This story has been getting a lot of ink in the Chicago Tribune, once a great newspaper, now just a cost-cutting excuse to sell advetising space to idiots, like those in our household, who are willing to pay the Trib to have their ads delivered on our driveway every morning about 4:30 am.
There are allegations, made by women, who are identified by name, that Cain groped them in automobiles. Cain's wife is disgusted by the allegations. Both women named are registered Republicans. The one who has not gotten an out-of-court settlement can't seem to go anywhere without the papers reporting the number of bankruptcies she has filed, as if the number of bankruptcies she has filed has ANYTHING in the world to do with whether or not this serial groper groped her. This women is engaged to a man in whose home she is living, with her 13-year old child, who was apparently born out of wedlock. Her husband is very supportive of her for telling this fairly sordid, but too 'oft repeated story, of how an attractive woman, having lost her job, gets inspired by an inspirational speaker who happens to be the owner of a very large and successful company, as well as an executive with the National Restuarant Association.
At an NRA dinner, she was so impressed with him, that she took the time to talk with him, and tell her story, in the hopes that he might be able to help her get a job. While in the car, he forced himself on her, acting like the typical male pig, for whom the thinking goes like this:
Hot chick digs me.
Hot chick wants something from me.
Hot chick hopes I can get her a job.
Sure, hot chick, I can get you a job.
But, hey hot chick, you know you WANT me.
Because I'm a REAL MAN.
So, here, because you want me,
Let me put my hand up your dress
to fondle your genitals,
and let me put my other hand
on your head, to better guide it
while you give me some head.
Quid pro quo, hey baby!
Interesting scenario, and as I said, one that plays out often enough. Although, hopefully, neither of them was driving, which leads me to conclude that SOMEWHERE out there is a limo driver who knows enough about the facts of this story to confirm or deny one way or the other, BUT, since Cain undoubtedly paid for the limo, unless the guy says, "Yeah he groped her and tried to make her suck his dick," his story will be tainted by the guy who's got the big green.
Let's logic this out. The woman has an attorney. Her fiance has a good job, that pays decent bucks, and can afford the nice house he is living in, where she stays, now a stay-at-home mom, which is probably a great deal for her (don't we all wish every mom who wanted to be a stay-at-home mom could be; it would go a long ways towards bringing back some balance into the lives of children, many of whom only see their parents at supper time, and even then, not for too long at all). The attorney ought to be competent, and ought to have adivsed this woman that she will be subject to much media scrutinty, that her child will learn of this, that her family, friends, relatives, will learn of this; that she will be dragged through the mud by a very powerful, wealthy, and likely vindictive man whose political career is about to explode in his face. It will be very painful, very stressful, a very trying time.
And yet, knowing this going in, she goes ahead, tells her story, and allows herself to be identified.
All the while, the newspaper and the TV news keep harping about her bankruptcies, some of which are recent.
About those bankruptcies. I'd really like to know the names of the banks and/or savings and loans that gave her the damn loans in the first place (with her history of defaulting and declaring bankruptcy). THIS to me is the REAL STORY, the subtext. What in the world induced her loan officers to give her the bank's money?
Well, we can fairly well logic this out too. She is an attractive woman, dresses nicely, speaks well. Face it, she's hot. She has also undoubtedly learned how to use her female charms to flatter men, to make them feel as if she appreciates them, likes them, perhaps for more than merely their place in her life as a loan officer; perhaps, if they do this thing for this hot chick, she will put out for them later on.
Guys, we THINK like this, and we take eye-to-eye contact, and a woman being comfortable in our presence as a SIGN, a SIGNAL, "She likes me; she thinks I'm hot; she WANTS ME!"
Face it, guys, we cam be PIGS in this arena.
Nobody teaches the class on "How to deal with a hot chick that gets your dick-to-twitchin' while she tries to advance her career or her life-style but she doesn't want your advances, just what you can do to help her 101."
Vivacious, attractive, even flirty women grab out attention. Hell, vivacious, attractive women grab our attention. HELL, WOMEN grab our attention. Even Jimmy Carter had "lust in his heart." (I do not find credible the alleged words of Jesus of Nazareth, "even if you have lust in your heart, you have been unfaithful to your wife," UNLESS, he was just making an observation - hey dawg, you see that fine female stuff and you would risk everything in a heart beat for somethin' that ain't gonna be real, and ain't gonna last more than a couple of minutes, GROW UP, Y'ALL."
So, should we the people hold it against Cain that he's a serial groper? AND, if you think about it for any length of time at all, he might NOT EVEN REMEMBER IT, because, this was the National Restuarant Association's dinner, and, be assured, the drinks were flowing to over-flowing, and the guy WAS NOT SOBER, and may in fact not even remember (putting the most charitable construction on all that he does, here). Which just makes him a drunken serial groper.
So, does this disqualify him from potentially beind POTUS?
Hell, we've had nothing but war criminals in the Office of the President of the United States since Kennedy, and it doesn't seem to bother us at all.
Personally, I'd rather have a drunken serial groper who would STOP ALL THE WARS. At least he just leaves psychic wounds. This would be a splendid improvement in the human condition around the world.
DO NOT LET CAIN'S SERIAL GROPING PREVENT YOU FROM VOTING FOR HIM IF YOU LIKE THE REST OF HIS POLITICS!
NOVEMBER 09, 2011
His name was on the lips of everyone I talked with in South Korea last week. As an underdog with little name recognition but a long history of progressive organizing, he came from behind late last month to become the new mayor of Seoul.
Remember his name. Park Won Soon is perhaps the first politician to win with an Occupy Wall Street platform.
A founder of the watchdog organization People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), Park has been a key leader in Korea’s vibrant civil society. After a couple decades as a political gadfly, he is now in a seat of considerable power. And people are talking about him not only for the positions he staked out as an independent candidate, which focused on social welfare issues, but for the potential of his victory to transform Korean politics in 2012. The implications for South Korea’s relations with the North, with its other neighbors, and with the United States are enormous.
I met Park Won Soon more than a decade ago, when he was just starting to think beyond PSPD. Korean civil society activists are always working, always networking and multitasking, and they sometimes joke that they only take vacations when hospitalized for exhaustion. Park, on the other hand, always struck me as exceptionally serene. The names of the organizations he built after PSPD — the grant-making Beautiful Foundation and a think tank called the Hope Institute — reflect his optimistic disposition and his desire not just to change Korean politics but to transform Korea’s overall sago bangshik, or way of thinking. He also possesses tremendous powers of persuasion. Once he even convinced the top South Korean steel company POSCO to underwrite fellowships for civil society activists to study in the United States. Try to imagine a similar partnership between Chrysler and Moveon.org.
This former watchdog now runs a city of over 10 million people, larger than Tokyo or Mexico City or any city in the United States. Seoul is responsible for almost 50 percent of the country’s GDP (New York, by comparison, is responsible for about 8 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product, Beijing about 3 percent of China’s). So, essentially, Park Won Soon is in charge of a mid-sized country, minus the foreign and military policy. Given Seoul’s disproportionate weight, the mayoralty is a political stepping stone, and one of Park’s predecessors in the job, Lee Myung-Bak, is now the conservative president of the country.
But Park Won Soon is not a career politician. He is more interested in the delivery of services, particularly to the less advantaged. “We must make sure no one is sleeping cold and hungry under the skies of Seoul,” he told his staff. On his first day in office, Park expanded the free lunch programto all elementary school children, a major commitment to universal entitlements that will ensure support across class lines. His effort to reduce university tuition at the publicly funded University of Seoul is a big thank-you to the huge number of young people that supported his campaign. He has been skeptical about a number of high-profile infrastructure programs in Seoul, preferring to focus on building more public housing. And he has pledged to increase social welfare spending in order to reduce economic inequality.
Rising inequality, which has spurred the growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its spread worldwide, has been a major problem in South Korea. For instance, the country ranks an impressive 15th in the world in the UN’s Human Development Index. But if income inequality is factored in, it drops to the 32nd position, a loss in rank exceeded only by the United States and Colombia. By decrying this inequality and labeling his opponent a member of the 1 percent, Park may be the first politician to rise to power in the Occupy Wall Street era – and he won’t be the last.
Park’s election has upended political expectations in Korea. As a political outsider, he nevertheless trounced the ruling Grand National Party (GNP) candidate Na Kyung-won. Na had some powerful backers. The most prominent was the GNP’s Park Geun-Hye, who is the daughter of former authoritarian leader Park Chung-Hee and a leading contender in the 2012 presidential race. That Na lost, and lost badly, reflects the unpopularity of President Lee Myung-Bak, whose approval rating hovers around 32 percent. The most popular podcast in Korea these days is a low-budget affair that features four guys sitting around a table slagging the president.
Next year South Korea will hold parliamentary elections in the spring and then presidential elections in the winter. The opposition Democratic Party smells blood. It has already shifted into high gear in the Korean parliament to defeat the recently signed free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States. But Park Won Soon’s victory will not translate directly into a victory for the Democratic Party. After all, he initially ran as an independent before agreeing to a unified ticket. Crucial backing came from Ahn Cheol-soo, a maverick academic and software tycoon who has largely avoided political parties. Ahn’s endorsement boosted the future mayor’s approval rating from 5 percent to nearly 50 percent. Korean voters, like their counterparts all over the world, are rejecting politics as usual and the ritual do-se-doing of parties.
During the election, Park didn’t say much about national policy, instead concentrating on municipal matters. But he has expressed concern about the FTA and criticized the current administration’s confrontational approach to North Korea. He has also indicated interest in joining the organization Mayors for Peace. These stands will embolden other politicians to follow suit. And they point to a repudiation of Lee Myung-Bak’s foreign policy and a return to the more independent initiatives of previous leaders Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo-Hyun.
