Weaponizing sex

Or more precisely, weaponizing sexual harassment, coercion, aggression, and violence: largely, a good thing. Our culture has changed its view of these behaviors, recognizing some that used to be thought cute or harmless, criminalizing others that once escaped that category. Women, and men for that matter, now have greater opportunities for bodily autonomy and safety, freedom of decision, and the chance, albeit imperfect, to pursue the right to be left alone.

And yet, our notoriously sexophobic culture can turn sexual misconduct into a selective weapon, just as corruption—undeniably a social ill in itself—is easily incorporated into the tyrant’s arsenal to consolidate autocratic power. (Recall the child-sex-ring debacle of the late 1980s—now revived as QAnon—that led to many horrific imprisonments of innocent daycare workers.)

Anita Hill educated America about how sexual harassers abuse and constrain women as workers; it is one of the age’s great ironies that a principal engineer of the backlash against Hill is now the champion of millions of women eager to see the back of the pussy-grabber-in-chief. Clarence Thomas still occupies the Supreme Court bench that Joe Biden ushered him into. The felling of an Epstein or a Weinstein remains an unusual denouement while most abuse escapes punishment.

While it is healthy that people sometimes now dare to denounce outrages against the body, we should keep in view the great utility accusations related to sex have had historically for the powerful. Some barely reach our consciousness: the Malaysian regime deployed rape accusations in 1998 against Anwar Ibrahim, [above right] a deputy prime minister, leading to a lengthy imprisonment, convenient for his political enemies. Ibrahim’s ordeal was further complicated by the fact that his accuser was a man in a country where any homosexual acts were illegal.

That was far away, but closer to home we have the sexual misconduct (consistently headlined as “rape”) allegations against Julian Assange, exploited by the security states of the U.S. and U.K. to get him into prison. Having weaponized his behavior, the furious spy agencies now have Assange in solitary and facing life in prison in the U.S. for the crime of embarrassing and exposing them.

A more obscure weaponization of sexual harassment claims also comes from the U.K., where former first minister Alex Salmond was framed by his rivals in the Scottish National Party with a bevy of anonymous testifiers to his alleged groping and sexual assault [see photo above]. Salmond faced 13 separate charges—he was acquitted on each one. The court awarded Salmond 512,000 pounds in legal costs from the Scottish Government over their botched fishing expedition, termed “unlawful, unfair and tainted by apparent bias.” Sounds a bit fishy, no?

But the British legal system grants excessive protections to accusers in cases like these, enabling the tabloid press to splash for weeks lurid headlines, like the one shown at the top, while Salmond’s defense was hogtied and unable to counter the accusatory narrative. Although the case collapsed ignominiously, the tabloids never undid the damage inflicted by their salacious tales, which linger in the public mind and no doubt put an end to Salmond’s political career. A cynic might observe that Salmond’s opposition to foreign adventures such as the Iraq invasion may have put him in severe disfavor with the intelligence/weapons lobby, but we don’t know if they had a hand in all this. If we find out in 10 years that they did, it won’t matter. The accusations have done their job.

Furthermore, the judicial persecution continues with one of Salmond’s few defenders, former ambassador Craig Murray [left], now charged with contempt of court for his blog posts on the trial, in which he took meticulous care not to identify any of the women whose testimony the jury promptly tossed out. While the tabloids get off scot-free despite publishing far more questionable material, Murray has to face an expensive slog through the courts in what certainly smells like retaliatory, selective prosecution. Read the details at his excellent blog.

Then we have our presidential aspirant himself, against whom a credible accusation of sexual assault dropped into the well of forgetfulness soon after it surfaced. As a thought experiment, can anybody imagine what we would all be talking about today if the accused were Bernie Sanders? When the Democrat hierarchy coalesced around Biden’s candidacy, female Democrats jumped to exclaim “Me Too!” while tossing the “Believe Women” slogan into the temporary trashcan. Believe me, I get it—now’s not the time for purity tests. But let’s also admit to a towering double standard.

Which brings us to the case of Kansan Aaron Coleman, the teenaged dishwasher who pulled off a surprise primary victory against an incumbent for that state’s legislature. He turns out to have engaged in reprehensible behavior with a female middle school classmate and is taking considerable heat for it. He is apologetic and claims to have grown up. Some voices insist he be shunned and banned—no doubt many Biden voters among them. And the state Democrat party is amassing a huge war chest to reverse the vote with a write-in campaign for the corporate-friendly incumbent whom Coleman ousted, claiming that his behavior in childhood should disqualify him.

