Bin Laden raid not one in milllion after all

In remarks reported by the U.S. government's official news network, Voice of America, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- like every other Obama administration official this election season -- recounts with pride that glorious spring day when, flowers blooming and birds chirping, a team of Navy SEALs found what they admit was an unarmed Osama bin Laden and shot him dead.

While the rah-rah, Obama-got-Osama! stuff is passé and unremarkable at this point, what's noteworthy is Clinton's boast in her speech that the bin Laden raid was not out of the ordinary at all. It wasn't a one-off, spectacularly exceptional raid undertaken because the target was the world's most wanted terrorist, she says. Gosh no. America does this sort of stuff all the time!

"This may sound really exotic and scary to you all, but we've probably done something similar to this - helicopter in, take the target, look for who you're after, and get out of there - we have probably done it now 1,000 times."

Indeed, the U.S. military has terrorized the people of Afghanistan for years now with night raids that, according to the occupying force's own statistics, have killed hundreds if not thousands of innocent civilians. Being poor brown people, though, the dead don't have names, their passing not trumpeted by every Democratic strategist within shouting distance of a microphone.

Life is so unimportant to self-styled liberal humanitarians that it doesn't even factor into their ostensibly all-encompassing contingency planning, as Voice of America notes:

Even with that experience on the ground, Clinton said President Barack Obama's advisors worked through every contingency they could think of in assessing the bin Laden raid: What if something went wrong with the helicopters, like in the failed effort to rescue hostages in Iran in 1980? When was the next moonless night? What would Pakistan do?

Conspicuously not asked: What if the raid ends up killing innocent bystanders? What if it was a case of mistaken identity and Navy SEALs ended up massacring an innocent family? What if, in their zeal to find and kill bin Laden by faking a vaccination a program in effort to track him down by way of DNA, the U.S. government triggered a polio outbreak in Pakistan?

That's not the only conspicuous absence, though. Check out this description of the raid and see if you can see what's missing:

As the raid progressed, a helicopter damaged its tail section on a wall of the bin Laden compound, so another chopper was sent in from Afghanistan. SEALs moved women and children from the house to shield them from an explosion set off to destroy the damaged helicopter while other SEALs brought out what they hoped was bin Laden's body. "All of this is happening - the body is going out, the women and children are coming in, the reserve helicopter is on its way, but it's not there yet," Clinton says. "There was a lot of breath-holding." 

Somehow Osama bin Laden went from being Osama bin Laden to being a "body," yet in a speech dedicated solely to celebrating his killing, how he was actually killed goes unmentioned. Kind of weird -- and it kind of makes you wonder: Maybe even the likes of Clinton feel a tinge of shame about an execution-style killing of an unarmed man, no matter how nasty of a man he might have been. Or, perhaps, they just fear bragging about those particulars might remind people that the original tale of a cowardly, trembling Osama hiding behind one of his wives was a lie.

Either way, it's probably best to keep the story ambiguous.

Citizen Radio interview

Did I ever link to this? Yeah, I don't think I did. Anyway, if you're interested in hearing what I sound like with too much caffeine and not enough respect for the English language, check out this interview I did with Allison Kilkenny and Jamie Kilstein of Citizen Radio.

Topics discussed include: that time last December that I rode an elevator with Rep. Luis Gutiérez on the way to a DCCC fundraiser and heard him joke that he was in fact "the 1 percent" and that the Occupy movement was just a "bunch of anarchists"; the relationship between Occupy DC and the Democratic Party; and how one can voice discontent with the status quo without voting -- and without just giving up.

Cheers.

Shahzad Akbar on (not) coming to America

Update: The State Department has finally granted Akbar a visa. Check out his statement.

Shahzad Akbar is a lawyer in Pakistan who represents some of the many civilian victims of the Obama administration's drone war in his country. Later this month, he is scheduled to speak at a conference in Washington on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to wage war and, in the words of State Department lawyer Harold Koh, deliver habeas-free "justice" to America's perceived enemies. However, in what, gosh, has to be a coincidence, Akbar has been denied the visa he needs to enter the Greatest Force for Freedom in Human History.

Last week, I asked Akbar what that says about President Obama's commitment to peace and freedom. What follows is a copy of the exchange, edited for clarity:

Do you have any evidence that your visa is being denied because of your views -- e.g. contacts at the embassy who may have told you that, others who have gone through the same experience -- or is that just your assumption? Are such delays or non-responses atypical?

I applied for this visa about 14 months ago on invitation of Columbia University and at that time, the dean of the law school checked with his contact at the State Department and was informed that it wasn't the State Department which is holding my visa but a 'certain agency' (I assumed CIA) which I seem to have annoyed. 

