Assemblies emerging in Turkey: a lesson in democracy

By Jerome Roos, roarmag

The protesters are starting to counter-pose their own direct democracy to the sham of a democracy proposed by Erdogan’s authoritarian neoliberal state.

Something quite amazing is happening in Istanbul. In addition to the silent “standing man” actions around the country, people’s assemblies are slowly starting to emerge in different neighborhoods across the city. As in Spain, Greece and the Occupy encampments before, the protesters in Turkey are starting to counter-pose their own form of direct democracy to the sham of a democracy proposed by Erdogan’s authoritarian neoliberal state. If there was ever any doubt, this shows how deeply intertwined the global struggles truly are.

As the state launches its merciless witch hunt on protesters, activists and Tweeters, thousands of people are starting to gather in dignity in various public spaces. As Oscar ten Houten reports from on the ground in Istanbul, the Beşiktaş Assembly in Abbasaga park, which has been going on for days, tripled its number of participants on Tuesday night, with a total of ten popular assemblies taking place in Istanbul alone and at least one more in Izmir. As Oscar writes on his great blog (which he started at the occupation of Puerta del Sol in Madrid in 2011):

These meetings have nothing to do with Taksim Solidarity any more. They are spontaneous initiatives by local people who are fed up with Erdogan’s disregard for the Turkish citizens, their rights and freedoms, their history, beliefs and traditions. … We arrive in Kadıköy, and truly, I couldn’t believe this was happening. Well over two thousand people were gathered on the green, to express their anger with the government’s eviction of Gezi, and to share their hope for a better Turkey. Like anywhere else, it was a cross section of the population, which included all races and creeds.

Interestingly, the members of the popular assemblies in Turkey use the same hand-signs as the indignados, indicating that some of the methods were directly inspired by the real democracy protests in Spain. This, in turn, seems to confirm the idea we raised very early on in the Turkish uprising, and a claim that many Turkish activists have been making from the very start: namely that this movement is not just a local or national protest, but part of a global struggle against the subverted nature of representative capitalist democracy and for realdemocracy and total liberation.

What, then, is real democracy? Obviously it’s difficult to have a straightforward answer to such a complex question, seeing that different people will interpret the idea (and the ideal) differently. It is quite easy, however, to identify what it is not. Democracy stands for the rule of the people. As a result, when corporate interests and religious delusions begin to dominate government, that is not democracy. In fact, when a small elite of elected politicians is delegated to speak on behalf of the rest, that is not the rule of the people but their representation.

The worldwide experiments with direct democracy — in the form of horizontal self-organization through popular assemblies, decentralized mutual aid networks, thematic working groups, and so on — provide a glimpse of what another world could look like. Of course, none of this is to say that the protesters have a blueprint in hand for the ideal revolutionary society; but they are actively testing and trying out different models to see how large groups of people can effectively organize themselves without hierarchical and centralized leadership.

Last year, when shooting our first ROAR documentary – Utopia on the Horizon – in Athens, we interviewed Manolis Glezos, the 90-year-old Greek WWII resistance hero who is currently an MP for the coalition of the radical left. Glezos experimented with direct democracy when he was the mayor of a village on the island of Naxos. Even though Glezos still believes that a parliament controlled by popular forces can help activists on the ground, he insists that the citizens’ revolution as such cannot proceed if the people do not organize themselves from below.

So what about the popular assemblies in Syntagma Square, Puerta del Sol and Zuccotti Park? Was that real democracy? When we asked Glezos, he looked at us with an amused smile on his face, and — to our great surprise — just said: “No. This is not democracy. How can a few thousand people assembled in a square claim to speak on behalf of the millions that live in the region? This is not democracy — it’s a lesson in democracy. If this movement wants to survive, its direct democratic models will need to spread to the neighborhoods and to the working places. Only then will we start seeing the emergence of a genuinely democratic society.”

What Glezos is saying, in other words, is that for direct democracy to work, the assemblies need to be radicalized and extended into the working places in the form of workers’ self-management, as in the inspiring case of the Vio.Me factoryin Greece. Obviously, none of this will be enough to overthrow the capitalist state as such; but it is a starting point to help engage people in different forms of decision-making, different forms of production, and different ways of being, thinking and interacting. In a word, it is about building the social foundations of self-organization that will allow us to replace the oppressive institutions of the capitalist state when the time comes.

