OCTOBER 17, 2011
And An Unashamedly Interventionist Secretary of State
The war is not over yet in Libya after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi and the Obama administration has turned its attention to Iran. Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement of a “plot” to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in the United States, and warnings of dire consequences for Iran, mark a new escalation between the two countries.
The Obama administration says the offender behind the “plot” is an Iranian-American used-car salesman based in Texas, Mansour Arbabsiar, who believed he was hiring assassins from a Mexican drug cartel for a meager one-and-a-half million dollars. It was a trap set up by federal agents. Not for the first time, it seems, the American law enforcement agencies are responsible for planting ideas into the mind of someone naïve and ordinary and making an arrest as soon as the individual looks interested.
The evidence has to be tested in courts. The arrested man, and a second alleged conspirator who is in Iran, have not been indicted yet. Reports say the man in custody will plead “not guilty.” But the Obama administration has already found him guilty. Further, according to the Obama administration, the trail points all the way to the Iranian regime. That the government in Tehran would use an American citizen of Iranian descent to hatch a scheme with a Mexican drug cartel to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, involving less than two million dollars, is bizarre.
Why the Saudi ambassador and not a bigger target? For only one-and-a-half million dollars? Why would the authorities in Tehran take such a risk? What purpose would be served? Honest answers to these and other perplexing questions are hard to come by. Tehran, not surprisingly, rejects Washington’s accusations.
There will be those who will see the latest developments as part of a consistent pattern of U.S. foreign policy conduct in the Middle East, especially with regard to Iran. The motive––to teach Iran a lesson in any way possible. Like the bizarre accusations against Muammar Gaddafi that he was employing mass rape of women as a weapon against opponents, to justify NATO’s war in Libya.
Human rights organizations like Amnesty plainly contradicted the U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who made the fantastic claim that “we have information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those who were against the government. Apparently he [Colonel Gaddafi] used it to punish people.”
Now, as doubts increase over the “plot,” but the campaign against Iran is pushed by Washington regardless, expressions of incredulity abound. Respected magazine Veterans Today, which represents American servicemen, has an article titled “Mr. President, We Believe Holder Lied on Iran Terror.” Senior editor Gordon Duff commented, “Within 24 hours of the announcement of a new Iranian plot, the truth started leaking out. That leak is now a flood. The FBI made up the whole thing, invented it and you and they aren’t going to get away with it. Why something this outrageous, this incompetent?”
There seems to be no limit to which Hillary Clinton’s war of vengeance will go. It is worth noting her unrestrained outburst about Iran during the final phase of her unsuccessful bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 2008 presidential election. She said that as president she would “totally obliterate” Iran if it foolishly considered attacking Israel–– a scenario not very likely. Contrary to what some in Washington’s corridors of power think, the Iranians are more sensible than they are given credit for. At the time, Hillary Clinton’s opponent, Barack Obama, dismissed her outburst as “sabre rattling.”
The Obama administration’s character today is vastly different from Obama the candidate’s. Hillary Clinton, ex-New York senator and a committed supporter of Israel, is his secretary of state. I believe she is the most powerful figure to have arrived at the top in the State Department since Henry Kissinger during the Nixon presidency more than 35 years ago. Even then, Nixon was a formidable and liberal figure in international politics. An architect of détente, his foreign policy goals were radically different from Washington’s objectives in the twenty-first century.
Hillary Clinton is arguably the most interventionist secretary of state of the past half century. While Obama struggles at home with an increasingly belligerent Congress, Hillary Clinton has, in effect, seized control of U.S. foreign policy, which she conducts with far less diplomacy than military threats. Like the Bush-Cheney administration, we are witnessing an Obama-Clinton presidency, which brazenly engages in targeted killings in any country it wishes and, at the same time, accuses another country of plotting an assassination in Washington.
A Democratic administration has embraced the neoconservative Project for the New American Century. Its aggressiveness and stupidity compete with each other. It represents the law of the jungle.
Deepak Tripathi is the author of Breeding Ground: Afghanistan and the Origins of Islamist Terrorism (Potomac Books, Incorporated, Washington, D.C., 2011) and Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan (also Potomac, 2010). His works can be found at: http://deepaktripathi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at:dandatripathi@gmail.com.
OCTOBER 17, 2011
23 Reasons Why We Should be Careful About Uncritically Accepting Western Views of the Syrian Insurrection
As insurrection in Syria lurches towards civil war, the brakes need to be put on the propaganda pouring through the Western mainstream media and accepted uncritically by many who should know better. So here is a matrix of positions from which to argue about what is going on in this critical Middle Eastern country.
1. Syria has been a mukhabarat (intelligence) state since the redoubtable Abdel-Hamid Al-Serraj ran the intelligence services as the deuxième bureau in the 1950s. The authoritarian state which developed from the time former Syrian president Hafez Al-Assad took power in 1970 has crushed all dissent ruthlessly. On occasion it has either been him or them. The ubiquitous presence of themukhabarat is an unpleasant fact of Syrian life, but as Syria is a central target for assassination and subversion by Israel and Western intelligence agencies, as it has repeatedly come under military attack, as it has had a large chunk of its territories occupied, and as its enemies are forever looking for opportunities to bring it down, it can hardly be said that the mukhabarat is not needed.
2. There is no doubt that the bulk of the people demonstrating in Syria want a peaceful transition to a democratic form of government. Neither is there any doubt that armed groups operating from behind the screen of the demonstrations have no interest in reform. They want to destroy the government.
3. There have been very big demonstrations of support for the government. There is anger at the violence of the armed gangs and anger at external interference and exploitation of the situation by outside governments and the media. In the eyes of many Syrians, their country is once again the target of an international conspiracy.
4. Whatever the truth of the accusations made against the security forces, the armed groups have killed hundreds of police, soldiers and civilians, in total probably close to 1,000 at this stage. The civilian dead include university professors, doctors and even, very recently, the son of the grand mufti of the republic. The armed gangs have massacred, ambushed, assassinated, attacked government buildings and sabotaged railway lines.
5. Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has a strong base of personal popularity. Although he sits on top of the system, it is misleading to call him a dictator. The system itself is the true dictator. Deeply rooted power in Syria — entrenched over five decades — lies in the military and intelligence establishment, and to a lesser degree in the ruling Baath Party structure. These are the true sources of resistance to change. The demonstrations were Al-Assad’s opportunity to pass on the message, which he did, that the system had to change.
6. In the face of large-scale demonstrations earlier this year, the government did finally come up with a reform programme. This was rejected out of hand by the opposition. No attempt was even made to test the bona fides of the government.
7. The claim that armed opposition to the government has begun only recently is a complete lie. The killings of soldiers, police and civilians, often in the most brutal circumstances, has been going on virtually since the beginning.
8. The armed groups are well armed and well organised. Large shipments of weapons have been smuggled into Syria from Lebanon and Turkey. They include pump action shotguns, machine guns, Kalashnikovs, RPG launchers, Israeli-made hand grenades and numerous other explosives. It is not clear who is providing these weapons but someone is, and someone is paying for them. Interrogation of captured members of armed gangs points in the direction of former Lebanese prime minister Saad Al-Hariri’s Future Movement. Al-Hariri is a front man for the US and Saudi Arabia, with influence spreading well beyond Lebanon.
9. Armed opposition to the regime largely seems to be sponsored by the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. In 1982, the Syrian government ruthlessly crushed an uprising initiated by the Brotherhood in the city of Hama. Many thousands died, and part of the city was destroyed. The Brotherhood has two prime objectives: the destruction of the Baathist government and the destruction of the secular state in favour of an Islamic system. It is almost palpably thirsting for revenge.
10. The armed groups have strong support from outside, apart from what is already known or indicated. Exiled former Syrian vice-president and foreign minister, Abdel-Halim Khaddam, who lives in Paris, has been campaigning for years to bring down the Al-Assad government. He is funded by both the EU and the US. Other exiled activists include Burhan Ghalioun, backed by Qatar as the leader of the “National Council” set up in Istanbul. Ghalioun, like Khaddam, lives in Paris and like him also, lobbies against the Al-Assad government in Europe and in Washington.
Together with Mohamed Riyad Al-Shaqfa, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, he is receptive to outside “humanitarian intervention” in Syria on the Libyan model (others are against it). The promotion of the exiles as an alternative government is reminiscent of the way the US used exiled Iraqis (the so-called Iraqi National Congress) ahead of the invasion of Iraq.
11. The reporting by the Western media of the situations in Libya and Syria has been appalling. NATO intervention in Libya has been the cause of massive destruction and thousands of deaths. The war, following the invasion of Iraq, is yet another major international crime committed by the governments of the US, Britain and France. The Libyan city of Sirte has been bombarded day and night for two weeks without the Western media paying any attention to the heavy destruction and loss of life that must have followed. The Western media has made no attempt to check reports coming out of Sirte of the bombing of civilian buildings and the killing of hundreds of people. The only reason can be that the ugly truth could well derail the whole NATO operation.
12. In Syria the same media has followed the same pattern of misreporting and disinformation. It has ignored or skated over the evidence of widespread killings by armed gangs. It has invited its audience to disbelieve the claims of government and believe the claims of rebels, often made in the name of human rights organisations based in Europe or the US. Numerous outright lies have been told, as they were told in Libya and as they were told ahead of the attack on Iraq. Some at least have been exposed.
