, there were some pluses. The troop reduction was more substantial than the much smaller cuts advocated by outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the military command. Obama said the United States would negotiate with the Taliban if they "break from al-Qaida, abandon violence and abide by the Afghan constitution." It's doubtful that these conditions can be met, especially given the Taliban's opposition to equal rights for women, part of the Afghan constitution. But at least we may be at the table with them.

Obama had a positive but not triumphal tone, saying the United States "is starting this drawdown from a position of strength."

Actually, he is starting it from a position of weakness.

Although the war has been pretty much ignored by cable news and much of the rest of the mainstream media, apparently the American people have a different view. Around the country, local papers and television stations as well as NPR told the story of its human cost in interviews with survivors of dead servicemen and women and with stories about the wounded survivors.

Some media pundits say people don't care, that the fighting by U.S. volunteers is remote to them. But those volunteers have families. And many of them are in the National Guard, pulled from home and jobs by repeated deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. These National Guard women and men and their families, friends, neighbors and work colleagues make up a formidable network.

The latest poll by the Pew Research Center indicates how public opinion has changed. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed this month wanted us out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. That compares with 33 percent in a September 2008 Pew survey.

Then there's the high unemployment that Obama has not been able to end. As he spoke, the figure was 9.1 percent. Among those who make up that percentage are a substantial number of long-term unemployed. Their travail, and that of their families, has resonated through cities and towns. Why, they ask, is the nation sacrificing young people and wasting money in Afghanistan when our own economy is suffering and we can't find work?

These feelings have finally reached Washington and the political elite. Now Democrats and Republicans are drifting away from supporting the war or ignoring it.

That is why Obama adopted the rhetoric of war critics in his speech. "Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times," he said. "Now we must invest in America's greatest resource, our people. We must unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industry, while living within our means. We must rebuild our infrastructure and find new and clean sources of energy. America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home."

Rebuilding America means repairing freeways, constructing rail lines, restoring parks, adequately financing public schools, reducing home foreclosures, and assisting the cities and counties that have been forced to lay off workers ranging from police officers to trash collectors. And that's just a start.