Oil, Dollar Hegemony and Islam by Prof. Francis A. Boyle

Global Research, January 15, 2012
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28661

Little has changed in the imperialist tendencies of American foreign policy since the founding of the United States of America in seventeen eighty-nine. The fledgling United States opened the nineteenth century by stealing the continent of North America from the Indians, while in the process ethnically cleansing them and then finally deporting the pitiful few survivors by means of death marches (a la Bataan) to Bantustans, which in America we call reservations, as in instance of America’s manifest destiny to rule the world.

Then, the imperial government of the United States opened the twentieth century by stealing a colonial empire from Spain – in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, then inflicting a near-genocidal war against the Filipino people. While at the same time, purporting to annex, the kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the native Hawaiian people to near-genocidal conditions from which they still suffer today- all in the name of securing America’s so-called place in the sun.

And today at the dawn of the twenty first century, the world witnesses the effort by the imperial government of the United States of America to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Moslem states and peoples, surrounding central Asia and the Persian Gulf under the pretext of fighting a war against international terrorism or eliminating weapons of mass destruction or promoting democracy which is total nonsense.

For the past two hundred and sixteen years, the imperialist foreign policy of the United States of America since its foundation, has been predicated upon racism, aggression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, war crimes and outright genocide. At the dawn of the third millennium of humankind’s parlous existence, nothing has changed about the operational dynamics of American imperial policy. And we see this today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and what appears to be an illegal attack upon Iran.

Now the topic today is the Middle East Agenda : Oil, Dollar Hegemony and Islam. So, I’m only going to limit my comments to that subject. We have to begin the story with the Arab oil embargo in nineteen seventy-three. As you know in nineteen sixty-seven, Israel launched an illegal and preventive war against the surrounding Arab states, stole the land and ethnically cleansed the people. But eventually Egypt offered a Peace Treaty to Israel which Israel rejected and the Egyptians and the Arab states decided then to use force to recover their lands.

Israel almost collapsed, the United States and Europe came to their support by providing weapons and in reaction the Arab states imposed an oil embargo on the United States and Europe, and brought their economies to their knees. Whereupon, the then U.S Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger threatened them and said, this will never happen again, and if you do, we will prevent it. And it was not just a threat. The United States government then at that time, planned, prepared and conspired, to steal the oil of the Persian Gulf. They did not have the military capability to do this at that time, to carry out the Kissinger threat, which was also then repeated by the Ford administration, and the Carter administration under Harold Brown and Brzezinski.

So they put into planning an interventionist force, designed expressly for the purpose of stealing Arab oil fields, and that was called the rapid deployment force. And it took ten years of training, planning, positioning, and supply to build that interventionist force of that capability and eventually it was called the U.S. Central Command. The purpose of the U.S. Central Command is to steal and control and dominate the oil and gas resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. And that’s exactly what the U.S. Central Command proceeded to do in the Bush Sr. war against Iraq, their first military expedition.

And as we know, that war exterminated probably two hundred thousand Iraqis. Half of them innocent civilians. Simply wiped out in a bombing campaign and a military expedition of unprecedented dimensions. But remember, it took fifteen years for the Pentagon and three different administrations both Republicans and Democrats to get the capability to do this. And then, when that genocide or conflict was over, what happened? The United States carved Iraq up into three pieces with their air force, the so-called no-fly zones, a zone for the Kurds in the North, a zone for the Shi’ah in the South, and the Sunni in the middle. Why? To destroy Iraq as an effectively viable state.

In his book, Clash of Civilizations, Huntington from Harvard who advised the Pentagon and advised the state department pointed out that the only Arab state with the capability to lead the Arab world and challenge the United States and Israel was Iraq. And so Iraq had to be destroyed, to maintain the domination of the United States and its proxy, Israel. And remember after nineteen seventy-three, whatever it was before then, Israel is nothing more than a catspaw of the United States. They do what America tells them to do. Otherwise Israel is nothing more than a failed state.

In addition then, to destroying Iraq as a state, carving it up into three pieces, was the decision to debilitate and destroy the Iraqi people. And so they continued the genocidal economic sanctions on the people of Iraq, that my colleagues, Denis Halliday, Hans Von Sponeck, so courageously resisted and finally resigned as a matter of principle, calling them by what they really were, genocide. The United States and Britain maliciously and criminally imposed genocidal sanctions on the people of Iraq, that killed approximately 1.5 million Iraqis, all of whom were innocent civilians.

