* THE MANIFESTO OF THE MEDITERRANEAN MEETING IN TUNISIA
Source: CADTM
We, the representatives of progressive political parties from the Mediterranean region, gathered in Tunis from March 23 to 24, 2013, at the call of the Popular Front, and adopted the following resolution.
1. – For more than a quarter of a century, neoliberal capitalist globalization has extended its dominance over the entire planet. The processes launched have accelerated the commodization of the world in favour of a minority and have confiscated peoples´ citizenship and nations´ sovereignty. They are exacerbating economic insecurity and social inequality in the North and South and further widening the gap between the rich countries and the so-called poor countries.
Peoples of the South are subjected to a particularly devastating regime of structural adjustment policies and free trade policies which impedes a fair development, destroys the environment and deprives them of their sovereignty, thus weakening them even more and exacerbating their dependence on dominant economic areas of the North.
The fate of humanity is now decided by a handful of transnational corporations and by the international financial institutions over which people have no control.
Since 2008, in the midst of a crisis of the world capitalist system, structural adjustment policies have been extended to the countries of the northern Mediterranean, the so-called contemptuously PIGS.
In Tunisia, these policies have been imposed since 1986 by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In 1995, these were reinforced by the Association Agreement imposed by the European Union and its Member States. The political dictatorship has ensured the application of such policies.
At present, the various neoliberal capitalist globalization actors intend to carry on with these policies, trying to take advantage of the revolutionary crisis, by strengthening and expanding their scope. Thus they seek to block the path that leads to the development of aspirations and the desire for radical change massively expressed by the masses, particularly youth, during the revolutionary uprising of December- January 2011.
2. – The removal of the dictator has disarmed the local neoliberal capitalist order without reversing it have led to some progress. The social system which is the historical product of imperialist domination and, more recently, of the restructuring of the neoliberal capitalist world, is still standing. But the revolutionary crisis that initiated the insurgency remains active. The victory of the democratic, social and national revolution in Tunisia, as in other countries in the region, still remains a possibility.
3. - The Tunisian revolution marked the beginning of the Arab revolution. To date, four dictators, whose average time in power exceeded 30 years, have been eliminated. These political changes are, without a doubt, the most important occurrence that has taken place in the Arab region and Maghreb in decades. This is clearly a turning point in the history of Tunisia and the Arab region.
This is, in the proper sense of the term, a “historic” moment. In fact, for the first time in their history, the peoples of the Arab region, who have not stopped fighting, are standing up today against their direct oppressors, bursting onto the political scene to take hold of their destiny in their own hands.
4. – The debt -odious, illegitimate- used under the dictatorship as a tool for political submission and as a mechanism for the transfer of income from labour to local but above all to world capital, currently serves the counter-revolution to maintain the neo-colonial economy and imperialist domination in Tunisia. Furthermore, in Egypt, Morocco, Greece, Cyprus, the Spanish State and in many other countries of the Mediterranean basin, debt continues to serve the interests of a minority against the interests of the vast majority. It is everywhere, it is the pretext for the implementation of austerity policies imposed by international financial institutions and the capitalistic states that violate human rights.
5. – Everywhere, both in the North and the South, the same logics of profit, domination and destruction of the planet operate and continue to be imposed on the peoples and on nature. The Tunisian revolution, the Arab revolution, the heroic struggles of all peoples of the world against a neoliberal capitalist order, such as in Greece, Portugal, Catalonia, Basque country or the Spanish state, are the political founding acts of a new world order; one based on solidarity, that is democratic, feminist peaceful that ensures popular sovereignty and self-determination of the peoples and environmentally friendly- for which all our respective political parties are fighting.
6. – But standing in opposition of this popular will for a radical shift are the ruling classes, the transnationals and global finance institutions. They form a united front to counter-attack and to implement even more antisocial and undemocratic policies in order to break through this liberating popular impulse and momentum, and thus continue to make the costs of the global capitalist system crisis fall on the same shoulders, those of the working people and the planet.
7. – We, the representatives of progressive political parties from the Mediterranean region in the world, are convinced that we must unite our efforts and our actions, both regionally and internationally, to support and contribute to the struggles of the people and of the exploited and oppressed classes, in the region and worldwide, who yearn for freedom, dignity and social justice. We support the revolutionary struggle of the Syrian people to achieve freedom, democracy, social justice, equality and national dignity. We condemn any foreign intervention that goes against the achievement of these objectives.
In order to work together in this direction, we the progressive political parties from the Mediterranean region, that participated in this meeting in Tunisia against debt, austerity policies and imperialist domination, advocate for a free, democratic, social, solidarity-based and environmentally friendly Mediterranean region. We therefore commit to:
Support the process of mobilization and struggle of social movements, trade unions and social organizations for a citizen audit
Promote motions for non-payment of illegitimate debt and the external debt relief in the institutions in which we participate.
Incorporate in our political programs the NON payment of the illegitimate debt and the promotion of citizen audit and the support of the struggle for the sovereignty of peoples and self-determination.
Advance on the development of a network of mutual support between the nations to assist those who decided not to pay the illegitimate debt
Establish a permanent communication network for the exchange of information and experiences.
Develop a concrete cooperation aiming at developing tools for the struggle and mobilization necessary to achieve our goals.
Organize the next meeting in the Spanish State.
The progressive political parties in the Mediterranean region and other parts of the world that participated in the Tunisian Mediterranean Meeting welcomed the World Social Forum that was held in Tunis from March 26 to 30, and that allowed to advance towards the realization of the objectives enshrined in the Charter of Porto Alegre.
Finally, we strongly condemn the killing of Chokri Belaid, Secretary General of the Unified Democratic Patriotic Party and leader of the Popular Front, which we refer to as a political crime. We demand the truth to be told about all those involved in this heinous crime. […]
* SCIENTIST CONFIRM! “AUSTERITY IS TOO BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH”
Source: KeepTalkingGreece
Scientists confirm what we already know: that recession-driven austerity measures are not just bad for your wealth, they are also harming your health. It’s not only that your pockets are robbed causing sleepless nights, depression and heart attacks. The austerity cuts that primarily target the health sector boost infectious diseases as medicine and treatment become prohibitively expensive.
British scientists examined the impact of austerity to health issues and thus on the example of Greece and Great Britain.
The after-effects of the financial crisis is driving a wave of suicide, depression and infectious diseases as medicine and treatment become prohibitively expensive across Europe and North America, according to new research by academics.
After examining a decade of studies , Oxford University political economist David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist at Stanford University, have concluded austerity is seriously bad for health.
More than 10,000 suicides and up to a million cases of depression have been diagnosed during what they call the “Great Recession” and the austerity that followed it , the pair conclude in a book due to be published this week.
They cite examples in Greece, which has seen the rate of the Aids-causing HIV virus increase by 200pc as the health budget have been cut. The more than 50pc youth unemployment rate has also seen drug abuse on the increase, hastening the spread of the virus.
Greece also experienced its first malaria outbreak in decades following budget cuts to mosquito-spraying programmes.
In Britain, the academics claim 10,000 families have been pushed into homelessness by the austerity budget, and in the US 5m people no longer have access to healthcare since the recession.
“Politicians need to take into account the serious – and in some cases profound – health consequences of economic choices,” said Mr Stuckler, a senior researcher at Oxford University and co-author The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.
“The harms we have found include HIV and malaria outbreaks, shortages of essential medicines, lost healthcare access, and an avoidable epidemic of alcohol abuse, depression and suicide,” he said in a statement. “Austerity is having a devastating effect.”
Previous studies by Mr Stuckler published in journals such as The Lancet and the British Medical Journal have linked rising suicide rates in some parts of Europe to austerity measures, and found HIV epidemics to be spreading amid cutbacks in services to vulnerable people.
But he and Mr Basu said negative public health effects are not inevitable, even during the worst economic disasters. (full story Telegraph)
Greeks get really sick
Also Greek scientists have collected data on the impact of the austerity cuts on the people’s health. According to Christodoulos Stefanadis, cardiology professor at the University of Athens with experience at the country’s public hospitals:
Cardiovascular incidents increased by 20% in the last two years.
Increased is also the number of patients with high blood pressure.
One in six patients with cholesterol does not follow the prescribed treatment due to financial inability to come up with the self-participation percentage on prescribed medicine.
Unemployment, stress at work and depression are risk factors for cardiovascular diseases equal to risk factors like smoking, lack of exercise and unhealthy eating habits. […]
* CIA’s ‘BAGS OF CASH’ FUELED AFGHAN CORRUPTION, BOUGHT LITTLE INFLUENCE
By Jason Ditz, Anti-War
A Decade Later, CIA Still Throwing Money at Karzai
If you’re a top Afghan official money comes awfully easy. For Afghan President Hamid Karzai, you don’t even have to ask for it or leave your office, and people will show up with plastic shopping bags full of cash for you.
The “sacks of cash” phenomenon was unveiled in 2010, when officials revealed that Iran was showing up with $1 million in cash a few times a year for Karzai. The US was and is doing it too. The CIA has notoriously been showing up all the time with “ghost money” aimed at buying influence.
“It came in secret, and it left in secret,” noted Karzai’s former chief of staff. Over a decade later, the cash is still coming and going, but what influence if any was ever actually bought is unclear at best.
Officials are critical of the policy, saying that tens of millions of US dollars with no paperwork were actually a big part of how Afghanistan became one of the most corrupt nations in human history. Though there is of course no way of tracking all this money, US officials believe that large amounts were used to bribe politicians and warlords.
This is how all political business gets done in Afghanistan to this day, and despite officials insisting that the money is incredibly counterproductive, the CIA bags are still showing up regularly. […]
Mohamedou Ould Slahi began to tell his story in 2005. Over the course of several months, the Guantánamo prisoner handwrote his memoir, recounting what he calls his “endless world tour” of detention and interrogation. He wrote in English, a language he mastered in prison. His handwriting is relaxed but neat, his narrative, even riddled with redactions, vivid and captivating. In telling his story he tried, as he wrote, “to be as fair as possible to the U.S. government, to my brothers, and to myself.” He finished his 466-page draft in early 2006. For the next six years, the U.S. government held the manuscript as a classified secret.
When his pro bono attorneys were allowed to hand me a disk labeled “Unclassified Version” last year, Slahi had been a Guantánamo detainee for more than a decade. I sat down to start reading his manuscript nearly 10 years to the day from the book’s opening scene:
“[Redacted] July 2002, 22:00. The American team takes over. The music was off. The conversations of the guards faded away. The truck emptied.”
We’re in the middle of the action. Slahi’s life in captivity had begun eight months earlier, on Nov. 20, 2001, when Slahi, then 30, was summoned by Mauritanian police for questioning. He had just returned home from work; he was in the shower when police arrived. He dressed, grabbed his car keys—he went voluntarily, driving himself to the police station—and told his mother not to worry, he would be home soon. [...]
Editor’s Note: In recent months, many climate activists have focused their efforts on Canada’s tar sands and the companies set on extracting fossil fuels from them. With the debate raging louder than ever, Rolling Stone is in contact with one of the workers helping to build a pipeline to bring oil from the tar sands to the U.S. Read on for that anonymous correspondent’s first dispatch from one of the world’s most controversial jobs.
There’s something in the air in Fort McMurray, Alberta – and it’s not just fumes from the massive oil sands processing plants north of town. Spend enough time here, and you’ll pick up the pungent scents of machismo and money.
This is the heart of Canada’s controversial tar sands operation. If all goes as planned, this region will soon be sending its bitumen – the sticky, black petroleum byproduct colloquially known as “tar” – down the Keystone XL Pipeline. President Obama has yet to give the contentious project the green light, but work in the oil sands shows no sign of slowing down any time soon.
The region has 80,000 permanent residents, and hosts about 40,000 temporary workers at any given time – welders, pipefitters, heavy equipment operators, technicians, engineers and other hired hands who pass through Fort McMurray as the work ebbs and flows. I joined them this winter when, after hearing stories about Fort Mac for years, I signed on to help build a massive pipeline (not the Keystone XL). I was eager to see the tar sands for myself, experience life in Fort Mac firsthand – and, let’s be honest, I wanted to make some oil money, too. I’m writing this story anonymously to protect my friends, my colleagues and myself.
Much of the work here relies on ice roads and freezing temperatures, so when spring comes, the work ends. The obvious irony is that the carbon economy itself is very likely contributing to the early springs, late winters and wacky weather that keeps interrupting our work.
Few in northern Alberta seemed to notice when thousands gathered in Washington, D.C. to protest the Keystone project in February. Instead, everyone was talking about the southern extension project coming up later this year, and the 14,000 jobs it would bring.
The recent rupture of an Exxon pipeline in Arkansas, spilling tens of thousands of Canadian crude, made some noise here. But most chalked it up to “bad timing” –folks are quick to point out that the pipeline in question was installed in the 1940s, and my foreman assured us that Exxon would “make sure everyone is taken care of.” The prevailing logic seems to be that if you throw enough money at a problem, it’ll go away. […]
Greek seamen will launch a 48-hour strike on April 10th and 11th 2012 to protest the integration of their insurance fund NAT to the new health care system EOPPY and several other issues of their sector.
The strike will start on Monday (April 9/12) midnight.
The strike is a blow to those who want to use the sea ways during the Eastern Holidays.
This post will be updated if there is some development on the issue.
Letter submitted to The DePaulia, newspaper of DePaul University in Chicago
This survey course on NATO ignores the Alliance’s salient characteristic: That it is not only the world’s sole military bloc, one which from 1999-2012 waged unprovoked wars in three continents (Southeastern Europe, South Asia and North Africa), but the largest multinational war machine in history.
The observation that the NATO “website noted that according to the original treaty, an attack on one NATO country is an attack on everyone” is a reference to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, the basis for 150,000 troops from 50 nations serving under the military bloc’s command in Afghanistan – the largest invasion force in that nation’s history – and the largest number of troop-contributing countries in any war ever, certainly in one nation. The Afghan campaign is also the longest war in the history of the U.S.
In addition, Article 5 is the basis of NATO continuing its comprehensive naval surveillance and interdiction operation, Active Endeavor, throughout the Mediterranean Sea from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal, currently in its eleventh year and with no indication of ending.
If at the time of its founding in 1949 NATO’s chief purpose was to “combat the Soviet Union,” then please explain how it is that eight years after the fragmentation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics the bloc began a ten-year expansion that saw it increase membership by 75 percent, from 16 to 28 members in 2009.
Or what justification it employed to build military partnerships with another 40 nations throughout Europe, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, East Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa.
NATO is a historically unparalleled threat to world peace, not least because of its centrality in realizing the Ronald Reagan administration’s plan for a potential first-strike global missile shield.
It needs to be abolished, not discussed as though it were a beneficent and innocuous security agreement.
PARIS — When Melissa Dos Santos leaves her job at the end of each day, she goes home to an unlikely place: a tiny trailer in a campground 30 miles north of Paris, where scores of people who can barely make ends meet are living on a sprawling lot originally designed as a bucolic retreat for vacationers.
“I grew up in a house; living in a campground isn’t the same,” Ms. Dos Santos, 21, said wistfully.
Her dreams of a more normal life in an apartment with her boyfriend evaporated when they both took minimum-wage jobs — she in a supermarket and he as a Paris street sweeper — after months of searching fruitlessly for better-paying work. “People call us marginal,” she said. “Little by little, it’s eating us up.”
Europe’s long-running euro crisis may be cooling. But the economic distress it has left in its wake is pushing a rising tide of workers into precarious straits in France and across the European Union. Today, hundreds of thousands of people are living in campgrounds, vehicles and cheap hotel rooms. Millions more are sharing space with relatives, unable to afford the basic costs of living. […]
* THE WORLD BANK IS HOPELESS AND CHANGING LEADERS WON’T HELP
Source: The Daily Bell, Staff Report
Hats off to Ngozi … A golden opportunity for the rest of the world to show Barack Obama the meaning of meritocracy … When economists from the World Bank visit poor countries to dispense cash and advice, they routinely tell governments to reject cronyism and fill each important job with the best candidate available. It is good advice. The World Bank should take it. In appointing its next president, the bank’s board should reject the nominee of its most influential shareholder, America, and pick Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. – Economist
Dominant Social Theme: The World Bank is a great institution. We just need the right person to run it.
