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The ruling elite has created social institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance.

The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming, which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago, has been confronted by the power elite with two kinds of self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false. There are others who accept the science surrounding global warming but insist that the human species can adapt. Our only salvation-the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry-is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted pied pipers and fools.

On Thursday night, with police massing after a surprise march and several arrests, Liberty Plaza had a visitor: Ivan Marovic of the Serbian resistance movement Otpor!, which helped bring down Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Joined by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno from The Yes Men, he made a speech expressing his solidarity with the occupiers and reminded them that the world is, indeed, watching. Afterward, while talking with some of the occupation's organizers, he suggested how to take a different approach in encounters with the police.

When I first began writing about politics in late 2005, the standard liberal blogosphere critique -- one I naively believed back then -- was that Democrats were capitulating so continuously to the Bush agenda because they "lacked spine" and were inept political strategists: i.e., they found those policies so very offensive but were simply unwilling or unable to resist them.  It became apparent to me that this was little more than a self-soothing conceit: Democrats continuously voted for Bush policies because they were either indifferent to their enactment or actively supported them, and were owned and controlled by the same factions as the GOP.