And when U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked about the five hundred thousand dead children, she said that she thought the price was worth it. Now, I could have taken that statement to the International Court of Justice, and filed it against the United States as evidence of genocidal intent against the people of Iraq in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. And indeed I offered to do so to the then President of Iraq, but for whatever reasons he decided not to take these claims to the International Court of Justice.

And now, as you see, he is on trial in a total kangaroo court proceeding in Baghdad that is completely controlled and dominated by the United States government. So, 1.5 million Iraqis died as the result of these genocidal sanctions. And then came September 11. And we know for a fact that the Bush Jr. administration knew that a major terrorist attack was going to be launched on the United States. And they let it happen anyway deliberately and on purpose. Why? They wanted a pretext for war. And not just one war but for a long war which they are talking about today.

Indeed, from my research the war plans drawn up by the Pentagon for the war against Afghanistan were formulated as early as 1997. Enormous military forces fielded by that same U.S. Central Command, were already in and around and surrounding the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean before September 11. This war had been planned against Afghanistan. And armed, equipped, supplied, trained and war-gamed and ready to go. They just needed the pretext and that was September 11. Why? The United States wanted access to the oil and natural gas of Central Asia.

That had been a Pentagon objective since at least before the collapse of the Soviet Union in nineteen ninety-one. And the Nine Eleven attack gave them the pretext to make this major grab for the oil and gas of Central Asia. And they are there today with their bases, with their troops, in the surrounding countries in Central Asia. And of course in the process, obliterated, we don ‘t even have an estimate of the Muslims in Afghanistan who were killed in the air bombardment, twenty, twenty five thousand, maybe more, and tens of thousands of others starved to death and still suffering today.

But that, as we know from all the records was only the first step in the process. They wanted to finish the job in Iraq. And so immediately after September 11, Bush ordered Rumsfeld to update and operationalize the plans for attacking and invading Iraq. It had nothing at all to do with weapons of mass destruction. We in the peace movement in America had been saying that all along. The United Nations had determined there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. These were lies designed to scaremonger the American people and Congress into supporting an illegal war of aggression, a Nuremberg crime against peace, against Iraq. And they told whatever lies and broke what international laws they had to break in order to attack Iraq.

And today the estimate, again we don’t know. Perhaps two hundred thousand people in Iraq had been killed outright by the United States, Britain, its allies, Australia in Iraq. And again, most of them civilians. Clearly if you add up what United States government has done to Iraq from August of 1990, when it imposed the genocidal economic embargo until today. The United States and Britain have inflicted outright genocide on the Muslim and Christian people of Iraq and they are predominately Muslim as we know.

Now comes the third step in the Pentagon’s pre-existing plan, to control and dominate the oil and gas resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. It’ s sounds a bit like the plan that Hitler and the Nazis had in the 1930″s. Does it not? First go into Austria, then go into Czechoslovakia, then go into Poland. So first Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Iran. And so now Iran is going to be the next victim of these outright criminals unless you and I can stop them.

Right now there are three aircraft carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf. And whenever they had put three aircraft carrier task forces over there, it’ s always to prepare for an attack. And according to Seymour Hersch, the award winning journalist, it will probably be an aerial bombardment, along the lines of what they did to Yugoslavia in 1999. As you remember there, seventy eight days of aerial bombardment by the United States and NATO with no authorization from the Security Council. Clearly illegal. Killing again, we don’t know the exact number outright, four to five thousand innocent civilians. And targeting civilian infrastructure, all up and down, from which the people still suffer today. The use of depleted uranium ammunitions, outbreaks of cancer are documented today.

So this is what, is being planned right now as we speak; an attack upon Iran. Using jet fighter aircraft, fighter bombers, on these three aircraft carrier task forces, using cruise missiles on submarines and of course Israel will be involved and have a role to play, doing exactly what the Americans tell them to do. In addition, it appears that if they attack Iran, they will also attack Syria. Yesterday, if you heard President Bush’s press conference in Vienna, he threatened Syria, right? There’s no other word for it. He threatened Syria.