Free-Market Analysis: The World Bank is a part of a kind of “tag team” with the International Monetary Fund. The World Bank lends money to dictators and sundry thugs and then when these unsavory individuals abscond, the IMF is hauled in to make the people pay.
The process enriches Western corporations and ultimately creates more control for the Western power elite that has constructed the globalist echelon to begin with. The UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the International Criminal Court and many other internationalist entities are hopelessly corrupt and evidently were designed to be so.
Every part of the globalist government-in-waiting deals with other governments, and all the corruption this entails. The entire elitist mechanism is focused on providing a variety of bureaucrats with fiat money-from-nothing in order to first distort developing world economies and then collapse them.
This basic mechanism has been documented endlessly by the Internet’s alternative media, and choosing an African to run the World Bank won’t change an iota of the larger corrupt system.
That doesn’t stop the Economist, a leading mouthpiece of the power elite, from making the case that by switching the titular head from a Western person to an African person will somehow make a difference in what the World Bank is and what it was intended to be. Here’s more from the article: […]
Watching pompous politicians, egotistical economists, arrogant investment geniuses, clueless media pundits, and self- proclaimed experts on the Great Depression predict an economic recovery and a return to normalcy would be amusing if it wasn’t so pathetic. Their lack of historical perspective does a huge disservice to the American people, as their failure to grasp the cyclical nature of history results in a broad misunderstanding of the Crisis the country is facing. The ruling class and opinion leaders are dominated by linear thinkers that believe the world progresses in a straight line. Despite all evidence of history clearly moving through cycles that repeat every eighty to one hundred years (a long human life), the present generations are always surprised by these turnings in history. I can guarantee you this country will not truly experience an economic recovery or progress for another fifteen to twenty years. If you think the last four years have been bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Hope is not an option. There is too much debt, too little cash-flow, too many promises, too many lies, too little common sense, too much mass delusion, too much corruption, too little trust, too much hate, too many weapons in the hands of too many crazies, and too few visionary leaders to not create an epic worldwide implosion. Too bad. We’ve experienced horrific Crisis periods three times in the last 250 years and winter has arrived again exactly as forecasted by Strauss & Howe in 1997. The linear thinkers will continue to predict a recovery that never arrives. We have awful trials and tribulations, dreadful sacrifices of blood and treasure, and grim choices awaiting our country over the next fifteen years. Linear thinkers will scoff at such a statement as they irrationally view the world as a never ending forward progression towards a glorious future. History proves them wrong. We stand here in the year 2012 with no good options, only less worse options. Decades of foolishness, debt accumulation, and a materialistic feeding frenzy of delusion have left the world broke and out of options. And still our leaders accelerate the debt accumulation, while encouraging the masses to carry-on as if nothing has changed since 2008. Sadly, millions of lemmings want to believe they will not drown in the sea of un-payable commitments. Truth is a scarce resource on the planet today. […]
The big bad event of last week was, of course, the Supreme Court hearing on health reform. In the course of that hearing it became clear that several of the justices, and possibly a majority, are political creatures pure and simple, willing to embrace any argument, no matter how absurd, that serves the interests of Team Republican.
But we should not allow events in the court to completely overshadow another, almost equally disturbing spectacle. For on Thursday Republicans in the House of Representatives passed what was surely the most fraudulent budget in American history.
And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes. […]
The current French presidential election campaign was rudely interrupted at its very start by a series of murders in and around the southwestern city of Toulouse. On March 11, a paratrooper was shot dead by a mysterious motorcyclist in Toulouse. Four days later, in the nearby garrison town of Montauban, two more paratroopers were shot dead in similar circumstances. Then, four days after that, early in the morning of March 21 in a residential neighborhood of Toulouse, a helmeted gunman approached a Jewish school and coolly shot dead a rabbi and three children at point blank range before driving off on his motorcycle.
Since the targeted paratroopers were reported to be of North African extraction, the first wave of reaction focused on the assumption that the gunman was a far right racist, comparable to the Norwegian mass murderer Ander Behring Breivik. Commentators and politicians rushed to blame rightwing campaign rhetoric for “stirring up hatred”. Bernard Henry Lévy recycled his perpetual accusation that France is inherently anti-Semitic, writing: “So there you have it, France is a country where in 2012, in the third largest city, one can shoot at a Jewish school and kill several innocent children at point blank range.” The insinuation that France as a whole was somehow guilty was echoed on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, which predicted that the political debate around the shooting was likely to continue as “soul-searching about the nature of France”.
The reactions necessarily shifted drastically after it was reported that the lone killer had been identified as a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian extraction, Mohamed Merah. Rather than a neo-Nazi racist, the killer presented himself as an Al Qaeda fighter. As police surrounded his apartment in Toulouse, he reportedly claimed by telephone that he had killed the paratroopers for having fought in Afghanistan and murdered Jewish children to “avenge Palestinian children”. […]
[…] The Obama administration, which promised during its transition to power that it would enhance “whistle-blower laws to protect federal workers,” has been more prone than any administration in history in trying to silence and prosecute federal workers.
The Espionage Act, enacted back in 1917 to punish those who gave aid to our enemies, was used three times in all the prior administrations to bring cases against government officials accused of providing classified information to the media. It has been used six times since the current president took office.
Setting aside the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who is accused of stealing thousands of secret documents, the majority of the recent prosecutions seem to have everything to do with administrative secrecy and very little to do with national security.
In case after case, the Espionage Act has been deployed as a kind of ad hoc Official Secrets Act, which is not a law that has ever found traction in America, a place where the people’s right to know is viewed as superseding the government’s right to hide its business. […]
Occupy protesters in London are braced for eviction following a court ruling that dictates local authorities can remove the 4-month-old campsite outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. The ruling came Wednesday, and ever since the Occupy London Twitter account (@OccupyLSX) has been posting periodic ominous updates.
“No sign yet,” @OccupyLSX tweeted in response today to a question about the eviction status.
While some protesters seemed determined to hold their ground – Occupy London tweeted that they would not be “bullied or afraid,” – the group’s lawyer, Karen Todner, ensured everyone that the activists are “seeking to discuss the best way to evacuate the camp in a peaceful and orderly fashion.” […]
In Greece three-quarters of the independent doctors, lawyers, and engineers declare taxable income below the existential minimum. Tax fraud amounts to €20 billion per year (8.5% of GDP). And tax dodgers owe €63 billion in unpaid taxes (27% of GDP). The country is bankrupt and has been kept afloat by the Troika (EU, ECB, and IMF), of which Germany is by far the largest contributor. And the numbers are staggering: the first bailout package of €110 billion, the current bailout package of €130 billion, and the debt swap of €107 billion, in total €347 billion, amount to a mind boggling 150% of Greece’s GDP!
And even that won’t be enough, apparently, according to a crescendo of German politicians, among them Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble who inserted these devastating words into his letter to the members of the Bundestag: “I cannot give any guarantees that the path taken will lead to success.” And: It’s possibly “not the last time that the German Bundestag will have to deal with financial aid for Greece.” Thus, he put a third bailout package on the table. […]
Students and teachers in Spain have packed the streets of Valencia, angry at cuts to the education system by their government. They are also angry about harsh and brutal tactics used by police there at previous rallies when dozens were beaten and arrested. Spain is facing an out-of-control deficit and despite many across-the-board cuts, it slated for many more – in the realm of 40 billion Euros or 53 billion dollars. RT correspondent Sarah Firth brings the latest from Valencia, Spain in her report.
The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, was well under way when it officially commenced, early on a Wednesday evening in January, with an address, in the Congress Hall of the Congress Center, by Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany. She had a lot to say about Europe. Some of it—“Do we dare more Europe? Yes, we do dare”—made the news. But outside the hall many Davos participants paid her no mind. They loitered in various lounges carrying on conversations with each other. They talked and talked—as though they hadn’t been talking all day. They had talked while sitting on panels or while skipping panels that others were sitting on. “Historic Complexity: How Did We Get Here?,” “The Compensation Question,” “Global Risks 2012: The Seeds of Dystopia”: over the course of five days, a man could skip more than two hundred and fifty such sessions.
Many Davos participants rarely, if ever, attend even one. Instead, they float around in the slack spaces, sitting down to one arranged meeting after another, or else making themselves available for chance encounters, either with friends or with strangers whom they will ever after be able to refer to as friends. The Congress Center, the daytime hub, is a warren of interconnected lounges, cafés, lobbies, and lecture halls, with espresso bars, juice stations, and stacks of apples scattered about. The participants have their preferred hovering areas. Wandering the center in search of people to talk to was like fishing a stretch of river; one could observe, over time, which pools held which fish, and what times of day they liked to feed. Jamie Dimon, running shoes in hand, near the espresso stand by the Global Leadership Fellows Program, in the late afternoon. Fareed Zakaria, happily besieged, in the Industry Partners Lounge, just before lunch. The lunkers would very occasionally emerge from their deep holes (there were rumors of secret passageways) and glide through the crowd, with aides alongside, like pilot fish. (The W.E.F. says that Davos is an entourage-free zone, but this doesn’t seem to apply to the biggest of the big wheels, like heads of state.) It is said that the faster you walk the more important you are. […]
* MONSANTO WINS DISMISSAL OF ORGANIC GROWERS’ GENE-PATENT SUIT
By Don Jeffery, Bloomberg
Monsanto Co., the world’s largest seed company, won the dismissal of a lawsuit by growers of organic crops seeking to have its patents for genetically altered seeds invalidated.
U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan threw out the organic growers’ lawsuit in a ruling dated Feb. 24, saying it represented no controversy and that she had no jurisdiction over the suit.
Organic farmers, seed companies and food safety groups sued St. Louis-based Monsanto in March 2011 seeking court protection against possible lawsuits by the company for patent infringement if genetically modified crops were mistakenly found among their yields. […]
* AN EXCERPT FROM “KILLING THE COMPETITION: HOW THE NEW MONOPOLIES ARE DESTROYING OPEN MARKETS”
By Barry C. Lynn, Harpers
Fear, in any real market, is a natural emotion. There is the fear of not making a sale, not landing a job, not winning a client. Such fear is healthy, even constructive. It prods us to polish our wares, to refine our skills, and to conjure up—every so often—a wonder.
But these days, we see a different kind of fear in the eyes of America’s entrepreneurs and professionals. It’s a fear of the arbitrary edict, of the brute exercise of power. And the origins of this fear lie precisely in the fact that many if not most Americans can no longer count on open markets for their ideas and their work. Because of the overthrow of our antimonopoly laws a generation ago, we instead find ourselves subject to the ever more autocratic whims of the individuals who run our giant business corporations.
The equation is simple. In sector after sector of our political economy, there are still many sellers: many of us. But every day, there are fewer buyers: fewer of them. Hence, they enjoy more and more liberty to dictate terms—or simply to dictate. […]
* 2181 ITALIANS PACK A SPORTS ARENA TO LEARN MODERN MONETARY THEORY – THE ECONOMY DOESN’T NEED TO SUFFER NEOLIBERAL AUSTERITY
By Michael Hudson, Naked Capitalism
I have just returned from Rimini, Italy, where I experienced one of the most amazing spectacles of my academic life. Four of us associated with the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) were invited to lecture for three days on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and explain why Europe is in such monetary trouble today – and to show that there is an alternative, that the enforced austerity for the 99% and vast wealth grab by the 1% is not a force of nature.
[…]
The basic thrust of our argument is that just as commercial banks create credit electronically on their computer keyboards (creating a bank account credit for borrowers in exchange for their signing an IOU at interest), governments can create money. There is no need to borrow from banks, as computer keyboards provide nearly free credit creation to finance spending.
The difference, of course, is that governments spend money (at least in principle) to promote long-term growth and employment, to invest in public infrastructure, research and development, provide health care and other basic economic functions. Banks have a more short-term time frame. They lend credit against collateral in place. Some 80% of bank loans are mortgages against real estate. Other loans are made to finance leveraged buyouts and corporate takeovers. But most new fixed capital investment by corporations is financed out of retained earnings. […]
Published on Friday, January 27, 2012 by Common Dreams
Social media website Twitter announced Thursday that it will begin blocking certain messages (tweets) on a country-to-country basis. Twitter has been known as a vehicle for free speech as well as a source for social and political organizing — notably during the protests in 2011 from the Egyptian uprising to Occupy Wall Street. Governments will now request Twitter to take down certain ‘illegal’ tweets, which will be blocked from its citizens but may still be visible by users outside of the censored country. Many have now raised concerns that this will open the door for repressive governmental censorship, in some ways defeating the benefits of Twitter all together.
This is a sudden reverse in policy for Twitter who has previously boasted its capacity for free speech.
Users across the world are beginning the protest and a Twitter boycott has been planned for tomorrow. […]
* FORGET SOPA AND PIPA. OBAMA SIGNED ACTA, RESCUING AND WEAKENING CONGRESS AGAIN
By Rob Kall, OpEdNews
[…] Last fall, after President Obama signed the US on to the act, Senator Ron Wyden wrote a letter protesting the signing. The letter said …
Asking why the administration believes the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) does not require Congress’s formal approval. According to legal experts, cited by Wyden, if the USTR ratifies ACTA without Congress’ consent it may be circumventing Congress’s Constitutional authority to regulate international commerce and protect intellectual property and would therefore represent a significant expansion of the executive branch’s authority over international agreements.
“It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law,” Wyden writes.“But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law”the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress’ authority, absent congressional approval.”
ACTA makes SOPA and PIPA look like small problems. It allows the most repressive nations to demand that internet service providers (ISPs) remove content or even whole websites on demand. Picture China demanding removal of a website criticizing some policy or action. Google was just about shut down in China in response to Chinese demands. Imagine if China could have the same chilling effect in the US and the rest of the world. […]
* KNOWLEDGE IS A UNIVERSAL NATURAL RESOURCE — AND LOCKING IT UP HURTS EVERYONE
By Mike Masnick, TechDirt
from the time-to-face-facts dept
One of the more important points in understanding some of the fights over the ridiculousness of today’s copyright and patent laws is to recognize how knowledge (information) is a natural resource. It is the input that makes other great things. Economist Paul Romer’s famous research really showed how knowledge and information as a resource is what creates economic growth. Once you recognize that fact, you begin to run into problems when you think about locking up that natural resource. Think of other natural resources. Do we think the world is better off if there’s a greater supply of each of those? An abundance? If we have an abundance of wheat, that’s a good thing. If we have an abundance of energy, that’s a good thing. There may be side effects of such abundances, but the overall abundance is something worth cherishing.
The problem, however, comes when you have a new abundance where once there was scarcity. And that’s because anywhere there’s a scarcity, someone has built a business model based on that very scarcity. But that is a business model issue. Years ago, most economies rejected the idea of mercantilism, where governments would purposely build up monopolies and artificial scarcities, because of the realization that, in the long run, everyone was better off with a competitive market. The guy who had the sugar monopoly may have hated it — but everyone else was much, much better off.
