JANUARY 10, 2012
The Status Quo of Torture
by TRUDY BOND, ROY EIDELSON, BRAD OLSON AND STEPHEN SOLDZ
As we commemorate the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Guantánamo Detention Center, several thousand miles away sits another United States detention facility, less well-known but with a history perhaps even more gruesome. Obscured throughout the decade-long “global war on terror,” the detention center at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan is where two detainees died in December 2002. Initial autopsies at the time ruled both deaths homicides, according to a 2,000-page confidential Army file obtained by the New York Times. Autopsies of the two dead detainees found severe trauma to both prisoners’ legs. The coroner for one of the dead noted, “I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus.”
In January 2009, to much fanfare, newly-elected President Barack Obama signed a directive authorizing the closing of Guantánamo Detention Center. But a month later the new administration discreetly told a federal judge that military detainees at Bagram had no habeas corpus rights to challenge their imprisonment. At the same time, the Pentagon was moving forward on plans to build a new prison in Bagram, renamed the “Detention Facility in Parwan” (DFIP). This facility was designed to accommodate 600 prisoners under normal conditions and as many as 1,100 during a “surge.”
Today, President Obama has abandoned his inaugural pledge to close Guantánamo and there are more than 3,000 detainees at Bagram — five times the number of prisoners when the president took office — with a scheduled expansion of the facility by the end of 2012 to house up to 5,500 detainees. One troubling constant across the developments at Bagram is the presence and involvement of psychologists at these facilities, which clearly violate international legal standards for the treatment of detainees. Among the military psychologists present during the early years of the Bagram prison were Colonel Morgan Banks, Captain Bryce Lefever, and Colonel Larry James, notable for their key roles in formulating American Psychological Association (APA) much-criticized ethics policy on psychologist-assisted interrogations.
According to Banks’ biographical statement, he “spent four months over the winter of 2001/2002 at Bagram Airfield.” More broadly, Banks provided technical, consultation, and interrogation support to all Army psychologists. He also assisted in establishing the Army’s first permanent SERE training program. As for Lefever’s biosketch, it notes that he also served at the detention center at Bagram Air Base. He “was deployed as the Joint Special Forces Task Force psychologist to Afghanistan in 2002, where he lectured to interrogators and was consulted on various interrogation techniques.”
The third military psychologist, James, was the Chief Psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantánamo when, according to his book, Fixing Hell, he flew to Afghanistan to transfer three juveniles who had been forcibly and arbitrarily detained at Bagram. James described these boys as “the most fragile . . . children [he] had ever met,” yet he oversaw their being loaded onto a cargo plane at Bagram Air Force Base, “bound [and] blindfolded,” for a flight that typically lasted over 20 hours. Others who appear to have been transferred from Bagram to Guantánamo that same day reported being chained around the waist, wrists, back and ankles and the intense pain of being unable to speak, see, hear, move, or even stretch or breathe properly. The boys were essentially kidnapped, and were returned home a year later, having never had access to legal counsel and having never been charged with a crime.
Public information about exactly what transpires at Bagram today is scarce. The BBC was allowed a rare, one-hour visit to the new Parwan/Bagram prison in 2010. The report noted that “Prisoners are kept in 56 cells, which the prisoners refer to as ‘cages’. The front of the cells are made of mesh, the ceiling is clear, and the other three walls are solid. Guards can see down into the cells from above.” These detainees were moved around in wheelchairs, wearing goggles and headphones to block sight and sound.
In 2011, Daphne Eviatar, an attorney for Human Rights First, interviewed 18 former detainees from the main facility in Parwan and was permitted to observe seven detainee hearings there. In her detailed report she noted:
After many years of completely denying detainees in Afghanistan the opportunity to defend themselves against arbitrary detention, the United States government has finally implemented a hearing process that allows detainees to hear the charges against them and to make a statement in their own defense. Although a significant improvement, these new hearings fall short of minimum standards of due process required by international law.” [Emphasis added.]
In a subsequent interview with CBS News, Eviatar stated:
[Parwan] is worse than Guantánamo because there are fewer rights…There was no evidence presented, there was no questioning of the government’s evidence, whether this person had done anything wrong, whether he deserved to be in prison. So that’s a real problem — you have a complete lack of due process.
And in 2010 the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed the existence of a separate, second detention facility at Parwan. Many former prisoners have referred to it as the Tor Jail, translated as “Black Jail.” Nine former prisoners interviewed separately by the BBC spoke of almost identical treatment there: distressingly cold cells, perpetual loud noise, constant light, and, violating any sense of privacy, camera surveillance. One former prisoner said American soldiers made him dance to music to obtain permission to use the toilet.
Today, there are clear indications that psychologists continue to be involved in the detention and interrogation of detainees at Parwan/Bagram. Such activities stand in direct contravention of APA policy based on a 2008 petition resolution. Approved through a member-led referendum, this resolution prohibits psychologists from working in settings where “persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights” (or if they are providing treatment for military personnel).
Significant evidence that psychologists are working at Bagram/Parwan in violation of APA policy comes in part from a symposium on “Operational Problems in Behavioral Sciences” sponsored by the United States Air Force Medical Service in August 2011. The first slide of the partially redacted powerpoint presentation on the “BSCT Mission” describes the role of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) as providing: “…psychological expertise and consultation in order to assist the command in conducting safe, legal, ethical, and effective detention facility operations, intelligence interrogations, and detainee debriefing operations” (OTSG/MEDCOM Policy Memo 09-053).
A later slide reveals that the current BSCTs at the Parwan Detention Facility are composed of a psychologist or forensic psychiatrist, who must be licensed for independent practice, and a “behavioral science technician.” Further confirming the presence of psychologists, a June 2010 newspaper article about Parwan by the military editor of the Fayettville Observer notes: “Air Force Maj. Colin Burchfield, 34, a clinical psychologist, observes the behavior of both detainees and guards on TV monitors.”
Disturbingly, and contrary to the APA’s 2008 referendum policy, one of the key documents still used to support the ongoing involvement of psychologists at the Parwan facility is an earlier 2005 report from the APA’s “Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security” (the PENS Report). The PENS Report, cited in the Operational Problems powerpoint presentation described above, endorsed psychologists’ engagement in detainee interrogations — despite evidence that psychologists were involved in abusive interrogations and practices that violate international law.
Six of the nine voting members of the PENS Task Force were on the payroll of the U.S. military and/or intelligence agencies. Five of these six served in chains of command that had been accused of the kinds of abuses that led to the creation of the Task Force, including the three psychologists linked to the early Bagram prison: Dr. Morgan Banks, Dr. Bryce Lefever, and Dr. Larry James. The PENS Task Force concluded that psychologists have an important role to play in keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective,” and the APA Board approved the PENS Report in a highly unusual emergency vote.
The APA’s claims that it stands strongly against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment are belied by the organization’s repeated failure to take assertive and meaningful action. There is no clearer example than the continuing participation of psychologists in detention and interrogation activities at the Parwan/Bagram prison — a site where international law itself is seemingly confined indefinitely to a small, dark cell.
But health professionals, human rights advocates, and intelligence professionals of conscience worldwide have refused to accept this status quo. One noteworthy and promising effort is an online petition campaign calling for the annulment of APA’s PENS Report. The initiative has been supported by many distinguished members of APA, as well as non-psychologists such as psychiatrists Robert Jay Lifton and bioethicist Dr. Steven Miles; scholar-activists such as Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky; attorneys who have represented Guantanamo detainees; eminent veterans of the intelligence community; and many other psychologists and human rights advocates. Please consider joining this call and signing the petition at www.ethicalpsychology.org/pens.
Trudy Bond is an independent psychologist, steering committe member of Psycholgoists for Social Responsibility, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. For questions, responses or media contact, please contact her at drtrudybond@gmail.com.
Roy Eidelson is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com.
Brad Olson is an assistant professor and co-director of the Community Psychology Ph.D. Program in downtown Chicago. He is President-Elect of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) and co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology.
Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He edits the Psyche, Science, and Society blog. Soldz is a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and served as a psychological consultant on several Guantánamo trials. Currently Soldz is Past-President of Psychologists for Social Responsibility [PsySR].
JANUARY 10, 2012
A House Divided?
by JOSEPH GROSSO
What is it about the even barely noticed presence of poverty that sends so much of American politics and culture into attack mode? Harsh treatment of the poor of course has a long history in the work houses, debtors’ prisons, and chimney-sweepers, as any reader of Blake, Dickens, Hugo, and Zola can recognize. Yet in the present-day one would be hard-pressed to find a society more intolerant than the present United States. By now the facts have been so rehashed as to become strangely easier to ignore: the highest rate of poverty in the Western world, highest child poverty, highest permanent poverty, highest income inequality, highest rate of incarceration, highest health-care costs, it can go on and on. On top of it all one will probably the only society where one will find more, or at least as many, protests against improving any of this as for; where else in the world are there pro-austerity marches?