People said to have been killed by state security forces have turned up alive. The brothers of Zainab Al-Hosni claimed she has been kidnapped by security forces, murdered and her body dismembered. This lurid account, spread by the TV channels Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya amongst other outlets, was totally false. She is still alive although now, of course, the propaganda tack is to claim that this is not really her but a double. Al-Jazeera, the British newspaper The Guardian and the BBC have distinguished themselves by their blind support of anything that discredits the Syrian government. The same line is being followed by the mainstream media in the US. Al-Jazeera, in particular, having distinguished itself with its reporting of the Egyptian revolution, has lost all credibility as an independent Arab world news channel.
13. In seeking to destroy the Syrian government, the Muslim Brotherhood has a goal in common with the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, whose paranoia about Shia Islam reached fever pitch with the uprising in Bahrain. WikiLeaks has revealed how impatient it was for the US to attack Iran. A substitute target is the destruction of the strategic relationship between Iran, Syria and the Lebanese Shia group Hizbullah. The US and the Saudis may want to destroy the Alawi-dominated Baathist regime in Damascus for slightly different reasons, but the important thing is that they do want to destroy it.
14. The US is doing its utmost to drive Syria into a corner. It is giving financial support to exiled leaders of the opposition. It has tried (and so far failed, thanks to Russian and Chinese opposition) to introduce an extensive programme of sanctions through the UN Security Council. No doubt it will try again, and depending on how the situation develops, it may try, with British and French support, to bring on a no-fly zone resolution opening the door to foreign attack.
The situation is fluid and no doubt all sorts of contingency plans are being developed. The White House and the State Department are issuing hectoring statements every other day. Openly provoking the Syrian government, the US ambassador, accompanied by the French ambassador, travelled to Hama before Friday prayers. Against everything that is known about their past record of interference in Middle Eastern countries, it is inconceivable that the US and Israel, along with France and Britain, would not be involved in this uprising beyond what is already known.
15. While concentrating on the violence of the Syrian regime, the US and European governments (especially Britain) have totally ignored the violence directed against it. Their own infinitely greater violence, of course, in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places doesn’t even come into the picture. Turkey has joined their campaign against Syria with relish, going even further than they have in confronting the Syrian regime.
In the space of a few months Turkey’s “zero problem” regional policy has been upended in the most inchoate manner. Turkey eventually lent its support to the NATO attack on Libya, after initially holding back. It has antagonised Iran by its policy on Syria and by agreeing, despite strong domestic opposition, to host a US radar missile installation clearly directed against Iran. The Americans say the installation’s data will be shared with Israel, which has refused to apologise for the attack on the Turkish ship the Mavi Marmara, plunging Israeli-Turkish relations into near crisis. So from “zero problems”, Turkey now has a regional policy full of problems with Israel, Syria and Iran.
16. While some members of the Syrian opposition have spoken out against foreign intervention, the “Free Syrian Army” has said that its aim is to have a no-fly zone declared over northern Syria. A no-fly zone would have to be enforced, and we have seen how this led in Libya to massive infrastructural destruction, the killing of thousands of people and the opening of the door to a new period of Western domination.
17. If the Syrian government is brought down, every last Baathist and Alawi will be hunted down. In a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the status of minorities and women would be driven back.
18. Through its Syria Accountability Act, and through sanctions which the EU has imposed, the US has been trying to destroy the Syrian government for 20 years. The dismantling of unified Arab states along ethno-religious lines has been an aim of Israel’s for decades. Where Israel goes, the US naturally follows. The fruits of this policy can be seen in Iraq, where an independent state in all but name has been created for the Kurds and where the constitution, written by the US, separates Iraq’s people into Kurds, Sunnis, Shias and Christians, destroying the binding logic of Arab nationalism. Iraq has not known a moment’s peace since the British entered Baghdad in 1917.
In Syria, ethno-religious divisions (Sunni Muslim Arab, Sunni Muslim Kurd, Druze, Alawi and various Christian sects) render the country vulnerable in the same way to the promotion of sectarian discord and eventual disintegration as the unified Arab state the French originally tried to prevent coming into existence in the 1920s.
19. The destruction of the Baathist government in Syria would be a strategic victory of unsurpassed value to the US and Israel. The central arch in the strategic relationship between Iran, Syria and Hizbullah would be destroyed, leaving Hizbullah geographically isolated, with a hostile Sunni Muslim government next door, and leaving Hizbullah and Iran more exposed to a military attack by the US and Israel. Fortuitously or otherwise, the “Arab spring” as it has developed in Syria has placed in US and Israeli hands a lever by which they may be able to achieve their goal.
20. It is not necessarily the case that a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government in Egypt or Syria would be hostile to US interests. Wanting to be seen as a respectable member of the international community and another good example of “moderate Islam”, it is likely and certainly possible that an Egyptian government dominated by the Brotherhood would agree to maintain the peace treaty with Israel for as long as it can (i.e. until another large scale attack by Israel on Gaza or Lebanon makes it absolutely unsustainable).
21. A Syrian government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood would be close to Saudi Arabia and hostile to Iran, Hizbullah and the Shia of Iraq, especially those associated with the Shia leader Muqtada Al-Sadr. It would pay lip service to the Palestine cause and the liberation of the Golan Heights, but its practical policies would be unlikely to be any different from the government it is seeking to destroy.
22. The Syrian people are entitled to demand democracy and to be given it, but in this way and at this cost? Even now, an end to the killing and negotiations on political reform are surely the way forward, not violence which threatens to tear the country apart. Unfortunately, violence and not a negotiated settlement is what too many people inside Syria want and what too many governments watching and waiting for their opportunity also want. No Syrian can ultimately gain from this, whatever they presently think.
Their country is being driven towards a sectarian civil war, perhaps foreign intervention and certainly chaos on an even greater scale than we are now seeing. There will be no quick recovery if the state collapses or can be brought down. Like Iraq, and probably like Libya, looking at the present situation, Syria would enter a period of bloody turmoil that could last for years. Like Iraq, again, it would be completely knocked out of the ring as a state capable of standing up for Arab interests, which means, of course, standing up to the US and Israel.
23. Ultimately, whose interests does anyone think this outcome would serve?Jeremy Salt is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history and politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
OCTOBER 17, 2011
The anti-Wall Street protest has often resembled a street party. In occupied Liberty Park, people banged on drums, danced, performed mime, even dangled donuts to bait cops. Their mood has been merry, which is remarkable considering that they’ve been sleeping out in the open, on hard ground, in a compact park, without even tents over them. Food and money have been limited, and sanitation a logistical nuisance, yet even a cloudburst in the middle of the night, drenching everyone, was greeted with cheers. A sign, “THE REVOLUTION WILL BE PLAYFUL.”
Critics have slandered these protesters as idle and frivolous, as muddled crybabies who would flee from any job application, not that anyone’s hiring, by the way. This rally, then, is just a noisy blight on America’s crooked economic engine. With a first dusting of snow, these anarchists, hippies, art students, bums and trust fund kids would all go home to mommy. Third-term billionaire mayor Bloomberg—who says money can’t prolong life?—even moaned that this protest was targeting people just “struggling to make ends meet,” and he was sorta right, of course, because there’s no way Wall Street’s end can meet any of our ends.
When noticed at all, the protesters’ frequent meetings have often been dismissed as pointless and confused. Surely nothing will come of their callow and cumbersome deliberations. Their decisions can’t and won’t matter. America’s life and death matters are decided by cynical, rich old guys in suits, not bongo stroking freaks, so debate all you want, but there’s no way your jejune ideas can inflect, however slightly, this monster bank-dominated, Federal Reserve-run, two war party system.
With the just released The 99% Declaration, our ruling class has been issued an ultimatum, however. The anti-Wall Street protesters will convene a National General Assembly in Philadelphia from July 4th, 2012 until October of 2012, resulting in a “PETITION OF GRIEVANCES to be submitted to all members of Congress, The Supreme Court and President and each of the political candidates running in the nationwide Congressional and Presidential election in November 2012.” If these grievances are not redressed within one year, the 99% “will organize a third independent political party to run candidates in the 2014 mid-term elections.”
This is the best news I’ve heard in a while. Finally, some much needed oxygen in this suffocating political dungeon. These mostly young protesters have stayed clear of any current politician. Showing more maturity than many of their elders, they trust neither Democrats nor Republicans. They are not suckered by Obama nor distracted by Clinton’s Usher and Lady Gaga circus. It’s incredible, isn’t it, that the man who enacted NAFTA and repealed the Glass-Steagall act can now go on television to lament that “the American Dream has been under assault”?
With their rejection of this walled up and dead end system, the protesters can bring to mind Bartleby, with his “I’d prefer not to,” but this movement is not just a refusal to be co-opted into a murderous and life-sapping existence. Last week, America entered yet another war, but who’s keeping track any longer? A Yahoo! headline, “Mysteries of Clinton’s Big Concert Solved,” and the Cardinals are amazing, aren’t they?
A third, viable political party is long overdue. Though the moneyed interest will surely bare its fangs before it gives up even a sturgeon egg from its privileged table, it is high time we break apart this mad vehicle before it hurls us all into the abyss.
Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a just released novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.
OCTOBER 17, 2011
Careful now. Don’t repeat the signs on the street. Think first. Beware of diversions. So warns Richard Grossman.
“There’s no shortage of corruption and greed going all around,” says Richard Grossman. “But corruption and greed are not the problem. They are diversions.”