In a country where social hierarchy is deeply entrenched, where the language has multiple levels of address depending on social rank, Park Won Soon’s most radical policies may well lie in his hands-on, bottom-up approach. When addressing his management team, he uses the humble form of address and has asked his subordinates not to rise when he walks into the room. And last week, the new mayor showed up at 6 a.m. in a fluorescent green uniform to clean the Seoul streets in the morning trash pick-up. This was no mere photo op. Park is genuinely interested in the perspectives of all the citizens of Seoul.
Park Won Soon is certainly not the first civil society organizer to win political office in Korea. But he may be the first to combine a reformist platform with a commitment to revolution – a revolution in social values.
John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, writes its regular World Beat column, and will be publishing a book on Islamophobia with City Lights Press in 2012.
NOVEMBER 09, 2011
Reflections From Tunisia
by DAVID TRESILIAN
Tunis.
Some nine months after the country’s January Revolution and the ousting of former president Zein Al-Abidine bin Ali from power, Tunisia took a further step on the path to democratic government late last month when elections were held to elect the constituent assembly that will write the country’s new constitution.
With all the votes now counted and appeals to the country’s independent elections authority closed, the results are a clear vote of confidence in the Islamist Al-Nahda Party, banned under Bin Ali, to lead Tunisia’s transition towards a new and democratic future.
As the results were announced last week, the mood in Tunis was one of trying to digest the significance of the Al-Nahda victory at the polls and what this might mean for the country’s new constitution and the shape of its next government.
Yet, according to analysis in the Tunis press the Al-Nahda victory, though impressive, has not been overwhelming. Of the more than seven and half million Tunisians theoretically able to vote, only a little over four million in fact did so, making Al-Nahda’s 40.5 per cent of the vote something like 20 per cent of the electorate as a whole.
Moreover, with 90 seats in the new constituent assembly out of a total of 217, Al-Nahda, though the single largest party, does not possess an absolute majority, suggesting that it may need to enter into coalition with one or more of the other parties that won seats in the elections.
According to the results announced last Thursday, these parties were: the Congr̬s pour la R̩publique, 30 seats; Ettakatol Party, 21 seats; Al-Aridha, the Popular Petition Party, 19 seats; the Parti d̩mocrate progressiste, 17 seats; the P̕le d̩mocratique moderniste, a coalition of smaller leftist parties, five seats; and Al-Moubadara, five seats.
A sprinkling of smaller parties won a further two or three seats (Afek Tounes: three seats; Al-Badil Al-Thawri: three seats; Mouvement des patriots democrats: two seats).
According to Rachid Ghannouchi, co-founder of the Al-Nahda Party, who returned to Tunisia after two decades in exile after Bin Ali’s flight in January, the Party would be willing to join forces with any of the other parties that opposed the Bin Ali regime in writing a new constitution and in governing the country.
The main candidates for any coalition arrangements with Al-Nahda, Tunisia’s various leftist parties, were also the clearest losers in the recent elections. Either because they were not sufficiently organised to fight convincing campaigns, or because they failed to convince their supporters to turn out to vote, these left the field open to Al-Nahda and its dynamic secretary-general Hammadi Jebali to sweep the board, the latter being widely tipped to become Tunisia’s next prime minister.
Of the leftist parties contesting the elections, the Congrès pour la République (CR), led by one of Tunisia’s longest-standing opposition politicians, Moncef Marzouki, did best, winning some 345,000 votes, though this was still less than a third of Al-Nahda’s one-and-a-half million.
The CR was followed by the Ettakatol Party, led by veteran opposition politician Mustafa Bin Jaffar, this winning some 254,000 votes. Both Marzouki and Bin Jaffar are believed to have benefited from their long-standing opposition to the Bin Ali regime, with both men also having spent long periods in prison.
Comment in the Tunis press has not shed light on these parties’ intentions, and perhaps they themselves are still digesting an electoral showing that, while not excluding them from deliberations in the constituent assembly, nevertheless prevents them from playing a leading role.
According to an analysis of the results by Hatem M’Rad, a professor of political science at the Faculty of Political and Social Science in Tunis, which appeared in the Tunis papers on Monday, the leftist parties should be thankful that the results were not worse.
Had a first-past-the-post elections system been used, M’Rad wrote, instead of the proportional one that had in fact been employed, then Al-Nahda would have won all 217 seats in the constituent assembly instead of a little under half of them.
Al-Nahda, M’Rad wrote, “is the victor. The Party won the most votes in all the constituencies in the country, both in the 27 constituencies in Tunisia proper and in the six constituencies abroad. It won 90 seats out of a total of 217, which is 41.47 per cent of the total.”
“In the parliamentary elections in 1989, Al-Nahda got 13 per cent of the seats when it fielded candidates on independent lists as it was banned at the time. Between 1989 and 2011, Al-Nahda has increased its results from 13 per cent to 41.47 per cent, 13 per cent when it was an illegal party and 41.47 per cent when it was a legal one.”
Al-Nahda support was particularly high in popular areas and in Tunisia’s larger towns and cities, M’Rad wrote, the party exploiting what he called its campaign of charitable works and its populist discourse to persuade the less well-off that “God was to be found in the ballot box.”
In nine constituencies covering the country’s largest towns and cities, Al-Nahda won 35 of its 90 seats in the constituent assembly, in other words more than a third of the total number, M’Rad wrote.
For the time being, the only protests at the results of the elections and the way in which they were run seem to have been in the town of Sidi Bouzid in the centre of the country, ironically the starting point of January’s Revolution, where riots last week left sections of the town off limits and saw several public buildings destroyed.
The immediate cause of the riots seems to have been the decision by Tunisia’s electoral authority, the Instance supérieure indépendante pour les elections (ISIE), to invalidate six lists of candidates put forward by the Al-Aridh Party, also dubbed the Popular Petition Party, which is run from abroad by businessman Hachemi Hamdi, who is originally from Sidi Bouzid.
Immediately following the news of the invalidation of the lists, on the grounds that the candidates had received financing from abroad, Hamdi announced on his Al-Mostakilla satellite TV channel that he would be withdrawing all Al-Aridh Party candidates, as participating in the elections now “made no sense.”
This decision has subsequently been reversed, allowing Al-Aridh to conserve its 19 seats in the constituent assembly, but mystery still surrounds the cause of the riots in Sidi Bouzid, which were apparently directed partly against the Al-Nahda Party.
According to the Tunis press this week, the riots had broken out after Hammadi Jebali had described the residents of Sidi Bouzid as “idiotic peasants” on the Al-Nahda Party’s Hannibal TV station, with last weekend’s papers saying that tracts protesting against the town’s treatment by “the political elites and national media” had also been found in Sidi Bouzid.
Nevertheless, the newspaper La Presse said in its weekend edition that the riots in Sidi Bouzid had not broken out as a result of the invalidation of the Al-Aridh Party lists, contrary to what had been said in the international media. Instead, the paper detected the hand of members of the former regime who were seeking to spread chaos in the country as a way of destabilising the achievements of the Revolution.
“All the country’s political parties are as one in insisting on the need to unmask the enemies of the Revolution who have used this occasion to throw the Sidi Bouzid region into chaos following the holding of elections that have been praised worldwide for their transparency and fairness,” the paper commented on Monday.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that Rachid Ghannouchi has several times said that the one party that Al-Nahda will not cooperate with in any future coalition is Al-Aridh, describing Hamdi as having been “an ally of the dictatorship” of former president Bin Ali.
Describing the Party’s post-elections programme, Ghannouchi told the French newspaper Le Monde in an interview at the weekend that Al-Nahda’s priorities were economic and social ones, and that the Party intended to concentrate “on issues that have an immediate impact on people’s lives, such as security, development, ensuring stability, reforming the justice system, and bringing those accused of corruption to justice.”
This message, heading towards “a coalition of all the national forces” in Tunisia, and based on “Islamic values such as equality, brotherhood, trust and honesty,” Ghannouchi repeated in a press conference in Tunis last week, in which he said that Al-Nahda had no intention of “turning Tunisians into hypocrites and making them present themselves in any way other than they are.”
“I support the right of every Tunisian man and woman to dress how he or she pleases and to live in the manner of his or her choice,” Ghannouchi said, adding that the Party’s priorities were the realisation of the objectives of the Revolution, among them that every Tunisian man or woman should be able to live in dignity and free from unemployment and poverty.
This is a message that has gone down well with Tunisians answering questions from Al-Ahram Weekly. People approached in Tunis earlier this week for their opinions on the new turn the country was taking in the wake of last month’s elections all said that Al-Nahda’s victory had been a good thing for the future of the country.
Al-Nahda had not been implicated in the corruption of Bin Ali’s “mafia regime,” one respondent said, adding that their supporters had been imprisoned “in the tens of thousands” by the former regime’s security services and “hundreds had died or been tortured.”
On a trip round the town of Carthage near Tunis, which also houses the ancient Roman and Phoenician archaeological site, it became clear that the looted former residences of the Trabelsi family, relatives of the wife of the former president, had now been added to the tourist itinerary.
Carthage is a wealthy area, contrasting starkly with the popular quarters further inland, and the villas of the Trabelsi family have been stripped of everything that can be carried away, with revolutionary graffiti sprayed on walls for good measure.
None of the other villas had been touched, and the fury of the revolutionaries had been directed at the Trabelsi family villas alone. “It was an act of vengeance more than anything else,” a driver, Mohamed, explained, also a supporter of the Al-Nahda Party.
