"Horizontalist" movements in Argentina

Marina Sitrin's Everyday Revolutions: Horzontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (2012) is an interesting account of various grassroots social activist movements in Argentina since the political and economic turning point represented by the debt crisis of 2001, including neighborhood groups organizing to deal with local problems and groups that occupied and operated abandoned factories in a quasi-legal arrangement. As Sitrin makes clear, she has been an active and enthiastic participant

We could call it an account of the exercise of People's Power in a particular context.

She's clearly fascinated with various terms affiliated with the movements she identifies with horizontalism, including the name itself, and she uses them in italicized Spanish, as though she thinks using them only in Spanish in an English-language book gives them a special aura. When the reference is to concepts or phrases that may have some special Argentine context, like piqueteros (militant and distinctly rowdy protest groups) or punteros (party bosses for the Peronist Justicialista Party), that may be sensible. Though why "horizontalism" isn't a sufficient translation, since the whole book is about explaining the phenomenon, is not at all clear. So besides horizontalidad, we have asambleísta (participant in a popular assembly), autogestión (self-management), autonomia (autonomy), compañero (friend, comrade, co-worker, buddy), encuentro (meeting, encounter), escrache ("outing" actions to expose criminals from the military dictatorship of 1976-83) and politica afectiva (affective politics). Ironically in a book celebrating popular politics, it is likely todistance the English-only reader from the concepts she's celebrating.

Sitrin is coming from some sort of more-or-less explicitly anarchist viewpoint, of a type that we would associate with the activists of the early Occupy movement.

And analyses like these are important, because international corporations have perfected the art of creating a qualitative gap between political elites and their voters in even the most democratic countries. The failure of traditional center-left parties, including in the US and Europe, to offer any meaningful alternative to neoliberal policies even when they get elected on a platform of doing so (as in France and the US in 2012) means that democracy requires alternative ways of expressing people's power.

But Sitrin also romanticizes these movements. There's a lot of pleasant theorizing about "love in politics and a love-based politics," "new forms of of politics and organizing," "rupture," "the sense of revolution is something affective and relational," etc. In one sentence where she uses the English words for favorite concepts, she writes, "People, by the many thousands, explain that they are creating themselves anew, and are finding ways to survive based on new principles of solidarity, horizontalism, affective politics, and new values." There's also marginally interesting discussions about creating new kinds of power, the difference between power-over and power-to, and so on.

Much of that is superficial hype. Yes, politics can be rewarding. Getting together with like-minded participants such as neighbors or fellow workers or students and working out solutions to common issues can be a positive experience. Protesting can be a rush. And it's a sign of the extent to which democratic publics in many countries have become to a large extent de-politicized that such experience may seem to many to be radically personally transforming. The old urban political "machines" in large American cities have become synonymous with corruption. But they did provide an avenue for regular contact of ordinary citizens with some kind of representative of the local government that represented a vehicle for addressing real needs.

And she finds herself stuck in some of the elementary dilemmas on 19th-century anarchists, such as how is leadership exercised in a "horizontal" organization? Even on the most technical, rational grounds, a ship needs a captain, an airplane needs a pilot.

Of course, anarchism is about the easiest kind of political philosophy for Americans to reject. In Argentina, at least, there was a mass basis a century ago among workers for anarchist ideas. So it's worth noting that one of the virtues of anarchists' thinking is that their perspective leads them to focus on base democracy movements that scarcely appear on the radar screen of our star pundits. Everyday Revolutions is a good example of that.

Sitrin's posture of extreme skepticism toward "the state" shows its limits. It's one thing for a neighborhood group to create its own community center or even occupy and restart an abandoned factory. Someone taking a different spin might point to these as examples of "entrepreneurial" spirit. But if an international financial crisis takes down your entire economy, that's something people need a responsible government to handle, not one captured by Big Capital. Neighborhood collectives can't run a national retirement or health-care system or bank deposit insurance.

And if you read closely, you can see in her own presentation that the "horizontal" groups she celebrates don't reject cooperation with the state to the extent she does. And in one case she describes with approval, the rejection of a state role in resolving a problem is highly questionable. It had to do with an abandoned warehouse converted by a neighborhood group in the city of Lomas de Zamora (Buenos Aires province) into a community center they called La Toma, where they held evening parties that she says banned drugs and alcohol:

The night after one such party a young woman from the neighborhood and an outside assembly participant approached a few members of the assembly and shared with them that she had been sexually assaulted right La Toma by one of the teens who recently had begun to attend the social events. The assembly members who were told decided, together with this young woman, that this was an issue to take up in the assembly and not, at least for now, to take to the police.

I participated in the assemblies for the next few weeks where this issue was addressed. The young woman came to the assembly with a few friends and had a few assembly people sitting with her in the circle. The accused young man also came to the assembly, having been told of the accusation. Similarly, he was there with a few friends, and a few assembly people sat with him. For the next few weeks discussions were held where each person was able to explain what happened and their feelings about it. Eventually, proposals were made and agreed upon for a sort of restorative justice. Among those resolutions were that the young man agreed to get support for his alcohol misuse, that he would not go to any of La Toma's parties until his alcoholism was under control, that he would meet with counselors on issues of sexual abuse, together with a few participants from the assembly who would go along to support him. He also had to meet with a few volunteers from the assembly on a weekly basis for the next few months, keeping them posted as to his participation in the various groups. If he failed to attend any of the agreed upon meetings he would not be permitted to enter the space of La Toma.

