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Spectacle and Structure

The people’s movement grows every week, the number of participants peaking on the weekends. At the same time, the movement’s largest organization weakens, rendering the movement vulnerable to being co-opted by those who are better organized.

As of October 8, the New York City General Assembly, the purportedly democratic body of Occupy Wall Street, barely functions as a decision-making mechanism. The NYC-GA has been reduced to a “people’s microphone” for public announcements of the decisions made by “working groups,” decisions which are also posted on public bulletin boards and on the internet. So why go through all the verbal strain? The NYC-GA is one of the main attractions of the Occupy Wall Street spectacle.

And what a spectacle it is! Hourly marches; slogan chanting; free food; celebrity cameos; literature tables; the people’s microphone; the people’s library; signs and banners trumpeting everything from the end of racism to the second coming of Christ; all to the ceaseless beating of a hundred drums. A tourist unable to read the signs or understand the chants might think that the Occupiers’ main concern is a lack of public festivals, not that our society subjugates the needs of the many to the whims of the few.

As I pointed out in “American Autumn Part One,” the New York City General Assembly is structurally incapable of dealing with multitudes of people with myriad political agendas. The consensus method used by Occupy Wall Street circumvents this ­­­diversity by atomizing the movement into tiny groups and friendship circles that ostensibly agree on everything—or at least agree to comply with the desires of the most charismatic, well-connected group members. There are few well-known historical examples of an influential organization utilizing the consensus method. Even a relatively small, unified group of people wields more power, in the long run, than a massive, unorganized movement.

A democratic General Assembly would be the most just way to accommodate diversity while maintaining unity. In the absence of this, the competing organizations set to dictate the avowedly leaderless movement’s policies and goals are as follows:

The Working Groups

Because it is virtually impossible for the General Assembly—which consists of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people—to reach a consensus, everything has been delegated from day one to smaller “working groups.” Most of the hardcore occupiers—those who have spent multiple days and nights in the park—belong to one or more working group.

 

Unfortunately, these working groups also use the consensus model. On Saturday, October 8, I spoke with a member of the Press Working Group. He said that, with twenty to thirty people, the working groups were becoming too big and were finding it difficult to forge consensus. A group that has trouble coordinating the actions of thirty people is unlikely to provide the model for an alternative society, or even influence highly structured institutions like Bank of America—which has over a quarter million employees—and the US government. . The operations of these establishments, however, might be temporarily disrupted by the mobilization of millions of unorganized people performing simple acts in unison, like marching.

This appears to be the dominant rationale of the Direct Action Committee.

The Direct Action Committee

The Direct Action Committee is the major player of Occupy Wall Street. The leaders of the Direct Action Committee are, for the most part, the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street: members of Anonymous, Adbusters and other full-time activists. These people originally led the General Assembly, and used it to mobilize hundreds of people on marches during the movement’s initial weeks. Now that thousands of New Yorkers gather in downtown Manhattan to march daily, the Direct Action Committee no longer spends countless hours in the General Assembly convincing everyone to consent to these daily marches.

The marches are completely symbolic, calculated to garner the most attention possible for the least amount of work and thought afforded. The clearest example of the Direct Action Committee’s modus operandi is the fiasco at the Brooklyn Bridge. On October 1, The Direct Action Committee led seven-hundred marchers onto the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Shortly after reaching the roadway, the marchers were stopped by the NYPD. A police officer with a megaphone shouted to the leaders of the march that, “if you refuse to leave, you will be placed under arrest.” His voice was easily audible to the march’s leaders, even over the chants of “Take the bridge! Take the bridge!”

According to a witness who saw the events from the bridge’s walkway—and confirmed by this police video: http://www.youtube.com/nypd#p/a/u/1/BYfti1PeDmA—the leaders of the march did not solicit a group decision on whether or not to continue the march in the face of this threat. In fact, the march’s leaders did not even exercise their human microphone to inform the marchers that their arrest was imminent. Instead, the leaders changed the chant to, “Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” and led the march onto the bridge’s roadway, allowing the police to carry out what looked like—judging from the dozens of buses from Riker’s Island—a preplanned mass arrest, one of the largest in American history.

