LAPD takes on the Chalk Bloc

What started out as a night of art, fun and food trucks ended with Los Angeles police creating a riot scene, assaulting unarmed protesters and firing rubber bullets seemingly at random into a crowd of bystanders, all -- ostensibly -- because people were "vandalizing the sidewalk and privately owned buildings [by] writing in chalk," according to a spokeswoman for the LAPD.

That, friends, is what the LAPD says justified the department deploying helicopters with searchlights and more than 140 officers in riot gear. That is what justified officers shoving protesters and random pedestrians and firing potentially lethal "non-lethal" rounds into a crowd of civilians: people drawing in public spaces.

The message to the proles: Don't bring chalk to a gun fight.

Like a lot of people caught up in the commotion Thursday night, I didn't intend to get involved in a standoff with police. With the hours I work, I figured I had already missed all the subversive chalking, so I went straight from my office to an Occupy LA bail fundraiser instead -- except when I go there, I found it was just me and the woman taking donations at the door. After milling about and staring at my phone for 15 minutes, I headed back outside and saw a helicopter shining a spotlight a few blocks away. I put two and two together.

With the police helicopter as my guide, I walked over to the scene of the crime. What I saw was a typical-looking LA crowd milling about an intersection, some people drawing things on the street, others passing joints and doing their part to maintain the constant sweet wafting smell of marijuana that seems to be omnipresent in California. Surrounding this crowd were lines of police menacingly wielding batons and rifles.

Within minutes of my arrival, the police started moving their line, pushing people out of the intersection with reckless macho abandon, roughly pushing people (like me) in the back even as they tried in the midst of all the confusion to comply with the order to leave. Several officers also started firing their weapons into the crowd, which is not a terribly great way to deescalate a situation, particularly when the "non-lethal" rounds one is firing sound exactly like the lethal rounds members of the LAPD are notorious for firing at the people they purport to protect. One man named Charlie (pictured) said he was shot just walking down the sidewalk and that he had no connection to Occupy LA or the dangerously subversive chalking that preceded the tiny cock-waving show of police force. Another man was jumped by police right in front of me, tackled and tasered as they moved the police line. Again, without any apparent cause.

Corporate media coverage will, predictably, focus on injuries allegedly suffered by police from bottles thrown at them by people in the crowd. The people the police attacked will be ignored or, like other victims, blamed for inviting the attack. But there's a plus side: every time a cop brutalizes an innocent bystander, more people are made aware of the sort of state-sanctioned brutality that is a regular feature of life for the lesser privileged in American society. Last night, a lot of people who left their homes expecting a good time full of art and white wine ended up finding themselves in the middle of a police state dodging rubber bullets. That's an experience that can't be replicated by reading a radical political pamphlet.

The myth of America

(Originally posted on the BrandX blog)

Like any organized religion, America comes with its own creation story, a beautiful, inspiring myth used to lend legitimacy to our modern priestly class in Washington. But there's another story worth considering: the actual one of how the founders of the United States saw their new government as a protection against democracy -- as a means of safeguarding privilege and elevating the right to property over the rights of the people.

During the debate on the US constitution, the founders were pretty explicit about this, making it abundantly clear that protecting property – the large estates gifted to them by the British crown, the men and women sold to them by slave traders – was a driving force behind their push for a more powerful central government. James Madison, for instance, who would serve as the young republic's fourth president, warned his fellow founders of the perils of democracy, saying too much of it would jeopardize the property of the landed aristocracy. “In England,” he observed, “if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure.” Land would be redistributed to the landless, he cautioned. Without the rich exercising monopoly privileges over the commons, the masses would be less dependent on elites like them.

Is the Democratic Party a vehicle for radical change?

Los Angeles, CA - By this fall, the two major political parties in the United States will have spent around $10bn this election cycle to persuade an increasingly sceptical US public that there is more than just a stylistic difference between a Republican and a Democrat. Naturally, this campaign will focus primarily on the superficial (is Mitt Romney too weird to be president? Is Barack Obama too cool? And who loves America/Israel more?), as maintaining the facade of electoral choice requires obscuring the broad areas of bipartisan agreement: bailouts for the rich, prisons for the poor, and drone strikes for the poor and foreign.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera.