The end result was a very positive resolution where everyone concerned seemed satisfied and heard. The process was a lot more complex then space here allows me to describe. Included in the tensions and challenges were such things as the young man claiming that the young woman 'asked for it' by the way she was dressed, and that women usually push men away when they mean yes, etc. His friends who were with him were in complete agreement regarding these questions - at least at first. It was an amazing shift to see this tough street teen begin to listen to people around him on questions of gender and power, and that his desire to be a part of the assemblies and the occupied space was so great that he was willing to seek treatment and go to support groups with others from the assembly.

I find this story far more disturbing than inspiring. It's lacking in some key details, like the actual age of the assailant, the age of the victim and even the nature of the act, though by this description it was rape or attempted rape, admitted to by the teenage boy. But the bottom line is that the guy either raped or attempted to rape a woman, and he was not held legally accountable. And while it sounds like the assembly's demands on the kid were sensible, there's no mention of any actual professionals knowledgeable in either sex crimes or addiction being involved. Did the assailant have a prior police record? And what about security outside the center? Did they make any changes there, put in better lighting, what?

In other words, this puts us right back with elementary functions of the state. And, consensus or not, it doesn't seem to me based on the information provided that this was a legitimate function of such a group.

Sitrin does touch on something important, though, in emphasizing the role of such social movements in re-creating bonds and values of basic human solidarity that had been badly damaged by the state terror of the military dictatorship of 1976-83. As she describes the latter:

Juan Corradi called this a 'culture of fear' .... Some who were able, fled abroad, mainly for political reasons but for professional ones as well. Every level of society was monitored and censored. Artists, psychologists and architects were under particular attack, but no one was exempt. However, many others that did not leave lived in what the Argentine historian Luis Alberto Romero has called 'internal exile'. With this term he refers to people who hid out within Argentina, sometimes just by keeping a low profile, and others who literally were hidden in basements and attics, as with the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. He also refers to something much more profound affecting society at the time and future generations: those people who saw what was taking place and had the opinion of no te metas [don't get involved] or, when the brutality was impossible to ignore, with the opinion that 'they must have done something' ... . Between 1976 and 1978 the vast majority of people were 'disappeared' [i.e., the vast majority of those who were kidnapped by the dictatorship and were murdered where taken then]. One-third were women, hundreds of whom gave birth in captivity. The vast majority of all people [disappeared] were between fifteen and thirty-five. (pp. 25-26)

And she quotes Romero, "There were many victims, but the true objective was to reach the living, the whole of society that, before undertaking a total transformation, had to be controlled and dominated by terror and by language ... Only the voice of the state remained, addressing itself to an atomized collection of inhabitants."

This was an extreme form of de-politicizing the public. In fact, this is the phenomenon Argentine President Cristina Fernández addressed earlier this month on the anniversary of the 1976 military coup:

... the objective of the coup was not only a country without industries, a country where only finance capital ran things; it was also to install in every one of the Argentines that it was not worth it to be concerned with others, because if you concerned yourself with others something could happen to you. Better to be concerned with yourself, and if your were concerned with yourself, nothing would happen to you. Fear. And after fear follows egoism. Egoism is the child of fear. Don't ever forget it. Only those who are afraid can be egoists. Those who are not afraid are those who practice solidarity.

But Sitrin in clearly no fan of Cristina's, though she does admit, grudgingly, that the Kirchner governments since 2003 have done something important in prosecuting perpetrators of murder and torture during the dictatorship.

But because of his generally anti-political politics, Sitrin doesn't do a very good job explaining the larger political context in which all the movements she describes have operated. She seems to regard both Kirchners as almost as suspect as such a hardline neoliberal as Carlos Menem. And she really doesn't discuss the current opposition parties, the Radicals and the Socialists and their various allies like Mauricio Macri's PRI in Buenos Aires city, and the ways in which those parties also use militant citizens groups. She refers to a split among the militant piqueteros under Cristina's Administration. But without knowing how the Radicals and the PRI actively promoted that split and utilized them, you really can't understand what is going on with that.

Politics has different forms, and people do still manage to develop new ones. But what we know as politics will continue to involve political parties and arguments over the use of the state to distribute resources. Sitrin's anti-political stance has more than a passing resemblance to the Radical Centrism of someone like David "Bobo" Brooks. Consensus decision-making is possible in limited circumstances with, yes, leaders skilled in the process involved, as the Occupy Movement showed. But postpartisan agreement and the insistence quest for it in our current society are more often destructive than helpful. It gives veto power to the most intransigent and reactionary, who have no intention of playing by "postpartisan" rules, much less by consensus.

And as valuable and inspiring as the People's Power movement Sitrin describes are, there is still the worldly wisdom from Eric Hoffer, "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket." While that's no excuse to be cynical or apathetic, it is a reminder that popular movements can be volatile and their eventual end is always uncertain.

Tags: anarchism, argentina, everyday revolutions, horizontalism, occupy movement

A couple of quotes on official violence and "revolution by implosion"

"Does not right cease to be right whenever it is seized?" - Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History

"Law and Order": these words have always had an ominous sound; the entire necessity and the entire horror of legitimate force are condensed, and sanctioned, in this phrase. There can be no human association without law and order, enforceable law and order, but there are degrees of good and evil in human associations - measured in terms of the legitimate, organized violence required to protect the established society against the poor, the oppressed, the insane: the victims of its well-being. Over and above their legitimacy in constitutional terms, the extent to which established law and order can legitimately demand (and command) obedience and compliance largely depends (or ought to depend) on the extent to which this law and this order obey and comply with their own standards and values. These may first be ideological (like the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity advanced by the revolutionary bourgeoisie), but the ideology can become a material political force in the armor of the opposition as these values are betrayed, compromised, denied in the social reality. Then the betrayed promises are, as it were, "taken over" by the opposition, and with them the claim for legitimacy. In this situation, law and order become something to be established as against the established law and order: the existing society has become illegitimate, unlawful: it has invalidated its own law.

- Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (1969)

Genuinely unpopular regimes can suppress popular movements by force to a grimly effective extent. But the extent isn't infinite. Even strong states willing to use extensive violent repression, like East Germany in 1989-90 or Mubarak's Egypt, to take just two examples, found themselves unable to preserve power via force when the government had lost legitimacy to a sufficient extent.

This is a much more complex matter than simple popularity as might be expressed in an opinion poll, for instance. But it's an important part of understanding what Joschka Fischer called "revolution by implosion," which is how he characterized the post-1989 transitions in central and eastern Europe after the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

The more recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt would also seem to fit into something like a "revolution by implosion" model, though there was violence in both cases, mostly from the official side. In Libya and Syria, something more in the direction of a civil war developed.

Marcuse in that passage talks about "standards and values" that are "[o]ver and above their legitimacy in constitutional terms." In many cases in the United States, such as the disgustingly routine use of tasers by local police and the far-reaching restriction of protest to confines which make them ineffective, the established order is trampling on standards and values that are very much part of "their legitimacy in constitutional terms." The same can be said about many manifestations of the unending "war on drugs" which in practice is often a war on minorities.

This is part of what disturbs me about hearing President Obama routinely say that protecting "the security of the American people" (or variations of that formula) is his first priority as President. Glenn Greenwald isn't just splitting legalistic hairs when he insists against such formulas that the President is pledged to defend the Constitution of the United States, not "security" as such.

Because there is really no such thing as "security as such." Security from street crime, from home burglaries and sexual assault, are one category of security. Security from seeing homeless beggars or security from embarrassing protests outside a corporate headquarters are in very different categories. Security of the public from violence has very different implications for what kind of Constitutional order in which we live than does the security of the super-rich from annoyance by their inferiors.

The Occupy movement in 2011 highlighted, if only for a brief moment in time in the United States, the ways in which the law-and-order that protects the comfort of the present order of things from the political manifestations of "the victims of its well-being" can actually violate the deeper and more important values of society. They, and the continuing protests of the indignados in the eurozone's periphery countries against the brutal austerity policies laying waste to the lives of millions of people there, are showing how the values of advanced democratic societies "are betrayed, compromised, denied in the social reality."

Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, indignados, herbert marcuse, occupy movement, violence

Report on the Occupy movement now

Aljazeera English has quite an interesting discussion on the state of the Occupy movement in the US, Inside Story Americas - What happened to Occupy? 09/21/2012:

Guests: Author Marina Sitrin who has a book called Occupying Language (2012), Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership For Civil Justice Fund and a member of the leftist National Lawyers Guild, and activist Yates McKee.

Tags: occupy movement

Charlie Pierce on the Occupy movement and reviving popular democracy in the US: "Somebody has to care enough not to care"

Charlie Pierce is a good reporter and understands practical politics. He also understands what the last three decades of what most of the world calls neoliberal economic policies have done to American society and American democracy.

He came up with an excellent statement of why we need a progressive movement in the US that is both outside the Democratic Party and inside it (The 'End' of Occupy and the Corruption of Our Country Esquire Politics Blog 05/01/2012):

If the Occupy people want to march, I say let them march. If they resist conventional politics, that may be because conventional politics are worth resisting. What I do know is that, if i weren't for the people in the streets last autumn, the Obama people would be running a very different campaign and Willard Romney wouldn't look half as ridiculous as he does. Somebody has to care enough not to care. [my emphasis]

Pierce's point is the depth of the corruption of our political system and both our major political parties. I remember back in 1992, Jerry Brown made a theme of his Presidential campaign for the Democratic nomination the idea that our system of campaign financing was corrupt, legalized bribery.

I had long since learned that no matter how strange what Jerry says about such things may sound, he's probably seen some angle of it that most people have understood yet. It's the Jesuit influence on him, I think. But I still though he was going a little too far in describing it that way.

Now I wonder why I ever thought that. True, things have gotten much worse. But now the legal and extralegal corruption is so massive and so obvious, it's hard to imagine what reason made the think he was going too far in saying that.

But we can't roll back the clock and have a do-over on long-ago political choices. (For the record, I voted for Jerry in the California Democratic primary that year.) But the Republicans are clearly trying to roll back a lot about our political system and regulation of business to the 19th century, or at least to their imagined version of it. And the Democratic Party is crippled in terms of offering a serious progressive alternative. If the American political vocabulary was more sensible, we would be saying that President Obama and the current Democratic Party offer a mildly-compassionate conservative alternative to the Republicans on domestic policy, and a mildly less warmongering version of foreign policy.

The differences are substantial enough to be real. A Romney Administration would try to do nationally what new Republican Governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Rick Scott in Florida. And that's aggressively roll back labor rights and government services that benefit anyone except the One Percent. And third parties are a really difficult undertaking because the American winner-take-all electoral districts create maximum pressure to have a two-party system. Arguably, the only third party in American history successful enough to push its way for a long period into one of the two two-party slots was the Republican Party, founded in 1854.

But both our political parties are now amazingly resistant to popular pressure, even in the face of the current depression and the amazing pageant of criminality and recklessness that preceded it. Pierce writes:

Just this morning, the Wall Street Journal ran a feature about how the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the activities of the lawyers who worked for the assorted shark tanks that ran the world economy into the ditch. The SEC isn't looking into lawyers who were complicit in the fraud. It is looking into lawyers who helped build the stonewalls that went up when the true breadth and depth of the scandal started to come to light. This is a huge and messy legal fight ... but what it does is illustrate, again, what an utterly corrupt nation the United States of America was in the first decade of the 21st century. The governing elites, all of them, were complicit in massive fraud against the rest of us. Either they participated in it, which would be the bankers and (it appears) their lawyers, or they condoned and celebrated it, which would be the financial press and the elite media, or they shirked their duty to protect the political commonwealth from being hijacked, which would be the members of both parties in the government, and us, for letting so much of the country run on automatic pilot for so long.

