David Graeber on the practicality of protest

Economic anthropologist David Graeber was one of the early participants in Occupy Wall Street.  He wrote an interesting article in the current issue of The Baffler in which he argued that the power of the political and economic elite is based on their ability to convince the rest of us that there is no alternative to the status quo.  He said that is why they have such fear of dissent and protest.

One often hears that antiwar protests in the late sixties and early seventies were ultimately failures, since they did not appreciably speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina.   But afterward, those controlling U.S. foreign policy were so anxious about being met with similar popular unrest—and even more, with unrest within the military itself, which was genuinely falling apart by the early seventies—that they refused to commit U.S. forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years.

David Graeber

It took 9/11, an attack that led to thousands of civilian deaths on U.S. soil, to fully overcome the notorious “Vietnam syndrome”—and even then, the war planners made an almost obsessive effort to ensure the wars were effectively protest-proof.   Propaganda was incessant, the media was brought on board, experts provided exact calculations on body bag counts (how many U.S. casualties it would take to stir mass opposition), and the rules of engagement were carefully written to keep the count below that.

The problem was that since those rules of engagement ensured that thousands of women, children, and old people would end up “collateral damage” in order to minimize deaths and injuries to U.S. soldiers, this meant that in Iraq and Afghanistan, intense hatred for the occupying forces would pretty much guarantee that the United States couldn’t obtain its military objectives.

And remarkably, the war planners seemed to be aware of this.  It didn’t matter.  They considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than to actually win the war. It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.

I think this is true.   The reason the United States government is moving heaven and earth to capture Julian Assange and punish Bradley Manning is the fear of letting the American public know what the government really is doing.  Fear is the reason for the massive police response to the Occupy movement and to protests generally is so out of proportion to what is actually being done.

Urban police departments have military equipment and are encouraged to use military tactics, as if they were an occupation force in a hostile foreign country.   It is as if the powers that be are preparing to suppress an uprising among the citizenry.

The United States government has, for more than 30 years, been dismantling government regulation of corporations and Wall Street banks, dismantling the social safety net and reducing taxes on rich people, with the promise of economic growth and prosperity for all, and that this promise has not been fulfilled.    It also is true that the optimism and hope for a better future, which has characterized American life since before the United States was an independent nation, is vanishing.   And historically, disappointed hopes were what inspired revolutions.   So it is no wonder that the elite are fearful.

Click on  A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse for Graeber’s complete article, which is well worth reading in full.  The article was taken from Graeber’s new book, The Democracy Project (which I haven’t read).  Click on A Kaleidoscopic Sense of Possibility for Graeber’s discussion of the book with Lynn Parramore of Alternet.

Presidential death warrants and U.S. citizens

The White House has so far refused to give a straight answer to the question of whether the President claims to have authority to kill Americans on American soil based on his sole determination.

The police and the military have not only a right but a duty to use lethal force to protect human life.  Police have the right to use lethal force to take someone into custody who is charged with committing a crime or of whom there is probable cause to believe committed a crime.  If Americans wage war against their government, as in the Civil War, the government has the right to use lethal force to defeat them.

But in all these examples, the use of lethal force is limited to the specific situation.  The question is whether the President has an open-ended right to issue a death warrant against someone not engaging in an act of terrorism, not charged with a crime, not resisting arrest, not bearing arms against U.S. forces, but whom the President has determined is a threat to national security.

As it happens, I don’t think the President should have unlimited authority to order the killing of foreigners or people living in foreign countries, either.  But Obama administration’s response to the question about Americans on American soil shows how foolish it is to imagine that it is possible to grant a ruler absolute power and think it always will be used against somebody else.

So far as I can tell, the Obama administration has never acknowledged any legal restriction on the President’s power whatsoever.   I think this is a greater long-range threat to American freedom than anything our foreign enemies are doing.  You can be sure that whatever power is claimed by President Obama will be claimed by his successors, on whichever party.

I think Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky deserves great credit for pressing this question.   It is an example of how some Republicans libertarians, conservatives and even Tea Partiers are more principled defenders of liberty than many of us liberals.

