Guest Post: Federal court enjoins NDAA. An Obama-appointed judge rules its indefinite detention provisions likely violate the 1st and 5th Amendments

Posted on May 17, 2012 by MITCHEL COHEN

By Glenn Greenwald

A federal district judge today, the newly-appointed Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York, issued an amazing ruling: one which preliminarily enjoins enforcement of the highly controversial indefinite provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act, enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last December. This afternoon’s ruling came as part of a lawsuit brought by seven dissident plaintiffs — including Chris Hedges, Dan Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, and Brigitta Jonsdottir — alleging that the NDAA violates “both their free speech and associational rights guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

The ruling was a sweeping victory for the plaintiffs, as it rejected each of the Obama DOJ’s three arguments: (1) because none of the plaintiffs has yet been indefinitely detained, they lack “standing” to challenge the statute; (2) even if they have standing, the lack of imminent enforcement against them renders injunctive relief unnecessary; and (3) the NDAA creates no new detention powers beyond what the 2001 AUMF already provides.

As for the DOJ’s first argument — lack of standing — the court found that the plaintiffs are already suffering substantial injury from the reasonable fear that they could be indefinitely detained under section 1021 of the NDAA as a result of their constitutionally protected activities. As the court explained (h/t Charles Michael):

In support of their motion, Plaintiffs assert that § 1021 already has impacted their associational and expressive activities. … and would continue to impact them, and that § 1021 is vague to such an extent that it provokes fear that certain of their associational and expressive activities could subject them to indefinite or prolonged military detention.

The court found that the plaintiffs have “shown an actual fear that their expressive and associational activities” could subject them to indefinite detention under the law, and “each of them has put forward uncontroverted evidence of concrete — non-hypothetical — ways in which the presence of the legislation has already impacted those expressive and associational activities” (as but one example, Hedges presented evidence that his “prior journalistic activities relating to certain organizations such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban” proves “he has a realistic fear that those activities will subject him to detention under § 1021). Thus, concluded the court, these plaintiffs have the right to challenge the constitutionality of the statute notwithstanding the fact that they have not yet been detained under it; that’s because its broad, menacing detention powers are already harming them and the exercise of their constitutional rights.

Significantly, the court here repeatedly told the DOJ that it could preclude standing for the plaintiffs if they were willing to state clearly that none of the journalistic and free speech conduct that the plaintiffs engage in could subject them to indefinite detention. But the Government refused to make any such representation. Thus, concluded the court, “plaintiffs have stated a more than plausible claim that the statute inappropriately encroaches on their rights under the First Amendment.”

Independently, the court found that plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the NDAA violates their Fifth Amendment due process rights because the statute is so vague that it is virtually impossible to know what conduct could subject one to indefinite detention. Specifically, the court focused on the NDAA’s authorization to indefinitely detain not only Al Qaeda members, but also members of so-called “associated forces” and/or anyone who “substantially supports” such forces, and noted:

Plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on their vagueness challenge. The terms upon which they focused at the hearing relate to who is a “covered person.” In that regard, plaintiffs took issue with the lack of definition and clarity regarding who constitutes an “associated forces,” and what it means to “substantially” or “directly” “support” such forces or, al-Qaeda or the Taliban. . . .
The Government was unable to define precisely what “direct” or “substantial” “support” means. . . .Thus, an individual could run the risk of substantially supporting or directly supporting an associated force without even being aware that he or she was doing so.

Perhaps most importantly, the court categorically rejected the central defense of this odious bill from the Obama administration and its defenders: namely, that it did nothing more than the 2001 AUMF already did and thus did not really expand the Government’s power of indefinite detention. The court cited three reasons why the NDAA clearly expands the Government’s detention power over the 2001 AUMF (all of which I previously cited when denouncing this bill).

First, “by its terms, the AUMF is tied directly and only to those involved in the events of 9/11,” whereas the NDAA “has a non-specific definition of ‘covered person’ that reaches beyond those involved in the 9/11 attacks by its very terms.” Second, “the individuals or groups at issue in the AUMF are also more specific than those at issue in § 1021 of the NDAA; that’s because the AUMF covered those “directly involved in the 9/11 attacks while those in § 1021 [of the NDAA] are specific groups and ‘associated forces’.” Moreover, “the Government has not provided a concrete, cognizable set of organizations or individuals that constitute ‘associated forces,’ lending further indefiniteness to § 1021.” Third, the AUMF is much more specific about how one is guilty of “supporting” the covered Terrorist groups, while the NDAA is incredibly broad and un-specific in that regard, thus leading the court to believe that even legitimate activities could subject a person to indefinite detention.

The court also decisively rejected the argument that President Obama’s signing statement — expressing limits on how he intends to exercise the NDAA’s detention powers — solves any of these problems. That’s because, said the court, the signing statement “does not state that § 1021 of the NDAA will not be applied to otherwise-protected First Amendment speech nor does it give concrete definitions to the vague terms used in the statute.”

The court concluded by taking note of what is indeed the extraordinary nature of her ruling, but explained it this way:

This Court is acutely aware that preliminarily enjoining an act of Congress must be done with great caution. However, it is the responsibility of our judicial system to protect the public from acts of Congress which infringe upon constitutional rights.

I’ve been very hard on the federal judiciary in the past year due to its shameful, craven deference in the post-9/11 world to executive power and, especially, attempts to prosecute Muslims on Terrorism charges. But this is definitely an exception to that trend. This is an extraordinary and encouraging decision. All the usual caveats apply: this is only a preliminary injunction (though the court made it clear that she believes plaintiffs will ultimately prevail). It will certainly be appealed and can be reversed. There are still other authorities (including the AUMF) which the DOJ can use to assert the power of indefinite detention. Nonetheless, this is a rare and significant limit placed on the U.S. Government’s ability to seize ever-greater powers of detention-without-charges, and it is grounded in exactly the right constitutional principles: ones that federal courts and the Executive Branch have been willfully ignoring for the past decade.

UPDATE: I really should mention the rest of the plaintiffs who brought this lawsuit beyond the four well-known ones I named above, because each deserves immense credit for doing this. Alexa O’Brien is an independent journalist who writes for WL Central, regarding WikiLeaks, Guantanamo and other issues, and founded a website to work on America’s corrupted elections, U.S. Day of Rage. Kai Wargalla is a British activist who founded Occupy London and has done extensive work in advocating for WikiLeaks. Jennifer Bolen, who along with Hedges spearheaded the organization of this lawsuit, is an activist with Revolution Truth who did substantial work to defeat the NDAA.

Though I knew a fair amount about it as it proceeded, I hadn’t written about this lawsuit before, largely because I did not expect it to succeed; I anticipated that it would be dismissed on “standing” grounds, the favored tactic (along with the State Secrets privilege) for both the Bush and Obama DOJs to persuade federal courts not to even adjudicate constitutional challenges to the War on Terror powers. Serious kudos to all of the plaintiffs and lawyers here who persevered in what I’m certain they knew would be an uphill battle.