“Bin Ali and his family ruled this country for 23 years, and they never did a single good thing for it. Now we are really looking forward to a change.”
David Tresilian writes for Al-Ahram Weekly.
NOVEMBER 09, 2011
1
"End the Wars, Tax the Rich!"
Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine
by PHYLLIS BENNIS
This is an extraordinary time. The astonishing Occupy Wall Street movement emerged as the heart of our 99%, claimed the little scrap of earth in Zuccotti Park on behalf of all of us, and created a live-in soapbox from which to challenge inequality — how the 1% controls our economy, buys off our government, imposes their wars, and avoids paying their taxes. It both reflects and marks an end to the popular desperation that had taken over so much of our political life — instead, it applied the lessons of the Arab Spring, unexpectedly shaping a connection reaching far beyond the activist core, quickly moving from Wall Street to Main Street to the small parks, the steps of government buildings, the public squares from Oakland, California to Ames, Iowa, from Chicago to DC, to cities and towns across the country.
The challenges facing this new and different movement are legion, but joining its pop-up iterations is an incredible gift to those of us fighting that same outraged despair that first brought this vast disparity of folks to occupy what is now the people’s squares. In New York City, I huddled with GritTV’s Laura Flanders and Peace Action’s Judith LeBlanc, in the driving rain at the smaller-than-usual general assembly at Occupation Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park the other night. It was hard to see over the sea of umbrellas, and the meeting was pretty short. But the people’s mic functioned fine in the rain, as folks discussed a variety of ways to act in solidarity with our Oakland contingent, who had faced a particularly brutal police assault, critically injuring a young Iraq War veteran from Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace.
A couple of weeks ago while speaking at several places in Iowa, I visited the activists of Occupy Des Moines, who had regrouped in front of the state capitol after bailing out 37 of their number who had been arrested by state troopers at the order of the governor. While they stood with their signs, the progressive mayor of the city pulled up, offering a nearby city park as an alternative site, one that would be outside the right-wing governor’s jurisdiction. After a consensus decision, they moved their encampment, demonstrating again how this movement is creating new divides among the powerful.
Occupying DC
In Washington, we have two Occupy encampments. Both have been amazing in bringing new permanence and new breadth to the political resistance long present/absent/present in this city. With other IPSers and a variety of close friends and comrades, we’ve marched with the Occupy folks to protest at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and elsewhere. We’ve done teach-ins on the Iraq troop withdrawal and the renewed threats against Iran. We’ve had amazing discussions with folks occupying the squares.
Spending a day with the Institute’s Letelier-Moffitt human rights awardees, representatives of Wisconsin’s progressive movement, I hung out for a while at Freedom Plaza, one of the Occupy sites, talking with a brilliant homeless woman. She taught me more about homeless policy in DC than I had ever known. She described life in the shelters, saying that “yeah there’re bedbugs, and there’s no security and they’re way too crowded, but that’s not the real problem. The real failure is that the city government’s mandate is to advocate for our rights, and it’s the rights of homeless people that are being ignored. Their mandate isn’t just for charity, they’re supposed to be advocates for our rights.” She knew the details of the city mandate and what obligations were being ignored — I hadn’t had a clue. This is what this new movement looks like.
Occupying the Future
There are huge uncertainties, of course. Will the encampments figure out how to survive the encroaching winter? Can the iconic center, at Occupy Wall Street’s Zucotti Park, remain the symbolic heart of the national, indeed global movement, as its working groups and caucuses extend out into other parts of the city? Will the Occupy movement figure out how to balance the focus on new ways of living with each other, creating new democratic norms that are, in the new dictum, horizontal instead of vertical, while simultaneously figuring out how to escalate the challenge to power that the creation of the Occupy sites began?
We won’t know for a while. But we do know now, already, that Occupy Wall Street — and Occupy DC, Occupy Des Moines, Occupy Los Angeles and Chicago and Atlanta and Taos, New Mexico — have already shaken up our political stasis in a critically important new way. I’ve been thinking a lot about the first Palestinian intifada, the nonviolent, society-wide mobilization that transformed Palestine’s nationalist struggle beginning in the late 1980s. Palestinian activists chose “uprising” as the logical English equivalent, but intifada doesn’t really mean that — it means something closer to “shake-up” or “shaking out” — exactly what Occupy Wall Street has done to our body politic. It’s our intifada, and it’s shaking up that money-glutted, war-mongering, tax-avoiding 1 % like nothing in a couple of generations.
Milestones: Iraq Withdrawal, Qaddafi is Killed, Prisoners Go Free
In the meantime, the news is full of milestones. President Obama’s announcement that almost all of the U.S. troops still occupying Iraq will come home by the end of the year certainly counts as a huge milestone-to-come. It’s not complete, but it’s a huge victory for our U.S. and global antiwar mobilizations, and especially for the people of Iraq so desperate to see an end to eight years of occupation. It means almost all the U.S. troops, and all the Pentagon-paid contractors will leave by the end of this year — so even with the biggest U.S. embassy ever built, with 5,000 staff, and thousands of security contractors (paid by the State Department this time, abiding by the letter though clearly not the spirit of the get-them-all-out-by-the-end-of-2011 agreement) this is a huge tribute to our years of work. I talked about the troop withdrawal on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR, including some of the history of what the years of war and occupation, plus the 12 years of Washington’s crippling economic sanctions, have meant for the people of Iraq. Also on RT, I examined the consequences of the war for Iraqis.
And of course the killing of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, after he was captured alive, marked another grisly milestone in the Libyan civil war. In my article on salon.com, I wrote about how vulnerable Libya remains: still oil-rich but more divided than ever, after Qaddafi’s death. Far from “liberation,” Libya continues to face a host of serious dangers.
We also had a nice victory for popular mobilization. CTV, the Canadian network that had given in to pressure and removed my interview on Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian UN statehood bid, put it back on the website when they got enough letters of protest to decide they had to reverse their decision. And they just invited me back, this time to talk about the consequences of Qaddafi’s death. You can watch that CTV interview here.
Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine!
That’s the slogan coined by the BNC, the Palestinian leadership of the now-global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions — BDS — that challenges Israeli violations of international law and human rights. And we have yet another milestone, this one on the Palestine-Israel front, the prisoner swap that saw the first 400 or so out of a total of 1027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the one Israeli soldier held by Hamas. It was certainly a “win-win” at the human level, but of course there are political causes and consequences too. Here’s the link to the “Inside Story” show I did on al-Jazeera English, discussing the prisoner exchange with my old friend and Palestinian civil society leader Mustafa Barghouti as well as an Israeli colonel. Al-Jazeera also published my commentary on the prisoner swap.
Just as this newsletter was getting ready to go to press, we also got word from Paris that UNESCO voted overwhelmingly to recognize Palestine as a full Member State. According to U.S. policy, that will trigger an immediate cut-off of U.S. dues to the UN’s cultural, education and science organization, as well as ending U.S. dues payments to (and perhaps thus voting rights in) several other important UN agencies — possibly including the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors nuclear production around the world. Stay tuned for more analysis next time…
Amazing Times
The Occupy movement is bringing new energy, new activists, new ideas, new strategies into our movements for peace, justice and equality. One of the chants I heard last week, from folks at Brooklyn for Peace where I was speaking, seemed to capture the moment particularly well:
“How do we end the deficit? End the wars and tax the rich!”
It’s good advice. We’ve got a lot of work to do to get there.
Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer.
NOVEMBER 09, 2011
0
Why US Retribution Against UNESCO Will Backfire
Exacting a Price
by GRAHAM USHER
The Palestinians scored a victory on 31 October when UNESCO (the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organisation) admitted them into its ranks as a full member, despite an immediate cut of $60 million in American dues, or 22 per cent of the organisation’s budget.
Membership will enable the Palestinian Authority (PA) to register as its heritage such sites as the Nativity Church in Bethlehem and the Ibrahimi Mosque (or Cave of the Patriarchs) in Hebron, both encircled by the Israeli occupation.
Politically, it will give a boost to the PA’s flagging labours to win recognition as a UN member state, a bid currently snared in a Security Council sub-committee and facing a certain United States veto should it emerge from there.
A veto may not be necessary. On 31 October Bosnia-Herzegovina — a swing state on the Security Council — said it would abstain on the Palestinian bid following enormous lobbying by Israel on its Serbian president, which opposes UN membership (Bosnia’s Muslim president supports it while the Croat president passes).
Without Bosnia the Palestinians may lack the majority to force a vote on the council. And without a vote the US need not veto, sparing itself the opprobrium that would roil the region as Washington once again steps in to defend Israel’s occupation against Palestinian self-determination.
There was no similar escape for Washington at UNESCO’s governing board meeting in Paris. Despite the knowledge of the cut in US funds it approved Palestinian membership by a massive majority, with 107 nations voting in favour, 14 against and 52 abstaining.
Among those voting no was America, Israel and Canada. Among those voting yes was nearly every Asian, African and Arab country as well as emerging powers like Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia. Rarely has the global divide on Palestine been so publicly exposed.
And rarely has the absence of a common European Union policy been so palpable. In a flurry of European disarray France voted in favour of Palestine’s UNESCO bid, Germany voted against and Britain abstained. All three are meant to be European “counterweights” to America’s monopoly of the “peace process”. All three sit on the Security Council. It would be unwise of the Palestinians to count on their unity.
