Ex-US president indicts Obama as assassin

By Bill Van Auken, WSWS.ORG
27 June 2012

Jimmy Carter receiving his Nobel in Oslo.

A column published Monday in the New York Times by Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, constitutes an extraordinary indictment of the Obama administration for engaging in assassinations and other criminal violations of international law and the US Constitution.

Titling his column “A Cruel and Unusual Record,” Carter writes: “Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended.”

Referring to the infamous provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed into law by Obama on December 31 of last year, Carter writes: “Recent legislation has made legal the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or ‘associated forces,’ a broad, vague power that can be abused without meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress.” He goes on to refer to “unprecedented violations of our rights” through warrantless wiretapping and electronic data mining.

Elaborating on the US drone strikes, the former president adds, “Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable… We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.”

Carter’s column appeared on the same day that Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations testified before the UN Human Rights Commission, denouncing US drone attacks on his country in which “thousands of innocent people, including women and children, have been murdered.” He said that in 2010 alone, 957 Pakistanis were killed.

Carter goes on to indict the administration for the continued operation of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where, he notes, out of 169 prisoners “half have been cleared for release, yet have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom,” and others “have no prospect of ever being charged or tried either.”

In the few cases where prisoners have been brought before military tribunals, he notes, the defendants “have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers.” He continues: “Astoundingly, these facts cannot be used as a defense by the accused, because the government claims they occurred under the cover of ‘national security.’”

Aside from moral qualms, and there is no reason to doubt that these play a significant role in Carter’s case, the former president expresses profound concerns that the brazen criminality of the actions carried out by the US government is undermining American foreign policy. Not only are these methods fueling popular hostility around the globe, they are depriving Washington of the ability to cloak its policies in the mantle of human rights and the defense of democracy, a method employed to significant effect by US imperialism since its advent at the end of the 19th century.

Carter himself played the “human rights” card prominently during his presidency, even as his administration sought to prop up the torture regime of the Shah in Iran, initiated the CIA-backed Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan, and affirmed—in the Carter Doctrine—America’s right to use military force to assure its domination of Persian Gulf oil supplies.

A former senior naval officer and submarine expert, Carter was brought into the White House in 1977 to restore the credibility and stature of the American presidency in the wake of US imperialism’s debacle in Vietnam and the criminality surrounding Watergate.

Yet, nearly four decades later, the extra-constitutional methods and criminality in the White House go far beyond anything done under Richard Nixon.

There is no question that Carter chose each word of his column carefully, avoiding hyperbole. Indeed, the name Obama does not appear. In the first word of the piece, however, he inserted a link to the lengthy New York Times article of June 1 documenting how Obama personally directs the preparation of “kill lists,” choosing victims and signing off on drone strikes when it is known that innocent civilians will be killed.

In this context, Carter’s use of the word “assassination” to describe the drone attacks has an unmistakable meaning. The president of the United States, this former president is saying, is guilty of war crimes and murder.

At the age of 88, Carter is a disinterested observer, concerned more with his legacy than any political gain. His testimony is all the more extraordinary in that he occupied the same office as Obama, is a member of the same party, and supported Obama’s election.

What could impel him, with little more than four months until the presidential election, to level such charges at his party’s candidate and the sitting president? He must believe that the political setup in America has descended so far into criminality and the threat of a police state is so great that it is imperative for him to speak out.

Carter makes the telling point that these criminal actions have been carried out with “bipartisan executive and legislative” support and virtually “without dissent.” Indeed, as if to prove his point, his own statements in the column—which have explosive political significance—have been largely passed over in silence by the mass media.

Twelve years after the stolen presidential election of 2000, the central lesson of that crucial episode in American political life has been driven home ever more forcefully: there exists within the US corporate and political establishment no significant constituency for the defense of democratic rights and constitutional methods.

The unprecedented gulf between a ruling financial oligarchy and the masses of working people—which has grown uninterruptedly throughout this period—is wholly incompatible with such rights and such methods.

Carter’s words are a warning. The threat of an American police state and the use of the murderous methods employed by US imperialism abroad against the working class at home is real and growing. The working class must prepare accordingly, mobilizing its independent political power against the capitalist profit system from which these threats arise.

