Ché (What You Call Your) Pasa

It's On. Get Ready. Global General Strike. May 1, 2012

2012-01-30T10:50:00.001-08:00

What's emerging from that Occupy chrysalis is looking more and more astonishing every day.

Let the mass freakout begin.

Momentary Change of Pace: Geezers Rule

2012-01-30T09:36:00.001-08:00

Buffalo Springfield live at the Fox Theater in Oakland, CA, 6/2/11

Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Richie Furay, Joe Vitale, Rick Rosas

Go Old Farts!

(Warning, video is an hour and a half long, it's the entire show.)

Chris Hedges Fights The Good Fight

2012-01-30T05:16:00.000-08:00

(h/t Cuchulain in comments)
Chris Hedges, outspoken polemicist and prolific author that he is, doesn't just talk the talk on matters important to the future of the American Experiment in liberty, he walks the walk.

He's been arrested numerous times protesting the creeping tyrannies and indignities that have accompanied "the death of the liberal class" -- a term he used to title one of his recent non-fiction books. He's been arrested at the White House, he's been arrested at Goldman Sachs headquarters, he's been arrested at Quantico, and so it goes.

He has made clear that he believes civil disobedience is the only practical course left open to Americans struggling to restore dignity and justice in their lives and the lives of others; the political system is broken, captive to a tiny segment of the "1%", and it cannot function on behalf of the People in its present state.

"Stand up, fight back; resist."

Earlier this month, he took it a step further by filing suit against the President and the Secretary of Defense "to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31."

It's not necessarily clear what that means, so he helpfully explains:

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

Well. Isn't that special.

Now of course these objections to the NDAA were raised time and again prior to their passage and the assent to them by the President. These objections were dismissed on several levels. First, according to some analysts, there is no such authorization for domestic military policing; it's just not in the bill. Second, even if there were, it wouldn't apply to American citizens, only to foreigners deemed "terrorists." Third, even if it did apply to American citizens, which it doesn't, there is always habeus corpus so ultimately nothing has changed at law.

You see.

Besides the which, the President issued a signing statement setting forth the following:

Moreover, I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation. My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law.

So there.

But Hedges is not satisfied with airy promises from the White House press office, oh no:

I suspect the real purpose of this bill is to thwart internal, domestic movements that threaten the corporate state. The definition of a terrorist is already so amorphous under the Patriot Act that there are probably a few million Americans who qualify to be investigated if not locked up. Consider the arcane criteria that can make you a suspect in our new military-corporate state. The Department of Justice considers you worth investigating if you are missing a few fingers, if you have weatherproof ammunition, if you own guns or if you have hoarded more than seven days of food in your house. Adding a few of the obstructionist tactics of the Occupy movement to this list would be a seamless process. On the whim of the military, a suspected “terrorist” who also happens to be a U.S. citizen can suffer extraordinary rendition—being kidnapped and then left to rot in one of our black sites “until the end of hostilities.” Since this is an endless war that will be a very long stay.

When he wrote, the Occupy Movement was still in a kind of suspended animation, but over the weekend, as we know, it came out of its shell in Oakland -- with dozens of cities marching in solidarity after the Oakland demonstrators were violently assaulted by police and hundreds of peaceful protesters were arrested.

As we may not know, however, more and more officials are suggesting or are blatantly declaring the Occupiers and the Movement "terrorists." It's only a matter of time, it seems, before the designation is officially determined and the round ups begin.

We could see it as soon as this summer when the G8 and NATO hold their joint summits in Chicago. Or even before.

The City of London declared the Occupy Movement a "domestic terror organization" back in December to much outrage and denunciation, but the designation stands. In the United States, there has yet to be a designation of "domestic terrorists" as such, but members of the Oakland city council and other elected representatives have had no qualms using the term "domestic terrorists" to characterize Occupiers and the Movement, and a press release issued by the Oakland Police Department yesterday claimed -- in passing -- that the protesters used "improvised explosive devices" (pdf)against the police, which of course is a not-so-subtle means of classifying the Occupy demonstrators in the same category as armed insurgents abroad.

Just as a side note, the Oakland Police Department, as usual, was lying. One of the things that needs to be made clear as crystal is that the Oakland PD is notorious for issuing public statements that are blatant lies, and nothing whatever that they say should be taken as truthful without extensive evidence and investigatory follow up.

There were no "improvised explosive devices" used against the police in Oakland over the weekend. None. Zero. The police, of course, fired numerous tear gas rounds, flash-bang and smoke grenades, and rubber bullets at the crowds -- some of which were thrown back, as they tend to be in these confrontations. The police also fired tear gas against the wind which had the salutary effect of blowing back in the unprotected faces of the officers. Oops.

But that aside, Hedges, by filing suit against the President and Defense Secretary over the NDAA provisions for domestic military policing has taken the matter well beyond polemics. In a sense, he is directly challenging the authority of the White House and the Pentagon in these matters, and further, he is daring the President and/or the Secretary of Defense to order his arrest and indefinite detention in military custody because he may well fall under the provisions of the act regarding "support" of individuals and organizations deemed to be "terrorists" by the President due to his work as a writer of books, articles and essays that deal with such people and organizations previously designated or yet to be designated.

A lawsuit is not exactly The Revolution, of course, especially when Hedges would be among the first to acknowledge the corruption and practical uselessness of the courts to protect the People. Nevertheless, by taking this action, Hedges demonstrates once again what it means to be a citizen rather than a subject and I applaud him.

This Is What The Revolution Looks Like

2012-01-29T08:21:00.000-08:00

This is a portion of last night's events in Oakland, CA. Let it be understood that the uprising has never stopped in Oakland. It has been ongoing, sometimes quite dramatically, since October, and it shows no sign whatever of relenting.

The Oakland Police have been under Federal reform orders for years, not that they give a shit when it comes to that, and their recent violent crackdowns on Occupy Oakland have caused the federal judge involved to further order the OPD to clean up their act forthwith.

You will note, they were not quite as violent last night as they were on October 25, but they are still intentionally cruel and vicious.

This video -- and others that have been posted -- can only show a portion of the action of course, and much of it is boring and apparently inconsequential. That's the way these things go in real life. Dramatic action is occasional and brief. In the meantime, and in the background, all sorts of revolutionary activism is taking place, 24/7, throughout the city, and spreading from Oakland, all over the Bay Area and Northern California.

The Oakland uprising and Occupation is still the energy center for the movement as a whole, though the philosophical center may still be in New York. The People of Oakland take risks every single day. They confront Authority, defy Authority, and they figure out how to make a Better Future happen in the face of an Authority gone mad.

The People of Oakland will win in the end, though exactly what they will have won is still open to speculation and debate. The more suppressive Authority becomes, the more certain its failure. We're seeing how that works being played out on the streets of Oakland. As it is playing out, the energy released is spreading and spreading and spreading.

The idea that "Occupy is Dead" is ludicrous. But in a certain sense, it may be useful. I've hesitated to post much about what's going on in local Occupations around the country, in part because of the internal transformations going on, much like a metamorphosis. You can't have a successful metamorphosis if you keep opening the chrysalis for inspection. But we're getting close to the completion of the transformation.

We ain't seen nothin' yet.

Earlier in the day:

[These BTW are Spencer Mills' (OakFoSho) videos from yesterday.]

-----------------------

Rebel Communiqué from the Front Lines in the People's Commune of Oakland:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 29, 2011 – Oakland, CA – Yesterday, the Oakland Police deployed hundreds of officers in riot gear so as to prevent Occupy Oakland from putting a vacant building to better use. This is a building which has sat vacant for 6 years, and the city has no current plans for it. The Occupy Oakland GA passed a proposal calling for the space to be turned into a social center, convergence center and headquarters of the Occupy Oakland movement.

The police actions tonight cost the city of Oakland hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they repeatedly violated their own crowd control guidelines and protester’s civil rights.

With all the problems in our city, should preventing activists from putting a vacant building to better use be their highest priority? Was it worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent?

The OPD is facing receivership based on actions by police in the past, and they have apparently learned nothing since October. On October 25, Occupiers rushed to the aid of Scott Olsen who was shot in the head by police, and the good Samaritans who rushed to his aid had a grenade thrown at them by police. At 3:30pm this afternoon, OO medics yet again ran to the aid of injured protesters lying on the ground. Other occupiers ran forward and used shields to protect the medic and injured man. The police then repeatedly fired less lethal rounds at these people trying to protect and help an injured man.

Around the same time, officers #419, #327, and others were swinging batons at protesters in a violation of OPD crowd control policy, which allows for pushing or jabbing with batons, but not the swinging of them.

In the evening, police illegally kettled and arrested hundreds of protesters. Police can give notices to disperse, if a group is engaged in illegal activity. However, if the group disperses and reassembles somewhere else, they are required to give another notice to disperse. Tonight, they kettled a march in progress, and arrested hundreds for refusing to disperse. Contrary to their own policy, the OPD gave no option of leaving or instruction on how to depart. These arrests are completely illegal, and this will probably result in another class action lawsuit against the OPD, who have already cost Oakland $58 million in lawsuits over the past 10 years.

OPD Crowd Control Policy: “If after a crowd disperses pursuant to a declaration of unlawful assembly and subsequently participants assemble at a different geographic location where the participants are engaged in non-violent and lawful First Amendment activity, such an assembly cannot be dispersed unless it has been determined that it is an unlawful assembly and the required official declaration has been adequately given.”

“The announcements shall also specify adequate egress or escape routes. Whenever possible, a minimum of two escape/egress routes shall be identified and announced.”

“When the only violation present is unlawful assembly, the crowd should be given an opportunity to disperse rather than face arrest.”

At least 4 journalists were arrested in this kettling. They include Susie Cagle, Kristen Hanes, Vivian Ho who were arrested and then released, and Gavin Aronsen who was taken to jail.

One woman was in terrible pain from the cuffs. Dozens of fellow arrestees shouted at the OPD to check her cuffs. But, contrary to their own policy, the OPD refused and simply threw her in a paddy wagon.

OPD Crowd Control Policy: “Officers should be cognizant that flex-cuffs may tighten when arrestees’ hands swell or move … When arrestees complain of pain from overly tight flex cuffs, members shall examine the cuffs to ensure proper fit”

Numerous protesters were injured: some shot with “less lethal” rounds, some affected by tear gas, and some beaten by police batons. There are no totals yet for the numbers of protesters injured. One 19 year old woman was taken to the hospital with internal bleeding after she was beaten by Officer #119.

Cathy Jones, an attorney with the NLG gave the following statement to Occupy Oakland’s media team: “Through everything that has happened since September, from Occupy to the acceleration of “Bills” — NDAA, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA — never have I felt so helpless and enraged as I do tonight. These kids are heroes, and the rest of the country needs to open its collective eyes and grab what remains of its civil rights, because they are evaporating, quickly. Do you want to know what a police state looks like? Well, you sure as hell still do not know unless you were watching our citizen journalists.”

Today, Occupy Oakland events continue all day with a festival in Oscar Grant (Frank Ogawa) Plaza:

http://occupyoakland.org/2012/01/occupy-oakland-rise-up-festival-has-been-moved-to-oscar-grant-plaza-tomorrow/

Occupy Oakland is an emerging social movement without leaders or spokespersons. It is in solidarity with occupations currently occurring around the world in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Oakland Media is a committee of Occupy Oakland, established by the Occupy Oakland General Assembly.

CONTACT:

Occupy Oakland Media Committee
(510) 473-6250
media@occupyoakland.org

Heh.

History for Beginners -- Yakkity Yak

2012-01-28T11:28:00.000-08:00

a debate on #occupyws from Jacobin on Vimeo.

This panel discussion video is from last October; not sure of the exact date, but it was posted on October 18 and mention is made of the fact that Occupy Wall Street wasn't yet even 30 days old.

The discussion took place in a volunteer run bookstore in New York City -- not sure where exactly or what bookstore it was. The panelists included Natasha Lennard -- who was arrested in the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge -- Malcom Harris, Doug Henwood, Jodi Dean and Seth Ackerman of Jacobin magazine.

This was very early in the Occupy Movement, and yet many of the issues brought up in this little gabfest have just as much currency now as they did then. It's clear that there was only the sketch of an outline of how to proceed. The worries about dissipation of the energy of the early movement far outweighed fretting over co-optation that became such a focus of some of the activists as well as many political writers on the internet.

Those who objected to the format were dismissed, but the issue continues to be raised: how much does the Movement really want to differ from the mainstream anyway? Panel discussions are the emblem of the "going nowhere" regime the Left has adopted as its own; they also represent the mainstream -- and especially the academic -- organizational model of a very few adepts and experts telling the multitude what they think and therefore what the multitude should believe.

That isn't how the Occupy model works. One man brings it up very articulately.

Also, note the imbalances in both the panel and the audience. (In the Occupy model there would not be this separation into those who sit apart and talk to those who sit and listen) It's a fully male-dominant panel, a youth-dominant panel, a white-dominant panel, and it is a highly educated and broadly "left" panel. That is what much of the activist community looked like in those days. Even in New York. Or maybe especially there.

Note is made by the audience about how white -- though not how male and young -- it is, but again such note is dismissed.

Most of the topics raised in this discussion are still going on, but the matter of what kind of action to undertake -- in addition to philosophizing no end -- seems to have been widely resolved. Action is focused on what will bring attention to the worsening plight of the People, and what can be done and is necessary to ameliorate it.

The video is long, almost 2 hours, but it's the kind of thing that provides a fascinating glimpse into some of what was going on back in the very early days of the Occupy Movement -- from both the inside and the outside simultaneously, and how it struggled to define itself.

As one of the speakers in the audience says, "The Russian Revolution built on more than 50 years of revolutionary development of thought and action."

Indeed, it was closer to 100 years.

Revolutions may seem to happen in an instant, but the prep-time is often generations long.

Where observers may be off kilter is in assuming that the Occupy Revolt commenced sui generis on September 17, 2011. Not quite... Even among this panel, note is made of origins well before that, especially at UC Berkeley in 2009 (much beating of students back then, too). But that insight is challenged by the comment that the tactic of occupying various sites has been utilized for decades.

So it goes.

Envisioning That Better Future -- Eight: The End of Empire

2012-01-27T04:18:00.000-08:00

The Imperial route is widely seen as the natural outcome of all serious civilized human endeavor. The Empire, under this viewpoint, is not just natural, it is necessary. You cannot have civilization without it. Why just look at Europe after Rome fell. Obvious, isn't it? No civilization there again until Leonardo and Michelangelo. A thousand years of Darkness and Despair.

Except there was no pan-European empire in Leonardo's day or Michelangelo's time. In their Italy, there was no unified government; there was instead a plethora of more or less independent city-states many of which endured until the middle of the 19th Century.

Rome began as a quasi-independent city-state, as did Athens long before it. In fact, both are said to have originated as collections of neighboring hamlets that formed themselves into a political unit with no ambitions, supposedly, beyond common defense against marauders and pirates.

Both went through democratic periods, periods of tyranny, periods of prosperity, periods of suffering and collapse, and both eventually expanded their reach and rule far beyond their civic boundaries. Both were cruel masters to Natives under sway of their colonial outposts. Both faced frequent rebellion on the Peripheries of their empires; often enough, they faced rebellion right at home.

Observers at the time celebrated their Empires while some denounced and decried them. To Imperialist believers, Empire is necessary for there to even be civilization; to skeptics, Empire saps and destroys civilization because of its overwhelming human and financial costs.

The Imperial overreach of Athens was subsumed by the overreach of the Macedonians subsequent to the subjugation of Athens to Sparta. The center did not hold. But then, what of Sparta? Athens endures; Sparta is gone with the wind, as if it never was, though its legend lives on. The Macedonian empire of Alexander fragmented even before it was fully formed, and the semi-nations that took its place were themselves absorbed and acquired by Rome in the by and bye.

Nothing is forever. And no ruler is ever certain of his throne.

The American experience is of course derived in part from ideas that originated in Athens and Rome, and the impulse to Empire has been part and parcel of the American Dream since the beginning. While the foundation of the nation may have been in rebellion against the British Imperial authority, the Imperial impulse itself was maintained upon independence and it was strengthened with the establishment of the Constitution. Put another way, Empire is built in to the formulation of the State itself.

One cannot imagine a non-expansionist United States in the 19th Century. Expansion on the model of Empire was a necessity for survival. When domestic expansion ceased with the "closure of the frontier" in 1890, it was immediately picked up and renewed through overseas expansion and Imperial conquest, starting with Hawaii.

Throughout the early 20th Century, the United States not only ruled its domestic continental Empire, it had far-flung Imperial outposts in the Pacific and Caribbean that it had seized from the decadent Spanish Empire, and it ruled most of Latin America through economic sway, Native proxies, and sometimes directly through military invasion and martial law.

World War I and World War II had the consequence of breaking up the western empires, but in the process, those global conflicts gave rise to three remarkable and in some ways unprecedented domestic empires: the Soviet Union, the Republic of India and the People's Republic of China.

The European imperial outposts were jettisoned one by one and in batches, as Asia and Africa were "decolonized" and independence and self-determination was proclaimed and enshrined everywhere. Well. Sort of.

After a protracted and devastating civil war, at least partially engineered by outside forces including American, the Soviet Union fell heir to nearly the entirety of the former Russian Empire. Well, how about that. The current rump Russian Federation is a mere flickering shadow of what the Tsars and the Commissars had once ruled.

Independent India likewise emerged from a civil war that ensured the separation of Pakistan from India, and cobbled together the numerous semi-autonomous petty kingdoms of British India into a single Republic, a domestic Empire that even the mighty Brits had been unable to forge (or more likely had not wanted to see emerge.)

At the conclusion of China's long and bloody civil war, the Maoists took control of the entire domestic continental empire of China's glorious past; they also established a rigid and successful independence from alien and outside rule by anyone, including their ever-so-helpful Soviet pals.

Possibly to compensate for the loss of so much overseas territory, Western Europeans concentrated on the establishment of some sort of European continental union or domestic Empire, which is still an elusive goal. Perhaps it's not even a desirable one any more given the current financial pickle the Europeans find themselves in.

As part of that financial pickle that effects not just Europe but practically everywhere, we are witness to the rise of transnational corporate enterprises acting independently of governments, whether local, regional, national or international. Some of these enterprises are far wealthier than many nations, and they can operate with apparent impunity wherever and however they want. They capture governments -- as they have captured our own -- and operate them for their own parasitical interests in defiance of law and the People.

This parasitical and piratical practice by corporate entities roaming the globe is not entirely new, for much the same ethic of parasitism and quasi-independent extractive behavior by corporate entities was how many of the modern European empires were established in the first place. The corporations went in first and seized what they wanted; rule from the palace and throne came after.

The People are seemingly powerless before the onslaught of Empire, whether brought through military or economic conquest or through genocide and extermination.

But Empire, under any guise, should not be seen as either the promoter or savior of "civilization." For it does nothing of the kind. Civilization may or may not survive under Imperial rule, but it will definitely be altered by it, often not for the better.

In envisioning a better future, many are envisioning a future without Empire. It's natural but not easy to do it.

First thing is the recognition of Empire and its strengths and weaknesses, its durability as well as its fragility. There is a widespread myth running around on the internet and in academic circles that proposes that we are witness to the End of the American Empire which is alleged to be crumbling all around us, as it has been doing for many years. I argue this is not at all the case. The American Empire is doing fine; what we are witnessing and in the midst of is the End of the Republic, actually a much more subtle "ending" -- because the political forms and rituals of the Republic will continue indefinitely, but they will have no meaning. At best, they will be entertainment -- much as the current crop of Republican candidates for the presidential nomination are being marketed as entertainment today. At worst, they'll be empty and cynical rituals masking what's really going on, such as takes place in Congress each and every day.

The Empire, on the other hand, is going great guns (quite literally). Its imposition has been refined to such a point that it's almost automatic now. Imperial sway -- in concert with or under the control of -- transnational privateers is now a matter of remote targeting and liquidation according to parameters and protocols that most Americans (let alone their victims) know nothing of, who are in many cases not even aware they exist. Empire no longer requires invading armies and physical occupations of foreign lands.

The Libyan Thing might be instructive. There was no "invasion," for example, though many observers and commentators speak of what happened there as if there had been a physical, military invasion by Imperial Stormtroops, etc. It didn't happen, and it isn't happening now. There is no occupying force, either. There was Imperial intervention and the aerial bombardment of "forces" (let's understand that both the rebels and the Gaddafi forces -- as well as non-combatant civilians -- were subject to arbitrary Death From Above; that's just how these things are done these days) was only the most overt aspect of it. There was a whole menu of more covert Imperial interventions involved, from the relentless anti-Gaddafi propaganda campaign to international murder squads, financial and economic hits, and domestic terrorism and sabotage.

There's much Imperial chest puffing and strutting about over the success of the Libyan campaign, but it took far longer than it was supposed to, and obviously it was beset with lousy intelligence from the get go, as apparently the Imperial sponsors of the aktion had -- and perhaps still have -- no idea who among the fractious Natives they are "supporting." From the evidence, they are actually supporting none of them. Now that the nation of Libya has been successfully liquidated -- that, after all, was the point of the exercise -- the various corporate interests who sponsored the Imperial intervention are picking over the bones, with, you will note, the complicity of some of the Libyans, but by no means all of them. The Libyans may or may not continue their civil war, but the point of this exercise was to strip them of a national consciousness and of assets, and that has been accomplished rather spectacularly. And it was done without a single uniformed Imperial troop on the ground. (Set aside the murder squads for now.) Well, how about that.

The lesson for the Imperialists was that this sort of thing WORKS. And they will do it again.

A nation destroyed, a People in chaos, assets stripped, defenses neutralized, leaders exterminated. No invasion and no colonial outposts necessary. That is how the Empire will be carried forth. By comparison, the Iraq Thing seems primitive and barbaric -- and in retrospect completely unnecessary.

We are witness to the development of a New Imperialism that doesn't require the kinds of physical force that even a few years ago were considered essential for projection of power. Now, most of what's necessary can be done remotely or from overhead, by a relatively few dedicated and determined individuals with a mission and access to technology.

Once we realize that that is what the Empire means now -- and that it is doing just fine, better than ever -- and that it is the Republic that is being collapsed deliberately and with much malice aforethought, we'll begin to have a better idea how to proceed.

The OccupyTVNY interview with Lawrence Lessig and Chris Hedges I posted the other day can help us to focus on how truly out of touch some of even our most insightful elites tend to be. Lessig is, as I say, a nice man, but he still believes that some of the Republic's attributes are functional, even as he acknowledges the Republic has essentially been extinguished. So he advocates an Article V Constitutional Convention in response, as if it were even conceivable at this point. An Article V Convention five -- or ten -- years ago might have had some merit (I was an advocate for a while) but not now. It's too late for that. Not only is the Federal Government captive to its owners and sponsors, so are state governments (did one not pay attention to the 2010 "elections" at all?) and more and more, so are local governments. The People have been essentially and successfully shut out of their government at every level. Where there might have been support in State Legislatures for an Article V Convention (once it was explained by the right people) years ago, now there would only be a blank stare. It's too late, Larry.

Hedges understands this stark fact, and he seems to understand that none of the mechanisms of the Republic actually work on behalf of the People any more, nor can they be made to. That part of our history is over and done. A captured government does not respond to the People because it does not have to.

So what does he recommend? "Civil disobedience" -- in order to do what? Apparently to get the attention of the Rulership, and force them to accommodate the People's Interests. He witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Empire, after all, and the Revolutions that precipitated it. Surely if babushkas and the rebels assembling in the square and banging on their pots and pans could do it in the face of the implacable Soviet system, we more innovative and creative sorts can do likewise.

Yes, well, I thought that too. Years ago, I think we might have done it, but it didn't happen. There was no assembly, there were no babushkas, there was no banging on pots and pans, and there were no rebels where and when it might have made a difference.

Now it's really too late for even that to make a dent in the Imperial armor.

What to do now?

Hedges helpfully points out that in addition to civil disobedience, resisters also have to create and maintain parallel institutions and social structures that serve the People's interests in stark contrast to the failed and captured institutions of the Establishment that serve only the interests of the Mighty Few.

This parallelism is fundamental. Institutional parallelism is a characteristic of all successful separatist and revolutionary movements (and I might add it has also been characteristic of communities suffering under segregationist policies, more and more of which seem to be reinstituted day by day as more and more are ejected from the mainstream of society, and the Security State further and further encages and restricts the remainder.)

The Occupy Movement has established and maintained parallel institutions from its beginning, from communal feeding stations to People's Libraries to outreach and social service programs and more. These aspects are integral to the Movment and the Revolution at its core. As far as I know, all active Occupations utilize as much institutional parallelism as they are able. I have referred many times to the importance and necessity of the demonstration as the keystone of the success of the Movement. By providing alternatives to the failed systems of rule we are under, the Movement ensures its perpetuation.

But what of the Empire? Do we ever get free of it? Perhaps so, perhaps not. The End of Empire means the end of Imperial control in our mind's eye and of our actions and beliefs first and foremost. End that control, and whether or not a political empire continues doesn't matter. The more pressing issue of economic imperialism, which hamstrings everything else that people hope or do, though not so much what they believe, is a much tougher nut to crack (ask the Africans who saw their one hope in Libya demolished before their very eyes).

But even the ropes and strangulation of economic terrorism and imperialism can be undone, through non-cooperation among other means. Ultimately, it appears that the greed and stupidity of those who rule through economic terrorism and imperialism bring the superstructure down sooner or later, these days sooner if events in Europe are any guide.

And then?

Well, that's why we need those parallel institutions!

Yea, verily, the End Is Nigh, but it may not be quite what we anticipated.

And in case it wasn't clear, Mars is not the answer... ;-D

Barsoom

2012-01-26T04:12:00.000-08:00

Hubble Space Telescope image of the Acidalium hemisphere of Mars, 1995

I mentioned in a comment on the Megaupload post that I opened one of my old websites the other day, one I first created some time in 1997 or 98, I'm not sure, haven't updated since 2001, and which I hadn't even looked at for years.

It was a site about Mars, the Red Planet, the Mimic Planet as I came to call it, "Barsoom" as known by its inhabitants in Edgar Rice Burroughs's novels, which was being heavily featured in space science communities at the time because of the unprecedented images of the surface being returned from the Mars Orbital Camera.

These were stunning pictures that show things that in many cases are still unexplained. Which doesn't mean they are necessarily the work of Aliens, but only that the surface of Mars is telling us things we have yet to understand, and part of our failure to understand is due to the paradigms we use when observing. If we aren't thinking openly, we can't see clearly.

In the case of Mars, the problems of observation are long-standing, going back at least to Schiaparelli, but compounded by Lowell, and made even worse over time by the planetary science community which has its own set of biases and peculiarities, and is subject to a kind of authoritarian belief system that disallows innovative perspectives.

Telescopic observation of Mars is still quite interesting -- I find it fascinating myself, even with the relatively primitive telescopes I've used. But the orbital cameras and the landers of the space program have provided a startlingly different view of the surface than can be had from any telescope on Earth, and an honest assessment of that view shows that Lowell may have interpreted in error (as do we all about many things) but his vision -- if you will -- strikingly parallels what's actually there on the surface, but at a completely different scale than he saw it.

I've been to the Lowell Observatory and seen some of his primary materials and have come to understand somewhat better how he could believe what he did about what he was seeing through the telescope. Yes, he saw a surface that showed distinct linear patterns, dotted with circular spots here and there, and he saw darkenings and lightenings and other things that he interpreted erroneously. Yet closer to the surface, much closer, the orbital cameras showed that many of the things he thought he saw at a telescopic distance (but which are not visible -- at least to most people -- at that scale) are actually there -- or things that look like what he saw are there, though at a much smaller scale. So is much else besides, things that he never dreamed of.

Interpretations of the surface of Mars have been complicated since Lowell's time by the debate over the presence or absence of liquid water. Lowell claimed that he saw linear features on the surface that he interpreted as canals and that most likely water flowed in those canals to enable irrigation of parts of the surface. Other astronomers vehemently disagreed. They asserted there was no water so there was no point in canals, and the whole thing was just stupid, nyah, nyah. Unfortunately, this is the way some scientists are, and because Lowell was an outsider, a Boston Brahmin, and a writer, not a scientist at all, he was treated with a certain level of contempt by a portion of the planetary science community of his day, and his work was constantly being denounced -- as well as popularly accepted, in part because he was a good writer.

It had been obvious since the days of the Mariner 9 in 1971 that the surface of Mars had been heavily shaped by flowing water; dry riverbeds seemed to be everywhere. Yet there was no visible water at the surface now, and many of the features that were assumed to have been carved by water didn't quite "look right." There was something going on that didn't quite scan, but nobody quite knew what it was.

It was long assumed that the polar caps were mostly carbon dioxide -- and very thin at that -- but that was found not to be true. The caps were found to be quite thick and finely layered, and they were mostly water ice, with an annual carbon dioxide deposit that came and went with temperature. The permanent caps are nearly entirely water ice. The behavior of the CO2 caps was and is remarkable. The surface near the poles, especially in the south, can become very active with geysers blowing dark sand and CO2 gas into the atmosphere in startling displays, one of which I believed -- and believe -- was captured in action by the orbital camera but was misinterpreted at the time and still is, though the activity I say it depicts is now widely accepted within the planetary science community as real and frequent. They will not accept that the image actually shows the geysering taking place, however, due to the technical details of the capture of the image.