This time I reached out to US Deputy Ambassador Richard Hoagland saying that I believe that the US has blacklisted me, preventing me from obtaining a US visa, which I have not been given despite the passing of a year. I got a reply from the embassy saying that my visa is still under 'administrative process'. It was further added at a later stage that it's Homeland Security which is holding my visa and the State Department has no role in its delay/denial.

It is also interesting to note that my last visa to US was official visa which was given to me within 3 working days of applying.

Before my drone litigation, I had good interaction with the US Embassy political section and many would interact with me to discuss various legal and political issues, but after my drone litigation and criticism of the CIA I became 'persona non grata'.

In my personal opinion, in the US when it comes to matters outside the US, the security establishment i.e CIA and related agencies have unfettered discretion without any check. 

If it's true your visa is being denied because of your outspokenness on the drone war, what does that suggest about White House claims that remarkably few civilians have been killed? What does it say about the Obama administration's commitment to transparency and open debate?

It says simply one thing: that the White House has become hostage to the CIA's covert wars and unfettered discretions. Perhaps President Obama is naive to believe that no civilians are being killed in drone attacks, but he is too smart for that. I believe he is lying to American people. He has lost the sense of reality in his efforts to bring US troops home and has forgotten that the people he is killing through the robotic warfare are human beings too and they have rights as well, like due process and the right to life. Ironically, this whole exercise is not even making America safer as more people around the world now hate America for its drone attacks and places like Guantanamo and Bagram. 

What, exactly, have you uncovered with respect to the drone war and in what ways does it challenge the official Washington narrative? 

The first Obama strike was initially reported to have killed a high-value target. Our efforts and work have unearthed that the people killed were the family of Fahim Qureshi, a 15-year-old pre-engineering student who got injured himself, losing one eye as well. He also lost his Uncle Khalil who was in wheel chair for many years. Fahim also lost his 12-year-old cousin, Imran Khan. These people are here ready to face any allegation from United States, asking if they are terrorists then the US should bring evidence against them. They are waiting for justice for wrong done to them. There are many other cases where we are challenging the US narrative of killing high-value targets and this is what annoys the US about us.

The purpose of my visit to the US is to let the American people know what their government is doing in this part of the world and why people have strong reservations about America. My visit is in the context of Americans' right to know, which is being denied. Obama wants that Americans should only listen and believe what he tells them -- this, I must add, is the worst type of tyranny ever imposed by an elected President of the United States, which used to be an emblem of freedom of speech.

The conservatism of Rachel Maddow

Once upon a time - say, three years ago - your average Democrat appeared to care about issues of war and peace. When the man dropping the bombs spoke with an affected Texas twang, the moral and fiscal costs of empire were the subject of numerous protests and earnest panel discussions, the issue not just a banal matter of policy upon which reasonable people could disagree, but a matter of the nation's very soul.

Then the guy in the White House changed.

Now, if the Democratic rank and file haven't necessarily learned to love the bomb - though many certainly have - they have at least learned to stop worrying about it. Barack Obama may have dramatically expanded the war in Afghanistan, launched twice as many drone strikes in Pakistan as his predecessor and dropped women-and-children killing cluster bombs in Yemen, but peruse a liberal magazine or blog and you're more likely to find a strongly worded denunciation of Rush Limbaugh than the president. War isn't over, but one could be forgiven for thinking that it is.

Given the lamentable state of liberal affairs, Drift, a new book from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, is refreshing. Most left-of-centre pundits long ago relegated the issue of killing poor foreigners in unjustifiable wars of aggression to the status of a niche concern, somewhere between Mitt Romney's family dog and the search results for "Santorum" in terms of national importance. So in that sense, it's nice to see a prominent progressive at least trying to grapple with the evils of militarism and rise of the US empire. It's just a shame the book isn't very good.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera.

What DC taught me about journalism

I thought I had done good. As a 22-year-old reporter just out of college, I had just gotten the then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Jay Rockefeller, to admit right into my microphone that while he couldn’t deny the Bush administration was potentially funding covert – and illicit – acts of war against Iran, he wasn’t prepared to do a damn thing about it.

Weeks earlier, in March 2007, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh had reported in The New Yorker that U.S. intelligence officials were telling him that President George W. Bush had authorized support for a lovely little Pakistani terrorist organization called “Jundullah,” or Army of God, to wage a low-level war against the Islamic Republic, from bombing police cadets to assassinating high-ranking military officials. ABC News reported the same thing a month later, noting that U.S. officials said the “the relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or ‘finding’ as well as congressional oversight,” reminiscent of how the Reagan administration had used proxies “to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s.”

