Shame

This remarkable video of the Occupy Davis incident—in which a line of armed cops responds to students sitting on the ground and refusing to leave by pepper spraying them as if they were insects—reveals the growing moral force of the popular movement and why the ruling elites are increasingly alarmed.

You can almost read the mind of this poor mook cop, guns and equipment dangling off him at every angle: uppity civilians are refusing to obey my order; therefore, I will assert my authority in the easiest, most effective possible way. No doubt he’s been at a dozen training courses sponsored by Homeland Security or the anti-terrorist network and long ago lost any sense of what policing is supposed to be about or how democratic societies are theoretically different from thug dictatorships.

The students, however, were not so easily intimidated and promptly performed what could become a defining moment of Occupy history. They began to chant, ‘Shame on you!’ and faced the cops down, even pushing them back. This was a brilliant, intuitive discovery of the moral force of righteousness, and Occupiers should replay it on the sides of buildings from coast to coast. The cops suddenly lose their bearings entirely: one moment they think they’re the revered guardians of public order; the next they’re exposed as bullies. Their faces tell it all: they don’t know if maybe the kids aren’t right.

I am reminded of a similar although much more vicious incident during my years reporting from Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship. Shortly after the notorious degollados murders (the word means, ‘those whose throats were cut’), there was a memorial ceremony in the main Santiago cemetery for the three victims. These were high-ranking Communist Party leaders who were snatched off the streets—in one case as the man was leaving his children at school—and later found dead in a field near the airport.

Memorials such as these were always swarming with heavily armed cops desperately trying to provoke any sort of incident so that they could start cracking heads and hauling people in. (The corrupt press would then blame the victims for starting ‘violence.’) Family members in attendance often had lost relatives to the torture dungeons of the regime or had them disappear never to be seen again. So the rage and resentment was right on the surface, and the attendees had to exercise enormous self-control to avoid giving the goons an excuse.

One of the dead men came from a well-known artist family, and his father, Roberto Parada, began to read a poem, which was entitled, ‘Ode to a Vile Bastard’ while his mother, the stage actress María Maluenda, and the widow, Estela Ortiz, looked on. The cops confidently circulated through the crowd, jostling the mourners and ready to pounce. But Parada just kept reading his screed against the regime and by extension those of its enforcers present, despite the vast imbalance of weaponry and ostensible power. It was an inspiring moment. Then Estela Ortiz then took the stage and let loose a volley of defiant denunciation that I only wish I had had the presence of mind to record. She was utterly fearless and directed her words right into the faces of the cops, cursing them as animals and cowardly thugs of a corrupt regime.

Little by little, the cops began to fall back. The looks on their faces were exactly what we see in the Davis video: surprise, then guilty shock. They suddenly saw themselves for what they were: armed goons harassing the mourning families of the civilian victims of the state that paid them.

Occupy’s radicalism is, in my opinion, precisely there: it is turning the tables on the smug exploiters and making it no longer cool for them to sit atop the pyramid flashing their filthy fortunes. Bankers are no longer the smartest, the hippest, the cleverest, the guys to meet, the A list with the hot babes—they are quickly becoming pariahs, and this, more than anything, will undermine their cozy get-rich-quick schemes.

Occupy = Vote (Not)

Our Mayor One-Percent’s crackdown on Zucotti Park may boomerang as soon as today. The Occupy movement could never thrive as an experiment in Utopian community while mobilizing against the greedy, ruling elite, and now there is a chance its attention will sharpen on the latter while issues of sleeping arrangements and where to find a potty become secondary. No doubt there was a certain creative spirit generated by maintaining a headquarters in the tiny plaza, but it was always temporary. I’ll be curious to see what ideas percolate up next about how to proceed, such as the suggestion that people in the neighborhood start to take in Occupiers so that they can sleep offsite and still stick around. Today’s demonstration should also give us an idea of the strength of the forces sympathetic to OWS and what they/we all have in mind.

A lot is being written about the nationwide coordination of the evictions and the role of Homeland Security, the FBI and probably the Obama Administration. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone not in a coma. The Occupy movement is a gigantic headache for the entire political class, and occasional pious bleatings of sympathy aside, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are eager to see it grow and coalesce further.

It’s a bit surprising to see even sophisticated observers like Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker miss the point in this regard as they gently urge OWSers to get back into the ‘political’ game and grasp—poor, innocent lambs that they are—that sooner or later it’s all about who wins elections. The Tea Party, these commentators point out, had a major success by channeling its energies into the 2010 elections and thereby imposing the current crew of lunatics on the entire country, despite their relatively low numbers. Or as Hertzberg wrote on Nov. 7, ‘Ultimately, inevitably, the route to real change has to run through politics—the politics of America’s broken, god-awful, immutably two-party electoral system, the only one we have.’