Reposted from http://www.salon.com/2012/05/16/federal_court_ enjoins_ndaa/singleton/

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WE ARE THE 39 PERCENT! (and that’s huge, for New York)

Posted on March 31, 2012 by MITCHEL COHEN

In the NY Times, Clyde Haberman asked about the Park Slope Food Coop referendum: “Why is Israel singled out for economic ostracism and not China, the ruthless occupier of Tibet and a denier of fundamental human rights to its own people?”

There are several answers:

1) Israel claims to speak in the name of all Jews everywhere — including me. I support the boycott of Israel because I refuse to allow the fact that I’m Jewish be used by the Israeli government as a ruse rationalizing the horrors that State is perpetrating against the Palestinian people. Not in my name!

2) Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign military aid. Its war machine is propped up by our tax dollars ($27 billion in last 10 years). Thus, we have an added responsibility to speak out against Israel’s egregious policies and our own government’s as well.

3) I, and most others at the Coop, are most certainly involved in other campaigns for labor, human, social justice and environmental rights.

The resolution proposed to the Park Slope Food Coop contained two issues wrapped up in one: Democracy at the Food Coop, and whether to boycott products from Israel.

Rabbi Andy Bachman explicitly argued to deny that all members be polled: “Some issues are not for everyone to vote on. This is one of them.”

I beg to differ. Continue reading »

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Remembering Rachel Corrie. (No words, today)

Posted on March 10, 2012 by MITCHEL COHEN

Rachel Corrie: April 10, 1979 - March 16, 2003

 

Click HERE to watch Rachel’s last public interview.

 

 

 

 

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FEMINISM & THE POLITICS OF THE COMMONS

Posted on February 23, 2012 by MITCHEL COHEN

by SILVIA FEDERICI

(excerpt)
We need to overcome the state of irresponsibility concerning the consequences of our actions that results from the destructive ways in which the social division of labor is organized in capitalism; short of that, the production of our life inevitably becomes a production of death for others. As [Maria] Mies points out, globalization has worsened this crisis, widening the distances between what is produced and what is consumed, thereby intensifying, despite the appearance of an increased global interconnectedness, our blindness to the blood in the food we eat, the petroleum we use, the clothes we wear, and the computers we communicate with.

Overcoming this state of oblivion is where a feminist perspective teaches us to start in our reconstruction of the commons. No commons is possible unless we refuse to base our life and our reproduction on the suffering of others, unless we refuse to see ourselves as separate from them. Indeed, if commoning has any meaning, it must be the production of ourselves as a common subject.

This is how we must understand the slogan “no commons without community.” But ‘community’ has to be intended not as a gated reality, a grouping of people joined by exclusive interests separating them from others, as with communities formed on the basis of religion or ethnicity, but rather as a quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and of responsibility to each other and to the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals.

Certainly, the achievement of such community, like the collectivization of our everyday work of reproduction, can only be a beginning. It is no substitute for broader anti-privatization campaigns and the reclamation of our common wealth. But it is an essential part of our education to collective government and our recognition of history as a collective project, which is perhaps the main casualty of the neo-liberal era of capitalism.

Read Silvia Federici’s full essay HERE.

 

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GREECE IN FLAMES: PRELUDE TO EUROPEAN REVOLUTION? A DEBATE WITHIN THE LEFT.

Posted on February 13, 2012 by MITCHEL COHEN

by Savas Michael-Matsas

The worst fears of the ruling classes of Greece and Europe are becoming true: an uncontrollable social explosion is under way in Greece.

When these lines are written, late in the night on February 12-13, 2012, the violent clashes and street fights between demonstrators and the riot police, in the center of Athens and in other cities all over the country, still continue. The phony “majority” that just voted in Parliament the new package of measures of social cannibalism imposed by the troika of the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF cannot and will not stop the Greek social wild fire to expand in the country and spread beyond Greece, all over Europe and internationally.

The popular rally in Syntagma Square Sunday, February 12 was literally gigantic: nearly a million people converged in the Square in front of the Parliament from all the neighborhoods of the Greek capital, in a mass mobilization that superseded in magnitude and fighting spirit every previous one, including the huge rallies during the General Strikes of June and October 2011.

Last week, already two General Strikes had taken place, on February 7 and on February 10-11 but many factors — lack of preparation, bureaucratic opposition to a real mass mobilization, extremely bad weather conditions — although significant, they had nothing in common with what happened on February 12, when the masses flooded the streets in Athens and nearly all other cities giving a nearly insurrectionary character to the mobilization.

The riot police, with a prepared plan, attacked the people in Syntagma from the early moments of the rally, at 5.15 pm. When the well known composer Theodorakis and the hero of the anti-Nazi resistance Manolis Glezos, both nearly 90 years old, advanced to enter the Parliament to make a joint statement of protest, the riot police attacked them and all the demonstrators in the Square with tons of chemicals. From that moment the center of Athens was transformed into a battlefield, while people continued to come en masse from all directions. In front of the Parliament itself, they have resisted and remained until 10.30 pm some contingents from the EEK, ANTARSYA, and the youth of SYRIZA. But all the streets and avenues from Omonia to Syntagma and even around Acropolis were packed by people resisting the savage police brutality until late after midnight.

Barricades were erected in some of the streets. Banks, big shops, cinemas etc., about 40 buildings, were set on fire. The police station in Exarchia was attacked. A hundred citizens from all age groups were injured, some of them seriously and brought to the hospital. Another hundred were arrested, including the demonstrators who had occupied the Town Hall of Athens. The center of Athens looks today like a bombarded city.

It is noteworthy the fact that the Stalinist KKE one more time held its own independent rally in Omonia Square (they claim to have assembled 50 thousand people) but they avoided to join the many hundreds of thousands of people in and around Syntagma Square because of the clashes of the demonstrators with the police, and they remained far way from the battle, finally dispersing peacefully their contingents. According to the Stalinist mantra every violent clash with police forces, and any form of direct action is “a State provocation”.

The popular rebellion is not limited to Athens. In other cities, all over Greece, from Corfu in the North West and Thessalonica in the North to Patras in the West and Creta in the South, were and are taking place mobilizations, demonstrations, occupations of public buildings, town halls, prefectures etc. Attacks by angry demonstrators against the political offices of bourgeois members of parliament took place: in Corfu (North West, Ionian Sea), Agrinion (Western Greece), Iraklion (Creta, South Aegean Sea) the offices of all local deputies were destroyed.

The fury of the rapidly impoverished and ruined people was reflected even in the Parliament, blowing up the bourgeois parliamentary political system as it used to be the last 38 years, after the fall of the dictatorship. Although, a two thirds majority of deputies voted for the barbaric Memorandum imposed by the troika and the current Papadimos government, the negative vote of an unprecedented large number of deputies was followed by massive expulsions from the ruling parties supporting Papadimos — 46 deputies, including founding members or parliamentary spokesmen of their respective parties, ministers etc., were expelled in the middle of the night from the neo-liberal “socialist” PASOK, the right wing New Democracy and the far right LAOS. Now in Parliament the second in numbers party is the “Party of the Expelled,” 63 deputies from the beginning of the crisis (PASOK now has 130 deputies from the initial figure of 158, and the New Democracy 62. The total number of the deputies is 300). The far right LAOS, seeing its influence shrink dramatically in the polls, voted against the new bail out, expelling two of its leading members who remained in the government as ministers and voted in favor.