And, so, we go back to knowledge and information. Unlike most other resources, knowledge is not just abundant… it is infinite. As Thomas Jefferson once famously wrote:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. […]
It was tried previously (several times) under “slightly different” circumstances, and failed. Yet when it comes to taking over a country without spilling even one drop of blood, and converting its citizens into debt slaves, Germany’s Merkel may have just succeeded where so many of her predecessors failed. According to a Reuters exclusive, “Germany is pushing for Greece to relinquish control over its budget policy to European institutions [ZH: read ze Germans] as part of discussions over a second rescue package, a European source told Reuters on Friday.” Reuters add: “There are internal discussions within the Euro group and proposals, one of which comes from Germany, on how to constructively treat country aid programs that are continuously off track, whether this can simply be ignored or whether we say that’s enough,” the source said.’ So while the great distraction that is the Charles Dallara “negotiation” with Hedge Funds continues (as its outcome is irrelevant: a Greece default is assured at this point), the real development once again was behind the scenes where Germany was cleanly and clinically taking over Greece. Because while today it is the fiscal apparatus, tomorrow it is the legislative. As for the executive: who cares. At that point Goldman will merely appoint one of its retired partners as Greek president and Greece will become the first 21st century German, pardon, European colony. But at least it will have its precious euro. We can’t wait until Greek citizens find out about this quiet coup.
The source added that under the proposals European institutions already operating in Greece should be given “certain decision-making powers” over fiscal policy.
“This could be carried out even more stringently through external expertise,” the source said.
The German demands for greater control over Greek budget policy comes amid intense talks to finalize a second 130-billion euro rescue package for Greece, which has repeatedly failed to meet the fiscal targets set out for it by its international lenders.
It is likely to spark a strong reaction in Athens ahead of elections expected to take place in April. […]
The future of the Arab spring and the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street movements is very difficult to foresee, but one thing is certain: the fight to break the infernal cycle of debt is a vital one. If it is not energetically pursued, there is little chance of overcoming the next neo-liberal offensive, writes Éric Toussaint.
Part 1: Looking back on the movements that preceded the Arab Spring, the Indignados, and Occupy Wall Street
In 2011, social and political rebellion has re-emerged in the streets and on squares all over the world. It has appeared in new forms and been given new names: the Arab Spring, the Indignados, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. The main regions affected are North Africa and the Middle East (including Israel), Europe and North America. Not all countries in those areas have been equally affected by this new wave of mobilizations and new forms of organization, but everybody has heard about the movement. In the countries in which it has not been massive, active minorities have attempted to give it wider legitimacy with varying results |1|. In the Southern hemisphere, only Chile has experienced a movement that can be compared to that of the Indignados in 2011 |2|.
If we try to sum up what has been achieved by the alterglobalist movement over the past two decades, we can distinguish between different phases related to the overall developments in the world.
From 1999 to 2005, in response to a heightening of the neoliberal offensive in Northern countries, large-scale mobilizations occurred against the WTO (Seattle in November 1999), the World Bank, the IMF, and the G8 (Washington in April 2000, Prague in September 2000, Genoa in July 2001). The World Social Forum emerged in that context in Porto Alegre in January 2001. Over the following years the movement spread to several continents (Latin America, Europe, Africa, South Asia, and North America). New international networks were created: Jubilee South (on the issue of debt), ATTAC (against the dictatorship of financial markets), the World March of Women, Our World Is Not for Sale, and others. Older networks (dating back to the first half of the 1990s) such as Via Campesina, CADTM (North/South network that focuses on the debt, the WB and the IMF) were strengthened. The antiglobalization movement developed in these years, mainly within the context of the WSF. […]
The labor movement brought you the weekend. Thomas Friedman wants to take it away.
Even as he serves as a leading champion of corporate globalization, the New York Times columnist and flat-world author has a way of highlighting how ordinary people hardly have reason to be thrilled by what transnational capitalism has on offer. Case in point: in his most recent column, Friedman argues that “Average is Over.” Those with merely par-for-the-course skills and education, he tells us, are bound to find their jobs replaced by foreign workers or by new technology.
Friedman writes:
In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation, and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra—their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.
We should have seen this coming, especially since Friedman used the same title for a chapter in his latest book (That Used to Be Us, with Michael Mandelbaum). But the column still irks.
Many people (Marie Burns at the NYTimes Examiner being just one) have already beaten me to the inevitable Lake Wobegon reference. Others, such as Dean Baker, have taken on some of the economic misconceptions in the column—about productivity, for instance. (In a well-aimed parting shot, Baker remarks that “average” is apparently not over among high-paid professionals; “Thomas Friedman does a good enough job of demonstrating this directly twice a week in the NYT.”) […]
“What’s happened is that, almost overnight, we’ve switched from democracy in real-property recording to oligarchy in real-property recording. There was no court case behind this, no statute from Congress or the state legislatures. It was accomplished in a private corporate decision. The banks just did it.”
– Christopher Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah, on the “wholesale transfer of mortgages to a privatized database” and why it’s no coincidence more Americans are being foreclosed upon than any time since the Great Depression.
[…]
What makes the article so remarkable is it has one of the most powerful anti-MERS arguments I have ever read in the mainstream media. In addition to the quote above, there is this:
At the heart of the clouded-title problem is a Virginia-based company, recently much in the national news, called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems. MERS was created in 1995 as a privately held venture of the major mortgage-finance operators, chief among them the government-sponsored mortgaging entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Its stated purpose was to manage a confidential electronic registry for the tracking of the sale of mortgage loans between lenders, which could now place loans under MERS’s name to avoid filing the paperwork normally required whenever mortgage assignments changed hands. No longer would the traffickers in mortgages have to document their transactions with county clerks, nor would they have to pay the many and varied courthouse fees for such transactions. Instead, MERS was listed in local recording offices as the “mortgagee of record,” the in-name-only owner, a so-called nominee for the lender, so that MERS would effectively “own” the loan where the public record was concerned, while the lenders traded it back and forth.
This centralized database facilitated the buying and selling of mortgage debt at great speed and greatly reduced cost. It was a key innovation in expediting the packaging of mortgage-backed securities. Soon after the registry launched, in 1999, the Wall Street ratings agencies pronounced the system sound. “The legal mechanism set up to put creditors on notice of a mortgage is valid,” as was “the ability to foreclose,” assured Moody’s. That same year, Lehman Brothers issued the first AAA-rated mortgage-backed security built out of MERS mortgages. By the end of 2002, MERS was registering itself as the owner of 21,000 loans every day. Five years later, at the peak of the housing bubble, MERS registered some two thirds of all home loans in the United States.
Without the efficiencies of MERS there probably would never have been a mortgage-finance bubble.
After the housing market collapsed, however, MERS found itself under attack in courts across the country. MERS had singlehandedly unraveled centuries of precedent in property titling and mortgage recordation, and judges in state appellate and federal bankruptcy courts in more than a dozen jurisdictions—the primary venues where real estate cases are decided— determined that the company did not have the right to foreclose on the mortgages it held.
In 2009, Kansas became one of the first states to have its supreme court rule against MERS. In Landmark National Bank v. Boyd A. Kesler, the court concluded that MERS failed to follow Kansas statute: the company had not publicly recorded the chain of title with the relevant registers of deeds in counties across the state. A mortgage contract, the justices wrote, consists of two documents: the deed of trust, which secures the house as collateral on a loan, and the promissory note, which indebts the borrower to the lender. The two documents were sometimes literally inseparable: under the rules of the paper recording system at county court-houses, they were tied together with a ribbon or seal to be undone only once the note had been paid off. “In the event that a mortgage loan somehow separates interests of the note and the deed of trust, with the deed of trust lying with some independent entity,” said the Kansas court, “the mortgage may become unenforceable.”
MERS purported to be the independent entity holding the deed of trust. The note of indebtedness, however, was sold within the MERS system, or “assigned” among various lenders. This was in keeping with MERS’s policy: it was not a bank, made no loans, had no money to lend, and did not collect loan payments. It had no interest in the loan, only in the deed of trust. The company—along with the lenders that had used it to assign ownership of notes—had thus entered into a vexing legal bind. “There is no evidence of record that establishes that MERS either held the promissory note or was given the authority [to] assign the note,” the Kansas court found, quoting a decision from a district court in California. Not only did MERS fail to legally assign the notes, the company presented “no evidence as to who owns the note.”
Similar cases were brought before courts in Idaho, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Utah, and other states. “It appears that every MERS mortgage,” a New York State Supreme Court judge recently told me, “is defective, a piece of crap.” The language in the judgments against MERS became increasingly denunciatory. MERS’s arguments for standing in foreclosure were described as “absurd,” forcing courts to move through “a syntactical fog into an impassable swamp.” (emphasis added) […]
* DESPITE SALARY CAPS, TREASURY APPROVED LUCRATIVE EXEC PAYOUTS FOR DOZENS OF BAILED-OUT FIRMS (VIDEO)
Source: Democracy Now!
New York Daily News columnist and Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez reports the Treasury Department has approved payouts exceeding $5 million for 49 executives at firms that most benefited from the Wall Street bailout. The executives’ pay came despite the $500,000 salary cap established under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
To watch the complete daily, independent news hour, read the transcript, download the podcast, and for the additional reports, visit http://www.democracynow.org.
* LANNY BREUER, TASK FORCE LEADER, DOESN’T BOTHER SHOWING UP FOR MORTGAGE FRAUD PRESS CONFERENCE
By Matt Stoller, Naked Capitalism
Eric Holder has come out with details on the task force. But first, let’s look at a smoke signal. At this press conference announcing the task force, Holder had to apologize for Lanny Breuer, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, one of the key leaders of the investigative unit. Breuer, you see, couldn’t make it to the press conference because he was traveling. That’s how important this task force is to Breuer, so important that his travel schedule couldn’t brook interference. Such a bureaucratic snub has been no doubt noticed by the various underlings at the DOJ and the US Attorney offices.
Ok, let’s go to the substance.
I am pleased to report that this Working Group has considerable Department resources behind it as it builds on activities that have been underway through the broader Task Force. Currently, 15 attorneys, investigators, and analysts – here at Main Justice and throughout our U.S. Attorneys’ Offices – are supporting the investigative efforts that this Working Group will be focusing on going forward. And the FBI has assigned 10 agents and analysts to work with the group immediately. In the coming weeks, another 30 attorneys, investigators, and support staff from U.S. Attorneys’ Offices will join the Group’s work.
So that’s a total of 55 people, 10 of whom are FBI agents. Let’s do a few comparisons. During the Savings and Loan crisis, Bill Black reminds us that there were about a thousand FBI agents working on the various cases. That’s one hundred times the number of people working on a scandal that is about forty times larger and far more complex. […]
* ALEC BILL BEHIND PUSH TO REQUIRE CLIMATE DENIAL INSTRUCTION IN SCHOOLS
By Stephen Horn, desmogblog.com
On January 16, the Los Angeles Times revealed that anti-science bills have been popping up over the past several years in statehouses across the U.S., mandating the teaching of climate change denial or “skepticism” as a credible “theoretical alternative” to human caused climate change came.
“Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.”
What the excellent Times coverage missed is that key language in these anti-science bills all eminated from a single source: the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.
ALEC Exposed: No, Not Alec Baldwin*
In summer 2011, “ALEC Exposed,” a project of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD)**, taught those alarmed about the power that corporations wield in the American political sphere an important lesson: when bills with a similar DNA pop up in various statehouses nationwide, it’s no coincidence.
Explaining the nature and origins of the project, CMD wrote, “[CMD] unveiled a trove of over 800 ‘model’ bills and resolutions secretly voted on by corporations and politicians through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). These bills reveal the corporate collaboration reshaping our democracy, state by state.”
CMD continued, “Before our publication of this trove of bills, it has been difficult to trace the numerous controversial and extreme provisions popping up in legislatures across the country directly to ALEC and its corporate underwriters.”
CMD explained that ALEC conducts its operations in the most shadowy of manners (emphases mine):
“Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve ‘model’ bills…Corporations fund almost all of ALEC‘s operations.Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills.”
So, what is the name of the “model bill” this time around? […]
Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five conservative members of the Supreme Court handed for-profit corporations the right to secretly flood political campaigns with tidal waves of cash on the eve of an election, they moved America closer to outright plutocracy, where political power derived from wealth is devoted to the protection of wealth. It is now official: Just as they have adorned our athletic stadiums and multiple places of public assembly with their logos, corporations can officially put their brand on the government of the United States as well as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the fifty states.
The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission giving “artificial entities” the same rights of “free speech” as living, breathing human beings will likely prove as infamous as the Dred Scott ruling of 1857 that opened the unsettled territories of the United States to slavery whether future inhabitants wanted it or not. It took a civil war and another hundred years of enforced segregation and deprivation before the effects of that ruling were finally exorcised from our laws. God spare us civil strife over the pernicious consequences of Citizens United, but unless citizens stand their ground, America will divide even more swiftly into winners and losers with little pity for the latter.
Citizens United is but the latest battle in the class war waged for thirty years from the top down by the corporate and political right. Instead of creating a fair and level playing field for all, government would become the agent of the powerful and privileged. Public institutions, laws, and regulations, as well as the ideas, norms, and beliefs that aimed to protect the common good and helped create America’s iconic middle class, would become increasingly vulnerable. The Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow succinctly summed up results: “The redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful.” In the wake of Citizens United, popular resistance is all that can prevent the richest economic interests in the country from buying the democratic process lock, stock, and barrel. […]
The war on Iraq has so monopolized public attention as to obscure the regime change taking place in the Homeland. We may have invaded Iraq to bring in democracy and bring down a totalitarian regime, but in the process our own system may be moving closer to the latter and further weakening the former. The change has been intimated by the sudden popularity of two political terms rarely applied earlier to the American political system. “Empire” and “superpower” both suggest that a new system of power, concentrated and expansive, has come into existence and supplanted the old terms. “Empire” and “superpower” accurately symbolize the projection of American power abroad, but for that reason they obscure the internal consequences. Consider how odd it would sound if we were to refer to “the Constitution of the American Empire” or “superpower democracy.” The reason they ring false is that “constitution” signifies limitations on power, while “democracy” commonly refers to the active involvement of citizens with their government and the responsiveness of government to its citizens. For their part, “empire” and “superpower” stand for the surpassing of limits and the dwarfing of the citizenry.
The increasing power of the state and the declining power of institutions intended to control it has been in the making for some time. The party system is a notorious example. The Republicans have emerged as a unique phenomenon in American history of a fervently doctrinal party, zealous, ruthless, antidemocratic and boasting a near majority. As Republicans have become more ideologically intolerant, the Democrats have shrugged off the liberal label and their critical reform-minded constituencies to embrace centrism and footnote the end of ideology. In ceasing to be a genuine opposition party the Democrats have smoothed the road to power of a party more than eager to use it to promote empire abroad and corporate power at home. Bear in mind that a ruthless, ideologically driven party with a mass base was a crucial element in all of the twentieth-century regimes seeking total power.
Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security. Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media. Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media’s reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats of the Attorney General and by their own fears about unemployment. What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic. […]
* WHETHER OF NOT THE U.S. IS DECLINING IS THE WRONG QUESTION
By Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy
[…] The United States remains very powerful — especially when compared with some putative opponents like Iran — but its capacity to lead security and economic orders in every corner of the world has been diminished by failures in Iraq (and eventually, Afghanistan), by the burden of debt accumulated over the past decade, by the economic melt-down in 2007-2008, and by the emergence of somewhat stronger and independent actors in Brazil, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. One might also point to eroding national infrastructure and an educational system that impresses hardly anyone. Moreover, five decades of misguided policies have badly tarnished America’s image in many parts of the world, and especially in the Middle East and Central Asia. The erosion of authoritarian rule in the Arab world will force new governments to pay more attention to popular sentiment — which is generally hostile to the broad thrust of U.S. policy in the region — and the United States will be less able to rely on close relations with tame monarchs or military dictators henceforth. If it the United States remains far and away the world’s strongest state, its ability to get its way in world affairs is declining. […]
* LOCAL POLICE STOCKPILE HIGH-TECH, COMBAT-READY GEAR
By Andrew Becker, Center for Investigative Reporting
If terrorists ever target Fargo, N.D., the local police will be ready.
In recent years, they have bought bomb-detection robots, digital communications equipment and Kevlar helmets, like those used by soldiers in foreign wars. For local siege situations requiring real firepower, police there can use a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret. Until that day, however, the menacing truck is mostly used for training runs and appearances at the annual Fargo picnic, where it’s been displayed near a children’s bounce house.
