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By ELLIOT SPERBER

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As its anniversary is celebrated, we will no doubt be reminded that no matter what else it achieved, or failed to, Occupy Wall Street managed to introduce if not a new sensitivity to inequality to the world, it at least introduced a new phrase into popular political parlance.

Indeed, the slogan ‘We Are the 99%’ concisely articulates the fact that a deep, structural conflict exists between the so-called 1%, who own virtually the entire planet, and the 99%, who spend their lives in the service of that 1%. And though in actuality power is distributed in more complicated ways than the phrase suggests, and an elite far smaller than 1% calls the shots worldwide, with the willing complicity of much of the 99%, 99-to-1 sums up the point well enough. Because of this, the phrase has resonated strongly throughout not only the US, but around the world. With such ingrained inequalities in place, a society with democratic pretenses utterly fails to live up to the ideals on which the legitimacy of its representative government rests.

That is, the legitimacy of the US government, along with the legitimacy of the legal powers delegated and validated by the government – including, but not limited to, the legitimacy of its property laws – is contingent. The government and these associated powers, according to this argument, are only legitimate to the extent that they remain faithful to not only the principles set down in the Declaration of Independence, but to those reiterated in the preamble to the Constitution. Because the proposed and repeated purpose of the US’s attempt at organizing society is the establishment of justice, and the promotion of the general welfare, insofar as it deviates from these basic principles its laws and practices deviate from legitimacy.

The above argument was not then, nor is it still, a far-fetched one to make when the government at various levels, instead of vigorously investigating the perpetration of unprecedented financial crimes and injustices, among others, preferred to all but grant a pass to the crimes’ perpetrators. At the same time, the victims of these crimes were being evicted from their homes by this very same system. The fact that the losses of the super-rich were reimbursed by the State, allowing them to continue to harass regular people for payments of debts that would have been wiped clean on account of their bad business dealings had it not been for massive taxpayer funded bailouts, gave rise to substantial amounts of rage. An inkling of this sentiment found expression in another much-repeated popular slogan: banks got bailed out, we got sold out.

Further examples of this power structure’s inability to promote anything but the particular welfare, as opposed to the general welfare, are too numerous to comprehensively list. OWS, however, provided a forum for the expression of such grievances. Grouped beneath this umbrella were the manifold calls for various forms of justice. Among others were demands for environmental justice (demonstrators demanding that global warming be addressed, and that the practice of fracking, to name just two, be halted), political justice, (including the end to the wars, the closure of the prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, and others abroad, as well as at home), economic justice (pleas for debt forgiveness, an end to mortgage foreclosures, calls for a basic minimum income, etc.), as well as calls for social justice (inclusion, community, an end to discrimination, police abuse, and on).

Beyond these examples of the State’s inability to ‘promote the general welfare,’ there remain such things as entrenched poverty beside just as deeply entrenched wealth, a debt burden carried by most people indistinct from debt peonage, and many others. Concern with these injustices were by no means limited to sympathizers of OWS. They fly, or rather smack, in the face of the public’s most elementary notions of fairness. As such, it should come as little surprise that the indignation attending some of these injustices was shared by OWS’ distorted, mirror-image twin – the Tea Party.

While one hears little about the Tea Party these days (aside from the fact that one of their leading “thinkers” is the Republicans’ candidate for vice-president) for months the comparisons between OWS and the Tea Party were constant. Appearing to share an anti-statist position, this similarity was mostly deceptive. For the Tea Party would dissolve the state only to allow business unfettered power. Alongside its calls for lower taxes and smaller government raved an ardent nationalism, one that saw no problem with the State to the extent that it furthered US hegemony globally, seeing no problem in coupling demands for the elimination of taxes with that of the maintenance of an enormous, hypertrophic military and war industry.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, with its consensus-driven, participatory style, seemed to embrace something akin to the anarchistic notion that justice demands not only the dissolution of the State, but the dissolution of power in general. In spite of this, however, there were no shortages of liberals among OWS who seemed to posit nothing more extreme than the reimplementation of financial regulations, like the Glass-Steagall Act, or expressed their support for a more ambitious federal jobs program – something akin to the New Deal’s WPA. Indeed, the filmmaker Michael Moore was among the most vocal proponents of the Glass-Steagall Act’s reimplementation, implicitly rebuffing some of the more radical critiques of capitalist economics. Moore, whose analysis of capitalism doesn’t seem to go beyond a restoration of the post-World War II golden years, made plenty of appeals for the return to those times, and for good, union jobs such as the body-breaking one his father had in Flint, Michigan. Apparently Moore doesn’t understand that the wages and benefits that labor enjoyed during that period were the result of a compromise, a pay-off that workers received in order to stave off revolution. And without the existence of a Soviet threat, and revolutionary specters, such conditions have microscopically little probability of being realized. Of course, this doesn’t even touch on the imperialistic dimension of international economics, and that workers in the US enjoyed such a bounty at the expense of workers, and colonized workers at that, internationally. In spite of this, however, and for all of the flags that one found at Zuccotti Park, the emphasis at OWS was not, like Tea Party rallies, centered on US supremacy. Enjoying an orientation and set of concerns that was international, if not supranational, rather than national, in many respects the participants of OWS seemed to have more in common with the radicals involved in the Arab Spring than with the members of the Tea Party. To carry the analogy further (perhaps a little too far), the Tea Party activists were more like the counterparts to the supporters of dictators like Mubarak, bused in to city centers to foment counter-revolution, rather than people striving for justice. It is of no little account to note that, unlike OWS, which seemed to enjoy a genuine grassroots support, the Tea Party received its funding from a handful of ludicrously wealthy plutocrats, such as the infamous Koch brothers.