This was a banana republic. It was a failed state in everything except the fact that no tanks rolled in the streets. The terrorists were not hiding in Waziristan. They were having lunch at Cipriani's and sitting in luxury boxes at the Meadowlands. The government existed only to increase their profits and to provide a quasi-legal context for organized piracy. There was an extraordinary contempt for the law, for the institutions of government, and for the people the law and those institutions were supposed to serve. The country was cored out. It was a shell of a country and a shell corporation, and it has not recovered yet.

The failure of the two parties resulting from their all but total capture by what the old Jacksonians called the Money Power, their phrase for the One Percent, has produced the dynamic Digby describes in Hullabaloo 04/29/2012:

[E]ven as the Republicans have moved hard to the right, the Democrats protect the status quo. Which, with each passing year, has moved farther right. Basically, Republicans enact their agenda and it becomes the status quo. Then the Democrats come along and protect what they've done. That becomes the center. At which point the Republicans call the Democrats communists and move even farther right.

This has led us to the point where Democrats are willing to embrace the "Simpson-Bowles" proposals to begin the phaseout of Social Security and Medicare in exchange for cosmetic tax increases on the wealthy which could quickly be reversed:

Within the course of just a few months the Democratic minority leader [Nancy Pelosi] has moved from saying that Simpson-Bowles was beyond the pale to saying that she would have voted for it. It's now the new center.

I'm sure it makes the DC Democrats proud as punch to be the "grown-ups" in the room and be able to look down their noses at the rambunctious Tea Partiers. But the fact is that the Tea Partiers are all that's keeping the government from codifying a "consensus" that up until about five minutes ago existed only as Grover Norquist's wet dream. As far as I'm concerned they have done us a big favor.

I don't know about you, but I think the "status quo" sucks. I take no pride in being a member of a Party that is "reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures" when the entire premise is bullshit. There's enough money. The government simply insists upon allowing millionaires and corporations to escape their responsibilities and we are a global military empire which, as they always do, is sucking the lifeblood out of our polity.

It will take a continuing effort from organized labor and other popular groups taking action outside the Democratic Party to force the Democrats even to defend Social Security and Medicare now.

By contrast, during the Great Depression, Roosevelt and the Democrats started the Social Security program.

Tags: austerity economics, democratic movement, democratic party, medicare, occupy movement, social security

Corey Robin vs. the Occupy movement

Now I'm more concerned than ever about the implications of Corey Robin's ahistorical argument that there is no meaningful distinction between conservative and Radical Right. He's attracted quite a bit of sympathetic attention among progressives for this argument, which puts the stodgy go-slow-or-even-do-nothing conservative in the same boat with the howling reactionary who wants to create a dystopia based on some imagined version of an ideal 19th century.

He makes his case at some length in his book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011) . As a matter of history, I think he's seriously overreaching. I can understand the argument's contemporary resonance, though, given the current state of the Republican Party in which segregationist and McCarthyist talk that would not so long ago have been publicly disowned by respectable business conservatives is now considered normal, mainstream Republican practice.

Now Robin's addressing the Occupy movement in The Conservative Reaction Chronicle of Higher Education 01/08/2012. And this piece presents an uncomfortable reminder that if a stodgy conservative who mainly wants to not rock the boat for the 1% too much is the same as a blithering Bircher or a cornpone brownshirt, then the Birchers and the brownshirts are also no more threatening or obnoxious than your standard Chamber of Commerce or Rotary Club member.

Not that Robin is endorsing the Patriot Militias in his Chronicle piece. But he certainly does seem to be advising Republicans, hey, this is the kind of hippie agitation that you need to oppose the way you do it best:

After decades of "compassionate conservatism," "a thousand points of light," and "Morning in America," dark talk of class warfare on the right can seem like a strange throwback. So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we've forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much. With the roar against the ruling classes growing ever louder, the right seems to be reverting to type. It thus behooves us to take a second look at the conservative tradition, not just its current incarnation but also across time, for that tradition provides us with an understanding of why the conservative responds to Occupy Wall Street as he does. ...

Given the reactionary thruST [sic] of conservatism, Occupy Wall Street may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the right. Thoughtful conservatives have long understood the symbiotic relationship between the right's intellectual - and ultimately political - vitality and insurgencies from the left. Friedrich Hayek accurately observed that the political theory of capitalism "became stationary when it was most influential" and "progressed" only when it was "on the defensive." Frank Meyer, intellectual architect of the fusion strategy that brought together the libertarian and traditionalist wings of the Republican Party, noted that it was "ironic, though not historically unprecedented," that bursts "of creative energy" on the right "should occur simultaneously with a continuing spread of the influence of liberalism in the practical political sphere."

Conversely, conservative writers like David Frum and Andrew Sullivan have worried of late about the intellectual flabbiness of the contemporary right: A movement that once seemed the emblem of heterodoxy has succumbed to stale thinking and rote incantations. But if Occupy Wall Street turns out to be a movement rather than a moment — if it has real staying power; if it moves from public squares to private institutions; if it starts to divest the elite of their privileges and powers, not just in their offshore accounts but in their backyards and board rooms — it could provide the kind of creative provocation that once produced a Burke or a Hayek. The metaphor of occupation is threatening enough; one can only imagine what might happen were it made real. And while the mavens of the right would probably prefer four more years to four good books, they might want to rethink that. They wouldn't be in the position they're in - when, even out of power, they still govern the country - had their predecessors made the same choice. [my emphasis]

That last part is a bit unclear, though he must mean "four more years" of Obama, though it's not at all obvious which "mavens of the right would probably prefer four more years" of the Marxist-Kenyan-socialist-European-Islamunist-atheist Obama to having a Republican in the White House.