Not that PA President Mahmoud Abbas was in any mood for recrimination. “This vote is for the sake of peace and represents the international consensus on support for the legitimate Palestinian national rights of our people, the foremost of which is the establishment of its independent state,” he said, accurately, after the UNESCO landslide.
Abbas’s strategy of taking the case of Palestine to the UN is bearing fruit — not least in extracting a price on Washington for its defence of Israel no matter what it does.
Under Congressional legislation dating from the 1990s the Obama administration is mandated to withhold US funds from any UN agency that accepts Palestine as a full member. However, if the US doesn’t pay its dues to UNESCO it will lose its right to vote in the agency. That’s a disenfranchisement that hurts America far more than the Palestinians or even UNESCO.
Since 2003 — when the US rejoined the agency — UNESCO has been a key plank in American foreign policy, especially in Afghanistan, where it funds the country’s biggest education project. That project may now wither.
UNESCO membership also confers voting rights in other UN agencies, including the World Property Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). In the last year the WIPO has advised dozens of US companies on laws protecting intellectual property rights. But “if Palestine joins the WIPO, the US will have to pull out, limiting its ability to advance American interests and create jobs at home,” wrote former Senator, Timothy Wirth, president of the UN Foundation, in the Huffington Post on 31 October.
Finally, the PA’s success at UNESCO will surely spur it to join other heavyweight UN affiliates like the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Membership of the ICC may allow the PA to prosecute Israel for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, including the illegal transfer of settlers into occupied territory
Palestinian membership of IAEA would cause a real problem for America’s role in an agency that is central to its policies of containing Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programmes and promoting nuclear non-proliferation, writes Wirth. “Should the US stop paying dues to the IAEA — which it could be forced to do under current legislation if Palestine is admitted as a member — the US would have to give up (its) vote on the board. It would literally lose a seat at the table during the next nuclear crisis”.
Because of its unconditional defence of Israel — and in the name of an imaginary peace process — the US is condemning itself to isolation in a range UN bodies it knows are vital to its national security. That may bring the Obama administration peace with a pro-Israel Congress but risks increasing American irrelevance abroad.
“There are significant problems if [Palestinian membership of UN agencies] begins to cascade,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Congress last month, before UNESCO “cascaded” in Palestine’s favour. “What happens with the IAEA? What happens with the World Health Organisation? What happens with the Food and Agriculture Organisation?” she asked.
NOVEMBER 09, 2011
3
If the Greek People Could Negotiate Directly With the ECB and IMF
Bankers Crush Greek Democracy
by DEAN BAKER
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou touched off a firestorm last week when he proposed putting the austerity package designed by the “troika” (the I.M.F, the European Central Bank and the European Union) up for a popular vote. The idea that the Greek people might directly be able to decide their future terrified leaders across Europe and around the world. Financial markets panicked, sending stocks plummeting and bond yields soaring.
However, by the end of the week things were back under control. The leaders of France and Germany apparently laid down the law to Papandreou and he backed off plans for the referendum. While the government is in the process of collapsing in Greece, the world can now rest assured that the Greek people will not have an opportunity to vote on their future.
This is unfortunate since it means that Greece’s future will likely be decided by politicians who may not have the interests of the Greek people foremost in their minds. By their own projections, the austerity package designed by the troika promises a decade of austerity, with high unemployment, falling real wages and sharp reductions in public services and pensions. And, their projections have consistently proven to be overly optimistic.
If given the opportunity would the Greek people endorse this sort of austerity package? The answer obviously depends on the alternative.
The alternative route almost certainly means a disorderly debt default and a departure from the euro. That is not a pretty picture. If Greece follows the path of Argentina, the last country to make a similar break, then the economy is likely to undergo a free fall for a period of time. The duration of this free fall will depend on how long it takes the government to get a new currency in use and construct some provisional formula for converting euro-denominated contracts into the new currency.
In Argentina this period was three months, with another three months of stagnation before the economy began a sustained boom. The process could be more difficult in Greece, both because it is tied in more extensively to the eurozone countries and also because Argentina at least had its own currency.
However, even in the case of Greece, such a break would not be impossible. There will be a desire to hold the new currency. The government just has to impose a new property tax that is only payable in the new currency.
People will want to hold onto ocean-front property in the Greek islands or at the foot of the Acropolis, so there will be demand for the currency. Also, the prospect of a tourist boom, once prices in Greece fall by 50 percent relative to Italy, Spain, and other popular destinations will go a long way toward supporting the Greek economy.
If the Greek people can convince themselves of a plausible alternative then they could make a few demands on the troika. First, they could say that 10 years of continuous austerity is not acceptable.
Yes, the Greeks had been reckless borrowers, but the European banks had also been reckless lenders. It is true that the Greek government had lied about its budget situation. However, the word among finance types is that everyone knew they were lying and went along with the joke. Goldman Sachs even designed a nifty swap that allowed it to profit from the lies.
Instead of austerity, the Greek people might insist that the ECB focus on a growth agenda. This would mean that the ECB would have to ditch its obsession with a 2 percent inflation target and start acting like a real central bank. The ECB could start by guaranteeing the debt of Italy and Spain, both of which risk a rising interest rate-default death spiral if there is not a credible guarantee behind their debt.
It might also start pushing more expansionary policies. It’s always hard to admit when you are wrong, but the ECB-IMF policy of growth through austerity is not working. Every month we get more proof of this fact with data showing that growth is lower than expected and unemployment is higher than expected. Is there any evidence that could get these people to change their minds before they destroy Europe’s economy? Maybe the Greek people could have forced the troika to actually look at the data.
There would have been other potential for fun in these negotiations. The Greek people, who have already been forced to accept a rise in their retirement age and lower pensions, may suggest the same for IMF economists. These hard-working types can often retire from their jobs in their early 50s. Instead of the meager Greek pensions of a few hundred euros a month that got the banker types so riled, the IMF crew can be pocketing close to $10,000 a month in their pensions. Maybe IMF pensions would have come up for debate if the Greek people actually had to be convinced that a bailout was in their own good.
But the chance to bring the Greek people into the discussion was quickly nixed. We are back to a conversation among the bankers and the politicians. There is not much room for democracy in this story, but we can still dream.
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy . He also has a blog, ” Beat the Press ,” where he discusses the media’s coverage of economic issues.
This article was originally published by The Guardian.
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
...And Keep Lying Some More...
By this morning the Sanger/Broad bull roar piece on the IAEA report had been altered, and the remarks about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate were promoted to paragraph six. The key sentence now reads:
The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...
You can see the IAEA report in the raw here. If you can get past the Guardian's incendiary intro and manage to merely skim the report from head to tail, you'll come away with the strong impression that it's loaded with he said/she said allegations that clearly came from the U.S. and Israel, not from actual scientific inspection.
The ongoing campaign to bully the UN into going along with the anti-Iran strategy seems to have established a permanent base camp in the New York headquarters. When the neocons and likudniks read the IAEA report their lips must have been moving. It occurs to me that liberal dog of war Susan Rice, our Ambassador to the UN, is accomplishing things that Revoltin' John Bolton only dreamed of.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
When he was younger and (perhaps) only dimly
if at all aware of the transient nature
of his athletic gifts, Michael Jordan routinely
performed improvisational acts of acrobatic genius.
Now, at the zenith of his physical maturity
with the accumulation of myriad miracles
as part and parcel of his psychic/physical being,
his statements – his legacy – his gifts to us -
he has measured moments when
he seems to make time stand still
and use space as a three-dimensional
step ladder twisting and turning his body
to supernatural affect; defying gravity
and all the known laws of physics.
He has done this all before,
He has done this all the long.
He can no longer even amaze himself.
And we, having watched all this blessed while,
in disbelief and awe, as the divine and human kind
intersect in this temporal time-space-and place,
We have come to take much too much for granted,
and only the taped highlights will allow our progeny
to see the Miracles of Michael which miss entirely
the entire point of being Michael Jordan!
And that is this: to show what one human being
can WILL himself to do, to defy gravity,
to over come the odds after failing
even to make his high school basketball team.
THAT is the true MIRACLE OF MICHAEL -
that he perservered, and after many losses,
and many losing campaigns, trooped on valiantly,
ultimately to TRIUMPH, again, and again, and again,
and again, and again, and again -
and NOT FOR HIS SAKE ALONE,
but – and these were always the keys
always the critical things -
he did it for the team; for those newbies,
veterans though they may have been,
who had yet to win a ring, and for THAT thing,
did Michael exhort his colleagues in greatness
the incomprable Pippen, the Genius Rodman,
The yoemen – Grant and Cartwright,
The undefensible one – Kuckok
The three-points specialists –
Kerr, Paxon, Brown, Hodges, Buechler
The one from down under – Longley
The one who sacrificed his
offense the better to play defense – Harper
the cutest NBA All Star ever – Armstrong
the best announcer of them all – King,
the brilliant late season pick up
whose father was a Motown singer – Bison Dele,
The defensive specialist / three-point shooter Brown,
those whose names all (save we few) have forgotten -
Blanton, Courtney, English, McCray,
Hansen, Hopson, Randall, Sparrow, Nevitt,
Haley, Simpkins, Caffey, Steigna,
Nealey, Tucker, Walker, Levingston,
Booth, Burrell, Klein, LaRue, Vaughn
the Williams' – Scott and Corey,
the hydra heads – Perdue, Wennington,
Edwards, Salley, Parrish
And the glove-fitting coaches – Jackson/Bach -
The two of these – Jordan/ Jackson so attuned,
so in synch to the ultimate objective
to be World Champions, nothing less,
and to do so year in and year out,
With all the distractions, with all the pain
of preparation required, all the focus,
almost 100 games per year, and all the training
required, especially in the off season,
for it is the work one does in the off season
that determines the progress that player will make
as a professional NBA player,
but also as a trusted team mate,
who will thoroughly know, understand, and
most importantly, ACCEPT the role that
the TEAM requires of him,
Yes, THAT was the greatness of MJ
Not that when he soared he flew,
But that in order to win, it was sometimes
necessary that he soar; in order to inspire,
to DEMAND 100% of his team mates
(nothing less was acceptable; nothing more required)
One had to be selfless, one had to know one's limitations,
and in Michael's case – the sky was the limit,
there were no limitations, but, in order to accomplish that – to play basketball on THAT über-surreal plane
of athletic performance, delimited by physics,
as it is presently understood,
that DEMANDED that Michael play as a Deity
like a Diety of a very ancient time,
When the gods walked the earth,
It was simply that, of Michael
That his will to win on the basketball court
Was so strong, so intense, so focused,
That it required him to unleash the inner deity
Which resodes in each and every one of us.