Nevertheless the Fuhrer of the LAOS, Karatzaferis, said that he will continue to support the Papadimos government to “save the fatherland from communism!”

A similar statement was made by the leader of the right wing New Democracy, Antonis Samaras saying that his Party is the last rampart against “mob rule” — by “mob” meaning the rebelled masses that lean more and more to the left.

The political personnel of the bourgeoisie is decimated. Many attempts were made in these last months to create new bourgeois political parties — and more attempts certainly will come in the next period with so many bourgeois politicians becoming homeless” after their expulsion — but they had no success at all so far, disappearing nearly after their first public appearance.

The political challenge comes to the Left. But the Stalinist KKE continues its self-centered policy focusing mainly to its own electoral and organizationally strengthening and keeping the slogan for a workers people’s power” a vague slogan for a very distant future; the Synaspismos, main force in SYRIZA, looks to the remnants of the excluded from PASOK to build a kind of “popular front” coalition with governmental ambitions; and the “Democratic Left,” the right wing split from Synaspismos, thanks to its good results in the polls, becomes a pole of attraction for all refugees from the right wing of PASOK, hoping to become a junior partner in a future bourgeois coalition government, replacing perhaps the far right LAOS.

The lack of any real radical alternative to the collapsing system from the parliamentary and from the centrist extra-parliamentary Left, makes the re-groupment of the vanguard fighters, particularly from the young generation, in a revolutionary internationalist Party of the proletariat the main challenge and urgent task for our own Party, the EEK.

As the social-political explosion is under the way, we keep fighting with even more determination for an indefinite General Political Strike to overthrow the government, to break with the dictatorship of the EU and the IMF, to cancel the debt to the international usurers and to re-organize the entire economy on new, socialist bases, under workers power. Our hopes are focused in our class brothers and sisters in Europe and all over the world to join us in revolutionary struggle as well as in a revolutionary International needed now more than ever before.

- Athens, 13 February 2012

RESPONSE BY PETROS EVDOKAS

Well, it might be a prelude to revolution but it’s not yet even a prelude to a revolution within Greece itself.

Popular leaders like Glezos and Theodorakis are the visible part of a humongous majority of activist-oriented millions of people in the country who have been organizing (and recently calling openly) for an uprising. The majority of people are behind this sentiment and support it, BUT, also the majority of people have the political maturity to desire an uprising that is as peaceful and mindful as possible.

The arson attacks against more than forty buildings on Sunday that burned down a large number of shops and buildings that have NOTHING to do with the regime of Corporate and State oppressors, took place against the wishes of the people-in-rebellion. They are actions of conscious and unconscious agents of the regime. If you think this claim is too extreme, please see the top photo of the new Cyprus IndyMedia article titled “This is who burned down Athens” – it’s all in the boots.

There is nothing “revolutionary” about burning down classical architecture  buildings that people love and identify with, cafes and movie theaters that  constitute some of the last remaining humane parts of the City’s downtown.

At this time, the debate among true and honest revolutionary networks has not yet concluded on what is the best way to revolution in THIS juncture. Strikes are more and more organized and well attended, but takeover strikes (occupations) are only now, in this last year beginning to appear, and only on a very small scale. Armed response teams capable of delivering meaningful blows to the regime (meaningful in the political sense), or capable of defending strikes, occupations, and protests from the regime, or capable of enforcing direct actions such as liberation and distribution of food in the cities or the countryside have not yet been formed because the people still do not support such a move. It might come to that, but popular awareness, desire and willingness to engage in the revolution is the one and most important factor that we need to be in tune with. The only ones engaged in armed actions in the last few years are the same fake anarchists and regime provocateurs who repeatedly pull off highly destructive (and sometimes lethal) actions that erode the peoples’ morale.

Nobody wants to be part of a revolution that kills workers, attacks leftist demonstrators and firebombs small shops, and the people have repeatedly in the last few years immediately responded to these actions by pulling away from mass mobilizations. That is EXACTLY the reason why the regime seeks to instigate such actions, with the help of a few hundred brainless idiots who think that such behaviour is “revolutionary”.

YET ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE

David Schwartzman writes: Interesting analysis from a militant of the EEK which in the 2009 legislative election got less than 0.1% of the vote according to wiki. Instead of attacking the main left parties, how about forging unity, starting with the rank and file? Here is another take:
 

Greece: A Brutal Experiment on People’s Lives

by Afrodity Giannakis Thessaloniki via Green Left

February 12, 2012

Greek unions launched a two-day general strike on February 10 against new extreme austerity measures the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Union is seeking to impose on the southern European nation. The deal will give Greece a new “bail-out” worth 130 billion euros (A$161 billion) in return for fresh spending cuts.

Amid ongoing street protests and building occupations, the Greek cabinet approved the deal on February 10. Six cabinet members resigned in protest. Greek parliament was scheduled to vote on the deal on the evening of February 12.

[The vote was 199 in favor and 74 opposed, with 27 abstentions or blank ballots.  - Portside]

Below, Afrodity Giannakis writes from Thessaloniki on the impact of the austerity on Greek society.

Continue reading »

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REBELLION IN EUROPE & THE ROLE OF THE LEFT

Posted on February 11, 2012 by MITCHEL COHEN

Over the last few years, Leftist resistance in Europe has been growing by leaps and bounds against back-breaking austerity measures forced on the working class in a number of countries by the German (and American) banks, who are calling the shots. These measures have been acquiesced to and implemented by the in-name-only “Socialist” parties in power in such places as Greece and Spain, and in other countries such as Italy and Iceland.

The banks are squeezing the working class dry in order to break the  advances won by workers over decades of struggle, argues NYC College of Technology professor (Sociology) Costas Panayotakis in several radio interviews on “Steal This Radio” over the last three years.

Costas Panayotakis has since seen his new book “Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy — The Future of World Capitalism,” published by Pluto Press to critical acclaim.

Here, in the first radio interview (January 2009), Costas Panayotakis is joined by French legislator Olivier Beaubillard (from the French Communist Party) and biologist Cendra Agulhon. They discuss the role of the Left in the current struggles. (In the first segment, Mitchel Cohen reports on and dissects the assassination of Michael Connell, Karl Rove’s elections “fixer”. How quickly we forget!)  Steal This Radio #66

A year later (March 23, 2010), Costas returns, along with Neni Panouryia (Dept. of Anthropology, Columbia University); Poulikos Poulikakos (previously at the left newspaper PRIN (“before”)); and Ingo Bader (Technical University, Berlin), who all discuss the current capitalist crisis in Europe, the shortcomings of the organized Left, and — among other things — the pressure of European banks upon Greece to sell-off the  2,500-year-old Parthenon — the most famous surviving building from Greece’s golden age — to corporate investors (no doubt to build a McDonald’s beneath the famous columns!).  Listen Here:   Steal This Radio #105

And then we shift to Italy. On Steal This Radio #110 (April 30, 2010) following an interview with actress Karin de la Penha, who at the time was appearing in “The Fly in the Fridge,” Mitchel and Karin engage in a very interesting conversation with fast-talking young Italian radical activists Chiarra and MariaTeresa of the Italian Autonomist Movement, about what’s happening with organizing Italy’s youth. (Their project’s website is:
http://www.globalproject.info and http://www.uniriot.org)

All of these interviews shed much light on the crisis in global capitalism and how it’s affecting social movements and everyday life in Europe, with special focus on debates in the resistance movements that few in the United States get to hear, but in some ways which are reminiscent of the debates in the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland movements these past few weeks.

