American Authoritarianism and the OWS Movement
On one hand, the continuing focus on whether tents qualify
as speech and the ongoing debate over use of public space is a distraction from
the more important issue of the 1% versus 99% message. On the other hand, we’re
seeing, first hand, just how totally warped our interpretation of the
Constitution and rule of law has become in terms of the treatment of human
beings speaking out against the elites versus corporations buying influence.
As I have commented before here and on my privacy revolt
blog, one of the defining trends of the past decade is the emergence of
corporations as not just “people”, but in fact “supercitizens”…that have far
greater rights than do people but with none of the responsibilities. Citizens
United put the stamp on this transition, in which MONEY, the unlimited use of
it to bribe politicians and purchase influence, is considered free speech.
Consider the irony in that: as the corporations can hide
their crimes behind the 4th Amendment, and buy political influence using the 1st
Amendment, American citizens are being beaten, shot, pepper sprayed and tear
gassed for simply SPEAKING OUT against those crimes committed against them.
As Robert Reich, Berkeley Professor, correctly noted, “A
funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum.
According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now
people. But when real people without money assemble to express their
dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as
public nuisances and evicted.”
It wasn’t too long ago that I wrote my op-ed entitled “The
Patriot Act and the Quiet Death of the US Bill of Rights”. Who would have known
my thesis would be totally and completely validated by what we’re seeing on the
streets across America?
As I wrote then, “the precedent set by the Patriot Act
appears to be serving to accelerate the rapid disintegration of civil liberties
in this country…The Patriot Act was sold as an indispensable weapon in the government’s
arsenal to fight and “win” the “War on Terror”. We were assured that the sole
purpose of these unprecedented powers granted government were to locate and
catch terrorists - not raid the homes of pot dealers and wiretap peace
activists. Monitoring political groups and activities deemed “threatening”
(i.e. environmentalists, peace activists), expanding the already disastrous and
wasteful war on drugs, and spying on journalists isn’t about fighting terrorism, it’s
about stifling dissent and consolidating power – at the expense of civil
liberties.
How ironic that the very “tool” hailed as our nation’s
protector has instead been used to violate the very Constitutional protections
we are allegedly defending from “attack” by outside threats. What was promised
as a “temporary”, targeted law to keep us safe from terror has morphed into a
rewriting of the Bill of Rights.”
Now, we’re seeing the stark reality of this new American
authoritarianism first hand. If you haven’t watched the footage of
photographers getting shot, students beaten, an 84 year old women pepper sprayed, books
burned/destroyed, disabled people being tear gassed, Iraq war veterans that
survived that occupation only to be nearly killed on the streets of their own
country, New York City Councilman being assaulted by cops, and the incredible Orwellian wordplay being utilized by Mayors like
Michael Bloomberg you should check it out…because we're seeing what happens when people actually
challenge the status quo and fight the power.
Clearly, our rights only apply when we stay quiet and obedient. Thankfully, the ACLU, among others, are suing the Oakland police department.
Brad Blog has more, including videos, of the
GROTESQUE police brutality…writing “Some of the
police brutality that has occurred at Occupy demonstrations around the country
has been appalling. It' s
particularly upsetting to watch as those cops seen violating the law and the
Constitutional rights of demonstrators are also part of the "99
Percent" themselves.
One of them --- Officer Fred Shavies of the Oakland PD, who
was revealed as an undercover infiltrator at Occupy Oakland --- now concedes as
much in an extraordinarily moving interview in which he condemns the violence
by his fellow cops and says he sees the Occupy movement as a possible
"turning point, the tipping point" for our generation.
"It looks like...police shot tear gas into it, right?,"
says Davies, referencing the October 25 violence in Oakland at the intersection
of 14th & Broadway that The
BRAD BLOG has documented in great detail here (see here, here and here for example).
"That could be the photograph or the video for our
generation. That’s our Birmingham," he explains, alluding to the police
brutality that occurred during the otherwise peaceful fight for voting rights
in the South during the 60s. "So, twenty years from now this movement
could be the turning point, the tipping point," Davies says during the
interview, as he identifies with the protesters in the "99 percent"
movement, adding that he is one of them.
We' re not among
the anti-cop folks around here. We have, however, reported in great detail on
the lawlessness demonstrated by some of the "law enforcement"
officials in Oakland, referenced by Davies, as well as the serious injuries
they' ve inflicted on peaceful
demonstrators and even some who weren't demonstrating at all.