And if Michael Jordan could unleash his inner deity,
As have others who have come before him,
And as have others who will came after,
Then, why can't we all?
What holds us back?
Is it our will that holds us back?
Or is it that we have not imagined
What we could accomplish
If we were to let go of orthodoxy,
Let go of the limitations we are told that bind us
What could we do, if only we were to
be like Mike?
(And if Jesus Christ Incarnate were to return to earth
(Again, in this time-space-and place intersect,
(Would you be entirely surprised to see Him
(Leading by example His life as a professional
(basket ball player? Or perhaps a singer
(in a Rock & Roll Band calling itself
(Blessed Union of Souls, and singing
(“I believe that will find the answer
(I believe that Love will find the way.”)
Weekend Edition November 4-6, 2011
“Italy’s borrowing costs have spiked higher towards levels that forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal to be bailed out. The yield on Italy’s ten-year bond is up another 0.32 percentage point at 6.43 percent, a new euro-era high. A yield above 7 percent is widely thought to be unsustainable….
What’s particularly concerning is that Italy’s borrowing costs have spiked higher, even though the European Central Bank has been buying the country’s bonds in secondary markets in an attempt to keep the yields down.”
“Italian Debt Fears Hit Markets After IMF Invite”, NPR, November 4, 2011
Well, that didn’t take long.
The European Central Bank’s (ECB) new president, Mario Draghi, has been in office for less than a week and already he’s got the printing presses running at full-tilt. Go figure? Draghi–who also served as a managing director for the “vampire squid” (G-Sax)–has promised repeatedly to focus laserlike on “price stability” following in the tradition of his predecessor Jean-Claude Trichet who famously said, “The ECB has only one needle on its compass, and that is inflation.”
Inflation, inflation inflation, that’s all that matters to the ECB, that is, unless its shifty bank buddies are in trouble, then all bets are off. Then the ECB will provide “unlimited” liquidity to prop up the Potemkin banking system and make sure that folks don’t get the crazy idea that the banks are grossly undercapitalized and loaded with non performing loans, plunging sovereign bonds and other assorted junk paper that might fetch just pennies on the dollar at any of the eurozone’s many flea markets.
So, what happened on Friday, you ask?
Well, what happened was the leaders at the G-20 meeting in Cannes couldn’t agree on whether to boost the IMF’s resources or not, even though the IMF will need the extra money to keep Europe from imploding. That news sent Italian bond yields into the stratosphere making a default in Italy all the more probable. And–as has been widely reported–if Italy’s $1.9 trillion bond market craters, then it’s “game over” for the eurozone. So, who stepped into the breach and reversed the trend by loading up on Italian sovereign debt even though he promised he would not expand the bond buying program?
I’m guessing it was Super Mario, that’s who; only his effort seems to have failed miserably as this chart from zero hedge indicates. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/btp-stick-save-fail
So, what’s wrong with the ECB acting as central banks do and backstopping the individual states?
Nothing at all. In fact, the ECB is doing exactly what it should be doing if–and this is a BIG “if”–if its actions are approved by a democratically-elected government and not a bunch of rapacious, sleazebag banksters whose only interest is expanding their powerbase while they transfer more public money into their own pockets. That’s when the “lender of last resort” provision becomes a problem. So, it’s a question of legitimacy, right? Draghi has about as much legitimacy as Henry Paulson, Jon Corzine, Lloyd Blankfein, or any of the other Goldman chiselers, which is to say, none at all.
Even so, by the end of Friday we expect that Draghi will set aside principle, promises and other commitments and do what we would expect from a G-Sax operative acting in the greater interests of the Global Bank Alliance; print like madman to stop the bleeding. Here’s a clip from an article in Bloomberg:
“European Central Bank President Mario Draghi signaled he’d rather use interest rates than the printing press to bolster growth as the debt crisis drags the euro-area economy toward recession.
Chairing his first policy meeting after succeeding Jean-Claude Trichet on Nov. 1, Draghi unexpectedly cut the benchmark rate yesterday by a quarter point to 1.25 percent and left the door open to a further move. At the same time, he ruled out ramping up ECB bond buying to reduce governments’ borrowing costs, saying the program is “temporary” and “limited.”
“It’s back to basics on the crisis fighting; rates rather than bond purchases,” said Julian Callow, chief European economist at Barclays Capital in London. (“Draghi Chooses Rates Over Printing Press as Recession Looms”, Bloomberg)
“Back to basics”, eh? Well, we should know by the end of the Friday whether Bloomberg is right or not. If they are right, then you can bet I’ll be feasting on crow this evening.
Like Greece and the other faltering members of the EU’s Debtors Prison, Italy has already surrendered its sovereignty to its overlords in Brussels. Check out this blurb from Friday’s New York Times:
“Acceding to pressure from European leaders, Italy “invited” the International Monetary Fund to look over Rome’s shoulder to ensure it is carrying out reforms designed to keep the country from succumbing to Europe’s widening sovereign debt crisis, European Union officials said Friday.
In an extraordinary move, Italy said it had invited the fund to scrutinize its books every three months to make sure a $75 billion dollar austerity package is carried out according to plan. A team from the European Commission will also travel to Rome next week to start monitoring Rome’s efforts, the president of the group, Jose Manuel Barroso said….
Yet, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s shaky coalition government is having trouble implementing a number of painful austerity measures passed recently to reduce the nation’s deficit and its mountain of debt, which is the second highest in the euro zone after Greece.” (“Italy Agrees to Allow I.M.F. to Monitor Its Progress on Debt”, New York Times)
Get the picture? Sovereignty is a thing of the past in the eurozone, just like democracy is on its last legs. The banks have extended their tentacles into every corner while working people are being fitted for a structural adjustment straitjacket that will allow financial vultures to swoop down and scavenge public assets while stomping out the labor movement with a Size 12 jackboot. Welcome to EU Banktopia, neoliberalism’s new citadel on the continent.
Still, that doesn’t mean their strategy won’t hit a few speed bumps on the way. This is from Reuters:
“Banks including BNP Paribas and ING are ditching billions of euros of euro zone government bonds, cutting their exposure to the region’s trouble spots. More lenders are expected to retreat as the euro zone crisis deepens and leaders raise the possibility of the exit of Greece from the bloc, further damaging prices.
“The market value of the debt of the countries most under scrutiny is likely to decline further as banks unload sovereign bonds,” Charles Dallara, managing director of the Institute of International Finance, warned on Wednesday.” (“Bank exodus from euro zone sovereign debt quickens”, Reuters)
Rising yields on sovereign bonds are a de facto bank run which could lead to another crash. And there won’t be nearly enough money in the new EU emergency fund (EFSF) to pull Italy bank from the brink if the panic continues. The only institution with sufficient resources to reverse the trend is the ECB, which, according to Draghi, is opposed to the idea. He’d rather impose additional belt tightening measures on hard-hit deficit countries than let the ECB expand its balance sheet. But cutting spending during a slump only increases the misery, widens the deficits and pushes the eurozone deeper into recession. Here’s a clip from the Streetlight blog that explains:
“Austerity as a response to the recent rise in Italy’s borrowing costs is exactly the wrong policy prescription. It misdirects attention from the real problem here, which is the self-fulfilling doom spiral in the debt market that Italy has gotten trapped in. The only way to break out of this cycle is to do something radical to change market expectations….
Cuts in government spending will be overwhelmed by Italy’s higher borrowing costs, which are far, far greater in euro terms than any cuts in government spending that could realistically be achieved. And so Italy’s budget deficit will still rise sharply. And if we assume that severe austerity will likely lead to a contraction in Italian GDP, as it has done in the UK, Greece, and elsewhere, then the trajectory of Italy’s debt looks even worse with the cuts in government spending than it did without them.” (“Italy’s Future”, The Streetlight blog)
There is a way out of this mess if EU leaders choose to take it, but that’s not what they want. What they want is more austerity, more hairshirts, more fiscal consolidation, and more agonizing cutbacks to social services. They want to keep Greece, Italy and the rest, just barely breathing so they can strip-mine the country without triggering a full-blown meltdown. That’s what this austerity-thing is all about. It’s a gigantic looting operation conducted by the Financial Mafia. Do you need more proof? Just take a look at this clip from Draghi first press conference on Thursday:
“…all euro area governments need to show their inflexible determination to fully honour their own individual sovereign signature as a key element in ensuring financial stability in the euro area as a whole. The Governing Council ….. urges all governments to implement fully and as quickly as possible the measures necessary to achieve fiscal consolidation and sustainable pension systems, as well as to improve governance. The governments of countries under joint EU-IMF adjustment programmes and those of countries that are particularly vulnerable should stand ready to take any additional measures that become necessary.