But there is something more. The direct democracy of the squares is also about saying that we cannot wait for some distant revolution to overthrow the capitalist system. We are currently facing a global humanitarian tragedy, an ecological disaster and a profound social and political crisis. We have to act now. We cannot rely on corporate elites to do this for us. We cannot trust in political representatives to take the process ahead. The only ones we can trust are ourselves. We, the people, will have to carry this revolution forward. Starting now.

Still, on a more humble level — yet perhaps the most important of all — we should be careful not to fetishize direct democracy. At the end of the day, the assembly is a very simple phenomenon: it is about ordinary people craving to be heard and to have a say in their lives. Assemblies are a way to allow those who have been shut up for years to finally stand up in dignity and to speak their voice — and be heard. It is about recovering our collective sense of humanity from the rapacious claws and unrepresentive institutions of the capitalist state.

As such, the assemblies are a beautiful and crucial form of social engagement and political participation. In the future, they may well be expanded to cover more and more segments of the population. But even in these moments of elation, when we see the people taking matters into their own hands and enacting realdemocracy in the places where they live and work, we should stay realistic: this is only just the beginning. The capitalist state survives, and creating our own parallel society is not enough. We must self-organize, and then push our quest for autonomy outwards to eventually encapsulate all of society.

Luckily, there is hope that such radical aspirations may not just be a pipe dream. In a sign that this leaderless movement is already deregulating the violent flow of authority unleashed by the Turkish state, the increasingly desperate government is doubling down on the repression, arresting random people who were sighted at the protests or who sent out “provocative” Tweets, and even threatening to send in the army. As Oscar puts it, “the authorities still don’t understand what’s happening. They look for leaders, people to corrupt or to eliminate. But there are none. We are not an organisation, we are a world wide web. We are the people on the threshold of changing times.”

ABOUT ROARMAG AND THE AUTHOR
ROAR is edited by Jérôme Roos, a writer, activist and filmmaker from Amsterdam and a PhD Researcher at the European University Institute in Florence. Our contributions come from volunteers around the world.

OpEds: Murder Made Sexy

By William T. Hathaway

SOF personnel in Iraq. The power of life and death is intoxicating to many youths, who, like most of the population, are also pitifully ignorant about the actual political goals they implement. (Wikipedia)

The US Special Forces is a bizarrely gendered world, as I found out when I joined it to write a book about war. This all-male bastion is sexualized in a truly perverted way, particularly in its methods for turning young men into killers on command.

[pullquote] The day the superrich and the politicians invest their sons and daughters in wars, the wars will end. [/pullquote]

Being the epitome of patriarchy, the military creates soldiers by forcing them into the role of the lowliest creatures in patriarchy: women. The recruits’ sense of personal power is stripped away, and they are required to obey commands from the men higher in the hierarchy and do the military’s “housework”: scrubbing and waxing floors, dusting windowsills, washing dishes, cleaning toilets to meet the standards of the commanders. They are forced to be obsessed with their appearance and to stand passively at attention while the older, more powerful men inspect them from a few inches away about how closely they’ve shaved, how neat their hair looks, how correctly they are dressed, often insulting them, calling them pussies and queers.

This intimate domination stirs homosexual feelings and at the same time represses them, creating psychological conflicts that are then channeled into aggression. A confused inner rage is generated in the young men, then given an outlet: the enemy.

A favorite ritual involves the distinction between guns and rifles. The word “gun” is reserved for the big cannons that kill dozens of people with one shot. “Rifle” is the smaller weapon that kills only one person at a time. If a recruit mistakenly calls his rifle a gun, he is ordered to stand in front of the group, point to his rifle, and shout, “This is my rifle,” then point to his crotch and shout, “This is my gun.” Then back to his rifle, “This is for fighting,” back to his crotch, “This is for fun!”

Their phallus is symbolically turned into a weapon. Instead of something loving that brings you closer to another person and can create new life, their sexuality becomes a tool for death, for destroying life. The military flips sexuality into its opposite.

This sexualization of violence is profoundly sick, but it’s just an extension of a pathology that permeates our society. It’s further proof that we have to dismantle patriarchy before we can have peace.