Of course, their campaign has nothing whatever to do with Coleman’s support for legalizing marijuana, abortion rights, and Medicare for All. But the party that welcomed an unrepentant Bill Clinton to their recent convention has no time for a kid who committed abuse at age 13.

I have read numerous accounts of how the Chinese Communist Party works at the local level and reached the conclusion that party operatives there are compelled to engage in routine corruption that greases the wheels of the state from top to bottom. If promoted, the lowly official then must collude with his bosses’ more lucrative graft and extortion at risk of marginalization, dismissal, or worse. With corruption then baked into the system, the top capos can easily take down their rivals with a lively “anti-corruption” campaign, which will resonate with the long-suffering citizens who have had to put up with the constant grifting by their overlords. Power struggles are veiled with pious phrases about cleaning up the bad behavior of this one and that one, but no real reform of the system is attempted or intended.

The weaponization of sex threatens to follow this playbook: shock and dismay over the antics of one’s enemies; understanding and dismissal on the rare occasion when the complaints reach one’s friends. Supporting victims of abuse should remain the focus; at the same time, we should not be naïve about when and why we hear from them and which ones are taken seriously.

Our elections don’t need protection from any damn furriners

The loose talk about Russian-Chinese-Iranian interference in our democratic process makes several assumptions, the first being that we have a democratic process with which to interfere. That is increasingly debatable and brings up a correlate: that our system reflects the popular will or, as Lincoln phrased it, government of, by, and for the people.

Let me hasten to say that, having lived under military dictatorship, I value democratic forms even when imperfect or plagued with cheating in all its multitudinous manifestations. We have not sunk to the depths of electoral playacting that occurs in, say, Azerbaijan or Guinea-Bissau; opposition candidates are not regularly assassinated, nor are their supporters frequently beaten with pipes or caused to disappear. Even budding autocrats such as Erdoğan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines and many like-minded others must submit at least superficially to the electoral process while massaging it to assure their permanence in power. Pinochet himself could not crush the electorate when he stood in a 1988 plebiscite to award himself a new eight-year term as president and famously “ran alone and finished second.”

But the idea that the sovereign American people march to the voting booths, select representatives to defend their interests and well-being, and then monitor these solons to make sure they do so is frankly fantastical. Rather than worrying ourselves about what the nefarious Russkies or an Iranian hacker in a long gown might be doing, we should direct our gaze to the behavior of native-born Americans.

Before delving into that, however, let’s pause to remind those who came in late that ALL the “reports” of foreign interference in our sacred elections come from anonymous sources at spook agencies whose record is weak when it comes to propagating actual facts. More often, they pull convenient rumors out of their collective G-I tract and feed the tasty chittlins to selected stenographers at the Times and Post. These spicy propaganda sausages are like QAnon chalkboard drawings for liberals, satisfying fantasies designed to keep Democrat-leaning voters believing in the November tooth fairy while remaining in a state of paralyzed anxiety. Pore over the dozens of breathless paragraphs in the Times or listen to the endless MSNBC chatter about these spy tales from anonymous insider sources, and you will wait impatiently for anything resembling a confirmable datum. Check out Craig Murray for many hilarious details of the British version of this journalistic cotton candy from the “Intelligence Community.”

While our discomfited gaze is drawn to the prospects of October surprises, November sabotage, and post-election defiance, the evidence of ongoing voter suppression right here at home performed by U.S. citizens on other U.S. citizens is evident for all to see. Furthermore, it’s been going on for years. In 2019, Georgia tossed hundreds of thousands of mostly black and Hispanic voters off their registration rolls. Earlier, in 2017, Georgia governor Brian Kemp cheated his way into the statehouse by purging 1 out of every 10 voters in a similar fashion. Democrats let him get away with it.

In 2016 Michigan Republicans successfully challenged on technicalities 75,000 absentee ballots, mostly from Detroit districts, enabling Trump to win that key state by a margin of 10,000.

Wisconsin Republicans put so many obstacles in the way of voting that Trump arguably squeaked by in 2016 with that thumb on the scale.

Then in 2020 the 600,000 residents of Milwaukee (40% black) had five polling stations available while the state refused to let people vote absentee.