However, if the slogan ‘banks got bailed out, we got sold out’ expresses a populistic anger directed toward the banks, and the rich, it also raises the issue of being sold out, or betrayed. This no doubt owes itself to the fact that, among the anarchists and radicals in OWS, many people involved were not only liberals, but one-time Obama supporters. Betrayed by his misleading message of hope and change, these people imparted a significant ideological infusion into OWS. While comparisons to the Tea Party can provide some sense of its parameters, and though many may not care to admit it, one may gain a clearer idea of what OWS is by comparing it not to the Tea Party as much as to Obama himself. Indeed, it should not be at all surprising that, in the age of Obama – a politician skilled above all else in the art of marketing – a movement born from the pages of a magazine should share a considerable deal of his proclivities.

Although it may not be an altogether fair charge to level, since political movements in general appeal to such things, Obama and OWS share an emphasis on hope and change. While Obama’s hope and change, though, contains rhetoric – or used to at least – about green energy, and other futuristic technologies, his is a decidedly backward-looking, nostalgic type of change, one that would restore the US to its former “greatness.” Sentiments such as these were not foreign to the sensibility pervading OWS. In addition to such a backward-looking utopianism, though, OWS also contained a forward-looking, prefigurative utopian element that suggested a break with the nostalgic notion of returning to some past golden time.

Beyond this somewhat superficial similarity, however, Obama and OWS also maintain a comparable position concerning the pace of change. Unwilling to announce any particular goals, many strains of OWS emphasized the importance of movement-building. Not wanting to turn anyone away with unsavory political radicalism, OWS focused its energies on growing the movement. Obama’s strategy, misrepresenting himself as an agent of meaningful change, was identical. Aside from his fraudulent 2008 campaign, Obama continues to employ just such rhetoric, announcing time and again that it is actually too soon to see any real change. Insisting that change takes time, he instead offers further portions of hope. That is, both Obama and OWS engage in similar deceptions. One misrepresents, in order to get more support. And the other, insofar as it keeps mum about its more radical aspirations (with its organizers, for all their talk concerning their respect for autonomy, explicitly asking participants to abstain from mentioning anarchy, or Marx, to name just two inflammatory terms) misrepresents itself as well, with the same rationale. Neither wants to scare away any potential supporter with the truth of their actual political position.

Though Obama allows people to think he is an agent of change, he is in fact ‘more of the same.’ Willfully and knowingly misrepresenting himself, Obama allows people to think he’s legitimately concerned with the welfare of the people of the world. OWS, on the other hand, doesn’t misrepresent itself so much as it refuses to represent itself. Its much discussed refusal to elicit demands owes itself only partially to a principled anti-statist position, one that refuses to make demands of an entity with no legitimate power to grant them. The other part owes itself to a very Obamian marketing sensibility. Just like Obama, OWS has turned itself into a brand.

Related to this is another characteristic that OWS shares with Obama. Neither negotiates forcefully. Of course, as they have nothing even approximating comparable bargaining power, it is not exactly fair to issue such a charge. Nevertheless, there seems to be a similar sensibility at play. For example, as anyone who has studied negotiation techniques learns right away, the first, most basic rule is to ask in any negotiation for more than what you want. Obama, however, a Harvard-trained lawyer, never seems to have learned this elementary rule. Rather than asking for more than what he wants, Obama’s negotiation strategy involves asking for less, as when he notoriously initiated negotiations over what would become his Affordable Care Act by throwing out his biggest bargaining chip, the so-called public option. While it seems hard to believe that Obama did not throw out the public option enthusiastically, in order to realize the business-friendly ACA, his supporters maintain that he was forced to do such a thing by an intransigent congress. As such, they argue, he was only being realistic. This notion of his being realistic, of course, calls to mind the slogan from May, 1968, that you should Be Realistic, and Demand the Impossible. In this respect it appears that OWS has more in common with Obama than with its ostensible allies from nearly half a century ago. Rather than demand the impossible, or even ask for more than what they want, OWS refuses to make demands at all.