—————————————

COSTAS PANAYOTAKIS

Here’s what my favorite Marxist, Bertell Ollman, says about Costas Panayotakis’ new book:

 

“Capitalist-produced scarcity proves to be an extraordinarily enlightening vantage point from which to analyze both capitalism and its socialist alternatives. Panayotakis’s book provides an extremely scholarly, insightful and well-argued contribution — with ecology and feminism given the attention often denied them — to this crucially important literature. Highly Recommended!”

- Bertell Ollman, Department of Politics, New York University, author of Dance of the Dialectic: Marx’s Method

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Guest Post: The Real Heroes of Super Bowl Sunday

Posted on February 6, 2012 by MITCHEL COHEN

by Dave Zirin

I emerge from the echo-chamber of Super Bowl Sunday energized and armed with a new set of heroes and folk-tales to pass on to others. My hero on our great (near) secular national holiday wasn’t Giants quarterback Eli Manning, who one suspects would be going to Disney World whether he won or lost. It wasn’t the incredible looking Madonna, spotted backstage drinking her daughter’s stem cells, or M.I.A. with her middle-finger-malfunction. It also wasn’t Clint Eastwood who made a commercial where I think he threatened to murder Detroit.

My new heroes are the people in the Occupy and Labor movements who gathered to protest on Super Bowl Sunday. It certainly didn’t make SportsCenter that night, but several hundred people gathered at the Indianapolis state house to stand up against the recent passage of the state’s “right to work” legislation and make clear that the fight was far from done.

Continue reading »

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Posted on January 14, 2012 by MITCHEL COHEN

January 15, 2012 would be Dr. King’s 83rd birthday. The airwaves are filled with timid and nostalgic tributes to the great man. Except for WBAI and other non-commercial stations, only Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — and even there but a tiny snippet of it — makes it onto the airwaves.

Nothing about Dr. King’s analysis in which he castigates the United States as being “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Nothing about Dr. King’s brilliant and courageous insights into the social and economic calamities of capitalism and the congruence of the oppression of people in Vietnam with that of people of color in the United States.

And, nothing about what it really means to be “Non-Violent”. Dr. King castigates those who praised him and the Civil Rights movement for being non-violent in the face of white supremacists in the South but who condemned him for calling on his country to be non-violent in its dealings with the rest of the world.

“In international conflicts the truth is hard to come by  because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for our superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the Truth. Ye shall know the Truth, says Jesus, and the Truth shall set you free.

“Now I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam today because I agree with Dante that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

Ever hear any of that on mainstream corporate radio?

All of that placed — and continue to place — Dr. King at odds with many of his key advisers in the Civil Rights movement, and with the President of the United States — then … and now.

His life — and keep in mind that he was assassinated when he was just 39 years old! — is thus relegated more-or-less “safe,” for those in power.  The hallowed if troubling days happened back then, which (they say) no longer exist. And so, Dr. King’s complex analysis is distorted and rendered almost meaningless today, and offered in a sense as a paean to  “Isn’t America great? Look at how far we have come.” Who now hears the entirety of any of Dr. King’s speeches? What insights could this ancient man actually hold for us today, and for our own movements for freedom?

Three years ago, on January 15, 2009, I broadcast Steal This Radio #67 over NYTalkRadio.net. That show included:

  • A Letter from Lori Berenson from jail in Peru
  • A perspective on the Pirates of Somalia. (Who knew that the “pirates” were defending the waters from the U.S. and Europe’s dumping of nuclear wastes off the coast of Somalia?)
  • Mitchel Cohen’s pained and outraged denunciation of Israel’s invasion of Gaza
  • The entirety of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam.”

I’ve decided to rebroadcast here that entire show — rather than to excerpt only Dr. King’s segment — because Dr. King’s great orations are simply not “over and done with”. They took place in a context of historical forces that are every bit as powerful today as they were back then.

So here, then, is Steal This Radio #67, which includes Dr. King’s speech in full,  delivered on April 30, 1967 at Ebenezer Baptist Church, as a followup to his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Manhattan’s Riverside Cathedral on April 4, 1967.  (Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, one year later  (Forgotten from history is that on Apr. 4, 1967, Dr. King also addressed a giant anti-war rally in New York City, the largest rally I’d ever been at, until that point.) This speech in my estimation is simply one of the most profound and greatest speeches of all time.

I’ve broken the show into six segments (because the requirements of this site prevent the uploading of any files greater than 10 mb). Please click on each of the segments in sequence. As always, your comments are welcome.

Happy 83rd birthday, Dr. King!

Steal This Radio #67
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

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LISTEN GORE: SOME INCONVENIENT TRUTHS ABOUT THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

Posted on December 29, 2011 by MITCHEL COHEN

BY MITCHEL COHEN

Barack Obama, like Al Gore and other Democrats supposedly concerned with saving the environment, propose false solutions for what they call the “energy crisis” we’re facing. They want to:

    1) Build new nuclear power plants and centralized (so that they could meter it) “sustainable energy” projects;

    2) Utilize coal gassification, liquification technologies (“clean” coal), and carbon sequestration;

    3) Expand the use of agro-fuels, which in the U.S. means ethanol from genetically engineered corn;

    4) Block emission agreements unless they are based on free-market trade in pollution credits (carbon-trading);

    5) Promote “green” capitalism and consumption;

    6) Extract dirty oil from tar sands and natural gas by hydro-fracturing, at the expense of the water supply and the likely generation of earthquakes;

    7) engage in endless wars for oil and empire (using “fighting terrorism“ as a pretext).

Together, these projects are built upon false “solutions” for saving the environment by the same forces that are destroying it. They have brought complex life on the planet to the point of no return. We can and must stop them.

Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,“ raises the issue of global warming in a way that scares the bejeezus out of viewers, as it should since the consequences of global climate change are truly earth-shaking. The former Vice-President does a good job of presenting the graphic evidence, along with exquisite and terrifying pictures that document the melting of the polar ice caps and the effects on other species, new diseases and rising ocean levels.

But, typically, the solutions Gore offers are standard Democratic Party fare. You’d never know by watching this film that Gore and Clinton ran this country for 8 years and that their policies – as much as those of the Bush regime — helped pave the way for the crisis we face today.

Gore never critiques the system causing the global ecological crisis that may well lead to the endgame for all higher life on this planet. At one point in the film, he even mourns the negative impact of global warming on the U.S.’s deteriorating oil pipelines. Oh, the horror! What is needed, says Gore and the Democrats, are technological fixes that would enable us to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and tweak existing consumption patterns.