“Most people are so fascinated by it, because nothing happens here,” said Carol Archbold, a Fargo resident and criminal justice professor at North Dakota State University. “There’s no terrorism here.”
Fargo, like thousands of other communities in every state, has been on a gear-buying spree with the aid of more than $34 billion in federal government grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
The federal grant spending, awarded with little oversight from Washington, has fueled a rapid, broad transformation of police operations in Fargo and in departments across the country. More than ever before, police rely on quasi-military tactics and equipment, the Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
No one can say exactly what has been purchased in total across the country or how it’s being used, because the federal government doesn’t keep close track. State and local governments don’t maintain uniform records. But a review of records from 41 states obtained through open-government requests, and interviews with more than two-dozen current and former police officials and terrorism experts, shows police departments around the U.S. have transformed into small army-like forces.
Since Occupy Wall Street and similar protests broke out this fall, confusion about how to respond has landed some police departments in national headlines for electing to use intimidating riot gear, pepper spray and rubber bullets to disperse demonstrators. Observers have decried these aggressive tactics as more evidence that police are overly militarized. Among them is former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper, who today regrets his “militaristic” answer in 1999 to the infamous “Battle in Seattle” protests.
Many police, including beat cops, now routinely carry assault rifles. Combined with body armor and other apparel, many officers look more and more like combat troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The list of equipment bought with the federal grants reads like a defense contractor catalog. High-tech gear fills the garages, locker rooms and patrol cars in departments across the country.
Although local officials say they have become more cautious about spending in recent years, police departments around the country are continually expanding the equipment and tactics of their jobs, despite, in many cases, the lack of an apparent need.
The share of federal grants for Fargo and the county it anchors is more than $8 million, a considerable sum for terrorism defense given its remote location and status as one of the safest areas in America. Fargo has averaged fewer than two homicides a year since 2005, and there have been no prosecutions of international terrorism in the state for at least a decade, if ever.
North Dakota’s biggest city is a humble place set on plains so flat that locals like to say you can watch your dog run away for two weeks. Yet all patrol officers in Fargo now carry an assault rifle in their squad car.
Fargo police Lt. Ross Renner, who commands a regional SWAT team, said the world is a dangerous place, and the city wants to be ready for anything.
With that in mind, Renner pushed for military-style assault rifles to become standard issue in department patrol cars.
“It’s foolish to not be cognizant of the threats out there, whether it’s New York, Los Angeles or Fargo. Our residents have the right to be protected,” Renner said. “We don’t have every-day threats here when it comes to terrorism, but we are asked to be prepared.”
Other communities also have ramped up as well. In Montgomery County, Texas, the sheriff’s department owns a $300,000 pilotless surveillance drone. In Garland County, Ark., known for its pleasant hot springs, a local law enforcement agency acquired four handheld bulletproof protective shields costing $600 each. In East Baton Rouge, La., it was $400 ballistic helmets. In Augusta, Maine, with fewer than 20,000 people and where an officer hasn’t died from gunfire in the line of duty in more than 125 years, police bought eight $1,500 tactical vests. And for police in Des Moines, Iowa, it was two $180,000 bomb robots.
Homeland security and law enforcement officials say the expenditures and modern training have helped save civilian and police lives. Do the armored vehicles and combat dress produce a sort of “shock and awe” effect? Lt. Jeremy Clark of the West Hartford Police Department in Connecticut hopes so. He said it can persuade suspects to give up sooner.
“The only time I hear the complaint of ‘God, you guys look scary’ is if the incident turns out to be nothing,” said Clark, who organizes an annual SWAT competition.
But the gear also can be used for heavy-handed – even excessive – tactics. In one case, dozens of officers in combat-style gear raided a rave in Utah as a police helicopter buzzed overhead. An online video shows the battle-ready team wearing masks and brandishing rifles as they holler for the music to be shut off and pin partygoers to the ground.
Arizona tactical officers this year sprayed the home of ex-Marine Jose Guerena with gunfire as the man stood in a hallway with a rifle that he did not shoot [PDF]. He was hit 22 times and died. Police had targeted the man’s older brother in a narcotics-trafficking probe, but nothing illegal was found in the younger Guerena’s home, and no related arrests had been made months after the raid.
Police say greater firepower and more protective equipment became increasingly necessary not only as everyday criminals obtained deadlier weapons, but also in response to 9/11 and other terrorist attacks. They point to a 1997 Los Angeles-area shootout with heavily armed bank robbers and the bloody 2008 shooting and bombing attack in Mumbai, India, which left 164 people dead and 300 wounded.
Every community in the country has some explanation for why it needs more money, not less, to protect against every conceivable threat. It could be a shooting rampage at an amusement park, a weapon of mass destruction hidden at a manufacturing plant, a nuclear device detonated at a major coastal port. Nothing short of absolute security seems acceptable.
“The argument for up-armoring is always based on the least likely of terrorist scenarios,” said Mark Randol, a former terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service. “Anyone can get a gun and shoot up stuff. No amount of SWAT equipment can stop that.”
Law enforcement leaders nonetheless bristle at the word “militarization,” even if the defense community itself acknowledges a convergence of the two.
“I don’t see us as militarizing police; I see us as keeping abreast with society,” said former Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, now chairman of Kroll Inc., the security consulting firm. […]
* OCCUPY PROTESTERS INDICTED ON FELONY CHARGES IN HOUSTON
By Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com
Cody Duty / AP Occupy Houston protesters lay in the exit ramp at the Port of Houston Authority on Dec. 12
Seven Occupy protesters were indicted on felony charges by a grand jury in Houston on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office says, in connection with their demonstration at the local port as part of a national day of action by the movement.
The decision comes nearly a week after a judge initially dismissed the charges, saying the protesters could not be charged with possessing or using a “criminal instrument” – a felony in Texas – for their use of PVC pipe.
The protesters — three from Austin, four from Houston — put their arms through the pipe and used latches on it to connect together, making their arrest more difficult but not preventing it, said one of their attorneys, Daphne Silverman, of the National Lawyer’s Guild in Houston. Donna Hawkins, a spokeswoman for the District Attorney’s Office, confirmed the indictment.
“They are feeling, ‘wow,’ is the word. … They’re in a lot of shock. They were very happy with the justice’s decision last week, they believed in her, they believed in the justice system,” Silverman said. “These people … are not criminals. These folks are out there attempting to make the country better for all of us.”
Silverman, who noted that she believed the law had been wrongly applied by the prosecutor, said it’s likely the protesters will be back in court in January to talk about the next step, such as negotiations or to go to trial. If convicted, they face up to two years in jail.
* DO PRIVATE MILITARY CONTRACTORS HAVE IMPUNITY TO TORTURE?
By Laura Raymond, Firedoglake
Unbelievably, in 2011 this question has not yet been settled in the courts of the United States. Human rights attorneys are headed back to court in the coming month to argue that, yes, victims of war crimes and torture by contractors should have a path to justice. Attorneys from my organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, along with co-counsel, are representing Iraqi civilians who were horribly tortured in Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq in seeking to hold accountable two private contractors for their violations of international, federal and state law. By the military’s own internal investigations, private military contractors from the U.S.-based corporations L-3 Services and CACI International were involved in the war crimes and acts of torture that took place, which included rape, being forced to watch family members and others be raped, severe beatings, being hung in stress positions, being pulled across the floor by genitals, mock executions, and other incidents, many of which were documented by photographs. The cases, Al Shimari v. CACI and Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla and L-3 aim to secure a day in court for the plaintiffs, none of whom were ever charged with any crimes.
The Department of Justice has thus far failed to prosecute any of the contractors involved, so the only path currently available for any accountability is through these human rights lawsuits. However, after years of litigation, the allegations of torture by contractors in these cases have still never been seriously examined, much less ruled on, by the courts. None of the plaintiffs in any of these cases has yet to have his or her day in court to tell their account of what they suffered. The reason is because the private military contractors have raised numerous legal defenses– many of which the plaintiffs’ lawyers have argued are plainly inapplicable to private corporations–which have kept the cases from moving into the discovery phase, where the nature of the contractors obligations, actions and oversight, as well as what happened to the plaintiffs would be the examined in detail. So far, CACI and Titan/L-3 have focused the courts on any question but whether the plaintiffs were tortured. As CCR and co-counsel summarize the question in their brief in Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla and L-3:
Are corporate defendants entitled to categorical “law of war” immunity for their alleged torture and war crimes when such a proposed immunity runs counter to settled understandings of the law of war and centuries of Supreme Court precedent, and would give for-profit contractors more protection from suit than genuine members of the U.S. Armed Forces?
This week, CCR and co-counsel filed briefs that argue the cases must go forward. Additionally, yesterday a number of other human rights organizations along with a group of retired high-ranking military officers are filing supporting amicus briefs to add their voices to the chorus of concern over contractor impunity. The military officers’ brief argues that, “given that employees of civilian contractors indisputably are not subject to the military chain of command, and therefore cannot be disciplined or held accountable by the military, it makes little sense to extend to them such absolute tort law immunity for their misconduct.” […]
* THE DEFINING ISSUE: NOT GOVERNMENT’S SIZE, BUT WHO IT’S FOR
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich’s Blog
The defining political issue of 2012 won’t be the government’s size. It will be who government is for.
Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government.
But the surge of cynicism now engulfing America isn’t about government’s size. The cynicism comes from a growing perception that government isn’t working for average people. It’s for big business, Wall Street, and the very rich instead.
In a recent Pew Foundation poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.
That’s understandable. To take a few examples:
Wall Street got bailed out but homeowners caught in the fierce downdraft caused by the Street’s excesses have got almost nothing.
Big agribusiness continues to rake in hundreds of billions in price supports and ethanol subsidies. Big pharma gets extended patent protection that drives up everyone’s drug prices. Big oil gets its own federal subsidy. But small businesses on the Main Streets of America are barely making it.
American Airlines uses bankruptcy to ward off debtors and renegotiate labor contracts. Donald Trump’s businesses go bankrupt without impinging on Trump’s own personal fortune. But the law won’t allow you to use personal bankruptcy to renegotiate your home mortgage. […]
[…] Chomsky’s speech was entitled “Arab Spring, American Winter.” In it, he presented the Occupy movement as the first popular reaction to a “vicious class war” waged against working people for over 30 years in the United States, just as the Arab Spring uprisings this year in the Middle East and North Africa were reactions to decades or centuries of repression by wealthy elites supported by the United States and other Western powers.
Greeted with a standing ovation, on top of his game at 83, he stood, in jeans and sweater, talking and answering questions for two hours in his always-even voice.
Riffing from one topic to another, Chomsky — who, an emeritus professor at MIT, also is known as the father of modern linguistics — demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of American foreign policy and history, citing stunningly revealing official documents chronicling our country’s economic and military predations abroad.
He compared the rule of international elites over Middle Eastern, African, Latin American, and Asian countries to the rule of the rich 1 percent — it is often the rule of one-tenth of one percent, he suggested — in the United States.
Quoting Adam Smith, the 18th-century father of capitalist theory, Chomsky delved into the roots of the neoliberal soak-the-poor philosophy dominant worldwide. “We’re essentially living in a nightmare” that the classical economists predicted, he said.
This nightmare’s concentration of wealth “accelerates” political-campaign-money competition, he said, driving politicians into the arms of wealthy interests. One result: “The Democrats are now what used to be called moderate Republicans.” […]
* THIS BASTARDIZED LIBERTARIANISM MAKES ‘FREEDOM’ AN INSTRUMENT OF OPPRESSION
It’s the disguise used by those who wish to exploit without restraint, denying the need for the state to protect the 99%
By George Monibot, Common Dreams
Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the right-wing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?
In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.
Right-wing libertarianism recognizes few legitimate constraints on the power to act, regardless of the impact on the lives of others. In the UK it is forcefully promoted by groups like the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Policy Exchange. Their concept of freedom looks to me like nothing but a justification for greed.
So why have we been been so slow to challenge this concept of liberty? I believe that one of the reasons is as follows. The great political conflict of our age – between neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side, and social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other – has been mischaracterized as a clash between negative and positive freedoms. These freedoms were most clearly defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty. It is a work of beauty: reading it is like listening to a gloriously crafted piece of music. I will try not to mangle it too badly.
Put briefly and crudely, negative freedom is the freedom to be or to act without interference from other people. Positive freedom is freedom from inhibition: it’s the power gained by transcending social or psychological constraints. Berlin explained how positive freedom had been abused by tyrannies, particularly by the Soviet Union. It portrayed its brutal governance as the empowerment of the people, who could achieve a higher freedom by subordinating themselves to a collective single will.
Rightwing libertarians claim that greens and social justice campaigners are closet communists trying to resurrect Soviet conceptions of positive freedom. In reality, the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms.
As Berlin noted: “No man’s activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. ‘Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows’.” So, he argued, some people’s freedom must sometimes be curtailed “to secure the freedom of others”. In other words, your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. The negative freedom not to have our noses punched is the freedom that green and social justice campaigns, exemplified by the Occupy movement, exist to defend.
Berlin also shows that freedom can intrude on other values, such as justice, equality or human happiness. “If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral.” It follows that the state should impose legal restraints on freedoms that interfere with other people’s freedoms – or on freedoms which conflict with justice and humanity.
These conflicts of negative freedom were summarized in one of the greatest poems of the 19th century, which could be seen as the founding document of British environmentalism. In The Fallen Elm, John Clare describes the felling of the tree he loved, presumably by his landlord, that grew beside his home. “Self-interest saw thee stand in freedom’s ways / So thy old shadow must a tyrant be. / Thou’st heard the knave, abusing those in power, / Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free.”
The landlord was exercising his freedom to cut the tree down. In doing so, he was intruding on Clare’s freedom to delight in the tree, whose existence enhanced his life. The landlord justifies this destruction by characterizing the tree as an impediment to freedom – his freedom, which he conflates with the general liberty of humankind. Without the involvement of the state (which today might take the form of a tree preservation order) the powerful man could trample the pleasures of the powerless man. Clare then compares the felling of the tree with further intrusions on his liberty. “Such was thy ruin, music-making elm; / The right of freedom was to injure thine: / As thou wert served, so would they overwhelm / In freedom’s name the little that is mine.”
But right-wing libertarians do not recognize this conflict. They speak, like Clare’s landlord, as if the same freedom affects everybody in the same way. They assert their freedom to pollute, exploit, even – among the gun nuts – to kill, as if these were fundamental human rights. They characterize any attempt to restrain them as tyranny. They refuse to see that there is a clash between the freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow. […]
It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.
True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.
But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.
Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:
“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”
Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:
“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.
Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:
Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”
Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.
“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.
But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.
Why? It’s not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.
It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.
The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).
So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enoughin our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.
But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing butskin in the game. You’ve got it all riding on how well America works.
You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you’d better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.
And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.
The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.
An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.
But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.
Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.
Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” – had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system’s doors would always be open to him. What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed. […]
There are several relatively brief items worth noting today:
(1) There are two new must-read articles on one of the worst legacies of the Obama presidency thus far: the failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for the criminal behavior that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. The first is from Jeff Connaughton, the former chief of staff to former Democratic Sen. Ted Kaufman, who chaired Senate oversight hearings on financial fraud prosecutions; Connaughton documents what he calls the “misleading” statements and multiple actions of President Obama designed to shield those executives from accountability. The second is from Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi who, commenting on Connaughton’s piece, writes that “what makes Obama’s statements so dangerous is that they suggest an ongoing strategy of covering up the Wall Street crimewave.”