You' ve seen some
of the videos of NYPD officers violently pepper spraying peaceful
demonstrators, and the videos from Oakland as seen in the articles linked
above. Here are two more recent examples of appalling police behavior as
witnessed on video tape…"
In the end, perhaps the benefit of all this will be that no
longer will the public keep denying that our civil liberties are under assault,
or, that this assault has ANYTHING to do with preventing terrorism. The fact
is, the 1st and 4th Amendments no longer apply to people, but rather, only too
corporations and the protection of their crimes. Instead, we the new ENEMY…and,
even if the movement has been taken off message (largely not their own fault…but
because the Matrix is attempting to assimilate and destroy it), these constitutional
questions are being pushed to the forefront for the WORLD to see.
With that said, let’s remember what this movement is really
all about.
As Time magazine of all places pointed out awhile back: “you pick up a disproportionate share of America’s
tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to
prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been
excused from paying. You’re compelled to abide by laws while others are granted
immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not.
You’re barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on
necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run
your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for
your competitors… In contrast the fortunate few who contribute to the right
politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their
special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them
out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides
the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government
gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the
government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply
with, the government gives it approval. If they want to kill legislation
that is intended for the public, it gets killed."
And, for more evidence of this GRAND disconnect between corporations and the rich and the rest of us, check out the latest
report from Citizens for Tax Justice that shows that anti-union telecom
company Verizon not only paid no taxes in the last three years, the company
received nearly $1 billion in rebates from the government.
Verizon enjoyed some $14 billion in federal and state corporate
income tax subsidies in the 2008-2010 period even though it earned $33.4
billion in pre-tax U.S. income during that time.
At the federal level, Verizon should have paid about $11.4
billion at the statutory rate of 35 percent during the three-year period.
Instead, it got $951 million in rebates, putting its federal tax subsidies at
$12.3 billion. Its effective federal tax rate was -2.9 percent.
Mobilize TOMORROW!
From movement action alert: None of these facts changed overnight and the 99 Percent
Movement will continue to demand an economy that works for everyone:
- The top 1 percet of Americans still own 40 percent of our country’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent owns only 7 percent.
- The richest 1 percent earned one out of every four dollars in 2007. Thirty years earlier, the richest only made one out of every 11 dollars.
- One in four millionaires pays a lower tax rate than 10 million middle-income Americans.
- Fourteen million Americans are unemployed.
- Corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash – more cash than at any time in nearly a half century – instead of hiring more employees.
Tomorrow is a big day for the movement…if you can, join a
protest near you.
Deficits, the Super Committee and Mitt Romney
One argument you CONTINUE to hear on the right is that Obama
is the cause of our deficits and that we need to gut social spending to address
the problem. As a Kos blogger noted, here are a few facts about the percentage of
debt we can rightfully attribute to the Obama administration:
Bush Tax Cuts: $3 Trillion
Bush Unfunded Medicare D: 300 Billion
Bush 2008 Stimulus including TARP: 200 Billion
Bush Domestic/Defense Spending: 1.7 Trillion
Bush Afghan and Iraq Wars: 1.4 Trillion
Bush additional policies (e.g., Farm Bill): 400B
Bush Total: $7 Trillion
Obama Recovery Act: $800 Billion
Obama 2010 Tax Cut Deal: 250 Billion
Obama One-Time emergency costs (sm. bus., etc.): 400B
Obama Total: $1.4 Trillion
Super Fraud Committee
Again, we should all be PRAYING that NO DEAL is reached by
this group. I’m not going to go into the latest proposals and counter proposals
because they are BEYOND criminal (obviously the GOP’s is worse). As pointed out
by the Campaign for America’s Future, “I thought I had worked out all the
worst-case scenarios for the supercommittee (there was never a best-case). But this
is even worse than my worst imagining: a deal to undermine key social
insurance programs in return for a promise that Congress will come up with a
plan for raising revenue at some future date. If you think that promise has any
credibility whatsoever – if you have any doubts that the end result would be to
gut Social Security and actually cut taxes for the wealthy – I have this
Nigerian bank account that can be yours if you send me $100,000 in expenses. The
worst of it is that Democrats might actually go for it.”
And let me reiterate just how bad an idea it is to raise the
Medicare retirement age…an idea that keeps coming up as a potential component
of these deals (and mentioned by Obama too!). What’s so extraordinarily
nonsensical about it is that not only does it represent a drastic cut in
benefits to people already hurting, it also saves next to NO MONEY because the
costs just get shifted.
See here: A report by the Kaiser Family Foundation said that
much of the cost savings from raising the age would be eaten up by the
consequences. (The Kaiser study compresses the eligibility change to one year.