This is the image that I cropped from a larger one and colorized and showed as possible evidence of geysering near the south pole. This was well before it was widely accepted that such geysering does indeed take place.

From this crop, it looks pretty obvious (at least to me) what is going on, but many of those who have seen the image strenuously deny it shows what it seems to show, claiming that the apparent appearance of geysers in action is merely an optical illusion (they are so common on Mars; remember the canals!). In fact, say the skeptics, according to the image data, the picture was taken from almost directly overhead, not at a glancing angle close to 30° which would have been necessary for the appearance of actual geysers geysering. Thus, what we actually see here is the surface appearance seen from directly overhead, after two separate incidents of outgassing (or some other process) which occurred at different times under different wind regimes. There are many other images which show similar patterns of dark deposits at almost right angles to one another.

Of course, I being stubborn continue to insist that I am right and the skeptics are wrong; for the emission angle of the image doesn't necessarily reflect how the image is processed, since many images taken at relatively low angles were processed to look as if they had been taken from directly overhead. The data that appears on the image record doesn't necessarily reflect what happened from the time the image was captured until it was released. Etc. Etc.

This is a futile argument, however, and these days, since the geysering phenomenon is now widely accepted -- but not widely known of outside the planetary science community -- what this picture actually shows is essentially moot. Yes, it is an image that looks to show what is widely accepted as taking place on the surface, though skeptics say it doesn't actually show it. Got that?

Many other issues like that were being batted around back in the day: was there evidence of glaciers on the surface today? Was water being released at the surface? Could water even exist at the surface? And so on.

There were so many opposing camps, and the arguments were more on a political plane than a scientific or even straightforward observational one.

The political positions about Mars came to dominate all other considerations, and this seemed to me to go back to the Lowellian era of telescopic observation and popular culture. There was a time, for example, when Gil Levin (project scientist on the Viking Mission who asserts that evidence of life on Mars was found by the Vikings) questioned the color manipulation being done by the image processors at JPL, manipulations that eventually produced some of the oddest sky and surface colors imaginable for Mars, and almost always obscured the actual sky and surface colors. Levin began to speak out about it from early on in the Viking mission and he became more strident as time went on because he felt that the manipulation was a deliberate (if pious) fraud intentionally done to disguise actual findings -- such as what he believed was evidence of biology on the surface of Mars.

The official defenses of the color manipulations -- some of which were patently absurd -- revealed the political basis of many of the pronouncements about Mars; science -- or even simple and accurate observations -- had to take a back seat to Mars science politics. And that has always been about who is doing the asserting and interpreting and what their position is in the pecking order.

To this day, Gil Levin's arguments in favor of a biological interpretation of the Viking findings are largely suppressed and unknown outside a circle of enthusiasts. He broke with the consensus of his peers, and doing that is perhaps the surest way to perdition known to mankind, especially in the sciences.

All that aside, it eventually dawned on me that probably everyone was wrong about Mars, and that what we were seeing and sensing remotely with our spacecraft was probably not at all what we thought it was. Interpretations relied on "water" -- and I came to realize that that was probably the key error.

Water there is in abundance on Mars in the form of ice and vapor, but the fluid that has flowed and ponded at the surface of Mars has probably never been "water" as we would understand it, that is pure or somewhat salty. No, it's more likely that much of the evidence of flowing water on the surface of Mars is actually evidence of flowing aqueous solutions of sulfuric acid, and that changes everything.

First of all, sulfuric acid can remain liquid under Martian conditions far longer than pure or salty water can. The mythology has long been that "liquid water can't exist" on the surface of Mars, which is something of a falsehood, because liquid water can and does exist on the surface to this day and landers have from time to time produced images of it, most startlingly the drops of water that clung to the legs of the Phoenix Polar Lander after it landed on a patch of ice.

Of course, there are those who dispute any such thing ever happened, pshaw. So it goes.

My own view now is that though there can be liquid water at the surface of Mars, and it can persist for some time in a liquid state without freezing or evaporating/subliming "instantly" as the Mars Myths insist must occur, it doesn't matter that much because liquid water is and has always been rather rare at the surface of Mars. An aqueous solution of sulfuric acid has been far more common and is probably the volatile that has carved most of the evidence of "flowing water" on the surface.

Almost all of this flow, of course, has come from the interior. It is probably still in a liquid state fairly near the surface, primarily in and near the vast Northern Lowlands. These lowlands may have once been an open ocean but not of liquid water. As a sulfuric acid ocean, it would appear similar to an ocean of water, but it would behave very differently.

For one thing, it would neither freeze nor sublime under typical Martian conditions. It would instead remain liquid, though it might become more viscous at low temperatures and pressures, neither a slush nor a gel, but somewhat similar to them, thick and slow-moving. A cold sulfuric acid lake or ocean would be very placid compared to an ocean or lake of water.

There are many craters that show evidence of repeated flooding from below. There are remnant deposits in some of these craters (they are often referred to as "White Rock" deposits) that show hundreds of layers, all of which are approximately the same thickness (a few meters or less). These formations were long mysterious and enigmatic.

Then the Opportunity craft landed in a crater in Meridiani Planum that showed "white rock" around its rim.

Studies were undertaken.

The "White Rock" -- in Meridiani at least -- turned out not to be "rock" at all. It was a sulfate deposit. A layered sulfate deposit. Within which and all around which there were little blue balls of an iron precipitate called hematite. Oh. My. Goodness. What the hell?

This spectacular finding was cited by a very excited project scientist Steve Squyres as proof positive that the landing site and all around it had been "soaked in liquid water." Meridiani had to have been formed in a liquid which Squyres initially insisted was water; there was no other way.

Well, except... Actually formation of what we see would imply that the liquid was actually a fairly saturated solution of sulfuric acid, not water as we would commonly understand it at all. In order to get those kinds of precipitates, especially in those quantities, the solution would have to have been close to super-saturated, but even a mild saturation would imply that the "water" was no longer water at all, but was instead the equivalent of battery acid, and adding even distilled water would still leave you with an aqueous solution of sulfuric acid.

That understanding changes everything. If much or most of the "water" that has ever been at the surface of Mars was actually a strong sulfuric acid solution, what does that say about the possibility of biology on Mars? Is it even conceivable? I'm not saying it isn't, by the way. What I'm suggesting is that the question needs be explored more fully. If sulfuric acid is and has been the predominant volatile liquid on the Martian surface then the implications for biology and evolution are quite different than if the volatile has been water.

Ultimately, Squyres himself came around to the view that "water" as such was unlikely as the volatile agent at the surface of Mars, that it was probably sulfuric acid at considerable concentration. But I've seen very little followup to the implications and consequences of a sulfuric acid as opposed to a water regime on Mars.

I stepped back from the Mars questions when it seemed that the discoveries being made were confounding expectations too much for a clear understanding to materialize. Mars is a planet of deception and illusion and what we may think we see there is... really something else.

A new lander called "Curiosity" is expected to land in Gale Crater in August. Given the nature of the site, I don't doubt there will be surprises.

The Face on Mars is still there after all, still staring into space, still wondering...

Momentary Change of Pace: Constructivists

2012-01-25T15:31:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to post this, and actually write quite a bit more about the topic, but I haven't had the motivation.

Still, the Constructivist Movement was very influential in my own development as somewhat of an artist for the stage and privately. Yet I have no memory of ever being exposed to it at all. It's the strangest thing. There's a thread of Soviet Constructivism that runs through practically everything I've painted or designed or built, and yet... I have no idea how it came to me. It must have been in high school, or even before, probably was well before high school.

And yet...

Strange.

Nice video, tho:

Chris Hedges Explains It All for Lawrence Lessig

2012-01-25T15:19:00.000-08:00

Occupy the Courts -- and other things.

The hostess takes her own sweet time getting in gear for this episode of OccupyTVNY, but once the guests pick up the scattered threads, the whole turns out pretty well...

Lessig is a very nice man, but he can't seem to understand the fact that there is a Revolution going on, something that Hedges has known since seemingly forever.

Not only is a Revolution going on, it is a necessary thing.

Lessig is advocating an Article V Constitutional Convention, something that was bruited about in some of the chat rooms of the Bushevik Era but which has largely been superseded, in part because it was recognized that state legislatures are equally as captured as the national legislature, thus check-mating the idea some time ago. Nice that Lessig is picking up on the idea. I guess.

Meanwhile, Hedges is saying -- as he's been saying for years -- that civil disobedience is the only path (barring armed rebellion) remaining to the people in the face of our obdurate failed public and private institutions. He sees Occupy as perhaps the last great hope for the People -- or perhaps whatever emerges from the chrysalis of Occupy in Metamorphosis.

Or maybe it's too late.

But even if it is, you still have to stand on some kind of moral principle as you're cut down by the Tsar's Cossacks.

It's interesting that they both seem to recognize that we are very close to a February Revolution moment.

Though I don't think we'll really get there till June!

Normalizing Obscenity

2012-01-25T08:21:00.000-08:00

I've been intrigued with the coverage of Romney's tax return releases, sparse as that coverage has been, even in the so-called "left" media and new media.

Nearly all the coverage in the major mass media has been an effort to normalize Mr. Romney's situation, using terms like "unsurprising," "typical for wealthy people like the Romneys," "sophisticated but perfectly legal," and so on.

Note is made of Romney's remarkably low tax rate -- which of course is said to be a consequence of policies set by Congress, so there's nothing wrong with it. Of course not.

The idea that someone can make more than $20 million a year for literally -- quite literally -- doing nothing to earn it is not even mentioned as a bit "unusual," as if anyone could be doing this if only they... worked hard enough, or deserved it, or something of the sort, as if it were perfectly normal and should be celebrated as "an American success story."

The fact that the Romneys literally do nothing at all to "earn" most of this money, they are merely passive investors in mostly blind trusts, is not even considered worth remarking on.

How Mitt initially got the money to embark on this do-nothing wealth machine -- from the disruption and destruction of other people's lives and futures ("that's capitalism, my friend!") -- is only mentioned by rivals. The fact that Bain Capital is and has always been a predatory outfit, looting and destroying the work of others for its own profits is not a topic for discussion amid polite company at all.

It's all perfectly normal, what anyone of his wealth and financial sophistication (not to mention political ambition) would be expected to do.

And he tithes to his church, so he's obviously moral.

Stunning.

("And did you hear? Those nasty Democrats and that arrogant Negro in the White House are engaging in Class War again.")

On War's Utility

2012-01-24T08:12:00.001-08:00

It's long been an article of faith among America's Rightists and Reactionaries that FDR's New Deal policies didn't get us out of the Great Depression, it was World War II that did it. The corollary is that War is necessary to maintain Americans in the prosperity to which we were once accustomed.

While the Rightist/Reactionary catechism on these matters has an element of truth, it is far too simplistic to serve as a policy formulation; nevertheless it does.

War -- or its semblance and especially the preparation for it -- is seen by our policy-makers as a necessity for prosperity. This was a profound lesson learned from the experience of the Great Depression, World War II, and its subsequent continuation by other means throughout the Cold War.

The New Deal was not for nothing, despite the R/R mythology about it; whether it prolonged the Depression or not is utterly beside the point. But the New Deal did not end the Depression. It could not do so; it was too small, too narrowly focused, and too beset by opposition from the get-go.

What the New Deal did was ameliorate the dire economic conditions of enough people for long enough to prevent a coup or a revolution. It was initially a stop-gap that stabilized the political situation enough to "save capitalism" and it provided the outline of an economic stabilization program through Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and public works.

Make no mistake. These were very modest efforts, and they did not "end the Depression." They made it bearable for a sufficient number of people to keep the lid on discontent, and they provided "hope" for the rest that otherwise would have been absent.

The preparations for World War II and then the War itself are what transformed the situation, transcended political animosities, and got us out of the Depression in very spectacular fashion.

It's a lesson our policy-makers have neither learned nor forgotten. Permanent War became the centerpiece of American prosperity and policy following WWII, but it appears that the lesson of what happened and why it worked -- and why the New Deal didn't -- during and after WWII has never quite been understood by those same policy-makers who can't quite figure out why the various wars and dominance principles and practices of recent times not only didn't prevent economic catastrophe, they've arguably made it worse.

How could that have happened? And why hasn't any economic or war policy adopted in recent times made things better for more than a tiny handful of the super-rich?

If you go back to the New Deal, you should be able to see why the current policies are such stunning failures: The New Deal provided extremely modest levels of government funded temporary relief for some out of work individuals and households, instituted temporary programs of public works that employed some of those who were out of work and paid them very modest wages for their efforts, and it instituted long term programs like Social Security and Unemployment Insurance that were paid for through taxes on workers and their employers.

Wages and prices were stabilized -- to keep them from falling even further -- and unions were, for the first time, empowered and protected by government to bargain on behalf of workers for better wages, benefits, and working conditions; this was paid for in a sense by continuing high unemployment, however, which had the effect at the time of cancelling out any overall benefit to workers.

Banks were barred from engaging in the kinds of speculation, gambling, and chicanery that had been the precipitating cause of the financial collapse. Depositors' funds were guaranteed up to a certain relatively modest ceiling by the government.

These policies and programs stabilized the country economically and politically, and by instituting New Deal stabilization programs, FDR "saved capitalism" from itself. These programs and policies didn't necessarily prolong the Depression, but they did not reverse it, either. They were far too modest to do that. Even at the time, it was widely recognized that though the New Deal helped overcome the worst of the Depression, it was far too modest, underfunded, and in some cases, wrong-headed.

Something much more massive was necessary.

In Europe, the Fascists and the Nazis led the way with "something much more massive." In Asia, Japan was leading the way. Initially, that was not their later wars of aggression.

And then there was the Soviet Union, which stood apart from all the nonsense economic "solutions" in the West and East and went its own way.

The key which the Soviets, Fascists, Nazis, and Japanese Imperialists discovered was that full employment and economic security were the fundamental necessities for economic revival. Together with full employment, economic progress required enforced savings, by suppressing consumerism to an essentially subsistence level or by other means including confiscation of financial surpluses. These savings were then invested in research and development and expansion of manufacturing capability, infrastructure, and other general necessities.

Unfortunately, that included preparations for -- and then precipitation of -- wars of aggression, starting with the Japanese in Manchuria and China. The Japanese expansion into China was simple enough to understand: they wanted access to and control of markets, resources, and eventually slaves to maintain their expansionist economy.

It worked very well initially; why not continue, then, indefinitely?

In Europe, expansionist economic policies were combined with ethnic determinist policies to enable Germany to absorb Austria and Czechoslovakia, Italy to expand its interests and colonies in Africa, and so on.

The Soviet Union was isolated, but was doing astonishing things with very little financial wherewithal to create an entirely new social/political and economic system out of what was at hand.

The United States and most of the rest of the English-speaking world was way behind in comparison, limping along at best. All that changed, though, when the United States began serious preparations for war in 1938; unemployment began dropping, and by 1941, it was for the first time since 1930 under 10%. Of course, beginning in 1942, practically everyone who could work was employed either in the war effort or in civilian support capacities.

While many more people were collecting (still relatively modest) paychecks during the War, there was very little beyond bare necessities to buy, so workers bought War Bonds and Stamps, effectively saving a relatively large portion of their earnings. These savings were then invested in research and development, war materiel, and so on. Nukes! Yay! Jet planes! Yay! Television! Yay! Radar! Yay! On and on.

At the end of the War, many people had a surprising amount of money in savings, and there was so much pent up demand -- for many Americans, fifteen years of denial -- that the economy went on a growth binge that just went on and on and on. It wasn't at all like prior boom and bust economies; the post war American economy was very stable, growing incrementally, predictably, and this growth was paralleled by unprecedented social progress.

While the accumulated savings of Americans was the chief impetus to the economic growth after WWII, the United States remained on a war footing after V-J Day, having transferred the designation of "enemy" from the Axis powers to the Communists. "Minor Wars" -- in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and so on -- were constant. The draft continued. The military-industrial complex prospered -- and it was considered at the time both a danger and a benefit that it did so. The danger was that it could consume us all, but the benefit was that its secure prosperity was a stabilizing influence on the whole economy.

Post WWII, the policy was to maintain as close to full employment as possible because it was understood to be the most stabilizing social and political force, and full employment was key to economic growth. "Small wars" were engaged in continuously in order to counter the "Soviet threat" -- and to keep the forces limber and employed.

War's utility was largely a matter of domestic political stabilization and economic growth -- and international competition with Our Rivals in Russia.

The mobilization against the Vietnam War really did shock the older generation; they could not understand why my generation was so opposed to it, when to the older generation, the War ethic and economy are what saved them. It was not only how the nation had survived, WWII was for most Americans who lived through it, the most profoundly and deeply emotionally fulfilling thing they'd ever known.

Korea and the "small wars" of the 1950's were a continuation of that fulfillment, and when they got bigger in Indochina in the 1960's War was still seen as a blessing.

Opposition was deeply disturbing to that mindset.

With the end of the Vietnam War, the American War Economy shuddered and eventually collapsed.

The efforts to revive it after 9/11 have failed in part because the War Economy now only involves a very small segment of the population; there isn't even a hint at attempting to achieve full employment -- in fact, the ongoing economic policy is to maintain high unemployment levels indefinitely -- and for all intents and purposes, tens of millions of Americans have simply been made irrelevant and redundant. The War Economy now is meant only for the profit of the few, the government's owners and sponsors.

War still has a utility but not for the masses, who are more and more being left to fend for themselves, as even the inadequate New Deal programs and policies are successively dismantled.

You would think Our Betters would know better. But they don't.

Haditha

2012-01-23T18:48:00.000-08:00

Good lord. Not that the plea deal is a surprise, mind you. The surprise, if there is one, is that it took so long. What's not a surprise is that there is no justice.

We are not supposed to blame soldiers for this kind of shit -- and I have no doubt that this kind of shit was far more common than any American back home is ever likely to know -- because they are just doing their jobs, yadda yadda. That's the problem, though. Their "jobs" include protocols for massacres like Haditha, as well as much else that is practically unmentionable in polite society, not because it is WAR so much as it is utterly conscienceless and morally bankrupt barbarity and depravity that has been drilled into these soldiers to the point where they act as if in a trance, killing and destroying anything and everything that gets in their way or sets them off, triggering a Pavlovian response that they often seem to have no control over at all.

This shit was going on in Iraq so often...

Any resistance was met with extreme violence and brutality, any resistance at all... armed resistance and IEDs were met with slaughter essentially at random. Which led to more resistance, more slaughter, more and more...

And slaughter was met with celebration. The more the slaughter of the innocents the more the celebration.

So here we are, many years down the road, and literally no one at all is held responsible for the many killings of Iraqi civilians. They weren't even counted among the dead for quite a long time; the dead Iraqi civilians didn't even exist as statistics in official reports or the eyes of the troops who so callously killed them.

They were less than non-people.

Let's be clear: the entire Iraq War was a criminal enterprise, all of it, from the get go, from the moment the propaganda drums commenced to beat; and it was based on another criminal enterprise, the First Gulf War, which was based on its own crimes and on the crimes and the lies that preceded it.

Throughout all these crimes and lies dating back decades, hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered, probably millions slaughtered overall, of which two dozen were slaughtered in Haditha, Iraq, in November of 2005.

And, as was so often the case, the truth of what happened as told by the Iraqis was met with a blizzard of lies and propaganda from the military.

But eventually, as happened now and then, the lies fell before the truth, crimes were suspected and charged, and courts-martial were convened, only to lead to dismissals and plea bargains that basically exonerated the troops and their officers and their commanders all the way up the chain to the White House itself.

No one was to blame, too bad so sad, war is hell, oh well!

Got rid of that nasty Saddam for ya, though, didn't we? You're welcome.

Jesus.

Battle for Haditha, 2007

--------------------------------------------------------
These are some testimonies from Haditha and elsewhere in Iraq both before and after the Massacre on November 15, 2005:

Iraqi Doctors Beaten and Arrested in Haditha Hospital

Sabah Ali (30/10/2005)

Dr. Walid Al-Obeidi, the director of Haditha General Hospital and Dr. Jamil Abdul Jabbar, the only surgeon in the Haditha area were arrested for a week, very badly beaten and threatened to face the same treatment in the future by the American troops.

Dr. Walid said “they arrested me in my house in front of my family, covered my eyes, and tied my hands to the back on Oct 5 2005 morning, during the last attack on Haditha (360 kilometers west of Baghdad). They occupied the hospital for 8 days and made it their office. The first day they beat me on my eyes, nose, back, hands, legs... My face was covered with blood .When they removed the tie I could not see. They investigated me until the afternoon. I realized later that I was arrested in the hospital store. Then they tied my hands to the front, and left me for two days. I was moved then to the pharmacy department. They accused me of treating terrorists, and asked for their names.

I told them that I treat patients regardless of their identity, according to my oath as a doctor; even if they were national guards (which we actually I did) or American soldiers. And any way, if I do not want to treat the insurgents, I have no choice, because they were armed and masked. I would do anything they tell to do. Few days later, one of the soldiers came in the room, did not say anything, kicked me again on my face and left”.

Dr. Jamil, a surgeon for 20 years, was arrested and very badly beaten. When we met him, 22 days later, his face was still blue. His nose was broken, and a big opening in his head: “They beat me on my eyes and nose, kicked me with boots under my chin. One of them threatened me if I do not talk after he counts to three, he would shoot me. He began counting, after three he turned the gun upside down and hit me on the back of my head. For days I could not move or see. They threatened us of abusing our families. For some reason they took my picture while I was bleeding, I could hear the camera click”.

Both doctors were threatened if they do not talk, they would receive the same treatment in the future. They were warned of passing any information of the arrest to the media. They were asked who wrote the hostile slogans against the American on the opposite wall of the hospital? What are the names of the insurgents they treated? and what are the bodies’ pictures in the hospital computer?

Dr.Walid said he does not know who wrote on the wall outside the hospital, what the names of the insurgents are, because they were masked. He explained that the dead bodies’ pictures were of unknown people whose bodies were found after the fighting. “We can not keep these bodies forever; we do not have enough cold boxes. So, after two months, we take their pictures and bury them, so that whenever some one from their families comes to ask we show the pictures of the dead bodies”.
The UN, the international HR organizations, WHO, Doctors sans frontiers…and all who it may concern are called upon to do some thing to help these, and other Iraqi doctors, and to prevent similar treatment in the future. Dr.Walid and Dr. Jamil believe that they may face the arrest and beating in the future. They demand that the American troops stop occupying the hospital and destroying it every time the attack Haditha. They also believe that the Iraqi authorities are incapable of protecting them.

----------------------------------------------------------

Alqaim October Massacre: Indiscriminate Killing Zone
Dedicated to the UN, UNSC, and the International Society….

Sabah Ali (05/11/2005)

We had to postpone our trip to Al-Qaim and Haditha several times for 2 weeks. Many times the road was closed because of some military operations. We decided to go to the refugee camps first, be ready to move from there as soon as the road is clear. There were 8100 refugee families now (last time, before Oct 1, they were 7450) distributed on the nearest towns, villages and in the desert. Some of the camps were cut from any kind of relief, especially those which were across the Euphrates, because the American troops bombed all the bridges in Alqaim (3) and Haditha (2). The need now is for thick clothes, especially for children, blankets, and medicines for daily use, apart from food. The new families were those who escaped the latest attack on Alqaim (Oct1) and Haditha (Oct 5) The River’s Gate, as it was called. One of the biggest emergency relief organizations in Iraq now admitted that they can not reach the behind-the-river villages.

Arriving in Alqaim general hospital on Oct 25 afternoon, after being lost on a desert detour for more than 2 hours, and coming from the nearest refugee camp where we listened to different stories of the last attack on Oct 1,2005, we were well prepared to listen to the crowed at the emergency room. A big black banner says that the ambulance driver, Mahmood Chiad, was shot on Oct 1,2005 by the American troops while he was trying to help some injured families.

A young man, H.Khalaf, was lying on a trolley, soaked in blood. He was shot in his genitals by an American sniper while he was going home from the market just across the street. The shot injured his right thigh, his testes, and went out through his left thigh.

“There was nothing, no shooting, no bombing, nothing” a neighbor who brought Khalaf to the hospital said. “We heard the shot, and he was lying there bleeding. We could not reach him. He crawled to the side street for few minutes”. The doctor does not know yet how bad the injury is. The bleeding was still running.

In the ward another young man, Salah Hamid, was shot under the belt too. He was driving his taxi at 10 am on Monday Oct17, 2005 in the market place when he was shot by the American snipers. Salah was so angry that he cried and used obscene words (unacceptable in those areas). His car was completely ruined. The doctor explained that a large part of his intestine had to be cut.

In the doctors’ hall, the windows, the curtains, the walls were covered with bullet shots.

The hospital’s assistant director described how bad and difficult the situation is, the continuous bombing of houses and cars, the snipers who shoot indiscriminately any moving thing (two days ago they killed 6 donkeys), the besieged city, the closed highway “I do not understand why they cut the high way and let families go through the desert, they are searching everything and everybody! Now, on top of everything else, the oxegen tubes are not allowed in the hospital”.

(Municipal hotel destroyed)

The administrative assistant explained the situation in the bombed areas across the river (Euphrates) after the bridges were bombed in the attack “There are many villages: Rumana, Al-Beidha, Al-Ish, Dgheima, Baghooz, Al-rabot….etc where families sought shelter from the bombing. These villages are cut of any kind of help now, and are exposed to regular bombing. There is no doctor or clinic in an area of 110 kilometers along the river. The injured families have to be brought by boats, bleed to death, or die under the rubbles. It is impossible to count the dead, their families bury them on the spot, without any document, and of course no media coverage. Civilians, relatives and neighbors help evacuating those buried under the rubbles. Snipers are still hurting us most. On the Referendum day Oct 15, no one would dare to go out; I would not, even if I was given the post of a president”.

The ambulance driver, Mahmood Chiad, 35, was going to Karabla, to help some injured family during the attack. He was shot and killed by a bullet in the left chest. The ambulance was then hit by a grenade which ripped it in two parts, and burnt it. It was still there, but we could not film in the no man’s land, as they call it. Mahmood left a widow and six children; the oldest of them, Aimen (m), is 10 years old. “The family was not given any compensation or pension” said his colleague Muneer Said “he was very poor, living in a tin extension of a house, his family should be taken care of”.

Early next morning, around 7 am, there was noise and crowd in the hospital. Two cars covered with dust, and few men were standing at the emergency gate. One old man, over 60, was sobbing and talking to the sky, repeating hysterically “please come and see what happened to me”, other men were crying silently.

In the emergency ward, a girl of ten was lying on one trolley, and a young woman on another. They were still conscious. The girl, Yosr Jasim Mohammad Al-Ta’i, 10, (going to 5^th grade, as she said proudly), was injured in her feet, back, and right ear, which were covered with blood. She did not know that she is the only survivor of a family of 8. Her father, her mother Ibtisam Thiyab Othman, and five of her brothers and sister were buried dead under the rubbles when the American airplanes bombed Al-Ish village at 2 am that day, Oct 26.2005.

The woman, Sa’diya, 35, was injured in her thigh. She was rapped in a burnt out quilt. Sa’diya was in her uncles’ house. Her house was blown up by the American troops the day before “they took the women and children out, and blow the house, I do not know if they arrested the men or they blow them inside the house. We came to my uncles’ house yesterday, today at 2 am we were bombed again”. Sa’diya was terribly shocked. “I do not know how many people were killed. We were more than 30 in the house. My three uncles, their wives and children, my aunt, and five guests in the diwan (guest room), were killed. I do not know if there are any survivors, I was buried under the wall. I saw my uncle Idan, and two of the children Farooq (m)8, and Ahmad (m) 7, they were dead”. (Sa’diy did not know that Yosr, one of the guests and herself are the only survivors of the many families in that house).

Khalifa Mokhlos the only survivor among the 4 men in the guest room said that the other 4 men were killed when two missiles hit the house. “Jasim M. Mokhlos (30), Idan Abdulla Mosa (52), Awad M.Mosa (45), and Moslem K.Hussein (30) were all killed”.

K., the chief of community council in Al-Risala district, himself handicapped in the Iraqi-Iranian war, was telling us many stories of demolished houses and killed families. We asked to visit some of them. He was hesitant, but then suggested that we only visit those in the relatively safe districts. Alqaim now looks so different from Alqaim we saw 18 months ago in the first major American attack in April 2004. Then it was a city full of life, shops, offices, people, police…there was movement in the street. Now it is a dead city. Fear and suspicion are the kings of the streets.

The first family was of Saggar Hamdan, a Land Cruiser driver who was taking his- and his brother in law’s- families to the Okashat refugee camp 200 kilometers away in the desert at 4 pm on the attack first day. His father explained that” there were 19 women and children in the car when it was shot and burnt by the American troops. Saggar , his wife Khadija, and his 6 children (Ala’(m)10, Adil (m), Omar(m), Sheima’(f), Lamia(f)’, and a baby) and his niece were killed. No one was allowed to approach the car until it was no more than ashes”. It was only after 5 days that a cousin, Hashim Hamid, was allowed to get the bodies.