As Frederick Douglas wrote, and as many are quick to quote, power will concede nothing without a demand. And as sympathizers of OWS will point out, making demands of power at the same time validates that power. Furthermore, when that power is regarded as something that is not only hostile, but wholly lacking in legitimacy, making demands is at best a degrading affair. At worst the party making demands itself becomes a counter-power. As many iterate and reiterate, OWS does not strive to be such a counter-power. Rather, its aim is to pull the rug out from under power. On this point the sentiments of OWS are to some degree in accord with the words of the Zapatista Comandante Ramona when she said, referring to the Zapatistas’ struggle, that we do not want to seize power, we want to break power into little pieces, so everyone can hold some. This remark deserves some consideration.

While it is a generalization, and a problematic simplification, in a world in which all is in perpetual flux, to some extent human history itself may be described as little more than the concentrations and dispersions of energy, or power. And, if such is the case, and history is this sequence of concentrations – which, upon achieving certain quantities, assume tyrannical qualities – we may regard the disruption and dispersion of such concentrations as ruptures, and the concentrations as stabilizations.

As one facet of human history, U.S. history can be seen as just such a series of ruptures and continuities – of adjustments and stabilizations. Of course, just where one defines a rupture, and where one marks the stabilization, are bound to involve some degree of controversy. For the autochthonous peoples inhabiting the Americas, the arrival of Europeans five centuries ago for the most part initiated a concentration of power that would not only destroy their cultures, but spread monumental misery as well. And while the imperial presences of England, France, Spain, and others, continued to contribute to a process of deforming an earth in which power was dispersed, to one in which it grew more and more concentrated, these concentrations in turn produced their dispersions. As noted above, when power becomes more and more concentrated it becomes more and more tyrannical. And it was just such an appeal to the shaking off of tyranny that provided some of the rationale for the American Revolution. While the Declaration of Independence marks a rupture and dispersion of a concentrated power, the advent of the US Constitution, with its tripartite schema of government designed to concentrate and stabilize this dispersion, marked this dispersion’s limit, and reconcentration. For the constitution’s separation of power schema was not designed to eliminate, disperse, or distribute power so much as balance, contain, and stabilize it.

To some degree this concentration was ruptured again and again. During the Jacksonian era, a dispersion of power extended the franchise beyond the requirement of land ownership – a partial and relative dispersal of power that was followed by stabilization and concentration. When the Civil War broke out, and in the ensuing period of Reconstruction, power was again dispersed. This, of course, was followed by another concentration of power in the form of Jim Crow laws and terror. In the 20th century, the suffrage movement of the 1920s, as well as the New Deal of the 1930s and 40s, and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, marked an extended period of ruptures and dispersions of power.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, power concentrated yet again, into unprecedented extremes. And while there have been many exceptions, and in some social areas there have been ruptures and dispersions of power, economically power has concentrated and polarized over the past few decades to unprecedented levels. It may be far too soon to determine whether OWS marks the beginning of a meaningful dispersion of power. Among other things, it ought to be noted that while these ruptures and dispersions of power may be punctuated by particular legislative achievements, their truly significant alterations manifest in the adjustment of social norms. If this is the case, one would do well to inquire as to what types of norms OWS might herald.

Perhaps Occupy Wall Street’s most consistent and clear articulation of normative content inheres in its advocacy of Autonomy and Non-Violence. And though one could see these two positions as being contradictory, since the exhortation to be non-violent may conflict with another’s autonomy, an investigation into their interrelations may yield insight. While there have been considerable, and so far unsuccessful efforts within OWS to articulate just what non-violence means, and while examinations of the etymology of words is not always enlightening, it seems in this case that such an examination may shed some light. For the word violence shares the same root with the word violate. But just what does it mean to violate another’s autonomy? If non-violence is merely autonomy’s limit, is this just not a restatement of the harm principle? Is it anything aside from a rephrasing of the golden rule admonishing one to do unto others what one would have done to oneself? Or is it perhaps something closer to the so-called ‘silver rule’ of Confucianism, to avoid doing to others what you would not want done to yourself?