Going back further, Ohio purged its voter rolls in 2004 to lock in a key state for W’s second term victory.

States everywhere use electronic voting machines that are easily hacked, producing dubious results that can never be audited due to the lack of a paper trail.

We now hear cries of horror about the attempts to cripple the U.S. Postal Service and block mail-in voting, as well we should. But note that these voter suppression tactics are old news. They have been in the GOP toolbox for at least two decades while the Resistance raises no more than a bland objection before acquiescing to the results of the theft—the classic example being Democrat legitimization of the purloining of the 2000 presidential election with Supreme Court collusion. The kind of permanent denunciation of vote-rigging that would educate (and inflame) the public to insist on free and fair elections—the kind of thing we demand from other countries—is sorely lacking.

Perhaps one reason is that the Democrat machines actually like the cheating as they can do it, too. After all, electoral chaos, incompetence, and the subsequent freedom from accountability enables them to maintain minority control in their respective fiefdoms. Brooklyn (NY) famously “lost” the registrations of many tens of thousands of likely Bernie voters during the state's key 2016 primary.

California’s primary apparatus is so dysfunctional and unreliable that no one can confidently say that that all-blue state accurately reports voter preference, especially in close races. [Upon searching for links for this item, I noted that the headlines for 2016 and 2020 both used the word “chaos.” Plus ça change . . .]

Aside from dubious outcomes in close races, our political class has made sure that most of them aren’t close at all. Gerrymandering is a long-standing national sport, enabling the two sets of party insiders to set up shop as feudal potentates in their respective enclaves without fear of annoying interruptions from mere citizens. North Carolina’s absurd districts [see map above] are a national disgrace. Wisconsin Republicans regularly get fewer votes and a majority of state legislative seats.

Finally, of course, there is the staggering absurdity of the Electoral College, a slaveholder-protection artifact from the most shameful aspects of our early history. But perhaps this anti-democratic anachronism more accurately reflects the nature of our democracy than we care to acknowledge. A hefty percentage of seats occupied by our political class are non-competitive, safely dominated by one party or the other, such that the respective machines can concentrate on serving the interests of whatever lobby or corporate interest group they wish. No wonder preserving the accuracy of expressions of the people’s will awakens so little fervor among them. And if something goes wrong, there’s always the Russians/Chinese/Iranians to take the blame.

Dangers of a Biden Administration

Trump is terrible, okay we got that out of the way.

Biden’s attacks on the collapsing Trump "government," despite a few rhetorical bows to Bernie’s platform, is heavy on symbolism in the domestic realm. In foreign policy the Biden-ite discourse is arguably worse than Trump’s, who has been fairly consistent in avoiding new wars and even has taken steps—horror of horrors—to end old ones.

One thing you have to credit Democrats for: they know how to sniff the winds for the aroma of shifting zeitgeists. They’re all over getting rid of Confederate flags, ending the celebration of slave-owning rebel generals, and sporting kente cloth at their kneeling ceremonies. They will publicly worship the late John Lewis, who was a loyal member of their team, and quote Martin Luther King (except not the antiwar or anti-capitalist parts).

Of course, in another era mainstream Democrat symbolism took a slightly different tack, such as when Bill Clinton staged his 1992 campaign event at Stone Mountain, Georgia, [top] where the new Ku Klux Klan celebrated its revived role during the Jim Crow era. Clinton was making sure no one would Willie Horton him and so arranged a line-up of black prisoners as the backdrop to his speech, flanked by a phalanx of southern Democrat pols hostile to the fading civil rights movement.

And the Clinton flirtation with southern fried racism didn’t end with mere gestures. Sax-playing Bill, the “first black president” according to Toni Morrison, followed up with the hugely successful 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—if you define “success” as putting hundreds of thousands of black guys in prison for long periods. Also if “vote blue, no matter who” is your entire political philosophy: cue today’s Democrats vowing to “fight for” reductions in these Draconian mandatory minimum prison terms that they were so instrumental in establishing. If they fail, of course, it will be the meanie Republicans’ fault now that the damage is done. Few will want to dredge up Senate majority leader George Mitchell’s statement that “This is a Democratic bill. The author of the bill is a Democrat. The principal supporter for this bill is a Democratic president.”