But OWS and its larger constituency have better instincts than that. They know that the electoral game is rigged and that the promises made in November are easily shredded by Christmas. What better demonstration of that fact than the ongoing disgrace of the Obama Administration itself, which systematically marginalized the popular forces that got it into office and folded the uprising against the Bush-era crimes into an electoral machine that it promptly dismantled once the job was done. The right wing, especially the Christian conservative movement, refused to play along with the GOP in that way and kept its potency.

No, OWS is much more a cousin to the rebellions of the 60s and 70s, which is why its propaganda doesn’t even address who’s running for what nor declare itself either for or against any of those guys as candidates per se. Its denizens don’t denounce Obama; they just ignore him. Obvious enemies of the 99% like Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker get mic-checked and harassed, but that doesn’t reduce Occupy Chicago to a voter canvassing operation for his Democratic counterpart. The core of Occupy is direct action, disruption, denunciation, confrontation, and the like, not letter-writing campaigns nor patient tolerance of proxies, even the well-meaning ones, in city councils or state legislatures. That hasn’t worked, and there’s even less reason to believe in it now that corporations can buy that entire system out of their petty cash boxes. As for the ‘route to real change,’ we’ll see about that. I don’t think the civil rights, antiwar, or women’s movements suffered from Hertzberg’s poverty of vision.

Yes, Hendrik, people haven’t forgotten that electoral democracy is better than dictatorship, and no doubt many millions will head out to vote in primaries next year. But as elected European leaders are sidelined in one country after another in favor of ‘technocrats’ willing to do the bidding of the French and German bankers, why should anyone delude himself that the worthy custom of suffrage will save us from subversion at the top?

"Occupy" the mind

I told someone just last night that the physical occupation part of the Occupy movement was not sustainable in the long run, but that if the authorities tried to smash it by force, they might well regret their decision. The movement can easily assume new forms that the 1% will find even harder to control, and now that Zucotti Park is being dismantled in the usual heavy-handed fashion—with an attempted news blackout to boot—the tactical skirmish is only going to get more interesting.

My neighborhood’s city councilman, Ydanis Rodríguez, is reportedly under arrest with a bleeding head wound. No doubt the cops decided he looked suspiciously Hispanic.

The stupidity of the 1%-defending powers has consistently stimulated the growth of the Occupy movement, and I don’t doubt this will be a further contribution.

Plumbing the depths of moral bankruptcy

Americans still capable of focusing on human decency rather than their own comfort should shudder with revulsion at the cheerleading for torture that occurred in the latest Republican presidential debate. These displays of willful ignorance and bloody-mindedness are farcical, but we scoff at our peril—history has too many examples of the vast damage that can be inflicted by buffoons.

For those who missed the spectacle, Bachmann openly welcomed torturing detainees in dungeons because it has worked so well to date. (Members of the audience stopped pulling the wings off butterflies and cheered wildly.) Cain said torture was bad but waterboarding doesn’t count as torture because he heard a general say so. Only Huntsman and Paul came out against drowning people repeatedly to make them talk—note their rank in the opinion polls.

This repugnant display will generate more ammunition for those voices obsessively convinced that we must save our republic by lining up behind Barack Obama. But Obama is the one individual who did most to enable Saturday’s celebration of viciousness. It was Obama who tried to close Guantánamo, met resistance and then dropped the subject. It was Obama who declared three months into his term that we must ‘look to the future’ and not even consider criminal investigations of ‘our’ torturers.

It was Obama who arranged for a new super-max facility to be built (in his home state of Illinois, no less) to house never-convicted detainees in inhuman conditions of isolation, even though they have been convicted of no crimes in any court.

The justification for this shredding of our 500-year-old system of legal protections for the accused, which dates from the resistance to the arbitrary power of the monarch, is that these particular accused are terrorist bad guys. How do we know? Someone in authority, preferably wearing a uniform, said so. Obama has done nothing to resist this mentality, and the argument that he was powerless in the face of right-wing fury is simply an excuse. We have no idea what would have happened if Obama had taken a firm stand against torture and lawlessness because he never did. And despite compromising away his principles, the attacks rain down upon him as a Muslim symp and a weakling anyway.

We have the worst of all worlds, and the torture regime is now an established part of our legal and political landscape with impunity for the perpetrators. The implications are chilling.