These Neo-Conservatives want to take out Syria as a favour to Israel. Remember, many of these Neo-Conservatives are affiliated personally and professionally with the Likhud Party in Israel and Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Beirut, the man who exterminated twenty thousand Arabs in Lebanon, most of them, not all of them were Muslims. And in addition, slaughtered two thousand completely innocent Palestinian women, children and old men at Sabra and Shatila. Ariel Sharon, the man who went to Haram Al-Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam, where Muhammad, (Peace Be Upon Him) ascended into heaven, and desecrated the Haram on September

28th, 2000, and deliberately provoked the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and has inflicted death and destruction on the Palestinian people since then. Close to thirty seven hundred Palestinians since then alone have been killed..most of them shot down like dogs in the street, and what has the Muslim world done about this?

My Palestinian friends tell me that they are worried that the government of Malaysia might recognize Israel and establish diplomatic relations with Israel. I certainly hope this is not true. We must treat the criminal apartheid regime in Israel, the same way the world treated the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa. If the United States attacks Iran, they will probably attack Syria with the Israeli air force and they will attack Lebanon to take out the Islamic resistance movement in southern Lebanon – Hezbollah that defended the legitimate rights of Lebanon and the Lebanese people and expelled the invading longstanding occupying Israeli army that had the full support of the United States government for over twenty years.

So they could attack Iran, Syria, Southern Lebanon and inflict yet another round of ethnic cleansing on the suffering Palestinian people. Remember Sharon and Likhud believe that Jordan is Palestine. And they want to drive as many Palestinians as possible out of their homes and into Jordan.

So if the United States as reported by Hersh and other reliable sources, goes ahead and attacks Iran, we could see warfare erupt all the way from Egypt to the border with India. This whole area convulsed in warfare. And who will be the primary victims of this war? Muslims. The United States could not care less about Muslim life. Look at the demonization and victimization of Muslims that we have seen inflicted by the United States and its surrogate, Israel. Look at Guantanamo, where six hundred Muslim men have been treated like dogs in a kennel. Pretty much the way the Nazis treated the Jews. Look at Abu Ghraib and the sadism and sexual exploitation and perversion of Muslims by their American captors. And the same thing has been done in Baghram in Afghanistan. And when Professor Sharif Bassiouni, the UN special rapporteur filed the report with the Security Council against US practices in Afghanistan, the Americans had Kofi Annan fire him. Just as they had Kofi Annan fire Mary Robinson, the UN high commissioner for human rights, when she protested what was going on down in Guantanamo.

The United States could not care less about Muslim life. And the same is true for the genocidal apartheid regime in Israel. They would be happy to use nuclear weapons against Iran. They would be happy to break the taboo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki against Muslims in Iran. It would create no problem at all for them. Indeed, I went to school with these Neo-Conservatives at the University of Chicago. Wolfowitz was there, Chalabi, Khalilzad, Shulsky, all the rest of them. I went through the exact same program. Their mentor, Professor Leo Strauss. And who was his teacher in Germany and his sponsor? Professor Carl Schmitt who went on to become the most notorious Nazi law Professor of his day, justifying every atrocity that the Nazis inflicted on everyone.

We must understand that these Neo-Conservatives are in fact Neo-Nazis. They have espoused the Nazi doctrine of Schmitt and Strauss and Machiavelli and Nietzsche, the ‘superman’. They are the supermen, and the Muslims are the scum of the earth.

Now, I do not believe the United States will initially start bombing Iran with nuclear weapons. But if things get out of control they are fully prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons. And here in our materials, you have the Pentagon’s Joint Publication 3-12, which you can get on the internet.. just do a Google search and read it. And you will see there dated fifteenth March 2005; nuclear, tactical nuclear weapons have been fully integrated into United States conventional forces.

So if Iran were to defend itself, human wave attacks, whatever, they will be happy to use nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. Remember, these Neo-Nazis, Neo-Cons want to break the taboo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They want to use tactical nuclear weapons, to be able to say to the rest of the world, you do what we tell you to do or else look what we did to the Iranians.

It’s a very serious situation. And this could even get further out of control. Remember that before Bush invaded Iraq, President Putin of Russia said that if he invades Iraq he could set off World War Three. Well, I interpreted that as an implicit threat. Even the famous American news broadcaster Walter Cronkite said that if Bush invaded Iraq he could set off World War Three. Two weeks ago we had the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; China, Russia and Iran. So again, if Bush were to attack Iran, he very well could set off a Third World War, a nuclear war. And that is where you come in.