Read the rest at Salon.com.

Wells Fargo's ties to the prison industry

Wells Fargo is one of the top five largest banks in America, a fact that on its own is damning enough, basic human decency not exactly being conducive to success in the financial industry. Despite, or rather because of, its role as one of the leading sub-prime mortgage lenders prior to the 2008 crash in the housing market, the bank was handed $37 billion from the U.S. government, a transfer of wealth from the foreclosed upon have-nots to the haves doing the foreclosing – people like chairman and CEO John Stumpf, whose compensation actually rose after his company’s de facto bankruptcy to a cool $18 million last year.

As Wells Fargo has grown over the years, using its bailout funds to gobble up rival Wachovia and expand to the East Coast, so has the U.S. prison population. By 2008, one in 100 American adults were either in jail or in prison – and one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34, many simply for non-violent offenses, justice not so much blind as bigoted. Overall, more than 2.3 million people are currently behind bars, up 50 percent in the last 15 years, the land of the free now accounting for a full quarter of the world’s prisoners.

These developments are not unrelated.

Read the rest at Salon.com.

Bradley Manning exposed atrocities -- and liberalism

More than three years into the presidency of Barack Obama, it’s almost a cliché now to ask: What if George W. Bush did it? From dramatically escalating the war in Afghanistan to institutionalizing the practice of indefinite imprisonment, Obama has dashed hopes he would offer a change from the Bush’s national security policies – but he hasn’t faced a whole lot of resistance from liberals who once decried those policies as an affront to American values.

Like those on the right who now crow about fascism but spent the Bush years gleefully declaring left-wing celebrities “enemies of the state,” many of those on the liberal-left treat issues of war and civil liberties as useful merely for partisan purposes. When a Democrat’s in power those issues become inconvenient. And usually ignored.

Read the rest at Salon.com.

Why I should be a vegetarian (but I'm not)

I've been thinking a lot lately about eating my dog. Like, a lot a lot. Except, it's not that I really want to coat him in a layer of barbecue sauce and give him a good spin in a rotisserie oven, it's that I don't want to do that. And I can't think of any principled rationalization why.

Oh sure, I can point to the things I like about my dog that give me pause when I think about devouring him. Most days they even exceed the things I dislike about him, typically depending on the number of Nicaraguan children (“Nica Nuggets”) he himself has tried to devour that day. But besides his better-than-average cuddling ability, there's really not a whole lot that separates him from something I'd eat for dinner. Like a pig.

Living in Nicaragua really drives that point home. Visiting the island of Ometepe, for instance, you'll see giant 300-pound pigs in people's front yards just hanging out. Ya know, livin' the pig life. Sometimes they'll even be playing or cuddled up with the family dog. In El Gigante, a beach town in the southwest of the country, I recall seeing a litter of playful little piglets that I first mistook for puppies – you know, the equally intelligent and sociable little fellas we're supposed to go “awww, oh my god look at them, look at them!” over. But they weren't puppies, of course. They were future bacon.

I didn't eat pork for a week.

On the one rationalizing hand, you could argue that the living conditions of these piggies is much better here in Central America, so no sweat. Yeah, they're still slaughtered for food, but at least they get to live a portion of their lives outside of the confines of a cage. It sure as hell isn't like the massive corporate-agriculture facilities you'd find in the United States. So go ahead and eat that pork chop without guilt.

Except, not really. Yeah, the living conditions are better, but the result is the same: breakfast sausage. Up until the moment they die before their time, they can frolic and play, to a degree, but they still end up in people's stomachs. Their life before that is better, but the end result is the same.

And for what? We know we as human beings can live without eating meat. We know we don't need to eat one of the most clever creatures in nature to survive. But we do anyway. Because it tastes good.

Part of me says that's okay, that I'm just being over-sentimental. Look at the animal kingdom, the meat-loving part of my brain says: animals eat other animals all the time. Like, it's what they do. So that pulled-pork sandwich? It's no big deal, bro. Things die, we eat them. Hell, while visiting the otherwise cosmopolitan-ish city of León in northwest Nicaragua, I witnessed a dog gnawing on a horse's severed leg -- all three feet of it -- a site so revolting I couldn't help but laugh. So quit getting all weepy about the cycle of life, buddy, 'cause dude? You're weirding out the other customers.

At the same time, though, I feel bad about it. And when I read folks referring to sentient beings as little more than property – things that may be killed based on the whims of some dead crazy woman whose will stipulated that her cats die with her – I can't help but be horrified. If we're really the superior species we claim to be, and we know we can get by without slaughtering less sophisticated species, what the hell does that say about us that we keep on doing it?