Bill Van Auken is a senior political analyst with WSWS.ORG., a socialist organization.
Thank you, WSWS.ORG.

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Pure Transformation or Persistent Deterioration? What Next Wisconsin? America? The World?

By Kristine Mattis

And as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end
That bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names …

Paul Weller (The Jam)

Scott Walker's triumph reflects not only the enduring power of money in US politics, but the confusion among voters in all parts of the nation, and a general disgust with Democratic party politics due to numerous betrayals.

We all know the old Albert Einstein adage that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. What does that say about Wisconsin? June 5th 2012 saw an exact rematch of the 2010 gubernatorial election between Republican Scott Walker and Democrat Tom Barrett – and the exact same result, the only difference being that Walker won by an even wider margin than before.

While pundits have been pontificating about the causes of such a seemingly absurd victory by Scott Walker after the enormous groundswell of citizens fighting for sixteen months against the governor and his Tea Party Republican administration, most of the discussion has been shallow and fraught with inaccuracies. Furthermore, mere speculation on the causes of the Walker win only point to the ease with which our society retreats back to often unfounded conventional wisdom. Walker outspending Barrett 7 to 1, an ignorant electorate hell bent on voting against their own interests, and poor “messaging” by the Democratic party/candidate may all have played a part in the crushing Walker win, but these observations only scratch the surface of the problems facing Wisconsin, the country, and the world and serve to fuel the media’s incessant focus on the horse race. This insistence on focusing on the superficial always serves, by design, to impede the discourse on substantive issues.

The following represent some of the points directly and indirectly connected to the Wisconsin election which I failed to hear in the media discourse on the subject:

In Wisconsin:

  • Scott Walker did NOT originally campaign on taking away collective bargaining rights. Thus, when he and his cronies claimed that he just carried out his campaign promises, they lied.
  • The right to collective bargaining has nothing to do with and does not preclude balancing a budget.

In America:

  • The fact that private sector and non-union employees do not have living wages, full benefits and access to health care is a travesty, but their friends and neighbors in unions in the public sector are not to blame. ALL workers should have such benefits, which all humans should be entitled to. By demonizing fellow workers who have these basic human rights, we only allow the elite to sit back with their excess riches while the rest fight for scraps. The haves promulgate the falsehood of entitlement abuse through exploiting the fear and selfishness of the have-nots. It is a divide and conquer strategy through which the elite pit the working class against one another in a race to the bottom. In reality, the hoarding by the super-rich few is to blame for the lack of basic resources for the many.
  • An entitlement is a right, not a “handout.”
  • The decline in wages and benefits across all sectors has mirrored the decline in unions in America; when unions are strong, ALL WORKERS benefit.
  • Blind support of Democratic candidates by unions over the past several decades has resulted in no gains or benefits for workers. On the contrary, in the country as a whole as in Wisconsin, Democratic candidates have erroneously blamed public employees for financial woes and have demanded concessions from public workers while remaining unwavering in their support for corporations and the wealthy.
  • The budget crises facing our governments on all levels are due to the enormous expenditures on subsidizing already wealthy and large corporations, the lowering of taxes on the rich, the virtual raping of the citizenry and our federal government by Wall Street millionaires and billionaires, and the unrelenting military spending on illegal and immoral wars and on redundant and unnecessary weapons.
  • Corporate subsidies only enrich corporations and their upper management, not their rank and file employees and not citizens. Increased tax breaks and monies to corporations do not trickle down to workers. Corporations do not create more jobs through such measures as lower taxes and increased subsidies; they simply create more wealth for themselves.
  • While Democrat and Republican politicians stress their minor differences through their socially more liberal or conservative beliefs, these amount to little in terms of concrete societal change, as both parties adhere to the identical dominant economic, plutocratic, oligarchic paradigm which is destroying the nation and the world. It is not by chance that all of the presidents of the past twenty-four years have been Ivy League graduates, as the next president will also be. The vast majority of these people are not admitted to elite institutions based simply on their merit; they are admitted due to their family wealth, power, and/or prestige. And for those like Bill Clinton who do not come from such pedigrees, the only way they are able to sustain their status after having been accepted into the power elite is by implicitly promising to maintain and propagate the dominant paradigm and the status quo.
     