Rather than the harm principle, or the golden rule, or the silver rule, the twin values of non-violence and autonomy allow for a radical articulation of justice. Indeed, the inquiry into what non-violence means, and the consideration of violence as a violation of another’s autonomy, yields the following formulation. Because a person’s autonomy includes not only their ability to move about, but his or her well-being too, this leads to not only the position that one must abstain from intruding on another’s autonomy in the sense of causing active harms – such as exposing another to harmful toxins, or otherwise abusing another – it precludes the commission of passive harms as well. For example, allowing conditions that are harmful to merely persist – harmful to not only people, but to animals and the environment as well – are violations of autonomy. Beyond removing active harms, passive harms (including, but not limited to, the lack of access to salutary housing, nutrition, health care, education, and so on) must be removed – precisely by making them freely available. This is a just society’s duty, and an economy’s sole purpose. The conditions that produce and reproduce both active and passive harms must be changed, transformed into conditions that allow for autonomy and the general welfare – that is, into the conditions of justice, to which laws, if they are to avoid being tyrannical, must only follow. To the extent that it does not pursue these aims, as this country’s founding documents maintain, a given society has no legitimacy whatsoever. As its anniversary approaches, dragging along with it a train of questions and slogans, it seems that OWS’ most meaningful contribution to contemporary politics are these two conjoined concepts.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elliot Sperber is a writer, attorney, and contributor to hygiecracy.blogspot.com. He lives in New York City and can be reached at elliot.sperber@gmail.com

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•••

The Smell of Mendacity
by DANIEL KOVALIK
“You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’  Even if the plan is horrifying!”– The Joker

Sounding very much like his predecessor, George W. Bush, President Obama engaged in a very calculated act of misdirection and obfuscation at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to continue justifying his unprovoked acts of war abroad.

One of the key lines of his acceptance speech, brief as it was, wreaked with what Big Daddy in  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof referred to as “the smell of mendacity.”

Thus, Obama stated:  “I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. And we have. We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, Al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama Bin Laden is dead.”

In this well-crafted, though wholly misleading statement, Obama strongly suggests that the Taliban attacked us on 9/11.  This is, of course, not true.   The Taliban never attacked us.   Their only crime was to insist upon proof of Osama bin Laden’s culpability for the 9/11 attacks before handing him over to the U.S.   (And, the Taliban’s request in this regard was not purely academic.  Thus, as explained in a little-known article in the Ithaca Journal by Ed Haas — so unknown that it won the Project Censored Award — the FBI admitted that it never included the 9/11 attacks in Bin Laden’s “Ten Most Wanted” rap sheet because the FBI had “no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”).

Watch below the entire Obama speech at the DNC coronation. (WARNING: Strong stomach required.)

Still, it was the Taliban’s insistence on such due process niceties (niceties the U.S. once claimed to hold dear) which led to the U.S. war in Afghanistan which continues now 11 years later – “our longest war” as Obama, in a moment of candor, correctly pointed out.   Yet, despite the Taliban’s undeniable lack of responsibility for 9/11, Obama reserves the lion’s share of his drone attacks for ostensible Taliban targets, rather than Al Qaeda.   Thus, as Peter Bergen from CNN noted in a September 6 article, entitled, “Drone is Obama’s Weapon of Choice,” only 8% of Obama’s drone targets are al Qaeda as compared to just over 50% being Taliban targets.  No wonder then that Obama must try to make the American people (in the words of W) “misremember” who really was responsible for 9/11 – otherwise, his ongoing war in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, complete with the drone campaign, would appear needlessly cruel; and indeed, it is.

Obama also stated in his acceptance that “Al Qaeda is on the path to defeat.”   Whether that is true or not in general is uncertain.  However, what is certain is that Al Qaeda is doing quite well in Syria where, as the Council on Foreign Relations recently noted, Al Qaeda is actually the critical fighting force in the Free Syrian Army – an army the U.S. is actively supporting, both directly and through its allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar.   But again, such inconvenient facts must be buried.

In the end, Obama’s untruths are revealing of a foreign policy which is as incoherent as it is cruel – at least assuming that this foreign policy is indeed aimed at rooting out terrorists who threaten the security of U.S. citizens as Obama would have us belief.  Of course, given that the U.S. is barely targeting Al Qaeda at all in our main theater of conflict (Afghanistan/Pakistan), and given that it is actually aiding and abetting Al Qaeda in places like Syria, one must ask the question which our leaders hope we will never ask – is our over-bloated military and our endless wars really aimed at keeping us secure?  The facts suggest that the answer is a resounding no.