“The essence of the power arrayed against the 99 percent are structures of minority-rule governance deeply rooted, honored and celebrated, even by, I suspect, many of the people who are occupying Wall Street today.”
“I’m referring to the great myths of this nation’s founding and founders, of the U.S. Constitution and constitutional jurisprudence, the nonsense about limited governance, the sanctification of ‘the rule of law’ when lawmaking and interpreting and enforcing have been the special preserve in every generation of a small minority.”
“I’m talking about the private ordering of economic decision making, the sweeping constitutional privileges wielded by directors of the ‘creatures of law’ we call chartered, incorporated businesses camouflaged as ‘free enterprise’ and ‘the invisible hand.’”
“I hope that teach-ins about such realities in Wall Street and Washington and other places are going on. So far, I’ve not seen evidence.”
Grossman has been one of the major philosophers of the movement to challenge corporate power.
Over his career, his thinking has moved from regulate the corporation, to challenge corporate constitutional empowerment, to criminalize the corporate form.
“And criminalizing public officials who have enabled and abetted usurpation,” Grossman adds. “And then rethinking everything relating to designing institutions to help a sovereign people live in sane and rational ways.”
Grossman objects to being called the father of the movement to challenge corporate personhood – what he dismissively calls the “corporate personhood fetish.”
“ I never focused on personhood,” Grossman said. “I helped to explain Supreme Court cases starting with Dartmouth College in 1819 that turned business corporation directors into usurpers.”
“My focus was on the Constitution as a minority-rule plan of governance, and on usurpations galore.”
“And so this move to amend the Constitution that sprung up after the Citizens United decision – I don’t understand it as strategy, as an educational process, as an organizing process, as a goal.”
“Why validate the idea that amending the Constitution offers a remedy for two hundred years of minority rule? For today’s corporate state? Corporate ‘speech’ is such a minuscule aspect of the nation’s private governance and mass denials that have been in place since the nation was founded.”
“Let’s keep in mind that when the Constitution was ratified, all states denied most people standing before the law. They denied most people the authority to vote.”
“The authors of the US Constitution included no language in that plan of governance requiring the United States to remove all barriers to human liberty – to maximize liberty throughout the land.”
“They did craft language requiring the United States to remove all barriers to commerce – to maximize production and commerce throughout the land. To impose a national economy on communities throughout the land.”
“They certainly understood the concept of a strong, centralized federal government swimming in the preemption and prerogative authority of kings.” Russell Mokhiber edits Corporate Crime Reporter.
[For a complete transcript of the Interview with Richard Grossman, see 25 Corporate Crime Reporter 40, October 17, 2011, print edition only.]
OCTOBER 17, 2011
Common Terry was in a buoyant mood as he marched along Market Street Saturday afternoon along with a couple hundred activists who, following a rally outside the Liberty Bell pavilion, headed over to Philadelphia’s ornate City Hall to join the thousand or so occupiers camped out there.
“We’ve been occupying places for a long time,” said the laid off part-time teacher from Oakland, California. “University administration buildings, parks in Berkeley, nuclear plants. And now we’re occupying the centers of cities!”
Terry, who says he has been shuttling back and forth between the occupations in Philadelphia and New York, said he had purchased a one-month $60 Trailpass on Greyhound and was planning to attend a number of other occupation sites around the country.
The movement is clearly growing in size, and impact.
“This is cool. It’s a good thing they’re doing. Living democracy in action,” said two tourists outside the Constitution Center, as demonstrators marched past carrying signs saying “Hands of my Security and Medicare!” and “Tax the Rich!” and chanting “Banks got bailouts! We got sold out!”
A second couple, Christie and Billy Leetch, down from Boston, said they were happy to see the occupation happening in Philadelphia. “The one in Boston was violently attacked by the police a few days ago,” said Christie. “It was really disgusting, watching them arresting peacefully demonstrating veterans.”
“I agree with the message, and with the civil unrest,” said her husband. “It’s the only way to effect change without picking up guns.”
While the demonstration at Independence Mall was underway, a phalanx of Philadelphia Police, mounted on bikes and wearing jackets that said “Police Strike Force,” waited in a line along the 6th Street Boundary, looking ready to roll out and bang heads. It was a strikingly aggressive image juxtaposed to the completely peaceful crowd assembled across the street from them, and seemed wholly inappropriate. The crowd ignored the biker cops.
Once at City Hall, it became immediately apparent why the city was complaining about having to spend an alleged $400,000 to “accommodate” the protesters encamped outside the ornate building. At every entrance to the block-sized edifice, there were 6-10 cops lounging around earning overtime and looking totally bored. City Hall, a towering stone structure that rises castle-like around a huge open square, was completely fenced off around its circumference by bicycle-stand-like metal barricades, behind which numerous armed cops stood.
Clearly a lot of public employee time had gone into shipping in and setting up those barricades, and even more was going into paying for the round-the-clock police guard.
None of it is needed. On the west side of the building, where there is a large plaza, several hundred brightly-colored, igloo-shaped tents have been pitched by the occupiers, who number perhaps 800 or so. The mood is festive and calm. Two cops standing at either end of the plaza would suffice to provide security, or call for back-up if anything untoward were to happen. No clean-up crews are required. These occupiers, like their compatriots in the Occupy Wall Street action, are keeping their grounds cleaner than they’ve ever been kept by city workers.
The complaint about public costs of the occupations is as bogus as is the police ban in New York on umbrellas and tents.
Wilson Sproehnle, a 60-something Vietnam War era veteran wearing a Veterans for Peace T-shirt, and sporting long gray dreadlocks, is one of the occupiers at City Hall. He said, “This is just like the anti-war movement in the 1960s, and it’s also completely different.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him, a bit puzzled.
“Back in the ‘60s,” he explained, “you had a bunch of groups, each with their own agenda that they were pushing. And there were leaders back then, who would tell us what to do, and then we’d all do it. Now there are no groups with agendas. Just lots of people coming together to protest. And there are no leaders. Everybody meets together, everybody gets to say what they are thinking, and everybody discusses things until we reach agreement. It’s a beautiful thing!”
This was one occupation among hundreds across the U.S. and around the world on Global Occupation Day.
The encampment at City Hall here looks like it is settling in for the long hall. There is a registration tent, a medical tent, there’s even a beauty salon tent for those who want to attend to their appearance. Also, donations for supplies are pouring in and–no small matter — the owner of the privately-run underground mall area of the nearby Suburban Station of the city’s public transit system has told the protesters that they are welcome to use the public washrooms there 24 hours per day.
“The city has told us we’ll have to leave next month because they are supposedly planning to start work on putting an ice-skating rink here,” said one occupier. “But we won’t be iced out! They shouldn’t be spending public funds on a skating rink when schools and libraries are being shut down for lack of money. And besides, they are just putting a rink here because it’s the only spot around the City Hall building where there is room for people to protest.”
In fact, the plaza has been the scene of protests for decades. and would be hard to replace if it were removed.
Given the commitment of these demonstrators to stay put, it may not be something that Mayor Michael Nutter and the City Council will want to attempt.
DAVE LINDORFF is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new award-winning independent online alternative newspaper. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, LINN WASHINGTON, JR., and CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
OCTOBER 19, 2011
In recent years there seemed to be a nuclear power renaissance. One reason for this has been the adoption by its promoters of the theme of global warming, and their claim that nuclear power is clean energy because it does not produce carbon emissions. But is nuclear power in fact the clean-energy solution its promoters claim?
Only one third of the heat energy produced in a nuclear reactor is transformed into electricity. In Japan, the remaining two thirds of the energy that remains in the water vapor– that is, twice as much energy as contained in the generated electricity – is disposed of in the sea. In the cooling system, seawater is used to cool the water vapor, which condenses again to water and is circulated through the reactor once again. This heated seawater is called “thermal discharge”. How much heat does this thermal discharge carry into the sea? The amount is startling.
Before the Fukushima accident, that is, at the end of 2010, Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors were producing a total of 49,112,000 kilowatts of electricity. So every day they were throwing away twice that much, approximately 100,000,000 kilowatts of energy, in the form of heat, into the sea.
This means that every day they were pumping into the sea energy equivalent to 100 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. The Hiroshima bomb destroyed the city in an instant and ended the lives of some 140,000 people, but when energy 100 times that great is “dropped” into the sea daily, what effect does that have? That it would not be destructive of the ocean’s ecology is unimaginable. Before saying that “nuclear power plants supply one third of the demand for electricity”, it needs to be said that “twice as much energy as the electricity they produce is used to heat up the sea.”
I want to ask, what kind of global warming debate is it that never discusses this fact? In Japan, the number one global warming agent is the nuclear power plants.
After I left the company I was working for, I spent a long time translating medical books. In the 1970s I was translating books depicting the suffering of people whose health was damaged by environmental pollution, and at the same time through an agent was accepting work from industry. At that time I received a request from
TEPCO to translate a 1970s report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In it was the following passage.
“When thermal discharge from nuclear power plants is released into the sea, the heat does not immediately disperse. Rather it concentrates and remains suspended in what are called “hot spots”. For this reason it has a very large effect on sea life near the shore. In the shallows, even a difference of two or three degrees can kill fish eggs or young fish.”
I translated this English correctly and delivered the manuscript to TEPCO. The report of which it was a part was apparently suppressed within the company. To this day it has never appeared.