[Update 3/7/13]  Attorney General Eric Holder sent Rand Paul a letter saying that the President does not have authority to use weaponized drones against American citizens not engaged in combat on American soil.  Click on Eric Holder answers Ron Paul (sort of) for my follow-up post.

Gun laws and psychiatric surveillance

If you live in New York state and go to see a therapist about anger management problems, there is a possibility you may lose your deer rifle and go into a police data base of potentially dangerous people.

New York’s new gun-control law requires therapists and social workers to report to county mental health directors whether they believe a patient is dangerous.  That information will go into a state data base, which would be used to confiscate gun owners’ weapons.

I would not go to a therapist if I did not think I could trust him or her to keep what I confided in confidence.  I would not trust a therapist if I thought the therapist was going to report what I said to the police.  The unintended consequence of such a law is that people most in need of therapy will not seek it.

Human beings have free will.  That means human behavior is unpredictable.  But New York state law puts the burden of predicting human behavior on therapists, but does not allow them to use their own judgment as to what to do.  A therapist has options if a patient seems dangerously violent—to increase the patient’s medications, to notify people who may be at-risk, to start proceedings to have the patient committed to a mental institution and, yes, to notify the police if that seems necessary.

Simply by the law of averages, someday somebody who is in therapy is going to commit a violent crime with a gun.  No therapist wants to be in the position of not having notified the authorities in advance that the person is dangerous.  The incentive will be to notify the authorities even if there is only a slight possibility of danger.

A conservative friend of mine pointed out that the same incentive applies to prosecutors and judges, and is nothing new.  But prosecutors and judges have to justify their decisions by actual evidence.  Therapists make a subjective judgment and don’t have to prove they’re right.

Even if there were an accurate predictive science of psychology, as in the movie and Philip K. Dick short story “Minority Report”, there still would be a problem in denying you of your legal rights not because of what you had done, but because of what someone thinks you might do.  There are people in prison who have served their sentences, but who are not released because some psychiatrist thinks the person will be a recidivist.

The basic principle of liberty under law, as affirmed in England’s Magna Carta of 1215, the English Bill of Rights of 1688 and the U.S. Constitution in Article One, Section 9, is that the government can punish you only if you have broken a law and that you have a right to know the specific law you are accused of breaking.  Another principle of liberty under law is presumption of innocence.  The prosecution has to prove you have broken the law.

When we look at the old Soviet Union, and how psychiatry was abused to punish political dissidents who had broken no law, we ought to be wary of making therapists agents of the police.

§§§

Click on NY Gun Law May Discourage Mental Health Therapy for Those Who Need It for a report by CBS News.

The Senate votes to outlaw indefinite detention

On Friday, the Senate voted 67 to 29 for an amendment introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein to the defense authorization bill that read as follows.

Dianne Feinstein

An authorization to use military force, a declaration of war, or any similar authority shall not authorize the detention without charge or trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in the United States unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention

I’m encouraged that the Senate is pushing back against unchecked Presidential power, although this is a basic Constitutional principle that ought to be taken for granted.   I’m glad to see Democrats willing to stand up to a Democratic President on a question of basic principle.

I’m not sure what the House of Representatives will do.   Most of the opponents of the amendment in the Senate were Republicans, and the House has a Republican majority

Click on The Senate Voted to Outlaw Indefinite Detention…Or Did It? for a report on the vote by Adam Serwer of Mother Jones.@

[Added 12/3/12]  The problem with the amendment is that it makes a Constitutional right subject to an act of Congress.  Still, it is a step in the right direction.

[Added 12/22/12]  I was too hopeful. The bill died in the House.

[Added 1/9/13]  Congress added a rider to the defense appropriations bill restricting the authority of the President to release prisoners or put them on trial.

Obama supporters vs. Obama policies

A citizen journalist named Luke Rudkowski interviewed supporters of President Obama in New York City about Obama’s policies as President with regard to kill lists, drone warfare, warrantless surveillance and warrantless detention, but with one twist—he presented these policies as Mitt Romney’s proposals rather than as things Obama has done.   The Obama supporters were outraged at Romney, and startled and confused when told the truth.

I wonder whether the same thing could have been done in reverse with Romney supporters.  I’m not sure.  I suspect, although I can’t prove, that a large fraction of Republican voters support authoritarian government on principle, rather than merely out of party loyalty.