(2) A New York Times article yesterday examined the sometimes severe psychological stress experienced by the long-distance, remote-controlled operators of America’s drones. In one sense, that story angle is perverse: whatever stress these drone pilots experience is a tiny fraction of that continuously suffered by those who live with the falling bombs and missiles launched by these drones near their homes and children. But the articles makes one interesting point: while long working hours are the principal cause of the stress (necessitated by America’s massive increase in drone usage under President Obama), one source of stress for at least a small portion of these pilots is having to confront the images of the “collateral damage” they cause — meaning the innocent human life they extinguish with their joysticks and video game buttons:
In one surprising finding that challenged some of the survey’s initial suppositions, the authors found limited stress related to a unique aspect of the operators’ jobs: watching hours of close-up video of people killed in drone strikes. After a strike, operators assess the damage, and unlike fighter pilots who fly thousands of feet above their targets, drone operators can see in vivid detail what they have destroyed. . . .
Both Dr. Chappelle and Colonel McDonald said that 4 percent or less of operators were at high risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, the severe anxiety disorder that can include flashbacks, nightmares, anger, hypervigilance or avoidance of people, places or situations. In those cases, the authors suggested, the operators had seen close-up video of what the military calls collateral damage, casualties of women, children or other civilians. “Collateral damage is unnerving or unsettling to these guys,” Colonel McDonald said.
The doctors conducting the study were actually surprised that the psychological injuries from seeing this was as limited as it is. Still, at least some of these drone pilots have enough of a conscience to be seriously disturbed by the horrific results of these strikes. If only the general citizenry — who are typically kept blissfully unaware of the human devastation their government is causing — were as affected.
Along those lines, CNN.com, to its credit, today has a stomach-turning story of a 4-year-girl Pakistani girl who was severely burned by an American drone strike back in 2009, when she was a year old, complete with horrifying videos of her injuries:
She has eyelashes but no eyebrows. She has all her fingers but is missing four nails. Her skin is so taut now that she can no longer frown.
But she can still smile.
Her face tells a story of suffering. . . .Shakira, believed burned in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan, will undergo reconstructive surgery in January. . .
In 2009, [Hashmat] Effendi was on a medical mission with Texas-based House of Charity in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. The region’s natural beauty was once compared to Switzerland’s, but by then it was a Taliban-infested area rife with violence.
One of the doctors found three little girls left in a trash bin. They’d suffered horrific injuries.
“Who are they?” the doctor asked.
Nobody knew.
Where were their parents? Where were they from?
Shakira, 4, is believed to have been burned in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in 2009.
All anyone could say is that there had been a U.S. drone attack.
The doctor, who was traveling with House of Charity, took them back with him. They were in grave condition. Two of the girls died, but the littlest one had a chance of making it if she were treated right away.
She was only a year old, Effendi guessed, but small for her age. She was skinny. Dirty. Very bloody. She had fresh burns all over her face, her scalp and on her arms.
This repeats itself over and over. And yet, it could hardly be less controversial in the country responsible for these attacks, largely because there is no partisan gain to be had from caring about it (merely to mention the irony that the GOP candidate currently leading most Iowa polls is the only major candidate from either party who opposes all of this is to trigger all sorts of recriminations; apparently, the ongoing slaughter of innocent men, women and children is far too insignificant an issue even to make the agenda of discussion). In fact, literally every time I even raise the horrors of the Obama drone program and the secrecy and lawlessness under which it’s conducted, I’m bombarded with arguments that drones are not an important issue or, from the most pathological Obama apologists, even fun drone humor designed to mock concerns about these attacks (such frivolity follows in the footsteps of their leader himself and his top aides). Contrary to the outright lie told by John Brennan, the President’s top counter-terrorism adviser, the fact is that the U.S. is continuously blowing up, burning, and killing innocent people, including numerous children, in the Muslim world. The program under which that is done is shrouded in almost complete secrecy. And it not only continues, but does so with little controversy.
(3) In response to the criticism I voiced a couple of weeks ago of NPR’s largely one-sided news story on domestic drones (criticism apparently expressed as well by numerous NPR listeners), that outlet’s Ombudsman defended the coverage but said “the complaints raise good—even intriguing—points for a second story that focuses exclusively on the privacy concerns surrounding potential police use of drones here at home.” Yesterday, the generally excellent Tom Ashbrook devoted a full hour on his NPR On Point Show to the proliferation of drones, featuring an ACLU staff attorney specializing in privacy issues. TPM’s Jillian Rayfield also has a good article on the growth of domestic drones and the unique dangers they pose.
(4) In Salon, Jordan Michael Smith compiles substantial evidence to argue that “the media consensus on Israel is collapsing.” Few developments are as imperative: The Australianreports today how the U.S., yet again, is alienating itself from the world consensus, and angering even close allies, by standing alone once again to shield Israel from even the mildest rebuke for the most egregious misconduct. To be sure, the smear campaigns are as concerted as ever toward those who question this bipartisan Israel orthodoxy — Time‘s Joe Klein this week responded to some of those smears aimed at him for doing so: see his Point 7 and the update – but, as Smith documents, they are increasingly ineffective.
(5) In The New Yorker, George Packer, who vocally supported the attack on Iraq but criticized it when it starting failing, writes about Christopher Hitchens, who never deviated from full-throated support. Most of what Packer writes is, as one would expect, little more than the now-trite reminiscing about Hitchens we’ve heard from his thousands of media friends which Neal Pollack parodied so brilliantly here, but Packer’s concluding paragraph struck me as something worth highlighting:
Iraq led Hitchens to some of his worst indulgences—the propaganda trip to Iraq in Wolfowitz’s entourage, the pose of Byronic heroism. But perhaps the war and the enemies it made him helped give Hitchens the courage of his last years and months—the atheist in the foxhole. Hitchens was one of the very few people who could slash and burn you in print, then meet for drinks and talk in the true warmth of friendship, discussing a writer we both admired, garrulous to the very last. It was a sign of his essential decency that he didn’t make it personal.
Is it really “a sign of decency” to refuse to view any political ideas as not merely wrong in some abstract intellectual sense, but as a reflection of the person’s character? Obviously, there are many political disagreements — most — which can and should be conducted in perfectly good faith without the need for personal animus. Conversely, though, aren’t there some political views so repellent and sociopathic that “a sign of essential decency” is to make it personal, rather than refusing to do so? This line of thought strikes me as anything but essentially decent:
Sure, he was and remained a fervent, unrepentant public cheerleader for an aggressive, baseless attack on another country that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people and displaced millions more, and sure, he was very eager to fuel an Endless War that resulted in the deaths of countless innocent men, women and children that he himself never fought in, but I’m not going to hold any of that against him. I’ll argue with him as part of entertaining, invigorating political debate, but then will be happy to go out for drinks with him — he’s a really fun guy — and will proudly call him my friend.
In what sense does “decency” compel — or even permit — that line of thought? Packer, as he usually does, is simply giving voice to the standard mindset of Washington’s political and media class. As Charles Davis put it to me by email a couple of days ago when discussing David Corn’s expressed admiration for Hitchens — the irony that the Washington Bureau Chief of Mother Jones, of all places, waxed so effusive about one of the nation’s leading war zealots:
That’s Washington. Issues of war and peace — life and death — are just something you argue about from 9 to 5, and only when the cameras are on. Disagreeing on the wisdom of invading and occupying other nations is like disagreeing on whether the minimum wage should be $9.50 or $9.25: nothing serious enough to end a relationship over (see: Lake, Eli). And what’s a few hundred thousand dead brown people between friends?
The bottomless willingness of political and media elites to forgive each other of their sins, insulate personal relationships from everything else, and subordinate all other considerations to loyalty to their shared membership in those circles is not “a sign of essential decency.” It’s one of the leading causes of Washington’s rot.
(6) Physics Professor, noted atheist, and author Mano Singham has an interesting review of With Liberty and Justice for Some. […]
* THE GLOBALIZATION OF WAR: “MILITARY ROADMAP TO WWIII
ONLINE INTERACTIVE E-READER
By Michel Chossudovsky and Finian Cunningham, Global Research
The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest.
The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously.
The concept of the “Long War” has characterized US military doctrine since the end of World War II. The broader objective of global military dominance in support of an imperial project was first formulated under the Truman administration in the late 1940s at the outset of the Cold War.
In September 1990, some five weeks after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, US President and Commander in Chief George Herbert Walker Bush delivered a historical address to a joint session of the US Congress and the Senate in which he proclaimed a New World Order emerging from the rubble of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union.
Bush Senior had envisaged a world of “peaceful international co-operation”, one which was no longer locked into the confrontation between competing super powers, under the shadow of the doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) which had characterized the Cold War era.
Bush declared emphatically at the outset of what became known as “the post-Cold War era” that:
“a new partnership of nations has begun, and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times… a new world order can emerge: A new era freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony.”
Of course, speeches by American presidents are often occasions for cynical platitudes and contradictions that should not be taken at face value. After all, President Bush was holding forth on international law and justice only months after his country had invaded Panama in December 1989 causing the deaths of several thousand citizens – committing crimes comparable to what Saddam Hussein would be accused of and supposedly held to account for. Also in 1991, the US and its NATO allies went on to unleash, under a “humanitarian” mantle, a protracted war against Yugoslavia, leading to the destruction, fragmentation and impoverishment of an entire country.
Nevertheless, it is instructive to use Bush Senior’s slanted vision of a “New World Order” as a reference point for how dramatically the world has changed in the intervening 20 years of the so-called post-Cold War era, and in particular how unilaterally degenerate the contemporary international conduct of the US has become under the Clinton, G. W. Bush Junior and Obama administrations.
Bush Senior’s “promise” of world peace has opened up, in the wake of the Cold War, an age of continuous warfare accompanied by a process of economic dislocation, social devastation and environmental degradation.
In a bitter irony, this concept of peaceful international co-operation and partnership was used as a pretext to unleash The Gulf War, which consisted in “defending the sovereignty” of Kuwait and “upholding international law” following the Iraqi 1990 invasion.
Global Warfare
We are dealing with a global military agenda, namely “Global Warfare”. Far from a world of peaceful cooperation, we are living in a dystopian world of permanent wars – wars that are being waged in flagrant contravention of international law and against public opinion and interest.
Far from a “new era more secure in the quest for peace” we may see a world more akin to George Orwell’s 1984, dominated by perpetual conflict, insecurity, authoritarian surveillance, doublethink and public mind control.
A problem for many citizens is that “doublethink and mind control” have become so deeply embedded and disseminated by the mass media, including the so-called quality free press, such as The New York Times and The Guardian.
The Post 9/11 Era: America’s Doctrine of Pre-emptive Warfare
Allegedly sponsored by Al Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon played a central role in molding public opinion. One of the main objectives of war propaganda is to “fabricate an enemy”. The “outside enemy” personified by Osama bin Laden is “threatening America”.
Pre-emptive war directed against “Islamic terrorists” is required to defend the Homeland. Realities are turned upside down: America is under attack.
In the wake of 9/11, the creation of this “outside enemy” served to obfuscate the real economic and strategic objectives behind the American-led wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Waged on the grounds of self-defense, the pre-emptive war is upheld as a “just war” with a humanitarian mandate.
From the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war in the early 1980s, the US intelligence apparatus has supported the formation of the “Islamic brigades”. Propaganda purports to erase the history of Al Qaeda, drown the truth and “kill the evidence” on how this “outside enemy” was fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”.
The US intelligence apparatus has created it own terrorist organizations. And at the same time, it creates its own terrorist warnings concerning the terrorist organizations which it has itself created. Meanwhile, a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program “to go after” these terrorist organizations has been put in place.
Instead of “war” or “state terrorism”, we are told of “humanitarian intervention” directed against “terrorists”.
Instead of “offence”, we are told of “defense” or “protection”.
Instead of “mass murder” we are told of “collateral damage”.
A good versus evil dichotomy prevails. The perpetrators of war are presented as the victims. Public opinion is misled: “We must fight against evil in all its forms as a means to preserving the Western way of life.”
Breaking the “Big Lie” which presents war as a humanitarian undertaking, means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies. […]
* NURSES SAY PRIVATE EQUITY FIRM STARVING MASSACHUSETTS HOSPITALS
By Mark Brenner and Mischa Gaus, Labor Notes
Nurses sang sour carols today to the private equity firm they say is starving Massachusetts hospitals and pitting workers against each other.
Massachusetts nurses came to the headquarters of Cerberus Capital in Manhattan because Cerberus is the money behind Steward Health Systems, which took over the troubled Catholic hospital system Caritas last year and now is squeezing patients and workers for ultra-profits.
Hundreds of fellow members of National Nurses United, the Massachusetts nurses’ national union, sang and chanted outside Cerberus this afternoon.
Realizing that private equity firms specialize in stripping troubled businesses down and flipping them to new owners, the Massachusetts Nurses Association had insisted during the takeover on guarantees that practices and specialties could not be phased out.
Hospital workers did take concessions, but MNA secured a multi-employer pension plan and set the stage for negotiating with the chain collectively across four of its hospitals rather than one by one.
Now Steward is challenging MNA’s pension plan, closing down units, and threatening to shutter whole hospitals in order to get nurses to open up their contracts.
“Their whole pitch was to keep the community hospitals alive,” said Linda Tasker, a telemetry nurse at Merrimack Valley Hospital. “But they’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, and picking out the hospitals that will make the most money.”
Steward is also laying off many staff nurses—especially those at the top of the seniority list and pay scale.
Victoria Webster and Lynne Blanchard were two of 13 nurses fired in May at Carney hospital’s psychiatric unit in Dorchester. They say the firings, which included 19 mental health counselors, came after they blew the whistle on patient violence and poor staffing at the facility. Steward hired a crop of inexperienced new nurses, they say.
Cerberus, with reported holdings of about $20 billion, has a checkered history in health care: One of its companies held a contract at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., where abysmal conditions for wounded veterans came to light in 2007. A Congressional oversight committee said the decision to privatize support services to the Cerberus outfit “led to a precipitous drop in support personnel.”
Tens of thousands of Europeans are migrating from their homelands, many heading to the southern hemisphere, as the continent sinks deeper into financial crisis.
While official statistics shows that Portugal, Greece and Ireland had the largest stream of immigrants leaving their country’s this year, evidence points to the same happening in Spain and Italy.
In 2010, 1.21 million Greeks have emigrated, according to the World Bank, equaling 10.8 percent of the population.
The top destinations for the Greek were Germany, Australia, Canada, Albania, Turkey, UK, Cyprus, and Belgium.
This year, 2,500 Greek citizens have moved to Australia and another 40,000 have “expressed interest” in moving south.
In Ireland, where 14.5 percent of the population is jobless, in the 12 months to April this year, 40,200 Irish passport-holders left, up from 27,700 the previous year.
According to the Ireland’s central statistics office, the number will increase to 50,000 by the end of year, many heading for Australia and the US.
Meanwhile, Portugal’s foreign ministry reports that at least 10,000 people have left for oil-rich Angola this year. The Portuguese are also heading to other former colonies, such as Mozambique and Brazil.
According to Brazilian government figures, the number of foreigners legally living in Brazil rose to 1.47 million in June, which 330,000 of them are Portuguese.
Since its formation, the European Union has been a haven for those seeking refuge from war, persecution and poverty in other parts of the world.
The worsening debt crisis, however, has forced European governments to adopt harsh austerity measures and tough economic reforms, which have made life much harder for ordinary citizens, creating a new stream of immigrants leaving the continent.
The debt crisis has also sparked several incidents of social unrest, with strikes in Greece against austerity measures turning bloody and a violent protest in Rome injuring more than 100 people.
Europe plunged into a financial crisis in early 2010. Insolvency now threatens heavily debt-ridden countries such as Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain
The Fisheries Agency publishes the result of the survey of radioactive materials (iodine, cesium only) in marine products including seaweeds. In the latest result published on December 21 for the items reported since October, radioactive cesium has been found in dried “nori” in:
Kanagawa Prefecture – 1 sample, at 11 becquerels/kg
I’ve never seen the news of radioactive cesium detection in nori in the mainstream media at all. Without Twitter, I wouldn’t have known about it. I’m curious to know how radioactive cesium traveled from Fukushima to Tokyo Bay. The government has claimed that the Kuroshio Current would prevent the spread of radioactive materials south of Ibaraki.