It’s not as if the wealthy, as personified by Wall Street, have been behaving well. Last year Goldman Sachs paid $550 million to settle SEC charges that it withheld information from investors on a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) it sold that soon after was worthless. A federal judge this past November refused to endorse a similarly $285 million agreement that would have allowed Citigroup to avoid admitting any wrong doing when it marketed and sold a toxic CDO while taking a short position against it at the same time realizing a tidy $160 million for the bank while costing investors more than $700 million. Leaving finance and going back a couple of years and one finds pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer paying a record $2.3 billion and pleading guilty to a felony count for illegal marketing- all these fines a mere pittance next to these companies bottom lines.
What’s this corporate mischief next to welfare mothers and drunks on the public dole? It’s easy to see the persistence of poverty as a sort of insult to the American Dream in the mind of true believers. After all, what good is a class system in the land of opportunity? The excess riffraff that stand outside such nationalistic pride are easily detested.
Beyond such prideful chauvinism is an even darker scar that explains why the poor pay through the nose while the rich get off with pocket change. In What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank famously posited that the white middle and working classes of the heartland are diverted with ‘moral’ issues such as gay rights and abortion into supporting the right wing economics that ultimately destroys them. This could be traced to the 1970s coinciding with the rise of neoliberalism and religious fundamentalism in a time of economic stagflation.
Yet as Jefferson Cowie describes in Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, the 1970s were also a time a great labor unrest, the most unrest in fact since the mid-1940s. In 1970 alone over 2.4 million workers engaged in large-scale stoppages. The United Mine Workers and United Auto Workers saw significant insurgencies against stale leadership and for greater industrial democracy. The United Farm Workers still had life. For all his petty bigotry it shouldn’t be overlooked that Archie Bunker, the enduring symbol of 70s popular culture, was a union man who worked on a loading dock. Still the 1970s were also the only decade other than the 1930s when Americans ended up poorer than they began. Robert Reich in Aftershock traces the rise of the anti-tax movement to the early 1970s, not as a movement towards social conservatism but as simply a protest about paying taxes with incomes that had stagnated.
Nonagricultural workers earnings declined by about 13% with family income only staying level with wives entering the workforce.
It was also the decade of deindustrialization, inflation, and a fierce white backlash against busing and affirmative action (Archie Bunker aptly summed up what many white men were probably feeling when he yelled at his progressive, ‘meathead’ his son-in-law Mike: ‘Look at me. I know I have a lot going against me. I’m white, I’m protestant, I’m hardworking. Can’t you find one lousy amendment to protect me?!’). Crowie quotes Cleveland Robinson, one of the founders of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, explaining “The basic ingredient to successful affirmative action is full employment.” Otherwise “you will have both blacks and whites fight for the same jobs.” Needless to say, full employment was far off the agenda by decade’s end, leaving that very dynamic in the minds of many working class whites.
Of course since its inception the American working class has been divided. Going back to the 1850s conflict between Yankee (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) and immigrant Irish (Catholic) workers undermined early organizing efforts, a pattern that would emerge in subsequent generations. An important point to bear in mind is that for all the anti-Catholic hysteria of the ‘know-nothings’ the overall trend was towards both separation and assimilation. Mike Davis brilliantly described this in Prisoners of the American Dream:
The ingenuity of American Catholicism, already becoming apparent in the 1850s, was that it functioned as an apparatus for acculturating millions of Catholic immigrants to American liberal-capitalist society while simultaneously carving out its own sphere of sub-cultural hegemony…
Thus what developed, according to Davis, was ‘two corporatist subcultures along a religious divide’, leaving the working class as a whole fractured at the time of grave national crisis unable to form an independent party, certainly unable to form some kind of alliance with oppressed black slaves- an inability that would extend right through the New Deal, which also excluded African Americans. This would continue as successive waves of European immigrants followed the same dynamic: initial discrimination, eventually achieving the status of ‘whiteness’ while keeping separate largely conservative subcultures, thereby reinforcing both American capitalism and a splintered working class.
If a divided working class is one side of the coin, the other mutually reinforcing side has been a state that for the most part has been callous in addressing the needs of working poor. This too has a long history that continues right through the present. Violence was always part of the equation. American labor history is far bloodier than any other industrial nation whether it was striking workers and their families at Ludlow, the martyrs of Haymarket, or the striking workers killed at Pullman.
For all the ire liberals direct at the likes of Hoover and Reagan, the marginalizing of labor has been a bipartisan affair. Barack Obama has typically ignored the concerns of labor, a constituency that worked hard for his election, not even muttering a phrase like ‘living wage’ or voicing a peep for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make unionizing somewhat easier.
Historically divided and penned in by an indifferent and hostile state, a nasty strain of producerism has always been part of working class culture, a producerism that doesn’t spare the rich but whose main target has always been the poor and working poor, particularly when it lazily aligns itself to conservative interests and parties; the poor always being an easier target than the rich.
Traces of this can be found all the way in the Omaha Platform, which launched the Populist Party back in 1892. While the populists railed against war and trusts there was a resolution about ‘the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage earners’. It is not hard to see the same sentiment in the more recent rants against immigrants and the welfare state (i.e. big government): social Darwinism where only the few prosper in their gated communities and pent houses while the many are left to stew in bitterness and cynicism at their neighbors.
Given the roots of this it is hard to imagine much improvement in the short term. The political landscape is barren of any serious alternatives. Corporations have an even tighter grip on national elections and Obama has long discarded the opportunity early in his presidency to serious confront Wall Street. The main duty of the American Left should be to return to working class politicians with the difficult goal of uniting the working class with a sense of solidarity that runs across its diverse spectrum, with the ultimate long term goal of doing the same for society as a whole. That may seem sanctimonious and utopian, but is there any other way to seriously reduce poverty?
Joseph Grosso is a writer and librarian in New York City.
Preppy protester: The moment a 19-year-old Mitt Romney demonstrated in favour of Vietnam War draft
Teenage Romney takes unpopular stance in favour of south-east Asian war
But his status as 'Mormon missionary' exempted him from the draft
Future GOP presidential candidate dressed in smart, preppy clothes
Romney's father George was the Governor of Michigan at the time
By GRAHAM SMITH
Last updated at 1:06 PM on 6th January 2012
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They say every picture tells a story.
A newly-unearthed photograph showing Mitt Romney demonstrating in favour of the Vietnam War draft might leave the presidential candidate feeling somewhat embarrassed.
The veteran Republican, then 19, can be seen picketing an anti-war sit-in at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1966.
Mr Romney will no doubt be proud of his younger self taking what was at the time a very unpopular stance.
However, he might grimace at his clean-cut appearance and preppy wardrobe.
Taking a stand: A young Mitt Romney holds up a placard at a pro-draft demonstration at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in May 1966
Fortunate son: Mr Romney's status as a 'Mormon missionary' meant he was exempt from the Vietnam War draft
Taken at the height of the swinging Sixties, Mr Romney holds a sign declaring 'Speak Out, Don't Sit In' as, alongside like-minded individuals, he proclaims his support for Lyndon Johnson's ever-expanding draft.
But, in a marked contrast to the relaxed dress sense associated with that decade's youth movement, he is wearing smart white slacks, a white buttoned-up shirt and a dark blazer.
A newspaper clipping headlined 'Governor's son pickets the pickets' states: 'Mitt Romney, son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, was one of the pickets who supported the Stanford University administration in opposition to sit-in demonstrators.'
The photograph was taken on May 20, 1966, shortly after a group of students had taken over the office of Stanford University President Wallace Sterling.
They were protesting at the introduction of a test designed to help the authorities decide who was eligible for the draft.
Mr Romney was one of approximately 150 conservative students who counter-picketed the sit-in.
Carey Coulter was one of the demonstrators alongside Mr Romney that day. He told BuzzFeed.com: 'We were there to get an education and these people holding the administration hostage was antithetical to that.
'Mitt walked up to me and said that he had some experience with the press, and that he would handle the press for me if I wanted him to. I said fine, because I was busy running the demonstration.
'I don't recall ever seeing him again.'
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The press experience to which Mr Romney referred no doubt came from witnessing how his father, George, dealt with the media.
George Romney headed American Motors before becoming Michigan governor in 1963, a position he held for six years before being appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development by Richard Nixon.
Handling the press: A newspaper cutting records the moment the future presidential candidate made his mark
Ironically, he later had a change of heart and turned against the Vietnam War.
His pro-war son, meanwhile, never served in south-east Asia because his status as a Mormon missionary exempted him from the draft.
The GOP hopeful spent just one year at Stanford before heading to France for 30 months of missionary work.
He had already met his future wife Ann in 1965 when he was 18 and she was 15. The couple married in 1969 and have five sons and 16 grandchildren.
Mr Romney went on to earn millions as a business consultant and venture capitalist.
After co-founding private equity firm Bain Capital in the late 1970s, he helped launch the Staples office supply chain, as well as buy Domino's Pizza.
His public career began in 1999, when he was recruited to take over the 2002 Winter Olympics after scandal and financial deficits threatened the Salt Lake City games.