“I had to jeopardize my life, hold a white flag and stand in the American convoy way” Hashim said. “I told them that I wanted the bodies of my cousin and his family. The American Commander said “ I am sorry, it was a mistake, we did not know that it was a family”, and he gave me a plastic sac full of the charred bodies.

………….

The second family was of Mohammad Jabir, a boy of nine years who was shot by an American sniper at his house door in the “Death Street” on Thursday Oct 20, 2005.

“He was going to his uncles’ house, across the street in the railway houses” his father said, trying hard to hold his tears “They were 4 of my children, went out to visit their uncle’s family, they were shot at immediately. They returned back, Mohammad was putting his hand on his chest, said I am injured, and then fell to the ground. He was bleeding. We tried to save him, but no ambulance or car was allowed to pass through. His uncle did not mind the shooting; he drove his car and took us to the hospital. By then Mohammad was dead”.

The mother was heavily covered with black: “when we tried to take him to the hospital, the soldiers shot at us. I was shouting, but no one dared to approach. We sat on the ground waiting for the shooting to stop, until his uncle came with the car”

Mohammad is the 13^th child killed by a sniper in the railway houses “they call it the Death Street, one of the children who were killed was only 1.5 years, another was 3. I can take you to visit their families all. On October 23, 2005, at 2 pm, the American airplane was going and coming back many times on the street shooting all the time”. Jabir left his house and is now living in the family’s big house with other 5 families in another area.

……….

The third family was of Attiya Mikhlif. The house was no more than a heap of rubbles. It was bombed at 6 am on August 30, 2005. There was no one of the family left to tell the story. Neighbors were hesitant to talk. “The old man died years ago” one of the neighbors volunteered to talk at last. “There was his old wife, Dalla Hardan 55, his three sons, Daham 35, Rashid 25, and Salman 18, and two daughters in law: Rafaah 19 and Kholood 19. Rashid, his bride Rafaah, Salman and his bride Kholood were all newly married”. All of them were killed that morning.

-“why do you think the house was bombed?”

- “Who knows, the Americans say that there were insurgents in the house, but they were families as you see. And anyway, you do not air bomb houses to kill insurgents who are supposed to be in!!”

………..

The fourth family was of Kawan Abu Mohammad. On September 8, 2005, the house in an agricultural area called the Senjaq was bombed killing 11 civilians, most of them children. The old man, Kawan 70, his son Mohammad 50, a teacher of physics, his daughter in law Hamdiya 40 (Mohammad’s wife), and their 4 children: Dhoha 16(f), Ro’a 10(f), Obeida 12(m), and Hotheifa 4 (m)were all killed under the rubles. Khalid, 18, Kawan’s grandson whose uncle Mohammad was helping him in physics, Amjad(m) 22, Zeinab 17(f), and Saja 8 (f)were all Kawan’s grandchildren, who were visiting their grandfather were all killed in that bombing too. Two members of the family survived: Mahmood Kawan 25(m) was paralyzed and Nahida 16, Amjad’s sister was mildly injured.

K., of the community council, took us then to Al-Risala district where 8 houses were bombed together on Saturday 22, 2005 around 3 am, and the Big Mosque on 23^rd . Fortunately, they were empty. “The Americans believe that the insurgents hide in these empty houses” K. explained. Many families returned from the refugee camps to find their houses destroyed.

In one of the houses in Al-Salaam district, Alwan Abdul Kareem refused to stay with his family in the refugee camp in Anah. He found it unbearable to live as a refugee, so he returned home alone 4 days later. The house was bombed on the same day (Oct 22), he was killed under the heavy stairs where he was hiding, eating his sohoor (the last meal before fasting). Alwan was 58, a gardener and a school guard. We met his family in Anah refugee camp. He left a wife Shokriya, 40, and eight children.

In Anah refugee camp 5 families (around 10 each) lived in one house. They did not receive the monthly food ration for 3 months. K., very anxious to show us how bad the damage was, could not keep his promise of staying away from the dangerous areas. Near the railway station, a completely damaged hotel was used by the municipality to host the very poor families for a symbolic price. So is the railway itself.

Shawkat A. Abbood, who just arrived from Alqaim, told us about the attack on Si'da, a village 10 kilometers to the east, said that on October 1, the market place was closed at 10 am, the city was besieged from two remaining places: Si’da and Karabla, 10 kilometers away. The electricity and phones were cut, all offices were closed, and cars were prevented from moving … “When the bombing began, we remained at home. Translators in military vehicles told the people through megaphones to stay at home, that their lives would be in danger if they move out. We could hear the bombing, but we did not know where exactly. The bombing continued for 4 days. Airplanes were roaming 24 hours; the intensive bombing was at night. In the Rumana village they bombed 4 houses. There were 12 injured the first day. We do not know exactly about the dead, may be 30-40”

-“It was a declared attack, why the families did not leave?”

- “some families do not have any alternative, or too poor to move, some put tents in the farms of the Senjaq area. And any way what was declared was that the American troops are going to enter Alqaim with the Iraqi troops, they called the civilians to cooperate with the troops to arrest the insurgents”. Shawkat’s mother, 55, was crying, listening to her son. She is diabetic, and too frightened “when I hear the bombing, I shiver, feel the pain in my back; I feel the ceiling coming down and crushing me”.

In Alqaim we met A.M. an employee in the electricity office. “We tried 3 times to repair the electricity; the Americans were shooting at us every time. The third time they said you have 30 minutes to repair it. It takes two hours, as you know, on the desert road to reach the station. But we managed to do. The other station is near the customs office (which is now a military base) we could not reach that point”. The same story is repeated with the water.

Shareef, a fireman, and an emergency relief volunteer was very angry “where are the nations of the world, the Moslems, the Arabs…millions of them pray everyday, do not they see what is happening to us”.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Both testimonies are from this link (Index Research)via(The BRusselstribunal.org) where there is much, much more. What was done in Iraq and to Iraq's people by the Americans and under American authority was a monstrous evil, a crime against humanity. The Haditha Massacre was part of a vast murder machine that began long before that incident and lasted long afterwards.

History for Beginners

2012-01-23T06:35:00.000-08:00

After the heady, arguably Revolutionary events of last January, this year's opening month and its absurdist and obsessive media spectacle of the Republican Campaign Clown Car, one cannot be blamed if one longs for... something better. Change the channel, mKay? This is boresome.

Well, I have not watched a single "debate" (they are not debates, they have not been debates for years, for generations, why are they calling them "debates" when they are nothing but sales pitches? I ask you.) in the Republican campaign, and I doubt I will even watch the Incumbent trade sound bites with the Challenger (whomever it may be -- even Romney who now has to overcome so many obstacles -- in the end). It's become a Gong Show with aspects of Survivor thrown in to make it seem up to date.

Entertainment for the masses and revenues (Oh, boy! Big Fucking Revenues!http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif) for the Entertainment conglomerates. Talk about revenue sharing and wealth transfers! Yeek!

I did watch Arcade Fire on Austin City Limitsthough. Anyone who was following the Wisconsin Uprising and Occupation last winter is aware of Arcade Fire because of the video below, even if, like me, they didn't know of them beforehand:

Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill" Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Arcade Fire's "Revolution (Lies)" was hailed at the time as "the soundtrack of a Revolution."

Little did we know then that Wisconsin actually was the spark that would ignite revolutionary fervor throughout the land. Our friends in Egypt knew, though.

They knew that what they had done just days and weeks before and what their colleagues in Tunisia had done and what was igniting in Europe was unstoppable. Once the spark is lit... there you are. It's under way. Hold on, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

And so it has been. Thus the media focus on the Clown Car of the Perpetual Political Campaign is more than a little, erm, stupid. And maybe that's for the best. Our friends at dKos have been absolutely obsessed with Republicans and their maunderings and maneuverings to capture the Throne for months and months, so much so, there has been practically no acknowledgement that there even are "Democrats" in Washington DC and statehouses any more. Whether the honchos over there realize it or not, their almost exclusive focus on Republicans functions as one of those subliminal messages that we all used to understand the media was filling our little heads with: Republicans are the only politicians that matter, the only political party that matters, focus exclusively on the Republicans, no matter how clownish they may be, they are your Rulers and your Buddies... over and over again, repeated endlessly, a mantra, a trance-inducing formula. To my eye, intentional. Let us not forget, Markos, like many other luminaries in the internet's so-called "progressive" political field, is an ex-Republican who converted as it were.

He, like so many others who want to sit at the Big Table and be a Playah in the Palace, has never been much of a liberal/leftist/progressive in any recognizable political sense of those terms. I've said that he, like many others on the lefter side of the internet political dial, is essentially a libertarian entrepreneur. That's not quite the same thing as the "hard left partisan" that he and others have been accused of being.

But then, libertarians have long been angling to capture the leftish mantle. And who's to blame them? The Dems gave it up a long time ago. In fact, I would argue that the Dems have never been a leftist party at all, they are a conservative political party. They are the oldest political party in the country, and they take that status very seriously. They see themselves as the Responsible Party conserving what is best in American culture, society, and politics, in opposition to various radical reactionary parties (like the Republicans) who have arisen from time to time, while simultaneously standing in opposition to the "mob", the vox populi, We the People, whose ravenings and outcries must be kept suppressed at all times and by any means necessary.

Sometimes that means throwing bones to the masses, but for some time now, neither major political party has been the least bit inclined to throw bones (sometimes not even rhetorical ones) to their bases.

Hm. How did that happen? This is not normal American politics.

From what little I can figure out from my experience on the inside of the Federal government "what happened" was Waco and then Oklahoma City. And then the Clinton impeachment, the Bush seizure of the White House and the collapse of Congressional authority, followed in quick succession by the 9/11 attack and the wars of revenge and imperial aggression that followed upon that singular event. Thence the rigorous institutionalization of the National Security State and the New Model Mercenary Militarist that bids to rule the world -- on behalf, it would seem, of a rather small but very powerful cohort of global corporatists. The "People"? Pshaw. What of them?

What I witnessed was the government barricading itself against the People.

From the inside, these events were all of a piece, almost seamless; they altered government's relationship with the People, and they fundamentally altered politics in ways that I don't think more than a few people have fully come to recognize.

Politics has always been a spectacle and a show, that's it's nature. But now it is one that is completely meaningless at the federal level. Once in office, elected representatives do not serve you and me, they can't or they wouldn't be there, not for long anyway. They serve a ruling class, one that is rather more shadowy than we may think. This is not to go all CT, but the people who are actually pulling the strings in the DC Palaces, and more and more in the provinces as well, are people we've probably never heard of; at the top there is no separation between these people and their interests and the government. It's all the same.

We the People are simply irrelevant at that level. We exist to the extent we can be manipulated when need be to follow the commands and desires of a ruling elite. But as we've seen, there are "too many" of us, by many millions. Way too many. Must cull the herd one way or another. It seems that the preferred method is relatively simple: dismissal from society and neglect.

Though I have long railed about it, there is still very little general recognition of what has happened and is happening to tens of millions of Americans who have been jettisoned, not just from the so-called middle class but from any class at all. They've become essentially non-people, by the tens of millions. They have no jobs and they cannot get jobs because there aren't any openings and there won't ever be again. They have no homes because their homes have been seized and will be given to others at pennies on the dollar. There are few and diminishing social services available to them -- or anyone for that matter -- and so American poverty rates are skyrocketing, hunger stalks the land, people are suffering quite openly, and some are dying. Very little is done by our policy-makers to alleviate this suffering, because it's standard policy not to. And in America, it has always been standard policy to blame the victim.

But things are different this time. The cruelty that policy-makers are exhibiting is remarkable, for one thing. Nothing quite like this has been seen and known in this country for decades, not since the Hoover era, and even then, policy-makers were more circumspect about their contempt for the common herd. The current social/political/economic situation is being used by policy-makers as an opportunity -- yet another in a long string of them -- to take away customary rights, benefits, and privileges that Americans thought were guaranteed by contract or the Constitution.

Benefits are being cut, or they are not available at all. Access to basic services like health care and education is being denied. Rights that workers earned long ago are being withdrawn. Pension obligations are being refused. Contracts are abrogated. Homes are seized and sold to others for a tiny percentage of what had been demanded from the debtor. On and on.

This American model of cruelty is like something out of a 19th Century novel -- a nightmare of despair that we thought we overcame... but it turns out our policy makers never got the message.

I trace it back to Waco, one of the cruelest -- and most spectacular -- domestic policing actions our federal government has ever engaged in. Once under way, it seemed impossible to stop. Why that should be is still a matter of controversy, but the upshot was almost too horrible to contemplate, not just the miserable deaths of scores of innocents in the holocaust of Branch Davidian compound, but in the armed rebellion that commenced soon thereafter.

In fact, according to reports, the action at the Branch Davidian compound was intended to thwart armed rebellion by certain shadowy crypto-religious forces that were arming and aligning with one another in preparation for the coming Apocalypse (or something of the sort). The Davidians were among the many armed Apocalyptic Believers who were being tracked at the time, and the action itself was planned -- if you want to call what the incompetents in charge were doing "planning" -- during the latter days of the Bush (Senior) administration, apparently without the knowledge of headquarters. The action itself was put in motion under the authority of the Clinton Justice Department. The point of it was to neutralize this particular armed camp and to intimidate anyone else who might be contemplating armed insurrection in preparation for the Return of the Lord.

It didn't go well.

This all happened at a time when the domestic security state apparatus was relatively primitive though quite extensive, built as it was on a Drug War platform. That's a whole other topic in itself.

Waco was a catastrophic failure. And I cannot imagine we would be in such a horrible mess now if it weren't for that catastrophe. There are plenty of people who would disagree with my assessment, who would see the origins of our current pickle elsewhere. There is no single source, of course. But Waco was the catalyst for what was to come.

After the shock wore off, the response to the slaughter at Waco was an intensification not a diminution of the armed insurrectionist movements around the country, exactly the opposite of the intent of action itself.

This culminated in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. While directly related to Waco, that reaction seemed to come from an even deeper animosity against The Government due to what McVeigh witnessed and participated in during the First Gulf War. As awful as the slaughter in Waco was, it had eerie echoes of Iraq where hundreds of mostly women and children were burnt alive in a shelter in Baghdad, where surrendered prisoners were machine gunned down in the field because they were inconvenient, and where McVeigh himself was ordered to bury hundreds of Iraqi soldiers alive. On their retreat from Kuwait, tens of thousands of Iraqi troops -- conscripts almost all -- were ruthlessly slaughtered from above in an action that had no modern precedent.

The First Gulf War has been largely forgotten thanks to subsequent events in the region but at the time it was seen as one of the most barbaric campaigns the United States had ever conducted, of such surpassing brutality and cruelty that it was practically unimaginable.

The sight of Schwartzkopf, Cheney, Powell, et al, lying on teevee and celebrating this disgusting slaughter still turns my stomach, and I know people who were involved in it who were emotionally shattered by what they did or what they witnessed, and who were physically sickened as well and still suffer from complications.

Hundreds of thousands of American troops paid a heavy price for the momentary glory of the warrior-policy-makers who just kept right on strutting and puffing out their chests while the rest of us languished.

Here we are, two decades on, and the cruelty on display overseas that thence was made manifest domestically has borne extraordinarily foul fruit given the global economic collapse and further overseas war-making that has made it so gosh-darn hard to fund even the basic domestic social services Americans have already paid for like Social Security and Medicare and so forth.

The question, as always, is what do we do about it?

We see that the political/electoral system does not work on behalf of the People, and under the current circumstances, it cannot. The government itself is absent, barricaded away from you and me, and We the People do not have access to it. We are subjects -- when we are considered at all which is ever less often. The rituals of politics and elections still continue, of course, as they did in Rome for hundreds of years after the Republic was extinguished. Roman elections were part of panem et circenses that kept the lower orders entertained while their betters got on with the important matters of state and empire that simply didn't involve the plebeians -- except to the extent they could be a revenue source and be manipulated.

When there were too many, the herd was culled. When they rebelled...

The situation now, however, is far more complex -- and yet in some ways, simpler -- than historical parallels. We are facing a global onslaught against the People and the Earth by what is really a tiny fragment of hyper-wealthy and powerful individuals who are competing against one another to be King of the World. We largely don't know who these people are; even if we know some of their names, we have little or no idea what their political/social/moral points of view are, and those few we do know something of are so surpassingly benighted and cruel it's almost unimaginable.

The People rising up against this fragment of quasi-humanity should have overwhelmed them long ago, but it hasn't happened, not even close. Oh no, the struggle has barely begun.

Wither?

Yesterday, I posted a few movies, one of which was Frank Lopez's "END:CIV," which I think I've posted before. It's one of those "earth is dying/we are dying" manifesto movies you see from time to time. Typically, I don't much care for doomer-gloomer stuff, and I stay away from it on principle, but this is Frank Lopez, AKA, "The Stimulator" on Submedia.tv, who I became interested in when Global Revolution would run his "End of the World (As We Know It) and I feel fine" anarchist shit during the frequent outages of the Occupy Wall Street live feeds. I'm becoming more and more fond of him and his ideas and his work. "The Stimulator" is linked at right. Below is a link to a Q and A in Troy, NY, last April after a screening of "END:CIV". It gets pretty intense as some of the audience takes him to task over his views of non-violence, Gandhi, King, et al, and I think it is worth listening to the exchanges. As he says, we don't have a lot of time, and unless we have an honest and open discussion about tactics, we aren't going to get anywhere...

Q&A with activist media maker Frank Lopez

We may still be at the Beginning of the Beginning, but there is a lot of history behind it.

Lot of history....

Some Movies

2012-01-22T18:30:00.000-08:00

I know, I've posted two of these before, but we can always see them again. Alien Planet is new to me.

Is there some reason our oligarchs and plutocrats are so mindless or insane?

Toward Critical Spirit

2012-01-22T13:51:00.000-08:00

Via Yves Smith and Naked Capitalism:

I've been saying "Watch Europe and North Africa" -- and Spain in particular -- for some time because it is from Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and from North Africa that the bases of the American and Global Occupy Movement come.

This was understood in the Occupy Wall Street development process because so many of the M15 Movement participants were activists within or advising the OWS participants. And of course the precursor American Rebellion and Occupation in Wisconsin was openly and directly derived from the Egyptian and Tunisian models.

Little information was widely distributed about these aspects of the Movement in the United States, so it was easy enough for some Zeitgeisters and RonPauliacs to assert predominance early on in many of the Occupations around the country and not face a lot of opposition.

Because their political, social and moral ideas have long been excluded from the "mainstream," many people who participated early on in the Occupy Movement were simply unfamiliar with them; the more they learned, the more most rejected them.

Zeitgeist and RonPaulism, for example, function little differently than religious cults, and even though many people are drawn to religion and can be susceptible to cults, there is ultimately no "there there" for most people in either the Zeitgeist or the RonPauliac cults. These cults are focused on esoterica of monetary policy, for example, obsessed with the Fed and all its many perverse ways, but they fail to develop any kind of practical social/political or functional economic alternative. So, they get nowhere. But then, to my jaundiced eye, they aren't meant to get anywhere as political/social or economic alternatives. They are meant solely to perpetuate themselves and to keep their founders and leaders in the public eye and in comfort.

But ultimately, their interests are irrelevant to the Revolution, though, who knows, there may be some elements of Zeitgeistism or even RonPaulism that winds up in the programs and policies of the Better Future we're all so busy envisioning and some are so busy building.

The energy of the Movement and the Revolution is not in Zeitgeistism or RonPaulism. It looks to me like both sap energy at the local level, and they simply have no relevance at the national and international levels. Their relevance to the Movement as a whole remains to be seen.

In the video above, Miguel Yarza of Democracia Real Ya explains it all for you, what is really going on and what is really important in for the future of the Movement and the Revolution: Dignity, Justice, Community and Peace is the way I synthesize these values. Yarza describes what is actually going on in Spain and Europe and elsewhere as a result of the diffusion of M15 and Democracia Real Ya ideas and ideals throughout the Occupy Movement.

Democracial Real Ya is a Dignity and (social/economic) Justice movement, as were the uprisings and revolutions in North Africa, though in North Africa, legal justice became a focus of the movements after the state crackdowns on the demonstrations and protests.

In this country, we're still figuring out some of the Dignity and Justice aspects of the uprisings, but there has been a very gratifying focus at many Occupations on the plight of the homeless and homeless mentally ill in particular, and on the necessity to keep people in their homes if they have them. The fight against foreclosures in this county mirrors what's going on in Spain. Also, more and more American Occupations are taking cues from Europe and liberating vacant buildings, even if only briefly at this point. On Friday, for example, the former Jack Tarr/Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco that was closed and abandoned a few years ago was liberated for a few hours with the intention of making it into living quarters for some of the thousands of homeless in San Francisco and the Bay Area. This action was modeled on the Traveler's Aid building liberation in Oakland last November and that action in turn was modeled on the many abandoned building liberations in Spain and elsewhere in Europe that have been going on for many years. Squatting has a long history in Europe and is legally protected, whereas in the United States, it is strictly against the law and sometimes brutally suppressed if it occurs; thus, those who are doing it in this country -- and it is happening more widely than most of us realize -- are very courageous. While it is not unprecedented in this country, the current energy behind it, drawing mostly on the anarchist community, is new.

Real Democracy continues to be a goal through all the various aspects of the Movements, Uprisings, and Revolutions, most especially in Europe and North Africa where the betrayal of the People by their Rulers is so stark and profound. What they have been "given" is not at all what they thought they were getting. Bait and switch is too kind a word, and it goes back to the triumph of Neo-Liberal economic theory (another form of cultic belief) that essentially strip mines wealth from the public and hands it to oligarchs and plutocrats who, for whatever reason, have no sense of social responsibility whatsoever.

"Democracy" was supposed to prevent that outcome, but in its current form of representative/parliamentary/managed democracy, it is actually enabling it. Peoples in Europe and North Africa see that stark reality and they revolt. The notion is gaining traction in the United States as even the Rs understand that the Plutocrats who own our government have no sense of social responsibility at all, any more than their European counterparts do, and this is wrong.

One may disagree with the Gingrich response to the issue of social responsibility -- please do! -- but at least he has some idea what it is. Romney, for whatever reason, and Paul, for selfish reasons, do not.

As for the current White House and Congress, it's hard to say. If it were not for the social benefit programs currently in place, almost all of them dating back decades, it is doubtful that the current political class would be doing anything on behalf of the masses, for in general they seem to lack conscience or any ability to act on conscience if they have it.

Most institutions that proclaim a social conscience or responsibility have failed, in my view because they are more concerned with their organizational survival than they are with serving their clients. Why that's so is a whole other discussion.

It's therefore up to the People to voice their interests and to demonstrate how to act on those interests.

It's difficult -- especially under conditions of brutal repression -- but it is taking place just the same. And every time there is another fierce crack down by Authority (the UC Riverside confrontation the other day was certainly typical) the opposition to oppression grows. It takes time to figure out what to do about it. Notably, the Authorities are more flexible in their repressive tactics than I would have thought -- which gives us some idea of the extent of the training they have received in suppressing popular unrest. Obviously this factor of "law enforcement" has been emphasized heavily since 1999, even though they still make unforced errors routinely in dealing with the public.

Yarza is talking about building a "critical spirit," which we can think about as a critical mass, that will tip the balance away from the Neo-Liberal catastrophist cult that has captured governments everywhere. And you never know when the tipping point will come. Nor can you necessarily predict just how the cookie will crumble.

But the pressure must be maintained, and the image of the future must be prepared.

When we do our part, the critical spirit takes care of itself.

And there is no sign that the People are tiring.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

[Occupy Oakland's Unstoppable Bus cruising San Francisco's Financial District.]

---------------------------------------

John Spritzler and David Stratman, "Thinking about Revolution."

SOPA, PIPA and The Megaupload Thing

2012-01-21T06:17:00.000-08:00

Well, whoever has been put in charge of riling up the online masses certainly managed a threepeat this week what with the shutdown and blackouts of various sections of the interwebs in protest against the online piracy bills sailing through Congress and the quite dramatic seizure and shutdown of Megaupload and the arrest of a number of its luminaries in New Zealand followed by Anonymous disrupting the web-presence of the DoJ, FBI, and various parasitical entertainment corporations.

All in a week's online fun, isn't it?

I haven't followed all the intricacies of the online piracy bills, so I won't address them directly, but it seems to me that if the DoJ can command foreign agents (not just in New Zealand, apparently) to round up whomever they designate, and can on its own and in collaboration with others seize whatever pelf they choose in whatever amounts they can find, on accusation alone, and, further, can destroy one of the most popular websites in the world, again on accusation alone, then the bills in Congress are simply redundant. The Government already has the power to do whatever they please, apparently at the command of certain entertainment conglomerates, and there's nothing you can do about it.

That seems to be the "message" being sent here to all and sundry, far and wide.

Your internet operation exists on sufferance alone.

I used Megaupload infrequently but occasionally, because I could sometimes find things there that I couldn't find anywhere else, not even from corporate sources. This is the value of this kind of file sharing. People have stuff that you may be looking for -- or related to what you are looking for -- and they are able and willing to share it through sites like Megaupload, much as a neighbor or library might have done prior to the advent of the Internet.

This is not "piracy" by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm so old, I remember a time before the Internet and all its filesharing sites and the controversies surrounding them. It wasn't as easy as it is now to do independent research or to find interesting diversions from research. But it was certainly possible, nonetheless, and copyright issues rarely arose.

Imagine, if you will, a newsstand in the Bygone Era. They still exist in a somewhat truncated form. There was one in San Francisco I visited frequently when I lived there in the 1970's; it had a vast array of periodicals and publications, from all over the world, and I would sometimes stay in there for hours browsing the racks, reading freely from whatever caught my eye or interested me. I would usually buy one or two periodicals if I wanted to keep particular articles at hand -- I still have some of them -- but most of them I just put back on the shelf, as did pretty much every other customer.

I'm looking at one of my bookshelves as I write this, and I'm remembering where some of these books came from. Some were purchased at that news stand in San Francisco back in those days, some were books given to me by relatives or friends well before or after that, some were purchased second hand for 50 cents, some were mail-order, some are college texts, and so on. In other words, they have been acquired over decades from all kinds of sources, and some of them are now fairly rare and difficult to come by.

Some were purchased at standard or discount retail, but many were not. Quite a few were not purchased by me at all. They were purchased by someone else and given to me. Or I bought them for a few pennies at a thrift store or from a discard bookrack on the street or at a library sale. In other words, the copyright holder was only paid once, if at all, for these books. And at a library or newsstand, I could read anything on the shelves without paying a fee to the copyright holder.

I could share any of the copyright material in my possession -- no matter how I acquired it -- with anyone at any time without running the risk of arrest or seizure for copyright violation, and the copyright holder had no right to payment when I did so.

What I couldn't and didn't do was claim someone else's literary or artistic work as my own, and I certainly never tried to profit from someone else's literary or artistic work. But I could if I wanted to -- without violating copyright.

I own a lot of paintings and books, some of which have a market value well beyond the price I may (or someone may) have paid for them originally. I may sell those items for whatever I can get for them in the market, and assuming a profit in the sale, that profit is mine, not the copyright holder's or the original artist's.

I may never have paid the copyright holder or artist for these books and paintings, but I can profit from them freely -- except that I cannot legally claim copyrighted literary or artistic work as having been created by me if it wasn't. And I wouldn't do that anyway.

In addition, anyone who wishes and who I give access to can view any goddamn thing on my shelves they want to, and if I let them, they can have it for whatever purpose they choose -- without payment to me or to the original copyright holder.

The same is true of my entire recorded music collection, all the 78's, 45s, the 33 1/3rds, all the CDs, all the DVDs. No matter how I acquired them, in other words, anyone I give access to can listen to them. They can watch any movie I have on tape or DVD. It's no violation of copyright, nor is it even remotely piracy, to do so.

What I can't do -- and wouldn't do -- is republish copyrighted works as if I owned rights to them. I can pass on and resell books and other copyrighted material I own, but I cannot print copies of copyrighted books and sell them or make new recordings of copyrighted music or videos without a license to do so.

Since the advent of the InterTubes, however, some copyright holders have decided that every view by every viewer on the Internet must be paid for. The informal or formal sharing such as has long been done in homes and libraries is somehow piracy when it is done on the Internet. Same with the selling of material: you can sell a copyrighted book or recording on the Internet through eBay or whathaveyou, but apparently you cannot charge to view or listen to a copyrighted book or recording on the Internet, nor apparently can you make it available to view or listen to over the internet for free, nor even link to it in some cases, unless you have a license without being accused of piracy.

This situation is absurd.

From what I know of Megaupload and other similar sites, the site provided a platform for people to share with others all sorts of copyrighted and other material that they had access to, for free or at a very small charge (for faster speed not content.) To me, this is exactly what I can do with printed and recorded material in my home, any time I want, and without having my property seized for doing so.

Somehow, back in the Old Days Before the Internet, copyright holders managed to get by without charging every viewer or reader or listener every time they looked, read or listened to a copyright work, or by so restricting access to copyrighted material that it couldn't even be referred to without a license (as has been the case with AP news stories from time to time). They managed to survive even though purchasers of their works could do anything they wanted with them -- including re-sell for a profit -- without owing the copyright holder a damn thing. They even survived the advent of public libraries, book fairs, reading circles and so on. How did they do it?