Even there, Gore equivocates. He and Clinton did nothing to improve fuel efficiency in the U.S. – a “solution” Gore proposes in the movie without any hint that he’d once actually been in a position to do something about it. Gore asks us who can best manage the relatively minor solutions he recommends, the Democrats or Republicans. For Gore, it’s sort of “trust US, not THEM, because they are liars and we’re not.“

Well, should we trust him?

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Cathryn, in San Francisco (December 2011)

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WHERE THE CRISES INTERSECT: LAWRENCE SUMMERS, AL GORE, AND U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL & ECONOMIC POLICY

Posted on December 24, 2011 by MITCHEL COHEN

Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, & Larry Summers were part of the President’s Working Group, a financial policy committee that stifled the regulatory efforts of Brooksley Born, who headed the Commodities Future Trading Commission during the Clinton-Gore administration and was among the first mainstream financiers to see the danger of Over-the-Counter (OTC) derivatives trading.

Introduction
OBAMA’S WINTER OF NEO-LIBERAL DISCONTENT

by MITCHEL COHEN

President Obama’s chief economics adviser, Lawrence Summers, left the cabinet a year ago as rebellions against the neoliberal, austerity and anti-democratic programs he authored washed over Tunisia, Egypt, and Europe. But hopes for a shift in government policy were dashed, as President Obama continued to pursue Summers’ corporate and bank-friendly policies, accelerating the global ecological and economic crises.

Capitalist planners such as Summers hop from administration to administration. Republican or Dem­ocrat – it makes little difference. The competition among corporations to increase market share and maximize profits remains constant, as does the government’s protection of corporate interests regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. In times of economic crisis such as the one in which the U.S. – and indeed, the world – is currently mired, the space for av­oiding the worst aspects of unemployment, ecological devastation, poverty, vast reductions in public services and expansion of imperialist wars are circumscribed by the urgency, for capitalism, of stripping down to essentials, controlling natural resources and labor, and repressing all forms of organizing and resistance.

Law­rence Summers is Capitalism’s chief economist. He was, as we shall see, a major influence on Bill Clinton and Al Gore, whose approach to economics and the environment is continued by Obama. While Gore powerfully illustrated the planetary devastation underway via Global Climate Change in his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth,” it was Summers who provided Gore’s nonsensical consumer-driven approach about “what to do” to halt and repair the global ecological crisis. Here is where the ecological and the economic intersect.

Barack Obama explains to Larry Summers how high the bailout of banks and brokerage houses should go. (January 24, 2009)

To get us out of the crises, President Obama has turned to the same coter­ie of economic advisers who got us into them. They have brought the U.S. (and world) economy and ecology to the brink of collapse. Writer Ron Suskind, in his new book “Confidence Men,” confirms that there was never any question of Obama doing things differently. Describing the then-president-elect’s choice of economic advisers, Suskind notes,

“Obama, after all, had selected for his top domestic officials two men [Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner] whose actions [in the Clinton Administration] had contributed to the very financial disaster they were hired to solve.”1

John R. MacArthur, the editor of Harper’s, also references Suskind’s book: “These anti-reform appointments did not go unnoticed by party regulars, even though they were ignored by Obama groupies. ‘I don’t understand how you could do this,’ Suskind quotes Sen. Byron Dorgan (D.- N.D.) saying to Obama. ‘You’ve picked the wrong people!’

“The ‘wrong people’,” MacArthur notes,

“included Rahm Emanuel, now mayor of Chicago, and his replacement as White House chief of staff, William Daley. Both of these advisers were four-star generals within the Chicago Democratic machine who cut their teeth in Washington during the campaign to pass that job-killer North American Free Trade Act and who later worked for investment banks.2 But Obama’s hypocrisy in Osawatomie, Kansas, set a new standard in deception. Among other things, his speech blamed ‘regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this [the unfettered sales of bundled mortgages], but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all. It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility all across the system.’

“What’s truly breathtaking,” MacArthur bristles, “is the president’s gall, his stunning contempt for political history and contemporary reality. Besides neglecting to mention Democratic complicity in the debacle of 2008, he failed to point out that derivatives trading [still] remains largely unregulated while the Securities and Exchange Commission awaits ‘public comment on a detailed implementation plan’ for future regulation. In other words, until the banking and brokerage lobbies have had their say with John Boehner, Max Baucus, and Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. Meanwhile, the administration steadfastly opposes a res­toration of the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal law that reduced outlandish speculation by separating commercial and investment banks. In 1999, it was Summers and Geithner, led by Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (much admired by Obama), who persuaded Congress to repeal this crucial impediment to Wall Street recklessness.”3

THE CLINTON-GORE-KYOTO CONNECTION

Once Upon a Time, Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet. He also laid claim, along with the rest of the Clinton administration, to having “reinvented government.” A few years ago he re-invented himself as a modern-day Paul Revere galloping ac­ross the country on his white horse crying, “To arms, to arms, the Climate is Changing.” Yet back in the 1990s while the rest of the world was negotiating a mandatory reduction in industrial emissions that were punching holes in the Ozone layer, it was none other than Al Gore, Vice President of the United States, who traveled to Kyoto, Japan to take those negotiations hos­tage and prevent a ban on targeted emissions.4

Gore commandeered the Kyoto conference. The U.S. government, he said, would not sign the Accord – as limited as it was – if it imposed emissions reductions on industrial countries. Instead, he demanded that the rest of the world adopt his proposal that would allow industrial nations like the U.S. to continue polluting by establishing an international trade in carbon pollution credits. Gore’s “solution” – like Obama’s – was to turn pollution into a commodity and buy and sell it in the form of “pollution rights”. The free market trade in “pollution credits” would simply shift around pollution and spread it out more evenly without reducing the total amount of ozone-depleting greenhouse gases. It would allow the United States and other industrial countries to continue polluting the rest of the world.

In proposing (and imposing) that mechanism, Gore and Clinton were enacting a policy – trade in pollution credits – that had first been put into effect in a more limited way by President George H.W. Bush under the 1990 extension to the Nixon administration’s “Clean Air Act.”5 The mechanisms were developed by the World Bank (under Summers’ tutelage) and International Monetary Fund, and this quintessential capitalist policy was actually endorsed by several well-known environmental groups.     Continue reading »

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Guest Post
Arrested in Los Angeles — A Terrifying Ordeal in a Police State

Posted on December 7, 2011 by MITCHEL COHEN

by PATRICK MEIGHAN

My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protesters who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”

As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.

When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protester’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protester’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protester’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protester, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.

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Mexico Rising: Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Posted on December 3, 2011 by MITCHEL COHEN

The waves of “Occupy Wall Street” that have swept over the U.S. this Autumn (“The American Fall”) provoked me to dig out and post articles I wrote five years ago from the first occupation of this millenium. In 2006, gigantic waves of protest swept over Mexico following the theft of the national election, culminating in a massive occupation of the main commercial areas of Mexico City that went on for months. Some of the marches involved 2 million people in Mexico City.