In 2003, he took over as governor of Massachusetts after a campaign in which he cast himself as a moderate on abortion, gay rights and stem cell research. He had sounded many of the same themes during an unsuccessful 1994 U.S. Senate race against Democrat Edward M Kennedy.
He chose not to seek a second term and instead turned his sights to the White House.
Americans United for Change, a liberal group, last month used this 1980s photograph of Mitt Romney (centre) and his Bain Capital colleagues to compare him to Wall Street movie villain Gordon Gekko
Like father, like son: George Romney (left), then Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, signs an agreement with British Secretary of State Peter Walker in 1971
He lost the 2008 GOP nomination to John McCain and has been plotting his latest presidential nomination ever since.
But a record of changing positions on social issues including abortion and gay rights has left many conservatives questioning his sincerity.
Mr Romney oversaw a health care law enacted in Massachusetts that is similar to Barack Obama's national health overhaul, which conservatives despise.
He has also struggled to allay some sceptics of his Mormon faith.
His extreme wealth - the Romneys are believed to be worth between $190million and $264million - allowed him to invest more than $40million of his own money in the 2008 race.
Campaign trail: Mr Romney thanks Senator John McCain at an event in Charleston, South Carolina, yesterday
Winning streak? The former Massachusetts governor emerged the victor in the Iowa caucuses on Wednesday after hours of being deadlocked with former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum
It recently emerged that Mr Romney has plans to quadruple the size of his $12 million California home.
The 64-year-old filed an application in San Diego, California, to bulldoze his 3,009-square-foot oceanfront mansion in La Jolla and replace it with an 11,062-square-foot property.
A campaign official said that the GOP hopeful was planning the expansion as the home he bought three years ago 'is inadequate for their needs'.
The Romneys' official primary residence is a town house outside Boston. They also own a $10million vacation home on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire.
The couple sold the 6,400-square-foot home in Belmont, Massachusetts, where they raised their children, in 2009 for $3.5million.
In addition, their 9,500-square-foot ski lodge in Deer Valley, Utah, fetched $5.25million last year.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083002/Mitt-Romney-19-demonstrated-favour-Vietnam-War-draft.html#ixzz1j3qtbNPk
JANUARY 09, 2012
An Incredibly Close Screening
by MICHAEL WINSHIP
I knew all those years of sitting in darkened theaters on sunny afternoons, awash in movies new and old, stale popcorn and gallons of diet soda, would pay off some day. For one, there was the woman I met in 1975 at the late, lamented Carnegie Hall Cinema during a Mel Brooks double feature. She came and sat next to me when a guy kept bothering her during Blazing Saddles and we wound up dating –until she lit out for a career in the hinterlands, acting in summer stock.
But as lovely as she was, that’s not the payoff I mean. All that time reading about and watching movies didn’t just prepare me for romance, or Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit, if it comes to that. (Quick—the address of Charles Foster Kane’s love nest with Susan Alexander? 185 West 74th Street.)
What it did ready me for is one of my favorite things, interviewing screenwriters about their work. In my various capacities at the Writers Guild of America, East, I’ve had the opportunity over the last decade and a half to talk with many of them, in private for articles or video archives, and in public, in front of an audience, at screenings of their films. Sometimes the director and one or two of the actors come, too.
This has led to some odd experiences: like dealing with the emotionally fragile starlet who recently had gone through a very public break-up. I had to gently coax her out of her limo and into the screening because she was afraid of the paparazzi, who were covering a premiere at the theater next door. They didn’t notice.
Or the time the writer knelt next to me during his film and frantically whispered that an entire reel had been skipped, the next to last one. We let everyone see it when the movie was over but discovered that the hapless projectionist had been showing it that way — to critics — for weeks. The film opened and closed very quickly.
There was the incomprehensible interview with Jean-Luc Godard, which was not because my French was worse than his English, or vice versa, but simply because he’s Jean-Luc Godard; and the Q & A with British writer and director Mike Leigh — my first question triggered a rapid-fire, twenty-minute monologue that was impossible to interrupt. Because he covered virtually every one of my prepared questions, it wasn’t so bad. By the time he had worn himself out, we were ready for questions from the audience.
But one of the most unusual interviews took place just last month, a week or so before Christmas. I was scheduled to introduce a screening of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and talk afterwards with the author of its screenplay, Eric Roth, whose other credits include Forrest Gump and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
When I arrived at the theater, a representative from Warner Brothers let me know that the film’s director, Stephen Daldry, would be joining us as well. I had to pretty much toss the interview I’d prepared — most of my questions were about Eric’s work and screenwriting in general — but it would be okay. Stephen and I had met several years ago when he was promoting his movie The Hours and I was interviewing its screenwriter, David Hare.
If you haven’t heard by now, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, adapted from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, is a tough movie to watch, especially if you’re a New Yorker who was here on 9/11. But in my opinion, it’s well worth it; the engaging, entertaining and powerful story of an emotionally troubled Asperger’s kid who seeks to reconnect with the father he lost at the World Trade Center. The boy travels across the city trying to solve the riddle of a mysterious key he finds in his father’s closet a year after the attacks.
The film ended and there was applause, which doesn’t always happen at these things; we are, after all, jaded, Manhattan media sophisticates. The lights came up, I introduced Eric and Stephen and started to ask my first question.
Stephen interrupted (he’s a director). “I’d like to know what people think about the film. We’ve only just finished it and only shown it to a handful of audiences, so I’d like to know what you think.”
Silence.
I think we’re all experiencing a bit of shellshock, I said. Most of us were here on 9/11. Ten years later, it’s still kind of raw. Stephen repeated his question – what did you think?
Slowly, people began to respond, positively for the most part but in each of us the film triggered memories. People had friends in the buildings. A man who worked as an extra in the film — you see a split-second shot of him in a Batman costume — had a job in wire transfers at Bank of America. He worked the night shift at the Trade Center and left just minutes before American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. He’s still suffering from survivor guilt.
For me, it was a moment toward the end of the film when the boy, Oskar (an incredible performance by young, first-time actor Thomas Horn), visits an office downtown in the middle of the night. Security takes his photo and prints out a building ID. That would seem innocuous to most, but I remembered an evening about a week and a half after what Oskar calls “the worst day.” George Bush was addressing a joint session of Congress.
My then wife and I were burning candles to cover the smell from Ground Zero, which had shifted that rainy night from an odor of burning electrical cables and melted metal to something more feral and decaying. As we listened to Bush and I made dinner, she sat and sorted through a basket of odds and ends, then handed me something: a security ID with my picture — like Oskar’s — but taken the last time I had gone to the World Trade Center for a meeting.
The rest of my interview with Stephen and Eric went like that. I got a couple of my original questions in, but the evening had turned into a group therapy session, and that was fine. As Daldry recently said in the Los Angeles Times, “It’s a loss that’s very public and one that everyone has very rich stories about. One has to be responsible to the original author’s book… and you have to be aware of the truth of the reality of what happened to thousands of people who lost loved ones.“
I heard a new ad for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close on the radio this morning, its pitch apparently readjusted, aimed at those averse to a movie about the Trade Center calamity. It’s “not about 9/11,” the spot’s announcer declared, “but every day after.”
Nice try. The question is, as Stephen told the Times, “Is it time? Can we start to tell these stories yet or is it too early?” The film opens nationally on January 20. Spend a couple of hours in a darkened movie theater and find out what you think.
Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild, East, is senior writer on the new public television series Moyers & Company, premiering this month. Go to www.BillMoyers.com.
Fracking, Keystone XL, Mountaintop Removal and More
by STEPHANIE PENN SPEAR
On Jan. 10 at 1 p.m. on the west lawn of the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, concerned citizens from all over the state will gather to ask Gov. Kasich to impose an indefinite moratorium on Ohio’s oil and gas wastewater injection well sites and the natural gas extraction process that has become well-known as fracking, until further research and proper regulations are put in place to protect human health and the environment.
This protest is in response to the 11 earthquakes that have hit the Youngstown, Ohio area since March 2011. The most recent earthquake, with a 4.0 magnitude that was felt nearly 200 miles away, shook the community on New Year’s Eve. Won-Young Kim, a research professor of seismology geology at Columbia University who is advising the state of Ohio on the Dec. 31 earthquake, said that circumstantial evidence suggests a link between the earthquake and high-pressure well activity. Kim believes that the recent earthquake did not occur naturally and may have been caused by high-pressure liquid injection related to oil and gas exploration and production.
Fracking is a method of gas extraction that involves injecting a brew of toxic, heavy metal lubricants, chemicals and sand deep underground to fracture rock formations that release oil and gas. Hydraulic fracturing uses enormous quantities of fresh water, which gas companies take from nearby streams, ponds and rivers, or truck in if there is no immediate water source. Every time a gas well is fracked, four to nine million gallons of water are injected into the ground with a secret brew of chemicals. A single well can be fracked up to 12 times, totaling more than 100 million gallons of freshwater used in the lifetime of a well.