  • For those who decry the lack of a clear, cohesive, and compelling message by Democrats to counter Republicans, there lies a simple answer: Democrats do not have their own message because their message is the same as that of Republicans.

In the world:

  • The ritual of voting is illusory; the pretense that it represents democracy is a complete fabrication. When people do not have choice in their candidates, as when the elite of the moneyed political parties choose their “electable” politicians, voting is simply an exercise in futility.
  • The poor have always been and continue to be marginalized by all major political parties. Vast majorities of people around the world – including the poor themselves –  have bought into the false propaganda revering wealth and equating it with quality of character, while demonizing poverty and equating it with depravity. As psychological studies have shown, the exact opposite is true. The growing number of poor in the shadow of the more highly concentrated rich is a local and global concern addressed by virtually no one in politics.
  • Wealth inequality is an immoral blight in our society. The obscene concentration of wealth in America and around the globe is emblematic of the lack of democracy, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as, “the principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.” We absolutely do not live in a democracy, not in the U.S. nor in the world community.
  • Until ecology is prioritized ahead of economy, all other points are moot. Our already occurring global ecological decline will soon eclipse any of our current economic crises. We cannot live without ecological resources and we will poison ourselves to death in our quest to further create synthetic resources that do not fit within our natural ecological systems and our biosphere. NO ONE will dare address this reality in political circles.

While Scott Walker’s administration represents one of the most morally bankrupt, scientifically inept, and socially despicable governorship seen in recent decades, real change was not to be found among any of the Democratic candidates who opposed him, just as it is not found among the Democratic governors of other states in this nation.

By utilizing electoral politics as our source of change, our choice becomes thus:

We can be shoved off the cliff by the Republicans while being told that free-fall is freedom, or we can be coaxed along the path toward the cliff, while being distracted by trivialities and assured that the cliff does not exist (and when the cliff is in sight, being told that those who led us there really tried their best not to do so) by the Democrats.

Change can be very difficult, which is why people tend to cling to their jobs, their towns, their bad marriages even as they move toward dysfunction. We humans, particularly we industrialized, “civilized,” American humans, are creatures of habit, and we fear an alteration of our rituals. So we try our best to remain in our comfort zones, even as they become increasingly more and more uncomfortable – sometimes even untenable. That is why last year’s uprising in Wisconsin, like the entire Occupy movement across the country, was so remarkable. People changed their routines, relinquished their security, and finally stood up after enduring decade after decade of servitude, abuse, and disrespect. They said to their corporate overlords – at the state capitol of Wisconsin, on Wall Street, and in Washington – that they were not willing to complacently stand by and take it anymore.

 But apparently people are not mad enough to realize that the real change they may be seeking will never come through the voting process. It will never come through returning to “normalcy.” It will never come through adhering to and worshiping the inverted power structures that have been erected to maintain our complacency and servitude. These structures created the economy, the educational system, the workplace, the industrial infrastructure, the electoral process, and the law. Only when enough people – including all of us who intellectually, ideologically, and physically remain complicit – understand that our entire system is the problem will we have enough people power to work toward the genuine solution: changing our society.

 True change is extraordinarily difficult. It generates tremendous amounts of uncertainty, distress, and fear of the unknown. But it has the potential also to produce the most profound joy, creativity, and opportunity. And at this point, it may be our only chance at survival.

 So, what next?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Contributing editor Kristine Mattis is a teacher, writer, scholar, and activist. She is currently a PhD student in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison. Before returning to graduate school, Kristine worked as a medical researcher, as a reporter for the congressional record in the U.S. House of Representatives, and as a schoolteacher. She and her partner blog when they can at www.rebelpleb.blogspot.com

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OpEds: Adrienne Pine on nonviolence in the imperial context

Resisting the Cult of Non-Violence

ORIGINALLY AT QUOTHA.NET / Suggested by J. Timperio


Eds.