I rehash this old news to remind those eager to go back to bed—once Joe Biden is at the White House podium and putting everyone, including himself, to sleep with his recitation of bland nothingburgers—that the nation faces a series of deeply threatening crises that will not go away once Trump is dispatched to the dustbin. Simply removing the killer clowns from outer space who have leered at us for 3 ½ years won’t do a thing—we need radical policy changes and a fighting spirit equivalent to that of the white supremacists and neo-feudal minions of billionaires who now populate our mis-leadership class. We need someone who will jettison the Obama legacy of buckling to the felonious plutocrats, roll back both Bush’s and Trump’s obscene tax giveaways, resuscitate the long-dead antitrust function of government (targeting especially the internet mega-monopolists who mouth woke platitudes while ripping us off), immediately restore some emergency environmental protections, break with neoliberal orthodoxy to refashion an industrial policy that serves workers rather than corporate grifters, and come to the rescue of a populace caught between the Scylla of coronavirus and the Charybdis of debt peonage.

Bernie Sanders seems to think Biden is up to this, and while I find Bernie painfully credulous, he may be right about one thing: the pressure from below is going to be immense. Whether that pushes the corrupt Democrat machinery into first gear or not remains to be seen or, more exactly, forced to occur, by us. But there are possibilities not glimpsed in a long time.

That said, we should take note of a likely diversionary tactic emanating from the permanent war party frustrated by Trump’s unwillingness fully to indulge their belligerent fantasies: Democrat-led war scares. Biden has already said he has no interest in restoring the treaty with Iran (even if the U.S. were to be suddenly deemed agreement-capable), has attacked Trump from the right on Venezuela, and of course echoes the Putin Derangement Syndrome that has occupied Democrat hearts and minds since the first week of Trump’s presidency and the framing of Michael Flynn. His team is comprised of the usual gaggle of war-industry shills who think Trump leads a White House 5th column because he thinks nuclear war would ruin his business opportunities.

One need not sympathize with anyone in the sleazocracy to see that many shadowy forces did their damnedest to undermine Trump’s prerogatives as civilian head of state. They couldn’t tolerate any independence on that front despite Trump’s willingness to shovel ever higher mountains of public cash into the coffers of the arms makers and the uniformed services. He gave them vast opportunities for corruption and endless gifts like the destruction of nuclear weapons treaties, but it was never enough. Any attempt by Trump to pull back from Iraq or Afghanistan or not plunge further into the Syrian quagmire was instantly countered with lurid headlines of Russkie perfidy in our elections, our cyberspace, and no doubt tomorrow our underpants. All these howler propaganda campaigns based on “intelligence sources” whispering to stenographers at the Times and the Post got the full backing of the Democrat “resistance,” such as Adam Schiff (D-Raytheon).

And don’t expect any let-up in the relentless campaign to criminalize dissent on these and other fronts, such as the attempt to railroad Julian Assange for exposing U.S. war crimes. Biden’s Justice Department isn’t likely to be any less enthusiastic about dragging the much-abused Assange to a U.S. prison for “espionage” and drumming up long discredited theories about his links to the Russians (again). Nor should we expect self-appointed defenders of press freedom to endanger their access by dissenting from that shameful display.

Speaking of dissent, Trump’s experiment with disappearance squads via the deployment of Border Patrol kidnapper goons in Portland, Oregon, may give the Biden Administration creative new policing ideas. We shouldn’t succumb to any naïve fantasies about how Biden, a driving force behind the federal crime laws, will react to sustained challenges to his rule any more than we doubted Obama’s willingness to pull out the militarized police to crush Occupy.

We have our work cut out for us, and oh yes, Trump is terrible, I nearly forgot.

July Celebrates Genocide Month

[By Lionel Royer - Musée CROZATIER du Puy-en-Velay, Auvergne, France]

As we’re reexamining our history (both American and bipedal) and deciding what we want to memorialize and honor, July is a good time to reflect upon the fact that the entire month commemorates a guy who carried out genocidal slaughter in the heart of Europe. Not referring to Hitler here, but rather Julius Caesar.

There’s a new translation out of Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul, called this time The War for Gaul, so it’s a good occasion to get past those Latin 101 lessons about how Gallia is omnis divisa in partes tres and recall that JC was a bloodthirsty imperialist who marauded through the forests of what we now call France to make himself a fortune and please the homies back in Rome with some new provinces. Some of the tribes tried to avoid or slip out of the Roman yoke while others bowed to the inevitable, but Caesar still found ways to dispatch somewhere around 700,000 to a million “barbarians” in his pursuit of glory. And he didn’t even need to discover America to achieve it.