Moreover, the claim that nuclear power is a cheap form of energy is also untrue. Nuclear power plants are located far from the users of the electricity, so they require extraordinarily long transmission systems (In 1964 the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) stipulated that “Dangerous nuclear power plants must not be located in heavily populated areas”). The nuclear power plants that deliver electricity to the capital are the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini reactors, Niigata Prefecture’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactor, and Ibaragi Prefecture’s Tokai Daini reactor. The 14 nuclear power plants sending electricity to the Kansai (Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe) area are lined up along the faraway shore of the Japan Sea at Wakasa Bay, in Fukui Prefecture. When you take into account the transmission systems connecting the power plants with the metropolitan areas they serve, you cannot call it an inexpensive source of electricity.
Without Nuclear Power, Will There Be Blackouts?
After the Fukushima Daiichi accident, TEPCO carried out planned blackouts, and the Kan Naoto administration, “in order to avoid a major blackout due to electricity shortages in the summer months” is considering enacting measures enforcing limits on electricity consumption for the first time since the oil shock of 1974. This deep-seated “blackout fear” held by so many seems to be grounded in the idea that we must continue gingerly to maintain the nuclear power industry, which advertises itself as providing one-third of the country’s electricity. What I see in the opinion polls is the attitude, I don’t like living with nuclear power plants, but without them there is no way to get the electricity, so there’s nothing to be done because like they say, you can’t exchange your back for your belly.
This is a huge misunderstanding that must be corrected.
A survey by year of the generating capacity of Japan’s main sources of electrical power compared with the total amount of electricity demand tells a different story. In no year has the peak demand for electricity – that is, the demand for electricity in the hours between 2 and 3pm on the hottest days of summer – exceeded what could be provided by the combination of fossil fuel and water powered generators. Moreover, the highest recorded peak demand was in 2001, and has never been surpassed in the ten years since then. Rather, with the economic downturn, demand for electricity fell in 2008 and 2009.
From whence, then, comes the misunderstanding that nuclear power plants supply one third of the country’s electricity, and that without them there would be blackouts?. The answer sounds like a joke, but it is true: it is that while Japan has a very large capability for generating electricity from natural gas, these facilities have been intentionally kept operating at only 50-60 per cent of capacity. Among the major sources of electricity used in the advanced countries, natural gas is the cleanest. Then there are the petroleum powered plants; amazingly they are operating at only 10 to 20 per cent of their capacity. (This figure may sound unbelievable, but since the 1970s Oil Shock, most of the developed countries have a policy of reducing oil consumption as far as possible. Japan’s fossil fuel power plants use mainly coal and natural gas.) The idea that without nuclear power there would be blackouts is nonsense.
The reason TEPCO carried out intentional blackouts after the earthquake is that the fossil fuel reactors in the region also suffered temporary damage. No doubt there was also difficulty delivering fuel. But repairing fossil fuel power plants is nowhere near as difficult at repairing nuclear power plants. It’s just a matter of replacing damaged parts. Once repair work begins, it doesn’t take long before the plant is operating again. And once the fossil fuel plants are back on line, electricity demand is no problem.
After its nuclear plants were so badly damaged, TEPCO should have put its natural gas and petroleum plants into full operation, but it did not. Rather it carried out intentional blackouts, bringing confusion to the metropolitan area and bringing losses both to industry and to private citizens. In this it did not fulfill its responsibility as an electricity provider, and revealed a fundamental problem. And now we hear everywhere language fanning the fear of summertime blackouts, but this is only a false rumor being spread by people who know nothing of electrical power generation. (Translators note: in fact in the summer since this was written, there were no electrical blackouts in Japan.)
A natural gas power plant can be built in a few months. This was made clear in an article appearing the April 6, 2011 edition of Gasu Energii Shinbun (Gas Energy News) by Ishii Akira, head of the Energy and Environment Research Center, titled “After Fukushima, the Age of Natural Gas”. In this article, Ishii explains Japan’s energy situation from the standpoint of a professional. The Fukushima nuclear power plant accident took place on March 11. Why didn’t TEPCO begin immediately to take action to ensure that there would be no electrical shortage? If they couldn’t get it done in time, why did they not immediately ask the world’s largest manufacturer of natural gas power plants, America’s General Electric (GE) to do it for them? An electric company that can’t supply electricity to the public has no right to be called an electric company.
Nuclear power supporters will argue that the supply of natural gas is limited. But this too is the outdated opinion of one who does not know the energy industry. As Ishii Akira pointed out in an article of Feb 2, 2011 in Gas Energy News, new sources of natural gas are being discovered one after another all over the world. In the Mediterranean Sea, offshore from Madagascar, under the sea to the east of India, on the continental shelf in northwestern Australia, in Brazil, in Turkmenistan – in the ten years up to 2009 the world’s known supply of underground deposits has increased by close to 30 per cent. In addition to this natural gas supply, new, so-called non-traditional gases such as coal bed methane, tight sand gas, shale gas, and methane hydrate are being developed one after another. According to Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (which is dedicated to locating natural resources for Japan) the underground reserves of these new forms of natural gas total more than 922 trillion cubic meters, more than five times the reserves of traditional natural gas. No doubt there will be future discoveries one after another, so I would say that we have enough gas reserves alone to last well over 200 years.Translated by Douglas Lummis, ideaspeddler@gmail.com
Takashi Hirose can be contacted at takhi@jcom.home.ne.jp
This is excerpted from the concluding chapter of Takashi Hirose
Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster now available in English from Amazon Kindle Books.
OCTOBER 19, 2011
Co-optation.
An acquaintance of mine who ferrets about in the White House sends me a text, “We’re discussing the OWS. Seeing how to use it for the jobs bill.” I write back, “Good luck with that. I doubt that the Chicago Boys would like to play with social democracy.”
Connecticut AFL-CIO head John Olsen hits out with a big stick at a rally in Hartford on October 16. Speaking of the Occupy movement, Olsen says, “I’ve been waiting for this for my entire life.” Someone in the crowd tries to heckle him. Olsen says, “Brother, I appreciate your opinion. This is about free speech. Go ahead, have your say. That’s what this is about. Us getting the chance to have our say, and take this country back from the 1%.” Olsen has been saying this sort of thing for years. OWS has enabled the radical sections of the union movement to speak much more forthrightly about economic, social and political inequality than ever before.
The Financial Times decides to endorse the OWS (“America Wakes To the Din of Inequality,” October 16). The text is quite forthright, “The fundamental call for a fairer distribution of wealth cannot be ignored. What is at stake is the future of the American dream. The bargain has always been that all who work hard should have an opportunity for prosperity. That dream has been shattered by a crisis brought about by financial excess and political cynicism. The consequence has been growing inequality, rising poverty and sacrifice by those least able to bear it — all of which are failing to deliver economic growth.” Lionel Barber, the FT’s editor, must have forgotten about his work as unofficial advisor to George W. Bush and returned to his roots as a cub reporter at The Scotsman. At this moment, one forgives all that dross about the “bargain” of the American Dream.
The word on the streets is co-option. Will OWS be co-opted by the Democrats or other political institutions? The formulation is erroneous. Movements seek to widen and absorb all kinds of institutional currents – cultivating themselves as the mainstream, making their ideas common sense. If a core set of principles remains at the forefront (the 99% want state policy to work on their behalf, for instance), then anyone who joins the process would have to do so on the basis of those principles. Consistent principles are an inoculation against co-option by others, on their terms.
Jess and Ken at Occupy New Haven. Photo by Vijay Prashad.
Obama and his team must surely have an allergic reaction to the kinds of straightforward demands that emanate from the various occupied sites. Their temperament is with the bankers (in 2010, Obama called Goldman Sach’s Blankfein a “savvy businessman” in the context of the latter’s $17 million bonus). One top banker told Ron Suskind (Confidence Men) that Finance Secretary Timothy Geithner was “our man in Washington.” If the White House tries to engage with the OWS, it would only look silly. Its métier is elsewhere: at the Bombay Club, over martinis, with the fat cats.
On the Green.
What would Obama co-opt if he came for a walk onto New Haven’s Green?
Would he be able to adopt the agenda being pushed by Jennifer Lopez, who was the first to camp out here as part of Occupy New Haven? She wants to see the city open detox centers that don’t keep addicts waiting for hours (during which time most have a change of mind, dash off for a fix rather than to be fixed). Jennifer wants to see more affordable housing and decent jobs to help restore dignity to those whose lives have been destroyed over the past decades.
Would Obama be able to able to adopt the agenda being pushed by Ben Aubin, who is deeply invested in the creation of solidarity economies and wants Occupy New Haven to become an incubator for a new kind of society? Ben cut his teeth at New Haven’s Free Store, which was on the relatively tony Church Street. It is now located at the heart of the Occupy camp. Ben is inspired by San Francisco’s Diggers who ran a Free Store at 1090 Cole Street in the 1960s and by E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. His model is quite elegant: collect trashed and donated bicycles; teach and work with anyone interested in bike repair; build bike trailers to attach to the bikes; use these bikes to deliver goods to people who request them. The workers are now bike mechanics and bike delivery people who could earn some money by fixing bikes and by delivering free goods from the Free Store. “We need to go out into our communities,” Ben told me in front of about twenty tents, “and make our economies.”