Luke Rudkowski did not advocate a vote for Mitt Romney, nor do I.  He might well be worse than Obama, but Obama is bad enough.

Click on Luke Rudkowski | We Are Change for more of Rudkowski’s work.

The emerging American police state

If you had asked me 15 years ago what head of state would create a secret paramilitary force whose purpose was to execute an expanding list of death warrants into the indefinite future, I would not have said “the United States.”  I might have guessed Russia or China or North Korea or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  I would have said that such a force is a defining characteristic of a totalitarian government.

But in fact, as the Washington Post revealed recently, this is the policy of the United States, as carried out by a supposedly liberal Democrat who holds the Nobel Peace Prize.

The U.S. government has a policy of open-ended undeclared war, implemented by flying killer robot drones.  We have government surveillance in which every message and transaction carried over an electronic network is available to the state.   Our police are being increasingly militarized, as if they are preparing to put down an uprising.

I don’t think George W. Bush or Barack Obama are comparable to Hitler, but between the two of them, they have established an institutional and legal structure in which a Hitler, if he came to power, would lack no power to make his dictatorship total.  If you have the power of life and death without accountability, if you have the power to act in secret and prosecute those who reveal your secret, what power do you lack to be a dictator.  No, I don’t think George W. Bush or Barack Obama are comparable to Hitler, but having lived through their administrations, I find it easier to understand how the German people could come to accept Hitler’s rule as normal.

There are two things I find hard to understand.  Right-wing Republicans think that President Obama is secretly plotting against American constitutional liberties.  Yet these same Republicans are perfectly content to give this same President unlimited, unaccountable life-and-death powers exercised in secret.  They opposed the President’s health care plan because they imagine it would create death panels, yet they support the creation of real death panels.

Liberal Democrats are afraid of what Mitt Romney would do if elected President.  Yet they are content to give the President unlimited, unaccountable, life-and-death powers exercised in secret, as if there never will be a time when these powers are handed over to a right-wing Republican.

Click on Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. plans to keep adding to kill lists for the Washington Post report on the Obama administration’s “disposition matrix”.

Click on Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent for Glenn Greenwald’s analysis.

Click on US legislation targets anyone in the world it deems a threat – that could be you for the larger picture.

 

Imran Khan and the arrogance of U.S. power

Imran Khan, a former Pakistan cricket star, has gone into politics and may well be the next Prime Minister of Pakistan.  HE was interviewed in August by The Economist about his political views in the video above.

Last week, on his way to a political meeting in New York City, he was detained by U.S. immigration officials and interrogated for about 30 minutes concerning his opposition to U.S. drone attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan.   He missed his flight, but was allowed to continue.

A couple of things strike me about this.  First, Imran Khan’s political opinions are no great mystery.  Anybody with access to Google or YouTube can find them in a hurry.  Second, what was did the immigration official think he was accomplishing by harassing and insulting a foreign leader?  Did the official think he had the power to make Imran Khan mend his ways?  I don’t know which is worse—to think that this reflected some high level decision in Homeland Security, or that some low level official thought that this was within his discretion, and nobody called him to account.

In the total scheme of things, there are many worse violations of human rights than Imran Khan being questioned at the Toronto airport.  But it is an example of an attitude by American officials toward the rest of the world that has generated a bad backlash, and is certain to create a worse backlash in the years ahead.

Click on Imran Khan detained and ‘interrogated over drone views’ by US immigration for Glenn Greenwald’s report for Britain’s The Guardian.

Click on Outrage over CIA’s deadly ‘double tap’ drone attacks for a report in Britain’s The Independent.

 

The legacy of Barack Obama

Barack Obama leaves a rich legacy.  He has established a bipartisan consensus that the powers of the President of the United States include the signing of secret death warrants based on secret criteria, and created a secret paramilitary force using flying killer robots to carry it out.  He has established a bipartisan consensus of never-ending warfare with no criterion for victory that could ever bring that warfare to an end.  He has established the principle that the government has a right to operate in secrecy and that insiders who reveal wrongdoing deserve to go to prison.  What other powers would a fascist dictator lack?