William T. Hathaway’s first book, A World of Hurt, portrays his experiences on a Special Forces combat team and won a Rinehart Foundation Award for its uncovering of the psychological roots of war: the emotional blockage and need for patriarchal approval that draw men to the military. His latest book, Radical Peace: People Refusing War,presents the experiences of peace activists who have moved beyond petitions and demonstrations into direct action, defying the government’s laws and impeding its capacity to kill. He is a member of the Freedom Socialist Party, a red feminist organization (www.socialism.com). A sample of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.

Europe is getting restless: Obama’s Soft Totalitarianism

06/17/2013

People around the world were shocked to learn of the extent of US snooping. This anti-Obama poster comes from Hong Kong.

Europe Must Protect Itself from America

A Commentary by Jakob Augstein

Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government’s vast spying program call that assumption into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America’s reach for omnipotence.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama is coming to Germany. But who, really, will be visiting? He is the 44th president of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. He is an intelligent lawyer. And he is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

But is he a friend? The revelations brought to us by IT expert Edward Snowden have made certain what paranoid computer geeks and left-wing conspiracy theorists have long claimed: that we are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching.

On Tuesday, the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented is coming for a visit. If Barack Obama is our friend, then we really don’t need to be terribly worried about our enemies.

It is embarrassing: Barack Obama will be arriving in Berlin for only the second time, but his visit is coming just as we are learning that the US president is a snoop on a colossal scale. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that she will speak to the president about the surveillance program run by the National Security Agency, and the Berlin Interior Ministry has sent a set of 16 questions to the US Embassy. But Obama need not be afraid. German Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich, to be sure, did say: “That’s not how you treat friends.” But he wasn’t referring to the fact that our trans-Atlantic friends were spying on us. Rather, he meant the criticism of that spying.

Friedrich’s reaction is only paradoxical on the surface and can be explained by looking at geopolitical realities. The US is, for the time being, the only global power — and as such it is the only truly sovereign state in existence. All others are dependent — either as enemies or allies. And because most prefer to be allies, politicians — Germany’s included — prefer to grin and bear it.

‘It’s Legal’

German citizens should be able to expect that their government will protect them from spying by foreign governments. But the German interior minister says instead: “We are grateful for the excellent cooperation with US secret services.” Friedrich didn’t even try to cover up his own incompetence on the surveillance issue. “Everything we know about it, we have learned from the media,” he said. The head of the country’s domestic intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maassen, was not any more enlightened. “I didn’t know anything about it,” he said. And Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was also apparently in the dark. “These reports are extremely unsettling,” she said.

With all due respect: These are the people who are supposed to be protecting our rights? If it wasn’t so frightening, it would be absurd.

Obama grandstanding in Berlin. The obligatory cheering may soon stop.

Friedrich’s quote from the weekend was particularly quaint: “I have no reason to doubt that the US respects rights and the law.” Yet in a way, he is right. The problem is not the violation of certain laws. Rather, in the US the laws themselves are the problem. The NSA, in fact, didn’t even overreach its own authority when it sucked up 97 billion pieces of data in one single 30-day period last March. Rather, it was acting on the orders of the entire US government, including the executive, legislative and judicial branches, the Democrats, the Republicans, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Supreme Court. They are all in favor. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, merely shrugged her shoulders and said: “It’s legal.”

A Monitored Human Being Is Not a Free One

What, exactly, is the purpose of the National Security Agency? Security, as its name might suggest? No matter in what system or to what purpose: A monitored human being is not a free human being. And every state that systematically contravenes human rights, even in the alleged service of security, is acting criminally.

Those who believed that drone attacks in Pakistan or the camp at Guantanamo were merely regrettable events at the end of the world should stop to reflect. Those who still believed that the torture at Abu Ghraib or that the waterboarding in CIA prisons had nothing to do with them, are now changing their views. Those who thought that we are on the good side and that it is others who are stomping all over human rights are now opening their eyes. A regime is ruling in the United States today that acts in totalitarian ways when it comes to its claim to total control. Soft totalitarianism is still totalitarianism.