Would Obama be able to make sense of the lives of Jess and Ken, who have a vision for a world where the brutality inflicted upon them won’t be normal? Jess lost her family when she was very young, and went from foster home to foster home, faced physical and sexual abuse as a routine part of her life, and learned about power through her fraught exchanges with social workers. “I had to learn how the system works to survive,” she said. “If you are poor, you need to educate yourself to have power. You can’t let them take away your free will. No change comes from silence.” Ken lost his job, his apartment and his girlfriend, got on his bike in New Hampshire and began a journey to Florida. He stopped in New Haven four years ago, and now lives by his wits, with his corncob pipe, his bicycle and his friends. “When I lost my job, I lost my life,” he said wistfully.
Homelessness.
Joelle Fishman, who heads the Communist Party of Connecticut, knows a thing or two about sleeping on the New Haven Green. If she gets out her tent and joins the Occupy camp, this would be her third time on the Green. The first time was in the 1980s, when the mothers on welfare protested the state budget cuts. The second time was in 1992 when We the People, an organization of the homeless, went onto the Green to demand funding for homeless shelters and other social service agencies. Joelle is a remarkable organizer, and indefatigable. Often found at the People’s Center at Howe Street, Joelle is, with her husband Art Perlo, at every picket line and in the middle of every struggle (their parents were communists as well, with Art’s father Victor Perlo being the main theoretician of the CPUSA). It is not wonder that Joelle is at the Green, making contact with those who are sleeping out there (with an indefinite permit from the mayor).
Joelle tells me that Occupy New Haven reached out to the city’s homeless from the very first – after all, it has been the struggles by the homeless and the indigent that have kept the question of social services alive in a New Haven that has become absorbed into the obsessions of Yale University and its hospital. A study by the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness finds how easy it is to slip into the shadows – fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New Haven is at $1,246, which would mean that if a family wants to afford it, its members must earn about $23.96/hour (in a town where the minimum wage is $8.25/hour). No wonder that homelessness in Connecticut has increased by thirty-seven percent between 2009 and 2011. Eviction, drug addiction and domestic violence are the final straws that push the indigent out of their homes.
In 1992, United Homeless Families set up their camp in Hartford’s beautiful Bushnell Park. Bob Thomas, one of its leaders, told the liberal muckraker Mary Otto (then of the Hartford Courant) that the tent city was a “renewal of the human spirit.” Alvin Smith spoke at a press conference in March 1992, “We must take back our pride.” Such sentiments were repeated through the 1990s and into the 2000s, as homeless Tent Cities have sprung up across this very prosperous state that suffers from a malignancy of high inequality.
In the mid-1990s, the homeless and the near homeless felt the cold chill of illiberalism from Washington (Clinton’s welfare to work) and from Hartford (Governor John Rowland’s off the mark rhetoric against the poor: “right now we have twelve year olds that are having children” went one of his 1994 campaign advertisements). To confront this, groups like We the People and Mothers for Justice emerged in New Haven (in Hartford, Vecinos Unidos and Welfare Warriors). Against the political tide, these groups struggled to get their voices heard on the streets and before state legislative panels. As their worlds crumbled, the women and men of these organizations turned to help themselves and their neighbors – forming soup kitchens and a co-op for high-quality food at low prices (the Share program), protesting on the Green against food prices, and creating opportunities for the homeless and the indigent to get further education (raising and distributing grants, providing transportation and child care services). This was heroic work being done by people who were themselves only a few steps away from the shadows.
Occupy New Haven carries on this tradition. I have now been to six Occupy sites in New England (including in New York City). Each one has a different focus, and the best of them are rooted in the struggles that have preceded them in their locality. They are not driven by fashion. Occupy New Haven is grounded in the tent cities that have been on the Green every ten years. It is no wonder. The Green was once a cemetery. The tents are upon what was once the pauper’s gravesite. These are the voices of today’s paupers. Ten years ago, Rod Cleary was at the Tent City. He cautioned those who visited the protest site that they were standing on bones. “That’s what it’s going to be again if we ain’t careful.”
Money.
Money is not evident in the campsite. The food is free, and so are the blankets. Jennifer tells me that the mornings are busy, as the homeless from around the area come to get something to eat. There is talk now of getting a bio-diesel generator to run a media center and of getting involved in some kind of aeroponics organic farming at a nearby factory building. The urge for self-sufficiency is very strong, which means that there is an impatience to cease to rely upon goodwill and donations. “It’s a great opportunity for so many people to do what they have been wanting to do,” said Ben Aubin. They want change through innovation, to see if they can build toward a new kind of social order. It is ambitious.
It also might be the only realistic way to proceed. According to the National Priorities Project’s new costoftaxcuts.com website, the average tax cut for the 1% was greater than the average annual income of the remaining 99%. No wonder that there is no money for the kind of projects dreamed up by Ben Aubin and Jennifer Lopez. There is simply no capital for their imagination.
Whatever eventually happens to the “occupy” movement, there is no question that it has edged open a new, radical imagination. As one slogan put it audaciously, “We will not go back to apathy. We will see this march to its victorious end.”
VIJAY PRASHAD is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009. The Swedish and French editions are just out. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu
OCTOBER 19, 2011
The calls for repealing the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill are more than a little bizarre. It was only three years ago that the whole financial system was at the brink of collapse, with President Bush warning us of a second Great Depression if Congress didn’t quickly approve a massive bailout bill.
This crisis was the result of a poorly regulated financial system that was issuing millions of mortgages that they did not expect to be paid off. It was packaging these bad mortgages in mortgage-backed securities and more complex instruments and passing them off to gullible buyers all over the world. And we had companies like AIG issuing hundreds of billions of dollars credit default swaps that they had no ability to support.
This is the pre-Dodd-Frank world. Is this the world that those demanding repeal want us to bring back?
Dodd-Frank is far from a perfect piece of legislation. It could have been much stronger. For example, it could have required that the too-big-to-fail banks break themselves up, so that they could no longer freeload on an implicit government guarantee of support if they get into trouble. It could also have reinstituted a strict Glass-Steagall type separation that prohibited banks that take government-insured deposits from engaging in risky investment banking or hedge fund type activity.
But it does make the risks of the financial system more transparent. And, it give regulators an alternative to bailouts to deal with the sort of Lehman-AIG situation we faced in 2008.
Given the economic disaster that was brought on by the mismanagement of the financial system, Dodd-Frank is actually a very mild piece of legislation. Its opponents have highlighted the paperwork requirements imposed by the law. In fact, smaller banks will not be forced to deal with most of the requirements since they are explicitly exempted. The Goldman Sachs and the J.P. Morgans of the world specialize in creating paperwork and therefore will have little difficulty dealing with the requirements of the law.
However, the more important issue is the logic of this complaint. There is plenty of needless paperwork in the Defense Department, by the logic of the Dodd-Frank repealers we should just shut it down and start from scratch.
That doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t make sense to repeal Dodd-Frank. The proponents of repeal should put their specific complaints on the table and argue the case. That is the way serious people do things.This article originally appeared in Debate Club (U.S. News & World Report).
OCTOBER 19, 2011
Called by Greenpeace ‘the biggest environmental crime in history’, the expansion of oil production from Canadian tar sands is likely to get a major boost in November, courtesy of the Obama Administration. The estimated recoverable oil trapped in low-grade deposits of tar sands that require ripping up Canada’s boreal forest, a major carbon sink, is second in quantity only to Saudi Arabian oil reserves.
The amount of energy and water required to make the oil useable, not to mention burning the oil itself, will put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that internationally renowned NASA climate scientist James Hansen has said that extracting and refining the oil means it’s “essentially game over” in the global battle to avoid catastrophic climate change. The question needs to be asked: how did we get from a president who once promised real action on climate change to a man who is complicit in the environmental crime of the century? And having taken on that question, how should environmentalists respond?
Extracting oil from tar sands has only become economical as we have approached the End of the Age of Easy Oil and the price has shot above $100/barrel. There’s plenty more out there but it’s dirty, dangerous, hard to extract and hence ripe for environmental calamities such as last year’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This explains not only the development of Canadian tar sands, which require mining two tons of tar sands to obtain a single barrel of oil, as Shell, Exxon-Mobil and that paragon of environmental responsibility, BP, are all in on the action, but also underpins the hunt for oil in deep-water deposits off-shore and in the new oil frontier of the Arctic as well as shale gas extraction from hydrofracking.
Furthermore, it brings sharply into focus the reality that under capitalism, particularly its unregulated neoliberal variant, massive transnational oil companies will not hesitate to bolster their bottom lines and appease their shareholders before any concern about the stability of the biosphere filters through into corporate head offices.
One tar sands mine in Alberta has excavated more rock and soil than was required to build the Great Pyramid at Cheops, the Great Wall of China, the Suez Canal and the world’s 10 largest dams combined. Mining and processing is enough to heat three million homes and such is the electricity demand, it’s helping to fuel the requirement to build another environmental and health menace: more nuclear power stations. Water use is 349 million cubic meters annually; water that becomes so heavily contaminated that it can’t be put back in the rivers it’s bleeding dry. It must be kept sequestered in vast lakes of highly toxic effluent that already cover 50 square kilometers and are large enough to be seen from space. The negative impacts on indigenous land and culture, wildlife, forests, water, air and downstream pollution run on and on.