And yet, ultimately my decisions are no different than the guy ordering the meat lovers' pizza from Domino's Pizza Hut. I have twinges of guilt, yeah, but I continue eating animals that, in different circumstances, I might put a leash on and dress up in cute little outfits. Why? Because they taste good. Because that's what I grew up doing. Because I'm too lazy to explore the alternatives. What does that make me? I'm not sure, but I know I'm not any better than the person doing the dirty work of leading these animals to slaughter. And when I look at my dog I know that, under different circumstances in a different culture, it could be him being being served alongside my mashed potatoes.

Subsidizing military rule in Egypt

I forgot to link to this last week, so in case you missed it check out my piece with Medea Benjamin on the Obama administration's decision to send another $1.5 billion to Egypt despite (because of?) ongoing human rights abuses being committed by the ruling military.

Legitimately purchase this book

"Those who feel that like lemmings they are being led over a cliff would be well-advised not to read this book," says Noam Chomsky. "They may discover that they are right."

That book is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, edited by Joshua Frank and Counterpunch's Jeffrey St. Clair, a compilation of essays on the Obama years just published by AK Press. Touching on everything from drone strikes to bailouts, the book includes a piece by me on the persecution of Bradley Manning. That's a hint that you should buy it.

Let's talk about sex (trafficking)

Tom Friedman is a buffoon, his buffoonery so apparent and well-documented I don't much see the point in getting annoyed at what he writes anymore. Trashing one of his columns is like panning the latest single from LMFAO (or their earlier iteration, The Black Eyed Peas) for being vapid, over-produced dreck: well yeah, no shit.

Nick Kristof, on the other hand – now that's a dude who, like a lover or a war criminal, knows how to hit all my anger buttons. Perhaps because he doesn't have a mustache and has never said “suck on this” while on national TV, Kristof enjoys an air of seriousness among serious liberals that Friedman lost somewhere around his 358th mixed metaphor. Being a New York Times columnist, he's no less an imperialist, obviously, but his imperialism is of the crusading white savior variety, which is in vogue these days among the Kony 2012-retweeting set.

Besides selling a savvier, hipper brand of American empire -- "shock and awe" giving way to "the responsibility to protect" -- Kristof is a master at making noble white liberals feel noble for feeling noble. Be it saving poor Africans or exploited sex workers or undereducated Americans or the uncomfortably (for a privileged white liberal) black-like "white underclass," Kristof knows how to couple the aw-the-poor-thing dramatizing with stock neoliberal, imperial policies, from standardized testing to bombing Libyans. Wrapping these policies up in heart-wrenching stories allows Kristof and his like-minded readers to feel morally enlightened for supporting them; we're doing something! That they don't achieve their stated ends -- peace and prosperity, a better educated populace -- is besides the point: they make Kristof and friends feel better. Superior.

This was certainly true of his latest column, "Where Pimps Peddle Their Goods" -- not a reference to the Times -- on the problem of white slavery human trafficking. The problem, as Kristof tells it, is that pimps are using websites like the Village Voice-owned Backpage.com to, well, peddle their "goods": legally underage women who have been coerced into sex work. His solution, as it were, is to have Backpage remove its sex ads altogether.

Now, Kristof freely admits that of those posting on the site, “many” – by which he presumably means “the vast majority“ – are consenting adults who, while one may disapprove of their lifestyle or lament the socio-political conditions one believes contributed to their line of work, are doing what they do as freely as one can in a state capitalist economy. But the small matter of not just inconveniencing but possibly jeopardizing the lives of these sex workers -- who, barred from posting online, may seek clients on the street -- is of no concern to Kristof. Like a kindergarten teacher or Israeli prime minister keen on collective punishment, he maintains the bad actions of a few justifies punishing the many.

Because Jane spoke out of turn there will be no recess today. Put your heads down on the desk and, god damn it Jimmy, quit running with the scissors or we'll call in the IDF and end this playtime shit once and for all.

While banning sex ads isn't the same as bombing Gaza, Krisof admits in his penultimate paragraph that it will be just as ineffective at achieving its stated goal (which may not, of course, be the real goal):

Let’s be honest: Backpage’s exit from prostitution advertising wouldn’t solve the problem, for smaller Web sites would take on some of the ads. But it would be a setback for pimps to lose a major online marketplace. When Craigslist stopped taking such ads in 2010, many did not migrate to new sites: online prostitution advertising plummeted by more than 50 percent, according to AIM Group.

Hey! Notice what he did there? First, Kristof begins his column by talking about forced human trafficking, which everyone can agree is a Very Bad Thing. Using that as his hook, he then advocates banning all sex ads on Backpage. Though he admits this won't "solve the problem" of human trafficking, he then points to statistics showing that after Craigslist got rid of its sex-for-money ads, "online prostitution advertising plummeted by more than 50 percent."