But now, provide a platform for people to easily share copyright material on the Internet and you'll be subjected to arbitrary arrest and seizure of all your property, goods, and chattel. Download some copyright material via this platform and you might be subject to criminal prosecution yourself.

This is copyright control gone crazy.

I realize that the argument is that filesharing through services like Megaupload is akin to unlicensed republishing, since the work can be distributed widely rather than passed on in individual copies (that someone purchased at some point) and that such distribution is thought to diminish the value copyright holders derive from their product. But many lines of evidence show that's not the case. The wider the distribution, the more familiar the creator/author's work becomes to a far wider audience, and that can easily lead to a much higher value than it otherwise might. Many creator/authors are actually in favor of Megaupload and other file sharing sites because they do allow works and their creators to become much more widely known than they otherwise might. The ease with which one can gain access to the work is the key.

It might be "unlicensed republishing" if someone is literally pirating and making money off the work, but for the most part, they're not. Filesharing is free or very low cost to users. The works being distributed are generally (though not always) attributed appropriately. Those who make money off filesharing make money off the service itself or off of advertising, not off "unlicensed republishing" of copyrighted work. They are not stealing anything from copyright holders, they are in many cases enhancing the ability of copyright holders to make even more money off their works. This is the newstand and lending library model in hyperdrive. Copyright holders should love it.

The gross authoritarianism of the SOPA/PIPA/Megaupload Thing is its most troubling aspect to date. What was done to Megaupload and its people I think was meant to terrorize those who engage in "unlicensed" anything. The implication being you're next. And there's nothing you can do about it. The US Government can go anywhere in the world and do anything they want to you, and they will.

They don't need SOPA and they don't need PIPA; they'll just do it, and you are powerless in the face of such determination. They can and will seize everything you own. They can and will shut down your websites and deprive you of a livelihood. You can do nothing about it. And they will do this on behalf of an increasingly mindless corporate sector that seeks not simply profit but endless revenues by coercion, compulsion -- and government enforcement.

And people wonder why there is a revolt under way...

[Note: I left out any discussion of the file storage aspects of Megaupload, and the loss of that storage seems to be the factor that is currently raising the most ire among users, since file sharing is still possible through other sites. A lot of large files that were being kept at Megaupload so as to free other space are now gone, and most of these stored files were never available for more than very limited and usually in-house sharing. In some cases, valuable proprietary files -- copyright material owned by the user -- is now inaccessible because of the disabling of Megaupload in its entirety. Depending on exactly what has been lost -- and by whom -- this situation could have extraordinary repercussions.]

Redemption and The Obama Problem

2012-01-20T05:16:00.000-08:00

A big part of the initial enthusiasm for the candidacy of Barack Obama was due to the potential for Redemption that he represented. After 8 years of the monstrousness of Bush and Cheney and all their minions and lackeys in the White House and 8 years before that of sunny but compromised... erm... "vulgarity" of the Clinton White House (blow jobs on the job being so vulgar, dontchaknow), the need for the Redemption of the American government, indeed, the Redemption of America, was clear to anyone with eyes to see and brain to think.

And here was such a nice, well-spoken black man standing for the Presidency who wasn't out there blaming everybody and casting aspersions for his suffering and all. He merely pointed out that there was a Better Way Forward, that the Nation could heal and come together after a period of great difficulty. And he was the one to make it so.

There could hardly BE a more redemptive character given our history. And look at that smile and those big, floppy ears. Who could resist? Certainly, he was better and in better mental health than that crabby old grandpa and his harpie-like pseudo-sidekick. Boy howdy.

Besides, the economy had just gone into a tailspin, and the Busheviks in office, and the R side of the aisle in general, seemed indifferent to anything but the well-being of the top of the economic pyramid.

And so Obama was elected with enormous enthusiasm and Hope. Finally, our (real) long national nightmare would be over. Hurrah!

Well. It didn't work out so well.

The Redemption took place, to be sure, but it had nothing at all to do with America or the People; it had and has to do with the Highest of the Mighty who are doing better now than ever, and who are now more insulated and protected against the roaring of the mob than they have ever been. In Obama, whose election they funded with massive donations, they got someone who could not only do their bidding with bells on, they got someone who was almost magically able to manage the masses to go along with it. Though we were all told at the time his was a people-funded campaign, small-fry donations from the millions upon millions, it turns out that the banks and Wall Street were actually Obama's major donors, and soon enough, the People realized their small-fry contributions didn't mean a thing...

As I've pointed out many times, Candidate Obama was being auditioned for the role over a period of two years or more, his primary task being keeping the Rabble in line, and he passed with flying colors, something Gramps and Herself never came close to doing; they couldn't have pacified a mob if they tried. Obama did it with ease and a certain sort of grace that is still astonishing. He can spout perfect nonsense and the People will still respond as if they had been spoken to by God.

Throughout his tenancy in the White House, Mr. Obama has primarily served the interests of finance, the banks, and the rich. If the social service programs put forth in the (FD) Roosevelt and Johnson administrations had not existed, he would not have proposed them. From the outset, the Obama economic policy has been as close to Hooverism as it is possible for an American President to get at this time. Hoover's Redemption isn't complete, but it is getting closer thanks to Obama's adoption of his economic policies.

To this day, no matter how bad the unemployment situation is, Obama has not proposed a real jobs program for Americans; he won't even consider it. Nixon was on top of that problem when it came up during his administration. Not Obama. Nope. All he can come up with is the ditch metaphor, that it took a long time to get into this ditch and it will take a long time to get out of it.

Regardless of the falseness of the metaphor -- the crash was pretty damn fast to those who suffered, and the rich were rescued right away -- the fact is, the Rs have been making headway with the electorate by "talking about" jobs and job programs (of course they have no more intention of doing anything about it than Obama does). The fact that the Obama Administration has been stunningly indifferent to the plight of the unemployed should be the most serious mark against it, far and away more important to most people than the esoterica of "civil liberties," and even warmongering, but the Rs have proposed absolutely nothing of their own to do anything about it, so it's a wash.

In other words, nobody running for office intends to do a damn thing about the absence of employment for a large swath of the population. Not a damned thing.

The Rs will merely talk about it and do nothing; the Ds and Obama will wring their hands and do nothing.

Poverty is being imposed on millions upon millions more Americans year over year, and the Powers That Be like it like that. So that's the way it will be.

As of early this year, half of Americans were impoverished or officially "low income." This is why the R charge that "half of Americans don't pay income taxes!!" is so absurd. Yes? And? They're too fucking poor to pay income taxes, and they are getting poorer. "Lucky-duckies" indeed.

The impoverishment of the American People is not a matter of accidental Fate, it is a matter of policy from Washington. That policy is carried out by Obama with slightly less denunciation and demonization of those impoverished than it would be under an R administration. Optics!

The wars are winding down under the Obama reign, but they would have under Gramps as well. We can't "afford" them, you see, and there is no longer any value for the money spent, so... liquidate them.

Initially, the wars were a means of transferring boatloads of cash to favored friends of the Bush Regime, and for exterminating varied foe in dramatic fashion. The wars were spectacle for the masses, Big Money for friends. But then they got ugly.

And titanically expensive all around financed by borrowing from China, oops. Well, China's leaders are nobody's fools, and keeping the Americans Occupied as it were, occupying foreign lands, was a convenience for the Chinese and others who were able under the circumstances to foster their own societies and economic growth without the interference of Americans and their high-handed ways. They were busy elsewhere. The cost of keeping them at bay was worth it. But China is now balking at further payments along these lines.

As the funding for wars dries up, the wars themselves must be jettisoned, but many of the trappings of the wars have now been codified and institutionalized, trappings like the murder squads ("special forces"), the mercenaries, the drones, the camps for terror suspects, the torture policies, the ever greater limitations on civil liberties, the ever-expanding national security state and so on.

All of these trappings and more are now, it seems, permanent features of American law, lore, and practice. They were largely institutionalized under Obama.

Oh, well, Ron Paul has been talking about how bad they are, so that's good.

The fact is, there is no movement to upend most of what has been put in place as a consequence of the wars. Think back: much the same situation obtained after WWI and WWII as well. Many of the policies put in place as a consequence of those wars have stuck with us. They are useful to government and they perpetuate themselves because they are so useful.

I'll go so far as to suggest that it is the bloated military and the metastasized National Security State that are now the primary domestic economic engines. The war economy continued without let up -- it kept growing -- after WWII, the reason being that the war economy was seen as the primary means of staying out of another Depression. It worked after a fashion.

But here we are in another Depression anyway. In some sectors, that's blamed on the "Peace Dividend" in consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union; without a major foe, there was no rationale for the continued bloated military budget, thus... well, it's complicated.

This time, though, the bloated military and security budgets don't seem to be having any positive effect on the economic situation of most Americans. In fact, things have been getting worse. More ominously, practically every politician, including Obama, is endlessly yabbering about cutting budgets for such things as Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and any other kind of human assistance they can think of.

In other words, reducing further what little social services and income support most Americans have already paid for in order, it seems, to keep the wealthy as secure and comfortable as possible, and to keep the war machine and security state in tune forever.

Nothing else seems to matter to Our Rulers, nothing else at all.

And so the People rise, somewhat chaotically and ineffectively for the moment, but rise they do.

Redemption under Obama having failed, the Rs seek to put up a Gazillionaire with Issues as their nominee for the Throne. That will solve the problem! Right. Great plan. He could pull it off, of course, but at this point he is so close to implosion, it's hard to imagine just how he'd do it. It's early yet.

The pundits keep speculating that Romney's religion will keep him from being elected (Mormonism to me is more like a business with social service and secret society aspects rather than a religion), but this is pretty much the same narrative as was used by pundits to discuss the difficulty of electing JFK or Obama himself; some social "flaw" in other words, be it Catholicism or Mormonism or Colored-ism, interferes with the path to glory, and overcoming it is the test the candidate must pass.

What will hamstring Romney is his general snottiness. There would be no Redemption through him in any case. Back when Romney was endowed at the Temple, he took a vow to revenge the martyrdom of Prophet Joseph Smith in 1844. This is not quite the same as Redemption...

Obama, under the circumstances, has a much easier road than he otherwise would. He may be closer to re-confirmation on the Throne than anyone now realizes.

That means, if so, that Redemption, which this nation still so badly needs, is delayed yet again.

Psalm 94

3How long, O LORD?
How long will the wicked be allowed to gloat?
4Hear their arrogance!
How these evildoers boast!
5They oppress your people, LORD,
hurting those you love.

Envisioning That Better Future -- Seven: Liberty and Equality for All

2012-01-18T04:31:00.000-08:00

Yes. Well. That's the crux of the struggle, still, isn't it?

What does it mean, this call for liberty and equality that most of us hearing all our lives? What are we talking about here?

I've written before about the contrasting liberationist and communitarian impulses of the rebellions of the 1960's -- both of them asserting liberty and equality as fundamental values, but each having a distinctive vision of what they meant and how they would be applied in the real world.

The Movement Liberationists were not on the whole inclined toward Community. The Movement Communitarians were not, on the whole, inclined toward rampant individualism.

"Liberty" means something different in a Communitarian context than it does in a Liberationist one.

"Equality" means something different to a Liberationist than it does to a Communitarian.

The underlying spark for the rebellions of the 1960's was the Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1950's (which in turn was an outgrowth of earlier civil rights and justice movements). The Civil Rights movement combined Liberationist and Communitarian impulses rather successfully, but in the translation to the mostly urban white campus environment of the 1960s, the two were disentwined and separated into distinct threads.

The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was a strongly Liberationist movement that utilized little or nothing of a Communitarian nature. Individuals did come together of course -- there were thousands of students involved -- and the "community" was the campus itself, already present.

The Free Speech Movement did not seek to create a community, in other words. It grew out of the pre-existing campus community. It sought to liberate individuals in the community from the egregious strictures of the authorities of that community against political speech and activity on campus.

In this it was partially successful -- after a good deal of struggle. There was no attempt to fundamentally transform the campus community. That would come later.

Commmunitarianism did not really arise among the 1960's rebels until the advent of the Hippies, something that was not a campus phenomenon at all. The Hippies, instead, were an intentional community of like-minded strangers brought together in San Francisco in the famous Haight-Ashbury District who chose to live partially communally in an urban setting. Numbers of early communitarians quickly split off into sub-communities who established more or less self-sustaining rural communes, some of which are still in existence (most failed, of course; yes, "of course." It's very difficult to do communes successfully over time in this country).

The liberation the communitarians sought was liberation from social conformity and from interference by outside authority. Equality was a value within the commune.

On the other hand, Liberationists sought the liberation of the individual from the arbitrary imposition of authority, and from that impulse, liberationism developed a "group liberation" vision somewhat akin to the Civil Rights Movement, focused almost entirely on liberating various groups from the strictures of law and authority, but often leaving the individuals to fend for themselves once "liberated."

Most of this liberation was won -- sometimes after intense struggle -- but always at a cost. We don't often discuss the costs involved in "liberation," and it is not my point to discuss it extensively in this post, but we should be aware that "liberation" has in many cases been an unfair trade off.

"Equality" among Liberationists tended to be -- and still is -- a matter of legal status. One is equal before the law, or is supposed to be, or is in theory. That's the extent of it.

If we truly want a successful vision of the future, we're going to have to find some way to fuse to two again, and that's been a big part of the process of the Occupy Movement, perhaps its most important aspect to date.

My own impression has been that the core of the Occupations is always found in the attempt at forming temporary intentional communities. Every one of them to my knowledge -- and I've followed several dozen of the hundreds and hundreds that have been started -- have had the same initial goals: to set up and operate temporary communities of like minded and dedicated people on behalf of "the 99%" -- in other words, on behalf of the community as a whole.

It hasn't been entirely successful, in that most Americans have no experience with and no conception of this kind of intentional community building based on anarchic and democratic principles. It's all new and very unfamiliar to most Americans. And this sort of community-building is what is most threatening to the powers that be. Destroying these spontaneous communities -- and preventing their re-emergence -- has been one of the primary objectives of the anti-Occupy crackdowns by police forces all over the country.

Many Americans cannot grasp and are quite frightened by the prospect of these communities, filled as they are with so many of the discards and rejects of America, a fear that our rulers like to encourage.

And yet I think it is through the continued development of these communities that we'll find our future -- if one is to be found at all.

Is it a future of Liberty and Equality? Honestly? Not in the sense most of us have become accustomed to over the last several generations, no.

That's part of the difficulty so many Occupations have encountered. "Liberty" and "equality" mean something different in the context of an Occupation camp than they do in the context of the every-day legal and social processes of our society.

"Liberty" carries with it the burden of responsibility; one is not simply free to do as one pleases, in other words, and one is not able to do or be what one wants without consideration of the interests of everyone else in the community. This is the essence of the process of community-building from the ground up. It is not easy to do this; for some people, it is not even possible.

I was discussing some of these concepts with a fellow who has been active in intentional community development field for twenty years or more, and his initial statement was, "You people are trying to do something that's almost impossible." Yes, that's so, I acknowledged, now how do we do it?

"You're going to make a lot of mistakes," he said, "but that's the way you're going to learn." And so it has been.

The principles of horizontal organization and democratic authority seem to be more and more solidly established within the Occupy Movement as time goes on; these are the fundamentals of the Movement, and as people become more familiar with them, and more at ease with them, they seem more and more natural. The problem initially was the absence of any easily accessible guidelines to work from. Unfamiliarity with the processes involved and real discomfort with the results of some of the attempts led to lots and lots of mistakes, but that's how you learn.

"Be not afraid" became the motto flashed on the Verizon Building in Manhattan. ("Do not be afraid.")

"We are winning."

That's becoming more and more true every day. At least it seems to me, even though I have stepped back from day-to-day active participation in the Movement.

"Liberty" is tied directly with responsibility; "equality" is tied with interest and ability.

And all of it, in my view, is wrapped within conceptions of Dignity and Justice, Community and Peace that have been percolating for many long years.

It is the zeitgeist of the era.

The current ruling class is shuddering and facing irrelevancy in the midst of an unfamiliar yet oddly compelling global populist (not so much "popular") movement that can neither be suppressed nor absorbed. This is the Future, there's no way around it.

We will see a new era of Liberty and Equality for All. It won't be quite what we had in mind back in the Old Days, but that's probably for the best.

MLK Day -- Redemption and Remembrance

2012-01-16T10:08:00.000-08:00

Watch A Different Color Blue on PBS. See more from POV.

I spent a good deal of yesterday with an old friend, Charles Curtis Blackwell, a blind Black poet, painter, and playwright whose astonishing and powerful poetry-performance play "Is, the Color of Mississippi Mud" inaugurated our first season in our Downtown facility more than 20 years ago now.

It was a production like no other that had been attempted in this area; it's memory still reverberates among those who participated in it or saw it or heard about it, and it is still talked about in terms of awe and wonder.

Charles is not your everyday talent by any means -- as can be seen in the video above, as well as in the pages available to preview in the link to the script.
And there is so much more beyond these spare elements.

He's been through a kind of living hell more than once -- only to emerge stronger and more in tune with what I think he and I would call the Divine.

We discussed all kinds of things yesterday including how little the young, now the age our grandchildren might have been had we had any, seem to know or comprehend about the lives and the legacy of those like Dr. King who blazed such paths for the rest of us to follow in.

Charles is intimately familiar with the badder sides of the American experience -- he's lived it, not simply in the Jim Crow South (though he did) but through some of the most devastating emotional and psychological trials of modern living as well.

He is no stranger to the redemptive power of suffering, and part of why we got together yesterday was to remember some of our common experience as well as to celebrate what's coming.

He gave me a copy of his new script: "When Struggle Gave Improvisation the Blues." I'm reading it now. It's a vision of how the world was when time was, a very distinctive and characteristic Blackwell vision of the 1950's in America and the struggles of so many to build a better future. Their sacrifices, their gifts to the rest of us.

It's told in powerful poetry and jazz and dance and song and story, by a cast of eight or nine or twelve or however many are needed and want to be involved, the way Blackwell's "big pieces" always are, and it's fluid and open and deeply moving the way his works tend to be; but I don't know how it ends, as I haven't finished it yet. Something for the remainder of the day.

The idea of Redemption was always part of the mystique of Martin Luther King, Jr. The point being, of course, that the nation desperately needed redemption. So many false starts and dashed hopes, destroyed lives, absent futures due to America's Original Sin of chattel slavery and the ongoing efforts to suppress the liberties and human dignities of the slaves' descendants -- and so many others as well.

Art -- whether in performance or by some other means -- can be and often is a powerful redemptive force especially for individuals, but in the case of Martin Luther King the quest for redemption went far beyond the individual. His legacy is profound, but it is incomplete.

Over at Crooks and Liars, Richard EJ Eskow has written as extensive an examination of just how incomplete that legacy is as I've seen anywhere, and it is something I think we can all benefit from internalizing. We all have so very much farther to go to realize King's dream.

Even the worst among us seem to be moving toward the Light. I know, it seems impossible, but the signs are there. The armor of the Highest of the Mighty is cracking. They know they can't maintain the rest of creation in their thrall, for they are too frail and they know too little to pose as gods who walk among us much longer.

"Getting Past Self" (2006) by Charles Curtis Blackwell

Getting Past Self

Press Play

The Uselessness of Our Aristocrats

2012-01-14T05:36:00.000-08:00

While the Obama regime has made incalculable unforced errors that have kept our many overseas wars of aggression going -- indeed, expanded some of them -- restricted our liberties, perpetuated our Endless Recession, and made more and more people's lives as miserable and controlled as possible, even though a handful of predators in banking and finance and vulture capital continue to prosper mightily, the prospect of putting up another Republican Aristo against Obama -- someone who is arguably a Man of the People (if somewhat of a traitor to his class nonetheless) -- is looking more and more like a bizarre spectacle. Yet it may have an upshot no one has adequately anticipated.

Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee presumptive has been under a surprising level of attack from fellow Rs for his "vulture capitalism" period at Bain Capital during which he amassed an enormous fortune, much of it on the backs of... lesser people... whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed. That's how people of his ilk make money. They do leveraged buyouts, then strip the assets of the acquisitions. It's been going on for decades, Mitt got into the game early, made a huge fortune through debt finance and asset stripping, destroying many people's lives along the way, and he -- like all the rest of his ilk -- seems to be utterly oblivious to the wreckage he left behind. It's not his problem, you see. Someone else can clean up the mess.

This is the general attitude of our entire Aristocratic Class, not just Mittens. They seem completely incapable -- as a class -- of recognizing, let alone addressing, the level of human misery they cause in pursuit of endless riches above all else.

It's pathological.

Of course we've seen it all before, not that long ago, either. It was present in both Bush reigns, and of course it was the consistent attitude during the Go-Go 80's; the Lesser People simply don't matter. They are on the whole an undifferentiated, dehumanized mass, resources to be exploited and discarded at will.

This is the general attitude of our Overclass to the rest of humanity. They simply do not have a human connection with anyone, nor do they have a care for anyone, outside their own class, and more and more it is clear (as in the case of Mitt), they have no knowledge of anyone outside their own class. Nor do they want any, nor are they able to empathize with anyone at all, let alone those "beneath" them.

Unfortunately, this pathology is like an infection. Much as craziness and insanity are communicable with enough exposure, so is the complete lack of empathy that characterizes so much of our Aristocracy. It can spread all too easily through a population at large, and when it does, we see the kind of violent, crabbed and misshapen societies the United States has largely become -- one that celebrates the misfortune of others and one that punishes those who can't abide or keep up with the course of selfishness and greed.

Ordinary people may tolerate this state of affairs for a while, may even become temporary advocates for it, if they believe they are somehow better off under the rule of cruelty (cf: Fascist/Nazi era in Europe as example). But inevitably they awaken to the fact that they have been under assault and have been robbed all this time.

And they rise up. It is inevitable. And as we saw so many times last year -- still going on this year, but not getting quite as much press -- the Rule of Aristocratic Cruelty reacts with more repression and cruelty, and more and more physical and psychological violence, trying to force the masses to accept their sorry fate. In other words, their only response to the outcry against their cruelty is more cruelty more widely applied.

A more responsible Aristocracy (or at least one that wants to survive) listens to the outcry of the masses and adjusts its behavior accordingly to accommodate the pleas for redress they receive.

But ours, somewhat bewilderingly, does not. Pleas aren't even heard, let alone accommodated -- or rejected for that matter. Theft and looting, exploitation and destruction by the Overclass is more and more brazen; control or punishment only applies to those "below" never to those on top, while just being "below" becomes a punishable offense.

Our putative Aristocrats -- the Overclass -- has no regard at all for the interests of those beneath them, and they have only a marginal concern over how far they can push the lesser people and how fast.

The Overclass only serves itself, but its members are also in fierce and unrelenting competition with one another for pre-eminence. They cheerfully steal from one another, in other words, as well as from those beneath them. They seem to be hard-wired for theft and looting and destruction and they can't help themselves. It is an identity thing for them.

And here we have Mittens as the perfect example. He displays no conscience, no empathy, no consideration -- at all -- for any of those he has brought misery to over his long years as a titan of finance. If they have "problems", oh well, they need to bootstrap themselves like he did, suck it up and go on. Or not. It's not his "problem." Someone else can deal with it -- or no one. It doesn't matter. Because those who don't make it under his scheme of cruelty... don't matter.

"It's Capitalist Free Enterprise, my friends."

Yes, it is.

The more he goes down this path, the more people will associate their misery with what he is attempting to get them to celebrate: Capitalist Free Enterprise. And the more they will ultimately reject it.

Under the circumstances, full on Socialism is looking more and more promising. Or something else. But not Plunder Capitalism and the Useless Aristocracy that goes with it -- such as Mittens believes in as his secular religion. No more of that, thankyouverymuch.

Obama does not get off scot free by any means. His role, though, has always been quite different: to serve the interests of the Overclass fully while managing the masses. I've mentioned this many times before: Obama spent years auditioning for his role as Manager of the Masses, and he demonstrated just how well he was able to do it in Berlin, where he attracted a crowd of hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, who listened to him speechify about... nothing. He held them in thrall, and what he said to them didn't matter at all. Later, at his inauguration, he was able to enthrall millions who attended in bitter cold, while telling them that they would have to sacrifice and suffer in order to get through the rough times ahead.

Little did they realize they were being told they must suffer and sacrifice for the benefit of those who had been robbing them and destroying their lives, but there you are. That's how our system works.

Obama has been on message ever since. His premise is that "things could be worse," and they will be worse, guaranteed, if those Other People are ever put back in charge.

In other words, there is No Better Future for You. You will drudge along till all your goods and chattel are used up or stolen, and you'll feel grateful that things didn't get any worse than they did. That is your lot and your fate. Rejoice!

And yet, more and more obviously, the Aristocrats of Cruelty who rule us are seen as the useless parasites they are, burdens the rest of us can no longer afford.

The test for Obama now is whether he can keep the masses under control. So far, he's done surprisingly well at it. His real test will be whether he can manage the coming rebellions.

Needless to say, people like Mitt are too busy plundering to be bothered...

Will "Vulture Capitalist" Have Legs?

2012-01-13T15:05:00.000-08:00

I'm enjoying the spinning and skewering going on over Romney's Bain Capital Thing. It's a remarkable development so early in the political season. I can't help being a little cynical about it, though, because it feels like the entire Republican Establishment and their media handmaidens are trying like anything to defuse the issue for the general election by getting it out in the open now -- and then "pushing back".

This is a time-honored political tactic, and the Rs are sometimes brilliant at it. Say an R candidate has some sort of weakness -- they did it with Bush the Lesser all the time -- and have some other R point it out ("He cain't tawk that English so good..."). Or make a big deal out of his many failed businesses. Whatever. The point is to bring these perceived weaknesses into the discussion early and then transform them into strengths: "He's a Man of the People! He's someone I could have a beer with!" Yadda, yadda. And it works; well, it works well enough to snow some of the people some of the time (and of course all of the Haute Media all of the time) and that's good enough to gain enough votes to steal an election.

That's why I'm not at all convinced that Gingrich and Perry are really trying to stop or bring down Romney -- the Nominee Designate of the Republican Party and Our New Emperor In Waiting -- with all the "Vulture Capitalist" yabbering. No, not at all.

It's still very early in the political season, for example. The "Vulture Capitalist" charge is one that the Dems have made, but not until Romney was the nominee would it make any sense or have any impact. Romney won't be nominated for months and months. So the Rs -- being the marketeers that they are -- bring up candidate weaknesses now so as to counter them and defuse them early, before the Dems can use them.

Romney is said to be pushing back now, defending Capitalism and the Free Market and God and everything else, and also, too, defending Bain Capital, for no matter how bad some of their results were, "That's Free-Market Capitalism, my friends."

And so it is.

If the Dems were a Leftist party, which they are not, they would be hammering away at this kind of Truth Telling relentlessly -- "yes, this is what capitalism is, this is what it does, and this is why we're in this economic pickle now." But they won't do that, first because the Rs are doing it, so they don't have to. Then because the Dem Establishment is right there with Romney. Got his back they do.

The problem for the People brought on by Vulture Capitalism and leveraged buy outs and all the rest of the kit bag of tricks used by the financial cliques are very well known. They have been denounced and celebrated in song and story and endless reporting in the alternative media for decades.

Bush the Lesser was a Vulture, too, you know. We have been down this path before and we know where it leads.

But Dems go to Harvard Business School, too, you know; and they absorb the same predatory notions as the Rs; the Chicago School is no slouch in arguing on behalf of the wrecking crews, either. Putting controls on the activities of Bain or any of the other outfits set up to loot and plunder and wreak economic havoc is not in the policy cards no matter who you put in the Oval Office.

That Romney was/is one of the plunderers and looters may ultimately have no political legs at all; Obama's policies, after all, certainly won't control the likes of them.

But still, it's good to see this stuff out in the open, highlighted in the media, despite all the spin and lies that surround it (NPR).

People have a visceral revulsion to harm this sort of finance capitalism does to them. But it harms everyone. It is what causes the constant Crisis of Capitalism. We know that.

Maybe this time, we'll get furious enough to stop it.

Mark Morford Explains It All For You

2012-01-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

Mark Morford has been tweaking, tantalizing and teasing readers of the San Francisco Chronicle for long years now. Not as long as Herb Caen, to be sure, but still...

His columns were among the very few 'mainstream' media effusions that showed any real insight into what was really going on back in the early days of my involvement in the internet, despite the author's, shall we say, unique vision of Things As They Are.

Many of those who found him back in those days were delighted, and then they weren't so delighted any more because Morford does have a schtick, and unless you're up for it, it can be a bit much after a while, and then you crave it, can't get enough of it, and you want to go to San Francisco and take Yoga from him, and then you don't, and then you're all confused and you run around screaming while he twists himself into yet another impossible yoga position and laughs a celestial laugh that makes you stop and wonder... is this all really a joke?

All of it?

No!

So it goes on like that.