Considering some of the facts of tar sands mining, and the appalling environmental damage it will cause, this is surely an area where one would expect democratically-elected governments to step in and say: we must find an alternative. Yet, it seems almost certain that President Obama, who has the authority to stop the pipeline without recourse to Congress, will give the green light to further expansion as Canada seeks an export market to justify further production expansion. The Keystone XL project, a 1,700 mile pipeline that will be able to carry 700,000 barrels a day from Canada all the way down to the refineries in Texas, cutting through multiple states and risking the contamination of such essential fresh water sources as the Ogallala aquifer is essential to Canadian plans for tar sands development.
Yet we know from Wikileaks that the State Department has been in collusion with TransCanada, the pipeline company, to ensure favorable press and hired a state dept official formerly with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign team to guarantee that her new department won’t look too closely at the negative environmental implications. A company who count TransCanada as one of their major clients, Cardno Entrix, was hired by the State Department to carry out the environmental assessment.
Desperate to retain their members’ dues base and taking a nationalist and short-term position with regard to “American jobs”, the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters union, rather than actively campaigning for jobs with a real future such as those in an expanded renewable energy sector, energy conservation and infrastructure development are backing the pipeline.
Yes, we certainly need jobs, but why do we only ever get offered jobs when it’s in the interests of the fossil fuel corporations or the banks and we have to trade them off for environmental stability? Or when the government wants young American’s to go and fight and kill other young people in far off lands? What about the millions of jobs that could be created by manufacturing a clean energy economy, with a new energy grid, retrofitting buildings across the country for energy conservation and in building an updated and efficient sanitation system? Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of teachers we’d need to educate such a workforce. The bankers foreclosed on our homes and the capitalists and politicians that serve them seem intent on foreclosing on the planet.
Organized by Bill McKibben of 350.org, over 1,000 people were arrested outside the Whitehouse this summer to pressure Obama into refusing to sign off on the pipeline project. While this was a highly commendable and impressive action, it was also rather confusing as McKibben urged activists not to give up on Obama. Despite more than two years of unremitting disappointment on environmental questions (and much else) activists were encouraged to wear their 2008 Obama campaign buttons at the protests and on their way to jail. It was confusing because you can’t protest someone you simultaneously support and hope to build a robust and uncompromising movement for change in the teeth of corporate malfeasance and lobbying power. Either you protest and create a large enough oppositional movement that forces a rethink of government policy, as has happened in Germany with the German government’s u-turn on nuclear power, or you weaken the movement and bamboozle your supporters with misplaced calls for loyal protest actions to get our supposed friend in the Whitehouse on the right track.
McKibben has called Obama’s upcoming decision a “watershed moment” for his presidency and environmentalists who previously enthusiastically campaigned for him have vowed to sit out his 2012 re-election campaign if he doesn’t follow through and refuse to authorize the project. I hope they do.
In a statement that underscores the cynicism with which the Democratic Party take their most enthusiastic supporters, the New York Times quoted democratic pollster Mark Mellman: “Whatever qualms or questions they may have about this policy or that policy, at the end of the day the one thing they’re absolutely certain of–they’re going to hate these Republican candidates…So I’m not honestly all that worried about a solid or enthusiastic base.” In other words, the Democrats will simply run a negative campaign that only promises to be not quite as bad as the Republicans. Meanwhile, not quite as bad as the Republicans will fry the planet just as surely as if the Republicans had been in charge of the furnaces.
So this is a watershed moment not just for Obama, but also for McKibben and the mainstream environmental movement. Only a complete and irrevocable break with the Democratic Party will get us anywhere. In several articles written over the lifetime of the Obama presidency, including when he had super-majorities in both houses of Congress and could have acted with purpose on environmental questions, I have argued that, despite the rhetoric, Obama’s default position would always be to side with the corporations against a rational and forward-thinking environmental program. One that would protect health, create jobs and give us a chance of avoiding global climate meltdown. Obama has yet to provide any evidence that my analysis is incorrect.
In a coffin that should really have received its last nail some time ago, it is highly likely that he will further confirm my analysis with his commitment to the pipeline project. The question then will be, will the mainstream environmental organizations such as 350.org follow through, ditch the Democratic Party, make good on their promise not to campaign for an Obama second term, and help build the only thing that will save us: the construction of a broad-based but completely independent movement for real social and ecological change.
Paradoxically, the only force that might prevent President Obama from burning all his bridges to the environmental movement is Occupy Wall Street, which has already sharply moved the political narrative to the left in the United States precisely because it is independent of the two-party corporate duopoly that masquerades as democratic political choice. Yet, if OWS continues to grow and the Democratic Party are forced to respond by tacking to the left on environmental and social issues so as not to lose every last shred of liberal credibility, it further serves to underline my argument that we will only win real change when we categorically refuse to get taken for a ride by the Democratic chariot that is hitched so firmly to the corporate horse.
Chris Williams is a professor in the Dept of Chemistry & Physical Science, Pace University and author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2010)
OCTOBER 19, 2011
The silence in the press about the overheated rhetoric and dubious myths from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta makes for a very unhappy comparison of today’s defense journalism compared to previous eras when, for example, SecDef Casper Weinberger was the subject of serious critical analysis.
Prior to Tuesday of last week, Panetta had been sprinkling Washington D.C. with words like “doomsday mechanism,” “catastrophic,” and “shooting ourselves in the head” to describe any cuts in the Pentagon’s budget beyond the $450 over 10 years he and President Obama have already committed to. Panetta had set a new standard for overheated rhetoric to defend the Pentagon’s budget, and yet the press reported his words without suggesting anything out of the ordinary-thereby creating the impression that the rhetoric was completely appropriate.
Then on Tuesday October 11, a new Leon Panetta was rolled out in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. Gone were the apocalyptic lamentations proclaiming a return to 2007 levels of Pentagon spending to be the end of budget life as we know it-even if it is also true that 2007 was a post-World War II high at the time, $73 billion higher than spending in 2000, and $38 billion above average annual spending during the Cold War.
The new, more pensive Panetta called for “the thoughtful debate the entire country needs to have on how to sustain the nation’s strength.in a time of growing fiscal constraint.” He even eschewed hectoring Congress to go find cuts in entitlement spending to permit an unperturbed Pentagon budget. He used the “catastrophic damage” phrasing just once, and it was buried in the back of the speech.
The press kept itself silent. It is impossible to tell if any reporters discerned the new cooler rhetoric.
Panetta’s restraint and call for thoughtfulness didn’t last long, however. Less than 24 hours later, he was back at it, making an analogy that advocates of deeper cuts were the Nazis at Bastogne, Belgium in World War II and he was the storied US commander there who told them “Nuts” when they demanded surrender-a pretty outrageous assertion about both his critics and himself. A day later at the House Armed Services Committee, the overblown rhetoric was repeated, over and over again.
Again, the press remained silent, other than to repeat what Panetta said.
The Wilson Center speech also attempted to take the intellectual high road by putting budget problems in a strategic context and to prioritize solutions. However, the substance of these remarks was as ethereal as his transient attempt at rhetorical restraint.
He started with strategic pabulum straight from the bowels of the Pentagon bureaucracy. He read off a litany of threats: Iraq, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, “rising powers” in the “Asia-Pacific region” (that would be China) and cyber security without his (or the press) acknowledging the usual criticism such laundry lists attract. When virtually the same catalog of threats was offered in DOD’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, it was widely panned as having no identifiable strategic framework or priorities. As one more insightful critic, Franklin C. Spinney, pointed out, such lists-and the conventional wisdom critique of them-do not even recognize the Pentagon’s fundamental problems.
Now, the issue was content, rather than style. And, still no comments from any of the many press articles I read about the Wilson Center speech.
Then came the whopper. Panetta asserted “the American military today is without question the finest fighting force that has ever existed.” It is a phraseology commonly used by American politicians of both political parties to profess their support for the troops.
Apparently, seeing nothing worthy of comment, the press let it pass, as it has scores of times previously. I saw not a single article even hinting that Panetta’s data and logic had the slightest flaw.
Panetta’s “finest” US Navy “that has ever existed” has shrunk from 316 battleforce ships in 2001 to 287 in 2011, a decline of 10 percent. It is not a smaller, newer fleet; it is a smaller, older fleet-about four years older per ship, on average, than it was in 2001. Also, for the past year the press has been constantly reporting on severe maintenance and readiness problems throughout the fleet.
Panetta’s best ever Air Force declined from 142 fighter and bomber squadrons to 72 during the same 2001-2012 period, a decline of 49 percent, and the inventory has increased to an all-time high average for aircraft age: 23 years. Fighter pilot air training hours today are one-half of what they were in the 1970s, an era not touted for high readiness.
The Army’s brigade combat teams did grow from 44 to 45. But major Army equipment inventories are mostly older, and in 2006, the House Armed Services Committee leaked a memo documenting historic lows in the readiness of active Army units in the US. The analysis has not been publicly updated; we should worry that it has gotten worse, not better.
We got this smaller, older, less ready force not because of less money but because of more. In addition to the $1.3 trillion spent on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama added another $1 trillion to the “base” (non-war) parts of the defense budget.
One might see in the press the sometimes article about the age of the US air- and sea-borne fleets, but that is usually accompanied by implications that the defense budget is tight, not bloated.