That city edge

An unnamed NBA executive commenting on Moe Harkless, a player just drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers:

"He's a good kid. And he's one of those guys where, even though he's from New York City, he doesn't have that city edge to him. He's really polished."

And very articulate.

(via NBA.com)

The Santa-ization of MLK's legacy

By Matt Stoller and Charles Davis

“The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around.”

– Martin Luther King’s final speech, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop

In the first episode of BrandX, Russell Brand talked about meeting the Dalai Lama. Why did we choose him as the subject for our first show? Because the Dalai Lama’s preaching of peace, anti-consumerism, spirituality and nonviolence is radical, a stark contrast to the message of war and consumption one usually hears on television.

In the writer’s room, as we were talking about who the Dalai Lama is, we hit upon a question that none of us could answer: who is the American Dalai Lama? And we realized, there isn’t one. The last great spiritual figure in American history was Martin Luther King Jr.

Today, though, King has been turned into a Santa Clause figure. There’s a holiday commemorating his life and works and his likeness appears in ads for Apple Computer, Alcatel, and McDonald’s. King’s legacy, if commercial interests had their way, would be the nonthreatening “Think Different” campaign, an encouragement to purchase luxury electronic goods made by exploited foreign workers.

Where's Waldo?

Blink and you'll miss it. Don't blink.

 

Police brutality's so hot right now

The Boston Police Department has a union. This union has a newsletter. This newsletter is uproariously terrible, full of diatribes against liberals and multiculturalism that would feel right at home in an AM radio show in 1993. Interestingly enough, it also includes advertisements from those corporations seeking to curry favor with their enforcers, which also functions as a useful list of corporations whose office windows a liberal multiculturalist might -- wink-wink -- want to a throw a brick through.

Here, for instance, is Converse praising the police state with an ad featuring, curiously, the sort of insufferable hipster whose skull the uniformed dipshits producing the newsletter would probably kick the shit out of if they saw him at an Occupy protest:

If you hate yourself and want to extend that hate to the world around you, check out the rest of the issue (the final stab to the gut: it's a PDF).

Along the way I had to sell my soul

Don't let the '.org' fool you

Apparently people are catching on to the fact that the Nick Kristof-approved Change.org may not be as do-goodery and progressive as its do-goodery name might suggest. As Ryan Grim reports, the for-profit petitions-and-political-consulting company recently took a lot of heat for taking cash from corporate education reform groups associated with Michelle Rhee, a contract it ultimately dumped for incoherent reasons.

Indeed, a public statement from the company only rationalizes the initial decision to take money from a corporate front group, saying it was made in keeping with the its "open, democratic philosophy." The only explanation of the move to reject the cash is that users complained. Privately, "Change.org leaders" told Grim:

"the outrage resulted from a misunderstanding of the company's goal, which is not to spread American-style progressive values around the globe, but rather to empower as many people as possible under the theory that the world will be better as a result. By not embracing American progressivism, the company said it hopes to make its platform more welcoming to people around the globe who might see such an association as imperialist or anti-Muslim."

This is great, as in explaining a move designed to appease American progressives Change.org is suggesting that associating one's self with "American progressivism" could plausibly be seen as "imperalist or anti-Muslim," which -- though they presumably didn't meant it that way -- has the stingingly unfortunate distinction of being true, as least as far is it concerns the dominant, Kill List-embracing variety. The problem with a company like Change.org implying this, however, is that even as it bizarrely suggests taking corporate cash is something of an anti-imperialist act, it's taking money from the campaign to reelect the world's leading imperialist: Barack Obama, a guy who has murdered innocent Muslims from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia.

So far Change.org has hosted more than 40 petitions from "Obama for America," garnering support from more than 800,000 of its users, including founder and CEO Ben Rattray. Back in the fall of 2010, when I worked there, Rattray was even telling employees he thought his site could be instrumental in Obama's reelection, maybe even garnering him an addition million votes (a bit of hubris that perhaps explains why I was told to quit writing so much about Bradley Manning and to tone down criticisms of the president).

Personally? I don't think an online petition welcoming Joe Biden back to the campaign trail, because "[n]o one energizes a crowd quite like he does," will have much of an impact on anything, which is a problem with a lot of the petitions the company chose to exclusively focus its resources on when it fired all of its writers. But if Change.org doesn't want to be seen as either imperialistic or as an online home for corporate front groups, it should go ahead and kill two drones with one stone: drop the Obama contract.