Most proposals that have been floated in various deficit-cutting reports or
negotiations would phase the change in over 10 years or longer.)
But Kaiser found that with the new health care law in place,
gross savings would be $31.1 billion — but net savings would be one-sixth of
that, about $5.7 billion in 2014. That reflects the higher costs of subsidizing
some of the recipients in the exchanges or covering them under Medicaid, as
well as other cost shifts. Seven million people would be affected, and costs
would shift to them and their employers, and to state governments through
Medicaid.
The Kaiser study also found that the effects would ripple
through the private insurance market, affecting younger people. Taking older,
more expensive people out of Medicare and putting them in the private insurance
market would change the risk pools and raise premium costs by about 3 percent
for adults in the private market.
Can it be more obvious then this is NOTHING MORE than yet
another step towards dismantling the program – as privatizing social security
is to that program?
The Romney Plan
Now, with all of this info to consider…let’s take a look at Romney’s
Economic Plan…and sit back in awe of its criminality:
- Cuts to Social Security
- The end of Medicare as we know it
- Cuts to Medicaid more draconian those in the House GOP budget plan
- Repeals the Affordable Care Act — eliminating health care coverage for 32 MILLION Americans
Specifically outlines cuts in funding for:
- Planned Parenthood and Title X women’s health programs
- Amtrak
- NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
- National Endowment for the Arts & Humanities
- Foreign aid
- Repeals the New Deal-era law that ensures government contractors pay their workers a fair wage
- Throws more than 400,000 federal employees out of work
- Increases defense spending
Restoring Reagan Era Tax Rates
Just an example, again, of the fact that there is plenty of
money out there, and the problem is revenue, not spending. Here in California,
as we find out today that we’re already another $13 billion in the whole, total
taxpayer income between 1987 and 2009 increased by $219.4 billion, $77 billion
of that income gain was concentrated among just 1 percent of Californians.
That’s just 144,000 Californians getting a lot richer.
As Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner pointed out in an article
submission to me for the California Progress Report (she wants to reinstitute
the Reagan era taxes in California on the rich), “How else are the super-rich
different than you and me? Their income tax rates are plummeting. The top US
households paid 16.6 percent of their incomes in federal income taxes in 2007,
down from 26.4 percent in 1992.
Add to that the California Budget Project’s estimate that in
1978 CEO’s annual pay was 35 times that of average workers, but in 2007 CEO pay
was 275 times the average worker’s, and it’s even clearer if there is a war on
wealth, wealth is winning big.
Today California’s wealthiest pay a lower state income tax
rate than they did under Governor Reagan. That’s right, it’s not only the 45th
anniversary of Governor Reagan’s election, we’ll also soon be marking the
anniversary of Governor Reagan’s decision to set income tax rates for the
wealthiest Californians at a responsible rate. In honor of that anniversary I
will again be pursuing AB 1130, my legislation that would return California’s
upper income tax bracket to the level set by Governor Reagan.
Restoring the Reagan Rate would bring $2.3 billion more into
California' s coffers. That
could help roll back fees at our UCs, CSUs and community colleges, and take a
huge financial strain off middle class students and their families. It
would also help undo damage to our hard-hit K-12 schools.”
VIDEO SECTION
Olbermann’s Special Comment DESTROYING scum bag Mayor
Michael Bloomberg:
Daily Show on the latest from the GOP Fascist Clown Car
comedy show…starring Herman Cain:
Ed Schultz talked to The Nation' s
John Nichols about the recall drive of Gov. Scott Walker that just started this
Tuesday in Wisconsin:
Another Iraq war veteran injured by police:
SNL on another one of the GOP Clown Car Occupants…knuckle
dragger Rick Perry and his latest meltdown…
And this was AWESOME…a couple weeks ago (and why wasn’t this
in the news???), Chris Hedges, Cornel West and others held a mock trial of
Goldman Sachs in Zuccotti Park:
FROM C&L: Just in case anyone ever had any doubts where
the campaign of Herman Cain would go with his defense against allegations of
past sexual harassment, there was little doubt left when they began to attack
the accusers.
ARTICLE SECTION
GOP Hits Shameless New Extremes to Protect Interests of
Wealthy at the Expense of Everyone Else, David Sirota
A FEW CLIPS:
According to the most reliable counts, the United States’
invasion and occupation of Iraq has killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians, 650,000 Iraqi civiliansor more than 1 million Iraqi civilians. In other words, we’ve vaporized
the equivalent of Billings, Mont. (pop. 104,170), Memphis, Tenn. (pop. 646,889)
or San Jose, Calif. (pop. 945,942).