Obama has acted pro-actively to protect Wall Street bankers from prosecution for financial fraud, and to prevent the
“too big to fail” banks from being broken up.  He has offered to bargain away Social Security and Medicare in return for tax changes that could be achieved simply by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire.

When I think of Obama, I think of Bradley Manning stripped naked in his solitary cell.  I think of a 16-year-old boy sitting by the side of a road, suddenly turned into a “bug splat” because of the actions of his father.  I think of young black men going to prison for years for trivial drug offenses that Obama himself committed as a young man.  I think of Obama’s former chief of staff saying that everyone who expected Obama is keep his campaign promises is a “retard,” and his press secretary saying they should be drug-tested.

I will not vote for Barack Obama.  I will vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party, but almost all the alternative parties have a better platform than Obama’s.  It is a foregone conclusion that New York state will go for Obama, but if some of us show we want a better choice, that may have some effect in the long run.  Like the late Eugene V. Debs, I think it is better to vote for what I want, and get it, than vote for what I don’t want, and not get it.

But even if I lived in a swing state, I still would not vote for Obama.  It is not a foregone conclusion that a Romney administration would be worse.  If Romney is elected, some Democrats may remember they are liberals.  There might be opposition to the Wall Street oligarchy, the Homeland Security state and perpetual war, which there was under the Bush administration, but which has been neutered under the Obama administration.

Click on the following links for more.

The Obama Contradiction by Tom Engelhardt.

Obama moves to make the war on terror permanent by Glenn Greenwald.

The Question That Makes Most Obama Supporters Nervous and Evasive by Conor Friedersdorf.

President Romney Can Thank Obama For His Permanent Robotic Death List by Spencer Ackerman.

Symptoms of the Bush-Obama Presidency by David Bromwich.

Obama’s Betrayals: First the Base, Then the Party by Dave Lindorff

“Good Night and Good Luck”

Watching this excellent docudrama about Edward R. Murrow’s battle with Senator Joe McCarthy took me back, in imagination, to those days.  In 1953 and 1954, when the events of this movie took place, I was a college student in Wisconsin.   I listened faithfully to Edward R. Murrow’s CBS radio news broadcasts, and admired his use of language—precise, strong, not a word wasted and his tone of voice full of majesterial disdain for liars and demagogues.   I don’t remember whether I viewed Murrow’s CBS TV documentary on McCarthy when it was originally broadcast, but later, but I greatly admired it for the same reasons.

I watched it the other night on DVD at the home of my radical friend Larry, who pointed out that the time frame of the movie coincided with the CIA-sponsored coups against the elected governments of Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954—both of which planted the seeds of the tragic histories of those two countries down to this day.  I don’t remember if Murrow ever did broadcasts on those two events.  At the time they did not loom large in my consciousness.  To the extent that I thought about them, I thought about them not as examples of American imperialism, but as episodes in the global struggle against totalitarian Communism.

My writings for the student newspaper were about academic freedom, which all educated, right-thinking people were for, and about racial discrimination, which all educated right-thinking people were against.  I thought the danger to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights came from demagogues like McCarthy and the Southern segregationists.  I did not think there was anything systemically wrong with the basic institutions of American society, nor did Edward R. Murrow.

It is only in the past 20 years, and especially the past 10 years, that I have begun to see that I was wrong, and radical friends such as Larry were right.  U.S. government policies that I saw as byproducts of the struggle against Communism continued and grew stronger after the fall of Communism.

The movie depicts a program that Murrow did defending Milo Radulovich, an Air Force lieutenant who lost his commission on the grounds that he had been determined to be a security risk on the basis of secret information.  He had been asked to sever ties with his immigrant father, who subscribed to a Serbian-language newspaper published on Communist Yugoslavia, and his sister, who allegedly was active in liberal and left-wing causes.

Today this seems almost quaint.  The U.S. government now uses secret information to designate people for “targeted killing”.

Why I’m not voting for the black President

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer and blogger for The Atlantic Monthly, wrote an essay entitled “Fear of a Black President” in which, among other things, he described what President Obama’s election means to black people, and especially to black parents.  It means that there is literally no upper limit on what black Americans are allowed to achieve.  As recently as five years ago, I would not have believed it possible for a black person to be nominated, let alone elected, by either of the two major parties.  I take satisfaction as an American that I was proved wrong.