In the real world, of course we're seeing pushback from the right over the Occupy movement. And what are we supposed to make of this statement, "A movement that once seemed the emblem of heterodoxy has succumbed to stale thinking and rote incantations"? When the Republicans were prominently congratulating themselves for being the "party of ideas", those great ideas were crackpot things like supply side economics, union-busting, boosting military spending and freeing the wealthiest Americans from the oppressive burden of having to pay taxes to support their country. Pretty much the same "stale thinking and rote incantations" of these days, only marketed a bit more cleverly. Stuff like that may have made Young Republicans think of themselves as "the emblem of heterodoxy" though it more closely resembled what was once called "hardening of the arteries", i.e., old-age dementia.

But the relative lack of mildly disruptive activism like that of the Occupy movement certainly hasn't slowed the radicalization of the Christian Republican White People's Party. On the contrary, Occupy is forcing even the Republicans to give some lip service to helping working families. Even though much of it looks more like dementia than either "the emblem of heterodoxy" or "stale thinking and rote incantations". Will Bunch reports on Rick Santorum campaigning in New Hampshire (The Santorum surge isn't working Attytood 01/09/2012):

He chose to devote his entire speech to his tax and pro-manufacturing policies – completely avoiding any mention of his signature issues like abortion and family values. Instead, he made a blatant pitch for working class votes.

"Imagine, the president of the United States standing up and saying everybody should go to college in America," Santorum said of President Obama at one point "What intellectual snobbery is that?! Not every person wants or needs to go to college or should have to go to college. Hard work, getting skills, getting training, whether it’s at a trade school or whatever, is good work and important work." He then claimed that Obama instead wants to "redistribute wealth" to those who don’t get into college.

The fact that someone considered a credible if faltering Republican Presidential candidate within their Party is holding up college attendance as a sign of "intellectual snobbery" is a good example of how in the real existing Republican Party of 2012, it's hard to make a meaningful distinction between stodgy conservative and drooling reactionary.

But that's not what Robin is doing in the Chronicle article. It reads more like he's pointing to the Occupy movement and telling Republicans, you need to go after these people!

I also notice that, in the paragraphs at the end of the article, he talks about if the Occupy movement achieves such-and-so and if they achieve this other thing. But in the first paragraph quoted above, which is the second paragraph in the article, he talks about "movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up." I know that some of the activists see that as an ultimate goal. But in real time, there is no way that the Occupy movement is about to stage some massive general strike and bring on an apocalyptic change that would "reorder society from the bottom up". Any politician or police chief - or anti-terrorism official - who sees the Occupy movement that way at this moment is likely smoking some of that Ron Paul Bircher weed.

Tags: corey robin, occupy movement, reactionary mind

2011 retrospective: Occupy Wall Street and press corps disconnect

I'm trying to avoid the ever-popular year-end lists or retrospectives. But what the heck, here's one of my favorites from 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the cluelessness of the mainstream media in evaluating it, much less recognizing its potency. Here The Young Turks memorialize what may be the most emblematic moment on US mainstream TV news for 2011, Occupy Wall Street Attacked by Erin Burnett YouTube date 10/05/2011:



And this brilliant Halloween spoof by The Alyona Show's Alyona Minkovski 10/31/2011, Halloween:'Seriously, Protesters?!':



Tags: alyona minkovski, occupy movement, occupy wall street

Glenn Beck discovers white racism among Tea Party supporters

Will Bunch points out how a political myth has taken root that recasts the Tea Party in the image of Occupy Wall Street (The accidental truth-teller: Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and race in America Attywood 12/12/2011):

In recent months, a myth has been allowed to fester and take root about how the Tea Party Movement came about, and what it stands for. In particular, it is the falsehood that the Tea Party came about because of anger against the 2008-09 bailout of big banks and Wall Street. It was disturbing to see this lie repeated so often -- usually in the context of trying to make forced and ultimately confused comparisons between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street -- and not just in the usual conservative media sources, either.

He cites instances of this spin from the New York Post and FOX Business.

He doesn't cite this instance, from President Obama speech at Otawatomie a week ago:

But in 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We all know the story by now: Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or even sometimes understand them. Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off. Huge bets -- and huge bonuses -- made with other people’s money on the line. Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, 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. And it plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we’re still fighting to recover. It claimed the jobs and the homes and the basic security of millions of people -- innocent, hardworking Americans who had met their responsibilities but were still left holding the bag.

And ever since, there’s been a raging debate over the best way to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore fairness. Throughout the country, it’s sparked protests and political movements -- from the tea party to the people who’ve been occupying the streets of New York and other cities. [my emphasis]

But Bunch does refute the story with a bit of recent history:

The rise of the Tea Party had nothing to do with bank bailouts.

Remember, the federal government and the Bush administration (remember them?) started bailing out Wall Street and the banking industry in the fall of 2008, six months before the first Tea Party rally, or anything remotely like it. There was no great outpouring of anger from the rank-and-file of the American right. The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, was signed into law by Bush on Oct. 3, 2008. It was supported by Bush's successor, then-Sen. Barack Obama, but it was also supported by Sen. John McCain, his running mate and future Tea Party queen Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and even by none other than Glenn Beck. Simply put, there was no Tea Party movement, and no public protests by conservatives (or liberals for that matter) in 2008.