Horrifying as these statistics are, imagine how much more
disgusted you would be if a foreign power actually did vaporize those cities,
and then followed up that annihilation by having its leading politicians and
pundits demand that Americans pay reparations for the privilege of experiencing
such devastation.
SNIP
While the Iraq discourse is probably the most pronounced,
there are many other examples where the blame-the-victim’s twin dynamic
operates in similar fashion — just as Republican tacticians hope.
For instance, despite a tax code that lets Warren Buffet pay
a lower effective rate than his secretary and lets a quarter of all millionaires pay lower rates than the middle
class, the GOP has organized itself around demonizing the hardest-hit
victims of the recession — those so crushingly destitute that they don’t make
enough to pay federal income levies.
SNIP
Ignoring the indisputable fact that
the overall tax code (i.e., federal income, federal payroll, state and local
tax systems combined) is so flat that Americans pay almost exactly the same
share of taxes as their share of national income, the GOP’s nonsensical
blame-the-victim posture posits that the American economy would still be
exceptionally terrific, if only those lazy leeches at the bottom started paying
their “fair share.” In the process, the narrative works to undermine any
initiatives that might return tax rates to the higher levels (when the economy
was better, FYI) that forced the ultra-rich and big corporations to pay just a
bit more.
Along these same economic lines, Republicans (in tandem with
the financial industry and its media apologists) have been working hard to blame victims of the housing market collapse
for the recession. In this fantastical version of the disaster, irresponsible
low-income homebuyers — with the help of liberals in Congress, of course —
somehow forced the most powerful multinational banks on the planet to give them
loans they knew they couldn’t pay back and when they defaulted, the whole
economy collapsed.
U.S. takes the lead on behalf of cluster bombs, By Glenn Greenwald
A FEW CLIPS:
Slightly more than two months after he was awarded the 2009
Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama secretly ordered a cruise missile attack on
Yemen, using cluster bombs, which killed 44 innocent civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, as well as 14 people
alleged to be “militants.” It goes without saying that — unless you want Rick
Perry to win in 2012 — this act should in no way be seen as marring Obama’s
presidency or his character: what’s a couple dozen children blown up as a part
of a covert, undeclared air war? If anything, as numerous Democrats have ecstatically celebrated,
such acts show how Tough and Strong the Democrats are: after all, ponder the
massive amounts of nobility and courage it takes to sit in the Oval Office and
order this type of aggression on defenseless tribal regions in Yemen. As R.W.
Appel put it on the front page of The New York Times back in 1989 when
glorifying George H.W. Bush’s equally courageous invasion of Panama: “most
American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their
willingness to shed blood” and doing so has become “a Presidential initiation
rite.”
But one aspect of the December, 2009, attack that perhaps
did merit some more critical scrutiny was the use of cluster bombs, weapons which “scatter hundreds of bomblets over a large
area but with limited accuracy and high failure rates.” The inevitability of
“duds” — “unexploded ordnance” — poses a great risk to civilians, often well
after the conflict has ended, since — like land mines — they often detonate
when stumbled into by children and other innocents long after they disperse. According
to the Cluster Munitions Coalition, cluster bombs “caused more civilian
casualties in Iraq in 2003 and Kosovo in 1999 than any other weapon system.” As
Wired pointed out, while the U.S. used these weapons in both Iraq
and Afghanistan, “neither the Taliban nor Saddam used cluster bombs against
U.S. troops.”
SNIP
But now the Obama administration is moving far beyond a mere
refusal to join the convention banning these munitions. According to The Independent, the U.S. is playing the leading role “to
torpedo the global ban on cluster bombs” through a “proposal that would permit
the use of cluster bombs as long as they were manufactured after 1980 and had a
failure rate of less than one per cent.” The paper also reports that despite
Britain’s long-time role in supporting the ban, its conservative government is
now backing the Obama administration’s efforts to codify their use. The
Pentagon claims that newer cluster bombs can be used more safely, but activists
have documented that “many modern cluster bombs have far higher failure rates
on the field of battle than manufacturers claim.”
Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland,
Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise.
They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of
personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will
all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and
government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America,
including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or
preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars
are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human
capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers
do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where
the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.
Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to
watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in
24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system
of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be
thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy,
greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young
men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide
corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional
super committee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you
into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits.
Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.
SNIP
Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the
foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the
clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey
orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator
Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in
Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed
the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989
as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to
crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day. Tunisia’s Ben Ali and
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no longer count on the
security forces to fire into crowds.
The process of defection among the ruling class and security
forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a
rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and
a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be
while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies.
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