Francis A. Boyle is a leading American expert in international law. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign and is author of, inter alia, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, Destroying World Order, Biowarfare & Terrorism. And Tackling America’s Toughest Questions. He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University.

The Geopolitical Implications Of “Peak Everything”

[globalnetnews-summary] The Geopolitical Implications Of “Peak Everything” By Richard Heinberg

Tuesday, January 10, 2012 7:57 PM

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“This game of resource “musical chairs” could well bring about conflict and privation on a scale never seen before in world history. “

The Geopolitical Implications Of “Peak Everything” By Richard Heinberg
By carolyn, on January 10th, 2012
http://www.postcarbon.org/article/660520-geopolitical-implications-of-peak-everything

Compassion Is Our New Century

BY REBECCA SOLNIT

Published: Friday 23 December 2011

“Nothing has been more moving to me than this desire, realized imperfectly but repeatedly, to connect across differences, to be a community, to make a better world, to embrace each other.”

Usu­ally at year’s end, we’re sup­posed to look back at events just passed — and for­ward, in pre­dic­tion mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This mo­ment is so ex­tra­or­di­nary that it has hardly reg­is­tered. Peo­ple in thou­sands of com­mu­ni­ties across the United States and else­where are liv­ing in pub­lic, ex­per­i­ment­ing with di­rect democ­racy, call­ing things by their true names, and oblig­ing the media and politi­cians to do the same.

The breadth of this move­ment is one thing, its depth an­other. It has re­jected not just the par­tic­u­lars of our eco­nomic sys­tem, but the whole set of moral and emo­tional as­sump­tions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a pho­to­graph from Oc­cupy Austin in Texas.  The ami­able-look­ing el­derly woman is hold­ing a sign whose com­puter-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the base­ball cap is hold­ing a sign hand­writ­ten on card­board that states, “We are our broth­ers’ keeper.”

The photo of the two of them of­fers just a peek into a sin­gle mo­ment in the re­mark­able pe­riod we’re liv­ing through and the as­ton­ish­ing move­ment that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a strik­ing enough per­cent­age: every­one from teen pop su­per­star Miley Cyrus with her Oc­cupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Es­ther Green ice-fish­ing and hold­ing a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big let­ters, with the trans­la­tion — “oc­cupy the river” — in lit­tle ones below.

The woman with the stolen-votes sign is re­fer­ring to them. Her com­pan­ion is talk­ing about us, all of us, and our fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples. His sign comes straight out of Gen­e­sis, a de­nial of what that com­pet­i­tive en­tre­pre­neur Cain said to God after fore­clos­ing on his brother Abel’s life. He was not, he claimed, his brother’s keeper; we are not, he in­sisted, be­holden to each other, but sep­a­rate, iso­lated, each of us for our­selves.

Think of Cain as the first So­cial Dar­win­ist and this Oc­cu­pier in Austin as his op­po­site, claim­ing, no, our op­er­at­ing sys­tem should be love; we are all con­nected; we must take care of each other. And this move­ment, he’s say­ing, is about what the Ar­gen­tin­ian up­ris­ing that began a decade ago, on De­cem­ber 19, 2001, calledpo­lit­ica afec­tiva, the pol­i­tics of af­fec­tion.

If it’s a move­ment about love, it’s also about the money they so un­justly took, and con­tinue to take, from us — and about the fact that, right now, money and love are at war with each other. After all, in the Amer­i­can heart­land, peo­ple are be­gin­ning to be im­pris­oned for debt, while the Oc­cupy move­ment is ar­gu­ing for debt for­give­ness, rene­go­ti­a­tion, and debt ju­bilees.

Some­times love, or at least de­cency, wins.  One morn­ing late last month, 75-year-old Josephine Tol­bert, who ran a day­care cen­ter from her mod­est San Fran­cisco home, re­turned after drop­ping a child off at school only to find that she and the other chil­dren were locked out be­cause she was be­hind in her mort­gage pay­ments. True Com­pass LLC, who bought her place in a short sale while she thought she was still ne­go­ti­at­ing with Bank of Amer­ica, would not allow her back into her home of al­most four decades, even to get her med­i­cines or di­a­pers for the chil­dren.

We demon­strated at her home and at True Com­pass’s shabby of­fices while they hid within, and stu­dents from Oc­cupy San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity demon­strated out­side a True Com­pass-owned restau­rant on be­half of this African-Amer­i­can grand­mother. Thanks to this sol­i­dar­ity and the media at­ten­tion it gar­nered, Tol­bert has col­lected her keys, moved back in, and is rene­go­ti­at­ing the terms of her mort­gage.