Indeed, far from promoting security anywhere, U.S. war aims abroad appear intent upon creating instability and chaos; of dismantling states (such as Syria, Libya, Iraq, Somalia and of course Afghanistan) which our leaders view as impediments to the ability of multi-nationals to plunder world resources with impunity.   However, such chaos, while good for the business of a few, decidedly makes all of us much less secure.

The most notable example of this phenomenon, of course, lies in our long-time involvement in Afghanistan since 1979.  As we know now, through the admissions, and indeed bragging of Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the U.S. began aiding the anti-government rebels in Afghanistan (rebels which included Osama bin Laden) with the intention of provoking a Soviet invasion. That is, contrary to popular (and carefully manufactured) belief, the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan was not in fact the reaction to the Soviet invasion; it was the cause of the invasion.  The ultimate goal, as Brzezinski has explained with glee, was to give the USSR its own Vietnam-like quagmire which would fatally wound the Soviet Union.  In other words, the U.S. consciously set into motion a war with the intention of destroying one country (the Soviet Union) while sacrificing another (Afghanistan), and with the unintentional consequence of empowering terrorists such as Osama bin Laden who would later go on to attack us.

This, my friends, is an illustration of the chaos theory of U.S. foreign policy.

And, it is the realization of this frightening reality which Obama’s lies are designed to prevent.  Given the lack of virtually any opposition to this narrative, I would say that these lies are working according to plan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer living in Pittsburgh.  He is currently teaching International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

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•••

“With Assange, the political context is the totalizing immorality of the national security state on a global scale.”

By JoAnn Wypijewski [2]

Every once in a while, a situation arises that so completely captures the spirit of the time—in this case, the horror moving like an amoeba under the surface of our pleasant days, our absurd distractions, our seemingly serious politics—that ordinary assumptions, ordinary arguments and their limited conclusions serve only to obliterate honesty, and so any hope of grappling with the real. Such is the case of Julian Assange now.

He is the wanted man. Wanted for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings, ostensibly on sexual misconduct allegations in Sweden, but maybe not; maybe on charges of espionage or conspiracy in the United States instead; maybe to face indefinite detention, maybe torture or life in prison. It’s so hard to know… But one thing is not mysterious: the law is no more capable of delivering justice in his case today than it was for a black man alleged to have raped a white woman in the Jim Crow South.

I am not comparing the founder of WikiLeaks, a white man benefiting from not only white-skin privilege and straight-man privilege but also class and celebrity privilege, with black men on the other side of a lynch mob. This is not about the particulars of oppression; it is about the political context of law, the limits of liberal expectations and the monstrosity of the state.

Liberals have no trouble generally acknowledging that in those rape cases against black men, the reasoned application of law was impossible. It was impossible because justice was impossible, foreclosed not by the vagaries of this white jury or that bit of evidence but by the totalizing immorality of white supremacy that placed the Black Man in a separate category of human being, without common rights and expectations. A lawyer might take a case if it hadn’t been settled by the mob, but the warped conscience of white America could do nothing but warp the law and make of its rituals a sham. The Scottsboro Boys might have been innocent or they might have been guilty; it didn’t matter, because either way the result would be the same.

With Assange, the political context is the totalizing immorality of the national security state on a global scale. The sex-crime allegations against Assange emerged in Sweden on August 20, 2010, approximately four and a half months after WikiLeaks blazed into the public sphere by releasing a classified video that showed a US Apache helicopter crew slaughtering more than a dozen civilians, including two journalists, in a Baghdad suburb. By that August, Pfc. Bradley Manning, the reputed source of the video and about 750,000 other leaked government documents, was being held without charge in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, subjected to what his attorney, David Coombs, describes in harrowing detail in a recent motion as “unlawful pretrial punishment.” In plain terms, Manning was tortured. He faces court-martial for aiding the enemy and has been denounced as a traitor by members of Congress.

For disseminating classified materials that exposed war crimes, Assange has been called a terrorist. A coloring book for children, The True Faces of Evil—Terror, from Big Coloring Books Inc. out of St. Louis, includes his face on a sheet of detachable trading cards, along with Timothy McVeigh, Jared Lee Loughner, Ted Kaczynski, Maj. Nidal Hasan and Bill Ayers. A commentator on Fox News urged President Obama to order his assassination. Vice President Joe Biden called him a “high-tech terrorist” and suggested that the Justice Department might be angling for a prosecution; that was two years ago. Indications of a secret grand jury investigation and imminent indictment have helped ratchet up the rhetoric and tension in and around the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange has received political asylum.