Judging by the reaction to my Japanese tweet, there are many others like me who didn’t know about the detection. […]
City of London Police have sparked controversy by producing a brief in which the Occupy London movement is listed under domestic terrorism/extremism threats to City businesses.
The document was given to protesters at their “Bank of Ideas” base on Sun Street – a former site of financial corporation UBS. City police have stepped up an effort to quell the movement since they occupied the building on 18 November, with the document stating: “It is likely that activists aspire to identify other locations to occupy, especially those they identify with capitalism.
“Intelligence suggests that urban explorers are holding a discussion at the Sun Street squat. This may lead to an increase in urban exploration activity at abandoned or high profile sites in the capital.” The Occupy movement is listed alongside threats posed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), Al Qaeda and Belarusian terrorists.
“Just the words themselves are enough to deceive the public opinion and this is what we see at the moment,” Occupy spokesman Spyro Van Leemnen told Yahoo! News. “We are clearly nothing to do with extremists or terrorists, we are a peaceful group and we do use direct action to raise our point but definitely not terrorism.
“The building has been abandoned for a good few years now and we think it is crazy for a bank to have it empty and not used when we know at the same time there are so many family homes that have been repossessed. Occupying that building and giving it back to the community is definitely not a terrorist act,” he added. […]
* THE PENTAGON IS OFFERING FREE MILITARY HARDWARE TO EVERY POLICE DEPARTMENT IN THE US
By Robert Johnson, Business Insider
The U.S. military has some of the most advanced killing equipment in the world that allows it to invade almost wherever it likes at will.
We produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns out a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens.
Benjamin Carlson at The Daily reports on a little known endeavor called the “1033 Program” that gave more than $500 million of military gear to U.S. police forces in 2011 alone.
1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40-year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this year’s staggering take topped the charts, next year’s orders are up 400 percent over the same period.
This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns. […]
It isn’t red versus blue, it’s individualists versus institutionalists. And the latter may finally be winning
By David Sirota, Salon
[…] To clarify these two broad terms, let’s review their contemporary meaning.
Individualists are those who see society’s successes and problems as coming mostly from individual behavior. Motivated by impulse and human nature’s affinity for simple good-versus-evil stories, Individualists tend to see history as a series of parables about Great Men and Bad Men, Rogues and Bureaucrats, Heroes and Villains. In other words, Individualists subscribe to Margaret Thatcher’s theory that “there is no such thing as society — there are individual men and women.”
So, for example, an economic boom period is viewed by the Individualist as a success story of individual and/or presidential intelligence, innovation and hard work, not a triumph of institutions such as good schools, solid infrastructure or properly calibrated tax and trade laws. Likewise, rich people are viewed as singular superheroes whose wealth is a consequence of personal perseverance, not beneficiaries of institutional support whose assets have been accrued through systemic privilege.
At the same time, problems are portrayed by the Individualist as the result of personal transgressions, but not systemic forces: Crime is the scourge of individuals like Willie Horton, not a result of institutional forces like poverty or desperation; the education crisis is the result of individual bad teachers or parents, not systemic economic inequality or misguided school funding formulas; prejudice is the plague of individual bigots, not institutional racism; housing market meltdowns happen because of irresponsible home buyers, not because of predatory financial institutions or the banking system; and recessions occur because of “welfare queens,” “parasites,”“takers” or other assorted layabouts — but not larger forces like globalization or crony capitalism.
Institutionalists, by contrast, see it the other way around. They tend to see institutions – whether governmental agencies, corporations, popular cultures or specific policies and incentives – as the most prominent forces in society. To them, it’s “The Man,” more than the particular men.
Rooted more in data and empiricism than in gut feeling and apocrypha, this camp sees the most famous historical achievements like, say, the New Deal and civil rights movement not as merely the personal victory of people like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr., but as the result of decades of mass organizing for systemic change.
Similarly, the big problems in society aren’t seen as a reflection of individual shortcomings, but as a product of systemic dysfunction. In this Institutionalist view, Congress’ recent refusal to reduce the national debt isn’t merely the crime of individual lawmakers serving on the so-called supercommittee, but also the fault of a democratic system that’s rigged to fail. Likewise, abuses of state power — whether torture at Abu Ghraib prison or brutality from municipal police forces — are less the sin of the individual grunts than the product of a culture of violence. And nationwide unemployment doesn’t stem from a lack of “personal responsibility” among workers, but from an economy that is producing only one job opening for every seven job applicants — that is, an economy in systemic crisis.
* BANK OF AMERICA SENDS INTERNAL EMAIL EXPOSING WHERE THE “OCCUPY” MOVEMENT IS HURTING IT MOST
By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge
While the general media may be ignoring the latest peculiar twist on the “Occupy” theme, or in this case the “occupyourhomes.org“, Bank of America is taking it quote seriously. As a reminder, “Tuesday, December 6th is the National Day of Action to stop and reverse foreclosures. The Occupy Homes movement is holding actions around the country in support of homeowners and people fighting to have a home. Find an event near you and join in our day of action tomorrow!. There are actions happening in over 20 cities nationwide.
Events are taking place in Brooklyn, Buffalo and Rochester New York; Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose, Petaluma, Sacramento, Paradise and Contra Costa California; Lake Worth, Florida; Atlanta, Fayetteville, and DeKalb Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; Bloomington, Indiana; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Cleveland, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Detroit and Southgate Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington.”
And if you have not heard about today’s protest on the conventional media that is understandable:
as BAC says internally, this event “could impact our industry.”
Here are the specific warnings to BAC “field services” agents:
i) Your safety is our primary concern, so do not engage with the protesters;
ii) While in neighborhoods, please take notice of vacant BAC Field Services managed homes and ensure they are secured;
iii) Remind all parties of the bank’s media policy and report any media incidents.
Aside from the superficial implications, what is more important is that the big banks are showing precisely what the weakest links in the system are, and what makes them the most nervous: it is not protesters living in tents in a major metropolitan city: it is protesters disrupting the lifeblood of the broken banking system – the home selling/repossession pathway. Expect many more such protests now that Bank of America has tipped its hand.
* OCCUPY NOLA WILL BE ALLOWED TO REBUILD ENCAMPMENT IN DUNCAN PLAZA
By Katy Reckdahl, The Times-Picayune
U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey minutes ago granted a temporary restraining order to the Occupy NOLA movement, which had sought protection from the court under the First Amendment in a complaint filed yesterday. The ruling clears the way for the protesters to move back into Duncan Plaza, the park across the street from City Hall where they had been encamped for roughly two months.
Zainey’s ruling came about 12 hours after New Orleans police cleared the plaza of about 150 protesters at the direction of Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration. The protesters, like similar groups around the country, claim a variety of causes, but the movement generally is a protest against economic inequity in America.
Bill Quigley, a lawyer for the Occupy protesters, said he believes it is the first case to date in which a judge has allowed an Occupy protest to take up residence again after an eviction by the city.
Davida Finger, another Occupy lawyer, said that the decision proved that ”no one is above the law, even the city of New Orleans.”
Members of the Occupy movement said they plan to hold a general assembly at 7 p.m. this evening in Duncan Plaza. […]
* PEPPER SPRAY, A CHEMICAL WEAPON WITH UNCERTAIN RISK
By John Barimo, PhD Veterans for Peace
[…] Those independent studies without linkage to either the DOJ or IACP demonstrate that there is significant uncertainty surrounding OC exposure and its related effects on human health. Those studies also suggest that OC could be considered a lethal chemical weapon depending upon the physical condition of the victim. Additionally, we must also consider the impact of OC projectiles when directly striking a victim. Iraq War Veteran Scott Olsen suffered a fractured skull and temporary loss of speech after being stuck by such a projectile in October of 2011 at Occupy Oakland.
It is also important to consider the philosophical issues associated with state administered violence to maintain security and order. Politicians often engage in familiar rhetoric that demonizes nation states for behaviors which are deemed unacceptable and criminal. For example, in February of 2001, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared:
“We are against violence and we would call to account the Iranian government that is once again using its security forces and resorting to violence to prevent the free expression of ideas from their own people.”
And similarly President Barack Obama stated in August of 2011 that:
“True justice will not come from reprisals and violence. It will come from reconciliation and a Libya that allows its citizens to determine their own destiny.”
Often enough, the US government neutralizes an enemy regime over alleged crimes that are simultaneously overlooked by an allied regime as exemplified by the double standard of Libya and Bahrain with regards to human rights abuses. Furthermore, government practices in the US do not appear bound to the same standards imposed on other nations with regards to the use of violence against nonviolent demonstrators.
Technically speaking, OC stimulates nociceptors in exposed mucous membranes to produce intense pain. These nociceptors are sensory receptors in the nervous system which send nerve impulses to the brain which are experienced with extreme discomfort (4). Given this physiological description, how can civil authorities even remotely claim that the point blank application of OC is benign or nonviolent? How can the US Government continue to claim the moral high ground given such double standards with regards to the violent suppression of its citizens? The ethical and philosophical issues associated with the routine use of chemical weapons by police on nonviolent protestors are significant and there is considerable uncertainty associated with human health risks. Therefore, US lawmakers and policymakers should take moral responsibility and ban the use of Oleoresin Capsicum as an initial step in de-escalating the use violence against its citizens who desire to freely express their ideas in public places. […]
* CAPITOL REPORT: INFORMATION SCHEDULED ON NEW CAPITOL ACCESS RULES
By Jessica Vanegeren
The public will have three opportunities to learn about the updated policy that now governs protests and other activities occurring in the Capitol and other government buildings.
State Department of Administration and Capitol Police will be leading informational compliance sessions in the Capitol basement next week, from 9-11 a.m. Tuesday; 4-6 p.m. Thursday; and 9-11 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 10.
Although the new rules took effect immediately when announced Thursday, the state has indicated there will be an educational period through Dec. 16 to help familiarize groups with them.
Members of the public seeking to hold a rally inside the Capitol must apply for a permit if four or more persons are expected to attend; an outside event drawing more than 100 people also requires a permit. Officials encourage requests for permits be made at least one month in advance and Capitol Police say they will generally respond within 10 days.
Among the other rules: Individuals or organizations that obtain a permit for an event or protest can be held financially responsible for any property damage that occurs as a result of an event.
Individuals or organizations that organize, sponsor, promote or participate in an event may be held liable for law enforcement expenses arising out of the event, including a $50 per hour fee if the deployment of the Capitol Police is required.
The new policy drew criticism from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
“Scott Walker’s attempt to quash lawful dissent not only offends Wisconsin’s norms and traditions, it offends Wisconsin’s Constitution,” said party officials in a statement Friday, adding, “The more that Walker seeks to silence the voices of those opposed to his radical agenda, all the more guarantee that the people, in the form of the great recall movement, will be heard.”
* ARUNDHATI ROY: ‘THE PEOPLE WHO CREATED THE CRISIS WILL NOT BE THE ONES THAT COME UP WITH A SOLUTION’
By Arun Gupta, Guardian UK
[…] In this exclusive interview for the Guardian, Roy offers her thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, the role of the imagination, reclaiming language, and what is next for a movement that has reshaped America’s political discourse and seized the world’s attention.
AG: Why did you want to visit Occupy Wall Street and what are your impressions of it?
AR: How could I not want to visit? Given what I’ve been doing for so many years, it seems to me, intellectually and theoretically, quite predictable this was going to happen here at some point. But still I cannot deny myself the surprise and delight that it has happened. And I wanted to, obviously, see for myself the extent and size and texture and nature of it. So the first time I went there, because all those tents were up, it seemed more like a squat than a protest to me, but it began to reveal itself in a while. Some people were holding the ground and it was the hub for other people to organise, to think through things. As I said when I spoke at the People’s University, it seems to me to be introducing a new political language into the United States, a language that would be considered blasphemous only a while ago.
AG: Do you think that the Occupy movement should be defined by occupying one particular space or by occupying spaces?
AR: I don’t think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. I don’t think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost. The fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment. I think the movement will, or at least should, become a protean movement of ideas, as well as action, where the element of surprise remains with the protesters. We need to preserve the element of an intellectual ambush and a physical manifestation that takes the government and the police by surprise. It has to keep re-imagining itself, because holding territory may not be something the movement will be allowed to do in a state as powerful and violent as the United States.
AG: At the same, occupying public spaces did capture the public imagination. Why do you think that is?
AR: I think you had a whole subcutaneous discontent that these movements suddenly began to epitomise. The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it – and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent.
AG: You mentioned that they are under attack. Dozens of occupations have been shut down, evicted, at least temporarily, in the last week. What do you see as the next phase for this movement?
AR: I don’t know whether I’m qualified to answer that, because I’m not somebody who spends a lot of time here in the United States, but I suspect that it will keep reassembling in different ways and the anger created by the repression will, in fact, expand the movement. But eventually, the greater danger to the movement is that it may dovetail into the presidential election campaign that’s coming up. I’ve seen that happen before in the antiwar movement here, and I see it happening all the time in India. Eventually, all the energy goes into trying to campaign for the “better guy”, in this case Barack Obama, who’s actually expanding wars all over the world. Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.
AG: Your essays, such as “The Greater Common Good” and “Walking with the Comrades”, concern corporations, the military and state violently occupying other people’s lands in India. How do those occupations and resistances relate to the Occupy Wall Street movement?
AR: I hope that that the people in the Occupy movement are politically aware enough to know that their being excluded from the obscene amassing of wealth of US corporations is part of the same system of the exclusion and war that is being waged by these corporations in places like India, Africa and the Middle East. Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries. So, whether this movement is a movement for justice for the excluded in the United States, or whether it is a movement against an international system of global finance that is manufacturing levels of hunger and poverty on an unimaginable scale, remains to be seen.
AG: You’ve written about the need for a different imagination than that of capitalism. Can you talk about that?
AR: We often confuse or loosely use the ideas of crony capitalism or neoliberalism to actually avoid using the word “capitalism”, but once you’ve actually seen, let’s say, what’s happening in India and the United States – that this model of US economics packaged in a carton that says “democracy” is being forced on countries all over the world, militarily if necessary, has in the United States itself resulted in 400 of the richest people owning wealth equivalent [to that] of half of the population. Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.
In India, 100 of the richest people own assets worth 25% of the gross domestic product. There’s something terribly wrong. No individual and no corporation should be allowed to amass that kind of unlimited wealth, including bestselling writers like myself, who are showered with royalties. Money need not be our only reward. Corporations that are turning over these huge profits can own everything: the media, the universities, the mines, the weapons industry, insurance hospitals, drug companies, non-governmental organisations. They can buy judges, journalists, politicians, publishing houses, television stations, bookshops and even activists. This kind of monopoly, this cross-ownership of businesses, has to stop.
The whole privatisation of health and education, of natural resources and essential infrastructure – all of this is so twisted and so antithetical to anything that would place the interests of human beings or the environment at the center of what ought to be a government concern – should stop. The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people’s wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.
AG: What would the different imagination look like?
AR: The home minister of India has said that he wants 70% of the Indian population in the cities, which means moving something like 500 million people off their land. That cannot be done without India turning into a military state. But in the forests of central India and in many, many rural areas, a huge battle is being waged. Millions of people are being driven off their lands by mining companies, by dams, by infrastructure companies, and a huge battle is being waged. These are not people who have been co-opted into consumer culture, into the western notions of civilisation and progress. They are fighting for their lands and their livelihoods, refusing to be looted so that someone somewhere far away may “progress” at their cost.
India has millions of internally displaced people. And now, they are putting their bodies on the line and fighting back. They are being killed and imprisoned in their thousands. Theirs is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of civilisation, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfillment. And this battle demands that the world see that, at some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
That is why we must pay close attention to those with another imagination: an imagination outside of capitalism, as well as communism. We will soon have to admit that those people, like the millions of indigenous people fighting to prevent the takeover of their lands and the destruction of their environment – the people who still know the secrets of sustainable living – are not relics of the past, but the guides to our future.
