Alexander Cockburn liked pit barbeque. I know this, because, just prior to a planned road trip through Georgia and the Carolinas several years ago, he asked Counterpunch readers to recommend some good barbeque joints to visit. I e-mailed him the names of a couple, one in Ellijay, in north Georgia, the other in Jackson, just south of Atlanta. I explained that he would probably particularly enjoy the one in Ellijay, because the colorful owner, with a hill country gift for humorous self-promotion, enjoyed exaggerating his political association with people like Pat Buchanan with large photographs posted all around the restaurant. He thanked me for the referrals, saying that they were tempting, but that, unfortunately, his route was not taking him near them.

On Saturday, I was shocked to learn that Cockburn had died of cancer. Despite my disagreement with him on subjects like global warming and Occupy, I respected his intellectual independence. Cockburn rightly pilliored the emphasis that some on the the left place upon hostility towards religion, correctly observing that the US is one of the most Christian countries in the world. You aren't going to persuade many Americans to politically support you, he observed drily, by attacking Christianity. More importantly, he understood that both liberalism and the organized left had lost any political influence that they possessed long ago. Perhaps because of his close contact with direct action environmental protest movements on the West Coast, as personified through the efforts of people like Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney and Julia Butterfly, among others, he recognized the emergence of an anti-authoritarian left that integrated environmentalism with anti-capitalism. Living on the Lost Coast in Petrolia, he watched it happen right before his eyes.

Accordingly, Cockburn wasn't surprised at the eruption of confrontational protests against the WTO in Seattle on N30 in 1998, protests that he covered personally. And, because of his lack of surprise, he properly identified, in a compelling article entitled Seattle Diary, the flash points of contention that evolved out of it. He criticized the AFL-CIO for diverting a large march away from the downtown where locked down protesters were being tear gassed and pepper-sprayed by the Seattle police. Fearful of embarrassing President Clinton, who was scheduled to attend the meeting the following day, the AFL-CIO refused to come to the assistance of people in the streets who were fighting on its behalf against the neoliberal policies of the WTO. It was a classic instance of US labor unions serving in the role of mediating protest for the benefit of capital. In this, the AFL-CIO response to the street protests in Seattle prefigured the recent health care reform debacle where, after a similarly illusory campaign of opposition, it accepted a horrible program in return for a short-term carve out from a tax upon purported high cost health plans.

Cockburn also recognized the same tendency among NGOs that claim to oppose the reorganization of the global economy for the benefit of capital. He rightly criticized Global Exchange, and one of its founders, Medea Benjamin, for intervening on behalf of the police to protect Niketown, the Gap and McDonald's, from attack by angry crowds. Benjamin even went so far as to say that the people involved should have been arrested. Cockburn, upon being challenged by Benjamin's husband, Kevin Danaher, exposed them, like the leadership of the AFL-CIO, as being noteworthy for wanting a dialogue with the WTO while the protesters wanted to shut it down. Hence, Global Exchange was willing to assist the police in stopping the attacks because it impaired its prospects of serving as a self-selected intermediary between the anti-globalization movement, the WTO and the Clinton White House. It is one thing to argue that the left is not well served by instances of property destruction, as many in Occupy have done, and quite another to publicly state that those involved should be arrested. Just as the AFL-CIO was willing to serve in the role of ensuring that its members did not participate in unsanctioned protest that threatened its political and corporate relationships, Global Exchange attempted to fulfill a similar function in relation those involved in direct action.

For me, Cockburn's coverage of the N30 protests in Seattle was a seminal event, because it revealed a world of activism that I didn't know existed, or, if I did, seemed remote. At that time, I lived in a UC college town, Davis, California, where the boundaries of acceptable activism where dictated by the local Democratic Party apparatus, which was, of course, Clintonophile through and through. Cockburn intellectually legitimized the increasing centrality of anti-authoritarian activism, an activism that would be in the forefront of resistance to the so-called war on terror post-9/11, as most brutally manifested by the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and, more recently, in the Occupy movement. Like Tariq Ali, he insisted, despite criticism, upon the urgency of the creation of a broad based anti-imperialist effort that included the libertarian right. For both, saving the lives of people in the Middle East and Central Asia took precedence over the primacy of ideological consistency. The libertarian site antiwar.com periodically reposted his articles, and Justin Raimondo, the founder of the site, posted a heartfelt obituary. Cockburn understood that while, in the long term, the interests of anti-authoritarians and libertarians were at odds, they were congruent on the essential, contemporary question of US imperialism. Not surprisingly, liberals have taken the opposite stance, with the result that the interminable war on terror proceeds with little restraint.

Curiously, in one of his last articles, Cockburn posted a valedictory for Occupy. In it, he seems to have implicitly undergone a last minute conversion to an orthodox Leninism. For this, and other reasons, Louis Proyect found it objectionable, and while many of his criticisms are legitimate, he fails to recognize that Cockburn was saying a lot of the same things that sympathetic Marxists like Pham Binh have already said, especially in relation to the distortions created by the primacy of 24/7 activists and its opaque decisionmaking processes. Cockburn was especially sharp in his critique of the fetishization of social networking technology among some in Occupy, something that I had already expressed ambivalence about this in a post on my blog several months ago. My sense is that Cockburn may have again said the unmentionable, that Occupy is dead as we know it. He will not, however, live to discover whether the social conditions that gave rise to it will persist, if not intensify, resulting in future variations of like-minded anti-capitalist resistance.

Labels: Activism, Alternative Media, American Empire, Anarchism, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Religion

A couple of weeks ago, Louis Proyect posted an excellent article to The North Star site, Party-Building in the 21st Century. Proyect, the unrepentent Marxist, writes from the perspective of someone who has survived the sectarian stuggles of the last 40 years. Accordingly, there is much in the article that merits praise.

For example, Proyect is scornful of those Marxist formations that have seemingly existed solely for the purpose of denigrating the efforts of others to organize broad based anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist coalitions. He emphasizes that it is essential for the left to engage people in terms of the difficulties that they experience in their daily lives. Hence, his positive references to Lenin's 1899 draft programme for the Russian Social-Democrats, the Black Panther breakfast program and the recent SYRIZA 40-point program, which, along with structural measures like cutting military spending, taxing the banks and reforming the electoral process, includes proposals such as housing the homeless in churches, government buildings and banks, opening dining rooms in public schools to offer free breakfast and lunch to children and free health benefits to the unemployed, homeless and those with low salaries. For someone like me, who lives in a city, Sacramento, that has been devastated by the bursting of the real estate bubble, with a proliferating homeless population that constituted one of the most prominent features of the local Occupy effort, such an approach has great appeal.

Interestingly, as acknowledged by Proyect and Pham Binh, anti-authoritarians grasped this concept while Marxists did not, working upon issues within Occupy that were seemingly at odds with their vision of society. As a result, we have observed the peculiarity of anarchists participating in the defense of people threatened with foreclosure, protests against university fee increases and resistance to the closure of public schools. Of course, it only appears peculiar if one is unaware of the anti-authoritarian emphasis upon the need to provide support for those victimized by the deprivation and violence of the capitalist system. It remains an open question as to whether they can continue to do so, but they should be credited for the right response at a critical moment.

With Occupy currently out of public view as a consequence of police repression, there is much discussion how to proceed. Proyect, not surprisingly, along with other Marxists, sees the way forward through through a humanitarian program that forms the basis of a new socialist party, evoking the tangled history of such efforts going back to the 19th Century. Given that he knows his history well, his presentation, on its own terms, is flawless. But what does it mean to engage in party-building in the 21st Century by reference to examples that, in some instances, are over 100 years old? Of course, there is much to learn from them, but one must also account for the social evolution that have occurred during this period, with one of the most significant aspects of it being the disintegration of collective social institutions that engaged the working class. When anarchists and Marxists competed for the support of workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these workers, whether Marxist or anarchist, had networks of housing, schools, social centers, gymnasiums and newspapers. They created such networks because the governmental and non-profit programs that provide such services today either didn't exist, or were grossly inadequate. One of the paradoxes of the creation of the liberal social welfare state is that it substituted the governmental and non-profit provision of assistance for earlier efforts created by workers, providing, at least until recently, higher levels of support while simultaneously disempowering them. In parts of the world that experienced industrialization after the United States and northern Europe, like Italy and South America, this process was not concluded until the 1970s. Contemporary neoliberalism is distinctive because it extracts the value of these governmental forms of social assistance for the benefit of private investors.