[pullquote]

A regime is ruling in the United States today that acts in totalitarian ways when it comes to its claim to total control. Soft totalitarianism is still totalitarianism. We’re currently in the midst of a European crisis. But this unexpected flare-up of American imperialism serves as a reminder of the necessity for Europe. Does anyone seriously believe that Obama will ensure the chancellor and her interior minister that the American authorities will respect the rights of German citizens in the future? Only Europe can break the American fantasy of omnipotence…”

[/pullquote]

We’re currently in the midst of a European crisis. But this unexpected flare-up of American imperialism serves as a reminder of the necessity for Europe. Does anyone seriously believe that Obama will ensure the chancellor and her interior minister that the American authorities will respect the rights of German citizens in the future? Only Europe can break the American fantasy of omnipotence. One option would be for Europe to build its own system of networks to prevent American surveillance. Journalist Frank Schirrmacher of the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper recommended that over the weekend. “It would require subsidies and a vision as big as the moon landing,” he argues.

A simpler approach would be to just force American firms to respect European laws. The European Commission has the ability to do that. The draft for a new data privacy directive has already been presented. It just has to be implemented. Once that happens, American secret services might still be able to walk all over European law, but if US Internet giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook want to continue making money off of a half-billion Europeans, then they will have to abide by our laws. Under the new law, companies caught passing on data in ways not permitted are forced to pay fines. You can be sure that these companies would in turn apply pressure to their own government. The proposal envisions setting that fine at 2 percent of a company’s worldwide revenues.

That’s a lot of money — and also a language that America understands.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jakob Augstein is a leading leftwing German writer and publisher. He has often been the target of hysterical accusations of anti-semitism by Zionists, but that’s par for the course for anyone who criticizes Israel’s rightwing policies.

URL:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/europe-must-stand-up-to-american-cyber-snooping-a-906250.html

Chronicles of Inequality [Too Much, June 17, 2013]