Check out this letter from comrades in Cairo. What a relief to see Egyptians speaking out in English against the ICNC spin, as one after another “leader” of the Egyptian revolution is trotted out to represent Nonviolent Egyptian Youth in “solidarity” with Occupy Wall Street protesters, with their neutered Gandhis and MLKs (no anti-imperialism/anti-capitalism here) and “turn-the-other-cheek” blather. Regardless of who is actually behind this letter (it is signed “Comrades from Cairo”), it speaks some very important truths about what happened in Egypt. Here’s a quote:

We faced such direct and indirect violence, and continue to face it. Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

Counteracting the cult of non-violence is important on a number of levels. First, the international non-violence racket is intimately tied to so-called “non-violent communication,” which is Harmony Ideology at its most dangerous. Just to be clear, some of the techniques of NVC can be useful, for example, in trying to work out intimate relationship issues. Sometimes. But even then, they are potentially a silencing technique. Where entrenched power differentials exist, sticks and stones will still break your bones. And there’s no honor in that. Really, there isn’t. Try telling Mubarak, “when your police sodomized me, it made me feel sad.” Or telling Obama, “when you take all those corporate donations, it makes me feel disenfranchized.” Or telling Pepe Lobo, “What I hear you saying is that you care about human rights, and that makes me feel confused.”

Confrontation is productive. And political violence is productive. Sometimes it produces misery, and sometimes it produces liberation (which is always reversible—you can’t institutionalize freedom through representative democracy, obligatory speech patterns, or anything else). What violence produces depends on the kind of violence, who’s enacting it, how, and why. And silencing people, which non-violent communication does, is violent. Try it- try going to a meeting in, let’s say, Santa Cruz, and passionately arguing your point to a room full of non-violent communicators. It’s like not knowing Robert’s Rules in a union hall. If you can’t speak their language, you don’t get to speak. There’s something very Orwellian about the whole enterprise.

The same non-violence non-profits who take CIA money when they can get it (I’m not talking about ICNC, which just shares an accountant, has parallel goals, and whose president used to work there; ICNC has enough junk bond money to operate on its own) also give non-violent communication trainings and are inserting themselves wherever they can in the OWS movement. In DC, this is particularly worrisome, since the think-tank/lobbying/pro-USG logic is so hegemonic. And I’ve received four email invitations this week to attend think tank and right-wing academic seminars on What the Occupy Wall Street Movement Means and Why it Should Matter to Me. Framing is everything. Who gets to speak, what they get to say, whether their whole movement can be invalidated because somebody got justifiably angry and threw a rock. We don’t need to be tackling the rock-thrower. People throwing rocks doesn’t explain or justify the police violence I saw and felt in Oakland last Tuesday. We need to be tackling the derivative Christian logic of non-violence (but lacking the possibilities of liberation theology) that chastises the oppressed for rising up against the oppressor, using fictitious narratives about Egypt’s and Eastern European countries’ “revolutions” as legitimation. And when people come to town claiming to speak for a revolution and making their way into lefty media with the same bland lies, we need to be asking who is paying for their plane ticket, and why the hell are they not back at home, where their “revolution” is not in great shape at all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adrienne Pine’s research begins in Honduras, and employs a vertical slice approach to analyze the mechanisms supporting empire and the daily usurpations of democracy there and in the United States. She examines the non-profit industrial complex, the militarized and corporatized academy, diverse actors and institutions in the U.S. and Honduran governments, and the Honduran resistance movement in order to better understand how structures of violence prevent democratic processes from taking hold. Pine has been described as “a one-woman wrecking crew against the golpistas in Honduras and their handlers, paymasters, apologists and lackeys in DC” and sees militant anthropology as a key factor in overthrowing the corporatocracy. She is based in Washington, DC, where she learns from and teaches anthropology to the fabulous students at American University.

 

 

 

 

 

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OpEds: Recovering from Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS)

 

Witnessing the acts and utterances of Republican presidential candidates can be regarded as a helpful psychological exercise, a type of “exposure therapy” involving the development of methods used to bear the presence of unbearable people who insist on evincing the history of human ignorance, duplicity and insanity.

“I can’t go on; I go on.”–Samuel Beckett

All alive are tasked with the challenge of, not only proceeding through life despite these kinds of insults to common sense and common decency, but to make a stand, in one’s own unique way, against prevailing forms of madness and oppression.