Perhaps, if writers had noted the shrinking, aging, less ready to fight forces that resulted from higher, not lower, budgets, editors and readers would have asked for an explanation of the counterintuitive assertion. That, in turn, would have required some, but actually not a lot of, research and, worse, a discussion of how the conventional wisdom about the defense budget-that more money means better, stronger defenses-is badly wrong and misinformed. (One of the several places inquisitive reporters might have found their way to is a recent anthology I and nine authors with more than 400 years of defense related experience wrote: The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It)
Panetta’s empty “finest ever” rhetoric does not even stand up to a comparison of US armed forces to themselves ten years ago. The pretense that we outmatch the rest of the world (as much as we outspend it) relies on an absence of meaningful analysis, certainly none that Panetta has presented-or that anyone in the press asked for.
If an extra trillion dollars in the last ten years meant a decaying defense force, how does Panetta say he is going to prevent a hollowing out of our forces at the modestly lower budget levels he says he can live with? Again, no questions were asked.
He did list his general budget cutting recommendations; they were great fodder for scores of questions, none of which made it to my computer screen.
To his credit, Panetta’s Wilson Center speech’s first budget cutting priority was “ruthlessly pursuing efficiencies and streamlining efforts designed to eliminate overhead infrastructure, waste and duplication,” and Thursday at the House Armed Services Committee he said he would accelerate the Pentagon’s deadline for its meeting the Constitutional requirement-never before complied with-that it account for the trillions of dollars it has been spending. If actually done, he will permit himself and future decision makers to begin to understand how much spending is waste, duplication, abuse, excess overhead, doctored contractor spending records and much, much more. However, the audit Panetta says he wants to achieve is too modest to provide the comprehensive and detailed data he will really need to identify the overhead, waste and duplication he says he wants to ferret out. When you scratch his words, they seem a little hollow, but you would never know it by reading any articles about Panetta’s statements.
Then, Panetta’s budget cutting priorities went completely off the tracks. His number two priority-in agreement with much of today’s conventional wisdom-is to cut personnel costs. The number three priority is to cut force structure, which really means taking people out of the force, thereby reducing combat units and their support. Panetta’s last place to cut is “modernization,” meaning hardware.
He put a lot of rhetoric around his solicitude for the troops both at the Wilson Center and later at the House Armed Services Committee, but it is beginning to emerge that his real budget priorities are to cut people first and hardware last. It is no doubt true that pay and benefits costs are out of control in the Pentagon, but the same is true of hardware-in spades. The last GAO measure of hardware cost growth put it at $300 billion.
But again, nothing was written to question or even just probe Panetta’s recommendations.
Life is simple for Leon Panetta: he can say anything he wants without the slightest fear of probing questions. The place one would start is, of course, research, but there is not the slightest indication that the press is scratching the surface of what Secretary Panetta is saying. Casper Weinberger, rest his soul, must be seething with jealousy.Winslow T. Wheeler is director of the Straus Military Reform Project and editor of The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It.
OCTOBER 19, 2011
In Miami it is not considered polite or politic to criticize resident and former governor Jeb Bush, whose entire career was fueled by the mad housing boom and its campaign money that is now crashed to cinders. Bush spoke in Chicago last week to the Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention.
These days, the speechifying of Jeb! can be interpreted for the direction of the Republican message machine. What was reported was that Bush urged the audience to climb out of their fetal position and go on the offensive. “Who better to advocate a policy to get us out of this mess?” Bush implored the same businesses that shipwrecked the economy on the reefs from which scavengers now ply their trades.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with their taxpayer trillions, sent nearly two hundred fifty executives to Chicago where they rubbed shoulders with the same mortgage rating agencies and mortgage execution companies that used speed in execution as the housing market inflated and speed in execution as the housing market collapsed to “move product” while tens of millions of Americans suffered the consequences. Speed in execution means diminished or eviscerated regulations; one of the GOP’s chief goals whether for the environment or for zoning and development.
Jeb Bush is an elder statesman in the Republican Party these days. Why, is a mystery. On the other hand, who can deny the magic tricks at the heart of American politics tied to campaign finance that Bush mastered and re-materialized as the destruction of so much equity and hope. That is what the Occupy Wall Street’ers in Manhattan, Miami and elsewhere are protesting. Corporations are too powerful. Corporations are NOT people. But Jeb Bush (and his chosen presidential candidate, Mitt Romney) believe otherwise, with the US Supreme Court at their backs.
“Business has gotten way too timid,” said the former governor whose first consulting contract was with Lehman Brothers, the biggest pusher of mortgage derivative debt to the state of Florida. Bush continued with the banker boyz in Chicago, “The natural inclination is to cover. I would encourage you to stand up.” Stand up to the protesters, hinted Bush without also mentioning that between Enron and Lehman, his appointees cost Florida and money held in trust for policemen, firemen, and state and municipal employees nearly a billion dollars.
There is where the 1933 inaugural speech of Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be mashed with the Wall Street whiners and the renewed competition for its campaign cash by both Democrats and Republicans. Roosevelt, speaking to America at the height of the Depression, condemned an earlier generation of bankers; “Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.”
It bears pointing out that the same protections advocated by Roosevelt and built up through the safety net protecting banks, American business and consumers are the target of the GOP, now swept up in a kind of madness aimed against the victims. It is partly President Obama’s fault– he neither presided during the incipient stages of the housing bubble nor had the acuity to understand the nature of its creators — that he cannot say today as President Roosevelt did then, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization… there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.”
In Chicago, Jeb Bush faced the money changers and what he told them was in effect; put more tricks up your sleeve, more pigeons to fly from top hats, more beautiful women to saw in two, to materialize wholesome and Christian with the swipe of a magic wand.
Magic tricks like this: “One of the things that we’ve got to do is to address problems straight on and deal with them in a way that helps us meet goals. And so I want to talk about … one goal and a problem. The goal is, everybody who wants to own a home has got a shot at doing so… And so what are the barriers that we can deal with here in Washington? Well, probably the single barrier to first-time homeownership is high down payments. People take a look at the down payment, they say that’s too high, I’m not buying. They may have the desire to buy, but they don’t have the wherewithal to handle the down payment. We can deal with that. And so I’ve asked Congress to fully fund an American Dream down payment fund which will help a low-income family to qualify to buy, to buy. (Applause.) … (the problem is) that the rules are too complex. People get discouraged by the fine print on the contracts. They take a look and say, well, I’m not so sure I want to sign this. There’s too many words. (Laughter.) There’s too many pitfalls. So one of the things that the Secretary is going to do is he’s going to simplify the closing documents and all the documents that have to deal with homeownership.” (Bob Martinez, then secretary of HUD, would soon become a US Senator from Florida succeeded now by Jeb Bush protege, Marco Rubio.)
Those words, from a June 2002 speech by President George W. Bush, inspired the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. At the time Jeb Bush was governor of Florida, the same Jeb Bush who says, though a dismal decade has passed, that what is hindering the economic recovery are “regulations” and that the banker boyz need to get up out of their Fox Holes. Occupy Wall Street, take note.
Alan Farago is conservation chair of Friends of the Everglades. He can be reached at: afarago@bellsouth.net
Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
One of the Greatest Descriptions of Farm Work Ever Written— Don’t miss Frank Bardacke’s marvelous account from the California fields. ALSO Linn Washington Jr. on the “Black Backlash Against Obama.”
OCTOBER 19, 2011
Several seemingly well meaning pundits have asked: if Occupy Wall Street wants jobs, why don’t they come out and support President Obama’s jobs bill? Answering only for myself, the better question is: why doesn’t Obama support his own jobs bill? The White House is claiming that it needs sixty votes to pass the jobs bill in the Senate to overcome a threatened filibuster by Republicans. Maybe, but are these the same Republicans who just passed his toxic free-trade agreement with South Korea, Panama and Colombia with bipartisan support from Democrats? Why yes they are.
At this point in history, the evidence is in that these free trade agreements are a neo-liberal hoax to transfer jobs from the U.S. to low wage countries. Anyone who cares to can view the facts for themselves in the government statistics—the decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs has a very high correlation with the advent and implementation of free-trade agreements. Not only have manufacturing jobs been in absolute decline for more than a decade, the Participation Rate, the percentage of the working age population that is employed has been declining with it. As for the purported benefits of so-called free trade, where are they?
So Obama is willing to go to the mat with Republicans to send U.S. jobs elsewhere with a free-trade agreement but he is making only a symbolic effort to pass his weak, pathetic three-and-one-half-years late jobs bill because he needs more votes than George W. Bush ever needed to get his legislation passed?
But what has Obama accomplished with his jobs bill? The panel of pundits on a recent NPR roundtable agreed that he has gotten his poll numbers up on “who cares more about the economy, the president or congressional Republicans” by a full ten points. That is, Obama got what he wanted, an increase in his poll numbers, by creating the appearance of trying to create jobs without creating any jobs. And he did this while destroying jobs in the U.S. with a free trade agreement passed by the same Republicans he claims are holding his jobs bill hostage.
So, support Obama’s jobs bill? Thanks anyway, but Barack Obama and the dysfunctional political system that he represents is the problem. Getting cynical opportunists like him out of public office is the priority, not forever playing the patsy to his misdirections.Rob Urie is an artist and political economist living in New York.
OCTOBER 19, 2011
There is an unspoken law in modern electoral politics: Take care of your adversaries; your friends can take care of themselves.
In today’s political universe, progressives have no place to go but Democrat. So it is for minorities, labor advocates, environmentalists and antiwar protesters. There is no choice in electoral politics but to side with the milquetoast moderates of the Democratic Party.
In this environment of winner-take-all and take it for granted politics, the most populous state in the union is also the most neglected and under-represented. That is why a Democratic White House can get away with policies and programs that disregard the interests of California with a callousness that borders on disdain.