It has been common for the media to compartmentalize: on the one hand, there are complaints of sexual misconduct against Assange by two women in Sweden, which must be seen as a straightforward matter for law enforcement; on the other hand, there is his political activity, also his “attention-seeking,” “narcissism” and “arrogance,” which, come to think of it, sound a lot like traits in a rapist’s profile. Only rarely has anyone—notably Naomi Wolf and the team from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners program—begun with the intrinsic political challenge posed by WikiLeaks and proceeded from there to scrutinize the Swedish prosecutorial machinery.

That machinery is tricky. Police were so quick to initiate the arrest process that one of the women who came to them—to see if Assange could be forced to take an STD test after she’d had unprotected sex with him—became distraught and refused to give further testimony. The Swedish prosecutor’s office issued an arrest warrant for rape and molestation on one day and withdrew it the next, saying there was no reason to suspect rape, and that the other claim wasn’t serious enough for a warrant. About a week later, the Swedish director of prosecution reopened the investigation, and a court later approved her request to detain Assange for rape, molestation and unlawful coercion. By then he was in London, having been told he was free to leave Sweden. Assange was working with the New York Times and the Guardian in advance of launching the Iraq War Logs when the Swedes issued an international arrest warrant. He was readying the release of a cache of diplomatic cables when Interpol got involved, issuing a “red notice” for his arrest. In London, his legal efforts to block extradition were rejected by the High Court—whose strained decision was praised by the New Statesman’s David Allen Green as the ultimate in reasoned justice—and by the UK Supreme Court.

If the Swedish claims against Assange had involved anything but sex, it’s unlikely that liberals, and even some self-described radicals, would be tiptoeing around this part of the story, either by asking “So I guess he’s a bad guy?” or by arguing “Of course he needs to answer for his crimes.” If it were anything but sex, we would insist on the presumption of innocence. We have instead gotten comfortable with presuming guilt and trusting in the dignified processes of law to guarantee fairness.

“Believe the victim” entered the lexicon decades ago for historically understandable reasons. Women had been denied their own due process, in a sense—their right to make a complaint and expect justice, not vilification or worse. They are still being denied and derided, as the idiot spewings of Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin illustrate. The mutation of basic rights into an imperative for belief, and of full citizens into victims, has not made women any safer, but its cultural manipulation—particularly in high-profile cases—has struck at the foundations of civil liberty in a way that may not have been anticipated.

So here is the spectacle of Assange, as yet unindicted, bearing the dual brand of Sex Offender and Terrorist, the subhuman beings of the twenty-first century. The fusing of abuse and terror in his case thus implies two victims who must be believed, the women and the state. But the women’s claims are murky, and the state is not credible.

It should be possible to imagine a resolution outside the criminal justice system for problems that arise in the course of consensual sexual coupling: dissatisfaction over the use (or ill use) of condoms, constraints that keep people from expressing their wishes or intuiting those of another, selfishness, insensitivity, confusions as “yes” slides into “no” and back to “yes,” perhaps wordlessly—all issues that seem to apply in the Assange case but exist beyond it. That will require a braver sexual politics (and at least another column), and it does not demean experience to recognize that the language of punishment is a poor substitute for the lost language of love.

About the state, though, there must be no illusions. A nation that goes to war on fraud, that insists “We don’t torture” when evidence to the contrary abounds, that kidnaps foreign nationals and puts them on planes to be delivered to dungeons, that spies on its people, asserts its right to lock them up indefinitely and lets documented CIA torturers off the hook of accountability because they were only following orders: that nation will plot, and it will double-cross, and it will kill. Sweden participated in the US program of extraordinary rendition. The United Kingdom has threatened to storm Ecuador’s embassy. The United States now says it does not recognize the historic right of persons to seek diplomatic asylum. Assange’s lawyers have said that he will go to Sweden if he gets an absolutely firm guarantee from the Obama administration that it will not arrest him. Such a guarantee is impossible in an empire of lies.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/julian-assange-hunted-americas-violent-empire
Links:
[1] http://www.thenation.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/joann-wypijewski
[3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/julian-assange-0
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wikileaks-0
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/law-0
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/bradley-manning-0
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

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•••

by Judy Molland
September 15, 2012

Babysitting services in exchange for French or Spanish lessons? This barter/exchange system worked perfectly for my friends and I, a group of new moms with not much money, when our kids were toddlers.

We thought we were being innovative, but the country of Spain has taken our idea to a whole new level.