For purposes of this discussion, however, it is essential to understand that the socialist parties described by Proyect emerged, in most instances, as part of the vibrant, independent institutional universe created by workers prior to the creation of the welfare state. In other words, party-builders had fertile ground in which to construct them, with workers readily accessible to them and thereby responsive to an attempt to assert their interests through a collectively organized party structure. Along these lines, even Proyect's reference to the Black Panthers is consistent with this, as many African Americans, in places like Oakland, Los Angeles, Detroit and Newark, had been excluded from the benefits of the welfare state through discriminatory practices (consider, for example, that there was a housing shortage in Watts just prior to the 1965 riots while thousands upon thousands of homes were being constructed for whites in the Los Angeles suburbs nearby). Accordingly, it was still necessary for them to rely upon informal networks of social support that were no longer necessary for others, especially the white working class. Even anarchists, while hostile to the electoral process, did, in many instances, as anarcho-syndicalists, participate in unions that served a similar purpose.

In this, the great socialist parties of the 20th Century, the Labor Party in the United Kingdom, the Parti Comunista Italiano in Italy, the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Socialist and Communist parties in France, among others, were all dependent upon a collective ethos that facilitated the emergence of the mass based, modern political party. The repudiation of this collective ethos is one of the most salient features of our time, and presents a challenge that must be confronted by anyone, like Proyect and, to a lesser extent, Binh, who proposes a socialist party-building enterprise for the left. We need not linger long over the evidence of this repudiation, it is all around us, the abandonment of the political parties by larger and larger segments of the population, the atomization of people within their communities and the prominence of a virtual culture that increasingly manipulates people through simulation and stimulation, as anticipated by intellectual figures like Bifo and Baudrillard. Constructing a party in such circumstances requires more than a willingness to participate in coalitions and the creation of a platform that speaks directly to needs of people.

Put bluntly, it additionally requires a traumatic delegitimization of the existing structures of political, social and cultural authority. We can identify three places where it has occurred: Venezuela, Bolivia and Greece. In Venezuela, the 1989 caracazo ignited a process that lead to the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez and the implementation of measures designed to alleviate the extreme inequality within the country. In Bolivia, Evo Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism took power through the generational efforts of indigenous social movements in opposition to neoliberal policies and drug eradication measures dictated by the United States. Meanwhile, in Greece, the imposition of extreme austerity measures since 2009 has resulted in the success of SYRIZA, a coalition of leftist parties, in recent elections. Greece, and, perhaps, Bolivia as well, presents the prospect of a possible socialist formation contemplated by Proyect, while Venezuela remains a country where power is still exercised through elites, with the mobilization of the populace through participatory political structures being tentative at best.

Proyect has periodically said that he expects conditions in the United States to continue to decline because of the rapaciousness of global capitalist elites. It is a rational assessment with a high probability of being accurate. He therefore insists that there is a great urgency towards the undertaking of the party-building effort that he advocates. Perhaps so, but if it proceeds, it is likely to move forward absent the vanguardism that he mentions in relation to the Nicaraguan revolution. SYRIZA relies upon a consensus decisionmaking process that preserves unity around a coherent statement of policy objectives in opposition to austerity. By doing so, it highlights the fact that future socialist formations, to the extent that they can be considered parties at all, will not administer themselves in accordance with the Leninist practices of the past. Instead, they will operate more horizontally, exposing the irrelevancy of anti-authoritarian critiques centered around the pernicious hierarchies within them. Accordingly, we may be moving towards a squaring of the circle whereby anti-authoritarians concede the necessity of participation within the electoral processes of the state, while Marxists acknowledge that it must be done through a formation that is horizontal to the greatest degree possible.

But can this be done in the United States as proposed by Proyect? I tend to believe that the country is too large, too fragmented, too much in the thrall of capital and militaristic nationalism for it to happen anytime soon. Instead, there will be a prolonged period of direct action and mutual aid efforts to expose the deprivation of the system and ameliorate its effects. In doing so, the participants must necessarily engage the populace in terms of their daily needs. But building the new in the shell of the old is not just an aphorism, it is considered a realistic, immediate strategy for dealing with the loss of jobs, housing, educational opportunities and medical care required to survive in this society. Hence, the parents of children in the Oakland Unified School District, faced with the closure of 5 elementary schools, didn't decide to organize a local socialist coalition, instead, they seized one of the schools planned for closure, Lakeview Elementary, and reopened it to continue to educate their children. Through the proliferation of such actions over time, the left may accumulate sufficient power to accelerate the collapse of American capitalism. But I doubt that it will happen peaceably through participation in the electoral process. At most, such participation, if it happens, will merely be one instrument among many that the left pragmatically utilizes to bring about this outcome.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Anarchism, Bay Area, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street

UPDATE: From an article written by Ryan Phillips of Oakland North:

The entrance to Lakeview on Grand Avenue was guarded by Occupy Oakland protesters on Thursday, who tried to limit who came and went from the school to only parents and students. Inside the campus, elementary-school aged children worked in the garden and then inside the classroom of longtime Lakeview teacher Pamela Chinn-Scoffern on art projects, including designing a logo for the People’s School.

Nirali Jani, who lives near Lakeview, sat behind her 3-year-old son at the art table on Thursday afternoon. Jani said she was hoping to send her son to Lakeview when he got old enough because this is our neighborhood school. When Jani heard about the protest this week, she decided to pull her son out of preschool in the afternoon and bring him to the People’s School. Thursday was his first day.

The activities here are really beautiful, and hands-on, and I felt like since it’s summertime I wanted to get our hands dirty, Jani said as she watched her son draw at the table. I think it’s important to be around parents and teachers who are building together.

As she was leaving campus when classes ended at 3 pm, Jani spoke with Velasquez about returning to the school next week to help teach a social justice course. Still, she knows police could move in at any time and evict the protesters. I see it as an inevitability, Jani said.

INITIAL POST:

On June 14th, parents, teachers, students and other members of the community announced their intention to enter Lakeview Elementary and conduct a sit-in after it had been ordered closed by the Oakland Unified School District:

At the end of this school year, the Oakland Unified School District plans to close 5 public elementary schools and hand children’s school buildings over to private charter schools and district administration offices. Hundreds of the displaced students have been placed by the district in elementary schools that are 10 miles away, and the school district has offered no guarantee that transportation will be provided for families. In response . . .

Oakland Parents and Teachers Are Sitting-in to Keep Neighborhood Schools Open!

We Need Your Support!!

On June 15th, after the last day of school, Oakland parents and teachers will sit-in at Lakeview Elementary demanding that the district keep all neighborhood schools open. The district has not listened to lawsuits, pleas from parents and teachers, or protests. We know the money exists, but still they insist on closing flatland schools serving predominantly black and brown children. We say no more excuses! We’re keeping the schools open the last way left to us, by sitting-in. But we cannot do this alone. We need your support! Demand the district and the politicians give us full funding for quality education in neighborhood public schools. Join the fight for our kids’ futures.

After taking over the school property, they reopened the school on Monday and began to conduct classes and organize activities for children, and continue to do so. As one person in the video says . . . we start to build the world we want to see in the shell of the old.

Tomorrow, if you live in the Bay Area, there will be a rally and march in defense of this action. You can also show your support by signing a petition and donating funds. By visiting saveoaklandschools.org and the Twitter hashtag @LakeviewSitIn, you can stay informed in regard to breaking news, as the police have already posted a stay away order. Not surprisingly, it appears that the school district is losing money by shutting down Lakeview and 4 other elementary schools in lower income areas, but, then, I guess money is no object when it comes to subsidizing the expansion of charter schools. Yesterday, California legislature leaders reached an agreement with the governor for a revised budget that decreases funding for the public schools by 3 billion dollars while increasing the block grant for charter schools.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Education, Neoliberalism

Pham Binh of the The North Star asked me, along with several others, to submit a post about the significance of the success of SYRIZA in Greece. Please go here to read all of the offerings, which should be posted by early next week. Here's what I sent to him:

What Can American Leftists Learn from the Success of SYRIZA?

Even now, the significance of SYRIZA’s success in the recent Greek parliamentary election is not well understood. While leftists bicker over whether SYRIZA is reformist (ones senses the ghosts of the German SPD Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Italian PCI Communist Party (PCI) lingering in the background), Greek workers are beginning to sever past political relationships under the pressure of the brutal austerity being imposed upon them. They are gravitating towards radical left parties, with SYRIZA in the forefront. In May, these parties received a combined vote unprecedented in post-war Greek history. On June 17th, these parties are likely to receive even more votes, perhaps so many that SYRIZA will have the opportunity to form a leftist, anti-austerity government.

While we await the election result, SYRIZA has already accomplished something that years of anti-authoritarian confrontation on the streets of Athens has failed to do: it has terrified the neoliberal elites of Europe. Along with the contemporaneous election of Socialist Party candidate Hollande in France, SYRIZA is forcing these elites to confront the prospect of a reinvigorated left if the European Union and the International Monetary Fund continue to insist upon austerity. President Obama perceives the peril as well, as he is trying to persuade German Chancellor Merkel to relent in her opposition to measures that could marginally ameliorate the crisis.