As a case in point, within the mainstream narratives of the corporate media and that of both major political parties, one bears constant witness to palaver involving the nebulous tyrannies of “big government”; although, incongruously, one scarcely receives from those sources focused complaints and critiques (much less probing investigative reports or congressional hearings) directed at the excesses of the national security/police state and Military/Big Media/Prison Industrial Complex. The “big government” narrative is a misdirection campaign–a smoke screen serving to obscure corporate/military dominance of political life and its effects on the social criteria of everyday life in the nation. Accordingly, government is only as big as the 1% who own and operate it will allow it to be.

Therefore, due to the fact that elitist interests all but control the U.S. political class, in order to change government policies, a radical rethinking and revamping of the economic order of the nation must occur. Although, at this late date in the life of empire, change will have to come from the streets, from uprisings–by occupations–by a restructuring of the entire system, from its cracked foundation, to rotting support beams, to corroding particle board, to lousy paint job.

Yet, this will be an organic process…unpredictable, fraught with peril, freighted with the expansiveness of the novel, tinged with apprehensions borne of grief. But upheaval is inevitable because the present system is deep into the process of entropic runaway. And because uncertainty will be our constant companion, one is advised to make it an ally.  

The neoliberal capitalist order is on a path towards extinction. And it will, most likely, die ugly. But it has lived ugly as well. The system never worked as advertised…was more sales pitch than substance in its promise to increase innovation and deliver prosperity worldwide. Conversely, the set-up leveled enslavement to powerful interests by means of a 21st century version of company town despotism e.g., workhouses, sweat shops, unhealthy mining towns and industrial wastelands where the laboring classes are shackled by debt-slavery to company store-type coercion. 

This global company town criteria has inflicted sub-living wages, no benefit, no future jobs, yet the corporate state’s 24/7, commercial propaganda apparatus has the consumer multitudes of the U.S. convinced that they are “living the dream”. As a result, great numbers still believe their oligarchic oppressors actually believe their own lies about freedom, liberty and equal opportunity for all.

That’s right: Scheming princes simply love the peasants of their kingdom…They do, as long as those wretches continue to bow down in the presence of the powerful, do all they are commanded to do, and unthinkingly serve the interests of their vain, arrogant rulers. Absurdly, large numbers in the U.S. still claim the burdensome economic yoke they bear is a glittering accessory of freedom gifted to them by their privileged betters. 

Often, one hears the assertion: Although the U.S. is an empire, it is, in fact, a benign sort of empire…as far as empires go.

To the contrary, the nation’s post-Second World War, empire-building enterprise, as is the case throughout history with exercises in imperium, has leveled deathscapes abroad, corrupted the society’s elite and delivered anomie and alienation to the general population. From the soulless, dehumanizing nothingscapes of the U.S. interstate highway system and its resultant suburban project, to the douchescapes of hyper-commercialized pop culture, empire’s legacy is as pervasive as it is dismal.

And all delivered and maintained by trading in the bartered blood of the innocent abroad by mechanisms of imperial plunder while serving to create a gallery of heartless, authoritarian-minded, consumerism-addicted grotesques at home. One suspects this is the reason discussions involving the true nature of empire are not considered a subject fit for nice company.

Often, by attempting to adapt to the burdensome daily obligations and the spirit crushing, hierarchical structure of neoliberal capitalism, individuals will begin to internalize its pathologies. In the age of corporate state dominated media, to ensure the circular, self-reinforcing nature of the noxious narratives of empire remain in place, faux populist, conservative media talk show hosts, talking heads and rightist pundits–elitist bully boys and gals–i.e., the bigot whispers of the right–continually seed the dismal air with false narratives, contrived to misdirect anger and foment displaced resentments. 

In turn, little bullies, out in the U.S. spleenland, rendered resentful and mean of spirit by the incessant humiliation leveled by a class-stratified, exploitive economic system take up these self-defeating talking points that serve the 1%.  Accordingly, when, for example, participants in the OWS movement question the present social and economic structure, these downscale denizens of oligarchic rule personalize the critique; their identification with the system is so complete that they feel as though they have been attacked on a personal basis. 

As a consequence, all too often, their defenses are raised and they return volleys of ad hominem attacks that serve to defend a status quo that demeans them. This psychological phenomenon could be termed Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS)–a pathology suffered by personalities who have been traumatized by authority, but who endeavor to remedy the wounding and humiliation inflicted by a brutal, degrading order by identification with their oppressors.