Some of the fracking fluid used in the process of breaking apart the shale remains underground, but a large majority of it comes back to the surface mixed with hazardous chemicals, volatile organic compounds, and even radioactive material that was trapped underground and released in the process. This wastewater is then trucked to a disposal well and pumped back underground. With millions of gallons of hazardous liquid created during this process, a major challenge for the natural gas industry and regulators, has been the disposal of this toxic byproduct of fracking.
It is this toxic wastewater that is being high-pressure injected into many of Ohio’s deep wells, as far down as 9,000 feet, and blamed for the recent Youngstown earthquakes. Thanks to Ohio’s geology and the Kasich administration, along with other elected officials, Ohio now receives about 1,000 truckloads of frackwater everyday at disposal wells around Ohio. Ohio is home to 177 oil and gas wastewater injection well sites, 10 times more than surrounding states. More than half of the fracking wastewater coming into Ohio is from out of state, including New York and Pennsylvania.
Concerns on how to dispose of fracking wastewater are only one of the problems associated with natural gas extraction. Fracking has been linked to more than 1,000 incidents of groundwater contamination across the U.S., including cases where people can actually ignite their tap water. There is no doubt that proper regulations on the state and federal levels are lacking.
In New York state, opponents of fracking are asking lawmakers to extend the moratorium that was put into place in 2010, due to concerns that hydraulic fracturing, without proper regulation, could pollute groundwater.
Concerns over the extraction of natural gas are experienced worldwide and impact rural, suburban and urban communities. The number of anti-fracking groups is growing every day. Frustrations are running high as the U.S. continues to lack a sustainable energy policy that puts a cap on carbon and supports investment in renewable energy generation and manufacturing instead of supporting extreme fossil fuel extraction.
On the federal level and in Ohio and many other states, incentives for renewable energy projects and manufacturing need to be put back in place. Three years ago we were making some progress in moving toward a sustainable energy supply. But over the last couple years, states and the federal government have stripped away the incentives that were a first step in leveling the playing field between renewable and nonrenewable energy. Since the fossil fuel industry is so highly subsidized and externalizes much of its costs, the renewable energy industry cannot compete without the help of incentives.
In Ohio, we passed SB 221 in July 2008. It mandates that 25 percent of Ohio’s electricity generation come from advanced energy sources by 2025 with 12.5 percent from renewable sources including hydro. Half of the renewable energy generation has to come from within the state. It even contains a .5 percent solar carve out that has increased the value of solar renewable energy credits in the state. Coupled with this legislation was the Ohio Advanced Energy Fund grant program that provided a financial incentive to invest in renewable energy projects. However, the legislature failed to renew this grant program in 2010 and the number of projects in our state has greatly declined.
Creating jobs at the expense of human health and the environment is not sustainable. Energy generation is not a job vs. the environment issue. It’s a need for a cleaner environment creating jobs—green jobs that will transition our country to relying on cleaner, renewable sources of energy. Investment in renewable energy will create jobs, revitalize our strong manufacturing base and provide long-term solutions to our energy needs without contaminating our drinking water, polluting our air, displacing communities and making people sick.
I know there’s no perfect solution or silver bullet that will generate all the word’s energy needs, but it is clear that supporting extreme fossil fuel extraction—like fracking, mountaintop removal coal mining, tar sands mining or building pipelines like the proposed Keystone XL that would take the most toxic and corrosive oil from Alberta, Canada and pipe it through the breadbasket of America to ship it overseas—is not the answer. Energy efficiency, investment in distributed generation and grid-feeding renewable energy projects, rebuilding the electric grid, and investment in battery storage and innovative energy technologies is the direction our country needs to take.
The next several months are going to be interesting. As of right now, according to the House Energy & Commerce Committee clock, Obama has 43 days to decide on the Keystone XL pipeline as stated in the tax-cut bill passed at the end of last year. Gov. Cuomo will decide on the fate of New York’s moratorium on fracking as early as this week. Ohioans will speak out on Tuesday concerning their fears of continued natural gas extraction and disposal of toxic wastewater in their state. Public comments are being accepted on Obama’s proposal to allow drilling in the pristine Arctic Ocean and increased drilling in the Gulf of Mexico before adequate safety standards are in effect. Regulations aimed at limiting harmful power plant pollution that crosses state lines, including sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, which would prevent 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 heart attacks and 400,000 cases of asthma have been put on hold by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Appeals Court in Washington. Unfortunately, the list goes on.
I’ve been working in the grassroots environmental movement for more than 23 years. I’ve never seen so many people so worried about the health of the planet and concerned for future generations as we continue to consume resources at an unprecedented rate, and allow corporations to run our government and privatize our natural resources. I’ve also never seen such incredible grassroots leadership and collaboration among environmental organizations as we have today. Like I said, the next several months are going to be really interesting. Be sure to stay-tuned to EcoWatch.org as we keep you up-to-date on all the issues.
Stefanie Penn Spear is founder, executive director and editor of EcoWatch.org. She has been publishing environmental news for more than two decades. Spear works to unite the voice of the grassroots environmental movement and mobilize millions of people to engage in democracy to protect human health and the environment. She seeks to motivate individuals to become engaged in their community, adopt sustainable practices and support strong environmental policy.
JANUARY 09, 2012 -- by ANDREW LEVINE
In democracies, the people, the demos, rule. But that’s in theory; in the real world in our time, to count as a democracy it is enough to be governed by politicians who come to power through competitive elections that are generally free and fair. No so-called democracy comes close to meeting the theoretical standard, though some are more democratic than others. The United States may not be off the charts, but it is certainly near the bottom of the heap.
Because real world democracies these days superintend capitalist economies, there are limits to how democratic they can be – not just because, under capitalism, the economy is largely impervious to political control, but also because public policy must be sensitive both to the requirements of capitalist economies in general and to what capitalists demand at particular times and places. If there is significant discord, economic disaster threatens, with dire consequences for everyone, but especially for the politicians in charge. This makes “moderation” on their part all but inevitable, no matter what the demos wants. The United States is subject to these constraints, as all real world democracies are. We are also encumbered with additional obstacles in democracy’s way.
For one thing, we have a deeply entrenched duopoly party system that makes it hard for “third parties” or independent candidates even to gain ballot access. We also have an electoral system that, at the national level, makes it all but impossible for third parties or independents to win, and harder still for them to govern. This is why much of the compromising that happens elsewhere after elections are held, happens beforehand here.
With so few outlets for political expression, American voters tend to vote more strategically than voters in other democracies; they compromise even before the electoral process gets underway. Thus in the 2004 primaries, Democrats gave John Kerry enough delegates to win the nomination, not because any significant number of them particularly liked him or his policies, but because they deemed him the mostelectable candidate running and therefore the one most likely to dispatch George W. Bush. Similarly, in the just concluded Iowa caucuses, Mitt Romney won, by a whopping eight votes, not because Republican voters liked him – quite the contrary, they mostly despise him (sometimes even for the right reasons) – but because a (bare) plurality of caucus attendees had a John Kerry moment.
What makes it remotely plausible to call actually existing democracies “democracies” is the assumption that votes express peoples’ preferences for alternative outcomes or their considered judgments about the public good; in other words, that majority rule voting (or some semblance of it) reveals the peoples’ will. But if individuals strategize internally even before the electoral process begins, their votes don’t so much represent what they want but what they think others want. This further strains the already tenuous connection between what real world democracies are like and what democracies are supposed to be.
Fortunately, for (small-d) democrats, not all primary voters strategize from the get go. Therefore our primary elections can and sometimes do straightforwardly reflect the desires of at least some of the people who turn out to vote — provided, of course, that they have a way to register what their wants are.
Part of what makes the current round of Republican caucuses and primaries so surreal is the fact that, except for those who are willing to vote for Mitt Romney for “electability” reasons and except for Ron Paul’s supporters, Republican voters cannot settle on a candidate to rally around. The available choices are simply too risible even for them. This is why all it takes for the candidate of the hour to plummet is a little exposure to public scrutiny or an occasion to self-destruct. Rick Santorum, very likely the most execrable of the lot, was lucky to crest at just the right moment. A week more or less and he would have gone the way of all the others.
Still, the Republican caucuses and primaries, the early ones anyway, before winner-take-all rules kick in, are the only place we’re likely to see a glimmer of genuine democracy this electoral cycle.
Forget about democracy breaking out this time around in the Democratic fold. Despite having done everything in his power to merit another shellacking, Barack Obama is running unopposed; and, given the Republican field, he might as well be running unopposed in the general election as well. He will win in November, if not quite by default then by some close approximation. For this, he will have only the Republicans to thank.
Another reason why our democracy is less democratic than others is a jurisprudential tradition that puts the legislative process up for sale by conflating political corruption with constitutionally protected free speech. For this, we can’t blame Republicans alone. To be sure, it is mainly rightwing, pro-corporate judges, appointed by Reagan and the two Bushes, who have been moving the idea along. But it was the landmark case of Buckley v. Valeo, decided in 1976, which turned it into a matter of legal principle. That was back when the Supreme Court was still considered liberal, and when Ronald Reagan, Obama’s idea of a “transformative president,” was still a boogeyman liberals would trot out to scare independents.