Hun­dreds of other fore­clo­sure vic­tims are now being de­fended by local branches of the Oc­cupy move­ment, from West Oak­land to North Min­neapo­lis. As New York writer, film­maker, and Oc­cu­pier Astra Tay­lor puts it,

Not only does the oc­cu­pa­tion of aban­doned fore­closed homes con­nect the dots be­tween Wall Street and Main Street, it can also lead to swift and tan­gi­ble vic­to­ries, some­thing move­ments des­per­ately need for mo­men­tum to be main­tained. The banks, it seems, are softer tar­gets than one might ex­pect be­cause so many cases are rife with legal ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties and out­right crim­i­nal­ity. With one in five homes fac­ing fore­clo­sure and fil­ings show­ing no sign of slow­ing down in the next few years, the num­ber of peo­ple touched by the mort­gage cri­sis — whether be­cause they have lost their homes or be­cause their homes are now un­der­wa­ter — truly bog­gles the mind.”

If what’s been hap­pen­ing lo­cally and glob­ally has some of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of an up­ris­ing, then there has never been one quite so per­va­sive — from the sci­en­tists hold­ing an Oc­cupy sign in Antarc­tica to Oc­cupy pres­ences in places as far-flung as New Zealand and Aus­tralia, São Paulo, Frank­furt, Lon­don, Toronto, Los An­ge­les, and Reyk­javik. And don’t for­get the tini­est places, ei­ther. The other morn­ing at the Oak­land docks for the West Coast port shut­down demon­stra­tions, I met three mem­bers of Oc­cupy Amador County, a small rural area in Cal­i­for­nia’s Sierra Nevada.  Its largest town, Jack­son, has a lit­tle over 4,000 in­hab­i­tants, which hasn’t stopped it from hav­ing reg­u­lar out­door Fri­day evening Oc­cupy meet­ings.

A lit­tle girl in a red parka at the Oak­land docks was car­ry­ing a sign with a quote from blind-deaf-and-ar­tic­u­late early twen­ti­eth-cen­tury role model Helen Keller that said, “The best and most beau­ti­ful things in the world can­not be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.” Why quote Keller at a demon­stra­tion fo­cused on labor and eco­nom­ics? The an­swer is clear enough: be­cause Oc­cupy has some of the emo­tional res­o­nance of a spir­i­tual, as well as a po­lit­i­cal, move­ment.  Like those other up­heavals it’s aligned with in Spain, Greece, Ice­land (where they’re ac­tu­ally jail­ing bankers), Britain, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Chile, and most re­cently Rus­sia, it wants to ask basic ques­tions: What mat­ters? Who mat­ters? Who de­cides? On what prin­ci­ples?

Stop for a mo­ment and con­sider just how un­fore­seen and un­fore­see­able all of this was when, on De­cem­ber 17, 2010, Mo­hamed Bouaz­izi, a Tunisian veg­etable ven­dor in Sidi Bouzid, an out-of-the-way, im­pov­er­ished city, im­mo­lated him­self. He was protest­ing the dead-end life that the 1% econ­omy run by Tunisia’s au­to­cratic ruler Zine Ben Ali and his cor­rupt fam­ily al­lot­ted him, and the po­lice bru­tal­ity that went with it, two things that have re­mained front and cen­ter ever since. Above all, as his mother has since tes­ti­fied, he was for human dig­nity, for a world, that is, where the pri­mary sys­tem of value is not money.

“Com­pas­sion is our new cur­rency,” was the mes­sage  scrawled on a pizza-box lid at Oc­cupy Wall Street in Zuc­cotti Park in lower Man­hat­tan — held by a pen­sive-look­ing young man in Je­remy Ayers’s great photo por­trait.  But what can you buy with com­pas­sion?

 

Quite a lot, it turns out, in­clud­ing a global move­ment, and even pizza, which can ar­rive at that move­ment’s camp­ground as a gift of sol­i­dar­ity.  A few days into Oc­cupy Wall Street’s sur­prise suc­cess, a call for pizza went out and $2,600 in piz­zas came in within an hour, just as ear­lier this year the oc­cu­piers of Wis­con­sin’s state house had been co­pi­ously sup­plied with pizza — in­clud­ing pies paid for and dis­patched by Egypt­ian rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies. 