To wit, the lack of outrage exhibited by the general public regarding the nations trudge toward a police/national security state. For example, the lack of deference displayed by city officials and local police forces regarding the First Amendment rights of OWS participants. 

First off, lets clear the pepper spray-fogged air on the matter: The vast majority of rank and file police officers do not now and, most likely, never will view themselves as part of the 99%. Simply stated, police officers identify with their fellow cops. The vocation, by its institutionalized, militaristic, tribal nature, creates a wall of separation between its insider members and outsiders i.e., the civilian population at large.    

 It is an act of self-deception to insist that rank and file police officers, the so-called blue shirts, might even be tacit supporters of the 99% movement.

Good luck with that. But don’t be surprised if your entreaties are answered in the form of concentrated mists of pepper spray. In fact, as of late, that is exactly the reply we have received from the police, many times over.

Most police officers do not much identify with civilians. They harbor fealty to their careers and are indoctrinated to evince unquestioning loyalty to the department. Or as Bob Dylan presents the case in verse:

“Because the cops don’t need you and man they expect the same”–from Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

On a cultural basis, after years of hyper-authoritarian indoctrination by mass media sources and political influences, few, among the general public and in the political realm seem willing to demand openness and accountability from law enforcement organizations.  All too often, police (and U.S. soldiers as well) are viewed by a large percent of the general public as selfless heroes, noble souls, protecting life and liberty. And no matter how much evidence accumulates to the contrary, this image holds. 

How is it that so many can cling to the illusion that cops and soldiers–grownups, armed with deadly weaponry, and who have shown themselves willing to engage in acts of state sanctioned violence and oppression–are innocent victims of circumstance? Have we, in this nation, lost the concept of free will?

How did the perspective of a people become so upside down that heavily armed, body armor-enswathed men and women wearing uniforms of state power are viewed as blameless innocents while those they perpetrate brutality against are somehow regarded as the aggressors in the situation…deserving of the violence inflicted upon them? 

Let’s have a reckoning with reality regarding the nature of the forces coalescing against OWS and other global movements aligned against despotism: Authoritarian personality types detest the sight of freedom; its inherent uncertainties make them damn nervous. By reflex, they have a compulsion to lower a jackboot on its neck.

Or, in the words of one officer tasked with the duty of stifling the public’s right to free assembly at a recent OWS protest staged at the Winter Garden atrium of Brookfield Properties, within the World Financial Center located in lower Manhattan, “Don’t get in my face. I have a gun on me, okay? I don’t want any people coming that close to me.”

In acts of social and civic resistance, regardless of whether one evinces a Gandhi-like position of nonviolence or adopts a Malcolm X influenced stance of “by any means necessary”, the enforcers of a corrupt authoritarian order regard any and all displays of dissent as an invitation to force dissenters face down on the pavement, zip-cuffed and bleeding, then be remanded into custody–or worse. 

At this critical point, it is imperative we let die our illusions involving the present order. Yet we must do so without becoming so disillusioned that we lack the resolve to remake the world. Often, we cling to fictions involving the benign nature of power because the act spares us angst. To the contrary, we must bear witness to the collisions of our illusions and the realities of the day, because it is from the debris created by these collisions that the world will be built anew.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

 

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OWS at the crossroads—the first amendment on the ropes, but all’s well in lalaland

PATRICE GREANVILLE

Kelsey De Santis and Justin Timberlake at the Marine Corps Ball.  Disgraceful that the make-believe syndrome in America has reached such grotesque proportions. Is this what our Marines are fighting for? 

BEEN ABSENT A WHILE, swamped with those inevitable “other” things we must attend to while keeping the dialog going.  I missed the exchanges here. Anyhow, let’s get to business. 

Don’t you all feel great this morning to live in this great and free republic-er, democracy-the very best in the world, and to see, also, that the American Dream is alive and well?