And then he comes up with something like "The Rapture Is For Cowards (or is it Ninnies?)" and you know he is dead on, spot on tuned into the Universe in ways you can only imagine being if you could ever get through your current karmic debt, which you won't, so just get used to it, ease up, and learn to laugh or cry or anything besides whatever it is you're doing now.

Verily, from the Mayans to the Greeks, the pagans to the nutball evangelicals, New Age hippies to the witches of Burning Man, every tribe has their ache for transformation, for a final, orgasmic release into the Great Void. Right now it's freshly coupled to a feeling that 2012 is particularly pregnant and tangy, more potentially explosive than any other year to date. Indeed, the 2012 cataclysm is an idea that's been hovering around the collective consciousness for so long, there just might be something to it. You think?

Do you want signs? There are signs. Global warming has accelerated, unprecedented methane plumes are blasting out of the Arctic seabed to scare the horses, nature is in increasingly furious uproar, we are running out of maple syrup, frankincense, whooping cranes, Adderall and those exquisite nautilus seashells, which is just all kinds of depressing. Extinctions are happening faster than we can count, and we can count pretty fast.

Yes, well. It couldn't be truer. But so what?

It gets worse. Or maybe better. Did you know every animal species on earth is (at least partially) gay? That nearly every species we know enjoys homosexual sex for all sorts of reasons, many of which we don't even understand and most of which would make any evangelical shake with muddled rage? True. Don't tell the Tea Party. Or rather, do, and watch their faces explode.

Then there's dark matter, the stuff that, along with dark energy, makes up 96 percent of the entire universe. It's completely unknown. Inexplicable. Baffling. For all we know it's made of chocolate lubricant, tequila blanco and invisible alien spermatozoa and it's pouring down right now to impregnate all girls named Tiffany and Dakota and Caitlin. Apocalypse!

Oh my God, India and China! They're running out of water, for one thing. And when both dry up completely they will hop in their strange little cars and drive toward each other at breakneck speed, daring the other other to chicken out first so the other can race in and steal all their incense and/or iPods and sell them for Evian. I read that somewhere.

And?

Here's the wonderful thing: Peel back the uppermost layer of any apocalypse fantasy, 2012 prophecy or doomsday scenario, remove the lunk-headed shards related to zombies, aliens, gold bars, Ebola outbreaks and locust invasions, strip away the tremulous Christian pathos and evangelical illiteracy, and you're left with one stunning, increasingly intense desire for ecstatic awakening, writ large.

Put it this way: The real reason 2012 is so frontloaded? Because we've loaded it. Because there really has been mind-boggling technological advancement, environmental breakdown, change in the karmic weather. The tang in the air is a real tang. We are not the same planet, the same species, the same spiritual lugs we once were. At least, not all of us.

It is very possible and very true that the window of opportunity for some sort of great spiritual leapfrog is finally opening wider than a tiny sliver of a crack. The real question is: What are you going to do about it? Or the bigger question still: Are you even ready?

See, this is this catch. This is the one thing all tribes agree on when it comes to rapturous spiritual transformations and awakenings, be it Jesus coming to hoover up your quivering soul or (more elegantly) a simple stepping into the sheer bliss of consciousness itself and swimming there for the rest of forever.

It's this: You gotta be ready. You gotta be aligned to it, attuned, have done a bit of the work. Simply put, you need to be awake.

And when Morford gets into a state like this, he might be on to something, for he is often content to spin yarn and smirk and leave it at that. Not this time.

2012 is here.

Now.

And:

it's all just seven billion angels dancing on the head of a pin of Shiva.

Well sure. But you knew that...

Read the whole thing. Ponder.

Envisioning That Better Future -- Six: The End of Wars of Aggression

2012-01-12T02:59:00.000-08:00

Apart from the fact that the notion that the United States does not engage in wars of aggression has always been a lie, the ease with which the US Government has become captivated by the current round of aggressive warfare since 2001 -- more than a decade now -- is truly shocking.

Wars of aggression have been refined to the point of nearly pinpoint liquidation of individuals at will (sorry about the continuing collateral damage, but we're working on it! Really!) -- by remote control, no less, operated by pimply faced boys and girls at video game terminals at Groom Lake, NV, for cripes sake -- but still, the notion that American Military Might can or should be "projected" willy-nilly, wherever and whenever Our Rulers and their owners and sponsors so determine without let or hindrance by even a whiff of International Law or Treaty or any barrier at all is still shocking to the conscience of anyone who still has a conscience after all these years of lies and propaganda about what is going on.

At first, it was obvious that the wars of choice and aggression that were being undertaken by Our Rulers, ostensibly in pursuit of so-called "enemy combatants" and rogue Terror States or what have you were actually no different than the Imperial Wars of Aggression practiced routinely during the colonial period of Western history when those who were weaker in the face of the aggressor colonialists were simply bulldozed into oblivion by the war machines assembled against them, their nations were demolished, and their things were stolen -- their wives and daughters right along with their cattle.

This was called "Spreading Civilization" back in the day, and propaganda mills churned out endless justifications for it, especially when the United States engaged in overseas empire building. Our Little Brown Brothers didn't stand a chance.

The war to subdue the Philippines that started in 1898 went on for more than a decade, with enormous slaughter of the Natives and destruction of much of the country's enduring social and political fabric, all to preserve a lie: that the United States was not building an Empire. The Natives deserved what they got for resisting the imposition of authority by their Betters.

The horror of what went on in the Philippines to establish the American Imperial presence shocked the consciences of many Americans at the time -- leading to many excuses from the Government, much "soul searching," periodic "investigations" and reports to Congress, and the simultaneous consolidation of American authority over the islands, its resources and its peoples. It was one of the most brutal colonial conquests of a very brutal colonial era, but "good works" (schools and hospitals!) were offered to the surviving Natives as modest compensation for what they had lost.

And of course there was a handy class of already "civilized" Natives (thanks to the Spanish former colonial masters) who were just as happy to transfer their loyalty from Spain to the US as long there was a benefit in doing so. In those days, American policy was to make sure there would be a benefit to being... loyal subjects.

But Independence could not be denied forever; the Japanese attack and invasion of 1941-42 put the lie to American invincibility in the Pacific even if Japan was ultimately defeated. An independent Philippines was one of the more immediate consequences of WWII in the Pacific, but of course there would always be strings attached... American military bases, for example, and American sponsored dictatorships running things from Manila on behalf of American interests.

That lasted as long as it could, but not forever. It can't last forever because the whole construct is based on a lie: The US doesn't seek Empire (it does); the US does not seek to rule overseas (it does; latterly through proxies); the US is beneficent and benign believing only in democracy and human rights(in your dreams!)

Even as they shook free of American Imperialism, the peoples of the Philippines found themselves more heavily indebted to American interests. It's not at all clear that even now they have achieved the level of independence the initial rebellion of 1898 sought.

And the Philippines was only one of America's numerous colonial/imperial expansions during the late 19th - early 20th Centuries. There were plenty of others, but the Imperial cause was temporarily derailed by the repeated World Wars, the economic Depressions, and the advent of the Soviet Union as chief rival of the United States on the world stage.

Nevertheless, the United States has been organized as a domestic Imperial State since the adoption of the Constitution. Once that domestic continental empire was consolidated through negotiations, subterfuge, strategy and many, many wars of aggression -- and of course a Civil War -- sights were set overseas almost immediately; Hawaii being the first victim. Taking over the remnants of the Spanish Empire was in some was a brilliant maneuver. In other ways, it was a moral catastrophe.

All of this had been worked out during the period of domestic expansion and expropriation. The ways and means to Empire through wars of aggression against a weaker opposition were integral to the American character.

But after World War II, the notion of any nation having the right to pursue wars of aggression for colonial or any other purpose was discredited and indeed made illegal under international law. Nazis were tried and hanged for such things.

The wars that the United States engaged in after the end of WWII -- principally in Korea and Vietnam -- were justified under the rubric of "defense" of allies who had been attacked by "aggressive" neighbors. But of course, this was fiction, too, as the "neighbors" were created by the very external forces that then engaged in the wars. It was a sophisticated means of continuing wars of aggression, and it failed dismally in the swamps of the Mekong Delta among other places.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, seems to have released the hounds of aggressive war once again. This time around, it seems that the United States and its allies are intent on going back to those parts of the former British Empire where the Lessons of Liberty didn't quite "take" -- Iraq, obviously, and Afghanistan; but a good deal of Eastern Africa and parts of the Persian Gulf and Middle East as well. Most of the places now under the aggressive gaze of American forces are ones that failed to become integrated under the British Imperial umbrella back in the day, and it seems that the main point of the current round of aggressive wars against them is to whip them into shape for proper rule and exploitation under some Native version of Anglo-American "law."

That it is being done on the same basis as colonial wars and imperial expansions of the past is grotesque; that's exactly what led to the world wars and other catastrophes of the 20th Century. Is this not understood?

Apparently not. And why not?

Apparently, Our Ruling Classes cannot see their own failures except through the prism of an arch-rival, such as the Soviet Union was back in the day, that held a constant critical mirror up to the failures of the West and pointed out what frauds the Western "democracies" were.

The collapse of the Soviet Union took that mirror away, and despite the efforts of the current rulers of the Russian Federation to hold their cracked and de-silvered mirror up to highlight the hypocrisy of the West, there is no real global rival to Anglo-American Imperial hegemony these days. Nations like China and India, that should be more than a little interested in using a cudgel against Anglo-American Imperial adventurism and their consequent wars of aggression are far more interested in their own domestic development (which is in hyperdrive at the moment) than they are in curbing Anglo-American excesses overseas.

In fact, I suspect they approve of much of the aggressive warfare against uppity Natives that the Anglo-American alliance has been engaged in, for in the case of China (to some extent, India as well) they are financing it. If they see a danger to their own interests from the aggression of the Neo-Imperialists, they aren't showing it.

Yet it is vital for the United States to pull out of its current aggressive international posture, just as it is vital for Britain to do the same. There is no sign whatever of its happening, no matter the calls from the People and wide swaths of the intellectual communities to do so.

The Ruling Class neither listens to nor cares what the People "think." They only care about what the People DO; and so far, they have seen nothing that they feel they need fear from the People anywhere.

Certainly nothing -- yet -- equivalent to the Global Communist Conspiracy they once trembled before and made some positive accommodations to.

Yet there is nevertheless a global rising against the unfettered continuation of Neo-Imperialism, against the arbitrary imposition of authority, against the indignities and exploitation that are inevitable in the dictatorships propped up by the Neo-Imperialists, and against Neo-Imperialist indignity and exploitation as well.

People everywhere are saying "No!" -- but they haven't figured out yet how to stop it.

That is going to take a good deal more thought, struggle, experiment and failure to discover, but it will be discovered. For Peoples everywhere know that the Better Future they seek can only come once the new round of imperial wars of aggression are ended.

Envisioning That Better Future -- Five: The End of Cruelty

2012-01-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

The United States has become one of the most outrageously cruel societies thanks in part to a long tradition of physical cruelty and brutal excess -- going back at least to the earliest Colonial times -- but especially due to the determination of our Ruling Classes to develop and impose as cruel a regime as they believe they can get away with as a consequence of the 9/11 attacks. Not that there weren't many signs of what was to come well before those attacks.

Cruelty has become so ingrained in the American consciousness that the hundreds or thousands of domestic applications of cruelty by Authority every day in this country go practically unnoticed by the majority of people. Most don't know what's going on because they don't see it directly; those who do have some idea of what's going on may only have the vaguest idea of the scope of the problem, and many of them don't care about cruelty to others in any case.

Domestic cruelty is only part of the problem, however. Our international behavior, especially during our nation's now routine wars of aggression abroad, is less and less distinguishable from that of many aggressor nations of history, to the point where shocking the conscience (and lies) has become a widespread military tactic used by our allies as well.

It's shameful, deeply morally wrong, and it is ultimately unsustainable.

Any Better Future we envision will have deal with American cruelty and take the necessary steps to curb and then end it.

The immediate problem in dealing with the topic is that cruelty is pervasive in American society. Where do you start getting a handle on it and eventually getting rid of it?

So many Americans have been conditioned to accept the cruel treatment of The Other that in many cases, they don't even recognize it when they witness it. And I've been struck during the Occupy Movement at the general passivity of Occupy crowds in the face of often egregious brutality and cruelty by police forces all over the land.

The crowds may or may not make loud objections to the applications of force they witness, but most would never intervene. Few have any idea that they have the power to transform the cruelty or brutality they are witnessing or being subjected to, such as Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas did in shaming the NYPD last October.

Our entire prison/industrial complex is suffused with cruelty; but so is much of law enforcement in general. The entire injustice system relies on its own cruel instincts to oppress, repress, and suppress those it deems threats -- by excesses of criminalization, disparate enforcement, discriminatory sentencing, and on and on and on and on.

The entire system is an abomination and must be abolished and started over. It's well past the point of effective reform.

But there is more. The current hot candidate for the Republican nomination for President (and already designated successor to Obama as far as the media is concerned) Mitt Romney has let loose any number of apparently unconsciously cruel statements, from the fact that he likes to fire people to the absurd statement that he's "unemployed" too, that I've decided he's probably dogwhistling very effectively to the heartless Republican base. All the other candidates on the Republican side ten to be very open about their cruel intentions, particularly Gingrich, but certainly not limited to him. Romney-the-Moderate (so he's characterized) must communicate more... subtly. Not an easy task for him, given his history.

But the entire political system operates on a premise of cruelly disregarding the needs and interests of the People in order to serve the needs and interests of the High and the Mighty. Republicans have no lock on that kind of cruelty. It is ever-present throughout the system, and Democrats have developed remarkably effective methods of cruelly dismissing and denouncing their own base of support.

Corporate cruelty is too well known by too many people.

We could go on.

The point is that any vision of a Better Future -- that's going to mean anything to the People -- must end the systematic cruelty and brutality that is a paramount feature of American society in almost all its aspects. It's not just physical cruelty, either.

How to do that is still an open question. But nothing can be done without more widespread recognition of what's going on. The thousands of highly public arrests and hundreds of injuries connected with the Occupy Movement, together with routinely cruel treatment in custody -- and the greater levels of testimony about it -- are having a cumulative effect on consciousness and consciences.

It's a start...

Momentary Change of Pace: Just Because -- Laura del Sol and Cristina Hoyos in "Carmen"

2012-01-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

Long ago I posted a couple of scenes from Carlos Sauras's film of his Flamenco version of "Carmen," a truly brilliant 1983 movie that has become practically legendary in certain circles.

This has got to be one of the most extraordinary dance sequences ever filmed, and there are many in this movie. I'd say it is like nothing else ever put on film, but it isn't -- because there are several Carlos Saura flamenco movies floating around, including "El Amor Brujo", "Bodas de Sangre", and "Salome" that are artistic knock-outs.

Saura's brilliance, of course, is in the transformation of a very ancient, tradition-bound and specialized dance form into a story telling form for film, and in his stunning staging (especially for "Carmen").

The larger point being "We're not really stuck on the treadmill repeating the same things over and over; we can use so very much from the past to create something new and startling and wonderful."

It's a message we need to keep hearing.

Envisioning That Better Future -- Four: Educating Ourselves

2012-01-10T05:27:00.000-08:00

Everyone should have the right to -- and access to -- a free public education all the way through advanced degrees if they're up to it. This right should not in any way be compromised or questioned, any more than a right to adequate and accessible health care should be.

I got an education myself about just what has happened to public education in this country during the early weeks of the Occupy Movement. I literally had no idea how bad the economic situation was, especially for college students. I had no idea that a public college eduction now cost so much and that the majority of the financial burden was being placed directly on the shoulders of students and their families, and that those costs could neither be paid off through employment (there were and are no jobs for millions) or be discharged through bankruptcy.

This situation is simply debt-slavery for many, many millions. There is no escape.

The economics are one side of the dilemma faced by so many modern students; the other side is the deplorable -- unconscionable -- quality of public education itself. I've been aware that the quality of education has been on a declining path for many a long year, but I was oblivious to how bad things had gotten.

One of the important aspects of public education in the Pre-Reagan Era was learning how to learn -- which led to life-time learning whether or not one engaged in formal research and study. One learned the techniques of learning fairly early in one's education, and so one was always learning; no topic or study was out of bounds, one pursued one's interests as one saw fit and information was available.

But that aspect of education seems to be gone now. Students don't learn how to learn any more, they learn discreet topics, and then only partially. They don't follow their own interests, they are channeled into particular occupational categories and needs. Nor, shockingly, do they learn critical thinking skills; instead, they are often taught to simply accept what they are told by Authority and often to follow commands of Authority unquestioningly.

Good heavens! What happened?

So in addition to paying an arm and a leg -- and their firstborn -- for the privilege of being educated at all, students are having to put up with absolutely crap educational standards that don't even begin to advance or support the notion of learning as a good thing in and of itself.

Clearly, the Powers That Be don't consider adequate public education -- especially higher education -- to be a public good at all. They see it as a privilege for an elite, not for the common people at all.

One of the primary impetuses for the Occupy Revolution has been the crabbed and extraordinarily costly -- and ultimately deceitful -- nature of what passes for a modern public education. Students provided much of the energy for the rising in Wisconsin last winter, and students and recent graduates have been at the forefront of the Occupy Rising throughout. They are the ones who have seen their futures stolen right out from under them, and they have been the ones bearing the brunt of the repression as well. But then I'm coming to the realization that that's been their lot in life all along.

Repression is the hallmark of modern public education.

And that has to change fundamentally.

The Internet has provided a means -- that previously could only be imagined -- to provide a free and quite public education for the masses that includes such things as learning how to learn and critical thinking that have been long absent from the classroom.

What it doesn't and can't provide is the classroom itself. One of the things I discovered in the early weeks of the Occupy Movement was that classrooms could be spontaneously generated and that people would almost automatically attend -- because they truly wanted to learn, were almost desperate to do so. And they wanted to do it in direct connection with others of like mind.

How to translate that desire and those resources into the education of the Better Future we envision is still a work in progress, but there is no doubt that completely overhauling and revising education in this country is a key factor in the Rebellion that's taking place.

Education is the core project of the Revolution.

It is through education that we create the Future we want to see.

Envisioning That Better Future -- Three: Caring for One Another

2012-01-10T04:35:00.000-08:00

Americans have long been conditioned to be selfish, self-obsessed, self-worshippers. We are trained to think of ourselves as individuals, unique and important, filled with potential. It is our duty as human beings to realize our individual glory...

But often that conditioning goes against our nature -- which is to be nurturing and caring, cooperative and helpful, generous and kind and loving (well, pretty much). Human beings, for example, are hard wired toward family and clan, quite tribal in fact, and while often disparaged or denounced, it's not ordinarily a bad thing to be "tribal" at all. People need one another for survival. We are sometimes pack animals, too. Again, it's human nature.

One cannot easily be selfish or self-obsessed and care fully for another human being. Yet an innate sense of self-worth is necessary in order to give fully of oneself to another. If one's self-worth is lacking, on the other hand, one is forever working to build it up or to find some validation from someone or some thing outside oneself, rather than giving to another or caring for another -- or caring for others in a more global sense. But self-worth (ie: "diginty") is not the same as self-obsession or self-absorption.

There are always predatory characters among any population, and sometimes they are necessary sorts to have around. But the trick in any civil society is to curb and control the predators among the people, to channel their instinct need to exploit others toward useful and productive ends.

Yet we live in a nation that is largely built on predation and exploitation. Curbing predators or channeling their instincts has never been a high social priority, except in the case of limiting who among us may freely predate on nature or others.

Others are naturally -- or are conditioned to be -- individualists, independent to a certain extent from the society of the "tribe." Individualists aren't necessarily predators, however, and they should not be conflated with them. Individualists can easily care for others, whereas predators feed on others -- both literally and figuratively.

We've become a nation that leaves "caring" largely up to professionals. This has had a contradictory effect on society. The skill-level of "caring professionals" is highly developed, but their ability to actually care for or about any individual or their extended circle is limited and in some cases, nonexistent. They can apply outstanding skills to the problem of "care" but they may not truly care at all about those in their care.

Depersonalization is part of professionalization in just about any field. In the caring professions, depersonalization is considered necessary in order to survive the enormous emotional stresses encountered, as well as to be able to serve as many clients as possible and thus ensure substantial income (to pay off all those debts incurred in order to become a professional.)

The outcomes in the aggregate seem to be better under a professionalized caring regime -- in that, within certain boundaries, people live longer for example. Well, some people do. Life expectancy is declining in some segments of the population for reasons that are not entirely clear -- except that if you cannot afford to pay for professional care, too bad so sad for you.

People can surprisingly easily relearn to care for one another simply by being in situations that require it. For example, if professional care is withdrawn or unavailable, many people will instinctively take up the slack and do what they can on behalf of others. In most family relationships, often especially in extended families, caring for one another is automatic. Of course there are plenty of dysfunctional families where that doesn't happen and some kind of intervention may be needed, but on the whole people seem quite able to lend a hand to another when necessary or called upon to do so, and for the most part, they want to.

Providing opportunity and support for caring for one another must be part of whatever we envision for a better future. We must be fearless about it, and be unwilling to hand over all responsibility for care to a specialist class of professionals. Professional care givers may be desirable in a modern society, but their role should be one of support and advocacy rather than principal organizers and providers of care. In other words, a subsidiary role rather than primary.

This also means ratcheting down individualism and controlling predation and building rather than destroying family and social interactions and strength.

Building family and social strength is one thing Mormons do remarkably well all in all, and it's one reason for their success over time and space. Mormons are socialized to look out for one another and to care for one another in their own families and well beyond them, and they are provided plenty of support to do so, some of it skilled professional support. They do not by any means suppress individualism, but they don't rely on it as a basis for their society, and they are very careful to channel predation and predatory instincts and to protect one another from predation from outside the faith.

Some other religious communities or denominations follow somewhat the same pattern of social organization and it is one worth studying, respecting and perhaps emulating. It is quite different from the atomization and winner-take-all competition so characteristic of the society we have become.

Moving into the future, we need to recapture a sense of mutual interest and caring that is natural to the human species without necessarily attributing it to religious motives or spiritual beliefs. It is human nature -- which for the most part should be celebrated for its own sake.

Envisioning That Better Future -- Two: Debt Crisis

2012-01-09T10:35:00.001-08:00

Everyone knows the horrors of The Debt Crisis -- because everyone is exposed to the caterwauling of the media about it every day.

But it is a curious thing. Nearly all the caterwauling is about Government Debt. "Saddling our grandchildren, yadda yadda. Must cut Social Security, must privatize Medicare!!! Debt!!!!"

Yet household debt in the United States is enormous -- what passed for "economic growth" prior to the crash was all fueled with mountains of debt. But we're led to believe that nothing at all can be done to relieve household debt, in fact, in order to revive a consumer economy, personal and household debt would have to increase substantially -- because employers cannot raise wages (perish the thought) to create demand and thus revive the economy.

Households actually have a much greater debt burden than they realize. Not only do they have their mortgage and credit card and vehicle debts (as well as a host of other debts, like student loans and so on) to deal with, they are also saddled with the entire debt burden of government's guarantees to financiers that their gambling debts will also be paid off, in many cases, paid off multiple times.

By you and by me.

Government debt pales by comparison.

While the banksters and financiers have a free ride at your expense and mine -- and keep right on gambling with the proceeds -- American households get buried under even more debt to satisfy the insatiable maw of the vampire squid. Even as they try to get away...

Years ago, at the outset of this Endless Recession, I proposed Household Debt Relief as the primary tool to deal with the economic crash. I suggest that each household be provided with $80,000 to $100,000 for the specific purpose of paying down debt, energy saving home improvements and/or the purchase of a new energy responsible vehicle.

At the time, the idea was greeted with shock bordering on horror. Moral hazard! You can't do that! When I pointed out that Debt Relief for the High and Mighty was the current policy, but none for the ordinary folks, and that policy would ensure the perpetuation of the Recession, the outrage at the very idea of interfering in the marketplace at the household level was ratcheted up. This was even before Santelli's rant -- over the idea of providing a "bail out" to home owners.

Many more now seem to realize that unless there is substantial household debt relief, this Recession really will be Endless. Providing so much relief at the top and nothing at the bottom ("You can declare bankruptcy!" And in many cases, that won't discharge or mitigate debt at all; thanks Joe Biden!) means that the economy simply can't recover. The High and the Mighty hoard their wealth and demand ever more -- and gamble with the rest. Even the normal economy -- at ground level -- is stalled, and yet the high flyers are gambling with abandon. Speculation (with all the 'free money' the financial class has been given) is driving up prices, wages and benfits are falling, debt among the Lesser People is growing, all is not right with the world.

I sometimes think there may be a moment of grace on the horizon when our rulers actually come to their senses and realize Household Debt Relief is a necessity, and they actually do it.

This being an election year, you would think so.

But so far...

Nada.

So what do you do? The trick -- which is being recognized more and more widely -- is to Stop Paying.

Just stop.

If enough people do that, the effect on the financial exploitation system could be monumental and could easily lead to the kind of household debt relief that has been needed for many years.

Cindy Sheehan has made it something of a crusade to stop paying income tax, and the tax protest is a long American tradition. Author Nicholas Carroll has taken the debt bull by the horns full on with his book, "Walk Away From Debt for A Better Future", but that idea, too, of course has been around for a long time. Leaving debt behind was one of the major impetuses for Western Expansion, and debt was a major factor in driving millions out of Europe to come to America.

"Strategic Default/Bankruptcy" is one of the prime methods Our Betters have used for ages to ensure their debts never overwhelm them. They do it all the time in good times and bad; it is part of the process of doing business -- and when Our Betters do it, it is generally a deliberate form of screwing small fry creditors (sometimes big creditors, too) so as not to have to pay them in full.

It's been working for the Big Guys, so they see no reason not to do it.

When ordinary householders got into the game, however, with the real estate crash, that old "moral hazard" thing raised its wrinkly head. For ordinary people to do what the Big Guys have long depended on to cancel/restructure debts was loudly denounced as "immoral" and "evil," if not patently illegal.

I tended to share that point of view until I learned that many of the mortgages that were being foreclosed were being paid off multiple times, that in some places, even after the mortgage is paid through various means, the debtor can still be liable for the entire amount (thus paying off a mortgage that's already been paid off), that some student debt is not cancelable at all making the student debtor liable for the debt potentially for the rest of their lives and so on.

The issue is straightforward: Americans are being ripped off and enserfed by debt, in some cases by debt that cannot be discharged. Furthermore, the only way American consumers have been able to prop up the economy is through boatloads of debt, piled upon more debt, all of which enriches the Highest of the Mighty, while the ordinary schlubb is lucky to be able to maintain a modest lifestyle.

It's insane.

Unless the household debt crisis is addressed, the real economy is going to continue to falter and in many places decline while the false or financial economy is likely to continue to soar.

If public officials will not address the household debt crisis (I thought for a while they would as an election year bone) then people have to take matters into their own hands and stop paying.

It's risky to be sure, but if enough people stop paying simultaneously, there is literally nothing creditors can do about it; and if Authority tries to enforce creditor demands on tens or hundreds of millions of Americans all at once, "Revolution" is far too mild a word for what will happen.

So: get out from under the burden of debt -- yours and the gambling debts of the financial class -- by "walking away."

The model is somewhat like the Bank Funds Transfer last year on Guy Fawkes Day. Hundreds of millions of dollars were taken out of banks and put into credit unions on that day, and apparently the process is continuing -- if the flyers and inducements I get from my credit union are any indication. Take it a step farther and repudiate debt to the banksters as well.

Envisioning That Better Future -- One: Living Well With Less

2012-01-09T06:18:00.001-08:00

Stories are going around that "manufacturing is back" in the United States. Apparently manufacturers are hiring again -- at half the wages that industry workers were formerly paid.

As I've said many, many times on this blog and pretty much wherever else I've posted on the internets, it has been the policy of the United States Government from the beginning of this Endless Recession to force down wages and benefits for workers -- while at the same time boosting corporate profits and executive bonuses.

This has been clear as crystal from the get-go, but saying it is impolite, and because some people have not yet faced falling income and living standards, the fact that most Americans have been facing them for years doesn't register.

But it's hard to escape statistics. Half of Americans are now poor or officially low income, half. Almost a quarter of American children now live in poverty. The middle class is being decimated -- quite deliberately as a matter of policy from the top.

Maintaining high unemployment is policy.

Forcing down worker wages and benefits is policy.

Decimating the middle class is policy.

Supporting and expanding the power and reach of the Highest of the Mighty is policy.

And now that hiring is starting to occur in sectors that have long been written off, such as manufacturing, we're seeing wages paid that are no more than half of what was formerly paid in the same or similar sectors. Anybody who's been paying attention, though, has seen wages fall for many of those who have managed to stay employed during the Endless Recession, sometimes by half or more, but typically in the 10% to 25% range. And workers in practically every sector face constant pressure from the top to accept ever lower compensation.

This situation is not going to soon relent.

It is now customary.

We must "compete" globally, after all.

Universal poverty is the new standard to meet.

And they will call it The Greatest Expansion of Wealth in World History!!! Yay!

In fact, they have been calling it that for years. Of course, it IS an expansion of wealth for those on top.

So far, the global uprisings against these policies of governments (and their owners) have not been able to curb the trend, and some of the Revolutions that have taken place have turned out to principally serve the financiers and other wealth extractors they were intended to thwart.