…..The Governing Council therefore calls upon all euro area governments to accelerate, urgently, the implementation of substantial and comprehensive structural reforms. …. labour market reforms are essential and should focus on measures to remove rigidities and to enhance wage flexibility, so that wages and working conditions can be tailored to the specific needs of firms. …. These measures should be accompanied by structural reforms (and) the privatisation of services currently provided by the public sector. At the same time, the Governing Council stresses that it is absolutely imperative that euro area national authorities rapidly adopt and implement the measures announced and recommended in the Euro Summit statement of 26 October 2011.” (Press conference, Mario Draghi, President of the ECB)
Sound familiar? “Give us your money, destroy your unions, privatize your public assets, and follow our orders, or we’ll blow the place up.”
We have a name for that sort of thing, Mr. Draghi. It’s called terrorism.
Weekend Edition November 4-6, 2011
As an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1980s, I did not visit the nearby city of Oakland very frequently. For the most part, I was ensconced in my own student circles and, to the extent that I got involved in politics, it was the local campus activist scene which drew me in with its focus on Central America and U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in the region. To be sure, Oakland had a radical tradition going back to the 1960s and the Black Panther movement, yet by the time I was in school that era was already a distant memory for many.
If there was any doubt about Oakland’s radical stripes, however, then yesterday’s general strike will certainly dispel any such notions. Galvanized by tumultuous developments over the past several weeks, in particular a nasty police crackdown on a local “Occupy” encampment, activists moved to effectively shut down the city by carrying out a general strike no less. Activists were particularly incensed by violent police tactics including use of tear gas and even grenades. During nighttime unrest, an Iraq war veteran was hit with a projectile and suffered a skull fracture.
Spurred on by the need to end police brutality, defend schools and libraries against local closures, and put an end to overall economic inequality, Occupy Oakland called for a day of action in which the circulation of capital would be blockaded, students would walk out of class, and various occupations would be staged around the city. Oakland is particularly important to commerce as the local port is the fifth largest in the country, and though union officials did not authorize a strike many longshoremen voiced support for Occupy’s efforts.
The Unusual Weapon of the General Strike
General strikes are practically unheard of in the United States. Indeed, the Oakland unrest marks the first general strike in the country in 65 years. One notable exception to this pattern of labor docility was the Seattle general strike of 1919, which in my estimation holds profound historic lessons for anti-capitalist protesters in Lower Manhattan. For the most part, however, U.S. labor has shied away from such confrontational tactics, and this has posed a great tactical dilemma for the left according to veteran organizers.
Over the past month or so, I have puzzled over the fact that most of the organizing and political activism has centered upon New York, which is a little unusual. On a purely personal note, I have always been struck by the contrasting political cultures on the east and west coasts. As a New Yorker observing the local scene in the late 1980s, I was taken aback by the greater militancy of protests in Berkeley and San Francisco. In contrast to the Big Apple, where people were isolated from one another and seemed obedient and deferential towards the authorities, Bay Area protesters were less willing to play ball.
It is now Oakland, however, which has come full circle, providing a crucial missing link in the Occupy movement within the Bay Area and indeed farther afield. Peer a little closer and it’s not too surprising that the city should be in the radical vanguard. With its long and checkered political past, Oakland has been a path breaker in many ways including class struggle, women’s rights and racial justice.
Local Oakland Boy Jack London
It was the celebrated writer Jack London (1876 – 1916) no less who inspired future generations. A local Oakland boy, London was a member of the Socialist Labor Party and to this day his presence can be vividly felt in the city. Currently, Jack London Square is one of Oakland’s great landmarks and a symbol of the city’s maritime history. Situated in front of a natural estuary leading to San Francisco Bay, the site lies at the heart of Oakland’s port operations. As a boy, London spent much of his time on this very waterfront, later taking up an adventurous sea-faring life as an oyster pirate. And it is here in the square that local residents continue to honor London’s heritage by observing the general strike.
Though he is most recognized for masculine adventure stories and such works as Call of the Wild and the Sea Wolf, London also penned political fiction like the Iron Heel, a futuristic, distopian story about America in which corporate interests are on the ascendant. In the Iron Heel, London sought to consolidate his ideas concerning the working class and its struggle against the so-called shadowy “oligarchy.” The central protagonist of the book, a socialist named Ernest Everhard, witnesses the fall of the American republic and goes into underground resistance. A highly influential work, The Iron Heel exerted an impact upon George Orwell who went on to write two of the 20th century’s other great political novels, 1984 and Animal Farm.
Through Everhard, London was able to project his own political predictions for the coming decades. In 1937, Trotsky wrote “Jack London already foresaw and described the fascist regime as the inevitable result of the defeat of the proletarian revolution.” In the Iron Heel, London presciently anticipated the growing power of money in politics. Portraying capitalism as a “monstrous beast,” London foresaw Reaganomics and the rise of the Republican far right.
In an echo of today’s Occupy movement, London warned that the poor can only achieve a level playing field by uniting against the 1% who have inordinate access to the world’s wealth and resources. Though the oligarchy kills strikers and citizens, Everhard endures as a kind of personification of the working class ideal. “Far be it from me to deny that Socialism is a menace,” London once remarked. “It is its purpose to wipe out, root and branch, all capitalistic institutions of present-day society. It is distinctly revolutionary, and in scope and depth is vastly more tremendous than any revolution that has ever occurred in the history of the world.”
Today, London’s great granddaughter Tarnel Abbott continues to walk in the radical footsteps of the notable American writer. During the recent Oakland police disturbances, she wrote “It is true that Jack London is my ancestor, he is my great grandfather, but more importantly, he is a working class hero and a visionary. I looked at the Jack London oak tree in front of City Hall and felt possessed by the spirit of the great man. I thought of him standing there on his soap box making socialist speeches and getting arrested because he didn’t have a permit. I thought of him writing Revolution, The People of the Abyss and The Iron Heel. I felt that I was witnessing the Iron Heelof fascism being challenged. I knew that I too had to resist it.”
London’s Radical Heritage
If he had lived to see the day, London would surely have been proud of his great granddaughter as well as Oakland’s militant and combative post-war labor movement. In 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, workers gathered in Oakland’s streets to support the struggle of women department store employees. The move formed part of a larger national strike wave designed to ensure that demobilization did not serve to erode workers’ rights. The epicenter of the Oakland strike, which quickly developed into a general strike, was none other than Latham Square at the intersection of Broadway and Telegraph Avenue, which today serves as an organizing point for the Occupy movement.
Very soon, the strikers instructed all stores except pharmacies to shut down. A carnival-like atmosphere took root in the city with couples dancing in the streets, and Oakland was effectively shut down when 100,000 laborers joined the effort. What distinguished the Oakland general strike from other labor unrest was that it spread from the bottom up without much evidence of official union leadership in the streets. In this sense, the events of 1946 are reminiscent of today’s Occupy movement, which is not being formally directed by the rank and file [indeed, since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act one year after the 1946 Oakland general strike, unions have been barred from participating in strikes “in support of other workers,” though to be sure many local unions endorsed Occupy’s actions within the local vicinity].
Though certainly impressive, the general strike unfortunately collapsed after just 54 hours, called off by a wary and conservative American Federation of Labor. In the end, the city promised to stop sending scab delivery trucks to businesses where workers had been on strike, but female retail clerks didn’t get any of the concessions they had sought. Nevertheless, four labor candidates were elected to Oakland’s city council in 1947 and the strike had important psychological and symbolic consequences. Put simply, labor demonstrated that workers were willing to take big risks and rebel against top down control, even going so far as to essentially take control over the city itself.
Oakland’s 1960s Legacy
Though the 1946 strike was an important forerunner of the Occupy movement, it would be a mistake to view recent disturbances in the city within a strictly labor perspective. Judging from some recent online videos, Oakland’s Occupy activists are fairly diverse in a racial sense, perhaps more so than the Occupy Wall Street crowd. In this sense, what is happening in California harks back to the previous activist wave of the 1960s.
Founded in Oakland in 1966, the Black Panther Party played an important role in furthering the growth of black liberation movements. Guided by Oakland’s earlier socialist politics, the Panthers espoused revolutionary goals and called for a radical and, if necessary, violent transformation of society. The movement was founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, who had met as students at Merritt College in 1962. Their friendship was solidified by a desire to tackle issues such as racism, police brutality, housing discrimination and inferior quality of education.
By the 1960s, Oakland had changed dramatically in a racial sense. Though numerically small in the early twentieth century, Oakland’s black population had always displayed a tradition of radical political organizing. In the 1920s, for example, the city had one of the most active chapters of the UNIA or United Negro Improvement Association, an organization headed by the infamous Marcus Garvey. Later, Oakland served as the headquarters of the powerful Sleeping Car Porters Union. Though the city was overwhelmingly white in the early 20th century, World War II accelerated the pace of change by drawing in new workers to the shipyards and defense industries.
By the 1960s, the growing black population had grown incensed by the overwhelmingly white dominated city government and cases of police brutality, which all served to spur on the likes of Huey Newton. Though the Panthers were subjected to FBI harassment and imprisonment, eventually splintering in the early 1970s, the movement had an important impact on Oakland politics. Indeed, Seale himself went on to garner a full 37% of the vote in the city’s mayoral election of 1973, and eventually African Americans succeeded in wresting the entire political machine from white Republicans, occupying all major elected positions in Oakland. Moreover, the Panthers inspired other marginalized groups such as Native Americans, Chicanos and Asian-Americans who in turn launched their own struggles for racial equality.