Yes, folks, fairy tales still happen in America. Where else could a lower middle class kid in a Marine uniform get a date with a Galactic-class celeb like Justin Timberlake, just by “asking”…? Only in America, folks.  That’s why the media are giving this important story saturation coverage.  Those willing to die to protect “our freedoms” can literally have anything in America—anything. Which is bunk, of course. Both subject and predicate. In a companion article on this site, my colleague Phil Rockstroh puts his finger on this scandalous pretense with his usual perspicacity: 

Freedom rises despite cops and soldiers not because of them. And that is exactly why those who despise freedom propagate military hagiography and fetishize those wearing uniforms–so they can give the idea of liberty lip service as all the while they order it crushed. (See The Police State Makes Its Move: Retaining one’s humanity in the face of tyranny)

So while an innocent Marine has her dearest wish fulfilled, to the expected chorus of oohs and aahs by the prestitutes, our democracy keeps setting new standards of insubstantiality, with the vital First Amendment essentially voided by the creeping practice of “permissioning”—the custom of giving the authorities the “right” to grant permits to protest or congregate for political reasons, which is plainly absurd. Why should people need to ask permission to protest from those they’re precisely protesting against? 

Now any Mayor, not to mention someone higher up in the plutocratic structure, a governor like a Scott Walker, or a Kasich, or an Andy Cuomo (a bastard and a phony positioning himself as the tip of the spear of a new Kennedyesque dynasty—or so they hope) can posture as a constitutional scholar and determine whether the First Amendment is operational or not. At this writing, no courts have refereed the issue  (and we know how they may tilt at the very top, even if lower courts find the practice unconstitutional). 

In any case, imperious bastards like NYC’s Bloomberg have been seeking excuses to shut down OWS ever since it started, and began to show its subversive promise. The usual character assassination script was promptly rolled out—

  • OWS was a “nuisance” (complaining neighbors were trotted out on cue by the obedient media, when in reality they are few and distant from the spot);
  • unsanitary conditions (a bald-faced lie) were a public health risk to one and all;
  • the occupiers prevented a MacDonalds (?) and similar establishments from carrying on its God-given right to do business (private property trumps citizens rights again);
  • criminals were seeking harbor in the sprawling “disorder”;
  • plus other picayune “reasons” that could be marshaled to justify forcible eviction—the burgos believing that by erasing a physical symbol the movement and the grievances would be decapitated. 

Maybe the burgos decided to clamp down because things are getting out of control in burgoland: the Eurozone is unravelling, the unwashed are waking up to their plight, and there’s been a mutually reinforcing dynamic between protest groups in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere.

The two main options available to gloved tyrannies in the more developed world have always been low to moderate repression, and cooptation. They’re deploying both. Plus selective media omissions and distortions. But the protests will come and go for a while because the real progenitor is the burgo system itself, capitalism and its antisocial, anti-nature dynamic, which is now in its final and most pernicious phase, and spanning the globe, hence provoking global responses. Although uneven development has been the rule of economic history for centuries if not millennia, now the differences seem to have collapsed—as far as the masses are concerned—because the level of exploitation, criminality, illegitimacy and toxicity has reached simply unconscionable levels. A cancerous mafia has been running the world, and now the mask is finally melting away, with the heat self-applied. 

What next for the burgos? The Winter may give them a respite, at least in the US, and a few reforms may also dampen the ardor of those who remain in the fold of Democratic party reformism (on this topic, see Shamus Cooke’s excellent,  THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT NEEDS A GOOD FIGHT).   And they will be tempted to devise ways of shutting down the Internet’s “seditious” capabilities. That’s why a resolute defense of the Internet and social media, in general, is critical to the success of this phase of the evolving movement.  

In the Spring and Summer, new uprisings will likely take place, and if the movement has cogitated its tactical and strategic options well, sorted out the lessons of the first phase, a new level of more organized militancy may enter the stage. Concrete demands that can galvanize the workers are critical to the strengthening of the movement; otherwise labor will remain in the Democrats’ orbit. And, sooner rather than later, some sort of more disciplined formation must congeal. As I mentioned in a prior, what we need now is a national assembly to discuss a unity program, such delegates’ convention being the prelim to a people’s new charter of rights and governance. 

The historic moment is there to be grabbed, but the window of opportunity is narrow, and, like a barrage, moving away from us.

Patrice Greanville is TGP’s founding editor. 

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