In a sane world, this behavior would be considered deeply pathological, but instead we have no problem marveling at Caesar’s accomplishments, which also included another million Gallic civilians sent south into slavery. Plutarch in one passage reports that after a battle “the destruction was such that lakes and deep rivers were filled up with dead bodies and became passable to the Romans.” Imagine if they had had nuclear weapons or even gunpowder.

Caesar didn’t rule as dictator for very long (49-44 BCE), but he did manage to revamp the old Roman calendar into what became known as the Julian version, in which Quintilis posthumously turned into Iulius (July). Therefore, we still blithely mark our mid-summer frolics with the name of a man so notorious for mass slaughter and the slave trade that Robert E. Lee looks positively benign by comparison.

The point is not to morally relativize the Confederate slave-drivers and -traders but to revisit how easily we swallow the heroics of male bipeds whose behavior in its modern form is driving us quickly to species eradication. There is a statue of JC overlooking the Naples coast, and I gather it would occur to few Italians to remove it while plenty would be scandalized at the thought of one celebrating Mussolini. But Caesar helped Rome build its mighty empire, so Dante put his turncoat assassins Brutus and Cassius in the deepest circle of Hell, stuffed feet first into two of the three mouths of Satan himself. (Judas Iscariot got the third socket).

Human populations think it’s cool if their particular team (ethnicity, city-state, nation, empire) rules the roost, and they evidently experience little moral disquiet about how that control is maintained. Just to pick on the Romans a bit more, here’s one set of estimates of how many people died in their various campaigns to broaden and sustain the Empire: First Punic War (264-241 BCE) 400 thousand; Second Punic War (218-202 BCE) 770 thousand; Genocide of Carthage (146 BCE) population reduced from 500 to 55 thousand; Social (internal Italian) Wars (91-88 BCE) 300 thousand; Mithridatic Wars 400 thousand; Servile Wars (slave revolts) (134-71 BCE) 1 million; Gaul 700 thousand; British revolt 150 thousand; Jewish Wars 350 thousand; and so on. This doesn’t count the considerable numbers of Romans who died after falling into disfavor nor the estimated 3.5 million gladiators who died over seven centuries of games at the rate of 8,000 per arena-year. Boys will be boys.

This was obviously a polity whose elite was quite comfortable with the mind-boggling level of destruction required to sustain its dominance. But before we succumb to pride, let’s consider if there’s any reason to think that humanity or our benighted slice of it has advanced beyond such indifference—though the immediate motivations among those at the top may well have changed. For example, on the presumably incoming Biden team we find not war heroes hungry for triumphal processions to parade the captured enemy chieftains and stolen loot but Beltway sleaze merchants angling for a fat government contract for their buds in the armament industries, to which end they are determined to keep all the wars going and, better yet, to start new ones. The essential bloody-mindedness hasn’t changed, just its form.

Another variation is the sophistication of modern propaganda, but that turns out to be nothing so novel either. Romans were aghast at their unruly subjects getting a swelled head or forgetting to pay tribute and regularly sent out generals to slap down the provincials by skewering a few hundred thousand, that is, when they weren’t busy crucifying backtalking household servants. In modern times, we rely on our own interpreters of sheep entrails at the Temple of Jupiter, i.e. “intelligence sources” who whisper gnomic phrases about Russians paying off treacherous subjects to slip a dagger into a few centurions here and there. We display no greater skepticism at these oracular pronouncements from our pontifex maximus on the Potomac than the Romans did when massing their legions for a campaign against Carthage or the rebellious Helvetii.

At a less dire historical moment, one could be resigned to the incorrigible failings our of hyper-developed species and retreat to one’s garden. But when the preservation of our habitat hangs in the balance facing multiple threats, looking away from our cruel record is not an affordable luxury. We must question far more deeply, refuse easy answers, and demand nothing less than the reordering of the human spirit. Or die.

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What will incoming Dems do to reverse the damage?

Like cosmic background radiation reminding our universe of the Big Bang, Trumpism will spew its component parts in all directions at astronomical speeds once it implodes as a supernova. We can see this process gathering hyper-velocity now, his strange, white-dwarf universe shrinking and collapsing around the tiny point of its unstable star.