This was a poor decision for several reasons. First, this action exposed the marchers to potentially serious physical danger. Although the NYPD exercised uncharacteristic restraint, the safety of the marchers was left to the discretion and caprice of the individual officers—not to mention the additional risks that go with occupying a bridge. Second, it subjected everyone involved, including those who did not self-identify as “arrestable,” to the criminal justice system. Third, it sent a message that Occupy Wall Street’s leaders—predominantly middle-class white men—are not sensitive to the challenges that involuntary arrest poses to a significant portion of the 99%: those with young children, unsympathetic employers, questionable immigration status, arrest warrants, or a reasonable fear of the police. Finally, the strategic occupation of the oppressive forces represented by the Brooklyn Bridge proved mostly to annoy middle-class inter-borough commuters.

This action did result in generating more attention and greater interest in the movement. For all its faults, the Direct Action Committee’s mobilization of the populous is more participatory than the progressive movement that elected Obama. In 2008, most progressives seemed to believe that America’s representational democracy could be reformed from the inside, through the election of the right people. Now these same progressives are thoroughly disillusioned by our nation’s politics and strive to control their collective destiny through united action. Every day the Occupy Wall Street movement continues, more people dream of a radically different world and make the social networks necessary—if not sufficient—to create it.

If the Occupy Wall Street movement fails to transform these networks into participatory democratic structures that can challenge the hierarchal institutions that led us into financial crises and endless wars, people will likely settle with voting for the “lesser of two evils” every couple of years, an act that bears a greater resemblance to democracy than much of what goes on at Occupy Wall Street.

Organized Labor

Many people only began to take Occupy Wall Street seriously when the labor unions joined the movement. Labor unions control the machines and tools that are modern society’s vital organs. Every day, labor unions make the City run smoothly; and on any day, they can choose to stop. This power—kinetic and potential—makes labor organized in its current form capable of raising the standard of living for “the 99%.”

Similar to the working groups at Occupy Wall Street, however, the current organization of labor unions is incapable of shifting the paradigm to one in which there is no capital and no class differences. The hierarchal structure of labor unions provides the unity that Occupy Wall Street’s working groups lack.

American labor unions are organized similarly to bourgeois parties and corporations. Laborers elect union officials, who monopolize the organization’s administrative life. Part of this administrative work entails giving orders to the laborers, who do the work that gives the raw material its social value. At the end of the day, the laborers have the fruits of their labor taken from them and divided primarily among the company’s owners, secondly among the union leadership, and lastly back among themselves.

Unions keep in check owners who try to disrupt this division of profits. Union leaders who disrupt this dialectic are kept in check by company owners, or are recalled by union members. Union members who disrupt this dialectic can be fired either by their union leaders or their company’s owners. In short, the hierarchy is entrenched.

 

If Occupy Wall Street is ever to create a world free from oppression—instead of merely mitigating the pain of the oppressed—radical elements within the labor unions must cooperate with radical elements within Occupy Wall Street and form the democratic organizations that are necessary to bring about an ever more participatory, dialogic, democratic, egalitarian society.

The Democratic Party

The power of the Democratic Party to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street movement should not be underestimated. The Democrats hold the nation’s executive branch, as well as roughly half the legislative branch. Despite epitomizing the status quo, to millions of Americans the Democratic Party represents progressivism—particularly when compared to the Republicans. Until a viable alternative emerges, the Democratic Party will be the organization most capable of benefiting from the progressive outcry of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Since the Democratic Party is allowing the Occupy Wall Street movement to continue, one might conclude that the Democratic Party does not feel threatened by Occupy Wall Street. It may even bank on the movement’s power to mobilize the masses to counter the Tea Party, gain control of the House of Representatives, and maintain the Presidency.

This theory is bolstered by Mayor Bloomberg’s tacit support of Occupy Wall Street, and President Obama’s recent acknowledgement of the “broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” Rather than proposing a plan to end capitalism, Obama proposed “getting back to old-fashioned American values,” like “put(ting) in place financial rules that protect the American people.” During his speech he offered no criticisms of Occupy Wall Street, but did lambaste the Republicans for halting the progress of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Whatever their rationale, the Democrats will most likely wait to see how winter deals with the American Autumn. If Occupy Wall Street can resolve its structural shortcomings and last through the winter without its core members succumbing to frostbite, the Democrats may realize they’ve been playing with fire.

By Fritz Tucker

16 October 2011

Countercurrents.org

Fritz Tucker is a native Brooklynite, writer, activist, theorist and researcher of people’s movements the world over, from the US to Nepal. He blogs at fritztucker.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a k a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

I love you.

And I didn’t just say that so that hundreds of you would shout “I love you” back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.

Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.

If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”

That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began.

“Why are they protesting?” ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: “What took you so long?” “We’ve been wondering when you were going to show up.” And most of all: “Welcome.”

Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called “the movement of movements.”