Glug, glug . . . [redux]

So Herman Cain, the implausible, yet real black cracker from Georgia, now passes into the dustbin of history hoist on his own excessively favored petard. The GOP seems cursed forever to relive in ever new ways its morbid fascination with the wanderings of the Clintonian phallus; it flails ineffectually at Obama, wishing that it could focus its hate through discovering a sexual offense in someone who seems contentedly married to a comely wife.

The disagreeably TMI details of Cain’s forays up the skirts of job-seekers (recalling Joan Rivers’ career-making joke on Carson: ‘Are men threatened by smart women? What guy ever reached up a woman’s dress looking for a library card?’) are unseemly, but no Fox commentator can condemn them as inappropriate. Kenneth Starr’s Monica-gate performance, his careful parsing of the trail of semen stains up a certain blue garment, remains within living memory. Our biped politics have always been driven by the exigencies of the male organ, but the modern politicization of the bedroom, stirred to life by the ‘60s and exaggerated beyond farce by the Christian ‘80s, now places it in our, um, faces far more immediately. There is no escape from its heavy-veined demands.

The end of Cain’s brief aurora borealis was yawningly predictable, but his success at Republican speed-dating, while it lasted, reflected some of that coven’s loony core values: contempt for the vulnerable, faux populism in grating tones, ignorance as virtue, the whole mythology of personal superiority reflected in access to ample supplies of cash. Even Cain’s groping was financed by siphoning expense money from a corrupt lobbying system in which luxury suites and high-end snatch were coin of the realm. Cain must be dumbfounded to suddenly realize that his participation in this business as usual is now the cause of his downfall.

The real tragedy for Cain, as outlined by a New York magazine commentator this week, is that his goal of becoming a Sarah Palin-like celebrity and cash in massively on the inspirational lecture circuit is now endangered. He has become a laughingstock while also exposed as a sleaze, probably a fatal combination. But his intuition was faultless: politics as spectacle, the New Hampshire primary as reality television. Maybe he can court Kim Kardashian, and put his hand up her dress live for the cameras.

How dare these Greeks vote? [Updated]

The EU endgame is illustrating that we now live under not democracy nor even oligarchy but simple bankocracy. If we resuscitated Aristotle, he’d have to rewrite Politics entirely as rule-by-the-global-moneylenders surely never occurred to him as a possibility. No doubt he’d curse us for awakening him from a pleasant 2,500-year sleep for such vulgarity and refuse to enable the (ever more) Dismal Science as dignifying superstition and wizardry.

[cartoon by Martin Sutovec @Jack’s Political Cartoons]

It is remarkable how completely and utterly the core neoliberal presumptions have collapsed in the face of the European debacle: that democratic capitalism signaled the End of History, that this glorious final stage of human development would usher in a permanent state of blissful well-being based on the popular will, the primacy of markets and peace among (roughly similar) nations. But things haven’t quite worked out according to that plan.

As usual, it was biped hubris that monkeyed up the works. Had Merkel and Sarkozy been able to force their banker overlords to absorb the losses of an early Greek default a year or two ago, the rolling EU train wreck probably could have been avoided or at least postponed to more prosperous times (if those ever return again). But this is demanding passion fruits from a sycamore tree. The autistic brains who rule the financier universe, as wonderfully portrayed in the new film Margin Call, are incapable of the long view and want only more, more, more, preferably today but in any case no later than next week.

Geithner and Obama are now demanding of the European ‘allies’ that no peripheral Mediterranean upstarts be permitted to stiff Citibank and JP Morgan as U.S. banks are just as exposed to the new blood-letting as their European counterparts. No doubt Obama’s Democratic team concurs with Merkozy that any hint of putting the Greeks’ fate to a vote by themselves is anathema—another fine Greek word.

Uncertainty and instability have reigned for a good year now, and I read no convincing predictions of what will come next. But this shlumping along cannot go on forever, and I suspect some resolution is approaching, some defining event that, while not conclusive, emphatically points our fragile world in one direction or another. Outright Greek default, of course, is one possibility, an increasingly likely one given the disarray at the top in Greece and the danger that the replacement for the current mortally wounded government will be no government at all. That would cascade through the EU’s and the world’s banks with nasty consequences although it would probably focus the minds of our fractious leadership a good bit.

Another is some form of authoritarianism to get the unruly Greeks (and anyone else getting ideas) back in line. Francis Fukuyama notwithstanding, History has not in fact ended, and the fall-back position of ruling elites has been muscle from the times of australopithecus. One would have to be very innocent to suppose that that option is off the table. Meanwhile, silly assertions of popular sovereignty, like Papandreou’s plebiscite on the debt peonage deal, will not be tolerated.