What a mess.

Part of what has to be done in the process of envisioning is to recognize the way things really are, to understand what policies are really in place, and to effectively "shadow" -- if you will -- that reality with an alternative.

Wealth and poverty are relative things, not absolutes. One can get by on very little, one can live well -- and be generous to others -- on next to nothing, compared to the self-serving abundance of the hoarding elites.

In other words, impoverishment -- even the forced impoverishment of contemporary Americans -- is not necessarily a bad thing. Learning to live well on less can be good for the individual, for the community and for the environment. In fact, it is necessary and inevitable given the course of global climate change and other environmental factors.

We do well to envision a Better Future using fewer resources...

Those who have already been doing it for many years have an opportunity to step up to the challenge of helping and teaching others to do well with less. And the demonstration of how to do a great deal with far less money and material resources has begun in earnest all over the country. More of these demonstrations will be needed.

The next step toward envisioning and building a better future is to disconnect -- so far as possible -- from the financial sector that is sucking the life-blood out of communities and societies around the world.

We'll get to that in the next installment.

Envisioning That Better Future

2012-01-07T06:22:00.000-08:00

I had to do a Firefox update this morning, and this video was at the welcome page after I downloaded the update, and I thought, "My goodness, talk about 'Zeitgeist.' Mozilla gets it?!"

It's not a complete vision by any means. Come on, they're talking about the Internet here. Not the whole wide world, but the point is fundamental, scalable and universal.

An alternative path is necessary, one that is based in those values I keep hammering away at and which are more and more serving as the basis for blazing that alternative path.

DIGNITY, JUSTICE, COMMUNITY AND PEACE

It's not rocket science. It's basic.

So what are we talking about here?

I think it is more and more widely understood that our political system is not only broken, it may not be salvageable at all. This is true not just in the United States but seemingly throughout the Western World as apparently all Western governments have sold themselves out to the financiers and simply refuse to listen to or accommodate the interests and needs (let alone demands) of the People. It is universal, deliberate and cruel. We've seen how brutal and uncaring its implementation is at home and abroad. Even the apparently successful revolutions in North Africa led to... what looks like even more blind obedience to the financiers.

Under the circumstances, the People not only have no control over their own fate, they have no voice in the process of determining their Fate. The People are irrelevant or impediments in the current Western World political climate and a Ruling Class context which desperately seeks to serve the interests of a handful of predatory financial titans first and foremost.

Period.

So. What do you do? When government divorces itself so completely from the People, you have to go outside the government and political process; you literally don't have a choice. You cannot work within system without adhering to the strict protocols of service to finance first and foremost. You must become what you ostensibly oppose, or you will not be allowed to work within the system.

This is a concept that hasn't quite jelled among the masses, though it's getting there. There is still a wan hope that a responsive government is possible if only the "right" people are put in office. I would argue the hope is false; no matter who you put in office under the current system, the result will still be antithetical to the interests and needs of the People.

The Occupy Movement demonstrated an alternative path forward -- on the Principle of Just Do It -- and that was a necessary catalyst for taking control away from the unresponsive system that is in the process of consuming everything.

But my own experience therein showed the limitations of the alternatives as they were put forth.

The principles of Direct Democracy are grand, for example, but I found to my chagrin that the process is far more easily hijacked than it first appeared to be; locally, hijacking became routine, so frequent in fact that the point of having a democracy at all was lost, and those who were inclined to support the Movement and the process were driven away. This was partly due to the fact that the process itself was unfamiliar and scary to those of an authoritarian mindset. Initially, there was no informational or training support of any kind from New York or anywhere else; you had to figure it out on your own, or rely on incomplete or inappropriate documentation of the Puerta del Sol occupation in Madrid for guidance. That was literally all there was for those trying to figure out how to do this thing -- at least for those who were not already socialized to the process through various Anarchist practices that had been going on for years.

That meant that locally, practically no one had any idea at all what to do or how to do it, and those who did -- there were a few -- found themselves in the midst of swirling chaos and rivalry over process rather than things that mattered. Ultimately, what I feared would happen did happen. Those with an organizational facilitation background and mindset took over, with the active encouragement of Legal (way too many lawyers in this town!), and for all intents and purposes, the Movement collapsed. The Anarchists were driven out -- quite literally. "Go to Oakland!" And they did. A handful of diehards remain, primarily those who want to see the Movement become an integral part of the status quo -- in other words, one of the plethora of non-profit interest advocacy groups that already have seats at the all-important table.

There was never an Occupation here. The police crackdown was immediate and consistent, and it involved full-on riot response from the outset, even though there was never -- ever -- a hint of "riot" from the Occupiers. There were 130 arrests over the course of several months, all for failure to disperse, all but a few held in jail overnight for "violating curfew," and all charges were ultimately dismissed. Authority would not budge on the issue of "curfew." Thus there was never an encampment overnight -- at least not in the public square. No, it was an early morning to late at night presence, packing up each night and setting up each morning. The Plaza was never cleaner though! And night after night a few people would volunteer to be arrested for failure to disperse, and night after night the entire riot squad (dozens of police and vehicles) would be sent to the Plaza to arrest whoever had volunteered.

Every week, representatives of the Occupy would appear before the City Council to denounce their tactics and demand they honor the Constitution, and every week the Council would ignore them unless they went over their allotted two minutes -- in which case, on some occasions, officers would be ordered to arrest them.

Theater of the Absurd is putting it mildly.

With no real Occupation and no real Democracy, either, the local effort shuddered and eventually collapsed, though it isn't gone by any means. There are still a dozen or so activists who maintain an involvement and a periodic presence, and there are still some of those who raise a ruckus from time to time by highlighting various injustices that mean something to them. There is no Revolution here, however, and it is unlikely there will be in the short term.

The Revolution is being left to Oakland to figure out. And that's probably a good thing all in all.

Arguably, Oakland is still the center of energy for the Movement-cum-Revolution as a whole. If a way forward for the whole can be found, I think it will be developed there first and more fully than anywhere else.

And in Oakland, many, many options are being tested and refined. Occasional high profile efforts like the General Strike and the Port closures are like punctuation for the intensity of the grassroots efforts throughout the community to define and demonstrate as wide a range of alternatives and alternative systems as possible.

As for New York, it's quite a different situation. As soon as they adopted their Spokes Council model for operations, the Liberty Plaza encampment was brutally evicted (though with not quite as much drama as Oakland's eviction from Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza). That led to a situation of bifurcation -- there is a continuing development and demonstration process throughout the city, while there are continuing hit-and-run protests that get the police riled up and the People to witness.

The demonstration phase of the Occupations was to my mind their most important aspect, not the protests. But the demonstrations were all incomplete. It is only through fulfillment of the demonstration potential that any real change will occur.

Authority will attempt to subvert any successful demonstration.

Direct democracy and horizontal organization is the key, but it is something that cannot be left to chance to self-organize. It doesn't work that way. Most Americans have no familiarity with the process and have been propagandized and conditioned to reject it. They are conditioned to expect and accept an authoritarian hierarchy in all things and cannot easily adjust to something they have never seen or experienced in their lives -- and be expected to make it work.

The lesson from the Occupy experience is that direct democracy and horizontal organization can work, but only on a small scale among people of common interest and like minds who have been instructed in the process and have practiced it for some time. It isn't automatic or innate. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

No more than a few hundred people should be part of any direct democratic process; ideally, to my way of looking at it, when the number reaches a hundred or so, a split should be contemplated. It's not that more people cannot be accommodated -- we've seen functioning General Assemblies involving thousands -- it's that larger groups cannot be sustained in a direct democracy context. This was true in Athens back in the day too. Ultimately the system broke down -- in part because it had been corrupted (ie: hijacked), but also because it was too large, and too unrepresentative. Had the Athenean direct democracy been limited to say neighborhoods, or even smaller subsections of the city, and had all the People been included, it might have survived, and Athens might not have gone on its ultimately tragic Imperial course.

But that's as may be. The point is that Direct Democracy and Horizontal Organization -- both taken directly from Anarchist thought and practice, make no mistake about that -- do have a crucial role to play in envisioning that better future. Participation in a direct democratic process is one aspect (but not the only one) of Dignity.

Social and Economic Justice are further demonstrations that the Occupy Movement made but which have remained incomplete. Included of course is free and public education; in fact, that's the foundation of Social and Economic Justice, and I don't doubt that's why in many cases (prominently in New York) the educational and outreach programs of the Occupations and especially the libraries and independent media are targeted for destruction and elimination.

They are direct threats to the status quo.

Social Justice includes such things as providing for the least among us, sheltering and feeding the homeless, protecting the weak, elevating the poor. Taking care of one another.

This is something all the camps did, remarkably successfully, too. Whereas civic bodies and governments in general have more and more declined to serve those in need, and in fact in many cases have chosen to drive them out, saying they can't afford to serve those less able to take care of themselves or it's too difficult a problem for them to handle, most Occupations were able to do it with little or no problem at all, and if the Authorities had left them alone (or by god had supported them) these intractable issues might have been on their way to solution.

But no. The social justice demonstrations -- the kitchens, the shelters, the counseling, the emotional support, and so much else -- that are so very, very difficult, nay impossible, for civic bodies and run-of-the-mill non-profits to handle, were threatening to the status quo, and they had to be shut down. Yes we are able to take care of one another, and given the opportunity, we'll do it. But Authority won't have it.

Economic Justice is a more difficult kettle of fish, especially when there is the perception of a lot of money available. There were so many struggles over money -- and in some places a lot of theft -- that I thought the economic issue would ultimately be intractable. But people found ways around it -- in some cases by going without money, or using it to only the most limited extent.

The message being that money was a tool, but it wasn't a necessity if self-sufficiency was possible by other means. Occupations, for example, could operate relatively successfully without money directly. If people volunteered their services and took care of purchases on their own -- and donated goods and services rather than money to pay for goods and services -- Occupations did fine. Trouble was almost inevitable when substantial sums of money were on hand to pay for Occupation expenses. That certainly was the case in New York, but it also affected many other Occupations.

The idea that an urban activist community can be sustained without (much) money is difficult to comprehend, but some did it. And the demonstration that it can be done is threatening to the status quo. For example, locally, we have a plethora of homeless service non-profits, each an independent fiefdom, each with its highly paid staff and its corps of volunteers, each with its building or compound, its specialized services that have to be qualified for, each with its own policies and rules, each with its mission statement, each with its self-preservation priority. Each with a substantial budget, and each duplicating some aspect of every other. Every night, of course, a thousand or more homeless people are sleeping on the streets nevertheless.

In other words, despite the numerous agencies and organizations available to serve the homeless they miss as many as they reach (if not more so) and their primary function is to raise money to survive.

The Occupations took on the problem and said "We will serve the homeless" -- period. And this they did, in some communities offering food and shelter (and sometimes counseling) for nearly everyone who had been excluded for various reasons by the standard homeless service organizations, putting the lie the scarcity argument -- not enough money, not enough organizations, not enough staff, etc, to serve those in need.

There is no scarcity in material terms. If anything, there is an overabundance (despite the ongoing impoverishment of the population). It's the deliberate under-utilization of that abundance that makes economic justice so problematical.

Every Occupation was a temporary intentional community. That was one of the most striking aspects of the Occupations that may well have affected people far more strongly than anything else.

Where Occupations were actually able to establish an ongoing presence, the communities that spontaneously formed took on a serious but very celebratory aspect that was infectious. As is the case with any community, despite being "open" to all, these temporary intentional communities could not necessarily accommodate everyone for various reasons. Not everyone, in other words, "belonged." Sometimes exclusionary matters were handled quite bluntly; other times it was a much more subtle process of winnowing. But ultimately each community solidified -- but let's hope didn't fossilize. And those who may not have fit in with one community were welcome in another, or were encouraged to form their own Occupy community. It wasn't perfect, by any means, and like all the other demonstrations, the community demonstration was incomplete.

But just like every other demonstration Occupations engaged in, the formation of these temporary intentional communities was not that difficult, not nearly as difficult as the status quo/powers that be make it out to be. It not only can be done spontaneously, it was done in hundreds and hundreds of locations, some of which survive, and it can be done again. Now that people have seen that it can be done, and it's not that hard to do, there's no reason -- but for the weight of Authority -- that it won't continue.

That weight of Authority was -- and is -- the impediment to Peace.

The overt cruelty and brutality of Authority in suppressing the Occupy Movement has to have made a psychological and emotional impression on the public that is incalculable at present. People of good will saw things they couldn't believe were happening, from the pepper spraying frenzies, to the assaults and bludgeoning of protestors to the thousands and thousands of largely arbitrary arrests that were simply shocking to the consciences of many. "What is going on here?" Of course there were people of not such good will who saw these applications of force as a good thing, but I suspect there weren't so many of them. After all, the Occupations were petitioning for redress of grievance as guaranteed by the Constitution. To suppress them with such casual cruelty and brutality sends a very strong message: your petition will not be heard. Go away.

By and large, the arbitrary and frequently brutal imposition of Authority was the only interruption to the Peace of the encampments. The People left to their own devices were able for the most part to maintain a very high level of civil peace -- until they were attacked from without, generally by police forces intent on destruction.

What we saw during the initial phases of the Occupation Movement was a start on envisioning a better future for all of us. But it is a future that doesn't look much at all like the recent past or the present, and during the coming year, I hope to get into more detail of what it could look like.

The Future we might have had has been stolen from us; we aren't going to get it back. We will have to come up with something else, something better.

Santorum the Populist

2012-01-05T18:44:00.000-08:00

One of the few interesting developments of the Presidential campaign is the effort to market Rick Santorum as a Populist candidate.

Now why, I wondered, would any Republican candidate claim to be a Populist -- or have others claim it for him? Is this like Sarah's "populism?" But hers was based on... well... sex. There's a wonderful character sketch of her over at Naked Capitalism that I highly approve of:

PP: Well, I always thought the Sarah Palin phenomenon was a sexual thing. She tapped into that whole MILF thing that was launched, in particular, by the Desperate Housewives television show. Husbands wanted her, housewives wanted to be her – and pornographers made films about her. It was this (rather unusual) domestic sexuality that then gave her supposed power. It was this that turned her into the ‘great woman’ – the seemingly unknowing housewife who, despite her humble appearances, actually knows ‘something’ that she’s not letting on. *Queue Sarah Palin wink*.

That might be the single crudest political analysis ever undertaken, but I think there’s more than a grain of truth there. Seriously, look at the winking video linked above; that stuff was focus grouped and orchestrated!

Anyway, leaving poor Palin aside, let’s move onto that other thing that gets the conservative juices flowing to no end: war. Broadly speaking, what is it that fascinates conservatives about war so much?

Santorum has no sex appeal that I'm aware of -- and the more you learn about his... well, proclivities... the less appeal he has. But his blue-collar roots are supposed to inspire some sort of admiration for his fortitude and grit and that, in some inexplicable fashion, means that he's really just one of the guys you'd want to have a lemonade with. (I have a hard time imagining him with a beer for some reason.)

I wouldn't want him around to tell you the truth, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was one of the boys all the others picked on in school and got his lunch money taken more often than not. He prolly got beat up a few times, too, over nothing. Just. Because. He's got that look about him.

And he's been thoroughly reamed recently because of it:

Carmel High School in Mundelein, Illinois I assume refers to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, and no doubt it was run by the Carmelite Brothers and Sisters. Oh please, let it be so! Sure enough.

And that could explain a lot. He strikes me as a smarmy, irritating, judgmental scold, and I know way too many Catholic Believers who are just like that, many of them having learned their annoying ways at Catholic school. They model themselves after some particularly repugnant Brother or Sister and believe that they are thereby sanctified.

Sigh.

Well, that aside, Santorum's claim to have some connection with The People has only the slightest validity. It's not at all clear that he even has "blue collar" roots, as his father was a clinical psychologist who worked for the VA. Santorum has been a governmental functionary, lobbyist, or elected almost all of his adult life. How this is "blue collar" I have no idea.

The New Republic's notice of Santorum's semi-populism also notes its essential fraudulence. It's an obvious campaign ploy. David Brooks, however, waxes almost rhapsodic. Finally! A candidate for and of the white working class base of the Republican Party! And by extension, America!

Yay! Subtext, of course, is that he doesn't have a prayer of winning, but if he can spread his populist message far and wide enough, Rs (no doubt under Aristocratic Romney) will all benefit.

No doubt he can have a cabinet position: Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare; maybe Secretary of Labor. Something where he can do the most damage. And call it holy.

The fact that Republican Mandarins think they even need a "populist" to balance the Aristocrat they are going to nominate -- and who is already being promoted as the successor to Obama in some media quarters -- is an interesting development in that it suggests that the Revolutionary Occupy Movement may have had much more influence on the political process than any of us suspected.

That's not to say there haven't been failed Republican "populist candidates" in the past. There have been plenty of them. But by positing Santorum as the "populist" torch bearer for this cycle, the Republican Mandarins are -- to my eye -- grasping at straws. They obviously had no intention of making a popular appeal this time around. It was clear they believed they could take the White House with the simplest of ploys, manipulating their rubes with vague promises like they always do and using their TeaBaggers as ground troops.

But this time, something intervened, a real populist movement.

So, Santorum got nominated to thwart any genuine populist rising among the Rs. Of course once he's done his part, his bubble will be popped. Oh yes.

It's kind of brilliant in it's own nefarious way.

Persimmon Pudding

2012-01-05T15:42:00.000-08:00

We've been blessed with an astonishing abundance of persimmons this winter, so in order to use them up rather than letting them go to waste, we've been making pans and pans of persimmon pudding, a traditional -- in fact, a very old fashioned -- holiday dish.

Now, persimmons are not necessarily your typical foodstuff, and many Americans have no idea what to do with them. There are two common varieties of persimmon, hachiya and fuyu. We have had mostly hachiya persimmons -- and they are by far the most commonly encountered. They must be treated with a good deal of tender respect, because they are quite inedible before they are ripe. And it can take quite a while for them to ripen. The last ones we used for persimmon pudding were off the tree for two weeks ripening. You know they are ripe when they are uniformly soft.

Ripe hachiya persimmon

They are often wrapped in paper to ripen, or alternatively, their stem ends are joined together with string and they are hung over a kind of rack to air and ripen for as long as it takes. When they're done, you'll know. They will be very soft, sometimes the skin will be easily punctured, and their flesh will be a dark brilliant orange, somewhat fibrous looking, and very sweet/tart. In fact, their flavor is not unlike a very intense version of Sweetart candies.

Once they are ripe, they are perfect for persimmon pudding (you can use them in the dish before they are completely ripe, if you're of the impatient persuasion, but the pudding won't have quite the flavor or richness you get from fully ripened persimmons.)

Let's get to the recipe. This is a very old one, how old I don't know, and very basic. Anyone can do it.

PERSIMMON PUDDING

Preheat oven: 375°

Take two ripe persimmons and skin them. Skins should just slip off; if not, just start with a knife. Scrape any flesh left on the skins into a small bowl. Mash the persimmons in the bowl, removing any seeds (there are sometimes one or two long skinny seeds) and any hard fibrous material. (Alternatively, pulp them in a food processor.)

In another larger bowl combine:

1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Add:

2 eggs, beaten
1 1/4 cups milk
Persimmon pulp (you will probably have about 1 1/4 - 1 1/2 cups from two ripe persimmons, or somewhat more or somewhat less. The amount isn't crucial, but don't use more than two persimmons per recipe.)

Mix thoroughly by hand or with a mixer.

The pudding will be quite moist.

Pour mixture into ungreased pan (9" round or square. Don't fill quite to rim. If you have some left over, pour into smaller ramekin or pan.)

Bake for 45 minutes to an hour until golden brown and firm.

The result will puff up and look something like a layer cake. Once removed from the oven, though, it will sink back down. It will be very moist -- "pudding" remember? -- but not liquid.

Let cool for fifteen minutes to half an hour. Serve warm with whipped cream.

Serve any left over -- ha! -- pudding warm (nuke for 30 seconds or so).

Some people say persimmon pudding is an acquired taste, but we love it. It is warm and satisfying and just plain good at this time of the year.

There are many variations, but this is the simplest version, and the one we have had a lot of this winter.

Hope you enjoy!

Matt Taibbi Explains It All For You

2012-01-04T08:41:00.000-08:00

Though I was born in Iowa and my ancestors are from there (after leaving Ireland and Germany under apparent duress...) I have studiously ignored the Iowa Caucuses on this blog for the simple reason that they don't matter, politically, at all.

Matt Taibbi, one of the more insightful American news reporters (and media personalities) explains why:

It takes an awful lot to rob the presidential race of this elemental appeal. But this year’s race has lost that buzz. In fact, this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.

In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.

Indeed.

Many of the politics mavens of all persuasions and parties are almost desperately trying to make us believe that the "contest" under way (solely between Republicans, you may note) is somehow important or valid or meaningful. The media obsession with the Iowa Caucuses has been embarrassing, or it would be if more of the media were able to utilize even a hint of critical thinking.

None of the candidates have anything to offer outside the rigid barricades that the Ruling Class has erected around their government.

Cocktailhag makes a similar point:

Last week the New York Times bothered to run a two-page foldout on the preposterous “policy positions” of the candidates, which are, except for Ron Paul, exactly the same. None believe in Climate Change, and all fall over each other endorsing policies that will radically exacerbate it. All would further cut the absurdly low taxes on the rich while cutting programs for everyone else. None would produce anything that approximates a balanced federal budget, though they all risibly claim to be fanatically opposed to runaway “spending.” All are opposed to Obama’s mild and incremental health care reform and see socialism lurking in the pathetically weak Dodd-Frank banking law. All are opposed to environmental protection of any kind, and on social issues, all are somewhere to the right of the Taliban. All, except Paul, are in favor of war with Iran and increasing our destructive support of an increasingly belligerent Israel. All, except Paul again, think torture is the greatest thing since high-fructose corn syrup, of which they naturally are all in favor, too.

And I'd go farther to point out that Ron Paul is simply a con man who's been running his con for decades, and what he has to say is politically meaningless. That's why he is allowed to say it. But not, you may note, ever act on it. Ever.

Yet for days now, a good deal of the leftish blogosphere has been consumed with the quadrennial Ron Paul Wars, apparently inspired by something Matt Stoller wrote about liberal hypocrisy and/or hysteria about Ron Paul -- I don't know, I haven't followed Stoller for years. But the whole idea that somehow Paul should be taken seriously by liberals and progressives because some of his "positions" are "right" is absurd on its face. If liberals/progressives aren't making the "right" arguments about the issues, Paul and his ilk are not germane to fixing it. Shifting political allegiance to Paul because of some "position" or other he holds is somehow "left" of the progressive/liberal establishment is even more absurd.

Ron Paul is a con man, like pretty much ever other politician. His "positions" are as meaningless as any other politician's. And the quadrennial Ron Paul Wars are meant only to fragment the oppositional base.

I heard last night that attendance at some of the Iowa caucuses was orders of magnitude greater this year than in 2008, though why that should be so is anybody's guess, because there is nothing, really, for the caucus-goers to decide. They don't get to vote on policy, only personality.

Let's ignore the farce and get on with the Revolution.

More Nostalgia

2012-01-03T10:13:00.001-08:00

[The Happy Brood c. 1930]

This is the only picture I have of the lot of them, my father and his parents and all his brothers and sisters (at least the ones that lived) together for a portrait. I actually have quite a few of my father's pictures from around 1902 to 1919, but after that, there are none until shortly after my advent. And they stop in 1952 or so.

I have no pictures at all of my mother's family, and darned few of her. I tend to share her general dislike of the camera -- though I love taking pictures, I don't like being in them, and there are very few pictures of me anywhere (well, except maybe in my FBI file) after about the age of 4.

Raymond James ("Raymond J" as he was known) was my father; William Henry ("WH")was his father. As is apparent from the picture, it was a fairly prosperous household. Well, at that time, there were several households. The only ones who lived with WH and Elizabeth were Marion and Eleanor. Eugene and William were going to U of Iowa. Kathrine lived in San Francisco. My father lived in his own house down the street from the pater familias but wasn't yet married. Vincent was married and lived in another house down the street from his parents. Alice was married and lived across the street from her parents.

I'm not sure what Geraldine was doing at the time this picture was taken, but she would join Katherine in San Francisco by 1935, and they would both live there as spinster sisters until they died, Geraldine some time in the 1950's, Katherine in the late '60's.

Alice was the longest lived of this group, dying in 1996 at the age of 94. Her parents both died in 1944 within a few weeks of each other. My father died in 1969; his older brother Vincent passed away in 1960. Youngest sister Eleanor died in 1962. William and Eugene were still alive in the early 1990's (last I heard of them) but I have no idea what happened to them. William was living in Los Angeles. Eugene was in Virginia. Marion died in a freak accident in the snow in the winter of 1932 when she was 14. She was knocked down by a sled piloted by some spirited youths. Got a skull fracture from which she did not recover.

The prosperity of the family was based on land and law. They owned farms in the Davenport area, many houses in town, building lots in town and across the river, and they were partners in office buildings and apartment houses. All the family males of William Henry's generation were attorneys, as were my father and his brother Vincent.

They were prosperous but not rich. They had a large Victorian house something like this one:

(in fact, I think they owned this one but didn't live here)

They drove Packards. They had a "man" to take care of the cars. They had a "girl" to help with the housework. They were Democrats, Big Democrats -- in highly Republican Eastern Iowa. My grandfather was county Democratic Party chair for many years, and my father ran for office. He lost, but it was considered a symbolic gesture in any case.

Vincent wound up in a bit of trouble a few years before I was born.

He was charged with and tried for murder most foul. His wife, it seems, was found in her tub, bludgeoned to death with some 54 blows from a hammer. Vincent was deemed the most likely suspect by the county DA. They were political enemies and possibly rivals for mistresses, but I don't know anything about that.

My father got leave from the military (where he was an attorney) to go defend Vincent.

It was a sensational trial in the area at the time, cause for much speculation and revelation. Ultimately, Vincent was acquitted but ruined. He was seen by all to be a philanderer and a drunk, and even if he didn't kill his wife (he didn't), he was never again considered to be a fine upstanding gentleman. Eventually, he drank himself to death so they say.

I was brought up with quite a bit of lore about my supposed ancestors, a number of whom were alleged to have had a prominent role in the American Revolution and afterwards.

Well...

Yes, I share a last name with them, but I was never able to quite trace the lineage that was supposed to be. There was a gap which I was unable to fill. The story I was told was that the family had been dispossessed in Ireland in the 1600's, went briefly to England, and thence to Maryland starting in the late 1600's, establishing themselves there as minor -- or perhaps major -- potentates under the Calverts.

All well and good. I was supposedly descended from a branch of the family that was prominent in Colonial and Revolutionary affairs but not quite as prominent as the "famous" ones. A second son of a second son, that kind of thing. And in the early 1800's, I was told, there was a migratory trek from Maryland, through what is now West Virginia, and on to Ohio, by some time around 1850. From there the ancestors went to Iowa in 1857.

I could reach back to 1857 and find evidence of arrival; I even found some sketchy stuff in Ohio c. 1850, but between that point and Maryland in the early 1800's nothing. The names didn't match up, for one thing. Instead of Anthony, it was Alexander, for example. And instead of Daniel and Charles, it was James and Edward.

There is no history of a trek by that branch into the wilderness of [West] Virginia and Ohio. None.

So I decided the stories had probably been made up. But I didn't have any proof of that, either.

Then I found Census and other records from the era and made discoveries.

I couldn't find a direct connection with Revolutionary ancestors because there was none. What I found showed that Alexander brought his sons James and Edward to America from Ireland in 1850 -- when famine still ravaged the land. They farmed briefly in Ohio and then moved on to Iowa where they continued to farm. Alexander [pater] died in 1860. James was my great grandfather, and he arrived in the USA when he was 17; he married Alice O'Brien in 1863; Alice emigrated from Ireland in 1860; my grandfather, William Henry, James's and Alice's third child, was born in 1869.

William Henry married Elizabeth Veronica in 1899; their first son, Vincent, was born in 1900; their second son, Raymond (my father) was born in 1901. Alice, the next child, was born in 1902. And so on...

Elizabeth Veronica's parents were from Germany. I had been told that her father was a banker, but I found that apparently wasn't true, either. From what I was able to discover, he was a carpenter. One of his sons, however, did become a banker -- which may be the source of the fiction that his father had been a banker as well.

I was told that Elizabeth Veronica's parents came to America in 1848 as refugees from the Revolutions that swept the continent that year -- and which had particularly unfortunate repercussions in Germany. But I was also told that Reinhard, Elizabeth Veronica's father, was from Bavaria; from what I was able to find out, he was actually from Prussia. Reinhard's wife, Veronica, was possibly from Hesse, though I'm not completely sure about that (the only certain reference I have found says "Germany," but her maiden name, Cosman, is apparently fairly common in Hesse.)

So far as I've been able to learn, Reinhard did arrive in the USA in 1848, but I'm not sure about Veronica. Reinhard apparently went directly to the Frontier -- Iowa was still pretty rugged at the time. Given the lumber industry as it was in those days, I have little doubt that he prospered. And that prosperity may have led to informal banking. But I have no evidence of it.