Not what you think

The BBC:

"It's just full of accounts of sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks, non-procreative sex, and finishes with an account of what he considers homosexual behaviour, and it was fascinating."

Another war criminal cashes in

One could be forgiven for thinking there's anything honorable or honest about Colin Powell. For more than two decades now the Washington media has portrayed the former Secretary of State as something of a real life action hero, a reluctant warrior whose greatest fault – should they deign to mention any – was just being too darn loyal to a guy named George and his buddy Dick. What you might have missed is that Powell is a war criminal in his own right, one who in more than four decades of “public service” helped kill people from Vietnam to Panama to Iraq who never posed a threat to America. But don't just take some anti-war activists' word for it: Powell will proudly tell you as much, so long as he can make a buck from doing it in a book.

Read the rest at Common Dreams.

This land is my land

Leave it to an Israeli politician, the country's powerful Interior minister in this case, to make the oft-denied parallel between Jewish supremacy in Israel and white supremacy in South Africa as explicit as possible:

[O]n Sunday, Israeli daily Maariv published an interview with Interior Minister Eli Yishai, in which he stated that most of the "Muslims that arrive here do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man."

"I will continue the struggle until the end of my term, with no compromises," Yishai continued, stating that he would use "all the tools to expel the foreigners, until not one infiltrator remains." 

Racism exists everywhere, as your liberal Zionist friend has probably already reminded you. The difference is that in the case of Israeli racism, every U.S. politician of national importance (or who wishes to be important some day) pledges their support for it. When the likes of Nancy Pelosi speak fondly of a "Jewish democratic state," they are speaking fondly of a state that values perceived tribal identity -- and supremacy -- over true democracy for all of its inhabitants.

My tip to Israeli pols, though: if you want to continue your white settler project in the Middle East, you're going to want to quit drawing attention to the fact that Israel is a white settler project in the Middle East. American politicians are fine with supporting racism and colonialism, obviously, but the more liberal-minded prefer that fact to be obscured.

Obama expands the war on Iran

In May 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported:

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

In June 2012, the New York Times reported:

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

It's a damn good thing the super-sophisticated doctrine of American exceptionalism holds that it's okay for us to do things -- like use and stockpile nuclear weapons -- denied nations with smaller militaries, otherwise someone might well accuse the Obama administration of rank hypocrisy.

Tú sabes

Nicaragua's 'revolutionary' war on drugs

Rivas, Nicaragua - Ravished by violent drug trafficking organisations flush with prohibition profits, Central America is now one of the deadliest places on Earth, with Honduras experiencing even more murders per capita than Iraq. That's led some politicians to start talking about something they never would have considered just a decade ago, at least publicly: breaking with the militarised, literal war on drugs favoured by the United States in favour of decriminalisation - and perhaps even outright legalisation. But contrary to what one might assume, it's not the "anti-American" leftists leading the charge, but the reliably pro-American heads of the region's center-right governments.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera.

Rules for reformists

With the 2012 U.S. presidential election coming up, here are some helpful rules for discussion that I have gleaned from liberals online:

1. Don't criticize Barack Obama over anything that's happening in America, because it turns out all real domestic power lies in the hands of the House of Representatives, not the president.
2. Don't criticize Barack Obama's foreign policy because that will only depress his base and help Mitt Romney, who would probably be just as belligerent (unless you believe the Democratic Party). And my god, have you seen Romney's domestic policies (editor's note: obviously, ignore point #1 when speaking of Republicans)?
3. Don't criticize Barack Obama.

Hope this helps clear things up. Now get out there and start bashing the GOP while ignoring your own complicity in a system fueled by mass murder and incarceration!

Dana Rohrabacher: Lying now or then?

Back in 2002, California Republican Dana Rohrabacher was an outspoken advocate of invading Iraq, the sort that claimed it was improper to even label the impending invasion a "war" because it was really more of a liberation, one for which the Iraqi people would be so grateful they'd be "dancing in the streets waving American flags just as the people of Afghanistan still are grateful to us for freeing them." When that gratitude predictably failed to materialize -- it's hard to really let loose and celebrate when you're busy making funeral arrangements for family members liberated from their corporeal existence -- Rohrabacher, rather than engage in any sort of self-reflection, labeled Iraqis ungrateful and famously demanded they foot the bill for the destruction of their country.