	June 17, 2013
THIS WEEK
A CNN network reporter has been asking the online public to pick the topics he ought to be covering the rest of the year. The top pick, as of the end of last week: “America’s widening gap between the rich and poor.”CNN’s John Sutter says he “never expected” inequality to strike so many people as “the most pressing issue of our time.” People today, Sutter now sees, want to know a great deal more about the economic gaps that divide us.But where can someone start to get that more? Inequality.Org, our Too Muchonline companion, has just unveiled an ideal starting point, the most up-to-date guide yet to understanding why America has become so unequal, more unequal than any other major developed nation. This new guide, Growing Apart by historian Colin Gordon, taps the latest research on inequality — from all over the world — and links readers to a broad array of source material. One-stop shopping, so to speak, for stopping inequity. More on that inequity — and the struggle against it — in this week’s Too Much.	About Too Much, a project of the Institute for Policy StudiesProgram on Inequality and the Common Good Subscribe to Too Much Join us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter
GREED AT A GLANCE
U.S. Trust, the oldest and largest private wealth manager for America’s wealthy, has just completed an in-depth survey of the nation’s “high net worth families,” households that hold over $3 million in “investable assets.” The survey’s most fascinating finding: Only 43 percent of the 711 deep pockets U.S. Trust quizzed “consider themselves wealthy.” Still, says U.S. Trust, most all the high-net-worth set remains “optimistic” and “confident” about the future. You might be confident, too, if you held at least 275 times more financial wealth than the typical American family. New research from NYU economist Edward Wolff places America’s median financial wealth at just $10,890 . . .You can call Nick Hanauer a top 1 percenter. You can call him filthy rich. But don’t ever call Nick Hanauer, a Seattle-based venture capitalist, a “job creator.” Hanauer told a U.S. Senate subcommittee earlier this month that “rich business people like me” neither “create” jobs nor deserve tax breaks for creating them. So who does create jobs? Average people, Hanauer testified, with money in their pockets. Added the veteran entrepreneur: “Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalist’s course of last resort, something we do if and only if increasing customer demand requires it.” If “lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy” actually did create work, Hanauer’s testimony summed up, “then today we would be drowning in jobs.”No corporation works harder at making its annual shareholder meeting a made-for-media spectacle than Wal-Mart, and this year’s annual session, just held in Arkansas, had everything from in-person pop-ins by Tom Cruise and Kelly Clarkson to a giant puppet white elephant. All these people and props, naturally, sang Wal-Mart’s praises. But companies have to give shareholders at least some floor time at annual meetings, and activists made the most of the 15 minutes — out of four hours — Wal-Mart grudgingly opened up. Wal-Mart worker Janet Sparks contrasted the low wages workers like herself receive with CEO Michael Duke’s $20.7 million 2012 paycheck. Noted Sparks to audience cheers: “I don’t think that’s right.” Making the cheers even more significant: Wal-Mart execs pack their annual meeting audience with employees they consider loyalists.	Quote of the Week “Our economy is currently experiencing a ‘members only’ recovery. Ninety-nine percenters needn’t apply.” Timothy Noah, Fairness Doctrine, Democracy, Summer 2013
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK
IRAs, 401(k)s, and other similar vehicles shelter income from taxes. The original rationale: help average Americans save for retirement. But the nation’s wealthy are now exploiting these tax-sheltered accounts to dodge billions in taxes, the reason why the White House now wants to limit the nest-eggs that savers can shelter to $3.4 million. Putnam Investments CEO Robert Reynolds is leading the charge to kill that limit. His bizarre case for no cap: “Right now elderly poverty is at an all-time high.” That’s “nonsense” as an argument, noteseconomist Dean Baker, on two counts. Elderly poverty isn’t sitting near any all-time high, and the elderly who do live in poverty aren’t worrying about brushing “up against the $3.4 million tax-exempt limit” the White House has proposed.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend
IMAGES OF INEQUALITY
First the rich had yachts, then yachts that carried little submarines. Now the rich can have it all: a yacht that doubles as a sub. The new Migaloo, as designed by the Austrian yacht studio Motion Code: Blue, will stretch longer than a football field, dive below 300 meters, and, one report notes, “satisfy the ever raising demands from super-rich yacht owners who want to stand out from the crowd.”	Web Gem Move Your Money/ A campaign that encourages individuals and institutions to divest from the nation’s largest Wall Street banks and shift their assets to local financial institutions.
PROGRESS AND PROMISE
Earlier this month, at London’s flagship Apple store, protestors packed the premises, sang Irish songs, and waved placards that read “Take a tax holiday in Ireland” — exactly what Apple execs are doing to avoid billions in taxes. This past December activists jammed UK Starbucks outlets, turning the shops into faux-day-care-centers to highlight the child services cuts corporate tax evasion is forcing. Credit both these protests to UK Uncut, a grassroots movement that’s inspiring similar efforts worldwide, including in the United States. One sign of the overall protest impact: Germany’s finance minister is now calling fora global minimum tax on multinational corporations.	Take Action on InequalityFind out more — and spread the word — about Inequality for All, the engaging new egalitarian documentary that features former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich and will hit the Los Angeles Film Festival this weekend.
INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS
	Stat of the Week America’s most typical income-earners, analysts at Sentier Research are now estimating, took home this past January 7.3 percent less, after inflation, than they earned in January 2000 — and 4.5 percent less than they earned in June 2009, the year the Great Recession officially ended.
IN FOCUS
Where Uncle Sam Ought to Be SnoopingLet’s place private corporations with government contracts under surveillance — to make sure no one is getting rich off our tax dollars.Only 23 percent of Americans, says a new Reuters poll, consider former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden a “traitor” for blowing the whistle on the federal government’s massive surveillance of the nation’s telecom system. Many Americans, the poll data suggest, clearly do find the idea of government agents snooping through their phone calls and emails a good bit unnerving. But Americans have more on the surveillance front to worry about than overzealous government agents. Government personnel aren’t actually doing the snooping the 29-year-old Snowden revealed. NSA officials have contracted this snooping out — to private corporate contractors. These surveillance contracts, in turn, are making contractor executives exceedingly rich. And none have profited personally more than the power suits who run Booz Allen Hamilton and the private equity Carlyle Group. Whistle-blower Snowden did his snooping as a Booz Allen employee. Booz Allen, overall, has had tens of thousands