Since then, this unsavory line of thought has taken on new accretions. With the Citizens United case of 2010, five exceptionally retrograde Supreme Court justices advanced the idea to a new and unprecedented level, giving corporations free reign to buy and sell the political class. Ironically, the first victim of their “judicial activism” was Newt Gingrich in the Iowa caucuses. Back in the Clinton years, Gingrich did more than his share to increase the influence of money in our political scene. Expect to see many worthier victims before long.
* * *
As if all this wasn’t already bad enough, the existing system of caucuses and primary elections makes it worse. This is deeply ironic. Primary elections began in the Progressive Era where the idea was to defeat the corruption inherent in a system that allowed professional politicians to select candidates in “smoke filled rooms.” The practice lapsed in the years that followed until it was revived in the late 60s, in response to the civil rights movement and the upheavals brought on by the Vietnam War, again with a view to democratizing our politics. What we have now is the result.
Primaries and caucuses wouldn’t be bad ideas if they were fashioned with a view to enhancing popular control of the electoral system, and if corporate money were kept out of the process. But this is America — a land, Mitt Romney tells us, of opportunities (for capitalists, like him), not “entitlements” (like those necessary for insuring real democratic citizenship). And so, a good idea turned bad.
In the system that evolved we have corporations and one per centers exercising their free speech rights by test-marketing candidates to target audiences. This too wouldn’t be so bad if the target audiences were more representative of the general population. On the Democratic side, they generally are because Democrats who vote in early caucuses and primaries are somewhat representative of Democrats nationally, notwithstanding the fact that not one of the early contests is held in a so-called blue state.
[There has never been anything remotely red about the Democratic Party. But after decades of being red baited, Democrats, if they thought about it at all, must have been pleased when the networks assigned them the color blue. What defies comprehension is that Republicans don’t object to having been given red. Such is life in what Gore Vidal calls the United States of Amnesia.]
It helps too that the Democratic Party is more given over than the Republicans to selecting delegates on a proportional basis. This mitigates the effect of relying on non-representative samples.
Whether by design of happenstance, the target audiences Republicans use for test marketing their candidates are as sorry a lot as America can offer up – or nearly so. New Hampshire Republicans are a partial exception inasmuch as New Englanders pretty much got theocracy out of their system centuries ago. But Iowa’s right-wingers are still a godly bunch and South Carolina’s are even worse. And, for sheer backwardness, neither New England nor the mid-west have anything to compare with South Carolina Republicans who miss Jim Crow and hope that the Confederacy will rise again, or with the bevies of retired Republican military officers and contractors who find life in the palmetto state congenial.
In light of this, the GOP establishment surely felt relieved when the only candidate in the running whom they would dare trust to manage their affairs squeaked through in Iowa. He should have smooth sailing in New Hampshire as well. His fortunes could still go awry, but it does look like Romney will indeed be the one whom Obama will defeat.
If that prospect is too unpalatable for some Republican voters to come on board, count on the potentates of the Grand Old Party to put them in their place. If they can’t, it would show that the inmates have taken full control of the asylum. But the Iowa caucuses seem to have demonstrated that this is not now the case; that plutocratic money still talks too loud. We’ll know for sure after South Carolina. Barring an irrepressible Santorum surge there [anyone who hasn’t already should immediately google the s-word], Romney will get the nod.
For the Republican establishment, it would probably make more sense just to let their (formerly) useful idiots nominate one of their own than to force someone they can’t abide down their throats. Then they could surreptitiously throw their support behind Barack Obama. For those of them for whom the Republican Party is a family tradition, this would go against the grain. But, when it comes down to delivering the goods, Obama would be no worse than Romney; and there is no percentage in antagonizing people who will likely become useful again. But the pillars of the GOP aren’t that clever; and so, with their help, expect Romney to put on a well-funded fight. However, Obama will have lots of corporate money too, maybe even more than the Republican establishment will muster. And, so, without the enthusiastic support of the Republican base, Romney won’t stand a chance.
No doubt, the November election will be bitterly contested. But it will be even less consequential than presidential elections usually are, and except for those who take voyeuristic pleasure in watching the truly dreadful act out, it will be virtually without interest.
There is a silver lining, however. In a knockdown, money driven race between two devils we know, no one will be disappointed when “change” doesn’t happen. More importantly, this time around there will be less temptation than in the past for people in motion to become distracted by electoral antics.
For those who still hasn’t gotten the news about how meretricious and undemocratic our electoral politics has become, a robust offensive by a reinvigorated OWS movement this spring will demonstrate the point better than dozens of lackluster primaries and caucuses. But consciousness raising is only part of the OWS mission, and the next part is now coming due.
If the 2008 election proved anything more than the fecklessness of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, it was that our hardly democratic political system has crossed a threshold where it can no longer repair itself. This realization led, at first, to passivity and acquiescence on the left, at the same time that it fueled theocratic, libertarian and neoconservative enthusiasms on the right. But OWS changed all that.
Thanks to the events of last fall, people are thinking again about how things can and should be, and developing ideas about how to get from here to there. What they are thinking about has little, if anything, to do with the elections ahead. This is as it should be because, at most, elections only ratify changes already achieved outside the electoral arena.
People are coming to realize not just that Obama has been a great disappointment – that has been clear for some time – but that Obamamania was a great waste of time and effort. Even without OWS, there’s no chance that anyone anymore would enthuse over the prospect of four more years of an Obama presidency. But thanks to OWS, even were a different, still credible, Savior to come along, there is no chance of anything similar happening again – not now and not in the foreseeable future.
Therefore, as the primary season unfolds and the November election approaches, expect the whole electoral circus to seem increasingly irrelevant to ever larger swathes of the population. And as that understanding takes hold and deepens, expect changes to follow that cannot now be foreseen, but that could well be momentous.
ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press
Speculation is often idle, BUT, I am compelled to, because in certain cities, certain things seem to happen over and over and over and over and over again. Consider Oakland - police are FOREVER trying to quash protest movements - LEGAL protest movements; trying to intimidate protesters with overt signs of violence, be it tasing, billy clubs, whatever. WHY EXACTLY IS THIS? What is it about Oakland?
My thoughts - It is about Oaklands POLITICAL LEADERSHIP - which runs hard black, hard latino, and hard po' white trash (such as me-sef). But ... especially because it runs hard BLACK, and for ALL the wrong reasons, the "powers that be (political, academic, financial elites)" fear a mass uprising of the black community; kind of like Nat Turner's revolution, or the movement that brought "freedom and independence" to Haiti."
While it is quite true that the major source of conflict today is about class war fare, the plain and simple truth is this - peoples of the South (below the equator) - who are invariably peoples of colour (of necessity - pale skin burns like a muthah fuckah when exposed to the harshness of the sun - only those pale skins with Afro, or Hispanic, or Native American blood in them, so that their skin turns a leathery colour under prolonged exposure to the sun have a means of surviving in the harshness of heat, which does such wonders in the rain forests, the jungles, etc, and thus the MAJOR cause of exploitation is RACE - white folks, because of their theiving, marauding natures (back "in the day" before advances in agriculture, to survive, those pale faces that migrated way way way way North, had to steal the limited harvests of the (for the most part also pale, but not so much the whiter shade of pale) "civilized" farming communities.
BUT, exploiting peoples of colour under the pretense of attempting to up lift their lot (the White Man's Burden) because of their inferior intellects (don'tchaknow) and teach them how to govern themselves (hail Brittania, Brittania rules the world) and to take care of themselves (by exploiting their natural resources, privatizing the water industries and charging po' folk mega-bux for that which is their birth-right and heritage - it takes a certain kind of mind set to avoid the internal conflict that would topple a first world power - and thus do the palest of faces simply make THIS assumption, which permits them to maintain the murdering, rapacious ways:
These folk of color, they are inferior to us
They are simply not as intelligent as we are
They do not have any knowledge of how to husband their natural resources
They are not even smart enough to figure out how to make a profit on the abundant
fruit that is so low hanging
Ergo and therefore, we must enslave them, and put them to work for us, and ultimately, turn over
political control to one of our own favored colored folk, who will do our bidding,
abide by our rules (the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein (back in the day)
Ossama Bin Laden (at least when he and his was a'-killin' Ruskies)
These folks, they ain't really human, and thus, WE have an obligation
to help them to uplift themselves from veritable poverty, when there is so much
natural resource wealth the better to make billioinaires there for the plundering,
and thus we are not merely JUSTIFIED in our exploitation, we are compelled
by the Lord God Almight His-self who hath rendered unto us his one true gospel
the Prosperity Gospel that says, "Them's that's got shall get mo'
because dey be bettah than all that went befo'
Dem da't po' shall starve, cuz they lazy, they be large,
fat, bloated, slothful drunks and druggies, whores
who have no self-respect .... and thus, we are called
to take what is rightfully theirs, and render it unto ourselves.
Thus endeth the Prosperity Gospel for today.
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my fortunes to keep
My fortunes to keep, my fortunes to grow
So that all the world will know
Just how much I doth serve the Lord
By Him how much I am adored.
AMEN!