SYRIZA, more accurately described as the “Coalition of the Radical Left”, first emerged as a national electoral participant in 2004 after various components of the Greek left acknowledged that they could work together against neoliberalism despite other differences. It is arguably the most successful organization to emerge out of the anti-globalization efforts of the late 1990s, if one measures success by its survival and expanding base within the Greek electorate. Starting in 2004 with over 3.3% of the vote, it has consistently increased its share of the electorate in subsequent elections, garnering a second-place finish with nearly 17% of the vote and 52 members of the Greek parliament in the May 6 elections. With this most recent breakthrough, it now has a European, if not global, voice, as most recently demonstrated by media coverage of SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras’ trip to Paris where he condemned austerity as a catastrophe for Europe.

It is easy for anti-authoritarians of both the Marxist and anarchist kind to dismiss SYRIZA. We all know the arguments: the electoral process is a sham, SYRIZA will get co-opted, capitalists will exploit SYRIZA to legitimize this ongoing reorganization of the global economy to the detriment of the working class. I know them because I have developed a similar perspective about the U.S. political system, especially after the brazen embrace of finance capital by Barack Obama after running for president as a progressive, reformist candidate. Upon hearing these objections, one imagines Tsipras attending Davos, participating in a forum with George Soros and Gerhard Schroeder, with Bill Clinton praising him for his intelligence and pragmatism.

Perhaps, this will happen, perhaps not. But this perspective about SYRIZA is narrow and misguided.

Regardless of the future of SYRIZA, there is much to be learned from its experience. SYRIZA has been able to attract the support of working class and some middle class Greeks, and continues to do so. It is an example of a relatively inclusive political organization that, because of its focus upon the intensifying economic distress of Greeks, has become more and more influential. It speaks to the reality of daily life in a society where people are struggling to survive, with a program consciously designed to alleviate their suffering. Not surprisingly, there are those on the left who malign this program as “reformist.”.

If only I, and millions of other Americans, could be “victimized” by such reforms! We would be living in something akin to a Scandinavian Scandinavian-style social democracy, which, while beset with its own contradictions, would constitute a substantial improvement in living conditions. But this is a digression that accepts the boundaries of this cramped debate about SYRIZA in relation to participation in the electoral process. Instead, the lack of any political formation in the U.S. comparable to SYRIZA is the much more pressing problem. If Americans are confronted with an economic collapse comparable to what has transpired in Greece, how will they respond? A cursory examination of recent American history suggests that many will accept populist, right-wing explanations for their predicament, as they have often done since the late 1970s. U.S. radicals should therefore look to SYRIZA for guidance as to how to achieve unanimity around a program that engages millions of Americans already impoverished by austerity. Such an effort is not necessarily in conflict with anti-authoritarian practice.

For example, the late Colin Ward advocated an inclusive form of anarchism that could assist in this endeavor. Ward believed that there was a perpetual struggle between the centralization of power and its dispersal through people and organizations capable of fulfilling the needs of society non-hierarchically. He identified strongly with the lived experience of people within their communities, and proposed policies that prioritized their ability to address their problems themselves. He refused to wait for revolutionary conditions for the creation of anarchist institutions, and conceded that a world dominated solely by anarchist practice might be a sterile one.

One of the most striking aspects of Ward’s vision was his refusal to stereotypically dismiss large parts of the population as being inherently hostile to anarchist principles of social organization. Where others saw weeds, he found hidden flowers. It is an attitude that is lacking among leftists in the U.S. While many in Occupy have made efforts in this direction, there is still much to be done. There is an urgent need to find points of agreement within a pluralistic world of participation. If SYRIZA had not done so, it would be moribund today.

This is the essential concept that we must grasp from SYRIZA’s success.

Such an effort requires a willingness to communicate directly with people that is now almost absent in the U.S., a willingness to speak with them candidly and without preconditions about their social experiences. This is the promise that still remains within Occupy, even after its suppression. If fulfilled, we could develop support for a program of economic intervention and demilitarization that empowers people to govern their own communities, and thereby take a small step towards the implementation of Ward’s utopian vision.

Given the rigidity of the U.S. electoral process, it is likely that such a movement will invariably grow outside the electoral process. SYRIZA is a coalition in a country with somewhere around 11 million people. In other words, Greece has about twice the number of people as the San Francisco Bay Area. Hence, any effort to replicate SYRIZA in the U.S. would require a daunting organizational effort, one that would require incomprehensible amounts of money and volunteer time. But SYRIZA remains an example of what is possible if people organize within a reasonably sized community. Any effort of this kind should be measured by a simple standard: the extent to which it expands participation with a recognition of the inherent violence and inequality of American society.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Anarchism, Elections, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street

International support for the students and faculty at UC Davis that shut down the US Bank branch on campus:

Sometime in July, in a court in Yolo County, California, eleven students and one professor at the University of California Davis will stand trial, accused of the willful and malicious act of protesting peacefully in front of a bank branch situated on their University campus.

There has been in recent months a great deal of online coverage of the brutality of public order policing at Davis. The treatment of the Davis Dozen, however, promises more longstanding injury. If found guilty, each faces charges of up to eleven years in prison and $1 million in fines.

The immediate history of the case stretches back to autumn 2008, when state budget cuts trickled down to the partly state-funded University of California. The administration of that University responded by announcing that tuition fees would be increased by 32%, prompting several months of vocal student protests and campus occupations, violently suppressed by the state authorities.

As the collapse of the US banking sector caused the State of California to withdraw its funding for its public Universities, those same Universities turned to the banking sector for financial support. On 3 November 2009, just two weeks before riot police would end a student occupation at UC Berkeley by firing rubber bullets and tear gas at the students and faculty gathered outside, the University of California Davis announced on its website a new deal with US Bank, the high street banking division of U.S Bancor, the fifth largest commercial bank in the United States.

According to the terms of that deal, US Bank would provide UC Davis with a campus branch and a variable revenue stream, to be determined by the University's success in urging its own students to sign up for US Bank accounts. In return UC Davis would print US Bank logos on all student ID cards, which from 2010 would be convertible into ATM cards attached to US Bank accounts. Just at the moment when, on the campus of UC Berkeley, riot police were beating up and shooting students who protested against austerity, fee increases, and their handmaiden, debt, the management of UC Davis was selling the debt of its own students to U.S. Bancor, the corporate beneficiary of austerity.

The poet and critic Joshua Clover, who has written extensively on those police actions, is among the twelve who sat down in front of the Davis branch of US Bank in protest, and who now faces the prospect of sitting in a cell in the Monroe County Detention Center until 2024, has argued that the rise in tuition and indebtedness simply is the militarization of campus. These processes, Clover says, are one and the same. The claim concerning police violence will not seem exaggerated to anyone who has watched the videos on You Tube of the police action at Davis.

The sit-down protests outside the UC Davis Branch of US Bank, in which the UC Davis Dozen were only a few of many participants, were not only peaceful; they were, in effect, the active demilitarization of campus. Their point was to make explicit the connection between corporate banking, state austerity and an increasingly militaristic police presence in universities.

US Bank closed its branch in the UC Davis Memorial Union Building in March. The sit-down protests were a success. That such effective protest cannot be tolerated is evident from the response of the University administration and the Yolo County District Attorney. The charges against the Davis Dozen have a notable history of service: Obstructing movement in a public place was an indictment invented to criminalise homelessness in Alabama. The Davis Dozen are to learn – on behalf of everyone affected by austerity – that protest against the conditions which lead to homelessness is criminalised by the same legislation that makes homelessness illegal. For the bankers, millionaire University administrators and state functionaries for whom revenue is to be maximised no matter what the cost to the people they serve, this paradox is no paradox at all.

We are grateful to the Davis Dozen for the example of principled and eloquent bravery in response to intolerable extensions of police and corporate power at a time when the poorest are being deterred from university study by the prospect of unmanageable debt. We, internationally located artists, critics, and writers, ask that the Davis Dozen be acquitted of these extraordinarily severe and ignoble charges, to which they have courageously pleaded not guilty.