of employees doing intelligence work for the federal government. Booz Allen alumni also populate the highest echelons of America’s intelligence apparatus — and vice versa. The Obama administration’s top intelligence official, James Clapper, just happens to be a former Booz Allen exec. The George W. Bush intelligence chief, John McConnell, now serves as the Booz Allen vice chair. All these revolving doors open up into enormously lucrative worlds. In their 2010 fiscal year, the top five Booz Allen execs together pocketed just under $20 million. They averaged 23 times what members of Congress take home. But the real windfalls are flowing to top execs at the Carlyle Group, Booz Allen’s parent company since 2008. In 2011, Carlyle’s top three power suits shared a combined payday over $400 million. More windfalls will be arriving soon. Carlyle paid $2.54 billion to buy up Booz Allen. Analysts are now expecting that Carlyle’s ultimate return on the acquisition will triple the private equity giant’s initial cash outlay. What do all these mega millions have to do with the massive surveillance that Edward Snowden has so dramatically exposed? Washington power players, from the President on down, are insisting that this surveillance has one and only one purpose: keeping Americans safe from terrorism. But who can put much faith in these earnest assurances when other motives — financial motives — so clearly seem at play? Corporate execs at firms like Booz Allen and the Carlyle Group are making fortunes doing “systematic snooping” for the government. These execs have a vested self-interest in pumping up demand for their snooping services — and they’re indeed, the Washington Post reported last week, pumping away. This past April, the Post notes, Booz Allen established a new 1,500-employee division “aimed at creating new products that clients (read: government agencies) don’t know they need yet.” This new division is developing “social media analytics” that can anticipate the latest “cyber threat.” In other words, this new unit will be figuring out how to get the federal government to pay up even more for investigating who we “like” on Facebook. In one sense, none of this should surprise us. Corporate executives — particularly in the defense industry — have been enriching themselves off government contracts for years. Post-9/11 political dynamics have only turbocharged that process. America now sports, as Pulitzer Prize-winning analyst David Rohde observed last week, a “secrecy industrial complex.” Do the Snowden revelations have the potential to upset Corporate America’s long-running government contracting gravy train? Maybe, but only if anger over the revelations translates into real changes that keep private corporate contractors from getting rich off tax dollars. Like this article? Sign up to receive the Too Muchweekly in your email inbox. What might these changes entail? The Affordable Care Act enacted in 2010 — Obamacare — suggests one initial step. Under this new legislation, private health insurance companies can no longer deduct off their corporate income taxes any compensation over $500,000 that they pay their top executives. A more potent antidote to contracting windfalls would be simply denying government contracts to corporations that overcompensate their top execs, a course of action U.S. senator Hugo Black from Alabama, later a noted Supreme Court justice, proposed back in the early years of the Great Depression. How might this approach work today? The President of the United States makes about 25 times the compensation of the lowest-paid federal employee. We could apply that standard to federal contracting and deny our tax dollars to companies that pay their top execs over 25 times what any of their workers are making. Protecting privacy in a dangerous world will never be easy. But we’ll never have even a shot at protecting privacy until we take the profit out of violating it. Ending windfalls for contractors would be the logical place to start.	New Wisdom on WealthMark Schmitt, George Packer’s U.S.A., American Prospect, June 11, 2013. The most insightful commentary yet on an important new book that tracks a generation of growing inequality. David Moberg, New Visions from the New Left, In These Times, June 12, 2013. A top labor journalist explores two long-haul approaches to building an alternative to a top-heavy America. Rev. Chuck Arnold, Working to fill the most important gaps, Lompoc Record, June 13, 2013. A minister contemplates our global distribution of wealth and happiness. Chris Dillow, Why real wages are falling,Stumbling and Mumbling, June 13, 2013. The current five-year drop in U.S. real wages has been the worst since 1921-26, the second largest since 1855. Why so severe? One explanation. Jacob Hacker, How to reinvigorate the centre-left? Predistribution,Guardian, June 13, 2013. Why redistribution alone will never be enough to ensure equity. Paul Krugman, Sympathy for the Luddites, New York Times, June 14, 2013. Why education can’t be the answer to rising inequality. Donnie Maclurcan and Jen Hinton, How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not-For-Profit World by 2050, Daly News, June 15, 2013. Imagining what might happen if all of us realized that an economic system that concentrates wealth will never be socially and ecologically sustainable. Need a summer read? A new history of America’s first — and so far only — triumph over plutocracy.
NEW AND NOTABLE
The Pirates Attacking Our Social SecuritySarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, and Javier Rojo, Corporate Pirates of the Caribbean: Pro-Austerity CEOs look to Widen Tax Loophole, Institute for Policy Studies, June 12, 2013.Pirates plunder. Pirates don’t pay taxes on their plunder. And pirates love to frolic down Caribbean way. That’s how pirates operated back in the day. And that’s how pirates operate today. Only back centuries ago pirates brandished gaudy cutlasses. Today’s pirates brandish gaudy cufflinks. Today’s pirates lead America’s biggest corporations, and these “corporate pirates,” details this new Institute for Policy Studies report, pocket more loot than Blackbeard and his buddies could have ever imagined. The CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, the IPS report shows, have been parking billions in overseas tax havens throughout the Caribbean. Now they’re “brazenly seeking to widen tax haven loopholes” with a full-court press on behalf of a tax “reform” they call a “territorial tax system.” This “reform” would permanently exempt the foreign earnings of U.S. corporations from U.S. federal income taxes — and give these firms even more of an incentive to play the accounting games that shift U.S. profits offshore. The 59 U.S. corporations that belong to “Fix the Debt,” the lobby group pushing for austerity cuts to Social Security, are already shifting plenty. At the end of 2012, the CEOs of these companies had $544 billion in profits sitting overseas, up 15 percent over the $473 billion offshore at the end of 2011. These profits currently don’t face any U.S. corporate income tax unless they’re brought back stateside. If America’s top CEOs get Congress to swallow a territorial tax system, Corporate Pirates of the Caribbean reveals, their corporations could win “as much as $173 billion in immediate tax windfalls.”	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend who might want to subscribe
ABOUT TOO MUCH
Too Much, an online weekly publication of the Institute for Policy Studies \| 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036 \| (202) 234-9382 \| Editor: Sam Pizzigati. \| E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org \| Unsubscribe.