Putting aside the validity of that statistic, recall that in a piece about the need to address human trafficking Kristof is here bolstering his case for banning online sex ads from Backpage by pointing to a decline in said sex ads, not human trafficking. This is because there is not the slightest evidence that a decline those ads, if there in fact is one, has had the slightest impact on trafficking. Maybe, then, while trafficking is the public target of anti-trafficking campaigners, it is that icky matter of consenting adults engaging in consensual sex via the Internet that weirds people like Kristof out.

But who cares what the real motivation is or, worse yet, the result of the policies that are pushed? Like the Kristof-approved air war on Libya, which Amnesty International says killed “scores” of civilians, the crusade is more about the crusaders than those they are claiming to save. The impact of the policies doesn't matter so much as the spirit behind them. Kristof hasn't written about life liberated Libya, where blacks can't walk the streets without fear of murder or kidnapping, since September because the situation there is complicated. It doesn't lend itself to nice little morality tales, where you can do good by signing an online petition or deploying a few Predator drones.

Kristof meant well and he demonstrated his super-human levels of Concern with a couple 800-word, pro-war columns. And that's what matters.

Now, human trafficking is a problem, even if it's been overblown into the latest moral panic -- and by the time it hits the Times, it's indeed a certified moral panic. But it's not a problem that can be meaningfully addressed, much less solved, with feel-good measures and online advocacy; with a petition here, a letter-writing campaign there. Beware those suggesting it can: like the online petition sites, they probably just want your email address; like Nick Kristof, they probably just want your admiration.

'Foreclosing on the commons'

Check out my latest column for Al Jazeera, where I look to Peter Kropotkin for advise on addressing the US foreclosure crisis.

Obama doesn't bluff

In an exclusive interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, a journalist famed for his ability to fashion innuendo and hysterical falsehoods into a case for preemptive war, President Barack Obama reassured the Israeli government that when it comes to threatening military action against those irksome, annoyingly un-invaded Iranians, "As President of the United States, I don't bluff." He then put on a ten-gallon hat, hocked a loogie on the ground and whipped his dick out.

On what "all options" really means, the president said:

I think the Israeli people understand it, I think the American people understand it, and I think the Iranians understand it. It means a political component that involves isolating Iran; it means an economic component that involves unprecedented and crippling sanctions; it means a diplomatic component in which we have been able to strengthen the coalition that presents Iran with various options through the P-5 plus 1 and ensures that the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] is robust in evaluating Iran's military program.

As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, "U.S. intelligence agencies don't believe Iran is actively trying to build an atomic bomb," so it's not clear what "military program" the president believes there is to evaluate.

Moving on.

I think we in the United States instinctively sympathize with Israel, and I think political support for Israel is bipartisan and powerful.

The first part of that sentences is arguable; the second, not.

[O]ur assessment, which is shared by the Israelis, is that Iran does not yet have a nuclear weapon and is not yet in a position to obtain a nuclear weapon without us having a pretty long lead time in which we will know that they are making that attempt.

While the bit about a "long lead time" is appreciated, this is not true. The official assessment from the US intelligence community, with which the president is presumably familiar, is that Iran is not only "not yet" in possession of a nuclear weapon, but that in the words of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, they haven't even chose to build a nuke and are instead but "keeping themselves in a position to make that decision," which is government-speak for "we've got nothing."

[O]ur argument is going to be that it is important for us to see if we can solve this thing permanently, as opposed to temporarily. And the only way, historically, that a country has ultimately decided not to get nuclear weapons without constant military intervention has been when they themselves take [nuclear weapons] off the table.

Got it. The president doesn't listen to his own intelligence officials. But he's not Bush! No, he's literally not George W. Bush. He's Barack Obama, silly.

And as Obama-not-Bush hastens to point out, if you're the leader of an officially racist state seeking to annex evermore of your neighbor's land, he's the best friend you've got:

When you look at what I've done with respect to security for Israel, from joint training and joint exercises that outstrip anything that's been done in the past, to helping finance and construct the Iron Dome program to make sure that Israeli families are less vulnerable to missile strikes, to ensuring that Israel maintains its qualitative military edge, to fighting back against delegitimization of Israel, whether at the [UN] Human Rights Council, or in front of the UN General Assembly, or during the Goldstone Report, or after the flare-up involving the flotilla -- the truth of the matter is that the relationship has functioned very well.