Nowadays, Rohrabacher is busy revising his pre-war stance in an effort to make him look less like a dishonest warmonger. On Twitter, he confesses that he never really believed all that malarkey about weapons of mass destruction and existential threats to America's consumerist way of life. Not at all! His support for a war that directly killed upwards of 150,000 Iraqi civilians was all about Freedom, he says:

And, in case that wasn't clear enough:

Except, gosh -- and this is the kicker -- he didn't let the American people in on his little secret back before the war started. When it mattered. Here is Rohrabacher on the floor of the House of Representatives back in October 2002:

We're not declaring war on Iraq. We are declaring that Saddam Hussein must go. And Saddam Hussein must go for the sake of the people of Iraq and for the sake of the safety of our people. And let me note this, rebuilding Iraq will be much easier than building Afghanistan. Iraq has enormous resources that have been channeled away by Saddam Hussein to develop chemical and biological weapons and to develop nuclear weapons. Those billions of dollars can be put to use to build a better Iraq. And the people will applaud us for helping them with that end. No, this is much easier than the job in Afghanistan. Yet we have the naysayers among us who would lead us in the other direction.

So the question is, congressman: Were you lying then or are you lying now?

Update: The congressman answers:

Translation: I don't deny that I lied before Congress and the American public in a major floor speech on the eve of a decision to go to war. But other times I didn't!

Killing by remote control

Under George W. Bush, it was an Outrage! that the U.S. government was indefinitely imprisoning poor, innocent foreigners without so much as charging them with a crime. Under Barack Obama, killing poor, innocent foreigners without so much as charging them with a crime is now a mark of a Successful Foreign Policy, showing the president has the cojones to authorize mass murder based on an international stop and drone strike policy of profiling.

For the better part of four kind of depressing months, I returned to my old imperial stomping grounds in Washington, DC, to help research and write a book with Code Pink's Medea Benjamin on this new form of remote-controlled war, which has dramatically expanded under the Nobel-laureate-in-chief, killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia (turns out precision isn't such a grand thing when you have no idea who precisely you're targeting). As Medea and I show, drones are not the revolutionary, life-saving tools they have been sold as to the American public, but merely the latest evolution of inherently indiscriminate air warfare, one that threatens to make war more sanitary for television audiences but no less bloody for the faultless men, women and children who always bear the brunt of state-sanctioned violence.

Buy it or find a torrent or something.

The world's gone bad (not meaning good)

Fool me once

Angry Black Lady, the would-be MSNBC contributor who currently blogs for the extremely credible website The Raw Story -- after a career as a lawyer specializing in business and foreclosure litigation on behalf of underprivileged clients like J.P. Morgan Chase and Lloyd's of London -- writing back in March 2011 on the treatment of accused whistle-blower Bradley Manning:

I’m going to wait for some facts, if you don’t mind. And don’t sit here and snark at me about how I’m uncomfortable with the word torture. If it turns out Manning is being tortured, then I’ll happily take up that cause. But thus far, the reporting has been shoddy and bullshit and an appeal to emotion. There is no evidence that Manning’s treatment is torture . . . . Again, there is no righteousness in your position because you don’t know SHIT. If it turns out you’re not being grifted, then I’ll owe you an apology. But for now fuck off and take your self-righteousness back to the Lake where you belong. Leave the critical thinking to those of us who have the capability.

What's happened since then? Well, in April 2011 more than 250 legal experts, including Harvard University's Lawrence Tribe, "considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on constitutional law," signed a letter that called Manning's detention both "degrading and inhumane," as well as "illegal and immoral." That detention entailed Manning spending 23-hours-a-day in solitary confinement, a technique that Craig Haney of the University of California, Santa Cruz, notes has "been used to torture prisoners of war."

Meanwhile, the United Nations' special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, writes in a report released March 2012 after a 14-month investigation that:

"[I]mposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence."