The Trumpoid ejecta will contain valuable clues as to precisely which properties of modern political physics came together to blow up governance in the United States as the world looked on in appalled amusement. These elements predate Trump; he did not invent them, and their poisonous effects will survive him. What remedies will be applied? By whom?

Those who have turned Nov. 3 into a fetish object, insisting that All Will Be Well once a (D) replaces the (R) on our national throne, will take little interest in the repair work. These are the Facebook faces turning purple with rage at any suggestion that Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are not a three-person godhead poised to batter our nation’s sinful heart and redeem us from Trumpian evil. They refuse to acknowledge that when Trump is thoroughly discredited (and the repudiation will reach world-historic heights), the forces that brought him into being remain intact. The Democrat hierarchy has no track record of truly opposing these tendencies and in fact is complicit with many of them. We should be thinking hard now about how to address the damage in 2021 and beyond.

It’s hard to recall now, given the budding love affair between mainstream Dems and George W. Bush, but once upon a time Bush’s term in office was also considered a disgrace, so much so that he, a sitting president, wasn’t invited to his own party’s convention in 2008. (Neither was Cheney.) The economy was in the toilet thanks to years of corrupt non-regulation of the banking and mortgage sector, and the illegal conquest of Iraq, sold to us with a pack of lies, was turning into the criminal quagmire that it remains today.

Obama sailed into office and promptly turned the page on all that in the spirit of bipartisan kissy-face, which he claims to have thought would lead to a technocratic, kumbaya consensus with the reprobate Republicans grateful at the second chance he was giving them. It didn’t.

The Bush-era actions that Obama et al. decided to consign to unexplored history included: the destruction of habeas corpus by the creation of dungeons at Guantánamo where people are (still) held without trial; a regime of systematic torture of prisoners using secret drop-off sites in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and elsewhere; destruction of the evidence of same, including videotapes, by the CIA; illegal wiretapping and electronic surveillance of citizens in violation of the 4th Amendment as exposed by Edward Snowden (Senator Obama voted to grant retroactive immunity to the telecom partners); rampant bank fraud leading to the 2008 financial collapse and loss of home equity by 8 million households (many African-American); grotesque tax cuts for the hyper-wealthy. None of these profoundly destructive patterns of criminal and/or immoral behavior led to investigation, a public airing of what occurred, prosecution, or reversal. At best, there were squishy attempts at “reform,” most of which could be ignored, watered down later, or reversed.

Obama then deepened the rot by: persecuting journalists like James Risen and Julian Assange, paving the way for Trump’s more demagogic attack on Fake News; crushing the Occupy movement with an 18-city coordinated paramilitary attack; suppressing evidence of bankster crimes while reassuring the financier oligarchs that he was “standing between you and the pitchforks”; undermining the historic opportunity for truly universal health care with the insurance-friendly Obamacare mess (handing Congress back to the Republicans in the process); leaving intact the crushing student debt that is bankrupting entire generations; and so on.

In short, Obama and the Democrats became partners in much of the worst of the W era, pushing the window of what is now possible, both in terms of overt crimes and the ongoing looting of the nation by the rentier elite, sharply in the wrong direction. Obama himself, the quintessential centrist, chided critics with paternalistic admonishments about the limits of what was possible, limits which he had done little to expand.

All of which led directly to Trump’s election.

Many found Obama’s discourse as president measured, lofty, and statesmanlike; I thought he was a pompous ass. But there’s no arguing with success. He left office with considerable popularity and while in office convinced a goodly part of the masses that someone was on their side, despite the evidence of their own gradually sinking attempts at maintaining a livelihood. Now we are at a similar juncture as the slash-and-burn Republicans prepare to leave a trashed and looted nation to the next series of Democrat stand-ins.

But we are not in 2009. Twelve years have passed in which the rich have become richer, the yachts huger, the prisons fuller, the debts heavier, the racists scarier, the cops bloodier, and the planet hotter—all before the breakdown of everything brought on by COVID-19. And we have, to lead us out of this thicket of simultaneous social crises: Joe Biden! Mr More-of-the-Same running a Hidden Basement Campaign, which is set to succeed by default. A figure built on yesterday’s vaguest ideas wrapped in contentless word salad that the poor fellow can’t even spit out in full sentences.