By Mitchel Cohen
(all photos by Mitchel Cohen & Cathryn Swan)

(Mexico City — July 30, 2006) The sea of yellow swept through the veins of Mexico City en route to the Zocalo (central square) on Sunday, the platelets returning to the heart. Yellow for clean elections; amarillo for democracy, as manifest in the candidacy of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who believes that his populist electoral victory in the presidential election three weeks ago was stolen from him and the working class and poor of Mexico who voted for him.

Unlike John Kerry, Obrador — the former mayor of Mexico City — did not disappoint the 2 million people who completely filled the Zocalo and avenues in every direction for block after block. He has presented

Part of the colorful crowd of 2 million marching

evidence of fraud at 70,000 polling places to the Supreme Court. And, as his voice echoed from loudspeakers everywhere, he called on his supporters to remain in the Zocalo (after apologizing to the thousands of street vendors who would be inconvenienced by the occupation), setting up dozens of large white tents — one for each Mexican state — for the occupyers to organize themselves and expand the protests.

It was impossible to get to the giant zocalo until long after the rally had ended and the round-the-clock vigil had commenced with cultural festivities. Three members of the Brooklyn Greens — myself, Cathryn Swan and Robert Gold — along with Mexican comrades who helped with the translation, found a shady corner a few blocks away and listened to the crowd’s cheers as Obrador announced the occupation of the central square.

Obrador’s having been mayor of Mexico City allows certain amenities to the thousands of occupyers: toilets are plentiful; arrests are minimal; local police are all smiles and supportive of the protests despite the negative media barrage that batters Obrador and his working class base on a daily basis.

Army of Toilets available to Occupyers.

Lining up for purified drinking water at Occupation

Police Officer guards truck bringing valuable water to occupyers.

Long lines for water at sunrise

Dawn over tent city -- new world meets the old

Earlier, we inched our way down Avenida Juarez, where artists had hung dozens of dramatic paintings and historic quotations about the need for democracy. A few days ago, right wing vandals slashed a number of the artworks, each around 12 feet wide. When the artists returned to repair them, they found that hundreds of people had already shown up to defend the art and people from the neighborhoods had carefully stitched each tattered canvas back together, rendering them even more dramatic.

Rightwingers slashed the artwork that lined the main boulevard. Local people rallied to defend their art, and carefully stitched the pieces back together (here, supplemented by a band-aid).

All over Mexico City, Felipe Calderon -- George W. Bush's candidate -- is villified and parodied by taking the first few letters of his first and last name and combining them into "F-E-C-A-L", as in the sign, above.

 

Obrador speaking to Occupyers inside the giant tents.

While the amarillo waves washed down the streets, many focused not on Obrador himself but on the need for free elections, real democracy, an end to the corruption of all of the institutional political parties. Obrador has become the symbol of that movement, that hope. Not that he will be able to solve the momentous problems Mexico faces, particularly in the face of International Monetary Fund and U.S. economic pressures (which are intense). But, they feel that at least Obrador is honest and will clean house.

It remains to be seen how this movement for democracy will play out.

Zapatista Booth.

The Zapatistas, for instance, were critical of Obrador as a candidate but many EZLN supporters were evident in the crowd demanding free elections and supporting the movement.We stopped at one EZLN tent in which Zapatista supporters displayed pictures of numerous political prisoners in Mexico and raised funds for their defense.

Other tents contained literature from scores of political organizations, and giant banners sweated their slogans in the hot Mexican sun. One political party even hung huge pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin across one section of the plaza, and elsewhere anarchist symbols and sentiments were much in evidence.

I can only wonder what would have happened in the U.S. had John Kerry or Al Gore called for protests and occupations of public spaces across the United States over the presidential elections that had been stolen from them. Would the world look very different today had they done so?

The swiftness by which both Gore and Kerry abandoned those who voted for them — those who thought they were voting against war and for civil liberties and the environment — becomes even more despicable when contrasted with the opposite approach being taken today in Mexico and the possibilities being opened up by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the working class and the poor. Even the military has become more questioning of its support for the history of scandalous electoral fraud in Mexico.

Police Officer guarding a government building. Taken from behind the fence. Note that he's reading the political page of "La Jornada," the newspaper of the Left in Mexico.

A revolution is brewing in Mexico, one that for now is non-violent, powerful, and visible everywhere. Can the movement be co-opted? Will Obrador betray his base? The Zapatistas understand that the revolution proceeds on many fronts, with the electoral itself being the least of them. (But with protests against the stealing of the election registering huge.) As of this Sunday, the revolution has taken a giant step forward. What will happen tomorrow is anyone’s guess. But, for now, these are very exciting times, and the hopes of a huge swath of humanity rides on the ability of the Mexican people to reclaim liberty, not only for themselves but for the rest of us as well.


*****

All women-cops huddle at protest (Affinity Group?).

Police with plexi-glass shields.

TUES AUG 1, 2006 – You wouldn’t believe how great it is here, for now, in Mexico City.

Thousands of campesinos are occupying the zocalo and are branching out to various targets. Today several hundred are blockading the central Mexican Bank, and it is closed down.

Occupyers at Bank of Mexico shut down central Bank.

I’ve been taking a gazillion pictures for Z mag, Counterpunch and elsewhere, and have surprisingly met a couple of NY friends who have snuck down here too. We were interviewed in the rightwing newspaper Excelsior, which will be out tomorrow with our pictures and words.

The traffic is going crazy. I’ve seen many instances of road rage, as campesinos’ horse-drawn carts are starting to clog the streets.

Horse-drawn carts, bicycles, cars, vendors and of course "occupyers" all meet at main intersections in Mexico City. Traffic is a nightmare even when it is not being intentionally blocked.

The local police have been extremely friendly (unlike NYC) but not so the National police. The whole center of the city is in chaos …. Artists are bursting out everywhere, there’s a sign-up sheet to perform on the main stage with full band back-up. Woodstock comes to Mexico …..

Literally millions of dollars are pumped into this movement by Obrador … where is it coming from? The literally hundreds of tents that completely cover several miles (literally) of avenues. Music all night long, around 8,000 people last night building platforms to sleep on, children’s areas, etc. Democracy in action.

Complete media blackout on TV here, except for la Jornada.

*****************

AUGUST 3, 2006

Check out my article on Mexico City in Counterpunch ….

Cathryn and I just met with the owner of a terrific organic market and restaurant in Coyacun section of Mexico City — near Leon Trotsky’s  and Frida Kahlo’s houses.

The roof is made of solar panels (not mounted ON the roof –  they ARE the roof), and they feed electricity back into the grid. We are in the process of linking the owner, Bensi (who is from Venezuela), up with the Center for Global Justice in San Miguel de Allende, where Yolanda is organizing women’s cooperatives who weave baskets and grow organic cactus (Nopales, the healthiest thing in the world to eat, and invisible in the northeast U.S.) as they wait years for their husbands to return from picking crops in the U.S., and Attahuelpa is working with indigenous communities on pesticides and other serious environmental problems (such as the arsenic-poisoned water).