Instead, the Tea Party formed within days of Jan. 20, 2009, the date that Barack Obama became America's 44th president. The famous "Tea Party rant"by Rick Santelli credited with helping to launch the protests wasn't about bailing out banks or Wall Street but the idea that Washington would provide relief for middle-class homeowners who were under water. Another seminal moment came less than a month into Obama's presidency when a young Seattle conservative activist named Keli Carender organized a public protest. Against the bank bailouts and TARP? No. It was against the first major action of the new president, the $787 billion stimulus proposal that included infrastructure projects, saving blue-collar government jobs, and tax cuts (yes, tax cuts) for the middle class. [my emphasis]

Bunch did a considerable amount of original reporting on the Tea Party, including a book about it, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama (2010).

Glenn Beck, weirdly enough, managed to say on FOX Business last week that some Tea Party sympathizers were motivated by white racism. Which, of course, is not supposed to exist any more in the Republican Party.

Not that this represents some newly-found reality-testing skills on Beck's part. He brought this up in the context of accusing Newt Gingrich of being the same kind of "big government progressive" that he calls Obama. Go figure.

But, as Bunch puts it, "any dose of honesty is a breath of fresh air, even if emerges from the fetid swamp of Beck, Inc." And he explains:

But whatever his reason, the idea that Beck re-injected into the national conversation -- that race and the Tea Party are linked -- is an important one. The media needs to re-ground itself in the fact that on the playing field of social movements, Occupy Wall Street, despite its flaws, is rooted in a reality of billionaire-bought economic injustice, while the Tea Party is based heavily on an emotion. The ideology that was created in the wake of that emotion -- distrust of any government steps to ease a jobs crisis, distrust of elites even if that means not believing in established science such as man-made global warming -- continues to steer the current debate, even if actual Tea Party activists have all but vanished the scene. [my emphasis]

Tags: occupy movement, tea party, will bunch

ILWU and Occupy Oakland's call for a one-day shutdown of West Coast ports today (Corrected)

I have to agree with Laura Clawson about this one: Occupy Oakland attempting port shutdown despite union opposition Daily Kos 12/12/2011.

The Occupy Oakland group is pushing for a one-day strike at all West Coast ports on Tuesday today, December 12, even though the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) opposes it. The key to their remarkable success in the one-day general strike call in November was the participation of ILWU members by walking off work at the port. Technically, it was a wildcat action because it was not formally called by the ILWU. But Clawson is undoubtedly right in saying that the ILWU "tacitly supported" the November action.

If the organizers of this action don't have some very firm agreement, formal or otherwise, with the ILWU to do a strike, it's very unlikely to work. Not a smart move, from what I can see. We'll see what happens tomorrow today.

ILWU president President Robert McEllrath addressed the strike call in a 12/06/2011 letter: Message from Pres. McEllrath: We share Occupy’s concerns about America, but EGT battle is complicated:

The fact is that the story of corporate greed and its impact on the working class is the story of the 99%, and, of course, this reality connects us all. ...

Most recently, groups directly connected to the Occupy movement and other loosely affiliated social media groups have called for the shutdown of certain terminals and the West Coast ports. At the same time, these groups seek to link these shutdowns to the ILWU’s labor dispute with employer EGT. None of this is sanctioned by the membership of the ILWU or informed by the local and International leadership. Simply put, there has been no communication with the leadership and no vote within the ILWU ranks on EGT associated Occupy actions.

Further, since our November 22, 2011 press release clarifying our position regarding third-party protests to occupy West Coast ports on December 12, 2011, we have been the subject of much criticism from individuals affiliated with the Occupy movement. This is shortsighted and only serves the 1%. We ask only that our internal process be respected and that whatever transpires not be in our name as we have not taken part in the call for that action.

Reading between the lines of McEllrath's statement, he may be concerned that some well-organized left-wing sect is using the Occupy movement as a cover to get political influence in the ILWU. I'm just guessing there. But small, sectarian leftwing groups operate that way. Typically, if they do get control of a successful independent activist group of some kind, they effectively destroy it but use its reputation for a while to recruit members into their main organization. And a genuine mass movement like Occupy attracts such groups like flies to honey.

Tags: ilwu, occupy movement

Obama in Osawatomie

Obama gave a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, yesterday, one of his performances in which he tries to sound like an actual Democrat. Although he picked the location because it has some historical association with Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Another famous American historical figure is also associated with the place to the point of having been nicknamed Osawatomie: the anti-slavery guerrilla fighter John Brown, famous for his role in the mini civil war against slavery in "Bleeding Kansas".

So I even need to mention that the latter historical association makes no appearance in the President's speech?



Ken Thomas provides a news report in Barack Obama Addresses Payroll Tax Cuts, Economy In Kansas Speech Huffington Post 12/06/2011.

Ron Fournier does a report and analysis in No TR: The Limits of Obama's Bully Pulpit National Journal 11/06/2011.

And Charles Pierce applies his acid pen to the speech in Obama's Kansas Speech: The Good, the Bad, and the 99% Esquire Politics Blog 12/06/2011. Pierce reacts, uh, skeptically to Obama's equation of the Tea Party with the Occupy protests:

Can this meme please die a quick and bloody death? Back in 2009, the Tea Party demonstrations had fk-all to do with corporate greed. The whole thing started when Rick Santelli started raving about deadbeat mortgage holders and the hard-working stock traders in camera range behind him. The Tea Party demonstrations were manufactured events dedicated to the eternal proposition, "Me some, too, yes?" And even if you accept the fact that they were somehow spontaneous uprisings of people worried down to their orthotics about the goddamn deficit, which I don't, all of their energy was poured into opposing government spending — or, more specifically, government spending on those people, and not on us. If the corporate brains behind that "movement" ever thought it was seriously turning against the corporate piracy that caused the whole meltdown, they'd have pulled the plug, canceled all the buses, and a whole bunch of old white people would still be walking home from Washington. As I have said from the beginning about the Occupy movement, I will support it because, at the very least, those folks are yelling at the right buildings. [emphasis in original]

There's no doubt Obama can give a good speech when he focuses on doing so. Here he's in Big Picture mode. But even so, his politically pathological rhetorical centrism infects even a speech like this. At 7:00, he says:

This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. Because what's at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.