Things have gotten so bad in the golden state that even members of the Milquetoast Party are beginning to raise their voices: Thirty two representatives of the California congressional caucus recently went public with their plea for effective relief from the foreclosure crisis, an ongoing catastrophe that blocks any chance of real recovery from the Great Recession.
On the heals of that failure to take effective action, the Obama Justice Department has actively declared war on the one segment of the California economy that shows great promise: Medical Marijuana.
The Obama administration initially signaled that the federal government would not enforce drug laws against marijuana where voters had sanctioned it for medicinal purposes. Then, without cause or reason, Attorney General Eric Holder woke up one day with a new religion. He had seen the enemy and it was not Al Qaeda, it was not Mexican drug lords and the American gun dealers who supply them arms. No, it was California pot growers, suppliers and anyone associated with the expanding industry, including media outlets that accepted advertisements.
It is time for Californians to unite behind the common interest of economic survival. It is time for us all to speak out against the White House and its agents in the Justice Department. It is time to deliver a simple demand:
Cease and desist!
We are already suffering the effects of your failure to bail out the poor, the dispossessed and what remains of a disintegrating middle class. If you cannot help us and it is clear you have no intention of doing so, then at least get out of the way while we attempt to climb out of the ravine.
We have stood on the sidelines while your administration has churned out one Republican policy after another and called it victory. We have stood by in near silence as you extended the Bush tax cuts for the elite, rolled back soft-core Wall Street regulation, peddled a health insurance mandate as comprehensive reform and offered up Social Security to the Republican god of deficit reduction.
That you are speaking out for jobs now when you know it has no chance of passing congress is pure political theater. We know what follows: Another temporary payroll tax reduction financed by creative cuts to so-called entitlement programs. It will not be enough. It will not even be close to enough. You cannot plug the dam after it is broken.
As the Occupy Wall Street spreads and goes global, accomplishing more for the burgeoning victim class in four weeks than you will have been able to do in four years, what is your answer? With enthusiastic Republican support and the applause of chief executive officers everywhere, you push through Free Trade agreements with North Korea, Columbia and Panama.
We can almost see the smirk on your face as you confront your critics on the left: First comes the accusation of ingratitude, then the litany of alleged accomplishments, then the excuses, the endless excuses, a broken government, Republican obstructionism, the Senate filibuster rule, and finally, the ultimate rebuttal: What are you going to do about it?
We can rebut the former until the cow comes home but until we can answer the ultimate challenge emphatically and decisively, we will never get anywhere with the president, with the Democratic Party or with congress.
What are we going to do about it?
The White House can attack the California economy with absolute impunity. Wall Street is on the other coast and that is where the real money is.
What are we going to do about it?
Ask the president as he travels the land, his campaign for re-election already fully engaged: Where do you stand on Occupy Wall Street?
When he gives the standard, patronizing answer full of empathy and passion, ask him: What are you going to do about it? Will you refuse to accept contributions from Wall Street power brokers and the corporate elite? Watch him stammer like Rick Perry on the issue of immigration.
He gave his answer just last week. A president who could not be bothered to keep his promise to labor in actively supporting the fundamental right to organize the workplace by majority vote (the Employee Free Choice Act), a president who could not spare a moment to oppose Wisconsin’s prohibition of collective bargaining for public employees while it was happening, now signals a return to the Free Trade juggernaut.
We are not fools. We know what that means. Whatever the short term gains in certain sectors of the economy, the long-term effect is a continuation of job loss, union busting and lower wages.
What are we going to do about it?
The best immediate answer is Occupy Wall Street. The best long-term answer is to elect public officials who refuse to accept corporate contributions. Remove money from the equation and the stench of corruption will slowly abate.
Until we as a people are willing to reject money politics outright, we will have no power, no influence and no control over what happens next.Jack Random is the author of Jazzman Chronicles (Crow Dog Press) and Ghost Dance Insurrection (Dry Bones Press.)
OCTOBER 19, 2011
It was at Chicago’s Grant Park in the fall of 2008 that presidential candidate Barack Obama celebrated his election night victory with the people. Hope and change was in the air.
Three years later Grant Park is once again the scene of hope and change. But no thanks this time to President Obama or especially former White House chief of staff turned Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel. In fact, it was the latter who oversaw the arrest of 175 Occupy Chicago protesters last weekend for refusing to disperse after the park’s 11 pm curfew.
The new version of hope and change is found instead among the thousands of Occupy Chicago supporters who marched in the evening hours of Saturday, October 15, through the city’s loop to Grant Park. In conjunction with the day of global Wall Street protests, the occupiers made their way from their location on the hard sidewalks near Chicago’s Board of Trade and Federal Reserve Bank to the more inviting, grassy expanse of Grant Park.
But not so inviting, thanks to the repressive intervention of Mayor Emanuel and the Chicago police. Unlike Republican retrogrades like House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) or businessman Herman Cain, who condescendingly dismiss Occupy Wall Street as a mob of losers, Emanuel, as a Democrat with ties to both the Clinton and Obama presidential administrations, is well versed in feigning sympathy for the hardships endured by ordinary Americans.
Of course, as the former managing director of the investment banking firm of Wasserstein Perealla, Emanuel is also well versed in how to turn political connections into a financial windfall. It was in 1999 that Emanuel entered Wasserstein Perealla as a managing partner, despite having no experience in banking management. He left two and a half years later $16 million plus richer.
That’s how politics and banking work today. It’s a great club for the lucky few with the right political, business, and family ties. Indeed, for the one percent and their political hangers-on, the American dream is just a phone call or a business luncheon with the right person away. For the rest of the country, however, the system is a big disappointment, rigged from the get-go and getting worse. Indeed, for 30 years average Americans have watched their incomes stagnate, while the elite grow wealthier than ever.
Enter Occupy Wall Street. The 99 Percenters now mobilized in hundreds of American cities and towns represent a radical challenge to a corrupt and torpid status quo. In the broad, idealistic sweep of their demands for democracy and economic justice the movement embodies a better, more humane vision of the world and its potential.
“We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments,” declares the statement adopted by the New York City general assembly at Occupy Wall Street. In a sense, the occupiers are only the advance guard of a far more widespread American anger, percolating now in the fabric of the culture and earning these front line activists more favorable poll ratings in recent days than the man in the White House.
Their complaints are irrefutable in their legitimacy. Record profits and prosperity at the top translate not into an improved life for all, but into stagnant wages, jobs shipped overseas, students burdened with debt, and foreclosed homes. Massive bailouts go to Wall Street firms, given with few restrictions, yet despite record profits still they hoard their money, refusing to create jobs and showering lavish bonuses on themselves.
Instead of a humane, non-profit health care system, they give us corporate health care whose primary mission is not preventive medicine or care for the ill, but profits for private investors and insurers. Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars are poured into wars that generate only misery and death.
Predictably, some Democratic leaders such as former President Clinton and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) say they view Occupy Wall Street as a positive development. Such support is ethereal at best, the language of co-optation, familiar and second-nature to the Democratic establishment. How well it will play out this time is questionable. President Obama himself appears hesitant before the raw power of the demonstrating masses, offering only placid observations about how he understands the frustrations of Americans. Such sentiment is offered in the same breath as the reminder that it was right to bail out Wall Street.
The mass mobilizations in Madison, Wisconsin earlier this year against the right-wing governor’s plan to strip away public unions’ collective bargaining rights were a harbinger of the storm on the horizon. Unfortunately, the Wisconsin mobilizations (and the potential for strike actions) were aborted by the state Democratic Party and their allied union leaders, sacrificed to an ill-conceived recall campaign of elected officials opposed to collective bargaining.
Occupy Wall Street is different. This is a movement independent of any political party, rooted in grassroots activism, nurtured by mass mobilizations, and showing no signs of abating. The hope and change on display in Grant Park in 2008, stirred up by candidate Obama’s promise of “change we can believe in,” is now being called to account.
Where the Occupy Wall Street movement will be in coming months remains to be seen. But the least interesting question among all the questions raised is whether the Occupy Wall Street movement will help Obama’s re-election. How much more interesting instead to ponder the potential of the spirit of activism and idealism now finding expression across the land. As one young woman demonstrating at Grant Park told the Chicago Tribune (Oct. 16, 2011), “My soul has been touched in ways that I can’t even express. I believe it’s my civic duty. I am expecting to be arrested every time I protest.”
Such is the spirit of the burgeoning movement. The professional pundits who want to compress this oceanic social movement into the narrow straits of ponderous talk media banalities reveal only the limits of their petty social vision.
In the 1940 film, The Great Dictator, the great comedian Charlie Chaplin speaks out at the film’s conclusion against the tyranny then threatening the world. At the Grant Park rally, organizers played a recording of Chaplin’s short speech over loudspeakers. It was a telling moment. As Chaplin’s voice rose in passion and indignation, declaring “don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty,” denouncing the “machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts” who would destroy the world with their greed, hate, and violence, the thousands assembled in Grant Park roared their approval.
A social awakening has begun. Indeed, hope and change is in the air. This time it seems like the real thing.Mark T. Harris is a former Chicago-area writer who now lives in Portland, Oregon. He is a featured contributor to “The Flexible Writer,” fourth edition, by Susanna Rich (Allyn & Bacon/Longman, 2003). Website: www.Mark-T-Harris.com. Email: Mark@Mark-T-Harris.com.