AG: In the United States, as I’m sure you’re aware, political discourse is obsessed with the middle class, but the Occupy movement has made the poor and homeless visible for the first time in decades in the public discourse. Could you comment on that?
AR: It’s so much a reversal of what you see in India. In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can’t prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms. Whereas, here, the poor have been invisibilised, because obviously this model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I think the time will come when the movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.
AG: As a writer, what do you make of the term “occupation”, which has now somehow been reclaimed as a positive term when it’s always been one of the most heinous terms in political language?
AR: As a writer, I’ve often said that, among the other things that we need to reclaim, other than the obscene wealth of billionaires, is language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom. So I think that turning the word “occupation” on its head would be a good thing, though I would say that it needs a little more work. We ought to say, “Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine.” The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.
AG: As a novelist, you write a lot in terms of motivations and how characters interpret reality. Around the country, many occupiers we’ve talked to seem unable to reconcile their desires about Obama with what Obama really represents. When I talk to them about Obama’s record, they say, “Oh, his hands are tied; the Republicans are to blame, it’s not his fault.” Why do you think people react like this, even at the occupations?
AR: Even in India, we have the same problem. We have a right wing that is so vicious and so openly wicked, which is the Baratiya Janata party (BJP), and then we have the Congress party, which does almost worse things, but does it by night. And people feel that the only choices they have are to vote for this or for that. And my point is that, whoever you vote for, it doesn’t have to consume all the oxygen in the political debate. It’s just an artificial theatre, which in a way is designed to subsume the anger and to make you feel that this is all that you’re supposed to think about and talk about, when, in fact, you’re trapped between two kinds of washing powder that are owned by the same company.
Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations. Even if we do vote, we should just spend less time and intellectual energy on our choices and keep our eye on the ball.
AG: So it’s also a failure of the imagination?
AR: It’s walking into a pretty elaborate trap. But it happens everywhere, and it will continue to happen. Even I know that if I go back to India, and tomorrow the BJP comes to power, personally I’ll be in a lot more trouble than with the Congress [party] in power. But systemically, in terms of what is being done, there’s no difference, because they collaborate completely, all the time. So I’m not going to waste even three minutes of my time, if I have to speak, asking people to vote for this one or for that one.
AG: One question that a lot of people have asked me: when is your next novel coming out?
AR: I have no answer to that question … I really don’t know. Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.
AG: So this inspires you, as a novelist, the movement?
AR: Well, it comforts me, let’s just say. I feel in so many ways rewarded for having done what I did, along with hundreds of other people, even the times when it seemed futile.
• Michelle Fawcett contributed to this article. She and Arun Gupta are covering the Occupy movement nationwide for Salon, Alternet and other outlets. Their work is available at occupyusatoday.com
* JOE WALSH FLEES FROM CONSTITUENTS, AVOIDS MEETING WITH THE 99 PERCENT
By Think Progress
99 Percenters, including an unemployed resident who is relying on getting Medicare benefits that the congressman has been trying to cut with his support for the Ryan plan, had been encamped in Rep. Joe Walsh’s (R-IL) office since noon, hoping to talk to him about how to grow jobs and battle inequality. Yet despite repeated insistence that he would meet with them around 3 PM, Walsh decided to flee from the protesters around 3:20 instead, avoiding meeting with them altogether. Although his staff insisted that he had to make votes, they were fully aware of this when they suggested he would meet with them at 3. Walsh took off without saying a word. Former Campus Progress staff writer Micah Uetricht captured video of Walsh fleeing (which ThinkProgress also witnessed).
[…] In his book Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, Nicholas Christopher suggests the late 40s and 50s noir films were mining and expressing the deep-seated anxiety – the “collective shudder” – of a culture on the threshold of the post-Hiroshima atomic age that had not yet fully sorted out the demons of the Great Depression.
“The war ends but there is no closure,” Christopher writes. “Forces are unleashed. Organized crime, street violence, political corruption, poverty. … GIs returning to the United States from Europe and the Pacific carry, not microbes, but lethal infirmities of the mind and spirit after four years of living day in day out with brutality and violent death, and surviving a war in which 1,700 cities and townships were destroyed and 35 million people were killed.”
No society can just turn off this kind of “black energy,” which is the fertile ground and dramatic fodder of all fictional and film noir — popular art that taps into Jung’s notion of the Shadow. Jungian Robert A. Johnson defines the Shadow as the flip side of the Ego/Persona that we present to the outside world. The Shadow is the “refused and unacceptable characteristics … that collect in the dark corners of our personality.” This Shadow, Johnson says, “often has an energy potential nearly as great as that of our ego.”
Freud talks about the “seducing influence” of war on people and culture. This is connected to his ideas on the death instinct and Thanatos. When a society finds itself overwhelmed with this kind of black energy, he suggests, it slides toward moral bankruptcy. At this juncture, “[T]here is an end of all suppression of the baser passions, and men perpetuate deeds of cruelty, fraud and treachery, and barbarity.”
Christopher again:
“Between the economic poles of opulence and squalor, and the overlapping social codes of rapacious laissez-faire capitalism and organized crime, the indelible motto of the postwar American city in the so-called boom years becomes ‘Anything Goes.’ ” And key to the noir sensibility, “Power’s inescapable twin is violence.”
This is the shadow world of films like Born To Kill, a tightly-scripted tale about a small-time sociopath trying to make it in post-WWII America. Real-life tough-guy Lawrence Tierney easily charms women with his confidence and feels perfectly justified in killing whenever someone tries to “cut him out” of something he feels belongs to him. Despite the title, how much of this predator’s struggle for money and power is nature and how much is nurture is not an issue; the point is his focus and determination to get what he wants. As the deadly dame in the picture, Claire Trevor is his match as an amoral schemer.
Director Robert Wise keeps the film on an even, amoral keel. There is none of the salaciousness found in current films about sociopaths that separates us from them; in this film, the Tierney character is one of us. Hollywood code at the time required Wise to have the character blown away at the end, but in today’s moral climate, with a little more education, some political or financial savvy and rich backers, such a character could be governor of Texas or even in the White House with killer drones at his beck and call. Or he could be at the top of the Wall Street finance game fleecing working American schmucks of their life savings.
Born To Kill was made, and presumably takes place, in 1947, the year I was born as the middle child of a man with a PhD in physiology who spent three years skippering a PT boat in the south Pacific. On his return to domestic life, he had to re-acquaint himself with his pretty young wife, my mother. The equivalent of PTSD was a dirty little secret then. During that marital re-adjustment period I was conceived and born as part of the great baby boom.
As I approach my 65th year and look around at the world my father’s much venerated generation handed down and that my generation is passing on to the next, the levels of corruption and “black energy” have never seemed greater. Jungian cultural shadows loom everywhere. And as Johnson points out, “culture is an artificial imposed structure.” One culture’s Persona may be another’s Shadow and vice-versa. “The shadow of one culture is a tinderbox of trouble for another.”
In this kind of harsh and violent shadow world, power trumps everything. Economically squeezed, those who have power desperately want to hold onto it, while those who don’t have it feel the absence of it more acutely than ever. “Anything goes” prevails on both ends of the vertical continuum — in ghetto drug gangs and in Wall Street board rooms.
The rule is: Do what you have to do but don’t get caught. And don’t give an honest answer when you can bullshit your way out or into some position of advantage. The poster boy for this may be Countrywide Bank’s CEA Angelo Mozilo who got a slap on the wrist after fleecing millions of hard working Americans. The Lawrence Tierney character from 1947′s Born To Kill would have understood Mozilo perfectly. […]
From Decaying Democracies to Technocratic Dictatorships and Beyond
by James Petras
We live in a time of dynamic, regressive, regime changes. A period in which major political transformations and the dramatic roll back of a half century of socio-economic legislation are accelerated by a prolonged and deepening economic crises and a world-wide financier led offensive. This essay explores major ongoing regime changes that have a profound impact on governance, the class structures, economic institutions, political freedom and national sovereignty. We delineate a two-stage process of political regression. The first stage involves the transition from a decaying democracy to an oligarchical democracy; the second stage currently unfolding in Europe involves the transition from oligarchical democracy to colonial-technocratic dictatorship. We will identify the specific features of each regime focusing on the specific conditions and socio-economic forces behind each “transition”. We will proceed to clarify the key concepts, their operative meaning: specifically the nature and dynamics of “decaying democracies” (DD), oligarchical democracies (OD), and “colonial technocratic dictatorship” (CTD).
The second half of the essay will detail the politics of CTD, the regime which has moved furthest from the notion of a sovereign representative democracy. We will clarify the differences and similarities between traditional military-civilian and fascist dictatorships and the up-to-date CTD, focusing on the ideology of apolitical expertise and technocratic rule as a preliminary to an exploration of the profoundly colonial hierarchical chain of decision making.
The penultimate section will highlight the reason why the imperial ruling classes and their national collaborators have overturned the pre-existing “democratic” oligarchical ruling formulas of “indirect rule” in favor of a naked power grab. The turn to direct colonial rule (a coup by any other name) was consumated by the major financial ruling classes of Europe and the US.
We will evaluate the socio-economic impact of rule by imperial appointed colonial technocrats, the reason for rule by fiat and force over the previous process of persuasion, manipulation and co-optation.
In the concluding section we will evaluate the polarization of the class struggle in a time of colonial dictatorship, in the context of hollowed out electoral institutions and radical regressive social policies. The essay will address the twin issues of struggle for political freedom and social justice in the face of fiat rule by emerging technocratic colonial rulers.
What is at stake goes beyond the current regime changes to identifying the most basic institutional configurations which will define the life chances, personal and political freedoms of future generations, for decades to come.
Decaying Democracies and the Transition to Oligarchical Democracies
The decay of democracy is evident in every sphere of politics. Corruption is all pervasive, as parties and leaders vie for financial contributions from the wealthy and powerful; congressional and executive positions have a price tag; each piece of legislation is influenced by powerful corporate “lobbies” which spend millions writing the laws and engineering their approval. Prominent influence peddlers like the US felon Jack Abramoff boast that “every congressperson has their price.” The vote of citizens counts for nothing: the politician’s campaign promises have no relation to their behavior in office. Lies and deceptions are considered “normal” in the political process. The exercise of political rights are increasingly under police surveillance and active citizens are subject to arbitrary arrest. The political elite depletes the public treasury subsidizing colonial wars and pays for their military adventures by eliminating basic social programs, public agencies and services.
Legislators engage in vitriolic demagogy in virtual Punch and Judy puppet conflicts as public displays of partisanship while in private they feast together at the public trough. In the face of the discredited legislative institutions and the overt, gross buying and selling of public office, executive officials, elected and appointed, seize legislative and judicial powers.
Decaying democracy evolves into an “oligarchical democracy” as executive officials rule by fiat; overriding democratic rules and ignoring the interests of the majority. An executive junta, of elected and non-elected officials, resolves questions of war and peace, allocates billions of dollars or euros to a financial oligarchy, and reduces living standards of millions of citizens via class-biased “austerity packages.” The legislature abdicates its legislative and oversight function and submits to the executive junta’s “accomplished facts.” The citizenry is assigned the role of passive spectators – even as anger, disgust and hostility spreads and deepens. Isolated voices of dissenting representatives are drowned out by the cacophony of mass media contracted prestigious “experts” and academics shilling for the financial oligarchy and advising the executive junta. No longer do citizens look to the legislatures for relief or redress from the executive siezure and abuse of power. To fortify their absolute power, the oligarchies emasculate the constitutions, citing economic catastrophes and all pervasive “terrorist” threats. A vast and growing police state apparatus, with unlimited powers, enforces constraints on civic and political opposition. As legislative powers are sapped and executive authorities enlarge their sphere of action, the remaining democratic freedoms are curtailed via “bureaucratic restrictions” on time, place, and forms of political action. The purpose is to minimize the critical minority from mobilizing a sympathetic majority. As the economic crises worsen and the bondholders and investors demand higher interest rates, the oligarchy extends and deepens their austerity measures. Inequalities widen, exposing the oligarchical nature of the executive junta. The social bases of the regime narrows. The well-paid skilled workers and middle class employees and professionals begin to feel the acute erosion of wages, salaries, pensions, working conditions, and future career prospects. The narrowing of social support undermines the junta’s claim to democratic legitimacy. Faced with mass discontent and discredit and with strategic sections of the civil bureaucracy in revolt, factional strife breaks out among rival cliques within the “official parties” of government. The “democratic oligarchy” is pushed and pulled in several directions: it decrees social cuts but can only find limited support in implementing them. It decrees regressive taxes but cannot collect them. It launches colonial wars but cannot win them. The executive junta alternates between force and compromise; robust promises to the international bankers and then, under mass pressure, backsliding.
Over time oligarchical democracy is no longer useful as to the financial elite. Its democratic pretensions no longer can deceive the masses. Prolonged elite factional warfare erodes its willingness to impose the financial oligarchy’s full agenda. At this point oligarchical democracy as a political formula has run its course.
The financial elite are ready and willing to discard all pretenses of ruling via democratic oligarchs. They are seen as willing but too weak; too subject to domestic pressure from factional rivals and not willing to proceed to savage cuts in social budgets, even greater reductions in living standards and working conditions.
The real power behind the executive juntas comes to the fore. The international bankers discard the “native junta” and impose non-elected bankers to rule – dubbing their private bankers as technocrats.
The Transition to a Colonial “Technocratic” Dictatorship
The naked rule by foreign bankers is disguised by an ideology which describes it as rule by technocrats who are experts, apolitical and above private interests. The reality behind the technocratic rhetoric is that the officials appointed have a career of working with and for big financial private and international interests. Lucas Papdemos, the appointed Greek Prime Minister, worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and, as head of the Greek Central Bank, was responsible for cooking the books covering up the fraudulent budgetary accounts leading Greece to financial disaster. Mario Monti, the appointed Prime Minister of Italy was employed by the European Union and Goldman Sachs. These appointments by the banks are based on their total loyalty and unstinting commitments to impose the harshest regressive policies on the working populations of Greece and Italy. The so-called technocrats are not subject to party factions, nor remotely responsive to any social protests. They are free of all political commitments … except one, to secure the payment of the debt to foreign bondholders – especially the loans owed to major European and North American financial institutions. The technocrats are totally dependent on the foreign banks for their appointments and tenure in office. They have not a smattering of a political organizational base in the countries they govern. They rule because, foreign bankers threatened to bankrupt the countries if they were not appointed. They have zero independence, in the sense that the “technocrats” are merely instruments and direct representatives of the Euro-American bankers.
The “technocrats” by the nature of their appointments are colonial officials explicitly appointed at the behest of imperial bankers and sustained by them. Secondly, neither they nor their colonial mentors were elected by the people over whom they govern. They are imposed by economic coercion and political blackmail. Thirdly, the measures they adopt are designed to inflict the maximum pain by totally altering the basic relation-between labor and capital, by maximizing the power of the latter to hire, fire, fix salaries and working conditions. In other words, the technocratic agenda imposes a political and economic dictatorship.
The social institutions and political processes associated with a democratic-capitalist welfare state, corrupted by decadent democracies, eroded by oligarchical democracies are threatened with total demolition by the emerging colonial technocratic dictatorships (CTD). The language of social regression is full of euphemisms but the substance is clear. Social programs regarding public health, education, pensions, and disabilities are slashed or eliminated and the “savings” transferred into tributary payments to foreign bondholders (banks).