The Re­turn of the Dis­ap­peared

Dur­ing the 1970s and 1980s dic­ta­tor­ship and death-squad era in Chile, Ar­gentina, Brazil, and Cen­tral Amer­ica, the term “the dis­ap­peared” came to cover those who were kid­napped, held in se­cret, tor­tured, and then often ex­e­cuted in se­cret. So many decades later, their fates are often still being de­ci­phered.

In the United States, the dis­ap­peared also exist, not thanks to a bru­tal army or para­mil­i­taries, but to a bru­tal econ­omy.  When you lose your job, you van­ish from the work­place and sooner or later ar­rive at empti­ness in your day, your iden­tity, your wal­let, your abil­ity to par­tic­i­pate in a com­mer­cial so­ci­ety. When you lose your home, you dis­ap­pear from fa­mil­iar spaces: the block, the neigh­bor­hood, the rolls of home­own­ers.   Often, you van­ish in shame, leav­ing be­hind friends and ac­quain­tances.

At the ac­tions to sup­port some of the 1,500 mostly African-Amer­i­can home­own­ers being fore­closed upon in south­east­ern San Fran­cisco, sev­eral of them de­scribed how they had to over­come a pow­er­ful sense of shame sim­ply to speak up, no less de­fend them­selves or join this move­ment. In the U.S., fail­ure is al­ways sup­posed to be in­di­vid­ual, not sys­temic, and so it tends to pro­duce a sense of per­sonal dev­as­ta­tion that leaves its vic­tims feel­ing alone and lying low, even though they are among le­gions of oth­ers.

The peo­ple who de­stroyed our econ­omy through their bot­tom­less greed are, on the other hand, shame­less — as shame­less as the CEOs whose com­pen­sa­tion shot up36% in 2010, dur­ing this deep and grind­ing re­ces­sion. Com­pas­sion is def­i­nitely not their cur­rency.

 

The word “oc­cupy” it­self speaks pow­er­fully to the Amer­i­can dis­ap­peared and the very idea of dis­ap­pear­ance.  It speaks to those who have lost their oc­cu­pa­tion or the home they oc­cu­pied. In its many mean­ings, it’s a big tent. It means to fill a space, take pos­ses­sion of it, em­ploy one­self, busy one­self, fill time.  (In the sev­en­teenth and eigh­teenth cen­turies, the verb had a mean­ing so sex­ual it fell out of com­mon use.)  It de­scribes the state of being pre­sent that the Oc­cupy move­ment’s Gen­eral As­sem­blies and tent camps have lived out, a space in which — as Mo­hamed Bouaz­izi might have dreamed it — the dis­ap­peared can reap­pear with dig­nity. 

Oc­cupy has also cre­ated a space in which peo­ple of all kinds can co­ex­ist, from the home­less to the tenured, from the inner city to the agrar­ian. Co­ex­ist­ing in pub­lic with like­minded strangers and ac­quain­tances is one of the great foun­da­tions and ex­pe­ri­ences of democ­racy, which is why dic­ta­tor­ships ban gath­er­ings and groups — and why our First Amend­ment guar­an­tee of the right of the peo­ple peace­ably to as­sem­ble is being tested more strongly today than in any re­cent mo­ment in Amer­i­can his­tory. Nearly every Oc­cupy has at its cen­ter reg­u­lar meet­ings of aGen­eral As­sem­bly. These are ex­per­i­ments in di­rect democ­racy that have been messy, ex­as­per­at­ing and mirac­u­lous: are­nas in which every­one is in­vited to be heard, to have a voice, to be a mem­ber, to shape the fu­ture. Oc­cupy is first of all a con­ver­sa­tion among our­selves.

To oc­cupy also means to show up, to be pre­sent — a rad­i­cally un­plugged ex­pe­ri­ence for a dig­i­tal gen­er­a­tion. Today, the term is being ap­plied to any place where one plans to be pre­sent, ge­o­graph­i­cally or metaphor­i­cally: Oc­cupy Wall Street, oc­cupy the food sys­tem, oc­cupy your heart. The ad hoc in­ven­tion of the peo­ple’s mic by the oc­cu­piers of Zuc­cotti Park, which re­quires every­one to lis­ten, re­peat, and am­plify what’s being said, has only strength­ened this sense of pres­ence. You can’t text or half-lis­ten if your task is to re­peat every­thing, so that every­one hears and un­der­stands. You be­come the keeper of your brother’s or sis­ter’s voice as you re­peat their words.