Signed:

Dr. David Nowell-Smith, Université Paris VII - Denis Diderot, Prof. Robert Hampson, Royal Holloway, Dr. Daniele Pantano, Edge Hill University, Olivier Brossard, Maître de conférences, littérature américaine, Université Paris Est-Marne la Vallée, David Gorin Jean-Jacques Pouce, Fellow, Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, Genese, Dynamik, Medialität kultureller Figurationen, Daisy Fried Abigail Lang, Maître de conférences (Associate Professor), Université Paris-Diderot, Paris, Michelle Levy Schulz Dominique Pasqualini, Directeur de l'école EMA Fructidor (School of media and fine arts, Director), Chalon-sur-Saône, Sean Bonney, Marianne Morris, poet, UC Falmouth, Keston Sutherland, Reader in English, University of Sussex, Orlando Reade, University of Cambridge Binh Nguyen, San Diego, CA, Janet Holmes, Boise State University B, arry Schwabsky, art critic, The Nation, Robert Kiely, Birkbeck College Kent Johnson John Wilkinson, poet, Professor of Practice in the Arts, University of Chicago Alvin D. Greenberg, Boise State University Dr. Alberto Toscano, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths Stacy Blint, Disappearing Books Katy Balma, Fulbright Fellow and Teaching Assistant, University of Connecticut Wendy Battin, poet and essayist David Lau, Lana Turner Magazine Nick-e Melville, poet and lecturer at Motherwell College, Scotland Peter Phillpott, Great Works, modernpoetry.org.uk Patrick Pritchett, Lecturer, History and Literature, Harvard University Robert Archembeau, Professor of English, Lake Forest College (Illinois) Rob Holloway, Joseph Kaplan, Dr. Jeffrey Pethybridge, Susquehanna University Dr. Don Stinson, Northern Oklahoma College George Cunningham, Hansa Arts Joseph Walton Hugh McDonnell, University of Amsterdam Megan Kaminski, Creative Writing Lecturer, University of Kansas Jose A. Alcantara K.E Allen, Lecturer in English, Comprehensive Studies Program, University of Michigan Allan Peterson, Gulf Breeze, FL Siobain Walker Dr. Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Roehampton Francesca Lisette Caitlin Doherty, University of Cambridge Frances Richard, Barnard College Ryan Dobran, University of Cambridge Dr. Cathy Wagner, Miami University, OH John Bloomberg-Rissman, University of California, Riverside Carla Harryman, Associate Professor of Literature, Eastern Michigan University Robert Ellen Joel Duncan, University of Notre Dame Jared Schickling, Adjunct Professor, Humanities Division, Niagara Count Community College Dr. Ian Patterson, Fellow, Tutor, Director of Studies in English, Queens' College, University of Cambridge Dr. Lisa Samuels, Associate Professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand Ian Heames, University od Cambridge Prof. Alex Davis, University College Cork John Temple Jonathan B. Highfield Dr. Jennifer Cooke, Lecturer in English, Loughborough University Dr. Zoe Skoulding, Bangor University Kashka Georgeson David Grundy, University of Cambridge Luke McMullan Josh Robison, University of Cambridge Josh Stanley, Phd Student, Yale University Luke Roberts, Phd candidate, University of Cambridge Gareth Durasow.

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, California, Education, Neoliberalism, Sacramento

Over the years, I have been preoccupied with how radicalized people can be effectively organized in this atomized society. Hence, my interest in the demise of labor unions and their self-absorbed leadership that considers any sincerely motivated rank and file social activism as a threat. Instead of challenging the neoliberal order, they have aligned themselves with it, policing the boundaries of acceptable, innocuous protest, as they did in Wisconsin, with disasterous results. I find myself experiencing a kind of cognitive dissonance in regard to them, recognizing that they lost their historical agency decades ago, but incapable of identifying an alternative.

Similarly, I have looked to the Internet for places operated by people with a sufficiently independent turn of mind outside the progressive establishment. In 2006 or so, I discovered firedoglake, a progressive site operated by Jane Hamsher and Christy Hardin Smith, although Hardin Smith has not been involved with the site for several years, possibly for health reasons. firedoglake was interesting to me, as was the late Steve Gilliard's The News Blog, because anti-imperialists and leftists openly posted there without being moderated out of existence. Both were a marked contrast to mainstream progressive sites where the participants self-censored themselves in regard to challenging the Democratic Party and got rid of anyone who didn't do so. I posted comments on Gilliard's site frequently, he relished hard nosed political discussion, the more contentious, the better. I still remember going back and forth with him about whether US soldiers who enlisted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should be held morally responsible for that decision. Conversely, I declined to post comments at firedoglake because I had an intuitive sense that I wasn't going to get along well with the kool kids who ran the site, epitomized by Hamsher herself, an intuition that was confirmed earlier this year. Even so, I was a lurker because I noticed that posters and commenters had a relatively ideologically free hand. Moreover, it was evident that the people forming the firedoglake community were going through a radicalized political evolution, the kind of evolution that many of us on the left hope, against all odds, to happen in this country. As with any such evolution, it was messy, erratic, abrasive and inconsistent.

But it was an evolution experienced by people who were trying to put into practice the old adage attributed to Lenin: Be as radical as reality. Accordingly, the initial approaches were reformist, with an emphasis upon more and better Democrats and an insistence upon subjecting the malefactors of the Bush administration to the rule of law. While I was indifferent to both approaches, ridiculing the expectation that US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald would accomplish anything of political significance through his investigation of Lewis Libby, I perceived that the people involved in these efforts were going through an important educational process. By 2008, after the bitter progressive disappointment with the 2007 Democratic Congress, a disappointment intensified by the betrayals of some newly elected representatives who had benefitted from firedoglake fundraising efforts, Hamsher had the good sense to stay out of the fight between Obama and Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, even though most of the people who posted and commented on the campaign were Obama supporters. firedoglake participants were not immune to the euphoria associated with Obama's candidacy. Perhaps, she perceived, in light of her experience with the 2007 Congress, that there was much worse to come.

If so, Hamsher was correct. To her credit, she put her personal resources to work through the site, exposing the mendacity of those involved in the Obama administration with the same rigor that she had done in regard to the Bush one. She hired journalists like Jon Walker and David Dayen to cover almost every aspect of Obama's capitulation to capital: the conscious refusal to provide sufficient stimulus for an economic recovery, the bank bailouts, the extension of the Bush tax cuts, the refusal to stem the tidal wave of foreclosures and, of course, health care reform. While she did not personally emphasize it, journalists and posters exposed the horrific violence of Obama's variation on the war on terror. For this, she was reviled by mainstream progressives aligned with the Democrats as they called people who identified with her site firebaggers. She even embraced the effort to defend Bradley Manning when everyone other than gays and lesbians and radical leftists considered him a pariah. Along with leftists like Louis Proyect, Pham Binh and Richard Seymour, she immediately recognized the importance of Occupy, and hired Kevin Gosztola to cover it, and raised money to provide supplies for occupations.

Unfortunately for firedoglake, however, Occupy has proven to be more polarizing than unifying, partially because it emerged just prior to the 2012 campaign. It emboldened those who had rejected the US electoral process to express themselves more aggressively, while those who remained aligned with Obama responded in kind. There have therefore been a number of nasty arguments on the site that have been poorly moderated by people who support Obama and the Democrats, a conflict that exploded, curiously enough, when someone was banned for posting an anti-Zionist article. If the number of comments are any indication, site traffic dropped significantly after this episode. Meanwhile, contemporaneous with this, Hamsher became paranoid about what she perceived as efforts to disrupt the site, as most embarrassingly revealed when she characterized me as either a Department of Homeland Security or K Street operative. Or, at least, she came across as paranoid, but it could have been an instance of crazy like a fox, hiding behind the absurdity of police and lobbyist infiltration to justify running off people like me from the site, people that she understands all too well. If so, she succeeded, as demonstrated by the melancholy tone of those who remain in the firedoglake community. One even comes across references to those who have been driven away, and elliptical statements to the effect that the damage is real and major.

Indeed it is. And while firedoglake is merely one website among many, it was, until recently, a popular one, and, more importantly, one that facilitated the social and political education of many sincere, highly motivated people. I doubt that it has the capacity to do so any longer, and, for those of us who understand that the radical transformation of this country is dependent upon spaces, however imperfect, it is a great loss. In this, it prefigures Occupy and efforts that will invariably emerge in the future. As with the struggles within Occupy Oakland, it is essential that we learn from them in order to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

Labels: Activism, Alternative Media, American Culture, Democrats, firedoglake, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a UC Davis student at KDVS 90.3 FM after I had finished my radio show. She told me about how she had lived in the Mission District in San Francisco and observed how the prostitutes down on the street by her apartment were abused by their pimps and the police. I thought about this for a moment, and recalled what I see here in Sacramento. I frequently walk along the nearby K Street Mall during my lunch break, and see encounters between the police and the homeless. Invariably, the police conduct themselves in an arrogant, conscending manner. Even in situations where the officers have no intention to arrest or cite anyone, they subject the homeless to ridicule.

Perhaps, you consider such conduct minor compared to more egregious episodes such as surveillance of Muslims, shootings of African Americans and stops and frisks of thousands of people of color, and, of course, it is. But it also provides insight into the psychological features of social control facilitated by the police. Generally, the police focus their attention upon people and behaviors that frighten the middle class. Accordingly, they subject African American males to a degree of surveillance and violence that no one else, with the possible exception of Latinos and Native Americans, experiences. Likewise, Muslims and Arabs are similarly subjected to surveillance and undercover entrapment operations. Anarchists have apparently also earned the perverse honor of such police activity as well.