It would take the pen of a Trotsky to describe to what profound depths our political culture has sunk for it to present to us these two caricature candidacies at a moment of such gravity for all humanity. Obama arrived during an acute crisis of late capitalism and served it well; he cobbled together some salvage measures so the plutocrats could dump the costs on the most vulnerable and bounce back untouched. Meanwhile, he soothed the populace with fine phrases. The crisis was not solved, but merely kicked forward, and is now upon us again. But the complete absence of credible leadership from any quarter suggests that the system has no idea how to save itself this time around.

It is particularly curious that in this all-important election year, the usual dynamics of a presidential campaign have mostly disappeared, and not just because of the lock-down measures taken to try to save our immune systems. After the mad scramble of the early primaries, with endless debates and literally dozens of potential leaders to choose from, it now seems as if all that talk of putting someone in charge is an afterthought. Even Bernie Sanders sounds like a lost anachronism as he pounds away at his 50-year-old discourse about serving working people instead of the billionaires.

Have we accepted that no one is in charge? And that no one is riding to the rescue? Into the vacuum will surge new social forces—how healthy they are depends upon us.

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Would a transgender police chief solve our problems?

What if a major city facing a crippling upheaval against police abuses were to hire a transgender woman to take over law enforcement? It’s not a crazy idea, notwithstanding the Almodovarian implications, given the budding panic setting in at city halls around the country. What better gesture to the relentless crowds hitting the streets daily to demand radical change than to elevate the maximum symbol of wokeness and gender-bending, identitarian emancipation?

I knew a lot of transgender ladies during the time I ran an AIDS education and support group physically located at the main corner of transgender sex work in Santiago, Chile, and I can attest to the fact that they knew a great deal about how to handle violent men. I would gladly have accepted the services of many of them if I ever needed a bodyguard, and I don’t think that finding a credible candidate from among their ranks to buckle on some enforcement gear and manage the notoriously macho ranks of uniformed officers is a far-fetched notion.

But would it work to neutralize the deep perception of police departments as free-lance armies of occupation? It depends on what you think policing is about in our society as presently constituted. The mainstream view is that their job is peacekeeping, chasing down criminals, and protecting property. Residents of New York’s minority neighborhoods often don’t see it that way because their experience of the cops is permanent petty harassment combined with a surprising lack of competence in actually rooting out the crime that plagues their neighborhoods. A cynical wag might even conclude that eliminating crime isn’t really in a PD’s interest given that a steady stream of offenses keeps the arrest and prosecution numbers high, thus justifying more gear, more personnel, and more public deference.

Then there’s the opposite notion, that police exist to protect the assets and profits of the owner class, and on that score a moment of truth is about to arrive. Our three-month moratorium on evictions here in the city is about to end in a few days, at which time we will see a flood of cases in housing court by landlords seeking to oust non-payers, many of whom are now destitute and have no chance of coughing up $3000, $4000, or $5000 they owe in arrears. Police will be assigned the task of getting these people out of their now illegally occupied homes, and the BLM marchers may well be inspired to show up to express their opinions about what is taking place. At that point, anything could happen.

The marches are now surprisingly popular and draw broad support because they are mostly polite and well-behaved. The TV newscasters here express a fetishistic obsession with their peaceable nature, but when push literally comes to shove, these pious observers may find the tenor and consequences of the debate over what the police should do, when, and toward whom, to be more than a philosophical consideration.

A more immediate question, given that New York City is finalizing its annual spending plan, is how loud will the explosion be when Mayor De Blasio’s cop-worshipping budget proposal gets blasted into outer space. De Blasio originally tried to zero out all summer youth employment funding while not cutting a dime from the NYPD, despite the pandemic-induced plummet in revenues. In a bold attempt to get out in front of the rebellion and call it a parade, he pivoted to a $400 million cut. The latest figure bandied about is a reduction of $1 billion, or 1/6 of the police budget—which would put it back to roughly the spending level of 2013 when De Blasio took office after getting elected as a reformist progressive.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court this week ruled that LGBT persons are included as a protected population under the terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so police departments no longer have any grounds to refuse a TG applicant who then could move quickly up the ranks to a supervisory role, perhaps just in time to send out her riot squads to evict one of the black families who cheered our BLM demo last weekend.