Now in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that's happened, after the worst economic crisis, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: we are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.

I am here to say they are wrong. I'm here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we're greater together than we are on our own. I believe this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot. When everyone does their fair share. When everyone plays by the same rules.

Great! Obama doesn't have the booming cadence of FDR. But here he comes close to sounding like he shares FDR's passion for the working people and their interests.

Then he continues immediately with, "These are not Democratic values or Republican values. These aren't 1% values, or 99% values. These are They're American values. And we have to reclaim them." (my emphasis)

Did I mention that Obama's speech contained no historical references to John Brown or the fight against slavery? Some of those Abolitionists were just very uncivil, you know.

Why can't Obama straightforwardly state the obvious? That, no, these aren't Republican values, or 1% values. The Republicans and the wealthiest 1% whose interests they loyally serve reject those values and are determined to make sure that such values will not govern the United States.

Mammon forbid that the Democratic President even rhetorically claim to favor the interests of the 99% against the greed, recklessness and arrogance of the wealthiest 1%!

Speaking of heathen gods, Athena knows that Obama sounds more responsible and enlightened on the issue of regulating the banksters than any of the Republican candidates for President that have a remote chance of getting their authoritarian Party's nomination. But his own subservience to Wall Street during this depression makes him a deeply flawed messenger for defending those values he rhetorically endorses.

And for those who might be inclined to believe him, it really doesn't help for him to pepper-spray his own more confrontational rhetoric with "bipartisan" nonsense.

Obama and his Party have already offered up major cuts in Social Security and Medicare this year. On the supercommittee, the pitiful Democrats are begging, begging the Republicans to accept such cuts. Let's say that it seriously mitigates the credibility of the President's claim that he will defend the aspirations of working people to "secure their retirement".

Voters don't typically think in the policy-free terms of our Big Pundits, however much opportunity our media environment offers for mass manipulation by well-financed campaigns. Obama's very public insistence on drastic austerity economics in the middle of a depression in the wholly unnecessary debt-ceiling drama earlier this year showed clearly how unwilling Obama is to fight for those "American values" he enumerated at Osawatomie when it actually counts.

As long as Obama and the Democrats are willing to offer up cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits, those who support such programs or who want to see the Democrats fight for real on behalf of working people can't afford to take such claims seriously. However much worse the Republicans may be.

Ron Fournier, a lazy-minded Establishment pundit, digs up someone to present the excuse favored by the White House for their serial capitulations to Republicans and the 1%:

"There was a lot [Teddy] Roosevelt could do. America was expanding, not contracting," said Brian Carson, assistant professor of history and Misericordia University in Dallas, Pa. "Roosevelt was a symbolic figure as a man of action and I'm sure Barack Obama would like to be viewed that way. But, if anything, Obama seems to be a man of limits, personally and by the nature of the times."

He recalled that Roosevelt once gathered together the titans of industry to bully them about one of his initiatives. Imagine Obama doing that? His biggest contributors work on Wall Street, and he is temperamentally more likely to lead quietly behind the scenes, or delegate leadership to Congress, than seize the spotlight.

Obama gave a great speech. But the next TR? History doesn't repeat itself. In this case, it may not even rhyme.

"Think about it," Carson said, "What can a president do today?"

Our Pod Pundits may be impressed with the White House's excuse that they have no choice but to snivel before the demands of Wall Street and other business lobbies: shrugging their shoulders and saying, gee, what get a President do anyway?

I don't think voters outside the Beltway Village bubble are likely to be so easily impressed.

Charles Pierce in a follow-up post on the Osawatomie speech (The President Does Not Fully Understand the 99 Percent 12/07/2011) comments on the passage cited above, "I believe this country succeeds ... American values." (Editorial gripe: Pierce truncates the quote without an elipsis.) And his gives this Menckenesque commentary:

Is it necessary to count exactly how many ways the man is wrong here? Not in what he believes. Those indeed are the circumstances in which this country has succeeded. But the fact remains that, in the current political context, while the Democratic party may be timid in asserting them, those values still exist somewhere in the party. They simply do not exist in the Republican party. The Republican party does not believe in the truth of that first sentence, and it has no intention of pursuing policies that actually have a chance of giving "everyone a fair shot." The Republican party gave up on these "values" the first time they let [supply-side economics propagandist] Arthur Laffer into their corridors of power without handing him a mop and a bucket. And since the American people handed the House of Representatives over to these people — and since the American people have not yet laughed the entire GOP presidential field off the stage yet — it can be safely said that the president is going to have to work a lot harder to convince me that they are widely held "American values" any more.

More important, in our current political context, these are very much "99 percent values." They are not one percent values. The One Percent could care less if there ever is a thriving middle class in this country again. They'd sell the entire American middle class to the Somali pirates if there was a buck in it. There may be a political calculation at work here — Embrace the energy of the Occupy movement, Mr. President, but stay the hell out of the damn drum circle! — but the fact remains that the effectiveness of the "We Are the 99 Percent" argument is completely dependent upon its independence from the anesthetic stupor brought on by ameliorative political rhetoric. [my emphasis in bold]

Tags: barack obama, occupy movement

Allison Kilkenny on repressive tolerance

Allison Kilkenny doesn't use the phrase "repressive tolerance" in Occupy Wall Street and the Importance of Creative Protest The Nation 11/21/2011. She explains how Occupy's actual impact was connected with the participants' willingness to break with established procedures and rules on how free speech and freedom of assembly and the right to protest were to be exercised:

Up until Occupy, most protests had become exercises in futility. Protesters would show up with their sad, limp carboard signs, march around for a little while - maybe press would show up, but most likely not - and then everyone would go home. Hardly effective stuff.