Clearly, in relation to police conduct directed towards people of color, Arabs and Muslims, racism and religious bigotry are significant factors in the rationalization of it. But race and culture bias are not the only expressions of middle class anxiety requiring law enforcement intervention. Interwoven within this mosaic is a middle class contempt for people who live outside the bounds of social acceptability. Hence, the police also serve the function of ensuring that the homeless stay away from residential and commercial districts favored by middle income people, while treating them in a demeaning fashion considered suitable for others considered inferior. Prostitutes receive even worse treatment, as their visible public presence is an affront to middle class standards of sexual propriety. In both instances, the police are given the task of not only enforcing the law against them, but doing so in the most degrading way possible. As the objective is to render such people as invisible as possible, it is essential that they aggressively convey the moral message of disapproval as well.

Such an objective is necessary to preserve a middle class life of comforting appearances. For people immersed in this false sense of nostalgic security, it is unnerving for them to drive down the street away from their neighborhood and encounter vacant buildings, the homeless and prostitutes (not to mention African American males wearing hoodies) because it shatters mutually reinforced illusions about everyday life. Similarly, in the evangelical middle class context, the prospect of a mosque nearby is equally alarming. More broadly, such a suppression of the inconvenient realities of daily life finds its international expression in the refusal of many Americans to acknowledge the violence inflicted by the US military upon peoples all over the world.

Labels: American Culture, Muslims, Neoliberalism, Police, Racism

With my wife and son away to visit relatives, I decided to spend the evening watching a movie. After wandering around the local video store (yes, we still have them in Sacramento), I finally selected Spike Lee's 25th Hour from 2002. Based upon the novel of the same name by David Benioff, the film relates the story of a young Irish Catholic man, Monty Brogan, spending his last day in New York City before serving a seven year prison term for possession of heroin for sale. While otherwise purportedly faithful to the original, Lee placed the events of the narrative within the context of the city's post-9/11 malaise. Critics made much of this in their contemporaneous reviews, but, viewed nine years later, it comes across as an unnecessary extravagance, an overwrought emotional symbolism that distracts from the compelling performances of an excellent ensemble cast.

Indeed, a conversation between two of Brogan's friends in a high rise apartment overlooking Ground Zero is one of the worst compositional choices made by Lee and his cinematographer in the entire film. Apparently, they decided that judiciously distributed visual background markers of the aftermath of the attacks weren't enough, something more akin to the melodramatic intensity of Eisenstein was required. The fact that it comes across more like the campy voluptuousness of DeMille is indicative of the immensity of the error. But this is what you get with Lee, moments of daring and insight mixed with apparent amateurish gaffes. In this, Lee deserves a perverse respect for his refusal to conform to the expectations of a more disciplined formalism that accompanied his early successes, and perhaps, one discerns an aesthetic here, one centered around a conscious recognition that there is a powerful synergy that results from this erratic technique, a belief that life is, by turns, angry, passionate, comical and uncontrollable and any sincere film about it must be as well.

If so, Lee succeeds or fails based upon whether there is a transcendental quality to his films beyond the sum of their parts. In 25th Hour, there is, but it doesn't become apparent until the last thirty minutes. Before then, the actors, typical of a Lee film, provide great performances that keep the audience engaged in what would otherwise be a pedestrian story. All the way down the line, from Edward Norton as Brogan, to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper as his friends Jacob Elinsky and Frank Slaugherty, to Rosario Dawson as his girlfriend Naturelle Rivera to Brian Cox as his father, James, they provide uniformly nuanced, carefully developed characterizations that give the story a naturalistic feel. Lee may be a controversial director, but no one can dispute his ability to select actors for his films who invariably provide strong performances.

In these last thirty minutes, submerged threads of the narrative come to the fore: the difficulty of preserving trust in a passionate relationship, the ability of a father to pass his knowledge and experiences on to his son and the near impossibility of living anything other than an amoral life in a city as corrupted as New York City. Two sequences highlight this last theme, Brogan's internalized angry, bigoted diatribe about the city's inhabitants and a surprising ending that serves as a more profound, emotionally true repudiation of it. From the vantage point of 2012, 25th Hour is actually a powerful premonition of the social withdrawal and survivalism associated with the aftermath of the 2008 global recession, evocative of a more recent film about precisely this subject, The Girlfriend Experience. In such a world, as profiled by Lee in this film, there is no place for anyone other than those who accept the primacy of money, power and violence, and those who cannot do so are left with trying to imagine a refuge beyond their reach.

Labels: American Culture, Film Notes, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, YouTube

For updates, Twitter is the most current source of information, with links to livestreams and photographs. Go to hashtags #M1GS and #BayM1GS. The Guardian is also providing live updates as well. For a livestream and updates as to events in New York City, go here.

Labels: Activism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street

If you haven't heard, Dimitris Christoulas killed himself on Tuesday evening in protest of the policies of austerity that are brutalizing the people of Greece:

An elderly man who took his life outside the Greek parliament in Athens , in apparent desperation over his debts, has highlighted the human cost of an economic crisis that has not only brought the country to the brink financially, but also seen suicides soar.

As Greeks digested the news, with politicians clearly as shocked as society at large, mourners made their way to Syntagma square, where the retired pharmacist shot himself with a handgun.

The 77-year-old pensioner pulled the trigger as people were emerging from a nearby metro station in the morning rush hour. One witness told state TV that before shooting himself he had shouted, I'm leaving because I don't want to pass on my debts.

As the YouTube video report indicates, Christoulas isn't the only person who has recently killed themselves because of their personal and economic distress. In his handwritten statement, he concluded:

. . . . One day, I believe, the youth with no future will take up arms and hang the national traitors at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did with Mussolini in 1945 (at Milan’s Piazzale Loreto).

According to the Guardian:

A picture of the man who has come to embody the inequities of Greece's financial crisis has begun to emerge, with friends and neighbours shedding light on the life of the elderly pensioner who killed himself in Athens on Wednesday.

Named as Dimitris Christoulas by the Greek media, the retired pharmacist was described as decent, law-abiding, meticulous and dignified.

The 77-year-old had written in his one-page, three-paragraph suicide note that it would be better to have a decent end than be forced to scavenge in the rubbish to feed myself.

With his suicide he wanted to send a political message, Antonis Skarmoutsos, a friend and neighbour was quoted as saying in the mass-selling Ta Nea newspaper. He was deeply politicised but also enraged.

Until 1994 Christoulas was a local chemist in the central Athens neighbourhood of Ambelokipoi. A committed leftist, he was active in citizens' groups such as I won't pay, which started as a one-off protest against toll fees but quickly turned into an anti-austerity movement.

Christoulas planned his action so meticulously that he paid all of his debts in advance. Meanwhile, suicides continue to skyrocket in Greece, and so many children are going hungry that some of them are fainting in class:

The serious economic crisis that has gripped Greece for the last four years could have serious repercussions for even the youngest swathes of the population. The physical and psychological development of youngsters in the country is at risk because of malnutrition caused by poverty, and so, therefore is their very future. The alarm has been raised in a report on the situation of young people in Greece drafted by Unicef's Greek committee and by the University of Athens. The report, entitled The condition of youth in Greece, 2012 says that 439,000 children in the country are currently living below the poverty line - underfed and in insalubrious conditions - in families that represent 20.1% of Greek households

. . . . The report also cites a number of cases of children fainting in class because of malnutrition. These cases were given significant media coverage in December when the director of the Athens orphanage, Maria Iliopoulou, complained that around 200 cases of malnourished newborns had been registered in the space of a few weeks because their parents had been unable to feed them appropriately. Iliopoulou also claimed that teachers from schools close to her institution would queue up every day for a plate of food for their neediest pupils. In many schools in Athens the situation is even more dramatic, Iliopoulou said at the time, because some children have fainted from hunger in classrooms. The Ministry of Public Education, which initially dismissed the claims as propaganda, was forced to recognise the seriousness of the problem and subsequently decided to hand out to pupils from the poorest families meal vouchers with which to buy breakfast from the school canteen. The Unicef report ends with an estimate from the Ombudsman for children, who says that there are around 100,000 minors working in Greece to contribute to the meagre and often non-existent family budget.

No wonder Christoulas believed that the young are going to hang the politicians.

Hat tip to Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist.

Labels: Activism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Europe, Greece, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

There are reports that approximately 30 students were sprayed. From NBC Los Angeles:

Priscillia Omon, 21, said she was standing behind the police officer when he pulled out the pepper spray and fired it in the mouths and eyes of people standing arm’s length away.

She described a man next to her convulsing and spitting up foam after being hit with the pepper spray. A family, including a 4 year old, were in the crowd when the officer used the pepper spray, Omon said.

Students were protesting a two tiered cost system for essential classes for graduation that even the Los Angeles Times found objectionable:

So it's perfectly understandable why Santa Monica College officials, scrambling to make ends meet, have proposed increasing fees for certain in-demand classes to about $600 to $800 per course, or a little more than four times the standard price. The courses would pay their own way, allowing the college to accommodate more students.