It’s a tri­umph of the here and now — and it’s every­where: the Re­gents of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia are mic-checked, politi­cians are mic-checked, the Dur­ban Cli­mate Con­fer­ence in South Africa had oc­cu­piers and mic-check mo­ments. Ac­tivism had long been in dire need of new modes of doing things, and this year it got them.

A Mouth­ful of Truth

Be­fore the Oc­cupy move­ment ar­rived on the scene, po­lit­i­cal di­a­logue and media chat­ter in this coun­try seemed to be ar­riv­ing from a warped par­al­lel uni­verse. Tiny gov­ern­ment ex­pen­di­tures were de­nounced, while the vor­tex suck­ing our econ­omy dry was rarely ad­dressed; hard-work­ing im­mi­grants were por­trayed as dead­beats; peo­ple who did noth­ing were anointed as “job cre­ators”; the trashed econ­omy and mas­sive suf­fer­ing were over­looked, while politi­cians jousted over (and pun­dits pon­tif­i­cated about) the deficit; class war was only called class war when some­one other than the rul­ing class waged it. It’s as though we were try­ing to nav­i­gate Las Vegas with a tat­tered map of me­dieval Byzan­tium — via, that is, a bro­ken lan­guage in which every­thing and every­one got lost.

Then Oc­cupy ar­rived and, as if swept by some strange pan­demic, a con­ta­gious virus of truth-telling, every­one was sud­denly obliged to call things by their real names and talk about ac­tual prob­lems. The blather about the deficit was re­placed by ac­knowl­edg­ments of grotesque eco­nomic in­equal­ity. Greed was called greed, and once it had its true name, it be­came in­tol­er­a­ble, as had racism when the Civil Rights Move­ment named it and made it ev­i­dent to those who weren’t suf­fer­ing from it di­rectly. The vast scale of suf­fer­ing around stu­dent debt and tu­ition hikes, fore­clo­sures, un­em­ploy­ment, wage stag­na­tion, med­ical costs, and the other af­flic­tions of the nor­mal Amer­i­can sud­denly moved to the top of the news, and once ex­posed to the light, these, too, be­came in­tol­er­a­ble.

If the so­lu­tions to the night­mares being named are nei­ther near nor easy, nam­ing things, de­scrib­ing re­al­ity with some ac­cu­racy, is at least a cru­cial first step.  In­form­ing our­selves as cit­i­zens is an­other.  As­pects of our not-quite-democ­racy  that were once al­most in­vis­i­ble are now on the table for dis­cus­sion — and for op­po­si­tion, no­tably cor­po­rate per­son­hood, the legal sta­tus that gives cor­po­ra­tions the rights, but not the oblig­a­tions and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, of cit­i­zens. (One oft-re­peated Oc­cu­pier sign says, “I’ll be­lieve cor­po­ra­tions are peo­ple when Texas puts one to death.”)

The Los An­ge­les City Coun­cil passed a mea­sure call­ing for an end to cor­po­rate per­son­hood, the first big city to join the Move to Amend cam­paign against cor­po­rate per­son­hood and against the 2009 Supreme Court Cit­i­zens United rul­ing that gave cor­po­ra­tions un­lim­ited abil­ity to in­sert their cash in our po­lit­i­cal cam­paigns. Oc­cupy ac­tions across the coun­try are planned for Jan­u­ary 20th, the sec­ond an­niver­sary of Cit­i­zens United. Ver­mont’s in­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Bernie Sanders, who’s been speak­ing the truth alone for a long time, in­tro­duced a con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment to re­peal Cit­i­zens United and limit cor­po­rate power in the Sen­ate, while Con­gress­man Ted Deutch (D-FL) in­tro­duced a sim­i­lar mea­sure in the House.

Only a few years ago, hardly any­one knew what cor­po­rate per­son­hood was.  Now, signs de­nounc­ing it are com­mon.  Sim­i­larly, at Oc­cupy events, peo­ple make it clear that they know about the New Deal-era fi­nan­cial re­form mea­sure known as the Glass-Stea­gall Act, which was par­tially re­pealed in 1999, re­mov­ing the wall be­tween com­mer­cial and in­vest­ment banks; that they know about the pro­posed fi­nan­cial trans­fer tax, nick­named the Robin Hood Tax, that would raise bil­lions with a tiny levy on every fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tion; that they un­der­stand many of the means by which the 1% were en­riched and the rest of us robbed.