But there are important differences too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature, they only last a week. That made us transient too. We’d appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It’s because they don’t have roots. And they don’t have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.

Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen.

Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to non-violence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality. Which we saw more of just last night. Meanwhile, support for this movement grows and grows. More wisdom.

But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. Unemployment was low, stock portfolios were bulging. The media was drunk on easy money. Back then it was all about start-ups, not shutdowns.

We pointed out that the deregulation behind the frenzy came at a price. It was damaging to labor standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.

What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I’m not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that’s important.

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.

That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and proving health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says, “I care about you.” In a culture that trains people to avoid each other’s gaze, to say, “Let them die,” that is a deeply radical statement.

A few final thoughts. In this great struggle, here are some things that don’t matter.

§ What we wear.

§ Whether we shake our fists or make peace signs.

§ Whether we can fit our dreams for a better world into a media soundbite.

And here are a few things that do matter.

§ Our courage.

§ Our moral compass.

§ How we treat each other.

We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets—like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that’s easier to win.

Don’t give in to the temptation. I’m not saying don’t call each other on shit. But this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.

Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.

By Naomi Klein

7 October 2011

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

 

 

 

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Click here to access OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.

By Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

© 2011 TruthDig.com

 

 

 

Can occupations survive a winter of global weirding, escalated police brutality, and the corporate media’s venom? Should they?

In some parts of the country there will be no cold weather. In others, police abuses will result in larger occupations, not smaller. And it’s certainly possible that for the first time in recent years an independent progressive populist campaign will survive the enmity of the corporate media.

In other cases, the cold, the communications assaults, fatigue, and the difficulties encountered by activist camps that also become homes for the homeless and the mentally ill may begin to erode the usefulness of encampments.

What to do?

Here’s one activist’s recommendations:

Above all: stay! Continue to hold public space! Grow, and rotate people. No single person need stay forever. But the 99% of the 99% that cheers from the sidelines needs to get into the squares and parks. We don’t need emails or phone calls or checks or pizzas so much as we need live bodies!

In particular, return wherever police have sought to deprive us of our First Amendment rights. Those abuses cannot be tolerated or our rights will come under greater assault everywhere else. We must occupy precisely where we are told we cannot. The way to do this while keeping the conversation focused on what motivated us in the first place (the need to obey majority demands, to tax the rich, to prosecute the biggest criminals, to end the wars, to move the spending from the military to human needs) is this. We demand the right to petition our governments for a redress of grievances.

That is the First Amendment right that is under assault.

The strength of the Declaration of Independence was the great number of grievances against King George. We have a great number of grievances as well, and if CNN doesn’t have time for them, well, it can lengthen its sound bytes. Our demands are not going to shrink except by being satisfied.

Encampments can, with some difficulty, serve as bases for nonviolent action and as community gathering places and providers of community services. If done right, aiding the homeless, the hungry, and those in need of medical care can strengthen occupations that may very well turn out to be permanent.

But the dominant focus should be on nonviolent resistance. Let’s not just do theater or spectacle. Let’s not just get in the way of commuters and others in the 99%. Let’s get out of the streets and into the suites. Let’s shut down offices.

And, while the focus on the government’s funders, handlers, and lobbyists is very useful, I’d like to see more focus on government. I do not mean working with or through government. I mean resisting it, interfering with it, preventing its operations, shutting it down. The 1% is represented, and the rest of us are not. Let’s put a halt to those operations and insist on representative ones.

If occupations end anywhere, they should not be ended by police or the media but by a transition to other tactics that appear more useful in that time and place, and those other tools should be up and running first before any occupation is phased out.

Here are some ideas that are being tried or could be:

Start a weekly event, ideally on a weekday, that includes a march or demonstration, a nonviolent resistance action, and a community gathering in a public space. Make this weekly action huge before considering whether to end the permanent occupation. Consider targeting warm buildings for nonviolent resistance.

Occupy empty buildings as bases for the winter. Find a building owner who wants construction work done in exchange for occupation. Or just squat in buildings that are empty. Or find one of those many people who support us but will not join us who can donate the use of a building or a house, or who can cover the rent. We need to continue building community. Our strength comes from it.

Plan bus tours from city to city, rolling occupations with big events at every stop.

Plan people’s conventions, regionally and nationally and internationally. This will involve something else that’s critical at the level of the local Occupy event: choosing representatives. We must figure out, as many are figuring out, how to delegate responsibilities without losing democratic control.

Plan huge events for the spring, including the start of an International Spring of Occupations.