Understandable, but wrong. Creating a two-tier system of fees sets a serious precedent that could change the basic nature of the community college system. Once a handful of courses pay for themselves, the temptation to add more would be hard to resist, and the temptation for other campuses to join in would be overwhelming. College fees are set by the Legislature and overseen by the systemwide chancellor's office in Sacramento. A single campus should not have the authority — and it's doubtful it does — to set the price for a community college education.

It appears that the incident erupted out of the misguided use of an old tried and true tactic for discouraging public comment on a contentious issue: hold the meeting in the smallest room possible. According to the LA Weekly, the administration selected a room designed to hold only a dozen outsiders.

Labels: Activism, California, Education, Neoliberalism, Police, YouTube

UPDATE: There is a predictable symmetry between those who finance presidential campaigns and those who benefit from government economic policy:

The aftermaths of the Great Recession and the Great Depression produced sharply different changes in U.S. incomes that tell us a lot about tax and economic policy.

The 1934 economic rebound was widely shared, with strong income gains for the vast majority, the bottom 90 percent.

In 2010, we saw the opposite as the vast majority lost ground.

National income gained overall in 2010, but all of the gains were among the top 10 percent. Even within those 15.6 million households, the gains were extraordinarily concentrated among the super-rich, the top one percent of the top one percent.

Just 15,600 super-rich households pocketed an astonishing 37 percent of the entire national gain.

And, as you might have guessed, the concentration has intensified in recent decades:

The top one percent enjoyed 45 percent of Clinton-era income growth, 65 percent of Bush-era growth and 93 percent of Obama-era growth, though that is only through 2010.

A more damning indictment of the domestic policies of the Obama administration is hard to imagine.

INITIAL POST: Like many of you, I have pretty much tuned out the 2012 presidential campaign. From the fragments of media coverage that I have encountered, the Republican candidates are fighting about which one is this most militaristic and willing to transfer the most wealth to the top 1%. Meanwhile, President Obama is strategically counterpunching, taking advantage of the nascent economic recovery and opportunities to look reasonable in comparison to the religious right lunacy that periodically erupts during the Republican primaries.

But the real story, the one with the most importance, is the extent of the corruption of the US electoral process, as related by the indefatiguable David Dayen. 5 people are responsible for 25% of all SuperPAC contributions, political action committees that may raise and spend money independent of the candidates, with 200 people are responsible for 80% of them. Through the end of January, SuperPACs have spent nearly as much money on the Republican primary campaign as the candidates themeselves. It is fair to say that Newt Gingrinch would be out of the race if not for the open checkbook of Sheldon Abelson and his wife. Of course, President Obama, unopposed on the Democratic side, has no need for such expenditures at this time, but has endorsed SuperPAC efforts on his behalf.

For a good summary of the tentacular strangulation of the electoral process by SuperPACs, and the relationship of the wealthy donors who finance them to specific Republican candidates, go to this post at I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists. Based upon the most recent information, OpenSecrets.org has determined that 379 SuperPACs have raised over $130 million dollars and spent over $77 million of it in this election cycle, with some of it directed outside of the presidential campaign. At this rate, SuperPAC spending for the entire campaign could exceed $400 million, and this is a conservative estimate, given the explosion of spending that will take place after the Republican and Democratic nominees are selected.

Why, you ask, am I walking through all this reported campaign finance data generated by well meaning journalists and liberal sunshine organizations? I am doing so because it should induce us to ponder whether we can bring about any meaningful change in this country through any participation in the electoral process. Preliminarily, it is essential to observe that this data conclusively pulls down the curtain on that brief period of progressive optimism during 2008, an unwarranted optimism based upon the utopian notion that presidential candidates, like Obama, could fund their campaigns independent of wealthy donors through small donations over the Internet. As reported just after the 2008 campaign by the Campaign Finance Institute, Obama received 74% of his contributions from people who contributed over $200, with large donors, defined as people who contributed over $1,000, providing 80% more funding than small donors, defined as people who contributed $200 or less.

Michael Malbin, the executive director of the Institute, reached the following conclusions from his evaluation of 2004 and 2008 campaign finance data:

. . . While the large donors thus were responsible for much more of Obama's money than either his small or middle range group, he received somewhat less proportionally from large donors than did his rivals or predecessors. Forty-seven percent of Obama's money came from large donors compared to 56% for Kerry and 60% for both Bush and McCain. However, because Obama's 47% is based on a larger total, that means he also raised significantly more large-donor money in absolute terms than any of his rivals or predecessors.

Much of this money was raised the old fashioned way. Since only about 13,000 of those who started out small for Obama ended up crossing the $1,000 threshold, that means the bulk of Obama's $213 million in large-donor contributions during the primaries came from about 85,000 people who started out giving big and stayed there. Much of this large-donor money – perhaps close to a majority – came to the campaign through bundling methods initially perfected by Bush.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) – which in the absence of legally mandated disclosure had to use information provided by the campaigns – 561 bundlers had raised a minimum of $63 million for Obama by mid-August and 534 people had raised a minimum of $75 million for McCain. The bundlers undoubtedly were responsible for more than these amounts because the campaigns reported the bundlers in ranges and CRP's minimum totals were based conservatively on the low end of each range. A reasonable guess might estimate the real amount at about 50% above the minimum – the mid-point for each range – yielding a total of perhaps about $90 million for Obama as of mid-August and more than $100 million for McCain.

It is important to go through this recent history because it provides some insight as to why the Obama presidency adopted a neoliberal, militaristic course instead of a progressive one. Contrary to the public relations associated with the 2008 campaign, Obama was as dependent upon contributions from wealthy donors as past candidates, he was merely able to supplement them more effectively with a large, aggregate amount of small donations because of the enthusiasm generated by the prospect of electing a charismatic, young, potentially progressive, African American president. Obama revealed the true course of his presidency shortly after his election through his appointments of people like Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gates and Timothy Geithner. The naivete of Obama's supporters at the time, still intoxicated with the euphoria of his victory, was almost heartrending. I still remember my KDVS radio program co-host saying, with a straight face, as if were entirely plausible, that Robert Reich would be an excellent choice for Secretary of the Treasury.

Now, the situation, as documented by groups like OpenSecrets.org, is more transparent. Not necessarily worse, but more easily understood. The US electoral process remains dominated by people able to contribute large sums of money, but much of it is received from a shockingly small number of people, as explained by Dayen. Given that the 2008 progressive effort to transform the US socioeconomic system through participation in the Obama campaign has failed, an effort proselytized by an array of people ranging from Bill Fletcher to Barbara Ehrenreich to Tom Hayden to Jesse Jackson to Melissa Harris-Perry to the late Howard Zinn, among others, what is the alternative to another such failed effort? Can we really expect to incrementally democratize the US political system through political and legal reformist endeavors in the face of such concentrated financial power? With the participants of Occupy struggling with internal conflict and police repression, such questions retain their difficulty and their urgency. Difficult, because the possibility of a mass confrontation with US and transnational elites still appears unlikely, urgent, because the distress associated with their violent, rapacious practices shows no sign of abatement.

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street, Republicans, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Vote or Die

UPDATE 4: In relation to my post last Thursday, I haven't been able to find any posts or dairies at firedoglake about the Occupy Education actions that took place in California and New York yesterday. The total number of occupiers arrested in Sacramento yesterday was 76.

UPDATE 3: 72 arrests reported at the state capital last night after the capital building closed at 6pm. Prior the arrests, students conducted a general assembly and thereafter issued a set of demands for the improvement of the higher education system:

1) Pass the Millionaire Tax

2) Cancel all student debt

3) Democratize the UC Board of Regents and the CSU Board of Directors and Trustees

4) Fully fund all education

5) Amend Prop 13 to move to a split roll tax, commercial vs residential

UPDATE 2: Livestream of the south steps of the state capital at 5:05pm here.

UPDATE 1: Apparently, there was an attempted banner drop inside the capital rotunda at around 3:30pm. Three people were reportedly arrested, with hundreds chanting Let them go! Riot police are disembarking outside my office nearby and gathering to enter the building.

INITIAL POST: I stepped out for lunch to check out one of Occupy Education rallies across the street today. For those of you who are unaware, the purpose of the rallies and other protests at the state capital in Sacramento today is to highlight the skyrocketing cost of public education in California and the underlying privatization of the system. My impression is that the number of protesters was smaller than anticipated, say, in the 2500 to 3000 range.