Both Reinhard and Veronica died before 1900.

At the moment, so far as I know, the only living blood relatives I have are three nieces (my sister's children) and their children. I had a brother and a sister; both died. My grandparents were dead well before I was born, and my parents are both dead. I don't know the details of my uncles William and Eugene, whether they are still alive and whether they had children, but my father is the only one of those pictured above who I'm certain had "issue" (as they say) of his own. Vincent and Alice did not. Geraldine and Kathrine did not. Marion and Eleanor did not. William and Eugene may have, but I don't know.

My father was in the military in both WWI and WWII. He was only 17 when he was first commissioned an officer, but times were different then. His commission in WWI only lasted till the Armistice; he was drafted (!) to serve during WWII; he did basic training as a private and then was commissioned an officer again. My parents met at Wright Patterson Field in Ohio in 1944 where they were both serving in the Army Air Corps. She as a WAAC medical corps(wo)man, he as a JAG officer (later assigned to War Reconversion and contract termination.) They were married in 1947.

There is a whole long story about them that I may get into in another post, but suffice it to say... it's a long story!

New Year Nostalgia

2012-01-02T11:40:00.000-08:00

[San Jose Creek, 1930]

While tooling around the interwebs the other day, I happened upon some surprising sites that detailed the Old Days in the area of Los Angeles County where I lived from 1953 to 1959. The pictures and the stories from Back Then were fascinating -- for the first time, for example, since I left the area, I saw pictures of landmarks as they were then, rather than as they have been transformed in the past 50 years.

[Eastland Shopping Center, 1958]

Eastland, for example.

I have not seen this place in more than 50 years, and according to what I have read, it has radically changed in the interim (Grants and May Co are no longer there, for example, and the May Co building is gone). But this is what I remember it looking like. I was most astonished at seeing Clifton's Cafeteria; I haven't even heard the name in more than 50 years, and I had forgotten about it. But the minute I saw the picture, memories came back, and I recalled eating there from time to time, picking out my dishes from the abundant selections, concentrating on Jello for some reason, and hot turkey sandwiches(?) (I can still see and taste the gluey mashed potatoes divvied out with an ice cream scoop) and eating with lots of other people in a pink and beige vinyl and bleached wood 50's Futurist Paradise. It was startling how easily the memory flooded back.

Another thing that startled me was a story in LIFE Magazine that was referenced at one of the sites I visited. Called "Americans on the Move"--

Though I was quite devoted to LIFE Magazine at the time, I don't recall the story. It was particularly intriguing to me though because one of the families covered in it moved to a house in La Puente, "one hill over" from where I was living at the time.

It looks pretty bleak and I suppose it was. Our house was built in 1954, along with many hundreds of others, but the section "over the hill" where these houses were built wasn't started until 1956, and I don't think it was opened for sale until 1957. I remember going up on the hill to watch the construction, construction that was mirrored by some new houses being built starting next door to our own. Our house had been the last one on the street until then. It could be a very dry and dusty area prone to wildfires. We were a good 20 miles or more east of Downtown LA (on a clear day, you could see it from the top of the hills, but clear days were rare... smog, you know.) While there were towns further east, it was essentially a rural district.

Through various clickage, I found some of the unpublished photos from the story that were even more startling.

For example, this:

And this:

Seeing them, I said, "Wait a minute, that's my elementary school. That was the kindergarten..." I was in the 4th grade in 1957, and my familiarity with the kindergarten at the school was limited to infrequent visits, but I do recall the blonde wood low cabinets, the wooden blocks with which to make forts, the easels, the high windows, the clock and the light fixtures. It was almost shocking. A photographer for LIFE Magazine had been there? Hmmm. Of course, that was the year a friend of mine and I were featured in the local papers -- with pictures -- for having discovered Indian artifacts on the school grounds. So maybe having more photographers around didn't make an impression. Then again...

Well, things could get a little dicey out in the far eastern suburbs of Los Angeles County, as spending a few minutes with just about any Sam Shephard play will demonstrate. As for me, I had... more than a few adventures which I may get into one of these days.

In the meantime, it's been kind of astonishing to find so much online stuff about so many childhood memories. I never expected it. But it's there because someone who's lived in the area all his life has spent the time and had the interest to assemble it.

More.

And What of the Occupy?

2011-12-31T05:12:00.000-08:00

Did I get wrong-footed on this Occupy Thing? Is Teh Revolution an illusion after all?

Well, no. I don't think so.

Having been reduced from hundreds of Occupations to a few score of active ones today, the Occupy Wall Street Movement seems to have stalled or even reversed in the face of Implacable Authority -- and winter. From appearances, the Movement has not gone away, but it is certainly nothing like what it once was. Diminution has not resulted in concentration; instead, the energy seems to be more and more dispersed, and in its dispersion, dissipated.

I thought it was interesting that during the hey-day of this rabble rousing phase, Lambert Strether over at Correntewire always saw it as spreading like rhizomes in the plant world. I, on the other hand, tended to see the development of the Movement-cum-Revolution as akin to egg-laying. The Idea would be deposited pretty much everywhere. There would be a brief -- and rather spectacular -- initial life cycle followed by a potentially prolonged hibernation/chrysalis phase during which a metamorphosis would occur, from which something almost altogether different would emerge.

The two are not entirely incompatible versions of the possible course of development of what's come to be called The Occupy, because they both rely on biological models. That was a discussion I had with a number of Occupation participants fairly early on, in that it was obvious even then that the model for the Movement was organic and evolutionary, rooted in biology rather than rhetoric, and it would grow -- and in some cases diminish -- like an organism rather than a construct.

So it has been.

The many efforts to suppress it have been something like futile efforts to eradicate a biological pest, one that is both hardy and evolutionary. The object of suppression takes on different forms, disappears, reappears, develops, retreats, and eventually overcomes. It is not ever really suppressed. It becomes part of the landscape; the best Authority can do against it is learn to cope.

But then, why be against it?

This is the question that is being raised, hopefully more and more. What, exactly, is Authority against, anyway? Taking over the Public Square to petition for redress of grievance (this is a First Amendment issue, but not strictly a Free Speech issue) is simply not a chargeable offense; it is something that We, the People not only have the right to do, we have a duty to do it. Fighting against that right and duty -- as Authority has been doing more and more brutally -- is a losing proposition. Which, apparently, Authority is recognizing, slowly, and with great trepidation and reluctance.

The People are demanding hearing and redress of their grievances. They are not simply gathering for the sake of it (though that has always been a part of the process of Revolution, the massing of the masses for the sake of it). Their message and their demands are not unclear at all, but always, when presented with such petitions, Authority claims not to "understand" what it is the People clamor for, what it is they are discontent about, what it is they want. This is universal when such situations arise.

Authority insists the People's Message is so muddled there is nothing they can do about it, much as they would like to respond positively. But unless the correct forms and rituals are observed in the petitioning process, Authority must remain blind and deaf to the plight and pleas of the masses. So sorry, please.

And yet Authority knows exactly what the People are yowling about.

Oh yes they do.

Their efforts at suppression can at best be temporary stop-gaps while they figure out what to do. In this regard, it is worth noting that there was no effort at all to suppress the Tea Party during its brief fluorescence; in fact, the Tea Party's pseudo-Revolution was encouraged at every crossroads by Authority -- both governmental and corporate -- until, of course, the candidates they'd put in office proved so intransigent and antithetical to the interests of the Global Elites that they were ignored and sidestepped. Not suppressed. Sidestepped.

The Tea Party was never a popular movement; the Occupy is. That makes a big difference in how The Powers That Be respond. The 'Baggers essentially were brought forth -- and brought out of -- the hothouse of Bernaysian Manipulation, as a construct that popular discontent could glom onto; a product in other words, to be sold to the masses as the answer to what aggrieved them.

It was really quite a skilful campaign, starting with a low-key, almost underground, "resistance" campaign immediately after the presidential election of 2008, targeting the alleged "socialism" of the new Obama administration. It was all phony from the get, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that those who were discontent with the fact that a colored man was shortly to be squatting in the White House, and discontent with the fact that Power in some abstract sense was now taken away from its rightful possessors had somewhere to focus their rage and anger and frustration, even if only underground initially.

Shortly after the Obama Inauguration in 2009, the "Resistance" that had been underground came to the fore as the all-but-fully-formed "Tea Party" subsequent to the Rick Santelli Rant on CNBC that was put into heavy rotation on all the "news" for days and weeks. Game on.

The "Tea Party" became a 24/7 obsession of the FOX "News" cable network -- their pet, their joy, their pride -- and through FOX's constant promotion, and the efforts of numerous well-funded political consultants and hate radio personalities (which is actually where it all started anyway) the rightist rabble was most effectively roused.

But as a product being sold, it had a limited shelf-life, and after the 2010 congressional election, it essentially disappeared. Well, the plug was pulled. The point had been made, and the congressional landscape had been transformed; there was no further point for a rightist populist movement. Victory had been achieved.

Well...

It's a Pyrrhic Victory at best. The situation continues to be shitty for all but the very wealthiest of the Global Elite, and helping them to acquire more does nothing for anyone else. And as for all the reactionary social garbage they wanted enacted, good luck with that.

The congress, this congress, the one that the 'Baggers elected, is the least popular in the nation's post civil war history, and the various radical reactionary state legislatures and governors swept into office on the coattails of the 'Bagger Rebellion are facing firestorms of rejection from the engaged and enraged People.

What to do?

The Occupy Movement literally came out of nowhere -- well, the mind's eye of a clever former ad-man let's say. But it has become something quite unlike anything he might have envisioned. It ultimately didn't matter what he personally envisioned anyway. The Occupy instantly took on a life of its own, and so it has been ever since.

It is diverse and dispersed, leader-less/leader-full, and is as real as it gets.

It is evolving -- or rather metamorphosing. Evolution may come later.

Staying out of electoral politics is key.

Our electoral politics has become little more than a massive product promotion campaign, a biennial spectacle of salesmanship, that has little or no effect on policy; those policies are set at the "board" level, and whichever electoral product wins the campaign, the same general policies will be carried out no matter.

I think We the People learned this quite clearly over the past few elections. Who you put in office only matters on the margins of personality and finesse. The overall policies of government are never put to a popular vote, and they are carried out no matter who is sitting in the Big Chair or holding hearings about it.

That being so, the only real way to affect it is to act outside it.

This is what so many apparatchiks -- who of course infest the blogosphere, especially at election time -- simply cannot comprehend. They insist that the only way to affect policy is from within (you must participate, vote, support candidates, yadda, yadda, for it is the only way your voice will be heard and listened to). The only thing is, it's not true.

You can certainly have an effect and accomplish quite a bit from within, but unless you are part of a highly select few, you do not have any effect on policy. That doesn't change because you are on the inside or not. What you can do on the inside is achieve some of your personal or mutual material objectives. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does not affect policy, because you must work within policy parameters to get what you want or need.

But what if those policy parameters are just absolutely wrong? Then you have to be -- and act -- outside the system. This is a concept the apparatchik mind cannot embrace or fathom. But it is the only way to seriously affect policy makers and their policies. You have to apply pressure -- significant and sustained pressure -- from the outside.

Pressure from the Outside can become Revolutionary.

The Occupy Movement is intrinsically Revolutionary, and its Anarchist roots are the key to understanding its Revolutionary direction.

Realistically, we are dealing with an Anarcho-Communist/Syndicalist Revolutionary movement that is profoundly affecting the popular consciousness of what is Possible all over the developed world and beyond.

I don't think that anything quite like this has ever happened before. People's minds are being changed one by one and in batches all over the world about what can be done about what needs to be done. Once that happens, there is no going back.

Anarcho-Communist/Syndicalist concepts have never before had more than a very remote fringe appeal; yet now they're on the verge of becoming so wide spread as to be recognized as "natural."

To my way of looking at it, this is an almost inevitable result of the divorce between the Global Financial Elites and their Government lackeys on the one hand and the People on the other. When governments only serve financial elites, as is the case now in many regions, not just the United States, the People must assert their own interests separately.

And that inevitably means on a small scale, mutually, in community. That's been the chief characteristic of the demonstrations made by the Occupations. Temporary intentional communities are put together for the purpose of demonstrating an alternative to the rule of reactionary financial elites who have captured government.

Those demonstrations don't need to last very long for people to see and understand that alternatives are possible. Once they see that and internalize it, the camps can go away. Eviction doesn't matter in the larger scheme of things. The demonstration has been made. That's what matters in the long run.

As people find their own way forward in an alternative framework, the necessity for the elaborate state superstructure created to serve a diminishing global financial elite evaporates.

Even the necessity of The Occupy goes away. Once the notion of Alternative is inculcated through demonstration, it continues to develop on its own.

That's what's happening more and more broadly. Nothing quite so Revolutionary has happened in many a long year, and it can't be stopped once started.

I think Our Rulers are beginning to recognize that fundamental fact.

But we won't know how it will turn out until the butterfly -- or whatever is in there -- emerges from its chrysalis in its due time. Sometime next year, but no one can say when, and no one can say just what that Butterfly will look like or what it will do.

Stay tuned...

Change & Wonder: A Butterfly Complete Metamorphosis from David Britton on Vimeo.

Year End Musings

2011-12-29T05:34:00.000-08:00

[House near ours in New Mexico. I love its appearance of isolation out on the llano -- although the location is actually East Mountains -- and I like its vaguely pioneer aspect. It's a fairly new house built in the style of the pioneers (this area was opened for settlement around 1900) on about 40 acres of mostly horse-pasture. Our house in New Mexico is an actual pioneer dwelling, started in around 1900 and continually remodeled and added to ever since.]

Been through quite the year -- such that I doubt many of us have experienced in our lifetimes. Not only have the People been up in arms over various indignities, debilities, thefts and destructions, but the Earth itself is clearly in the process of rebelling against the depredations against it.

We're in for a very bumpy ride for some time to come.

The key understanding is that Our Rulers have screwed things up so thoroughly and so badly, it will take generations to unravel the mess they have made, and it will take generations more to restore some semblance of the basic principles of common decency that have been lost.

In other words, we're not going to solve this any time soon, no matter how much we inveigle against The Powers That Be. They will do their best to ignore our imprecations -- as they have been doing remarkably consistently throughout this year of Revolution -- but inevitably they will fail to stem the tide, and from all the signs, their end is nigh-er than they think.

From the observation posts round about, it's become quite obvious that the structure of predation and exploitation built and run by Our Rulers is on a shaky foundation, so shaky that it could collapse at any moment due to the fact that nearly all of its accumulated wealth and power is illusory.

That's been perhaps the most important revelation of the Occupy Movement and its precursors. Our Rulers not only have feet of clay, they are running con games in the air. For all the damage they are doing to the general well being of the Earth and its People, they are gaining essentially nothing thereby. For all that they are busy stealing from the rest of us -- and from one another -- the crushing burden of their pretense-economics will simply disintegrate in their midst sooner rather than later.

And then what?

We should try to be ready -- and for the most part, we really aren't. The disappointment in the outcome of the Revolutions in North Africa, for example, is an indication of how unready for "success" we really are.

In this country, the fact that the Wisconsin Uprising accomplished essentially nothing -- in that the rebels were not able to prevent or significantly alter any of the draconian impositions of the State under the Walker administration, despite the success of some of the later recalls -- is still being processed. The Wisconsin Thing was critically important for changing the minds of the masses to help get them out of their torpor and passivity, but politically it was a non-event. No matter how many hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands gather -- and occupy -- for redress of grievance from this government, it doesn't matter. They will be ignored, and their interests dismissed. Period. End. Of. Discussion.

And so it has been throughout most of the country most of the time given all the many rebellions and uprisings since Wisconsin.

The blank stare of the Robo-Riot-Police has become the Implacable Face of Rule.

It's become standard: the People may "rise up" all they like. Their petitions will not be received by Rulers, their grievances will not be redressed. Have a nice day. Have some pepper spray and bludgeoning to go with your retreat. Bye now!

The political system obviously only works for the favored few -- to the extent it works at all. Favored interests of the private sector can essentially have and do anything they want, with the cheery connivance of Government (such as it is) while the People are left to fend for themselves as best they may, corralled and contained and distracted by shiny objects to the extent they are considered at all by those in power.

The People have become useless impediments in the eyes of the Highest of the Mighty. They get in the way, but -- as has been demonstrated over and over again -- they are easily disposed of, they and their Mounds of Garbage that is all they possess in the world.

Yet another homeless encampment was "cleared" here yesterday, its 120 denizens scattered to the winds -- and to the completely inadequate shelters that can accommodate less than half of the number dispossessed -- and their things, their few pitiful belongings confiscated (supposedly for safe-keeping, but we know how that goes.)

So. These evicted dispossessed ones say they will simply establish another camp -- and they will keep on doing it no matter what the Authorities do. They have successfully been establishing and running camps for the homeless and the dispossessed for years; government ignores their pleas to be left alone to take care of one another. Camps are raided and destroyed over and over again -- and re-established over and over again.

The homeless aren't going away. Not so long as the predators run free.

Homeless encampments have been a feature of civil society in this country -- and very prominently around here -- for many years. Remember "Bag Ladies?" They go back almost 40 years now. They were the first sign I think most of us knew of that something had gone terribly wrong with the social contract, and that some of us were not just being dispossessed without recourse, some, like these forlorn women who carried all their remaining possessions in a couple of shopping bags while they rode public transit or trudged the sidewalks forlornly, endlessly.

Soon they were joined by more and more of the dispossessed and discarded, often those who had been discharged from mental hospitals but never provided with the promised "services" that were supposed to be available in the community once the Snake Pits that had housed them were shuttered and repurposed or demolished.

Then more and more homeless joined them, people whose livings had vanished in the great spurts of 'Growth' -- or rather economic lootings -- that periodically coursed through society leaving more and more wreckage in their wakes.

There was never enough shelter for all the discarded and dispossessed that were the inevitable product of the civic refusal to curb the triumph of greed, to provide for the least among us, and the many failed experiments of the plethora of non-profits and charities to handle the "crisis of homelessness." All they did was perpetuate it.

When the economy went into its latest tailspin, millions upon millions were forced into poverty -- millions more are still being forced into poverty -- and many millions were forced out of their homes and their livings. That's been the chief characteristic of policy since the beginning of this Endless Recession: enforced poverty for the millions, enforced dispossession, enforced exploitation and extraction for the millions upon millions, while a handful of top-dogs live like kings on the profits of impoverishment.

Half of all Americans are now "officially poor or low income." And most, according to experts, will never rise from this state; they'll never have the opportunity. In fact, given trends, more and more Americans are bound for poverty. The United States is becoming the richest Third World nation in history.

Well, under the circumstances, some people, of course, seek to do something about it -- and they set out to reverse the trend. "There's Revolution in this town."

So far, it has not been successful in turning the situation for the masses around, but it has awakened them from their slumber.

The question for the coming year is where that awakening is going to lead.

No one can say at this point.

Thus, the coming year is bound to be very exciting, fraught with danger, and kind of wonderful all at the same time.

No matter what Our Rulers do from this point on, it will matter less and less. Events have a way of taking on lives of their own, and the Events of 2011 have given rise to extraordinary levels of energy and activism among the many, in utter disregard of the Few.

Finally.

Dignity, Justice, Community, Peace.

2011-12-25T04:08:00.000-08:00

I had planned to be back in California by today, Christmas, but The Snow came and made the trip difficult enough for me to postpone travel at least for a day. But I know it has been worse for some who started out earlier and got stuck on the snowed in highways. Some may still be digging out. Snow this heavy, this early in the season, is pretty rare around here. Though many people were prepared -- as best they could be -- many others were caught by surprise and are doing their best to cope.

Coping with the weather became the primary focus of my stay in New Mexico this time; the frozen pipes, the repeated storms, the snow... It's all been very evocative for me because it reminds me of winters spent in Alaska and Upstate New York, long ago now, when I first got introduced to snow and blizzards and the joys of frigid fingers and toes and nose-and-eartips and all the many delights of the season as a regular thing.

You adapt. Amazingly quickly. It's been kind of like riding a bicycle. Once you know how to deal with Winter, you don't forget. Nevertheless, as a rule, I don't do very well in cold. It's probably genetic.

But while I've been here -- in between making pans and pans of tamales and shoveling snow and dealing with unexpected appearances of ice -- I've been thinking a lot about what I've come to see as the core values, the principles of this Revolution that's continuing all over the world.

Dignity, Justice, Community and Peace

They seems like such simple concepts -- but they prove to be so difficult to achieve.

The fact is, the People have been betrayed, and as they wake up to the total wreck their Betters are making of this world, their righteous anger rises higher and higher. Anger may motivate the uprising, but it's not enough by itself.

Dignity has been stripped from many millions over the course of this endless regression (it's gone beyond a recession). And many millions more are slated to lose their Dignity before it's over -- if it is ever over.

Dignity is an essential value of being; it's ingrained in the nature of existence, and yet there are constant assaults on one's dignity from nearly the moment of birth. There are people who seem to feel their own dignity is somehow jeopardized by the dignity of others, and so they seek to strip The Other of dignity so as to (somehow) enhance their own. They conflate having money or power with whether or not one "deserves" being treated with dignity. When the concept of universal dignity fails, it tends to be replaced with predatory instincts, stealing in other words. One takes from others who are "unworthy" of dignity. Yet once predation becomes the core value of a society, it hollows itself out until it collapses from within.

That's been happening to the United States at an accelerating pace lately, but predation has been a core value of many Americans from the beginning of the European conquest and settlement in the Americas. It has its roots in frustrations in Europe that led so many to abandon their lives in the Old Country and attempt to find their futures, if not their fortunes, in America.

Those frustrations were multiple, but in most cases they revolved around the absence of dignity for some group designated to be despised by others.

No, it is not the universal condition. It is a specific condition of certain societies. And it was transferred wholesale to what would become the United States.

I was watching some of Niall Ferguson's "economic" essays on PBS while I was here, and couple of things struck me: 1)he explained the Pinochet coup and brutal rule in Chile as a struggle against Communism which therefore justified the military extinguishing the elected Allende governmnet and the Chilean democracy as well as the execution of thousands and the torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands more suspected Communists. In his view democracy and social justice and (especially) the Welfare State are worthless extravagances that can be -- nay, should be -- sacrificed in the interests of... predation. He was almost jolly about the suffering of others.

2) he pointed out that the "conservative" economic principles which rule the world today (actually, they are radical not conservative at all) are developments of "canny Scots" who in the 17th and 18th centuries came up with -- radical -- new principles of economics and economic success: mindless predation of the strong on the weak, imperialism, extraction.

So here we are.

It is a mindless system of exploitation and destruction for nearly everyone. It characterized the thinking of parts of the ambitious members of the bourgeoisie for two centuries, and now it is being made the sole ideological principle of corporation and state.

Sooner or later -- generally sooner -- it leads to catastrophic failure and Revolution.

The principle failure is the failure of Dignity. Without Dignity, the People rebel.

The mindlessness of a system that sees value only in terms of dollars and display, that asserts a right -- nay a duty -- to extract and exploit and steal at will from any and all comers (don't think the high and the mighty are exempt; stealing from one another is an art form among the practitioners of this system) leads inevitably to its deterioration and decline and finally to its isolation and destruction.

Where there is no balance, there is no Dignity. Where there is no Dignity, there is no Future. And where there is no Future, there is no Justice.

The concept of Justice itself is an alien imposition on the economic predators who have so blithely taken control of the United States and the world for the purpose of endless exploitation of people and resources for profit.

Justice is a factor of nobility, and these exploiters, though sometimes styling themselves "nobles" have no nobility. They despise "justice" in any form that may affect their extractive demands or mitigate the destruction they cause. The situation for years now has been one of unbridled economic terrorism against whole peoples and governments by a handful of out of control monetary vampires.

"Justice" in their view is using the coercive power of the state to enforce ever greater levels of extraction and exploitation and most certainly using it to crush the occasional unrest of the masses.

We saw that in India during the British Raj. But that's how imperial societies work: extraction and exploitation on a magnificent scale (to what ultimate object is always something of a mystery; typically, it's just because the exploiter can and wants to do it); rigid and typically brutal suppression of the masses, generally with the active connivance of their ostensible protectors...

Ultimately, of course, this system of "justice" cannot be maintained, for it is based on lack of dignity for any but the select and a fierce competition between them for what has been stolen from everyone else.

The basic injustice and indignity of the system itself leads to its eventual disintegration. It cannot be maintained except through ever greater applications of force. And that is not a sustainable course. There are always too many to be kept down by the handful that constitutes the Power Elite; there are never enough mercenaries to do the job.

Absence of Justice destroys Community, and the destruction of Community causes despair leading to the denial of Peace.

Peoples have long since figured out how to live -- and flourish -- in societies based on Dignity, Justice, Community and Peace; it's demonstrated every day in many social contexts including certain religious contexts. Yet here we have the ongoing spectacle of a handful of financial actors seeking to thwart the best instincts and interests of humanity in order to strip as many as possible of all their social and economic assets.

Why? Because apparently they believe there is nothing standing in their way -- and they want to.

There is no sense in continuing this course, but our governments appear to be incapable of listening to the chorus of voices from the People, incapable of doing the right thing, incapable of acting on behalf of the People they ostensibly represent. And this is nearly a universal situation; governments almost everywhere have become the exclusive playthings of the very highest of the mighty for whom the interest of the People is at best an abstraction when it's not a distraction from the important work of exploitation and destruction.

The People will nevertheless prevail. The Empire of Greed will collapse. It's inevitable. The People will continue to demonstrate alternatives to the continuing destruction engaged in by governments and their owners and sponsors. Those demonstrations -- essentially of another way to live -- have a cumulative effect, and it may be a slow march from this point forward. But the effect is very real.

Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. The Beginning is Nigh.

[Posted from a motel in Kingman, AZ on my way back to California for belated Christmas....]

What Are They So Afraid Of?

2011-12-20T14:56:00.001-08:00

[Note: I'm at our place in New Mexico; we just had a doozy of a snow storm that shut down the Interstate all the way to the Texas border. The weather has been beautiful today, and I've spent most of it clearing the driveway of snow so I can get to the street, the street that was just plowed a little while ago, so we could very carefully drive along its still very slick surface to see the sights. It is a Winter Wonder Land out there!]

The Denver Action to "clear" Occupy Denver and their associated tents from the square last night caught my eye. I kept thinking, "What are they so afraid of?" -- meaning the cops. It's not so much that they doll themselves up like RoboCops. We're used to that by now. It's not even the fact that they always seem to arrive and act in formations following a strange little script of how to proceed against the Rabble. It's that they do it at all. Any of it.

It's not just Denver. They do it everywhere, all around the world. What are they so afraid of? And why to they do it at all?

I saw this picture at the Denver Post site, and thought, "Look how scary. He's posing like Tebow. In the street. How frightening..."

What are they so afraid of?

Hundreds of costumed and armed Denver police once again assembled -- this time under the watchful gaze of the new Denver police chief -- to evict a few dozen Occupy Denver demonstrators. A camera man had come to video the action and was guided away from the park by the police.

Flames rose when the demonstrators chose to burn some of their encampment equipment. But there was no violence from the demonstrators. As usual, the violence was perpetrated by the police against... their perception of defiance.

Defiance requires hundreds of police in riot costume in city after city to suppress -- or to appear to suppress -- while high level crime is... ignored. No, staying in a park after curfew requires an entire army of police. Anything else of a criminal nature, not so much.

Even a full scale sports riot doesn't usually call for this level of suppression.

The only comparable suppressive activity that I know of is the extraordinary level of police overreaction at every G8, G20, WTO, IMF, and political convention held since 1999.

Occupying parks and other public squares is being treated as if it were a National Special Security Event.

The Rulers are so frightened of defiance, they will go to any length to suppress it.

And apparently they will pay any price.

So long as their troops obey...

The Argentina Model?

2011-12-19T06:26:00.000-08:00

[Changed to a YouTube version because it is complete; the Google version wasn't. But warning: the last ten minutes or so has very garbled sound.]

Documentary on the events that led to the economic collapse of Argentina in 2001 which wiped out the middle class and raised the level of poverty to 57.5%. Central to the collapse was the implementation of neo-liberal policies which enabled the swindle of billions of dollars by foreign banks and corporations. Many of Argentina's assets and resources were shamefully plundered. Its financial system was even used for money laundering by Citibank, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan. The net result was massive wealth transfers and the impoverishment of society which culminated in many deaths due to oppression and malnutrition. If you want to stop the same thing from happening here, and it is happening here, right now, please join the revolution at the Kick Them All Out Projet http://www.KickThemAllOut.com and the Fire Congress Campaign.

Pot and pans are good.

Note: the video was posted to Google 3 years ago, it has been on YouTube as long. In the interim, the parallels between the situation in Argentina and in the United States -- not to mention Europe -- have become even starker.

Note: the Census Bureau has recently released figures showing that about half of Americans are now officially poor or low income.

Note: the parallels... many of the same individuals and banking institutions are involved in the current global exploitation regime. Even if they don't always get away with it, they don't care. They get away with it often enough to ensure they will always be counting profits at everyone else's expense.

Is It The Protest -- or The Demonstration?