In addition, Mendez noted:

"[S]olitary confinement is a harsh measure which may cause serious psychological and physiological adverse effects on individuals regardless of their specific conditions." Moreover, "[d]epending on the specific reason for its application, conditions, length, effects and other circumstances, solitary confinement can amount to a breach of article seven of the international covenant on civil and political rights, and to an act defined in article one or article 16 of the convention against torture."

Mendez has called for a ban on all solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days, noting that the United States is one of the most frequent employers of the technique, using it against at least 20,000 of the country's more than 2.3 million prisoners every day. Manning's time in solitary confinement, for reference, was more than nine months.

Clearly, those concerned about Manning's treatment back in March 2011, be they lawyers or activists or concerned citizens of the world, were not "being grifted," in the words of an executive director of a Political Action Committee. Prolonged solitary confinement is just as much torture as water boarding, destroying a person's sense of self worth and, in some cases, their mind. Were George W. Bush still president it's doubtful liberals would invest so much time in denying that in favor of attacks on the alleged whistle-blower.

But back to ABL. Now, a year after some privileged fool had the nerve to bring up past things she has asserted:

Funny how that works. After initially feigning concern about evils like torture or indefinite detention, ABL then proceeds to denying that there's any reason to be concerned about Barack Obama's role in perpetuating them. Then, after declaring that there's nothing to see here, folks, move along, she then later adopts a pose of disinterested superiority when confronted with inconvenient facts, like a federal judge ruling that American activists did in fact have legitimate fears they could be imprisoned forever under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed by Obama or the UN special rapporteur on torture declaring that Manning's extended time in solitary confinement likely violated international conventions against torture.

At other times, she just decides to ignore past expressions of concern in favor of full-throated support for whatever its Obama is doing. For instance, when Zaid Jilani, at the time with that bastion anti-Obama hackery the Center for American Progress, argued ABL ignores Obama's bombing of poor brown people all because she studiously ignores Obama's bombing of poor brown people – and mocks as unserious, privileged “emoprogs” those – she responded, hurt, that, “Of course I don’t favor bombing brown people.” It's just that not bombing poor brown people must be “balanced against all else that a president must accomplish before an idea becomes reality.” You know what's coming. About six months later, ABL published a post by a guest blogger accusing New York Times reporter Charlie Savage – author of the 2007 book, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency & the Subversion of American Democracy – of carrying out a “partisan hit job on President Obama.” His offense: suggesting Obama's unilateral decision to bomb Libya was at odds with a campaign-trail assertion that he would not bomb a country that did not pose an immediate threat without first consulting Congress.

Not fair! Savage “omits . . . the part that narrowly ties [the question posted to Obama] to the circumstances of a preemptive war to stop alleged WMD production where the U.S. is under no imminent threat.” But Libya wasn't even accused of WMD production is the no-really, not-joking objection. And anyway, “the theory of executive power that Savage is holding Obama up against is a discredited libertarian notion of weak executive power shared by Ron Paul and Glenn Greenwald views which have no support in constitutional law jurisprudence." And that reveals ABL and her cadre's perhaps favorite debate technique: when not mocking anyone who objects to Our President's unilateral wars or assassinations as blinded by privilege -- it takes a former lawyer for J.P. Morgan to spot it -- she invariably accuses those who think we should still talk about things like war and peace when a Democrat's in the White House of being little more than Ron Paul or Glenn Greenwald fanboys, just as some conservatives seek to tie any concerns about income inequality to Vladamir Lenin; it's easier to attack a flawed human being than an idea. It doesn't matter if you always objected to extrajudicial executions or unjust wars of aggression, it matters if you object to them under Obama. Because you know who else objects to things Obama does? Racists.

Not content just publishing pro-unilateral war diatribes, ABL -- when not claiming offense after someone points it out -- regularly makes her disregard for foreign life explicit on Twitter, with cute little posts like this:

I don't know about you, but I'm sure glad ABL's career representing some of the largest banks and insurers in the world has afforded her the privilege to contribute to the public discourse by way of opining all day on Twitter. Finally we have a corporate lawyer willing to stand up for power and call out the truly privileged: those who think the existence of the Republican Party does not detract from the fact that killing poor foreigners with Hellfire missiles and cluster bombs is wrong.

Update: The original version of this piece said the post on Charlie Savage was "by ABL," because that's what it says. On Twitter, she says she merely published it.