There's no disputing that. Back to Iran:

Now, what we've seen, what we've heard directly from them over the last couple of weeks is that nuclear weapons are sinful and un-Islamic. And those are formal speeches from the supreme leader and their foreign minister.

This is actually the only time I've seen a US politician acknowledge the official statements from Iranian leaders denouncing nuclear weapons as counter to their Islamic values. So, credit where it's due, I guess: good for him.

Unfortunately, Obama appears confused but moments later when he appears to suggest an Iranian nuclear weapon is what would set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East:

If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, I won't name the countries, but there are probably four or five countries in the Middle East who say, "We are going to start a program, and we will have nuclear weapons."

Weird, because if Israel already has nuclear weapons -- hundreds of them, in fact -- and the US president and his Israeli counterpart are going around claiming that now Iran wants them too, it would follow that it was Israel's construction of a nuclear weapon that set off a Middle East arms race, not Iran, no? But then, Obama refuses to even acknowledge that Israel is the one country in the region that hasn't signed on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has in fact covertly developed nuclear weapons, so one wouldn't expect him to make that point in an interview with a former (and proud) Israeli prison guard.

Having failed to make that obvious point, the president returns to a favorite pastime: waving his dick at the American electorate and reminding them he issued the orders to kill that unarmed, apparently surrendering motherfucker, Osama:

I think it's fair to say that the last three years, I've shown myself pretty clearly willing, when I believe it is in the core national interest of the United States, to direct military actions, even when they entail enormous risks. And obviously, the bin Laden operation . . . .

Those "enormous risks," the president did not hasten to add, are typically posed to poor foreigners, not America's patriotic, Mountain Dew-toasting drone operators in Nevada. But whatevs. Boom! Pow! This president kicks ass and he's pretty clearly willing to remind you of it.

Finally, an exchange between Obama and his prison guard over his unflinching support apartheid:

Why is it that despite me never failing to support Israel on every single problem that they've had over the last three years, that there are still questions about that?

GOLDBERG: That's a good way to phrase it.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: And my answer is: there is no good reason to doubt me on these issues.

No, there isn't. But come November 2012, millions of liberals will do it anyway.

Conflict and nonviolence are not mutually exclusive

Kevin Zeese, the would-be Chairman Mao of the Freedom Plaza Occupy camp in Washington, DC, has never found it within himself to say a nice word about the sister Occupy camp at McPherson Square. In listserv emails and general assembly rants, he and the other Old Left types who founded the Freedom Plaza camp (and grew bitter when it was superseded by their more vibrant, inclusive rivals) have repeatedly characterized their McPherson brethren as a bunch of naive, violent drug abusers.

Indeed, after I wrote about the assisted-living facility, more-nonviolent-than-thou vibe I picked up on after attending a general assembly at Freedom Plaza, Zeese sent me a note that, charitably, displayed a lack of self-awareness, countering my characterization of his group as generally smug and greying with -- god damn it, really? -- a long list of complaints about McPherson Square. People are openly smoking non-state-approved drugs there, I was told, as if they weren't long before the Occupy movement came around. One occupier had even asked if the noble Zeese could help "bring order" to the camp.

In sum: The damn kids. Now if I were in charge . . .

There were of course problems at McPherson that I witnessed during the time I spent there, including the same annoying fuck-those-other-guys attitude I noticed at Freedom Plaza. There were mentally unstable stable people. There were sexual harassers. I even heard one homeless guy use a "mic check" to try and find crack cocaine. But these were problems that beset many Occupy camps, and many of them were pre-existing, having more to do with DC's massive problem of homelessness than the relative inexperience of the young McPherson occupiers. And yet as I saw time and again in messages that were forwarded me from the Freedom Plaza listserv and in comments made to the press, Zeese & Friends' were willing to disseminate the absolute worst rumors about the McPherson camp with seemingly little concern that they were feeding rather than fact-checking disinformation.

Zeese and has cadre of aging activists, too timid to engage in anything confrontational, preferring Jackson Brown concerts to activism, were likewise critical of each and every McPherson-embraced action during my time back in DC. The kids at McPherson -- or "McOccupy," if you're a smug asshole -- are after all doing something, and doing something always brings with it the possibility of alienation. Block rush hour traffic? Why, that K Street lobbyist you inconvenienced is now going to go out and club an African child out of spite. Occupy an abandoned homeless shelter? Dunno, looks like vigilantism to me. Anything that entails any sort of threat of confrontation, particularly with the law, is to be condemned; after all, the police officers pepper spraying and evicting Occupy camps across the U.S. are "part of the 99%." And with just the right mix of folk music and deference to illegitimate authority, guys, they could become class conscious.