Make plans for OccupyTampa and OccupyCharlotte for the times of the two national conventions of the two political parties of the 1%.

Do not go electoral. Do not go lobbyist. Do not divert money or time into campaigns. Do not spend your days drafting legislation or emailing congress members. Plenty of other people will do that stuff no matter what, and they will do it better if you’re doing the more fundamental work of cultural change. Instead, put your skills into communications, education, outreach, inspiration, and organizing.

The best way to improve the elections is to improve the society. The best way to destroy the society is to focus too heavily on elections. The rational choice between two bums who are both worse than the two who were offered up in the previous election cannot possibly be rational.

We have larger work to do. It may take a long time. That should not affect our level of dedication. But when there is a moment of growing momentum, we must seize that moment to press forward with everything we’ve got.

By David Swanson

28 Ocotber 2011

@ War Is A Crime.org

David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie”

 

What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems — its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere — goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?

Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same:someone got rich and someone got sick.

In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.

Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.

And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.

The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.

Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.

Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.

Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.

If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.

In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.

The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: the corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.

First Kill the EPA, Then Social Security: Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.

Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.

The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.

Beware of Growth: Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It’s why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?

The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: we have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits. This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO2 the planet can absorb and remain habitable.

Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources, and stealing from the future — that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.

At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche of species extinction… that collapse is upon us now. In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.

Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.

An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.

Occupy Earth: Give credit where it’s due: it’s been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.

Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.

When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.

Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.

After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?

By Chip Ward

Chip Ward is a former grassroots organizer/activist who has led several successful campaigns to hold polluters accountable. He co-founded and led Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah.

 

Thanks in large part to the New York and national corporate media a massive campaign to shift power away from giant corporations and into the hands of the people is now afoot all across this continent. It was inspired by peoples’ nonviolent uprisings in other countries and sparked by courageous nonviolence on Wall Street.

Can we keep it going and growing despite the unreliability of the corporate media? When the television networks created Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, for us — following the courageous stand taken by Cindy Sheehan — they later turned against the movement and against Cindy. Already they are working to depict our occupations as violent, misdirected, undirected, and impotent.

Can we build the 99% awareness, the broad participation, the self-assurance, and the endurance to maintain on our own what we have never been able to create on our own without the cooperation of television? I think we can. I think this is different. There is broad popular support rapidly rising, but we will have to work extremely hard at communicating our purpose and our process. It must be universally understood that we want majority rule respected by our government for a change (including by ending the wars and taxing the rich) and that we will use no violence whatsoever to achieve our ends.

Communities

Occupations are becoming communities. We should be setting up permanent peoples’ encampments in our public squares with free medical clinics and other services, with modeling of democratic decision making, and with sharing of strategies, friendships, and legal services for those nonviolently resisting the corporate plutopentagocratic agenda.

Civil Resistance

We should continue to engage in ever more serious civil resistance. We need to nonviolently interfere with the operations of our misrepresentatives and their financial masters. Symbolism is not enough. Actual interference is needed, and actual interference also makes the best symbolism. We should be careful to target the 1% and their servants, and to minimize disruptions for the 99%. In D.C. for example, I’ve been arguing against shutting down highways and in favor of shutting down driveways of those in power, bringing them early morning donuts and coffee and allowing them to leave their streets once they’ve answered basic questions about the direction in which they will take our country with our approval.

Our general principle of targeting the 1% and doing so nonviolently should be so well understood that when corporate columnists misrepresent us, or infiltrate us in order to instigate violence, at the very least we do not begin questioning each other in obedience to corporate propaganda.

Politics

Tom Hayden was just on Keith Olbermann and, I think, said some very important truths and a fundamental lie. He said that 10,000 people sitting down in New York Streets and insisting on trials by juries of their peers if arrested could shut down the whole system. The same is true in Washington, although the population from which to try to draw 10,000 people is much smaller there. We’ve had marches of hundreds of thousands of people in these cities on weekends. There’s no reason we cannot have sit-ins of 10,000 on a weekday.

Hayden also said that President Barack Obama alone has the power to take huge steps to satisfy this movement. That’s true. He could end the wars, save $1.5 trillion, and remove the threat to Social Security and Medicare. He could also commit to vetoing any revenue or spending legislation until the top 1% is taxed at the level last seen when President Dwight Eisenhower was in town.

But then Hayden said another option would be for Obama to “lay down the gauntlet” and declare that he couldn’t do anything because the Republicans wouldn’t let him. That is not an option that will have any impact on a movement like this one. We’re not in this to elect somebody president. And we will not believe this kind of nonsense. As stated in the previous breath: Obama can end the wars if he chooses.