Political Impact of Wednesday’s Strike
As of this evening eastern time, it’s still a bit early to assess the practical impact of Oakland’s general strike. Some reports suggest that activists have not succeeded in shutting down the entire city let alone Oakland’s important port, though some businesses remain shuttered. It’s unclear moreover how many city workers joined the strikers but local coverage indicates that many teachers have joined the effort as well as thousands of students from the University of California, Berkeley.
Whatever the case, yesterday’s actions represent an important milestone for the Occupy movement. Just a couple of weeks ago, as I penned my latest article outlining how a general strike might unfold in Lower Manhattan, I wondered how many people might take my writing seriously. And while it’s still probably a stretch to think that activists can shut down the Wall Street area, the protests now seem to be accelerating at an exponential rate. Already, solidarity marches with the Oakland general strike have been organized in Boston and Philadelphia, for instance.
It is perhaps fitting that it was Oakland, home to radical socialists such as Jack London as well as later black liberation figures like Huey Newton, which pushed the unique weapon of the general strike. Though it was New York which initially provided the spark for the Occupy movement, Oakland is now nationalizing this struggle and inspiring other cities to take more decisive action. Already, the familiar call of “Oakland is New York, New York is Oakland!” is gaining traction amongst the demonstrators, much to the chagrin of economic elites and the political establishment.
NIKOLAS KOZLOFF is the author of No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet (Palgrave, 2010). Visit his website, http://www.nikolaskozloff.com/
Weekend Edition November 4-6, 2011
22
On "Violence" at Occupy Oakland
For the Fracture of Good Order
by EMILY BRISSETTE
“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children….”
These were Father Daniel Berrigan’s words when he was on trial in 1969 for a draft board raid in Catonsville, Maryland. He and eight others had entered the draft board office during business hours, removed draft files (against some resistance from the staff) and then burned them out front with homemade napalm. At the time, there were many who construed this as an act of violence and, given the denunciations of property destruction emerging out of Oakland today, there are many in our current day who would undoubtedly agree. But Berrigan and many of the others who carried out draft board raids were principled pacifists and did not understand the destruction of draft files as an act of violence. Disruptive, disturbing, provocative? Without a doubt. Shot through with incivility? Perhaps, if you insist. But the point was that when the forces of order and “civility” wreak havoc—destroying homes, livelihoods, and lives—the “fracture of good order” is not only warranted, but necessary and indeed a moral obligation.
There are no easy or simple parallels between the destruction of draft files in the 1960s and the breaking of bank windows today. It is, however, worth thinking through the commonalities—both are largely symbolic actions targeting the physical manifestations of a system that causes harm to people—and pausing a moment on that logic. This means restraining the urge to react with hostility to the idea of property destruction, reining in the urge to simply denounce it as violence and thus close off reflection and debate (since all “good” people are necessarily opposed to violence). And it means setting aside for the moment—but only for the moment—the question of whether tactics involving property destruction makes sense in this particular time and place.
The question that first needs to be addressed is: what is violence? what defines an act as violent? This seemingly simple question is anything but. This has been a point of contention—and yes, division—in progressive social movements for at least the past half century. For those who see property destruction as a legitimate tactic under certain circumstances, including Catholic pacifists in the 1960s who saw little disjunction between their avowed pacifism and acts of restrained destruction, violence above all denotes harm to human beings (and other living things). This is the touchstone for determining whether an act constitutes violence: are people being injured or killed?
When the definition of violence is expanded to include acts that are directed at property only, in which no person is at risk of injury, property is treated as on par with (and in practice often more valuable than) human life. We live in a system characterized by deep stratification and inequality. In this context in which some human lives are accorded very little worth, to treat property destruction as a form of violence minimizes the daily experience of real violence—harm to human beings—in many communities. It also makes it hard to see systemic, structural forms of violence—the harm of under-resourced schools, shuttered libraries, inadequate and labyrinth mental health services; the harm of foreclosure, unemployment, and hunger—as violence, because we are so accustomed to thinking of violence as a great outburst or a spectacle instead.
That so many react with horror and outrage at broken bank windows is not, however, surprising. The capitalist system in which we live sanctifies property and personalizes corporations, while dehumanizing millions of people in the US and billions worldwide. To a very large degree these ideas suffuse our common sense; they are the taken-for-granted assumptions out of which our moral and affective reactions emerge. But if we are serious about transforming our society to put human need at the center of our politics and economic practices, then we need to attend to the way unexamined assumptions shape our interpretations of this moment, its pitfalls and possibilities, and the way forward. We must deny the existing system the power to define the situation for us. We must root out the ways it shapes our interpretations and reactions, by thinking deeply, probing our assumptions, questioning the origins of our gut reactions and the allegiances these express. We must have the courage to pursue personal transformation alongside, in conjunction with, and as mutually constitutive of the social transformations we seek.
And we must have the courage to embrace disruption. As scholars and many participants of social movements have long pointed out, movements have transformative potential when they disrupt the status quo, when they interrupt or make difficult the smooth functioning of daily routines, when they unsettle a passive acceptance of social norms, values, or ideals. The Occupy Wall Street movement knows this intuitively, and on November 2nd Occupy Oakland pulled off the movement’s boldest act of disruption to date, with mass convergences and the forced closure of the Port of Oakland.
But a lingering fear remains within many, a fear of disruption that echoes in frantic calls for “peaceful protest.” To be clear: a fear of disruption does not usually inhere in calls for peaceful or nonviolent protest that issue from a deeply held and principled pacifism. Indeed, many committed pacifists have assumed great risks and stepped beyond the bounds of prevailing social norms in their efforts to transform society. A fear of disruption—and particularly of the consequences it might unleash—does however circulate among many today who insist on peaceful protest. Here peace is not equated with justice but with pacification. A desire for order, for predictability, for security.
This comes out most clearly in some of the proposals circulating for how to deal with those who engage in property destruction. Discursively expelling the “black-clad anarchists” from the fold of the 99%, either by insisting that they are another 1% who usurp or destroy the good of the many or by irresponsibly painting all as agents provocateurs, is perhaps the most benign—while at the same time fraught with all the dangers that divisiveness invites. Some proposals have gone further, suggesting the creation of an internal police force within the Occupy movement or active collaboration with the police. The irony, if these proposals and the sentiments they express were not so worrying, is that this vigilantism itself harbors the threat of violence—real violence, directed at people who have been cast out and made targets.
The unacknowledged assimilation of peace with pacification will only fetter the movement’s potential, by keeping us bound to and within the bounds of the dictates of order. This is not to celebrate an equally unthinking embrace of property destruction or overly confrontational tactics. But we must create space for a diversity of tactics—not, as some have suggested, as code for the legitimation of violence—but as a necessary corollary to the diversity of this movement itself. We must find a way to harmonize our myriad voices—not by silencing some, but by giving each its range of expression. We must accept that social transformation will entail conflict, that we won’t always be embraced by our audiences (even those in whose name we speak), and welcome the personal and collective growth that conflict can engender. We must, in short, recognize the power we wield in our capacity for disruption, and let go of our fear.
Emily Brissette is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, where she is completing a dissertation on the effects of deeply held cultural beliefs within the movements against the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. She can be reached at ebrisset (at) berkeley.edu
Weekend Edition November 4-6, 2011
5
The Mind of Winter and the Ground of Being
Occupy This
by DAVID Ker THOMSON
A land already possessed.
–Malthus
Brute Neighbors
I’m on my gondola doing loops around two cars and a fallen bumper positioned with the litigious freeze-frame melodrama of après-accident. Ooh, don’t move the cars, someone might lose brownie points in court.
Long faces, tow trucks, a renewed license to occupy the street as if the petty problems of the principals in the drama were everyone’s problem. “Ha-ha!” I call out like Nelson the Simpsons bully as I swing the gondola through. “City Without Cars thanks you all for coming. We’ve arranged a demonstration,” I say in my barker’s voice. “City Without Cars, Exhibit A.” I consider stealing the bumper, but the Saturn bumper I already have in the basement hasn’t exactly assuaged my wife’s desire to end our relationship. I think strategically and leave the bumper in the street.
The cars are only about twenty feet from the subway as the train beneath them isn’t buried very deeply here at the corner of Delaware between Oz and Dovercourt along Bloor. If you step off the gondola you can feel it rumbling.
The sense of entitlement it takes to think you have the right to crash your passenger car twenty feet above a passenger train strikes me as stratospheric, up there with bombing a nation whose language you don’t speak, bailing out bankers whose morality you do not share, and not moving out of the way on escalators.
If we can sum up the situation briefly here, we might say of these drivers that they are two people who think that those who ride public transportation are little people. Little people are quite literally beneath their notice and contempt. So here we have two lazy people—just two!—who are happy to spew poisons into the air of the children of the neighborhood, two people who can ignore the train beneath their feet, two people who understand the risks posed to children by running over them with cars but are happy to assume that risk. Two people, just two people, now arrogate to themselves the right to occupy the whole of the street for a half an hour based upon their demonstrable incompetence. The free pass you get to occupy the main east-west street of Toronto twenty feet above a passenger train is this: demonstrate that you cannot drive but that you’ve decided to do it anyway. Find a similarly incompetent person and smash into them. Pass go, collect the free half hour.