At a time when the future of the euro is in doubt and a bailout seems inevitable, alternative forms of exchange and survival are springing up in the cracks of capitalism, allowing people to exchange, barter, and live outside of failing currencies. These experiments aim to take communities back to a time when goods and services were bartered, before things such as interest rates, market speculation and derivatives complicated the financial world.

From The Guardian:

Psychologist Angels Corcoles recently taught a seminar about self-empowerment for women, and when she finished the organisers handed her a cheque with her fee. The amount was in hours, not euros.

But Corcoles didn’t mind. Through a citywide credit network that allows people to trade services without money, the 10 hours Corcoles earned could be used to pay for a haircut, yoga classes or even carpentry work.

In the city of Barcelona, the preferred model is time banks, which allow people to trade their services in hours without the involvement of money at all. There are more than 100 of these time banks within the city, ranging in size from a few dozen members to 3,000.

In another instance, residents in the city of Malaga have established a website which allows individuals to earn money and buy products using a virtual currency.

In the Catalonian fishing town of Vilanova i la Geltru, residents are experimenting with a localized currency, which is worth slightly more than the euro when it is used at local stores.

How does the system work?

Many of the time banks operate like real banks — with individual accounts, ledgers, checkbooks and, in many cases, even auditors. Some conduct transactions with physical checks and are overseen by a secretary who keeps track of deposits. Others exist solely on the internet.

From The Guardian:

Sergi Alonso, a 30-year-old computer technician who has been unable to find a full-time job, said he has helped numerous neighbours develop web pages and troubleshoot hardware problems through a time bank. In return, he was able to get private sewing instruction and piano lessons and learn about graphic design.

“Time banks help remind people that ‘regardless of your skills, you can always bring things to others,’” Alonso said.

Other eurozone countries with economic woes, such as Greece and Portugal, are experimenting with similar ideas, but it is Spain that has taken the lead.

There are now more than 325 time banks and alternative currency systems in Spain involving tens of thousands of citizens. Collectively, these projects represent one of the largest experiments in social money in modern times.

While each social-money project has its own accounting rules, the basic concept is the same. You earn credits by providing services or selling goods, and you can redeem the credits with people or businesses in the network.

These are the sort of experiments that create history if they succeed. But will the capitalist model allow that to happen?

What do you think? Can this work? Will it last? Is it a great idea or is it doomed to failure?

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/spaniards-ditch-money-in-favor-of-time-with-new-barter-systems.html#ixzz26fuaU3XS

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//

History will keep repeating itself until US foreign policy becomes congruent with its rhetoric.

In his sardonic 1955 novel “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene offered a devastating portrait of Alden Pyle, a young American covert agent in Vietnam, exuding idealist notions of democracy and Americanism while trying to cobble together a “third force” to stem the tide of the Vietnamese revolution. Unleashing mayhem upon the country’s population in the process, he ultimately becomes the victim of his own political intrigues.

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,” Graham Greene’s narrator says of Pyle.

The description seems apt as the eulogies pour in for J. Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, who was slain together with three other Americans in an armed assault on the American consulate in Benghazi Tuesday.

No one should take joy in the violent death of a 52-year-old man. But for all the tributes to his “idealism” and—in the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—his commitment to “advancing America’s values and interests,” it is impossible to understand the demise of Stevens without recognizing that this was an individual with blood on his hands who, like the fictional Pyle, fell victim to the very forces he helped unleash.

Stevens was a career operative for US imperialism in the Middle East. He was sent to Damascus, Cairo, Riyadh, Jerusalem and Tripoli as “political officer” and “chargé d’affaires,” defending “America’s values and interests” under conditions in which Washington was carrying out a near-genocidal war of aggression in Iraq, propping up the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt, and defending unconditionally every crime carried out by Israel against the Palestinian people.

In Libya, he played a major role in cementing ties between the US and the regime of Col. Muammar Gaddafi. Secret embassy cables written by Stevens from that period and made public by WikiLeaks give a revealing picture of his work.

They discuss, among other things, negotiations with the Libyan government for continued access by American interrogators to Libyan detainees who had been abducted, tortured and then handed back to the Gaddafi regime as part of the “war on terrorism.” Other cables detail multi-billion-dollar deals struck on behalf of American corporations seeking profits from Libyan oil.

At that time, Stevens described Gaddafi as an “engaging and charming interlocutor” as well as a “strong partner in the war against terrorism.”

The cables also reveal that Stevens devoted his attention to researching conditions in eastern Libya, and what he described as its “historical role as a locus of opposition.”

When, in the aftermath of the popular revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, Washington decided to seize upon demonstrations in Libya and promote a war for “regime change” as a means of bolstering its position in the region, Stevens was the man selected to become US envoy to the so-called rebels organized in the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council (NTC).