At the same time, as Coates pointed out, Barack Obama is under constant attack based on his race.  He is accused, based on no evidence whatsoever, of being a product of affirmative action, of being a Kenyan anti-colonial radical, of hating white people.   When Obama said policeman James Crowley’s arrest of Prof. Henry Louis Gates on trumped-up charges was “stupid,” he was accused of stirring up black people against white people.  Given Obama’s difficult situation, Coates wrote, it is understandable that he has not actually done anything to help black people as a group.

I think this is correct.  As a matter of pure political calculation, it is more important for him to reassure white people than to stand with black people.  The fact that he has shown a black man can be elected President, plus the nature of the attacks made on him as a black man, is enough to assure him the support of the vast majority of African-Americans.  So he can afford to turn his back on Van Jones, on Shirley Sherrod and on ACORN, while he would give ammunition to his attackers if he had stood by them.

Obama’s political career, as Coates noted, is based on presenting himself to white people as someone more reasonable than a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton.  Obama was not, except for his short and ineffective service as a community organizer, an advocate of the interests and grievances of African-Americans.  Rather he was the person who could bring black people and white people together and get them to, if not forget about race, at least put race in the background.

Much has been made of Obama’s connections with the angry preacher Jeremiah Wright, the ex-revolutionary Bill Ayers and the racketeer Tony Renko.  Obama is not angry, revolutionary or a racketeer.  The significance of these three people is that they are part of the Chicago power structure, which he as an outsider worked his way into, just as he worked his way into the Washington, D.C., power structure.

Obama’s political advancement was based on his ability to convince people in power that what he advocated was reasonable.  That is how he persuaded the Illinois state legislature to pass a law requiring police interrogations to be videotaped and made available to juries; that is how he together with Senator John McCain persuaded Congress to create an Internet site on which all earmarked appropriations would be listed.   All his speeches—and he is a great speaker—are examples of walking through minefields, of satisfying and reconciling all sides.

My astute friend Oidin pointed out during the 2008 campaign that Barack Obama’s advertising and video biography showed him interacting only with white people, not with black people.  His black sister did not emerge into the public eye until election night.  Many successful black people say they have to purposefully be less forceful than is natural to them, in order that white people not feel threatened by them.  President Obama is the prime example of the non-threatening black person—although there are a certain number of white people who will feel threatened by him no matter what he does or doesn’t do.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

When I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, it was not in order to do black people a favor.  I voted for him because I thought he would stop the country’s drift into perpetual warfare, lawless authoritarianism and economic oligarchy.  I thought that merely replacing President George W. Bush would be a change for the better.  I was wrong.

I don’t think President Obama is any worse than the leading white Presidential candidates of the past 10 years.  Obama built on precedents set by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.  He probably is no worse than Hillary Clinton or John McCain would have been in his place, let alone Mitt Romney.

But I am not demanding that the black President adhere to a higher standard than a white President.  The basic minimum duty of a President is to obey the law and to enforce the law.  I would vote for a Gerald Ford if I could count on him to do these two things.  President Obama has claimed the power to sign death warrants and commit acts of war based on decisions made in secret according to secret criteria.  He has refused to enforce the law against financial fraud or crimes against humanity.  The legal and organizational infrastructure for dictatorship exists in the United States, and Obama has not dismantled it.  He has strengthened it.

Human rights do not end at the water’s edge.  People in targeted areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen have as much right as you, me or Trayvon Martin to not be killed based on vague suspicions.

Most of my friends and acquaintances intend to vote for Obama.  They tell me it is my responsibility to choose among the options on the table and, if they are all bad, to vote for the least bad.  I don’t accept that.  If I don’t insist on a candidate who upholds the Constitution and the laws, then I am an enabler for the violation of the Constitution and the laws.

Click on Fear of a Black President for the complete article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic Monthly.  It is well worth reading in full.

Click on Vertical Solidarity is nonsense for a rejoiner by “B Psycho” on Psychopolitik.

Click on Why Barack Obama Is the More Effective Evil for an important article by Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report.

Click on The Hard Right Is Paranoid About the Wrong Things for comment by Conor Friedersdorf, another Atlantic writer, on rational and irrational reasons for opposing President Obama.