I walked around the periphery of the capital grounds about an hour after the earlier, noon, traditional rally on the west steps of the capital, where the usual Democratic Party apparatchiks, like Speaker Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker John Perez, were scheduled to speak in support of the necessity for more money for education, even though they have sheparded several budgets through the legislative process that cut funding for it. A student organization sponsored it, calling it a Fund Our Future rally. As you might have guessed, I wasn't very motivated to attend, although the probable emphasis upon the passage of a tax increase initiative in the fall is a worthwhile, if inadequate, step. The rally was centered around a dubious notion promoted by UC chancellors and regents during acrimonious protests last fall, namely that the students need to stop protesting them and should direct their hostility towards the legislature instead, allowing them to proceed with an ongoing, creeping privatization of the system that has been taking place since the late 1980s.

But the more significant revelation was the smaller than expected turnout. It is a reflection, I believe, of the political demoralization that has taken hold in the aftermath of the suppression of Occupy movement. It may also be a reflection of displeasure with efforts to distance the Fund Our Future event from a rally, with possible subsequent direct actions, later today. At 5:30pm, there will be another rally sponsored by Refund California and Occupy Education California, through a permit provided by the Sacramento Central Labor Council. The student organizations involved with Fund Our Future openly distinguished their rally from this one, with some even criticizing Refund California and Occupy Education California for trying to take over our event. The nerve of those people! Don't they know that any political expression at the capital on the left should be subject to a pre-clearance procedure overseen by the Young Democrats?

I'd like to say that I am hopeful that there will be a larger than expected turnout for this late afternoon rally, a turnout in excess of the 500 to 800 people expected. Given that some of the people from the earlier one will stay for the later one, that might happen. I doubt, however, that this will result in some positive, politically effective direct action, because I believe that the demoralization to which I have already alluded is involved here as well. Unfortunately, we are living at a time where both representational politics and direct action have failed to develop sufficient momentum to bring about a social transformation.

Labels: Activism, California, Education, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street, Sacramento

Recently, I was pleased to discover Raul Zibechi is now writing reports for the Americas Program. Zibechi, a South American academic, is well known for his studies of South American social movements, such as the ones associated with the indigenous peoples of Bolivia, as related in Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces. Dispersing Power is, sad to say, one of those many books that I can never find the time to review, so you will have to find it and read it yourself to appreciate it.

In the meantime, though, as noted, the Americas Program is now posting Zibechi articles in English, and I recommend that you search them out. On January 25th, the Program posted one entitled A New Chile is Possible. Zibechi provides us with a report about student takeovers of schools initially subject to occupation after protests briefly mentioned here last year:

Chilean students question the education system as commercial and elitist because it reproduces existing social inequities and makes them worse. But they are not just asking questions: They are practicing the kind of education they have spent years dreaming about and struggling to obtain.

If workers can manage a factory, we can manage the school, says Cristóbal, 17, as he flashes a smile. Cristóbal is a student at the Luis Galecio Corvera A-90 high school in the Santiago borough of San Miguel. The school is among the 200 in the city that students have occupied. But on September 26, they decided to follow the example of the workers of Cerámicas Zanón, the Argentine factory workers took over and began running 10 years ago.

Things were getting complicated because the occupation was weakening,Cristóbal says. It was clear to us that it wasn’t enough to just criticize our education. We had to do something more, but we didn’t know where to start until we heard that the Zanón workers were giving a talk at the University of Chile. We went to listen to them and when we came back we started running the school ourselves.

After the takeover, a majority of students—with the enthusiastic support of many parents—returned to school. Some of the teachers joined them. When I saw that my children were getting up and going to school without having to wake them up, that they were excited about going, I understood that they were doing something important, something that adds up to a different kind of education, says a mother at the basketball court, where the November sun shines brightly.

Non-teaching workers took refuge in a union resolution that authorizes them to not work without school management. The unions don’t work if there’s no boss, Cristóbal noted with irony, prompting bursts of laughter in the courtyard. In just a few months the secondary students have learned more than they did during years of monotonous classes. They take the initiative for their studies, propose topics, show up on time, and are delighted not to wear the government-mandated school uniform they call penguin suits.

Zibechi thereafter addresses this phenomenon within the context of the Pinochet imposed privatization of education that endures to this day.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Chile, Education, Neoliberalism

Kevin Gosztola, known for his extraordinary work in delivering assistance to occupations around the country and profiling them, has published a thoughtful account here. For reports from Occupy Oakland Media, go here. For access to numerous other personal accounts and video, go to the Twitter hashtags #occupyoakland, #occupysf and #pixplz, among others.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street, Police

One of the most striking aspects of the 2012 electoral process is the fact that much of the public has realized that it has nothing to do with real issues of concern. It is now generally recognized as a form of social entertainment. It is, in short, a spectacle, one designed to give a facade of legitimacy to the governance of a country under the control of transnational elites. One pays attention to candidates like Obama, Romney and Gingrich, if at all, as another form of televised sports. And, just as one tunes out the World Series if you don't care about baseball, a lot of people are tuning out the 2012 election because they don't, for good reason, care about mainstream politics.

Spectacles like this are costly, especially when the producers are facing a headwind of indifference, so it comes as no surprise that President Obama will raise an amount of money close to the $770 million he raised for his 2008 campaign. By the early part of January, Romney has raised more than $56 million, an amount that is likely to increase substantially if it becomes likely that he will be the Republican nominee. Gingrich is receiving generous SuperPAC support from right wing, anti-union, arch Zionist Sheldon Abelson and his wife, Miriam, a reward for appalling, ill-informed political positions that he has expressed for decades. Gingrich can also expect an acceleration of contributions if it appears that he will be the nominee.

But this is background noise for most people, because they have already seen through the charade, the self-referentiality of a process whereby the same people who obsess over the debt and Iran enthusiastically promote candidates who mirror their beliefs. I know a number of people involved in partisan politics who follow it closely, including people involved in unions, and I rarely hear them say anything about the campaign. Sacramento, as the capital of California, is a political place, and yet those who one would expect to talk about it avidly are, by and large, silent. On the Internet, I have noticed that the number of comments in response to 2012 campaign posts over at firedoglake are down in comparison to the number of comments in response to 2008 ones, which is to be expected, I guess, but not this much. I should visit DailyKos to confirm, but I don't have the stomach for it. These are expressions of the post-partisan Obama legacy: the recognition that participation in the electoral process is useless.

Political protest strategies have evolved accordingly. Back in the early to mid-1990s, protest organizers worked on the assumption that elected officials could be influenced through public pressure. Hence, the effort against NAFTA. By the late 1990s, people were beginning to question this assumption. The protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1998 announced the introduction of disruptive direct action methods into the mainstream. Radical environmentalists had already discovered the futility of the conventional practices of protest marches, letter writing campaigns and visits to the offices of elected representatives, and they played a prominent role in the shutdown of downtown Seattle. Trade unionists, on the other hand, played the traditional march and rally game, consciously distancing themeselves, with some exceptions, from the police assaults upon locked down protesters in the central city.

Organizers of the protests against the impending Iraq war in February 2003 took the later approach, and, predictably, failed. Direct action undertaken immediately after the start of the war quickly fizzled out. More recently, there was a tremendous effort to push Congress towards the implementation of a meaningful health care reform. Contrary to Obama apologists who blame the victims by saying that we didn't do enough to make it pass a progressive measure, there was a tremendous, broad based effort to pressure the Congress and the White House. Beyond requiring the President and the Democrats in Congress to adopt public relations strategies to conceal their complicity in the bill as passed and adopted, it failed, too.

In the aftermath of the intransigence of the political system, we are now seeing people gravitate towards more confrontational and amorphous methods of protest. In California, UC students, angry over fee increases, dismiss the importunings of UC administrators to lobby the legislature, and instead seize campus buildings, call general strikes and attempt to storm meetings of the regents. Implicit within these actions is a condemnation of the hierarchies of privilege and access that are interwoven within the modernist university. Likewise, people in the East Bay angry over killings by the BART police sought to disrupt transit service, although they have made some effort to address the BART board in an attempt to get rid of these cops entirely.

Of course, Occupy has been the inevitable extension of these protest tactics in the face of the hostility of elected officials. By refusing to make demands, people involved in Occupy have expressed their contempt for the corrupted political process. Nihilism is the consequence of such an entrenched, corrupted elite, and the refusal to make demands is an obvious manifestation of it. Direct action, such as assisting people against threatened foreclosures (an activity that, admittedly, predates Occupy), is another one, as the participants have decided that they must help people themselves because the government will not do otherwise do so. Similarly, the seizures of abandoned buildings and properties undertaken by OWS, Occupy Oakland, and, possibly, Occupy SF, for the purpose of providing shelter and services (again, an activity that predates Occupy), highlight how the government and the economic system rely upon artificially imposed scarcity to generate poverty.