At the time, the State Department refused to make public his official biography. Photographs of him were also unavailable. Businessweek was one of the few publications to carry a profile of Washington’s “man in Benghazi.” It noted his previous research on social unrest in eastern Libya and quoted a former State Department colleague as saying that Stevens was “already familiar with some opposition members from his posting in Tripoli.”

This raises the obvious question as to what role Stevens and the US had in fomenting the armed conflict in Libya from its outset. Whatever the case, what was promoted to the public as a crusade for human rights and to save the lives of Libyan civilians was in reality a war of imperialist plunder whose main objectives were to establish hegemonic control over the North African country’s oil wealth at the expense particularly of Russia and China.

Once in Benghazi, beginning in April 2011, Stevens’ role was to coordinate funding, weapons and training for the “rebels,” while ensuring that the collection of exiles, ex-Gaddafi functionaries and Islamists in the NTC toed America’s line.

A central problem in this venture was, in the absence of a genuine mass revolutionary uprising, the organization of a fighting force able to follow up the murderous aerial bombardment by the US and its allies. The opportunistic solution was the utilization of forces tied to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, who had both experience and motivation as fighters.

The Libyan war saw elements that had previously been denounced as terrorists and, in a number of cases, detained and tortured by the CIA, suddenly hailed as freedom fighters and heroes.

Clearly, Washington’s calculation was that, after using these forces, it could dispose of them later as a puppet state headed by the Libyan equivalent of a Hamid Karzai took shape. This state is being formed—now under the leadership of newly elected Prime Minister Mustafa Abu-Shakour, who spent 32 years as an exile in the US, where he worked at one time for the Pentagon—but its power has proven inadequate to disarm and disband tens of thousands of armed and unemployed militia members.

The war in Libya ended in October 2011 with the barbaric lynch-mob murder of Gaddafi. At the time, Secretary of State Clinton gloated over the former Libyan leader’s fate, laughingly declaring, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Speaking in the aftermath of Stevens’ killing Wednesday, Clinton declared, “How could this happen in a country we helped liberate in a city we helped save from destruction?” If the Secretary of State doesn’t know the answer to this question, she should have her head examined.

The same elements that she was lauding as “heroes” when they were sodomizing and lynching Gaddafi are the “savages” she and Obama now say must be “brought to justice.” No doubt, their desire to murder the ambassador was fueled by the conviction that the so-called “revolution” has brought them—not to mention the Libyan people—nothing.

Such sentiments are widespread throughout the region. Those who live in these countries know first-hand that the pursuit of American “interests and values” is a cynical exercise in destruction and greed that no professions of idealism can conceal.

As for the media, the fulsome tributes by those claiming to have known Stevens, in some cases citing emails he sent to members of the press, are a telling self-indictment of the incestuous relations between the Washington ruling establishment and the so-called fourth estate.

As in Iraq earlier, the war of aggression against Libya was possible thanks to deliberate and systematic lying to the American public by a corporate-controlled media that regurgitated the US government’s propaganda. It played an indispensable role in packaging an illegal war for regime change as a humanitarian venture aimed at saving lives and fostering democracy.

Standing out among the media eulogies for Stevens is that offered by the loathsome Roger Cohen, the New York Times columnist and former foreign editor, who has churned out column after column promoting US militarism from the Balkans to Iraq. Cohen tells his readers that Stevens “died for American values.”

What he means was spelled out a little over a year ago, when he penned a column on Libya entitled “Score one for interventionism,” arguing that “interventionism is inextricable from the American idea… the idea that the West must be prepared to fight for its values against barbarism.”

Cohen cites a July 4, 2011 email Stevens sent to a large number of people wishing them “a great 4th with plenty of beer, ice cream, hamburgers and Chinese fireworks.” At the time, Libya was awash in blood and gore, having undergone over 100 days of continuous US-NATO bombardment.

The endless repetition of tributes to Stevens’ idealism and good nature will no doubt strike a chord with the layers of the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left that lined up behind the Obama administration’s war in Libya. That this praise has come from both Democrats and the likes of Condoleezza Rice and others within the Bush administration, which he also served, will not faze them in the least.

Stevens in the end expressed the hypocritical and murderous role played by Washington on the world stage that Graham Greene’s novel pointed to more than half a century ago. He was another “quiet American,” concealing naked imperialist interests with rhetoric about democracy and liberation, while leaving a trail of mayhem and destruction in his wake.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bill Van Auken is a leading member of the Social Equality Party and senior editor with World Socialist Web Site.

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