Such is the advantage of inaction, of being a critic: when the only time you and your friends are in the news is because a provocateur had the cojones to do more than just sing kumbaya, it's easy to wallow in your own perceived greater commitment to non-violence. And when you conflate saying a naughty word to a cop with "violence," it's easy to see yourself as Gandhi's lovechild.

Why am I writing about this now? Because Zeese and his partner, Margaret Flowers, have an article up at Truthdig recounting results of their personal survey of Occupy camps nationwide in which they, true to form, denounce "violence" -- i.e., conflict with the authorities -- and imply "infiltrators" are to blame for all the Occupy actions that exceeded their comfort level, which is to say any with which you're familiar. As they write about their survey, which they had the time to conduct because, well, I'll let you think on that:

Finally, the issue of escalation of tactics to include property damage and conflict with police was brought up. The euphemism for this is “diversity of tactics.” In fact, there is great diversity within nonviolent tactics. This is really a debate between those who favor strategic nonviolence and those who favor property destruction and police conflict [ed. note: can the latter not be "strategic" as well?]. In 11 of 15 occupations, there were reports of verbal attacks on police and/or escalation of tactics from nonviolence to property destruction or violence. In one occupation, an individual took over the direct action working group and escalated the tactics used beyond what the group had agreed upon. In another Occupy, the General Assembly approved putting up a structure but agreed that if the police wanted it taken down the protesters would promptly do so to prove that it was temporary. After the structure was put up, a handful of people refused to take it down causing a 10 hour police conflict and undermining public support for the Occupy. In another occupation, because a minority of the demonstrators refused to adopt nonviolent strategies, a protest with the teachers union was canceled preventing a major opportunity to expand the movement. When it comes to the issue of violence versus property damage, it is particularly hard to tell whether the differences are political or instigated by infiltrators.

While the attempt to draw a clear distinction between "property damage and conflict with police" and "nonviolence" is humorously Hedgesian, the two bolded lines about the structure -- which occupiers at McPherson Square put up in order to host meetings during the winter -- are particularly curious and characteristically condescending. First, there is no evidence to suggest the standoff with police over the building in anyway "undermin[ed] public support for the Occupy [sic]." It made national news and, while some at the McPherson camp didn't support occupying the building, the overall feeling I got was that the police response, complete with helicopters and armored vehicles, illustrated to many who were ignorant how the state operates: with overwhelming, disproportionate force to any perceived challenges to its authority. Generally speaking, enjoying good relations with law enforcement is a sign one's movement is not seen as a threat to the status quo.

But Zeese and Flowers aren't fond of anything confrontational, and claiming concern for "public support" as a way of blocking any action that may garner anything more than public indifference is their modus operandi. Second, the "handful of people" they deride for defending the building were actually more than 30, who decided to do what they did after an impromptu general assembly in which no consensus was reached on how to respond to a police demand the building be torn down. But it's cute seeing the organizers of a smaller, rival camp attempt to speak with authority on the internal deliberations of occupiers who had rejected their Old Left, hierarchical approach to activism.

There's something to these recent rash of articles bashing the idea that a social movement ought to involve, gosh, "conflict" with the powers that be: They are almost all coming from old-school activists and commentators whose tactics have been employed for decades now and found wanting. The Occupy movement, by contrast, represents the rise of a new generation of activists who, while not without fault, are when at their best at lleast trying something new. That might anger some (though certainly not all) of the older, professional activists who feel their influence waning, but passivity in the face of injustice has been tried, folks. And it has failed.

Communism and anarchism

So I'm going through this phase where, as a means of procrastination, I'm reading a lot about the Soviet Union and the history of interaction between communists of the state and anarchist varieties, such as Emma Goldman's book, My Disillusionment in Russia, and Peter Kropotkin's vision of a possible anarcho-communist revolution, The Conquest of Bread.

You'll see that I used the word "possible." One of the key differences between anarchist and state communist thinkers is the dogma: the former, like Kropotkin, though willing to lay out a general outline of what they think must be done, aren't willing to dictate a One True Way to anarcho-topia, whereas your Lenins and Trotskys would argue that there must be a revolutionary party that must seize the existing institutions of state power and must institute a centrally administered dictatorship of the proletariat.

The more dogmatic, uniform nature of state communist thinkers is evident in their lexicography, anarcho-communists and other leftist dissenters are but "petit-bourgeois," to be purged the moment the Party has assumed power. Or maybe sooner. Trotsky, for example, calls anarchism "an utterly anti-revolutionary doctrine" due to its principled anti-statism, blaming it for the fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War:

To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing for the conquest of power.

Trotsky, of course, wrote those words while living in exile, having been purged from the Communist Party leadership by Stalin, who later had him assassinated. Live by the conquest of power, die by the conquest of power.