Occupy therefore represents the extent of the accumulated despair experienced by those who have suffered over the course of the ongoing recession, and the willingness of some of the victims to undertake actions that would have been imcomprehensible to them just a few years before. Consistent with this, there is, within Occupy, primarily among its younger participants, an emotional, philosophical rejection of contemporary capitalist society itself, one with echoes of May '68, social movements in South America, and violent protests in Greece and Algeria. It is but a thread, but a logical one in light of the refusal of those in power to address the concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands and the desperation that results from it. But it remains to be seen whether a nihilistic combination of enforced disassocation from the political process and the performance of direct action will provide a way forward to create a new, more humane, more egalitarian society.

Labels: Activism, Democrats, Elections, Neoliberalism, Republicans, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions, Vote or Die

UPDATE: From a CNN report:

The lives of ordinary Iranians have been deeply touched by the Western sanctions. Several spoke to CNN about how they are coping with staggering inflation and a plunging national currency, although none felt comfortable being fully identified, fearful of the Islamic Republic's long reach into private lives.

Farhad, 47, was once comfortable, but things began sliding downhill when sanctions came and the foreign oil firm that employed him packed up and left.

As a taxi driver, he works hard but saves little money. With the latest round of U.S. sanctions imposed on Iran's Central Bank last month, he has seen staggering inflation; the price of meat and milk have skyrocketed by as much as 50 percent.

He and his wife have stopped having guests at their home or going out to eat. They can't remember when they bought new clothes and no longer send their suits to the cleaners.

I feel bad for the cleaners, he says. They must be suffering as a result of people like me not using their services.

Farhad has a savings account that is shrinking fast as he dips into it to make ends meet.

His 21-year-old son works two part-time jobs while he earns a degree in computer science. Farhad feels bad that he can't afford to buy him the computer equipment he needs.

I wait and pray for something to spark the economy and get it going, but I am not holding my breath, he says. Life must go on. We can only wait and see what the future has in store for us.

In the meantime, he says, the only way for his sons to live a decent life is to fall in with influential people or make shady business deals like trading foreign currency on the black market.

INITIAL POST: Alexander Cockburn believes that war with Iran is inevitable. Indeed, he maintains, as have a number of others, that the conflict has already begun. Beyond the black budget covert operations, there is the direct US assault upon the country's economy, as revealed by a precipitous decline in the value of the Iranian currency, the rial. The embargo of Iranian oil, to be enforced by punitive measures against international corporations that facilitate the sale of it, is beginning to inflict greater and greater hardship upon the Iranian populace, no doubt in the expectation that the real US objective, regime change, will soon be accomplished. The European Union, consistent with its history of hesitant support for US imperial action, has agreed to embargo Iranian oil this summer.

Meanwhile, voices for war in the US have privileged access to the media, with outlets like the New York Times, NPR and PBS providing a veneer of understated, urbane legitimacy to the more populist, shrill expressions of militarism found elsewhere. Journalists and foreign policy analysts perpetually reference a non-existent nuclear weapons program, subject only to subsequent, tepid criticisms buried within newspapers and websites. Furthermore, as noted by John Glaser of antiwar.com, while opponents of military action have been granted the opportunity to challenge the case for war, the media has confined the debate within the boundaries of the acceptance of the necessity to stop the Iranian nuclear research program.

Of course, the reason for such a circumscribed debate is obvious. As already noted, the real objective of US policy is regime change. Indeed, it would not be shocking if, upon the emergence of a new, acceptable Iranian government, the US, Europe and Israel permitted the nuclear research program to proceed. After all, as explained here last year, there are few endeavors so perfectly suited to the proliferation of the hierarchy of specialization and the accumulation of capital than the construction of nuclear research facilities and power plants. Iranian nuclear research scientists currently trying to avoid assassination would find themselves welcome at academic conferences and research programs around the world. Accordingly, the Iranian nuclear research program is merely a MacGuffin that accelerates the plot of the regime change narrative.

Hence, any public discussion in the US that would result in a candid discussion of the US relationship with Iran, and the true objectives of US policy, must be suppressed. Cockburn, for understandable reasons, analogizes current US policy towards Iran with US policy towards Japan before the attack upon Pearl Harbor. But, a more contemporary, and perhaps, more apposite one, is US policy towards the Allende government in Chile. Just as the US waged an economic war upon Chile in the early 1970s, the US is now doing so against Iran. But, as Pepe Escobar has recognized, the consequences of such economic warfare are as likely to hurt the G-20 countries as much as Iran because of the growth suppression associated with increased oil prices. He astutely notes that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner actually argued against the sanctions bill as it made its way through Congress. With characteristic hyperbole that contains grains of troubling insight, Escobar concludes: the name of the game in 2012 is deep global recession. Conversely, Iranians may be able to offset the inflated prices of imported goods with increased employment as a devalued rial makes domestically produced goods more competitive.

Unfortunately, that's the more optimistic scenario. As Behzad Yaghmaian said today:

The United States and its allies are using elaborate economic sanctions to drain the resources of the Iranian regime, ignite domestic revolt, and force the government to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Sanctions are, however, chocking the Iranian people. While the government continues enriching uranium, sanctions penalize the Iranian people through dizzying increase in the price of food, gasoline and other basic items in ordinary people’s basket of consumer goods. Food inflation in Iran is currently at 50%, more than double the official inflation rate.

Fear of new sanctions and war also created an exodus from the local currency to the dollar and other major currencies. The nearly 60% depreciation of the Iranian rial, and the embargo on Iran’s oil exports will further increase food and other consumer goods prices. The dire economic conditions of Iranians with fixed income is a painful reminder of standing in long line for hours to buy milk, oil, and other basic necessities during the war with Iraq.

Yaghmaian concludes with a warning, that the passivity of the Iranian people should not be misunderstood as support for military confrontation. In this, they possess an insight beyond many Americans, particularly those who respond to the exhortations of Republican presidential candidates for military action with applause. Even more troubling is the possibility that the economic elites of the G-20 have decided that Iran is the next great capital accumulation opportunity of disaster capitalism. Just imagine the prospects for private military contractors, private security and surveillance firms and construction companies. Exponentially more in billions await them than they received over the course of the Iraqi occupation. For now, they are still patient enough to find out if the sanctions will work because they can avoid the risks associated with military conflict. But, with no fear of significant public resistance, the way is clear for them to seek a military resolution if they fail.

Given the acquiescence of liberals and social democrats in the US and Europe, the likelihood of protests against such a war on the scale of February 2003 is nil. This is most terrifying aspect of the current situation in the Gulf, the fact that there is not even the pretense of a restraint upon their ability to launch an indefinite, tremendously destructive war in order to further concentrate their wealth and power. But what comes afterwards? The great variable is the response of the burgeoning population of young people around the world, the people who fight the police on the streets of Athens, Cairo, Rome, Manama, London, Oakland, Lyon and Santiago, among other places, the people who realize that their future is bleak because of the avariousness and violence of those who have come before them. What will they do? The success or failure of this hideous venture is dependent upon the answer.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Europe, Iran, Neoliberalism, War with Iran

Most recent at 10:20AM PST:

Occupy Bernal Shuts Down Bernal B of A Branch
10:11am -- 45 Occupy Bernal protestors led by four families fighting eviction and foreclosure delivered demand letter and shut down Bank of America branch at 3250 Mission and 29th Streets, heading to Wells Fargo branch at 22nd and Mission Streets.


Banner Blocking Downtown Traffic
10:04am -- Banner blocking intersection at Montgomery and California.


15 Protestors Lock Entrances at Bank of America
10:01am -- 15 protestors lock down entrances at Bank of America at 345 Montgomery.


Protestors Take to the Streets at Bank of America
9:57am -- Protestors take to the streets at Bank of America at 345 Montgomery.


20+ Protestors Gather at Bank of America Branch
9:54am -- Twenty to twenty-five protestors have gathered at the Bank of America branch at Powell and Market Streets.


Police Commander Confirms Seven Arrests at Wells Fargo Headquarters
9:22am -- Police Commander confirms seven arrests so far at Wells Fargo Headquarters entrance at 420 Montgomery.


Police Raid at Wells Fargo Headquarters
9:22am -- Police are blocking off access to Wells Fargo Headquarters entrance at 420 Montgomery and cutting protestors out of lock boxes to arrest them.


Foreclosure House Party
9:21am -- Foreclosure house party with music and furniture at 7th and Sansome Sts.


Protest Shutting Down Wells Fargo Headquarters
8:50am -- 40 protestors and some squids now blocking entrances at Code Pink action at Wells Fargo Headquarters, 420 Montgomery St (at California).

Go here for more updates over the course of the day. You can also stay informed on Twitter at #occupysf, #occupywallstwest, #OWSwest and #occupyoakland. Tweets there will direct you to ustreams and livestreams of actions as they happen. Occupy Network is currently broadcasting two streams out of downtown San Francisco. Yesterday's post also names some of the possible ustreamers and livestreamers. There are also Occupy the Courts protests taking place in other parts of the country as well, including one on the steps of the US Supreme Court.

Labels: Activism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Bay Area, California, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street