I am sad to be leaving here in a few days, so much to do … and everyone here is so very friendly, supportive, and feeling positive ….

*******

Memorial for Slain students in 1968

AUGUST 6, 2006 — Cathryn and I visited the site in Mexico City where a number of anti-war students were murdered in 1968. Needless to say, as I was 19-years-old at that time and head-over-heals immersed in the anti-war and liberation movements, this was a very strange and very moving experience.

The plaza itself was a large barren “nothing”, at the foot of a 400 year-old church, and the remnants of the fort where indigenous people held off Coronado and his troops in the 1500′s, who were attempting to subjugate them.

At one end of the broken-tiled plaza stood a simple stone with the names and ages of the 1968ers who were murdered. Two couples were making out at its base. I wrote a note in memory of the students at Kent State, Jackson State and Mexico City, and somehow pushed it between two large stone blocks. As we were leaving, other pilgrims from Italy arrived and meditated on the significance of all those who have given their lives — actually, whose lives have been stolen — in the cause of peace and anti-imperialism.

The weird part had to do with the Soviet-style architecture that surrounds the entire area, giant drab cement ice-cube trays so jarring when framed against the glorious Spanish colonial architecture that abounds here.

When we returned to our friend Elina’s and Cuauhtemoc’s house for dinner,

Cauhotemac, Cathryn & Elina

we learned that the top election court here decided not to do a full review of all the ballots, but only a sample of 10 percent, which means the occupation of the City’s center is continuing. We just returned from the mile-long tented avenue, where hundreds of people staffed tables and were singing, talking politics and poetry even as late as 1 a.m. when we left.

Sunday morning at 11 a.m. Lopez Obrador will be again addressing the tens of thousands of people in the Zocalo, and we will know at that time what further actions will be taken, and whether the occupation will be terminated or continued.

After Obrador's speech, Javier, Elina and Cathryn (and I!) decide it's time for dessert!

 

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WHAT OCCUPY WALL STREET PROTESTERS WANT

Posted on November 25, 2011 by MITCHEL COHEN

Message: President Obama holds a note given to him by a protester as he greeted audience members after his speaking engagement in New Hampshire. (photo: Charles Dharapak/AP)

It reads:

Mr. President: Over 4000 peaceful protesters have been arrested. While banksters continue to destroy the economy with impunity. You must stop the assault on our 1st amendment rights. Your silence sends a message that police brutality is acceptable. Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.

——————————————–
Not very complicated, is it? What about this is so confusing to the corporate (i.e. “mainstream”) press?

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November, 1963

Posted on November 22, 2011 by MITCHEL COHEN

The Oswald Band's last live performance, November 24, 1963.

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THE GULF WAR 20 YEARS LATER (PART ONE: WHY CLASS MATTERS)

Posted on November 21, 2011 by MITCHEL COHEN

Sallie Latch's Anti-War Painting

“We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a New World Order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.”

- President George H.W. Bush, Sept. 11, 1990

In 1990, on the infamous date September 11th, U.S. President George H.W. Bush, declared his “New World Order” in a speech before the US Congress. Using words like “democracy” and “peace,” Bush was soon to rain thousands of tons of napalm, air-fuel explosives, phosphorous bombs, cluster bombs and uranium-encased shells upon Iraq, killing thousands, poisoning the drinking water and crops, terrorizing that country.

Seven years later, President Bill Clinton did George Bush one better — he actually signed a top secret directive authorizing first use of nuclear weapons against Iraq “under certain circumstances.”

By the end of February, 1998, two Los Angeles-class submarines carrying nuclear warheads atop Tomahawk missiles had arrived in the Gulf. Each missile was encased in so-called “depleted” uranium. The non-nuclear version of these weapons, also hardened with depleted uranium, are now being used by the US in Afghanistan and again in Iraq.

Depleted uranium had been used extensively in the Gulf war and in the bombardment of Yugoslavia, irradiating food and water supplies and poisoning those lands for millennia. Childhood cancers skyrocketed in Iraq and in Yugoslavia; depleted uranium is thought to be a contributing factor in the illnesses of tens of thousands of US soldiers who had handled or become exposed to the material. Of course all of this was completely immoral and constitute crimes against humanity. But here, I want to ask a different question:

“Right or wrong, what strategic goal was the U.S. government actually trying to accomplish, and was the Gulf War necessary for accomplishing it?”

* * *

What are we to make of George Bush’s assertion that the war had “nothing to do with oil”?

As much as the U.S. wanted the Gulf states to line up behind Saudi Arabia as the industry’s price-setter and steady prices at around $26 a barrel (think back to those halcyon days of yore!), it did not need the violent, brutal bombardment to accomplish that. Nor was the slaughter necessary to secure immediate profits for the oil companies, assert control over a larger share of the world’s oil resources, defend the hundreds of billions of dollars deposited in U.S. banks by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, or test out new weapons systems — all rationales we have heard from the peace movement, as it tried to make sense of what was (and still is) going on. From the long-term perspective of capital, the war was not needed to achieve those results; those were secondary plumbs, achievable through other measures.

We, as anti-imperialist activists and analysts, need to reframe the way we look at the bombardment and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to understand the U.S. ruling class’ hidden objectives, which are not at all apparent on the surface:

  1. The war enabled the international banking and oil companies to secure new political as well as economic conditions for the ongoing production of oil (and other commodities);  

  2. For the first time, the U.S. government — acting as the “executive arm of the ruling class” — succeeded in forcing all the factions and competing interests of the severely divided capitalist class into line behind the Trilateral Commission’s strategy for the globalization of capital: the “New World Order”; and,  

  3. The war enabled the U.S. government and its allies to crush the many eruptions of working class organizing in the Gulf region — most visibly in Iran and Iraq — and kept them from spreading to other countries. It accomplished this by breaking up the increasingly organized oil proletariat and replacing it with workers from even more desperate and unorganized areas of the world.

Donald Rumsfeld greets Saddam Hussein, 1983.

Please note, we are not talking here about going to war to generate huge immediate profits for oil companies (even though that was one result). Individual corporations have again profited handsomely, as we continued to be distracted from the Enron and WorldCom collapses, leading directly to the current crisis of the U.S. economy.

On the one hand the longstanding contradictions within the U.S. capitalist class between trilateralist (world bankers, oil cartels), construction, manufacturing, agribusiness, and aerospace/armaments/“defense” industries — all with their own competing sets of economic and political interests — had again propelled conflicting, even chaotic, government policies. And on the other, within Iraq — as had been the case in Iran eleven years earlier — leftist-led uprisings were threatening to destabilize the centralized nation-state itself, with the potential to launch a powerful communist push throughout the region. Crushing those uprisings became a priority for the US and a main reason for the U.S. government’s promotion, funding and arming of Iraq in its long war with Iran.

In 1978 and 1979 the Iranian revolution had bubbled up from the grassroots and ejected the Shah — the main supporter of Israel in the region and the U.S. government’s military strongman in the Arab and Western Asian oil-producing world. One of the key features of the Iranian revolution — one not shown on American TV, which focused solely on the student takeovers in Iran’s capital city, Teheran, and the 1979 taking of 52 hostages (1) — was the rebellion of the oil workers, some 80,000 strong.