Where I Live and What I Live For
Now imagine two people without cars occupying Bloor Street for a half hour. My thought experiment isn’t anything so complex as getting you to imagine the heroes of Austin or Oakland or Zuccotti Park or Gaza. Just imagine two occupiers. Imagine that the basis of their occupation is not willingness to maim their fellows, not willingness to risk the lives of children or show contempt for subway train passengers. Imagine, if you will, two people who wish to occupy Bloor on the basis of joy. This part of Bloor is right next to the swill trough for the police, who like getting battery-raised bantams at the corner of Delaware and sticking their oinky suburban snouts into it while ricocheting farts off the naugahyde up into their flack jackets. Imagine two people occupying this part of Bloor with no maiming qualifications—in fact, with no car at all! It’s okay officers, keep gumming your breasts, we’ve got the situation under control. Everyone’s stopping for joy. I can assure you that the joy perps’d be tied up in the back of a squad car in five minutes, their wrists bound in metal and slathered with the grease of dead hens.
That’s why we occupy the streets, you suburban dumbfux. Get it? It’s because we feel like it. Those of you who honk at my gondola because I move slowly out of the intersection dragging my eight-foot push stick fashioned from a cedar harvested in my back yard, you think history is going to be kind to you? I’m having a good time and I’m not hurting anyone, and the only reason I get out of your way at all you suburban dumbfux who are too lazy to take the train is because you’ve got a paid trigger with chicken grease on it backing you up. A thousand paid triggers. People like me get killed all the time, but we’re not backing down. My friend Katrina was just telling me about her friend, waiting on his bike at a light while she’s with the friend’s kids, and a truck drags him off and squishes him—on Halloween! You think it was fun telling the kids? People like us are killed all the time, but we’re not backing down. Well, okay, you’ve got us outnumbered, and we back down a little, but our retreat is organized and above all truculent, and we make farting noises in your general direction, as would any honorable warrior.
Higher Laws
Every year you kill some of us, and every year we don’t kill some of you. Does that seem fair? Remind me again—why aren’t we killing a few of you every year? I can never understand this sort of thing. It’s like higher math or something. If you cull folks, folks should be allowed to cull you back. Am I missing something? Heed the cull. My poet says, I have to say (he says) that nonviolence stuff seems like a cop out and about, a cop with his stick up your anus, a cop and you in room with a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Nonviolence is a copout. If our forbears had heeded the cull instead of indulging in all that nonviolence stuff, we wouldn’t be looking down the barrel of a thousand thousand cars and guns. Nonviolence is the most violent act of all; it breeds nothing but violence. Just because it’s systemic, my poet says, doesn’t mean it’s not violence of the most brutal and wide-ranging sort. Well, don’t listen to him. He’s not a potentate or anything, just a poet. As for me, waddoo I know, eh? If I spoke the truth as our people have spoken it in these parts for ten thousand years, do you think it would be legal to print it here? What dull things you people write about, if it’s legal to write it. You’re mollycoddled, you nonviolence types, and you pretend not to notice.
That poet, eh?
At the least we should have Bicyclists in Cars Day once a year, where people who don’t routinely drive on Bloor get to borrow the cars of people who do and just kind of ram them into each other. Such behavior isn’t really fair, as it’s only once a year and wouldn’t really even things up, but it would be clearly marked by joy.
Well, such were my thoughts as I poled home from St. James Park on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Wait, says my poet, stick this line into that crap you write: Temperament of Americana Chickens These birds are usually quiet and adapt well to confinement.
The Pond in Winter
Anyway, such were my thoughts, I was saying, as I poled home from St. James Park on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. For now, there’s still a home to pole back to, but storm clouds mass. I like to check in with the occupationists a few times a week. Today a guitarist named Doug (camp moniker “Patches” after two tiny bits of gray in the beard of a young man) comes down from the gazebo between songs and offers me the straight dope on things, including plans to survive an urban winter along the 45th parallel. Unlike me, Patches has been here continuously from day one. He’s slept in the nearby parking garage, but has now secured a tent, and the plan for overwintering is to slip a small tent inside a big one and stuff the intervening space with insulating newspapers. I’m reminded of what Wallace Stevens called “the mind of winter.” My advice about the mind of winter: best not to smoke in there. Patches directs me to another part of camp, where two men are building a yurt. The acoustical magic of moving through a compressed utopian space is compelling: ten paces brings a scene change, a new register of speech. The variously prosaic or world-historical dioramas of camp life. Seens from a newseum.
Solitude
It’s getting cold. I was up moving in the middle of the night along the barrier reefs a few miles out from the mainland far to the north of here the other night, the canoe invisible beneath me in the darkness. My people have been doing this for ten thousand years, says my poet, and when people wanted to fuck up the water everyone needed to live, they didn’t practice nonviolence or tender a plea to their congressperson. They killed them. Wasn’t rocket science, my poet says. Protecting the water is the least violent thing in the long run. I was sprinting between sightings of a North Star only occasionally visible, when it occurred to me that people don’t do this much anymore. Is that the “anymore” of late October or late capital? So late in October and capital, still later, I pulled the canoe out on shore, and it was the color and slipperiness of a greased watermelon, lightly basted in a rime of ice. Last pull-out of the season: end rime.
House-Warming
At the northwest corner of the park in Toronto, some wit has accurately captioned the scene by emphasizing the slogan of the parks in the city: A City Within A Park. On Friday local writer Jeff and I occupied the Occupation, a mickey’s worth of St. Remy’s in hand. There was a space under a tarp with a nice nest of straw and an official designation as a worker’s retreat. Well, “worker” is an ill-fitting name for Jeff and me, but it’ll do under certain circumstances. We parked our sleeping bags and snuggled in. The general assembly was in full swing but we convened a specific assembly around our brandy from “a revolution long since passed,” as Jeff characterized the spirits. “Try the spirits,” my mother used to say, quoting the Bible, and if I pass the phrase along here it is less out of context than first glance would suggest. Jeff tells me he has a “wild, unkempt mind,” and my wife—if she ever was my wife—says I’m estrambótico (outlandish?), but between Jeff and me we solved the problem of co-optation, the next challenge of the Occupation, in about fifteen tugs on the bottle. We’ll let you know.
My poet says next time we’re out on the water we should play around with that word ‘outlandish’.
Reading
I suspect Jeff of suspecting that I should be gentler on my readers, making the writing more accessible. But once “gondola,” say, is found to be “just” a pole and a longboard, all the other possibilities close down. One’s best readers are defrauded by explanation. Far from explaining things in terms everyone can understand, a good writer should be antagonizing his readers, dragging them through unfamiliar terrain, insulting them. Let a reader sit with “the litigious freeze-frame melodrama of après-accident” for a bit, or let them shove off back to their familiar whining about being disappointed with Obama. The devotees of leaderville aren’t going to get as far as eighteen hundred words into one of my articles in any case. I follow Jesus on this one. It was said of him and the people that “without a riddle spake he not unto them.” Riddles have a way of separating out fair-weather friends. Winter’s coming.
Plus I’m channeling twenty years of French political theory, muthafucka. You want to spend twenty years reading Foucault, Derrida, Bataille, and the surrealists, only some of whom could handle their end of a streetfight? Sacre bleu, don’t touch that dial. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” as Alligator Dundee almost said in a streetfight, “that’s a pipe.” Got in a standoff yesterday with the fine young man in his twenties with the large pectoral muscles at the house on Delaware that has the Support Our Troops sign on it. He called me a faggot, which was intuitive in a partial sort of way. He yelled into the house to get his mom to phone the police, which tipped the balance on the standoff but tells us everything we need to know about the oedipal drama called democracy, about how wars of democracy are constitutive rather than contingent, and tells us everything we need to know about the task of the writer in uncovering these oedipal configurations.
The point is to change the world, not ratify it. Thoreau didn’t sell out or sell at all, but his life as word trove went into the collective unconscious archive as a sleeper of immense power. Well, after a role in the hay on the ground of occupied being, Jeff and I come into alignment on even this topic. Whatever else the ground of being is, it’s the palimpsest of contested meaning on the planar field of script. Like, writing and such. The dingbats have been pretending to be in charge for a long time, but not everyone everywhere is always a retard. I’ll save writing like a Star or Economist reporter for when I’m doing my fifteen-year-old’s civics homework, thank-you very much (and with what spirit of glee you can imagine!).
Conclusion
St. James Park isn’t just a city within a park, it’s a city within a person. The City of God has been ascendant in the West for a millennium or two, but the idea that some higher power is going to save us, that some daddy politician needs to be presented with demands, is so naked you can see its Augustinian testicles hanging from behind through the spread of its Mrs. Clinton-style legs.
Food, shelter, curiosity—there isn’t much an authentic human needs, except for maybe a good gondola of some sort or other. In the city within a park, as within the mind of a man not so preoccupied that he cannot occupy the world fully, some folks are just getting on with it.
* * *
Well, my poet and I aren’t getting paid enough here at the homesite, lovely as it might be as a wall to mene mene tekel upon, so send cash. Otherwise, prepare to feel the wrath of my poet. On the same note, I’m off for a few weeks to put some of that research stuff into an important article on the unimportance of overpopulation (“The Rhetoric of the New Manifest Destiny” or some such) and try to sell it in a publishing world that loves blaming people for their births rather than for their destructive environmental habits. Wish me well. I’ll try not to show up here unless the cops actually attempt to clear out St. James Park. But you know I’m always out on the street every day messing with people’s minds. For now, I’ll pull out with a rhyming couplet.
End rime,
Out of time.
Section headings from Walden.
David Ker Thomson is a fitfully enthusiastic correspondent, and is working through May’s emails. Full disclosure: Mr. Thomson does not hold stocks in any of the companies implicitly criticized here. In fact he has no stocks at all. dave dot thomson at utoronto dot ca