If the fight over policing turns into a real, well, fight over policing, we needn’t waste time wondering how the courts are going to feel about that. That’s where the Supremes long ago set the tone by eagerly crippling unions, opening the floodgates to secretive political slush funds, and generally kowtowing to corporate and elite interests. Once the conflict returns to the realm of haves versus have-nots, our courts will be quick to send rent strikers, the jobless, or the destitute packing, no matter who is sharing the beds indoors with whom.

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Police “reform” is a failure because The Police think they are The State: Part 1

An anecdote from post-dictatorship Chile: a guy I knew slightly in Santiago had a job working for the first civilian president after 17 years of dictatorship and secret police terror. Patricio Aylwin was a Christian Democrat who had supported Pinochet’s coup like many “moderates” (equivalent to the mainstream Democrats of our day) and was elected in 1989 after a negotiated transition process that left Pinochet as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

My friend compiled the news reports of the day and sent a digest in to the president-elect along with the newspapers and magazines. (Aylwin hadn’t yet taken office.) He related to me that the police guards assigned to Aylwin’s home, carabineros (members of the national police who had military rank and whose commander previously sat on the four-man junta along with Pinochet), routinely intercepted the day’s newspapers, casually read whatever they fancied, and thought nothing of leaving the marks of their coffee cups on the president’s personal copies.

It was a minor but telling detail: these low-level police foot soldiers had so little fear of the ire of their ostensible civilian superior that they metaphorically put their feet up on his desk and spat on his carpet. Aylwin didn’t notice (or pretended not to), but the message was clear: our real boss is the guy in uniform, not some wanker politician in a suit.

This made me recall an interview I had with a long-retired military guy who lived around the corner from me in Ñuñoa, Gen. Roberto Viaux, a key figure in two attempted coups before Pinochet’s successful one. Although one of the attempts led to the murder of the Army chief, Viaux’s superior, he was allowed to decamp for exile in Paraguay and later to come back to Chile to live out his retirement.

Viaux was delusional and thought someone was going to come knocking on his door to play a new and heroic role when in fact he had long become a footnote to history. But he explained to me something absolutely central to military thinking: the armed forces and the nation, in the generals’ view, are one and the same. The nation exists if and only if the armed forces exist. In fact, let’s capitalize both: once the Armed Forces are gone, The Nation disappears. The two entities’ essences intermingle in a form of consubstantiality like that of the Three-Person Deity, with citizens relegated to a sort of misty Holy Ghost-ish role.)

Something similar operates in the miasmatic airs of One Police Plaza and not just in New York City. Law enforcement has long abandoned the view that its ranks exist to serve the city—they think they are the city. This was obvious a few years ago during the last “I Can’t Breathe” crisis when Mayor de Blasio made some conciliatory statements about how his own mixed-race son might be viewed by a trigger-happy cop. The police union had a cow over that, and shortly afterward two auxiliary officers were gunned down by a suicidal assailant who may have been angry about police abuses. Hundreds of officers then turned their backs on De Blasio when he spoke at the funeral.

This open act of insubordination made it clear that the ranks of the NYPD respond to their own hierarchy, not to the city that pays their hefty bills (and their overtime and their generous pensions after 20 years of service). It happened again this week when De Blasio’s daughter was arrested at a demonstration and had her bust sheet immediately leaked and circulated on social media by the cops who technically work for her father.

It’s even more obvious when police departments around the country respond to citizen demands for an end to state-sponsored murder by criminalizing their assembly and their speech. (Yeah, yeah, I know, arson and looting—we’re not talking about that.) The idea that someone should attempt to determine the parameters of public life or dare to assert limits on their deployment of the use of force is deeply offensive to their institutional self-concept.

Does this apply to every line officer or beat cop? It doesn’t have to. The belief system flows downward from the top, and the ideological true believers hold sway. I suspect that’s why so few cops of color dare to intervene to stop the white officers who overwhelmingly account for the excessive force abuses. They know who will get back-up from the system and who won’t.

And this is why “reform” of police practices is just a shiny object held out to distract children. Cops don’t need sensitivity training. They need a political revolution that restores them to their true role as public servants with a heavy burden of trust, i.e., the right to use deadly force, and the sanctions that come with misusing it. This change can only come from a restored civilian authority empowered by mass repudiation of the police as army of occupation.

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