With the involvement of two million people living in oil towns, striking workers shut down the massive Iranian petroleum industry.

“The U.S. engineered an attempt to get oil flowing again by staffing the fields and refineries with 10,000 naval cadets trained for this purpose. The strikebreaking effort failed. The striking workers refused to send oil to Israel and South Africa. Yet through a strong and intricate network of peoples’ com­mit­tees called Shura in Pharsi, oil products were distributed throughout Iran, though not to the Shah’s military.” (2)

The Iranian oil workers were irreplaceable in the dangerous and highly technical operations of the oil system. They immediately coordinated amongst themselves a national operation, using the organization and communications technology of the industry itself.

Iranian society during the revolutionary period was democratically run from the grassroots by decentralized popular committees (Komitehs or Shuraá) for approximately two years. These Shura formed in late 1978 in all sectors of society: the schools, the military and media, the oil industry, among the rural Kurds and in the civil service as well as in local neighborhoods. Garbage collection, bread baking and distribution, education and publishing, munitions manufacture and international relations were some of the social activities that these radical democratic committees carried out. (3)

The Ayatollah Khomeini’s aim in returning to Iran after the upsurge from his exile in Paris, was to reassert the power of the bazaari, the mullahs and the national bourgeoisie in Iran — the basis for his authority. In this way, the situation in Iran 31 years ago is very similar to that in Afghanistan under the Taliban. While declaring the United States to be “the Great Satan,” the Islamic fundamentalist Khomeini crushed the neighborhood and workers’ councils that were serving to democratize the society as well as the oil industry (to the consternation of the U.S. oil companies) by reactivating the Shah’s SAVAK — the savage secret police that had been trained a generation earlier by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s father. To gain the upper hand over the Shura, Khomeini needed a means for galvanizing the country. This was accomplished by the war with neighboring Iraq, which lasted for 8 long years and killing more than 1 million Iranian and Iraqi people.

From Khomeini’s position, the war between Iran and Iraq served as a means to defeat an insurgent working class movement at home. It enabled Khomeini to concentrate the power of the State in the hands of ultra-religious fanatics (an outcome welcomed by the U.S. government as the lesser of two evils, representing the long term interests of the oilgarchy); and, from Saddam Hussein’s position, the war served as a means to reap the material benefits of doing the U.S.’s bidding in the region and, similarly, to crush rising working class movements in Iraq, particularly around Basra, Nasria and Hilah where, for decades, there had been strong Stalinist as well as council communist movements, and among the Kurds in the North. The ruling clique in Iraq used U.S. aid to consolidate the power of Iraq’s fascist state through the terror of Saddam’s brownshirts — the Republican Guards. (More about them shortly.)

How could the U.S. play the various forces in the Middle East against each other? When should it befriend one sector, attack another? How could it maintain the Saudi rulers’ allegiance as U.S. capital’s primary ally in the region along with Israel? These have ever been the source of debate in Washington. Here we come to a main argument I am making: There is no monolithic U.S. policy that benefits all sectors of the ruling class equally. The alignment of members of the U.S. President’s cabinet with different sectors of capital helps explain the differences in approach and even outright policy struggles between Baker and Cheney in 1990, or Haig, Shultz and Weinberger a decade earlier (4) — and, for that matter, between Clinton/Gore and Bush/Cheney in 2000.

Support for sanctions against Iraq and for the U.N. Security Council resolutions had been a prime strategy of the big oil and banking sector, reflecting its own long-range economic and political interests, and its reliance upon military assistance to Israel. Military support for Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, had long been a strategy of the aerospace and construction companies, such as Bechtel and Northrup, with enormous projects in that country and billions of dollars at stake. In contrast to the first term of Reagan’s presidency (in whose cabinet the Bechtel corporation played an inordinately powerful and, except for Gen. Haig, a controlling role), all camps had strong presence in the first Bush Administration. (After the Gulf war and still under George H. W. Bush’s presidency, Bechtel was awarded multi-billion dollar contracts for the reconstruction of Kuwait. Bush used the power of his office to basically cajole, coerce and bribe the different sectors of capital into getting in line behind his policy of the New World Order/globalization of capital, just as his son attempted to do upon becoming President with members of the Security Council.) Bush’s successful co-optation of the right-wing of capital, which had historically been hostile to the United Nations, and disciplining the entire capitalist class behind the dominant strategy of seeking U.S. capital’s expansion through U.N. mechanisms was quite an extraordinary feat of political manipulation with long term political consequences.

The Gulf war was the hammer needed to accomplish that objective. The alphabet soup of UN structural adjustment programs, debt service payments, enterprise zones, the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NAFTA, GATT, U.S. Agency for International Development and what today we call NGOs — non-governmental organizations, the so-called “progressive” arm of globalization — are the resulting mechanisms through which the New World Order is implemented. (5)

Today, we are seeing various sectoral tensions being played out at the UN Security Council. Whether the massive outpouring of global antiwar sentiment has helped bring about a rupture in the New World Order consensus promulgated by George Bush, Sr. (which would be irony worthy of Sophocles (or, should we say, “Carlyle”) and give new meaning to Oedipus Rex, where the son wrecks the neoliberal strategy of the father, or is only a slightly chaotic blip within that hegemonic framework remains to be seen. It is this concern that is occupying the various global strategists.

Eight years ago I wrote that if the anti-globalization movement could more deeply influence the direction of the anti-war movement, we may be seeing the end of the period of neoliberalism and the beginnings of mass movements for revolutionary economic, ecological and social transformation. The route has been circuitous indeed, but in responding to the built-in capitalist economic crisis and the global ecological catastrophes we’re facing, the Occupy Wall Street movement today provides the kind of sustained attack on capitalism that some of us thought to be both possible and necessary 15 years ago.

NOTES

1. ABC’s Nightline, with Ted Koppel, was born as a means of documenting the hostage crisis day by day.

2. Terisa Turner, “The 1991 Gulf War and Popular Struggles,” in Arise Ye Mighty People! Gender, Class & Race in Popular Struggles, Terisa Turner and Bryan Furguson, eds. Africa World Press, Inc., Trenton, NJ.

3. Turner, ibid., and Terisa Turner, “The politics of world resource development in the 1990s,” International Oil Working Group, New York, 1990.

4. See, for example, Mitchel Cohen, “Class Wars: Haig, Israel & the U.S. Government,” in Red Balloon Newsletter, October 1981. Haig represented the strong pro-Israel position of the trilateralists; Shultz and Weinberger, who had been officers of the Bechtel Corporation, represented the position favoring arms to Saudi Arabia, which was strongly protested by Israel, even though they, too, did not take an anti-Israel line directly.

5. See Mitchel Cohen, “The L.A. Rebellion and the World Bank,” in The Capitalist Infesto: What Is The Existential Vacuum … & Does It Come With Attachments?, and also Mitchel Cohen, Haiti and Somalia: The International Trade in Toxic Waste for further development and case study applications of NGOs in practice and the development of a new global division of labor to which the Gulf war was central.

 

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