JANUARY 09, 2012
Coercive Attrition and the Occupy Movement
by GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER
As winter sets in, the Occupy Movement nationwide confronts a new series of challenges. Conspiring with the weather, however, is the threat of a shifting policing model currently being tested out in Oakland.
Coercive Attrition
The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci spoke of a distinction between “war of position” and “war of maneuver,” between those gradual and occasionally imperceptible political struggles that occur every day and the frontal attack on power toward which they eventually build. While this distinction is necessary, it should not be overstated, and nor can we associate the war of position too directly with ideological struggle and war of maneuver with direct military attacks on and by the coercive apparatus of the state. Recent events in Oakland and the strategy of coercive attrition directed against the Occupy Movement make perfectly clear just how insufficient such a correlation would be.
Recent weeks have seen the Occupy Movement confronted with a war of attrition nationwide: as cold weather sets in, many cities have opted to wait out the movement, allowing excitement to fade and the movement to devour itself in the petty squabbles of disempowerment. Often, though, this strategy of passive attrition operates alongside a more aggressive approach. In Philadelphia, for example, a hands-off approach to the now-decamped Occupy Philly operates in tandem with ferocity toward those who step out of line in a transparent attempt to bully radicals into submission (as with the case of two housing activists currently facing multiple felonies).
But it is in Oakland more than anywhere else that friendly weather and sustained militancy have given rise to a different approach, one similarly premised on chipping away at the movement through attrition and fatigue but doing so in a far more repressive manner. One key ingredient to this peculiar constellation of forces is the empty vessel perched atop the city government: Mayor Jean Quan. Quan was discredited long ago and from all sides, hated by the left for unleashing the near fatal attacks on Occupy Oakland in October, and by the right (represented by OPD and the City Council) for not taking a harder line. Now, having opted to vacillate rather than stand on the side of history, she will simply be hoping to serve out her term and avoid an embarrassing recall campaign.
This vacillation has been nowhere clearer than on the question of the epic Port Shutdowns on November 2nd and December 12th, the first of which catapulted Occupy Oakland to the forefront of the national movement, and the second of which demonstrated a capacity for coordinated militancy not seen in this country for decades at least. Since it was Quan who took the heat for the unrestrained actions of police in October, one could hardly blame the Mayor for hesitating to unleash OPD and other forces against those blocking the port. But when Quan suggested that the city might not be able to prevent future shutdowns of the port, her critics in City Council found powerful echo in Governor Jerry Brown. But for now at least, OPD’s hands are at least partially tied, an the full-on assaults of many an officer’s dream go unfulfilled for now.
Blocked from engaging in a brutal war of maneuver, OPD’s strategy has been a different one, and what remains of Occupy Oakland’s presence in Oscar Grant Plaza has seen small raids with a handful of arrests several times a week. While some interpret this half-heartedness by the forces of order as a sign of impotence, the frequency, the timing, and the serious charges incurred in the raids speak to a more sinister strategy.
“Shit’s Gonna Pop”
I arrived at Oscar Grant Plaza in the immediate aftermath of one such raid on Friday, December 30th, where rebels circulated through the plaza denouncing the most recent skirmish. Some still carried their belongings in the familiar plastic bags, souvenirs from a recent trip to Santa Rita County Jail. The rage is palpable and growing, with many pronouncing that “shit’s gonna pop” in somber tones, and another occupier angrily insisting that “they’ll see me in hell before they see me in jail.”
Just an hour earlier, a small OPD contingent had swept into the plaza and snatched a selected few who were gathered there. Those targeted included Brian Glasscock, an Occupy Oakland organizer well-known to Oakland Police as the sound operator for many Occupy events. It was for this reason, rather than any illegal activity, that Glasscock was identified by Lieutenant Hamilton, who had targeted him previously over sound system issues, and arrested for inciting a riot. “I think their strategy is to target those they know have been around doing things and throw them in jail hoping that something will stick,” Glasscock explained to me.
This strategy was perhaps clearest in the case of Tiffany Tran, a young occupier who faced felony charges under California’s Lynching Law. Just as police have recently begun to arrest Copwatchers who record their activities under felony wiretapping laws originally intended to control the police themselves, so too is this so-called “lynching” a case of inverting a law’s original intention. Originally designed to prevent Black Americans from being seized from the hands of police by lynch mobs, this law has been deployed recently to criminalize the practice of “de-arresting” those in police custody.
With the arrests, a scheduled New Years Eve noise demonstration outside the North County lockup gained new significance. A rowdy and celebratory crowd gathered at Oscar Grant Plaza to bid adieu to an epic year in militant style, before occupying the intersection of 14th and Broadway, ignition point for many a rebellion past. As we awaited the arrival of the sound system (that Glasscock was supposed to operate), we gulped the obligatory champagne from nondescript containers. The sound system soon arrived, some faces were covered, a massive banner was unfurled that sums up the spirit of the night as bluntly as possible–“Fuck the Police”–and we were off.
A block from our destination, attention inevitably turns to OPD headquarters, where a small phalanx of riot police stand guard behind closed doors. The scene was striking, as two occupying forces faced off against one another: one, an occupying army imported from the suburbs to oppress, the other, exuberant and brimming with the optimism of a new society in the works.
Arriving at the jail, cheers rebounded off the thick walls, their echoes doubled as imprisoned comrades began to flash lights inside to make it clear that we were being seen and heard inside. But there was no question of being seen or heard: soon, the ground was shaking with M-80 blasts and fireworks were launched from the middle of the street, exploding directly outside the windows of the jail. One previously injured protester reclined in a bike-drawn-cart, decadently sipping whiskey and enjoying the show. Astonishingly, there was not a cop in sight.
Requiescat in Pace, Habeas Corpus
While the charges thrown at protesters have been consistently ridiculous and few have stood up in court, Glasscock insists that “if nothing sticks then they’ve at least fucked with that person’s week.” And in this case, the police strategy was to hold those arrested for almost an entire week: strategically arresting protesters on a Friday, and before a holiday weekend no less, meant that the habeas corpus guidelines requiring that arrestees be charged within 48 hours of arrest were flexible at best. Since this refers to 48 business hours, neither the weekend nor the Monday holiday were included, and anger mounted outside the courtroom late Tuesday afternoon as it became increasingly clear that the authorities would wait until the last possible minute to drop the charges.
Walter Riley, lawyer for those arrested and father of rapper Boots Riley, who has played a key role in the Occupy organizing around the port shutdowns, complained loudly that the actions of the police and the District Attorney constituted a transparent attack on habeas corpus, and that more direct pressure needs to be brought to bear to make it clear that we won’t accept such strategies. But given the national offensive against habeas corpus embodied in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), local authorities might rightly sense that no federal authority will leap to defend the occupiers. It was little surprise when, despite this extended display of punitive power, the charges against all those arrested were later dropped after some had spent nearly 5 days behind bars.
But there would be little time for celebration when those arrested were released on Wednesday, as OPD again swept into the plaza later that evening in a repeat performance of the prior week. Again, there were a handful of arrests. Again, these were highly targeted, with eyewitnesses recounting how police broke off to arrest occupiers who had crossed the street to avoid a conflict. The vocal and militant Tactical Action Committee seemed to be the primary target, with some of the previous arrestees overhearing guards talking about how they wanted to get one member in particular. And again, the charges would have been laughable were they not a part of a broader and overarching strategy of containment.
Targeted Terror
One occupier known as Ali had become a clear target for repression due to his visibility, and even those arrested on the 30th had overheard officers discussing how the hoped to get their hands on him. On Wednesday the 4th, OPD seemed determined to do just that, chasing Ali across the street to arrest him. When they did so, he explained to me, officer Phan reached into his back pocket before feigning surprise and insisting that he was “going away for a long time” because they had found him to be in possession of ecstasy. Some in the Anti-Repression Committee believe that it was only the presence of the Livestream camera, and the fact that Ali immediately began to shout about the attempt to plant drugs, that prevented the charges from being successfully fabricated. Ali was later charged with misdemeanor obstruction.
A member of the recently-formed Anti-Repression and Solidarity Committee (ARC) of Occupy Oakland explained to me that the movement has seen in recent weeks a broad arc of repression, beginning on December 28th with the clearing of a small camp established in West Oakland by the Tactical Action Committee, followed the next day by the raid and arrests at an occupied house on Mandela Parkway. The most recent raids were but an upping of the stakes, she explained, adding that “I think the idea is that if they can bog us down in as many legal battles as possible, we won’t be able to restart this movement… Why would they come and raid the plaza when it’s just an info table and a food tent? They’re afraid if they don’t get rid of it it will just get bigger.”
Laleh, also a member of the ARC, feels that beyond merely the organizational toll taken by the targeting of key committee members, the police strategy is one of terror. “The fact that they have been chasing particular people and ignoring others has had a psychological effect, instilling a terror in people that wasn’t there before.” If these were isolated cases they could be accidental, she argues, but the fact that groups have been repeatedly arrested, slapped with charges, and held for days only to see the charges dismissed “makes the strategy clear.” The District Attorney needs to step in and restrain the OPD, she insists.