Public employees are fired, their retirement age extended and their salaries reduced and their tenure eliminated. Public enterprises are sold to foreign and domestic capitalist oligarchs with services curtailed and employees shed. Employers shred collective bargaining agreements. Workers are fired and hired at the whim of the owners. Vacations, severance pay, starting salaries and overtime pay are drastically reduced. These pro-capitalist regressive policies are dubbed “structural reforms.” Consultative processes are replaced by the dictatorial powers of capital – “legislated” and implemented by the appointed technocrats. Not since the time of Mussolini and fascist rule and the Greek military junta (1967-1973) has such a regressive assault on popular organizations and democratic rights taken place.
Comparing Fascist and Technocratic Dictatorships
The earlier fascist and military dictatorships have much in common with the current technocratic despots regarding the capitalist interests they defend and the social classes they oppress. But there are important differences which disguise the continuities.
The military junta in Greece and Mussolini in Italy seized power by force and violence, outlawed all opposition parties, press trade unions and closed the elected parliament. The current “technocratic” dictatorship is handed power by the political elites of the oligarchical democracy – a “peaceful” transition at least in its initial phase. In contrast to the earlier dictatorships, the current despotic regimes retain the hollowed out and emasculated electoral facades, as rubber stamp entities to provide a kind of “pseudo-legitimacy,” which beguiles the financial press but fools few public citizens.
From the very first day of technocratic rule the key slogans of the organized movements in Italy was, “No to a government of bankers”; while in Greece the slogan that greeted the puppet pragmatist Papdemos was “European Union, IMF, Get Out.”
The earlier dictatorships began as full blown police states, arresting pro-democracy movement activists and trade unionists before pursuing their pro-capitalist policies. The current technocrats first launch their vicious all-out assault on living and working conditions, with parliamentary assent and then in the face of sustained and determined resistance by the “parliaments of the street”, proceed to escalate police state repression by degree … practicing incremental police state rule.
Policies of the Technocratic Dictatorships: Scope, Depth and Method
The dictatorial organization of a technocratic regime is derived from its policies and political mission. In order to impose policies that result in massive transfers of wealth, power and legal rights from labor and households to capital, especially foreign capital, an authoritarian regime is essential, especially in anticipation of sustained resistance. The international financial oligarchy cannot secure “stable and sustainable” long term extraction of wealth with any semblance of democratic governance, even a decaying oligarchic democracy. Hence the last resort for the bankers in the EU and USA is to directly appoint one of their own to push, shove and impose a sequence of comprehensive large scale, long-term regressive changes. The mission of the technocrats is to impose an enduring institutional framework which will guarantee long-term, high interest payments based on decades of impoverishment and popular exclusion.
The mission of the “technocratic dictatorship” is not to put in place a single regressive policy of short duration, such as a salary freeze or dismissal of a few thousand school teachers. Their intent is to convert the entire state apparatus into an efficient press to continuously extract and transfer tax revenues and income from workers and employees to bond holders. To maximize the power and profits of capital over labor, the technocrats grant the capitalists absolute power to fix the terms of labor contracts, as far as hiring, firing, longevity, hours and working conditions.
The technocrats “method of rule” is to have an ear only for the foreign bankers, bondholders and private investors. The decision process is closed and limited to the coterie of bankers and technocrats without the least transparency. Above all, under colonial rules the technocrats must ignore the protestors if possible or, if necessary break heads. Under pressure from the banks, there is no time for mediation, compromise or delays as was the case under decaying and oligarchical democracies.
Ten historic transformations dominate the agenda of the technocratic dictatorships and their colonial mentors.
1) Massive shifts in budgetary allocations from welfare to bond and bank payments.2) Large scale changes in income policies from wages to profits, interest payments and rents.3) Highly regressive tax policies, increasing consumer (VAT) and wage taxes and lowering taxes on bondholders and investors.4) Eliminating employment security (“labor flexibility”), increasing the reserve army of unemployed to lower wages, intensifying the exploitation of employed labor (“higher productivity”).
5) Rewriting labor codes, undermining the balance of power between organized labor and capital. Wages, working conditions and health issues are taken out of the hands of rank and file unionists and put in the hands of technocratic “corporate commissions.”
6) The dismantling of a half century of public enterprises and institutions and privatizing telecommunications, energy, health, education and pension funds. Trillion dollar privatizations are windfall profits on a world historic scale. Private monopolies replace public and provide fewer jobs and services without adding any new productive capacity.
7) The economic axis shifts from production and services for mass consumption in the domestic market, to exports of specialized goods and services to overseas markets. This new dynamic requires lower wages to “compete” internationally but shrinks the domestic market. The new strategy translates into an increase in hard currency earnings from exports to pay the debt to the bondholders but results in greater misery and unemployment for domestic labor. Under the technocratic “model,” prosperity accrues to vulture investors buying lucrative but financially strapped local producers and real estate on the cheap.
8.) The technocratic dictatorship by design and policy aims at a “bipolar class structure” in which the bulk of the skilled workers and the middle class is impoverished and suffers downward mobility while enriching a strata of local bondholders and business owners who cash in on interest payments and the low cost of labor.
9) Deregulation of capital, privatization and the centrality of financial capital leads to greater colonial (foreign) ownership of land, banks, strategic economic sectors and “social” services. National sovereignty is replaced by imperial sovereignty in the economy as well as politics.
10) The unified power of colonial technocrats and imperial bondholders dictating policy concentrates power in a non-elected power elite. They rule with a narrow social base and no popular legitimacy. They are politically vulnerable, therefore, constantly dependent on economic threats or physical force.
Three Stages of Technocratic Dictatorial Rule
The historic task of the technocratic dictatorship is to roll-back the political, social and economic advances gained by the working class, public employees and pensioners since the defeat of fascist capitalism in 1945. The unmaking of over sixty years of history is no easy task, least of all in the midst of a deep ongoing socio-economic crises, in which the working class has already experienced severe cuts in wages and benefits and the number of young unemployed (18-30 years) throughout the EU and North America ranges between 25 to 50 percent.
The proposed agenda of the “technocrats” – parroting their colonial mentors in the banks – is ever more severe reductions in living and working conditions.The proposed “austerity” occurs in the face of growing economic inequalities between the wealthy 5% and the bottom 60% between Southern Europe and Northern Europe. Faced with downward mobility and heavy indebtedness, the middle class and especially their ‘educated children’, are outraged by the technocrats call for even greater social cuts. Outrage spreads from the lower middle class to business and professionals on the verge of bankruptcy and loss of status.
The technocratic rulers, constantly play on mass insecurity and fear of a “catastrophic collapse” if their ‘bitter medicine’ is not swallowed by the anguished middle classes who fear the prospect of sinking into the working class or worse.
The technocrats call on the present generation to sacrifice, to commit virtual suicide, to save future generations. With gravity and humble posturing they speak of “equal sacrifices”, a message belied by the firing of tens of thousands of employees and the selling of billions of euros/dollars of the national patrimony to foreign bankers and investors. Lowering public expenditures to pay bondholders and entice private investors erodes any appeal for “national unity” and “equal sacrifice” ..The technocratic regime strives to act decisively and quickly to impose its brutal regressive agenda, the rollback of sixty years of history before the masses have time rise up and bring them down.
To preclude political opposition the technocrats demand “national unity”, (the unity of bankers and oligarchs), the backing of the decadent electoral parties and their leaders and their total submission to the colonial bankers’ demands.
The technocrats’ political trajectory will be short lived given the draconian systemic changes and repressive structures they propose, the best they can accomplish is to dictate and implement policies and then return to their lucrative sanctuaries in the overseas banks.
Technocratic Rule: Stage One
With the unanimous backing of the mass media and the full backing of the powerful bankers, the technocrats take advantage of the downfall of the despised and discredited politicians of the past electoral regimes. They project a clean government image which speaks to a regime which is efficient and competent, capable of decisive action. They promise to put an end to deteriorating living conditions and partisan political paralyses. At the onset of their rule the technocratic dictators exploit the justified popular disgust with privileged “do-nothing” politicians to secure a measure of popular consent or at least passive acquiescence from the majority of the citizens drowning in debt and in search of a “savior.”
It should be noted that among the most politically aware and social conscious minority, the bankers resort to a colonized “technocratic regime” cuts no ice: they immediately identify the technocratic regime as illegitimate deriving powers from foreign bankers. They affirm the rights of citizens and national sovereignty. From the beginning, even under the cloak of emergency powers, the technocrats face a core of mass opposition.
The bankers realistically recognize the technocrats must move quickly and decisively.
Stage Two: Technocrats’ Shock Policies
The technocrats launch 100 days of the most egregious class warfare against the working class since the military/fascist regimes. In the name of the Free Markets, the Bondholder and the Unholy Alliance of political oligarchs and bankers dictate edicts, and laws are passed, immediately firing tens of thousands of public employees. Scores of public enterprises are rushed to the auction block. Job security is abolished and firing without cause becomes the law of the land. Regressive taxes are decreed and households are impoverished. The entire income pyramid is turned on its head. The technocrats widen inequalities and deepen immiseration.
The initial euphoria greeting technocratic rule is replaced by bitter reproaches. The lower middle class looking for a paternal dictatorial resolution of their condition, recognize “another political swindle”. As the technocratic regime races to fulfill its mission to the foreign bankers, the popular mood sours, bitterness spreads even among its ‘passive collaborators’. There are no crumbs from the table of a colonial regime empowered to maximize the outflow of state revenues to bondholders.
The compromised political oligarchy tries to revive their fortunes and “questions” the particularities of the technocratic “tsunami” smashing the social fabric of society. The scale and scope of the dictatorship’s extremist agenda and the ongoing build-up of mass frustrations frightens the political party collaborators, while the bankers urge them on to bigger and deeper social cuts. The technocrats in the face of the burgeoning popular storm begin to cower.
The bankers call for greater backbone and offer new loans for “keeping the course.” The technocrats bunker down – alternating between pleas for time and sacrifice with promises of prosperity “around the corner.” Mostly they rely on constant police mobilization and de facto militarization of civil society.
Mission Accomplished: Civil War or the Return of Oligarchical Democracy?
The outcome of the “experiment” with a colonial dictatorial technocratic regime is difficult to predict. One reason is because the measures adopted are so extreme and extensive, that they unify almost all important social classes (except the top 5%) against them at the same time. The concentration of power in an “appointed” elite further isolates them and unifies most citizens in favor of democracy against colonial submission and unelected rulers. The measures approved by the technocrats face the unlikely prospect of full implementation, especially by civil servants and public employees facing firings, pay cuts and reduced pensions. The across the board cuts undermine “divide and conquer” tactics. Given the scope and depth of the downgrading of the public sector and the indignity of serving a regime clearly under colonial tutelage, it is possible that breaks and fissures will take place in the military and police apparatus especially if they provoke popular uprisings which turn violent. The technocratic juntas cannot ensure that their policies will be implemented. If not, revenues will falter; strikes and protests will scare off predator buyers of public firms. The big squeeze will undermine local business, production will decline the recession will deepen.
Technocratic rule is by its nature transitory. Under threat of a mass revolt the new rulers will flee to their overseas financial sanctuaries. Local oligarchical collaboraters will hasten to augment their billion dollar euro overseas bank accounts in London, New York and Zurich.
The technocratic dictatorship will make every effort to hand power back to the oligarchical democratic politicians with the proviso that they retain the regressive changes in place. Technocratic rule will end up with “paper victories” unless the overseas bankers insist the “return to democracy” operates within the “new order.”
The application of force could boomerang. The technocrats and democratic oligarchs renewed threats of an economic catastrophe for non-compliance will be counter-manded by the reality of real existing misery and mass unemployment. For millions the living catastrophe resulting from technocratic policies will outweigh any future threats. The rebellious majority may choose to rise up and overthrow the old order and take its chances in an independent democratic socialist republic. One of the unforeseen consequences of imposing radical colonial appointed technocratic dictatorship is that it clears the political landscape of parasitic political oligarchies and lays the groundwork for a clean break. It facilitates renouncing the debt and reconstituting the social fabric of an independent democratic republic.
The serious danger is that the discredited politicians of the old order will demagogically attempt to seize the democratic banners of the “anti-dictatorial anti-technocrat” struggle to bring back what Marx called “the old crap of the previous order.” The recycled political oligarchs will adapt to the “restructured” new order of eternal debt payments as part of a deal to maintain the ongoing process of unending social regression. The revolutionary struggle against the colonial technocratic rulers must continue and deepen, to block the restoration of the democratic oligarchs.
Goldman Sachs, the most notorious investment bank on Wall Street, has two things in common with the legislators with significant investments in the company: wealth and power.
According to research by the Center for Responsive Politics, 19 current members of Congress reported holdings in Goldman Sachs during 2010. Whether by coincidence or not, most of these 19 Goldman Sachs investors in Congress are more powerful or more wealthy than their peers, or both.
Nine of them sit on either the most powerful committee in their chamber or committees charged with regulating the Wall Street giant. Moreover, seven of them are among the 25 wealthiest members of their respective chambers, according to the Center’s research.
And of the six lawmakers who fall into neither category, two are the most influential Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).
Altogether, the 19 had at least $480,000 and as much as $1.1 million invested in Goldman Sachs in 2010, the most recent year personal finance data are available. That’s an average of about $812,900 for these 19 lawmakers’ holdings combined.
Lawmakers are only required to report their personal assets and liabilities in broad ranges, meaning it’s impossible to know the precise value of these holdings. The Center uses the minimum and maximum values listed on the filings to calculate an average value for each asset and liability.
But these financial interests are not a one-way street: Goldman Sachs employees and its political action committee have contributed about $124,000, combined, to a dozen of the lawmakers who reported holdings in the company in 2010, according to the Center’s research. This includes all money given during the 2010 election cycle and thus far in 2011.
INFLUENCE
The congressional Goldman Sachs investors wield considerable influence in both chambers, either through powerful committees, leadership positions or committee assigned to overseeing Goldman and the big-money interests on Wall Street.
In the leadership category are names such as Boehner and Cantor, each of whom has an average $32,500 invested in Goldman.
Goldman Sachs’ employees, meanwhile, have also contributed heavily to Boehner and Cantor.
Boehner has received $29,500, and Cantor $48,000, from them since 2009, according to the Center’s research.
Other Goldman investors with this kind of power include two members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, better known as the debt supercommittee.
The first, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), reported $1,177 invested in Goldman in 2010, and, as minority whip, is the second highest ranking Republican in the Senate.
And not only is Kyl a member of the supercommittee and party leadership, he also sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which regulates Goldman Sachs and its peers on Wall Street.
Another one of Kyl’s colleagues on the supercommittee, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), is also a Goldman investor. Upton had an average of $8,000 invested in the company in 2010, according to the Center’s research.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), is another influential Goldman shareholder in Congress.
Ryan sits on two very important House committees: the Budget Committee, which he chairs, and the Ways and Means Committee. Ryan reported an average of $8,000 invested in Goldman and has received $5,800 from the company’s employees so far this year after receiving $10,000 from them during the 2010 cycle, according to the Center’s research.
One of Goldman Sachs’ most valuable congressional investors is Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), whose average of $550,000 in investments in the company is far and away the most in Congress.
Additionally Neugebauer sits on the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees Wall Street and the securities and investment industry of which Goldman is a part. That also helps explain the $9,500 Goldman Sachs employees have contributed to Neugebauer since January 2009 through the company’s political action committee.
Rep. Gary Peters (R-Mich.) is another Goldman Sachs investor on the Financial Services committee. He has an average of $8,000 invested and has received $4,500 from the company this year from its PAC.
Rep. Vernon Buchanon (R-Fla.), the eighth richest member of Congress and fifth richest member of the House, had an average $32,500 invested in Goldman in 2010. Buchanon also sits on the House Ways and Means Committee.
Another wealthy member of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Richard Berg (R-N.D.), is also a Goldman investor. Berg had $3,026 invested in Goldman in 2010 and is worth $33.5 million, making him the 14th wealthiest House member.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) is a Goldman investor and is also among the 25 wealthiest members of the House. Sensenbrenner, who is worth an estimated $18.7 million, had $16,816 invested in Goldman in 2010.