The Next War

It is critical that this movement be on high alert and continue to make connections between who’s paying in, what’s being defunded, and the war machine that is swallowing our savings. There is an effort underway yet again to justify a military strike by the United States and/or Israel against Iran. We need to be crystal clear: we will not stand for another war. Bombing anything is war. We will not stand for it. No crime, whether fictional or real, whether individual or national, can justify the greatest crime there is: the launching of war.

Saturday

This Saturday is an international day of action. This is an opportunity to build an international movement to oppose the international corporations that fund the elections of U.S. politicians, write our trade policies, and set our national course toward that cliff just up ahead. Let’s make this into a show of brotherhood and sisterhood across borders. Let’s do this without politicians or parties. Let’s make this a people’s demand for global social justice.

And then our public servants will be permitted to do what their name suggests and serve us.

By David Swanson

13 October, 2011

David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie”

The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki a U.S citizen in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on September 30 has been publicized by the mass media, President Obama and the usual experts on al-Qaeda as “a major blow to the jihadist network founded by Osama bin Laden” US officials called Awlaki “the most dangerous figure in Al-Qaeda” (Financial Times Oct. 1 and 2, 2011).

There is ample evidence to suggest that the publicity surrounding the killing of al-Awlaki has greatly exaggerated his political importance and is an attempt to cover up the declining influence of the US in the Islamic world. The State Department’s declaration of a major victory serves to exaggerate US military capacity to defeat its adversaries. The assassination serves to justify Obama’s arbitrary use of death squads to execute overseas US critics and adversaries by executive fiat denying the accused elementary judicial protections.

Myths About al-Awlaki

Al-Awlaki was a theological blogger in a small, poor Islamic country (Yemen). He was confined to propagandizing against Western countries, attempting to influence Islamic believers to resist Western military and cultural intervention. Within Yemen, his organizational affiliations were with a minority sector of the mass popular opposition to US backed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. His fundamentalist group was largely influential in a few small towns in southern Yemen. He was not a military or political leader in his organization, dubbed by the West as “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP). Like most of what the CIA calls “Al-Qaeda”, AQAP was a local autonomous organization, meaning that it was organized and controlled by local leaders even as it expressed agreement with many other loosely associated fundamentalist groups. Awlaki had a very limited role in the Yemeni groups’ military and political operations and virtually no influence in the mass movement engaged in ousting Saleh. There is no evidence, documented or observable, that he was “a very effective propagandist” as ex-CIA and now Brookings Institution member Bruce Riedal claims. In Yemen and among the mass popular movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain or elsewhere his followers were few and far between. One “expert” cites such intangibles as his “spiritual leadership”, which is as good a way as any to avoid the test of empirical evidence: apparently a crystal ball or a tarot read will do.

Given the paucity of evidence demonstrating Awlaki’s political and ideological influence among the mass movements in North Africa, the Middle East or Asia, the US intelligence agencies claim his “real influence was among English-speaking jihadi, some of whom he groomed personally to carry out attacks on the US.”

In other words Washington’s casting Awlaki as an “important threat” revolves around his speeches and writings, since he had no operational role in organizing suicide bomb attacks – or at least no concrete evidence has been presented up to now.

The intelligence agencies “suspect” he was involved in the plot that dispatched bombs in cargo aircraft from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010. US intelligence claims he provided a “theological justification” via e-mail for US army Major Nidal Malik’s killing of 13 people at Fort Hood. In other words, like many US philosophical writers and legal experts like Princeton’s Michael Walzer and Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, Awlaki discussed “just wars” and the “right” of violent action. If political writings and speeches of publicists are cited by an assassin as the bases for their action, should the White House execute, leading US Islamophobes like Marilyn Geller and Daniel Pipes, cited as inspiration by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Brevik? Or does their Zionist affiliation provide them immunity from Navy Seal assaults and drone missiles?

Even assuming that the unsubstantiated “suspicions” of the CIA, MI 16 and the Al Qaeda “experts” are correct and Awlaki had a direct or indirect hand in “terrorist action” against the US, these activities were absurdly amateurish and abject failures, certainly not a serious threat to our security. The “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s effort to ignite bomb materials on a flight to Detroit, December 25, 2009, led to roasting his testicles! Likewise the bombs dispatched in cargo aircraft from Yemen to Chicago in October 2010 were another bungled job.