This strategy also includes both fishing for parolees and attempting to provoke prisoners. “Everyone who is coming out is reporting targeting and segregation while in country jail, all kinds of physical abuse, taunting by COs, and even sleep deprivation,” Laleh explains, and all this in an effort to get a reaction that can lead to more charges (this seems to have been at play in the case of an occupier named Khali, who is being charged with assaulting an officer after his psychiatric medication was reportedly withheld for days).
Thankfully, though, not everyone is terrified, and an anonymous ARC member sees signs of the breakdown of the strategy of attrition both by occupiers and by the police themselves: at a “Fuck the Police March” called in response to the arrests, OPD officers clearly went beyond what the city had hoped, knocking a woman off her bike and beating her, firing rubber bullets, and allegedly breaking another marcher’s arm. More importantly still, the OPD’s strategy of low-level warfare “isn’t scaring people, it’s only making them angrier.”
When the Philadelphia Police Department wanted to destroy the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), they did not feel hindered by legal niceties: police arrested the RAM membership nearly every day on imaginary charges, knowing full well the toll taken on movements by even demonstrating the falseness of the ridiculous. Now, faced with the Occupy Movement, it would seem as though some local police agencies are once again taking a page from the PPD playbook on coercive attrition. Legality and its opposite thus march hand-in-hand, as a movement is harassed with impunity.
After Winter, Another Spring Looms
We press toward spring in this age of riots, closing an annual circuit opened in North Africa, but with no end in sight to the global cycle of struggle unleashed by Mohamed Bouazizi’s literal self-sacrifice. As I depart Oakland, this sinister war of position continues unabated, but and impending war of maneuver looms almost as certainly as the sun sets over the Golden Gate Bridge.
January 1st marked the 3rd anniversary of Oscar Grant’s murder by BART officer Johannes Mehserle, an event which opened a more localized cycle of struggle that in many ways laid the organizational foundations for Occupy Oakland’s peculiar militancy while teaching those in the streets a lesson in their own power. This year, organizers, myself included, marked this somber day with a march of several hundred between two popularly baptized locations: beginning in Oscar Grant Plaza, we retraced in reverse the path of the 2009 rebellions, covering miles of familiar ground before arriving at Oscar Grant Station (Fruitvale), where he was killed. Family, friends, and activists took to the stage at the memorial, remembering Oscar and the struggle bearing his name, and promising to keep up the fight by establishing an automatic response system with demonstrations at 14th and Broadway every time the police kill.
Monday at 5am, the momentum of the Port Shutdown will stretch its roots into fertile local soil, as Occupy Oakland will staff a “hard picket” of the American Licorice Factory in support of striking workers. If this uptick in worker militancy doesn’t prompt a frontal assault by the state, then the planned takeover of a large building on January 28th likely will, and if not this, then perhaps the impending blockade of the Port of Longview in Washington State, or the growing anger at ICE’s “silent raids” taking their toll on undocumented communities across the Bay Area.
Wandering around Oscar Grant Plaza, one phrase is on many lips: “There’s always spring.” But in this land of perpetual spring, seasons are but metaphors, and as the kindling is stacked ever higher, any of these moments could provide the spark. Spring looms, heavy with the promise of the future, but foreboding in the guarantee that its birth will be a violent one.
George Ciccariello-Maher is an exiled Oaklander who lives in Philadelphia and teaches political theory at Drexel University. He can be reached at gjcm(at)drexel.edu.
Find your rock.
Hold on to it.
Never let it go.
But, if you lose your rock,
Find another rock,
and hold onto it
Until it is time to
give it away.
Never surrender!
Merely retreat
And then, if necessary,
Fall back some more:
Fall back on a rock bed;
Fall back on a free fall;
Fall back on God'
Fall back on yourself.
Never surrender!
Believe in something.
Find your rock.
Never let it go.
There’s hair on the floor, and the scent of chemicals permeates the air.
A suburban politician moves among the smocked customers and busy barbers at Blades Barbershop on Chicago’s far Southeast Side. He’s got a message you don’t hear often from those whose livelihood depends on winning over voters.
“I’m from Barrington, and I don’t need your vote,” Republican state Sen. Dan Duffy recalls telling some of the barbershop’s customers on his visit this fall. “But I’m here because I vote on legislation that impacts your community. I want you to ask me questions.”
And they do.
Blades Barbershop is one of the unlikely places where some politicians are learning about the needs of black communities and educating residents there about who Republicans, as well as Democrats, are — in hopes of developing a more engaged electorate.
The nonpartisan Young Government organization, run by Jeffery Coleman of Chicago, organizes the tours. The group’s aim? “Making both Republican and Democratic powers recognize newly energized and better educated groups of young educated voters.”
The group, which formed in 2008 and, according to Coleman, has grown to a network of more than 6,000, organized a string of recent tours to give area residents the chance to pepper elected officials with questions about the most pressing needs of their neighborhoods. On their home turf.
That includes school equity. Discontinued after-school programs. Regulations hurting small businesses. A lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables at local grocery stores.
“In a barbershop, these topics come up all the time,” said Damion “Slim” Moore, the owner of Blades.
But he added that customers, without regular access to elected officials, “are losing faith in politics — period.”
By bringing lawmakers — many of whom don’t even represent the areas they are visiting — into black neighborhoods in Chicago, Young Government is seeking to change that.
“Barbershops provide not just haircuts,” said Coleman, whose father, Percy, is a 34th Ward Chicago alderman. “But in African-American communities, they’re sanctuaries ... where the real conversation starts.”
Among the lawmakers who have taken the tours are Democratic Congressman Danny Davis of Chicago, former Democratic Comptroller Dan Hynes of Orland Park and Barrington’s Duffy.
Duffy, unopposed in the March 20 primary election, will face Democrat Amanda Howland of Lake Zurich in November.
A resident of Lake Barrington who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, Duffy is fully aware that his district in Cook, Lake and McHenry counties doesn’t even come close to representing Blades or any of the other barbershops he visited.
Some of the people Duffy encounters have heard of his fight against the spread of red-light cameras. Others want to know why they don’t see their schools improving, or they tell him that they feel their vote is being taken for granted.
From Duffy’s perspective, the tour’s been educational, too.
He says he’s learned that a number of people feel that Republicans have “just written off” the black community as voting solidly Democratic.
During one of his first shop visits, he was hit with a simple question: “Why do you care?”
“If people are going to win statewide offices, then they need that (support),” Duffy responded. “To do that, you need to be receiving votes and building relationships in the African-American community.”
Keith Price, an alderman from South suburban Harvey who has been a Young Government member since 2009, says having lawmakers visit communities’ “home turf” will only pay dividends in the future.
“I think it’s very important. It gives candidates or just elected officials the opportunity to hear directly from some of the other areas. And that type of information — they can know what other communities are really wanting or striving for. If someone gets in certain spots they can always remember they have that dialogue in that community.”
Copyright © 2012 Paddock Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.
CHICAGO NEWS COOPERATIVE
Public Officials Found Helping Clients of Family
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative
Lobbyists outside the House Speaker's office. Some public officials have worked to benefit the lobbying client of a family member or business partner.
By JOHN SULLIVAN, FREDRIC N. TULSKY and KRISTEN McQUEARY
Published: January 08, 2012
Denny Jacobs, a former state senator, had a special ally last year when the state's largest electric utility company hired him to lobby for a controversial smart-grid energy bill that many say makes it easier for utilities to raise rates.
His son, State Senator Mike Jacobs, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, sponsored the bill and actively promoted the campaign of the Commonwealth Edison Company, one of his father's clients, to win its passage.
The downstate utility Ameren Corporation also backed it. "I'm with ComEd and I'm with Ameren on this bill," Senator Jacobs, a Democrat from East Moline, said in a floor speech. He even took to the floor to invite his colleagues to a reception hosted by ComEd. He denies that his father influenced him.
The smart grid legislation is one of several bills pushed by Senator Jacobs that benefited clients of his lobbyist father, a review of legislation by Medill Watchdog, a journalism program at Northwestern University, found. And Mike Jacobs is hardly the only Illinois public official supporting measures backed by close relatives.
Medill Watchdog examined statements of economic interests of public officials, lobbying registrations filed with the City of Chicago, Cook County and the state, and records of state bills and local ordinances. The investigation found 14 elected officials from Cook County alone who, while not lobbyists themselves, are related to or in business with lobbyists.
The review found more than a dozen instances in which an official took action that benefited the lobbying client of a family member or business partner.
Reformers say Illinois has a historic tolerance for corruption. "There are people who believe that's just the way it's done," said Kyle McCarter, a Republican state senator from Lebanon. "Cultures don't change overnight."
At the state level, Illinois law leaves it to legislators to decide whether to recuse themselves from matters that present potential conflicts of interest. At the local level, public officials must disqualify themselves if they have an "interest," but the law defines interest only as owning part of a company.
Some states are stricter. After a series of political scandals, Rhode Island adopted a constitutional amendment in 1986 demanding ethical conduct of public officials. The law there restricts officials from taking part in matters if they have direct or indirect financial interest. It restricts action in matters that benefit family members, including stepchildren or grandfathers-in-law, as well as restricting votes in cases that benefit business partners.