Keystone XL Activists Labeled Possible Eco-Terrorists

Green Scare Continues

by STEVE HORN

The vast majority of Americans, despite corporate propaganda, oppose the Keystone XL project, but it marches on inexorably. What does that show?

Despite heavy corporate propaganda the vast majority of Americans and Canadians oppose the Keystone XL project, but it marches on inexorably. What does that show? Democracy triumphant?

Documents recently obtained by Bold Nebraska [1] show that TransCanada – owner of the hotly-contested Keystone XL (KXL) [2] tar sands pipeline – has colluded with an FBI/DHS Fusion Center in Nebraska [3], labeling non-violent activists as possible candidates for “terrorism” charges and other serious criminal charges.

Further, the language in some of the documents is so vague that it could also ensnare journalists, researchers and academics, as well.

TransCanada also built a roster of names and photos of specific individuals involved in organizing against the pipeline, including350.org‘s Rae Breaux, Rainforest Action Network‘s Scott Parkin andTar Sands Blockade‘s Ron Seifert. Further, every activist ever arrested protesting the pipeline’s southern half is listed by name with their respective photo shown, along with the date of arrest.

[pullquote] PSYOPs-gate and “fracktivists” as “an insurgency” [4] all over again, but this time it’s another central battleground that’s in play: the northern half of KXL, a proposed border-crossing pipeline whose final fate lies in the hands of President Barack Obama.

The southern half of the pipeline was approved by the Obama Admin. via a March 2013 Executive Order [5]. Together, the two pipeline halves would pump diluted bitumen (“dilbit”) [6] south from the Alberta tar sands toward Port Arthur, TX, where it will be refined and shipped to the global export market [7].

Activists across North America have put up a formidable fight against both halves of the pipeline, ranging from the summer 2011 Tar Sands Action [8] to the ongoing Tar Sands Blockade [9]. Apparently, TransCanada has followed the action closely, given the level of detail in the documents.

Another Piece of the Puzzle

Unhappy with the protest efforts that would ultimately hurt their bottom-line profits, TransCanada has already filed a s [10]trategic lawsuit against public participation [10] (SLAPP) against Tar Sands Blockade, which was eventually settled out of court in Jan. 2013 [11]. That was just one small piece of the repressive puzzle, though it sent a reverberating message to eco-activists: they’re being watched [12].

In May 2013, Hot Springs School District in South Dakota held a mock bomb drill, with the mock “domestic terrorists” none other than anti-Keystone XL activists [13].

“The Hot Springs School District practiced a lockdown procedure after pretending to receive a letter from a group that wrote ‘things dear to everyone will be destroyed unless continuation of the Keystone pipeline and uranium mining is stopped immediately,” explained the Rapid City Journal [13]. “As part of the drill, the district’s 800 students locked classroom doors, pulled down window shades and remained quiet.”