If anything the Yemenite AQAP’s hopeless, hapless operational planning served to highlight its technical incompetence. In fact according to Mutallab’s own admission, published on NBC news at the time, Awlaki played no role in the planning or execution of the bomb attack. He merely served to refer Mutallab to the Al Qaeda organization.

Clearly, Awlaki was a minor figure in Yemen’s political struggles. He was a propagandist of little influence in the mass movements during the “Arab Spring”. He was an inept recruiter of English-speaking would be bombers. The claims that he planned and “hatched” two bomb plots (Financial Times, October 1 and 2, page 2) are refuted by the confession of one bomber and the absence of any corroboratory evidence regarding the failed cargo bombs.

The mass media inflate the importance of Awlaki to the stature of a major al-Qaeda leader and subsequently, his killing as a “major psychological blow” to world-wide jihadists. This imagery has no substance. But the puff pieces do have a very important propaganda purpose. Worse still, the killing of Awlaki provides a justification for extra-judicial state serial assassinations of ideological critics of Anglo-American leaders engaged in bloody colonial wars.

Propaganda to Bolster Flagging Military Morale

Recent events strongly suggest that the US and its NATO allies are losing the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban: top collaborator officials are knocked off at the drop of a Taliban turban. After years of occupation, Iraq is moving closer to Iran rather than the US. Libya in the post-Gaddafi period is under warring mercenary forces squaring off for a fight for the billion dollar booty. Al Qaeda prepares battle against neo-liberal expats and Gaddafi renegades.

Washington and NATO’s attempt to regain the initiative via puppet rulers in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Yemen is being countered by a “second wave” of mass pro-democracy movements. The “Arab Spring” is being followed by a “hot autumn”. Positive news and favorable outcomes for Obama are few and far between. He has run out of any pseudo-populist initiative to enchant the Arab-Islamic masses. His rhetoric rings hollow in the face of his UN speech, denying recognition of an independent Palestinian state. His groveling before Israel is clearly seen as an effort to bolster his re-election campaign financing by wealthy Zionists.

Diplomatically isolated and domestically in trouble over failed economic policies, Obama pulls the trigger and shoots an itinerant Muslim preacher in Yemen to send a “message” to the Arab world. In a word he says, “If you, the Arabs, the Islamic world, wont’ join us we can and will execute those of you who can be labeled “spiritual mentors” or are suspected of harboring terrorists.”

Obama’s defense of systematic killing of ideological critics, denying US constitutional norms of judicial due process to a U.S citizen and in blatant rejection of international law defines a homicidal executive.

Let us be absolutely clear what the larger implications are of political murder by executive fiat. If the President can order the murder of a dual American-Yemeni citizen abroad on the bases of his ideological-theological beliefs, what is to stop him from ordering the same in the US? If he uses arbitrary violence to compensate for diplomatic failure abroad what is to stop him from declaring a “heightened internal security threat” in order to suspend our remaining freedoms at home and to round up critics?

We seriously understate our “Obama problem” if we think of this ordered killing merely as an isolated murder of a “jihadist” in strife torn Yemen … Obama’s murder of Awlaki has profound, long term significance because it puts political assassinations at the center of US foreign and domestic policy. As Secretary of Defense Panetta states, “eliminating home grown terrorists” is at the core of our “internal security”.

By James Petras

James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, and Journal of Peasant Studies.

 

 

 

 

 

US President Barack Obama announced Friday that the remaining US troops in Iraq would be withdrawn from the country before the end of December, following the collapse of talks with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on extending the US presence into 2012.

Obama, in a statement delivered on short notice at a hastily called press appearance, portrayed the decision as the realization of a promise from the 2008 election campaign to end the war in Iraq. The pretense of fidelity to a campaign promise is ludicrous, given that the Obama administration has been striving for most of this year to overturn the December 31, 2011 deadline for a full US withdrawal, negotiated by the Bush administration in 2008.

US political and military officials have shuttled in and out of Iraq for months seeking to browbeat the Maliki government into a deal that would keep US troops in Iraq into 2012 and beyond. They proposed first to keep tens of thousands, then 18,000, then 5,000, then 3,000, but ultimately no deal could be finalized before the deadline.

Obama extended the war for nearly three years after taking office, and essentially carried out the policy adopted by the Bush administration before its departure.

The lack of advance notice of Obama’s White House announcement of the supposed end of the nearly nine-year war and the curious timing of the announcement—shortly before 1 PM on a Friday afternoon—suggest an attempt to keep the statement low-key and direct it largely to an Iraqi audience.