"Illinois law is really behind on this," said Paula Franzese, a Seton Hall law professor and former chairwoman of New Jersey's ethics commission.
Actual or potential conflicts are widespread, public records show.
Joseph Berrios, chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party, was also chairman of the county Board of Review when he was elected county assessor in 2010. All the while, he was a registered lobbyist and partner of the lobbying firm B-P Consulting. Since 2004, Mr. Berrios and his partner, Sam Panayotovich, have lobbied for the Illinois Coin Machine Operators, the group that makes and distributes video poker machines.
Mr. Berrios was a lobbyist in 2009 pushing a bill legalizing video poker when his daughter, State Representative Maria Antonia Berrios, a Democrat from Chicago, voted to approve it. Ms. Berrios also supported bills to allow racetracks to install slot machines, another measure the coin operators favored.
Ms. Berrios said there was no conflict, because her father had not lobbied her directly. Her spokesman, Manuel Galvan, said, "The truth is she would have voted for it regardless, and her father really did not lobby her except for the first year she was in office," in 2003.
On the night he won election as county assessor, Mr. Berrios repeated a campaign promise that he would give up his lobbying business. He no longer registers as a lobbyist, but state incorporation records still list him as an officer of B-P Consulting, and Mr. Panayotovich continues to lobby for the coin machine operators.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Berrios said he is in the process of selling his share of the business to Mr. Panayotovich.
Last year, state Representative Angelo Saviano, Republican of Elmwood Park, co-sponsored a bill in the House to help Mesirow Financial, a global investment firm, withhold some shareholder information when bidding on state contracts. Nicholas Saviano, Mr. Saviano's brother, is the senior managing director of business development and a registered lobbyist for Mesirow.
"There is no connection," Mr. Saviano said. "My brother is just an insurance salesman there. He didn't even know about the bill." Mr. Saviano said an outside lobbyist hired by Mesirow, William Filan, approached him to support the bill.
Few relationships are as striking as the one between Senator Jacobs and his father, the ex-senator. Lawmakers and lobbyists said the elder Mr. Jacobs often is found in his son's Senate office, sometimes with his feet propped up on a desk.
"He is a lobbyist. I am a senator," Senator Jacobs said. "He doesn't lobby me. There is no financial benefit," he said, and he discloses the relationship on ethics statements. Denny Jacobs did not return phone calls seeking comment.
In 2007, Denny Jacobs received $9,000 from the Illinois Recovery Association, which represents auto-repossession businesses, to lobby for a bill that would regulate the industry more tightly, according to Rick Constantine, who led the association's lobbying effort at the time. Senator Jacobs introduced the bill, which died in committee.
Denny Jacobs registered last year as a lobbyist for the Rock Island Boatworks, which owns the casino in that city. Senator Jacobs had sponsored a bill narrowly tailored to give the casino a tax break.
At the time Denny Jacobs was lobbying for the smart-grid bill last year, Senator Jacobs took to the floor of the Senate and invited colleagues to a reception of "appetizers" and "liquid libations" hosted by ComEd. State records show that the company spent $3,818 on the reception and an additional $5,690 taking lawmakers to dinner that night.
During hearings before the Senate Energy Committee he oversees, Senator Jacobs allowed less than 15 minutes of testimony before adjourning, sending the measure to the Senate floor.
The move denied Scott Musser, the associate state director of the AARP, the opportunity to express his opposition. "It was very suspect, especially on such a huge and controversial issue," Mr. Musser said.
Senator Jacobs said later, "I knew I had the votes, so I moved it." When the measure came up for debate on the Senate floor, Mr. McCarter, the Republican senator, criticized Senator Jacobs for being the chief sponsor of a bill for which his father lobbied. Senator Jacobs walked across the aisle and thumped Senator McCarter on the chest.
Senator McCarter later complained to Capitol police that Senator Jacobs punched him; Senator Jacobs said he merely poked him. He apologized, and a local prosecutor declined to pursue the matter.
Senator McCarter, a first-term legislator, said he felt disillusioned by the whole experience.
"It was a conflict of interest then, and it's still a conflict," Mr. McCarter said. "It's the way things have been done for so long, they don't even see it as wrong."
Senator Jacobs said that supporting a bill that benefited his father's client did not involve a conflict because the legislation was "good for Illinois." Many of his colleagues agreed, passing the law over the governor's veto.
This article is based on reporting by faculty and students of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Fredric N. Tulsky and John Sullivan are faculty members who direct the school's Medill Watchdog program, an initiative designed to hold public officials accountable through in-depth reporting.
Commentary No. 319, Dec. 15, 2011
"The United States versus Everybody"
Once upon a time, the United States had many friends, or at least relatively obedient followers. These days, it seems to have nothing but adversaries, of all political colorations. What is more, it seems not to be doing too well in its adversarial encounters.
Take what has been happening in November of 2011 and the first half of December. It has had confrontations with China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, Germany, and Latin America. One can't say that it has gotten the better part of any of these controversies.
The world interpreted the presence and announcements of Pres. Obama in Australia to be an open challenge to China. He told the Australian Parliament that the United States was determined "to allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region." To this end, the United States is deploying 250 Marines to an Australian air base in Darwin (and possibly raising the number in the future to 2500).
This is only one of a number of moves of similar military display in the region. So, as the United States pulls out (or is being forced out) of the Middle East - for both political and financial reasons - it flexes its muscles in the Asia-Pacific region. Is this really believable, given both the U.S. public's growing reluctance to be involved externally and its urgent demands to reduce expenditures, even in the military? So far, China's "response" has been virtually a non-response, as if to say that time is on China's side, even for its relations with the United States, or perhaps especially for its relations with the United States.
Then there's Pakistan. The United States has thrown down the gauntlet. Pakistan must cease coddling its Islamist movements. It must cease seeking to undermine the Karzai government in Afghanistan. It must cease menacing India with threatened military action in Kashmir. Or what? That's the problem. It seems, from leaked documents, that the United States was thinking that its last remaining friend in Pakistan, the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, might fire the Army's leader, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. In response, Gen. Kayani arranged that Pres. Zardari go to Dubai for medical treatment. The potential U.S.-backed coup failed. And if the United States tries to retaliate by cutting off financial aid, there's always China to take its place.
In the Middle East, what Pres. Obama wants above anything else is that nothing dramatic happen between Israel and the Palestinians until, at least, he is re-elected. This doesn't really satisfy the needs of Saudi Arabia or of Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel. So they are both proceeding in ways that continue to stir up the pot from the United States' point of view. And the United States has been put in the position of pleading with them, not commanding or controlling them
Then there's Iran, supposedly the main immediate worry of the United States (as it is of Saudi Arabia and Israel). So the United States has been using its most supersecret drones to spy on Iran. Nothing surprising in this, except that it seems that somehow one of these drones landed in Iran. I say "landed" because the key question is why and how did it land. The CIA, whose drone this is, has unconvincingly tried to suggest that some mechanical failure accounts for this. The Iranians have implied that they brought down the plan with cyberaction. The United States says "impossible" - but Debka, the internet's voice of the Israeli hawks, says it's true. I for one think it's likely. In addition, now that the Iranians have the drone, they are working on deciphering all its technical secrets. Who knows? They may publish the secrets for the entire world to know. And then, how secret will the supersecret drones be?
And, oh yes, Germany. As everyone knows, there is a "crisis" in the Eurozone. And Chancellor Merkel has been working very hard to get the Eurozone countries to buy a "solution" that will work for her, both politically within Germany and economically within Europe. She has pressed for a new European treaty that would impose automatic sanctions on Eurozone countries that violate its provisions. The United States thought that this was the wrong approach. The U.S. position was that this was a middle-run action that did not address the very short-term situation. Obama dispatched his Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, to Europe to insist on his alternate suggestions. No matter the details, nor who is wiser. The important thing to note is that Geithner was totally ignored and the Germans have gotten their way.
And finally, the Latin American and Caribbean countries met in Venezuela to found a new organization, CELAC - which are Spanish initials for the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. Every country in the Americas signed on, except for the two that weren't invited - the United States and Canada. CELAC is designed to replace the Organization of American States (OAS), which includes the United States and Canada, and has suspended Cuba. It may take a while for the OAS to disappear and only CELAC remain. Still it's not exactly something they are celebrating in Washington.
by Immanuel Wallerstein
01.05.12 - 8:24 PM
Two time-traveling “chrononauts” who took part in a secret CIA intergalactic program in the early 1980s say they encountered President Obama, aka Barry Soetero, at least twice at U.S. facilities on Mars after he was teleported there by a “jump room” for a perilous mission to establish a defense regime, during which his primary task was "to be seen and not eaten." The White House has denied the claim, though they admit the young Obama once watched "Marvin the Martian.” Of course, you'd expect them to. Still, time travel might help explain how a former constitutional law professor could subsequently blatantly disregard so many fundamental legal rights and principles once he gained power as president.