Even when the protests were massive, say during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, media had learned to ignore protests as being the hallmark of a bygone era of granola-munching hippies. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the media helped hand protesters loss after loss, perhaps recognizing the fact that protest waged within the perimeters constructed by city officials is completely ineffective.

Demonstrators need a permit to march, and even then must remain on the sidewalk and never disrupt traffic; they need a permit to use a bullhorn, a permit to play music, etc. Protesters, in other words, can protest as long as they never disrupt the normalcy of everyday living, which of course defeats the concept of meaningful protest in the first place.

After a while, all protests began to look the same. Protesters show up, march around, chant X or Y slogan, and if it’s super-exciting, clash with the police and everyone goes to jail. Repeat chorus. It’s no wonder the corporately controlled media were so easily able to write off protest culture as being unimportant or ineffective. The horrible truth was, it had become futile.

That is, of course, until Occupy showed up and refused to play by the city-written rules. No, they wouldn’t be getting permits. No, they wouldn’t be going home at curfew. They would remain in camps as permanent monuments to the injustice and inequality of America’s society. There was no “normal” anymore. There was only what Occupy chose to do, and to not do.

Repressive tolerance is a concept identified with the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse. To judge from these quotes from Marcuse's 1968 Postscript to his famous essay, "Repressive Tolerance", he would have related to Allison Kilkenny's point:

Under the conditions prevailing in this country, tolerance does not, and cannot, fulfill the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy, namely, protection of dissent. The progressive historical force of tolerance lies in its extension to those modes and forms of dissent which are not committed to the status quo of society, and not confined to the institutional framework of the established society. Consequently, the idea of tolerance implies the necessity, for the dissenting group or individuals, to become illegitimate if and when the established legitimacy prevents and counteracts the development of dissent. This would be the case not only in a totalitarian society, under a dictatorship, in one-party states, but also in a democracy (representative, parliamentary, or "direct") where the majority does not result from the development of independent thought and opinion but rather from the monopolistic or oligopolistic administration of public opinion, without terror and (normally) without censorship. ... The ideology of democracy hides its lack of substance. ...

However, the alternative to the established semi-democratic process is not a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy. Part of this struggle is the fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination. ... The tolerance which is the life element, the token of a free society, will never be the gift of the powers that be; it can, under the prevailing conditions of tyranny by the majority, only be won in the sustained effort of radical minorities, willing to break this tyranny and to work for the emergence of a free and sovereign majority - minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant and disobedient to the rules of behavior which tolerate destruction and suppression.

To quote Arlo Guthrie: Some things don't change, you know; some things do.

Tags: first subject, second subject, third subject

Democracy is inconvenient

And oligopoly is terrible. That's why democracy has to fight back against it. Bob Reich (The First Amendment Upside Down. Why We Must Occupy Democracy 11/22/2011):

The First Amendment is being stood on its head. Money speaks, and an unlimited amount of it can now be spent bribing and cajoling politicians. Yet peaceful assembly is viewed as a public nuisance and removed by force.

This is especially worrisome now that so many Americans are in economic trouble. The jobs recession grinds on, seemingly without end. Homes are being foreclosed upon. Qualified students cannot afford college. Or they’re forced to take on huge debt loads they can’t repay in a jobless economy. Schools are firing teachers. Vital social services are being axed.

How are Americans to be heard about what should be done about any of this if they are not allowed to mobilize and organize? When the freedom of speech goes to the highest bidder, moneyed interests have a disproportionate say.

Now more than ever, the First Amendment needs to be put right side up. Nothing less than the future of our democracy is at stake.

Accompanying video of Reich on the same subject:



Tags: occupy movement, robert reich

Occupying popular culture

I first heard this song by Hawaiian folk singer Makana on the Argentine news report that I included in my last post. (Yes, there are some good things about globalization!) The song, "We Are The Many," is a tad on the corny side, but what the heck. I like it anyway. It captures the "democratic moment" of the Occupy movement. The historical photos are great, too. (Correct video now posted.)



I kind of like the little "postmodern" touch about "gaze."

What I didn't realize until I had listened to it several times was that he performed it at the recent APEC conference where President Obama and other senior political administrators of the 1% gathered to plan more free-trade agreements to impoverish the workers - and to have a good time and expensive food, of course! He talks about it here:



He says he played the song for 45 minutes, which makes you wonder: did it not occur to anyone there that he was trashing the audience? It certainly creates a wonderful image of cluelessness if that's the case. Did they just think it was too harmless to worry about? Did they worry about making him look like a martyr by dragging him off the stage? The one-percenters generally haven't been displaying that level of subtlety about such things lately, though. And what did they make of his "Occupy With Aloha" t-shirt?

My fantasy is that Rush Limbaugh will get wind of this and do a hate-spewing rant against Makana which would make him nationally famous. Then FOX News can accuse him of being a hypocrite because he's successful!

If the APEC types are that clueless about their musical entertainment, I would highly recommend they invite Nina Hagen to perform at their next meeting:



While we're on the topic of Occupy songs, here's a rap one from Pittsburg rapper Jasiri X:

Jasiri X Performs 'Occupy (We are the 99)' The Alyona Show YouTube date 11/15/2011:



Jasiri X attracted attention for one of his earlier topical songs, What if the Tea Party was Black? YouTube date 11/14/2010:



Tags: jasiri x, makana, nina hagen, occupy movement