Obama’s announcement was broadcast live in Iraq at about 8 PM local time. This indicates that the statement, claiming an end to the US occupation and the beginning of a new relationship between “sovereign” and “equal” partners, was aimed at least in part at placating mass hostility in Iraq to the US troop presence, while providing Iraqi parliamentarians and politicians with political cover to negotiate some new deal to return US troops to the country.

The Iraqi defense minister followed Obama’s statement with one of his own declaring the need for a continued US troop presence, ostensibly to train Iraqi forces.

Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki is to visit Washington in December for further talks, and Obama held out the possibility of a future agreement to station US troops in Iraq in the guise of training Iraqi soldiers in the use of weapons systems the Iraqi government is buying from American military contractors.

There is no disguising, however, the debacle for the foreign policy of American imperialism. After nine years of warfare, with 4,400 US troops killed, tens of thousands wounded, and trillions of dollars squandered, the United States will lose its privileged access to bases on Iraqi soil as well as the legal immunity enjoyed by US soldiers.

The announcement produced bitter recriminations from Republican presidential candidates and representatives of the core of neoconservative pundits and strategists who played a central role in the Bush administration’s drive to war in Iraq.

Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, a leading adviser to General David Petraeus in the 2008 “surge” of US troops into Iraq, condemned the action as empowering the regime in neighboring Iran. “I don’t see how you can talk about containing Iran when you leave Iraq to its own devices in such a way that it has no ability to protect itself,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney denounced the decision, declaring, “President Obama’s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women.”

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann complained that the United States was being “kicked out” of Iraq “by the very people we liberated.” She complained, “Once we’re finished in Iraq, we’ll have more troops in Honduras than we’ll be leaving behind in Iraq.”

Significantly, however, the congressional Republican leadership was far more cautious in its response. House Speaker John Boehner claimed that the war in Iraq was a military victory won by American troops “under the strategy developed and implemented by our generals, and the leadership of both President Bush and President Obama.”

Romney, his chief rival Texas Governor Rick Perry, and several other Republican presidential candidates suggested that in taking the action, Obama was caving in to antiwar public opinion in the United States. “President Obama is putting political expediency ahead of sound military and security judgment,” Perry said, while Romney chimed in that he wanted to know what the US military advice to Obama had been—ignoring the inconvenient fact that it was political opposition within Iraq, not in the United States, that blocked an agreement.

In the face of overwhelming popular hostility to a continued American occupation, not one of the parties represented in the Iraqi parliament was willing to support an agreement that declared that US soldiers could not be held accountable under Iraqi law for crimes committed against Iraqi citizens.

This includes not only Maliki’s Dawa Party, which heads a shaky coalition dependent on support from the radical anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, but also the Sunni-based Iraqiya coalition, headed by the former CIA asset Ayad Allawi, who felt compelled to oppose any agreement with his former paymasters. Even the Kurdish nationalist parties, the KDP and PUK, which have long enjoyed close relations with Washington, opposed any continuing grant of immunity to American soldiers in Iraq.

At a press conference in Baghdad, Maliki said, “When the issue of immunity was brought up and the Iraqi side was told that the American side won’t leave a single soldier without full immunity, and the Iraqi answer was that it’s impossible to grant immunity to a single American soldier, negotiations stopped regarding the numbers, location and mechanics of training.”

The Obama administration and the Pentagon insisted on maintaining the regime of legal impunity, despite or rather because of the countless atrocities committed in the course of the invasion and conquest of Iraq and the occupation that followed. These were perpetrated not only by uniformed US soldiers, but also by tens of thousands of paramilitary security personnel, Blackwater mercenaries and plainclothes spies and operatives.

At least 5,000 of these mercenaries will remain in Iraq after December 31, most of them working as security contractors for the huge US Embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the world. The State Department will have a staggering 16,000 employees in Iraq, according to one estimate. These will have diplomatic immunity, but the security contractors will be subject to arrest and prosecution in Iraqi courts in the event of future actions like the Blackwater massacre in Nisour Square in Baghdad four years ago.

Obama sought to put the best possible face on the political setback, claiming that he and Maliki “are in full agreement about how to move forward” and that future US-Iraqi relations would be conducted as “a normal relationship between sovereign nations, an equal partnership based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” As though such a relationship were possible between an invaded country that saw a million of its citizens slaughtered and its infrastructure destroyed and the invading power which perpetrated that catastrophe!

In his remarks Friday, and then again in his Internet and radio speech Saturday, Obama suggested that the end of direct US military involvement in Iraq was a turning point on the road to a reduction of US military actions around the world. “The tide of war is receding,” he said Friday.