2011-12-18T00:56:00.000-08:00

Is it a distinction without a difference or is it a matter of fundamental importance?

"The Protester" is chosen as Time's Person of the Year for 2011, and it superficially makes perfect sense, since "protest" has been a constant and growing pubic activity throughout much of the world, most of the year.

I haven't paid much attention to Time Magazine since the end of the Luce era, and I usually find the widespread "lefty" blogospheric fascination with the magazine to be amusing at best -- when it's not an outright misperception. Time has had its ups and downs over the decades, but it's never actually been a "liberal" publication, nor have its writers and editors ever been as insightful as their reputations would suggest.

Time was once an important publication in a very tightly controlled haute media environment; it has always been closely aligned with the interests of power and money. It once had a breezy, popular-literate style of word-play and phrase-making, but has fallen into the sort of turgid prose and "balance" that characterizes so much of the post-modern media.

Those issues aside, the question I've been wrestling with for some time has to do with the nature of what is going on with this global revolution: is it a Protest or a Demonstration, and what is the difference?

Time focuses on the protest aspect of the Revolution, and further narrows the focus to a protest against government, specifically certain aspects of governments, especially the dictatorships abroad and the incipient dictatorships at home.

Like most other media, Time essentially ignores the demonstration aspects of the Revolution.

But isn't a demonstration and a protest the same thing?

Not in the context of the Occupy Movement and the various localized revolutions that have already taken place, nor is it the same thing in the context of the overall Global Revolution sweeping the Earth, the one that has as a motto: "Another World Is Possible."

Globally this Revolution is driven in large part by a reaction to the impositions and exploitations of a shrinking cadre of economic terrorists, a global neo-liberal elite, who see the earth and its peoples as resources and commodities to exploit, dispose of and to profit from. Period.

This neo-liberal elite has captured governments all over the world, and even the most ostensibly "democratic" governments have largely ceased listening to or considering the interests and needs of their People so as to better serve the demands and requirements of the notorious 1%. "People" don't matter at all in this context -- except for the extent to which they can be stripped of dignity, deprived of justice and community, and forced to struggle against one another.

This situation gives rise to revolt by its very nature.

Protest is a tactic used as part of the revolt, it is not the revolt itself.

For reasons that I've never quite understood, those in power -- and the media that is part of the power structure -- simply cannot fathom the tactical nature of protest, nor can they quite grasp the essential nature of the Demonstration that is at the heart of the Revolution.

This blindness may not be such a bad thing in the end, because the less that Power "understands" the greater the potential for the ultimate success of the Revolution.

The more that Power reacts against the Revolution from a basis of Dalek-like mindlessness, the less likely it is to succeed in the end.

Thus, the irony of breaking up the protest encampments in this country and abroad is that the demonstration that began in the encampments is dispersed throughout the community and society. The act of breaking up or suppressing the demonstration has the effect of spreading it. And the more the demonstration of the possibility of another world is spread, the greater the popular understanding and support of the Revolution.

By trying to focus solely on the Protest, Time and much of the media and associated officialdom in effect serves the interests of the Revolution itself.

I'm astonished watching governments all over the world and in this country double down on their austerity obsessions in service to their financial and economic overlords -- and in increasingly brutal defiance of the interests and demands of their People. It is a textbook example of institutions flailing and failing. Suppression is hardly a recipe for endurance, and the notion that "dialog" is somehow The Answer is just funny. It's long past time for rulers to "hear." Action alone will make the difference, and the only action so far undertaken is suppression -- often with extraordinary levels of official violence and brutality.

Government, however, is neither the direct source of the problems the People face, nor is it the answer directly. The obsessive focus on protest against governments, therefore, is a reflection of the obsessions of the media. That there is a parallel demonstration of alternatives doesn't occur to them.

"Another world is possible," but unless you explore it and show it repeatedly, it's hard to see how that Other World can be instituted, or even if it can.

The demonstration which began in the public squares has now largely -- but not totally -- been evicted from the squares (much as households have been evicted from their homes throughout the economic and financial disaster of today's neo-liberal capitalism) and has dispersed through communities all over the world.

"Be not afraid," has become the message of the Revolution (or "Don't be afraid," for those who are reluctant to engage Biblical references). "We are winning," is the coda.

Protest is a tactic, but it is not the Revolution itself. Suppressing -- or permitting -- protest is peripheral to the central demonstration that is at the heart of the Revolution.

Economic Meltdown Scheduled to Continue Indefinitely

2011-12-14T10:35:00.000-08:00

The correct response to the economic/financial meltdown was to provide substantial household debt relief, a real jobs program, and the prompt and effective re-regulation of banks and financial institutions.

Of course, none of this was done. Instead, all the gambling debts of the banks and financial institutions were backstopped (and often paid off, multiple times in some cases) with "created" money, and a few key manufacturers had their debts covered.

There was no household debt relief. In many cases, not even bankruptcy would discharge personal/student/household debt. Instead of a jobs program, there were repeated extensions of unemployment insurance benefits -- for those who qualified, which was never more than half of the unemployed, and in the later extensions, much fewer than half. Typical UI benefits were half or less (often much less) than previous earnings.

Millions and millions of Americans have been forced into poverty; millions and millions face hunger more and more often. Millions and millions of Americans have been forced out of their homes. And the process of impoverishment and eviction of Americans has not relented.

The economy continues to worsen for most Americans as wages and benefits are stagnant or in decline, there is a vicious campaign against public sector workers; pensions are under constant threat. Retirement and other savings of many millions of Americans have vanished.

Yet a handful of international bankers and financiers are doing better than ever, providing nothing of value at all, but successfully extorting governments at home and abroad of every nickel they can extract.

Governments all over the world have yielded to the demands of this handful of extortionists, forcing austerity and poverty onto their people while preserving their "nobles" from even the slightest patriotic requirement.

The People in general have no say in the economic policies of their governments, and governments have no care for their People.

So. There is a global -- and growing -- revolt.

As revolt/revolution proceeds, governments and Peoples are becoming more and more alienated from one another. Part of the demonstration of the Occupy Movement is to show how "another world is possible," and to demonstrate on a small and temporary scale, how to do it. How to live simply in community, in dignity, with justice, and in peace with one another. How to disconnect from the Grid of Control -- and why. So many demonstrations, so much need.

As government and Peoples divorce from one another, "another world" emerges spontaneously. It may not be what any of us had in mind in our utopian reveries, but it is the creation of the Future nevertheless.

The Future we thought we might have had has been stolen from us. The Earth itself is rebelling from the control of the financial elites. The more they seek to secure their own future, no matter what happens to anyone else, the worse their own fate will be.

Another world is possible...

Let's Not Fool Ourselves

2011-12-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

There are more police than demonstrators at port after port today. In Houston the police and fire department are using a Big Red Tent to hide the actual arrest of demonstrators who have laid down in the street.

Evolution Revolution.

They can use tents, too, you know! And there are more of them than you! Ha ha.

This winter is going to be remarkable.

And still "Power yields nothing..."
-----------------------------------------

Welllll, surprise surprise.

Oakland was shut down. San Diego was shut down. I'm not sure of any others at this point. Despite the overwhelming police presence, in other words, far outnumbering the demonstrators in some cases, the union stewards said "go home." And so the truckers and the longshoremen did. Ha.

Meanwhile word comes that all the charges against all the arrestees in Sacramento (113 at last count) have been dropped by the City... "in the interests of justice." Of course.

Was not able to get out to the Los Lunas action at the Wal-Mart distribution center -- just as well, it looks like there will be a major snow storm tonight if it isn't going on already -- but I'm sure the (Un)Occupy 'Burque folks have things well in hand as they are quite a feisty bunch. If things work out, I'm planning to head up to Santa Fe on Thursday, see how they're doing and then attend Las Posadas. So far as I know, Occupy Santa Fe are not even under threat of eviction from Railyard Park. But then, sometimes it's a little hard to sort out just what all is going on.

Here In New Mexico

2011-12-12T08:19:00.000-08:00

The drive south and east went surprisingly quickly and easily this time. It was becoming such a chore that I was coming to dread it. But not this time. Interesting how one adapts and/or responds to stimuli... Hmmm....

But when I got here, the pipes were frozen, sigh. Apparently the heat had not come on in the house at all during the past month (we keep the heater thermostat on at a somewhere below 60 temp). It was freezing cold inside, and it felt a bit like the Ice Palace Scene from Dr. Zhivago. Ice and snow everywhere, very beautiful really, but... cold.

Have been slowly thawing things out since yesterday afternoon when I got here. Have to figure out what's up with the heater and see if there's any plumbing damage. So far, so good -- (Gratitude toward the onlooking piping divinities and spirits) -- but we'll see when things are all thawed.

Meanwhile today's Port Actions are under way. The police at Oakland's action are assembling threateningly.

Watch live streaming video from occupyoakland at livestream.com

It's what they do.

Meanwhile Tim Pool is in Long Beach being denied "press" status.

Travel Day

2011-12-10T06:45:00.000-08:00

On the road today and tomorrow.

"Power Concedes Nothing... "

2011-12-10T04:33:00.000-08:00

BREAKING: Boston Occupation "cleared."

So far, Power has conceded nothing to the Occupy Movement, not even, in many cases, their presence before the Throne. The point being to ignore the rabble, and if that doesn't work, then to punish them. That is the range of accommodation many of our rulers have decided is just and proper in dealing with the Lesser People, while many of those who rule, it would seem, have no idea there are actual "people" beneath their own lofty status. There may be numbers, animals, statistics, but not actual humans for whom one need have any care.

This attitude from Above has been customary for many years, and it is a main driver for the revolt/revolution under way. There is only so much bullshit that any people will accept from their rulers before they take matters into their own hands and politely or impolitely push back. Americans were shockingly disinclined to do that while the National Security State was being developed and implemented, but now that it has been combined with an enduring -- seemingly endless -- economic collapse together with a stolen future for the Young, there's little to be lost by rising up.

So long as one has hope for the future, at least in this country, there is little agitation. When the future is lost -- or stolen as it has been -- all bets are off.

What's going on in the halls of Power in Europe is startling for its gross stupidity and blindness. Britain pulled out of the Eurozone Plan not because of any scruples, no. It was because Britain couldn't wring something worse out of the assembled nobles and nabobs in Brussels. They wanted the unfettered ability to continue to bring economic risk and harm to everyone including the High and the Mighty. The Europeans were content with limiting harm to the Lower Orders.

But... that just makes things worse all around. Do those people get it? No? What is the problem with them?

It's the same problem with the Ruling Class practically everywhere. They have decoupled from their People to the extent that they don't even recognize them as humans. The People are -- at best -- numbers to be managed or resources to be exploited. They have no say in their governments any more. They have no status, legal, moral, or otherwise, that the Rulership believes it need pay attention to.

The Rulers serve their Masters -- and those Masters are not US.

They build Social Unrest into their spreadsheets. It's a given. The masses will be Discontent. It is How They Are. Suppression of Mass Discontent is therefore budgeted, indeed, it is given a prominent place in all government budgets. Tactics for suppression are learned and deployed globally. The People are not to be allowed to Arise, and if they try to, any Movement not sanctioned from Above (as some have been) shall be crushed forthwith.

Oh? Movements and even Revolutions "sanctioned from Above?" Of course. It's happened many times, most prominently during the dissolution of the Soviet Empire and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was not at all an accident nor was it necessarily spontaneously generated from among the masses. It was clear to some observers at the time that these revolts were being engineered from... well, somewhere and not necessarily on site. Even the recent Arab Spring has been scrutinized for possible revolutionary engineering from elsewhere. Particularly so in the case of Libya, but seemingly so in the case of most of the others. You can almost tell whether a Revolution is "engineered" rather than spontaneous by how the US Government responds. If it is negative toward the Revolution, then it is spontaneous; if it is positive toward the Revolution then it is (or at least a significant part of it is) "engineered" from without.

There has been some chatter suggesting that the Occupy Movement is itself "engineered" by some sort of shadowy Black Op. I don't know that that's the case, but I can see why the notion might arise. For years, there was no populist movement at all in this country, then suddenly there was the Tea Party, which was self-evidently engineered. I traced its origin to the Grassfire Resistance Movement created pretty much the day of Obama's election victory -- but prepared well before it -- by a couple of Hate radio jocks tied in with the right people in the right wing. You will notice if you check the link that "Grassfire" is gone. As if it never was.

In a sense, it wasn't. It was obviously a sham "organization" to begin with. It was superseded by the Tea Party following Rick Santelli's obviously carefully prepared and presented rant against homeowners potentially getting bailed out as part of TARP or other government package. Note: there has been no homeowners' bailout, and in fact, there has never been any mention of it in the halls of Power -- except for Santelli's rant.

The Tea Party emerged fully-formed and obviously heavily funded and promoted by a plethora of Right Wing Interests from the get-go. They were spending big time and using every propaganda outlet they could get their hands on -- which was ultimately practically all of them -- to spread their message. Strangely, that message was heard and acted on with alacrity in the halls of Power. Americans had ne'er seen the like of it.

Not only was there no suppression of this "movement", there was no effort to protect the August Members of Congress who were being... openly threatened by armed TeaBaggers. This contrasted wildly with the intensity of overpolicing of dissent at the political conventions the summer before, where there were mass round ups prior to the Republican Convention, mass arrests during it, and other extraordinary suppression tactics employed.

The complete and utter lack of any such tactics employed against the 'Baggers, despite their open threats, showed as clearly as you could want that this was an "approved movement" -- even corporate- state sponsored. The scene of instigator report-backs to the Kochs was instructive. Or it should have been, if the obviousness of the Hate Radio and FOX "News" promotions weren't clues.

An irony of this sort of thing is that the nature of the beast, once recognized, has an interesting effect on the way people perceive democracy and representative government. The 'Baggers were able to force what they "wanted" into and onto government, but some of those who initially participated realized they were being used to support corporate interests not their own, that in fact they had no interests that the corporate interests needed to pay attention to. That realization is shocking when it comes -- if it comes. They realized, too, that this wasn't a genuine movement of and by the People at all. It was a corporate-government sponsored and supported "movement" intended as an illusion to mimic a mass movement, in order to ensure that corporate interests would always be... how shall I say this?... first at the table.

And so it is. Still.

Seeing how this works, though, discredits democracy in the eyes of those who witness it, and that seems to be one of the primary principles of these ersatz "revolutions".

They are called "democratic" revolutions or revolutions in support of democracy, but in the end they wind up discrediting democracy (such as has happened in the case of Iraq and elsewhere. Have you heard about Russia lately?)

We see the same sort of thing in our own government in that the Congress and President seem to have no connection with -- or interest in -- the People at all (except to manipulate them), and yet they are unable to function even on behalf of their corporate masters. Stalemate is the name of the game. We've been down this road before, and it led to Civil War -- which is not likely to happen again, but something will. Something's happening here as it is...

So the question arises, is Occupy for real or not? Given the suppression actions of Authority, it seems fairly obvious... but still, there is lingering suspicion. If the 'Baggers were a pretense, couldn't the Occupy be one as well?

Sure, but it doesn't much matter any more, because even if it were started as pretense (which it doesn't seem to have been) but instead seems to have originated as something of a lark, it has become a genuine populist/anarchist/liberationist/communitarian movement the like of which has not been seen in this country since the 1960's. Yet the Occupy Movement is quite different.

It seems completely organic and it cannot be commercialized (come on, the biggest "commercial" enterprise associated with Occupy is making buttons, and the whole thing is built around little pop up tents.) It has spread organically -- not forced at all -- through social media and the popular acceptance of an idea: A Better World Is Possible.

The fear of co-optation once was very strong. Though Dems and their associated political committees and union supporters were thought to be the most likely co-opters, the ones who were actually trying to do it (at least until recently) were the Zeitgeisters and the Ron Paul campaigners. They've largely faded away. There are actual political operatives (some from the Democratic Party) involved in some Occupations, but they do not have a controlling role, and if they ever did have one, the Occupation would rather quickly implode. However, in my view, the Movement is top-heavy with lawyers, and the lawyers have been essentially preventing the individual Occupations and the overall Movement from becoming something that actually threatens Established Power.

Lawyers want to litigate -- and this isn't a litigation Movement. I don't want to use this post to bash lawyers, but I'm not really sure the ones who are involved in the Occupations are serving the Movement more than peripherally, though their role has been central in many cases due to the large number of arrests and injuries and the many brutal and destructive suppressions.

Yet in fact, the problem is the law itself -- or rather the nature of that which gives rise to the law. Focus on law -- rather than on that which gives rise to it, our entire corrupt system -- can be crippling and devitializing. Of course, that's part of the point of litigation!

The chief risk going forward is normalization. Once the Occupy Movement becomes "normalized" it becomes part of the background noise and ultimately it becomes irrelevant. What if they had a Revolution and nobody came?

The failure of Power to concede anything of substance to the Movement, however, all but ensures that it won't be normalized or marginalized any time soon. Continuing and bigger efforts are under way that don't involve tents except as symbols. The General Strikes and the Port shut-downs and the Foreclosure resistance -- among many other actions directed at the "1%" will have a cumulative effect. The fact that so many "ordinary" people have now been directly subjected to the police state tactics used to suppress the movement (tactics that have a long history in some communities) has had the effect of awakening Americans to just what kind of a rigorous authoritarian state they live in.

Fewer and fewer are inclined to tolerate it.

What happens in Europe as Austerity grips the continent and what happens in North Africa as the Revolutions are betrayed will set the tone for the next phase of the Revolution in the US of A.

I'm sure there are think tanks pondering and forces of repression assembling.

But as we all know by now, you can't evict an idea whose time has come.

Siege

2011-12-09T16:23:00.000-08:00

I've been sitting on this story for a while, and I still haven't fully processed it -- I mean Max Blumenthal's incendiary piece that appeared in the Exiled Online last week but which has yet to turn into the kind of explosive viral piece that it could.

In all the hoo and hah over Naomi Wolf's claim and reclaim that DHS has been coordinating the raids on the Occupy encampments, the story of Israeli participation in the training of the law enforcement teams that have been most notorious in the suppression of Occupy hasn't been that widely noticed.

It's partly because Max Blumenthal wrote about it. Max is -- of course -- the World's Top Self Hating Jew® which -- of course -- makes anything he says or does defamatory of the kind and generous people known as Jews, especially those who have returned to their ancient homeland on the balmy shores of the Mediterranean Sea from which they were so rudely expelled some two thousand years ago.

But that aside...

What he's writing about is the fact that law enforcement in this country in general has adopted "Israeli" tactics (and in some cases weapons) for putting down domestic insurrection and revolt, following the path taken by the Israelis in their dealings with the various uprisings of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and occasionally in Israel itself.

So far as we know it hasn't come to the point of targeted assassination of Occupy "leaders" in this country yet, but there's little reason to believe that it couldn't or wouldn't happen under some scenarios. We haven't yet seen or heard of Occupy participants being disappeared, but there's little reason to believe that it couldn't happen.

But it's not merely that Israeli tactics in suppressing the Palestinians have been adopted by American security state operatives. What has got to me from practically the beginning of the Occupy Movement-cum-Revolution is that metaphorically what happened to the Jews of Europe under Nazi rule is being repeated by both the Occupiers and security forces. I doubt they are doing it consciously, and yet...

Occupy tactics include the creation of temporary intentional communities on public property. From a metaphorical perspective, these communities under tents and tarps can be seen a "ghettos" created by their inmates, which are then destroyed and utterly wiped from the face of the earth by the overwhelming power of the security state.

This scene has repeated over and over and over again, heartbreakingly if you witness it. The propaganda organs of the corporate security state have turned these violent and destructive episodes, spasms of state violence and destruction against non-violent protesters, into games, almost fun to engage in and watch. Whoo-hoo! Look at that! Come on, blow shit up!

The inmates of these temporary camps lose all their possessions in these raids, and every bit of (temporary) infrastructure and social benefit they had established in the course of the Occupation is destroyed. The Occupiers often face mass arrest -- along with bystanders and media. The Occupiers are said to be scattered and confused. They vow to return, but after the repeated destruction of the Oakland encampments, sometimes with extreme violence (for the USA but not for Israel) against the demonstrators, there is little will to repeatedly re-establish encampments once they have been destroyed. There may instead be a symbolic re-establishment -- such as one or a few tents set up and then voluntarily removed -- but no long-term encampment has been re-established once destroyed.

Strangely, there are many encampments that have gone largely unmolested by the authorities, indeed, some have been embraced and aided by them. We don't hear about those so much, but I hope to be able to write a bit more about them in the future.

The Siege has not begun for those encampments, and it may never. On the other hand, those encampments that have been under siege and eventually destroyed have obtained the status of Martyrs in the Movement. There are individual Martyrs, to be sure, such as Scott Olsen, but the destroyed encampments as a whole have each achieved Martyrdom, which is really quite a different thing than celebrating Heroes For The Cause. (As I've said before many times, I'm no hero worshipper.)

Oakland is still the central Martyr Encampment. They lost two encampments on Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza, and they lost two others elsewhere in the city as well. Yet the Oakland Occupation Movement appears to be as strong as -- if not stronger than -- ever: they are the lead Occupation for the December 12 Port Shut-Down Action. They were also in the forefront of the Stop Foreclosure Actions. I'm sure they will keep up the pressure.

The original Occupation in New York City has been undergoing a remarkable transformation into something akin to an established non-profit/NGO, but with such a legacy of direct democracy and spontaneity along an astonishing variety of demonstrations of that Other World That's Possible, that I can't see it turning into just another agency. No, they are turning into something that hasn't been seen in this country since the hey-day of Utopian Alternatives.

But back to the point of this post. There is no doubt that this country is grossly overpoliced. Absurdly so in the context of Occupy. Indeed, the temporary intentional communities that the Occupations established were or are self-generating, self-sustaining, and self-policing. There has been all kinds of whining about how much it has cost to "police" these encampments (including the costs of eviction and destruction), when it has been obvious all along that if they were just left alone, there wouldn't have been any costs at all. What is the social cost of official harassment, eviction and destruction of communities such as the Occupy encampments? What is the social cost of the wholesale destruction of communities in general that has come about due to the greed and the machinations of the "1%"?

The dozens or hundreds or thousands of police officers who have been repeatedly assembled to lay siege to and destroy encampments is an embarrassment and an absurd waste of resources.

But they want to show off, don't they?

They need to.

Don't they?

No. The answer is no. No they don't.

They are being driven to do it, though, by a culture of rulership in this country that is so completely divorced from the interests and needs of the People that it has no conception of either.

And Max Blumenthal has helped show us where some of that culture comes from.

Just stop it.

Swirling Events

2011-12-08T16:44:00.000-08:00

I tried to do some additional updates yesterday, but there was too much going on for me to keep track of coherently.

This was particularly true in San Francisco. But the swirling events of the Occupy Movement came to Sacramento as well as numerous other cities around the country and around the world.

The Movement is being suppressed everywhere, and it is growing everywhere. I wonder: is the suppression a necessary factor for the Movement's growth? When things settle down to a routine, people get on with their lives as best they can, and Occupy is merely a factor -- if even that -- in their day-to-day routines. But when Occupy is suppressed, as it is more and more, people who otherwise might not think it all that important righththisminute understand that it is "that important" and the Movement is re-energized.

When I say that "Those in power know not what they do," that's part of what I mean. Every suppression leads to greater growth.

But they do know what they are doing in some sense. They can't ultimately "win" -- that is, completely suppress the Movement and go on with their lives as if nothing had happened. Too late for that, way too late. But they seem to be following "Bush Rules" in the actions taken against the Movement. It's going on on several fronts, and I'll try to explain.

One thing I saw for example in San Francisco yesterday (on the livestream, I wasn't there in person) has been mirrored in other cities, particularly New York, but certainly not limited to New York. I was watching the live feed from the Market Street Rally after the eviction from Justin Herman Plaza (aka: "Bradley Manning Plaza"); it was relatively disorganized and spontaneous rally feeling, but the police were in heavy presence, organized into squadrons of maybe twenty or so, standing in formation here and there. Every now and then they would march around. At one point, the People were gathered on the sidewalks on either side of Market Street doing their usual things, and suddenly a squadron of police started marching from somewhere -- couldn't even tell where they came from except that it was from the direction of the Ferry Building. They marched in a squadron formation for a hundred feet or so, and then they formed a single line marching along the curb until a little past the location of the camera (it was magicmint's). Then a portion of the line formed a ring around a portion of the crowd, and from within the crowd two people were pulled out, seemingly at random, and arrested. The paddy wagon was brought forth and these two put in it and it was driven away. Then the police retreated.

Apparently this happened several times during the day.

Then that night, I was watching the gathering at Justin Herman/Bradley Manning Plaza (this was punkboy's and pixplz's feed). The People were gathering at the cleared site of the OccupySF encampment to hold their General Assembly. There were, I would guess, a few hundred people initially. The police came in squadron formations again and formed a double ring around a portion of the plaza, entrapping several dozen people inside their inner ring; most of the people were outside the rings, chanting and carrying on the way they do, but there was no violence at all. Then suddenly, right in front of the camera, police grabbed two men and pulled them roughly down into the sunken part of the plaza between the two rings of police. One appeared to be injured and in pain (it's probably a five or six foot drop into the area where he was being roughly manhandled, and there is a broad stone step that he apparently banged against before he hit the ground.) The man who appeared to be injured on the ground was roughly thrown onto his side whole the other was thrown onto his stomach and trussed with flexicuffs and then they were dragged roughly to what looked like a raised bed where the injured man was left writhing and apparently crying out in pain. I couldn't hear him, but others there could and were calling out to the police to get him medical attention. Of course, they paid no attention. There was a lot of chatter among the crowd concerning what this guy had done, and the answer was "nothing." He was just standing there with everybody else, and suddenly he was grabbed by police and thrown into the lower part of the plaza. It was impossible to tell what his injury was.

People were becoming more and more outraged at the utter cruelty the police were displaying by letting this man writhe in agony. People were calling 911 and ambulances were being sent (according to reports, I didn't see them) but the police were refusing them access to the victim due to "safety" concerns. Recall, there was no violence whatever, nor was there any threat of violence from the crowd. They simply wanted the man to receive medical attention.

The police instead let him writhe on the ground for at least a half an hour after the first Emergency Services personnel arrived (I'd say it was actually closer to an hour.) Finally, a EMT squad was allowed in, and eventually the man was put on a gurney and wheeled away.

After another couple of hours of a stand off between police and the Occupiers, and some negotiations between police and a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the police departed.

The General Assembly then continued. In triumph -- or as if nothing had happened.

The message was clear, and this is why punkboy's quote that I used as a heading in the previous post, "Fucking Nazi Germany!" is actually germane for once.

What we saw all yesterday in San Francisco were intimidation tactics that I wouldn't say were pioneered by the Nazis, but were certainly used and perfected by them. It wasn't solely Jews who suffered from these tactics by any means, but they provided a great deal of testimony about them and so their experience is the best known. But they were initially used against the political opponents of the Nazi Party and regime, particularly Communists and Social Democrats.

Raids were commonplace. They were often conducted in the dead of night when people would ordinarily be sleeping. They were conducted with overwhelming numbers of militarized police, acting essentially arbitrarily and destructively to terrorize the targets -- and the People as witnesses -- into complying with whatever the orders were. They used physical force (including summary execution) from time to time, but often didn't need to do anything more than show up to gain compliance. Even when the targets were compliant, they would often single out individuals for "special treatment" -- pulling them out of crowds and brutalizing and arresting them; people who had often done nothing at all to resist whatever aktion was under way. And anyone who did resist or tried to run was dealt with extremely harshly or fatally.

All this and more was meant to inspire extreme fear and terror in the target populations, and it worked, at least for a while. A big part of the psychology behind this brutal and arbitrary behavior by police is to terrorize the witnesses. They would do these aktions where and when many people could witness what was happening -- because they wanted people to see it. They wanted people to be afraid and to follow orders. Some of the things reported from Poland and the Ukraine (and I'm sure elsewhere) were incredibly brutal and cruel, and they were intended for the purpose of inspiring terror in the populations.

And that's what I think was happening yesterday in San Francisco. It looked objectively absurd, cruel, indeed monstrous in the case of the destruction of the camp and the arbitrary -- and apparently very painful -- arrest of the man who was pulled into the lower level of the plaza, but that's the point. That was one of the factors of the "Bush Rules" that were imposed on the various overseas wars. The point was to terrorize the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq to comply with their new overlords.

Similar rules of engagement were adopted with regard to domestic dissent as well. This arbitrary cruelty toward dissent in this country goes back at least to some of the protests during the Bush regime. But some would say it goes back to 1999 and the Battle in Seattle.

The point is to be mean, to show you're mean, and to intimidate and terrorize the People.

This is what our rulers want their militarized police forces to do.

The People, however, continue to fight back with a wide -- and growing -- range of tactics.

This isn't over yet.

Here is the video of the men being pulled through the police line onto the ground.

I saw it happen live and literally couldn't believe what I was seeing.

This is a video of some of the aftermath taken from a different angle:

I was watching this one live, too, and was saying "WTF!" over and over.

AgitProp

2011-12-08T13:18:00.000-08:00

Black Bloc gets such a bad rap, but this is fucking brilliant!

Occupy.

Foreclose.