Que será, será

No matter who registered voters in the U.S. select to be the ruling class' spokesman for a four-year term, the coming presidential election will make very little difference to the lives of most Americans -- and non-Americans. Banks will continue to get bailed out, both overtly and by way of the tax code and other more covert means. Bombs will continue to be dropped on poor foreigners, be it in the name of humanitarianism or the fight against terrorism. The state will still serve the interests of the rich, and so on and so on.

That's not to say resistance is futile; that no matter what we do, the cause of building a better world is for naught and efforts to affect positive social change would best be abandoned. That's the caricature of the non-electoral stance one hears from partisans of the two major parties: that the rejection of voting for one of the two corporate-sponsored candidates in a presidential election is a byproduct of nihilism glossed up as radicalism; a tacit concession that, gosh, change is hard so we might as well say screw it and play some Xbox.

In fact, those of us who reject the electoral charade do so, not because we just don't give a damn, but because we see elections as a damaging distraction, a pressure-valve that enables the average American to feel they're Throwing the Bastards Out without risking any serious damage to the institutional bastardry that goes on in Washington.

But if who occupies the White House matters little in terms of tangible policy, does it follow that it matters not at all to the cause of furthering the social revolution that is necessary to build a more just, equitable world? In terms of awakening the public to the systemic fucking they are receiving and spurring people to direct action -- lobby Congress to keep my house? No, thanks, I think me and my friends just won't leave it -- does it matter which faction of the ruling elite calls dibs on the Oval Office?

Doug Henwood, of the old state-socialist left, thinks it does. He argues that reelecting Barack Obama will be good for left-wing activists as, when his second term does not usher in a new progressive era, no longer will Democrats be able to claim Republicans have a monopoly on corporatist, war-mongering evil. That, in turn, will lead more and more people to realize the systemic nature of the American problem.

Henwood's argument has a logic to it, but one can also imagine a different outcome: Should Obama be re-elected, he will continue to pursue the same establishment-friendly, banker-approved polices as he has in his first term. Rather than admit they had been fooled not once but twice, however, Democratic pundits and partisans will continue adhering to the tried and true formula of pointing to this month's latest crazy Republican, arguing -- as they always have -- that while their guy isn't perfect, at least he's not the other guy. Rinse. Repeat. Hillary 2016.

Were a Republican in office, however, there would be no confusion about who is on who's side, no clichéd anecdotes about FDR and the need to push Obama -- gently, lovingly -- to be the best Obama he can be. War, again, would be a bad thing; hell, their might even be an antiwar movement. Government collusion with major corporate polluters would spur nasty editorials in Mother Jones, as opposed to excuse-making lectures about Political Realities.

At the same time, though, were a Republican to win in November, it would likely revive the myth of a Democratic savior. While center-left opposition to war would, maybe, be a Thing again, it would as we saw with opposition to the Iraq war be a thing used to elect more and better Democrats. Soon enough, another Obama-type figure would be found to re-brand the nominally left-leaning establishment political faction and, god damn it, we'd back to where we started all over again.

And that's why, friends, insofar as there is a debate over which party in power would be better for spawning a broad-based progressive social movement, it's kind of a silly one (yes, I've just wasted your time). A second term for Obama won't in and of itself awaken the public to the bipartisan, systemic nature of American plutocracy anymore than Bill Clinton's second term did. A Republican in office might awaken the partisan left's devotion to peace and freedom again, but only until the next Democrat is in power.

When it comes to affecting positive and systemic social change, it doesn't much matter who wields political power. Indeed, what matters is that we, the powerless, recognize that it's power -- not those who possess it at a given moment -- is the root of the problems we face. And that argument, I think, can be fairly easily made no matter whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat.

When Spanish isn't enough to sell a war

Check out my latest column for Al Jazeera, on Spanish-language broadcaster Univision's sudden shift to producing English-language war propaganda.

Quoted for truth

"You might have 100 people in your gang - we have 32,000 people in our gang. It's called the Metropolitan Police."

-- Chief Inspector Ian Kibblewhite, Enfield Police, England (BBC)

(via Lenin's Tomb)

'A Global Empire, Yet a "United States of Fear"'

In my latest piece for Inter Press Service, I review Tom Engelhardt's new collection of essays, United States of Fear, and opine on militarism in America.

Give it a read.

"Lawmakers, 'Experts' Spin Tales of Iranian Terror in Latin America"

Check out my latest piece for Inter Press Service on attempts by congressmen and career militarists posing as dispassionate experts to cast Iran's relations with Latin America as a "clear and present danger" to the United States.