[Update] I see the economics editor of The Guardian, Larry Elliott, agrees with me. The money quote:

‘The latest phase of Europe's sovereign debt crisis has exposed the quite flagrant contempt for voters, the people who are going to bear the full weight of the austerity programmes being cooked up by the political elites. . . . To the extent that governments had any power, it has been removed and placed in the hands of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. What matters to this group is what the financial markets think, not what voters might want. It is as if the democratic clock has been turned back to the days when France was ruled by the Bourbons.’

Elliott adds that this would be disturbing even if the austerity medicine being administered were working. It is not.

Who will police the police?

Police rallied outside a Bronx courthouse a few days ago to denounce the prosecutors who dared to indict their fellow officers for the ‘professional courtesy’ of fixing parking tickets. Gang leader Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, shouted and stamped his feet over the dastardly arrests since, as he insisted, ‘taking care of your family’ is not a crime.

This headline and story followed two days later: [bold highlights added]

‘Brooklyn Detective Convicted of Planting Drugs on Innocent People’

By TIM STELLOH, New York Daily News

The New York Police Department, already saddled with corruption scandals, saw its image further tainted on Tuesday with the conviction of a police detective for planting drugs on a woman and her boyfriend.

Before announcing the verdict, Justice Reichbach scolded the Police Department for what he described as a widespread culture of corruption endemic in its drug units.

“I thought I was not naïve,” he said.

“But even this court was shocked, not only by the seeming pervasive scope of misconduct but even more distressingly by the seeming casualness by which such conduct is employed.”

The case was rooted in a far larger tale of corruption in Police Department drug units: Several narcotics officers in Brooklyn have been caught mishandling drugs they seized as evidence, and hundreds of potentially tainted drug cases have been dismissed. The city has made payments to settle civil suits over wrongful incarcerations.

During the trial, prosecutors described the corruption within the Police Department drug units that Detective Jason Arbeeny worked for. One former detective, Stephen Anderson, who did not know the defendant, testified that officers in those units often planted drugs on innocent people.

The detective’s lawyer, Michael Elbaz, tried to discredit the most important prosecution witnesses, Yvelisse DeLeon and her boyfriend, Juan Figueroa. Ms. DeLeon had testified that the couple drove up to their apartment building in Coney Island and were approached by two plainclothes police officers. She said she then saw Detective Arbeeny remove a bag of powder from his pocket and place it in the vehicle.

“He brought out his pocket,” Ms. DeLeon told the court. “He said, ‘Look what I find.’ It looked like little powder in a little bag.”

In the department’s Brooklyn South narcotics unit, for instance, drugs seized as evidence are not counted or sealed until they reach the precinct and can be handled by multiple officers along the way, Justice Reichbach said, adding that such unacceptable practices “pale in significance” to the “cowboy culture” of the drug units.

“Anything goes in the never-ending war on drugs, and a refusal to go along with questionable practices raise the specter of blacklisting and isolation,” he said.

The accused, 14-year veteran detective Jason Arbeeny, faces only four years in prison for ruining people’s lives with phony accusations, ironically far fewer than the terms he saddled his victims with.

But ‘anything goes’ in the war on drugs and, needless to say, its capitalized first cousin, the War on Terror, and that simple phrase illustrates how Dick Cheney, Barack Obama and all their little friends are playing not just with fire but a warehouse full of Roman candles in setting whole categories of their enforcers above the law. Police states don’t just appear overnight—they require careful preparation, indoctrination and coaching, and a populace complicit with its crimes. Ours is eager to the point of embarrassment.

Note the similarities between Detective Arbeeny’s tactics and those loved by our Homeland Security teams: you find a guilty party and then figure out how to create evidence around them. So far, the terrorist-hunters haven’t been accused of total fabrications, but what’s stopping them? The day they face NYPD-style quotas to keep their funding intact cannot be far off.

Incidentally, there is a direct line between these abuses of policing power and the criminal behavior of the still-untouched Wall Streeters and their collaborators, the money-churning mortgage packagers and servicers. The nearly dead mortgage market may, in fact, turn out to be the one place where impunity’s consequences most quickly become obvious for the indifferent masses as they see the value of their principal asset—home equity—go up in smoke. This already has happened to millions, but many, many more could suffer a similar fate unless the ongoing legal shenanigans are investigated, exposed, prosecuted and thereby stopped. The Obama/Geithner team’s insistence that all will be well if we just let the banks get away with all their crimes is going to end badly—how is the housing market ever going to recover if people cannot trust even the deeds to their own properties?