In his Saturday speech, Obama took note of the Iraq decision and the destruction of the Gaddafi regime in Libya—culminating in the murder of Gaddafi last week—and declared, “After a decade of war, we’re turning the page and moving forward… As we end these wars, we’re focusing on our greatest challenge as a nation—rebuilding our economy and renewing our strength at home.”

This is a brazen lie on at least two levels. The US forces are being pulled out of Iraq only to facilitate the deployment of troops in many other countries around the world. Since Obama succeeded George W. Bush in the White House, after running a cynically false campaign posing as an “antiwar” candidate, he has greatly expanded the scope of US military operations around the world.

Bush had US forces engaged in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and covertly in Pakistan. Obama greatly escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and added new wars in Libya, Yemen, Somalia and now Uganda, where 100 US special forces were dispatched last week.

As for the claim that his administration is turning to “nation building” in the United States rather than in Iraq, this is mere posturing for electoral purposes. The Obama administration has worked hand-in-glove with the Republican right to slash social spending at home, even as it has increased military spending to levels far beyond those that prevailed during the Cold War.

Nor is the “withdrawal” from Iraq in any sense a pullback by the United States from the Bush doctrine of remaking the Middle East by military force. Obama has merely acted on the recognition, both in the Pentagon and in ruling class circles generally, that the US could no longer afford an open-ended military commitment on the scale of Iraq and had to find other methods to carry out its program of dominating the oil resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who visited Afghanistan, Pakistan and several Central Asian dictatorships during the week, took the occasion of the Iraq announcement to issue a warning to Iran not to “miscalculate” on US intentions in the Middle East.

Interviewed on the Sunday talks shows, she pointed to the 50,000 US troops that will remain deployed in the region, even after a final pullout from Iraq. This includes troops stationed at bases in Turkey, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia, as well as Djibouti, just across the Red Sea from Yemen. There is also a newly established CIA base for firing drone missiles at an undisclosed location on the Arabian Peninsula.

By Patrick Martin

 

 

 

By Shamus Cooke

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org)

The leader of the moderate Tunisian Islamist party that won the first election of the Arab spring met stock exchange executives on Wednesday to reassure financial markets of its commitment to free enterprise and foreign investment.

The Tunisian stock exchange fell earlier this week amid concerns over the victory of Nahda, which had been crushed by the autocratic regime ousted in January but re-emerged to gain at least 40 per cent of the seats in the constituent assembly.

But after a meeting with Rachid Ghannouchi, the head of Nahda, the bourse rallied. Mr Ghannouchi said his party was in favour of more companies listing and would help remove hurdles.

“We wanted to reassure them that we are on their side and that we want to play a positive role in the Tunisian economy,” said Moaz Ghannouchi, an economist and the son of the leader, who was also present at the meeting.

Officials of the party signalled they would protect the country’s crucial tourism sector and would not ban alcoholic drinks and bathing suits on its beaches, which draw millions of European holidaymakers every year.

Votes are still being counted, but Nahda officials are confident they are by far the single largest force in the constituent assembly that will write Tunisia’s first democratic constitution. Nahda has already started talks with secular parties on forming a coalition government to lead the country during a one-year transition. Hamadi Jbeli, secretary-general, said on Wednesday he was hoping to take the position of prime minister.

Mr Jbeli was quoted by the official TAP news agency as saying that the tourism sector was a national “achievement” that Nahda would not “touch”.

“Is it logical to handicap a strategic sector like tourism by forbidding wine or wearing bathing costumes?” he asked. “These are personal liberties for Tunisians and foreigners as well.”

He also said his party would not make Islamic banking “universal” or abolish Tunisia’s conventional banking system. “The market is central to Nahda’s economic philosophy as we can see in its programme,” he said.

Adel Grar, who heads the Tunisian stockbroker association and attended the meeting with Mr Ghannouchi, said he was reassured. The stock market, he said, was central to Nahda’s economic philosophy. “In addition, they seem to understand the practical problems we face,” he said.

 

Tunisia’s first democratic election has confirmed that the Islamists are the biggest political force – a development likely to be replicated in Egypt and Libya, the two other north African states, which also shook off dictators this year.

Soaring corruption in ruling circles was among the reasons behind the revolt which, in January toppled Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s former president.

Relatives of the president and his wife controlled large sectors of the economy and ensured there was no competition.

By Heba Saleh

27 October 2011

@ The Financial Times