This latest revelation, then, is a continuation of the troubling trend profiled in investigative journalist Will Potter’s book “Green Is the New Red [14].” That is, eco-activists are increasingly being treated as domestic eco-terrorists both by corporations and by law enforcement.

TransCanada Docs: “Attacking Critical Infrastructure” = “Terrorism”

The documents demonstrate a clear fishing expedition by TransCanada. For example, TransCanada’s PowerPoint presentation from Dec. 2012 on corporate security allege that Bold Nebraska had “suspicious vehicles/photography [15]” outside of its Omaha office.

That same presentation also says TransCanada has received “aggressive/abusive email and voicemail,” vaguely citing an incident in which someone said the words “blow up,” with no additional context offered. It also states the Tar Sands Blockade is “well-funded,” an ironic statement about a shoe-string operation coming from one of the richest and most powerful industries in human history.

Another portion of TransCanada’s PowerPoint presentation discusses the various criminal and anti-terrorism statutes that could be deployed[16] to deter grassroots efforts to stop KXL. The charge options TransCanada presented included criminal trespass, criminal conspiracy, and most prominently and alarmingly: federal and state anti-terrorism statutes.

Journalism Could be Terrorism/Criminal According to FBI/DHS Fusion Center Presentation

An April 2013 presentation given by John McDermott [17] – a Crime Analyst at the Nebraska Information Analysis Center (NIAC) [18], the name of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funded Nebraska-based Fusion Center [19] – details all of the various “suspicious activities” that could allegedly prove a “domestic terrorism” plot in-the-make.

NAIC says its mission is to [19] “[c]ollect, evaluate, analyze, and disseminate information and intelligence data regarding criminal and terrorist activity to federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies, other Fusion Centers and to the public and private entities as appropriate.”

Among the “observed behaviors and incidents reasonably indicative of preoperations planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity” is “photography, observation, or surveillance of facilities, buildings, or critical infrastructure and key resources.” A slippery slope, to say the least, which could ensnare journalists and photo-journalists out in the field doing their First Amendment-protected work.

Another so-called “suspicious activity” that could easily ensnare journalists, researchers and academics: “Eliciting information beyond curiosity about a facility’s or building’s purpose, operations, or security.”

Melissa Troutman [20] and Joshua Pribanic [21] – producers of the documentary film “Triple Divide [22]” and co-editors of the investigative journalism website Public Herald – are an important case in point. While in the Tioga State Forest (public land) filming a Seneca Resources fracking site in Troy, Pennsylvania, they were detained by a Seneca contractor and later labeled possible “eco-terrorists.”

“In discussions between the Seneca Resources and Chief Caldwell, we were made out to be considered ‘eco-terrorists’ who attempted to trespass and potentially vandalize Seneca’s drill sites, even though the audio recording of this incident is clear that we identified ourselves as investigative journalists in conversation with the second truck driver,”they explained in a post about the encounter [23], which can also be heard in their film.

“We were exercising a constitutional right as members of the free press to document and record events of interest to the public on public property when stripped of that right by contractors of Seneca.”

Activists protesting against the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) during its April 2013 meeting in Arizona were also labeled as possible “domestic terrorists” by the Arizona [24]FBI/DHS Fusion Center [24], as detailed in a recent investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy [25].

“Not Just Empty Rhetoric”

It’d be easy to write off TransCanada and law enforcement’s antics as absurd. Will Potter, in an article about the documents, warned against such a mentality.

“This isn’t empty rhetoric,” he wrote [3]. “In Texas, a terrorism investigation entrapped activists for using similar civil disobedience tactics [26]. And as I reported recently for VICE [27], Oregon considered legislation to criminalize tree sits. TransCanada has beenusing similar tactics in [Canada] as well [28].”

And this latest incident is merely the icing on the cake of the recent explosive findings by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian [29] about theNational Security Agency’s (NSA) spying [30] on the communcations records of every U.S. citizen [31].

“Many terrorism investigations (and a great many convictions) are politically contrived to suit the ends of corporations, offering a stark reminder of how the expansion of executive power — whether in the context of dragnet NSA surveillance, or the FBI treating civil disobedience as terrorism — poses a threat to democracy,” Shahid Buttar, Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committeetold DeSmogBlog.

Steve Horn is a Madison, WI-based freelance investigative journalist and Research Fellow at DeSmogBlog.