This rep­re­sents a strik­ing learn­ing curve. A new lan­guage of truth, de­bate about what ac­tu­ally mat­ters, an in­formed cit­i­zenry: that’s no small thing. But we need more.

We Are the 99.999%

I was my­self so caught up in the Oc­cupy move­ment that I stopped pay­ing my usual at­ten­tion to the war over the cli­mate — until I was brought up short by the cat­a­strophic fail­ure of the cli­mate ne­go­ti­a­tions in Dur­ban, South Africa. There, ear­lier this month, the most pow­er­ful and car­bon-pol­lut­ing coun­tries man­aged to avoid tak­ing any timely and sub­stan­tial mea­sures to keep the cli­mate from heat­ing up and the Earth from slip­ping into un­stop­pable chaotic change.

It’s our na­ture to be more com­pelled by im­me­di­ate human suf­fer­ing than by re­mote sys­temic prob­lems. Only this prob­lem isn’t any­where near as re­mote as many Amer­i­cans imag­ine.  It’s al­ready cre­at­ing human suf­fer­ing on a large scale and will cre­ate far more. Many of the food crises of the past decade are tied to cli­mate change, and in Africa thou­sands are dying of cli­mate-re­lated chaos. The floods, fires, storms, and heat waves of the past few years are cli­mate change com­ing to call ear­lier than ex­pected in the U.S.

In the most im­me­di­ate sense, Oc­cupy may have weak­ened the cli­mate move­ment by fo­cus­ing many of us on the ur­gent suf­fer­ing of our broth­ers, our neigh­bors, our democ­racy. In the end, how­ever, it could strengthen that move­ment with its new tac­tics, al­liances, spirit, and lan­guage of truth. After all, why have we been un­able to make the major changes re­quired to limit green­house gases in the at­mos­phere? The an­swer is a word sud­denly in wide cir­cu­la­tion: greed. Re­spond­ing ad­e­quately to this cri­sis would ben­e­fit every liv­ing thing. When it comes to cli­mate change, after all, we are the 99.999%.

But the in­ter­na­tional .001% who profit im­mea­sur­ably from the car­bon econ­omy — the oil and coal ty­coons, in­dus­tri­al­ists, and politi­cians whose strings they pull — are against this change. For decades, they’ve man­aged to pro­pa­gan­dize many Amer­i­cans, in and out of gov­ern­ment, into cli­mate de­nial, spread­ing lies about the sci­ence and eco­nom­ics of cli­mate change, and un­der­min­ing any pos­si­ble leg­is­la­tion and in­ter­na­tional ne­go­ti­a­tions to ame­lio­rate it. And if you think the evic­tion of el­derly home­own­ers is bru­tal, think of it as a tiny fore­shad­ow­ing of the dis­place­ment and dis­ap­pear­ance of peo­ple, com­mu­ni­ties, na­tions, species, habi­tats. Cli­mate change threat­ens to fore­close on all of us.

The groups work­ing on cli­mate change now, no­tably 350.​org and Tar Sands Ac­tion, have done as­ton­ish­ing things al­ready. Most re­cently, with the help of na­tive Cana­di­ans, local ac­tivists, and al­ter­na­tive media, they very nearly man­aged to kill the sin­gle scari­est and biggest North Amer­i­can threat to the cli­mate: the tar sands pipeline that would go from Canada to Texas. It’s been a re­mark­able show of or­ga­niz­ing power and pop­u­lar will. Oc­cupy the Cli­mate may need to come next.

Maybe Oc­cupy Wall Street and its thou­sands of spin-offs have built the foun­da­tion for it. But per­haps the great­est gift that it and the other move­ments of 2011 have given us is a sharp­en­ing of our per­cep­tions — and our con­flicts. So much more is out in the open now, in­clud­ing the greed, the bru­tal­ity with which en­ti­ties from the Egypt­ian army to the Oak­land po­lice im­pose the will of rulers, and most of all the deep gen­eros­ity of spirit that is be­hind, within, and around these in­sur­gen­cies and their ac­tivists. None of these move­ments is per­fect, and in­di­vid­u­als within them are not al­ways the great­est keep­ers of their broth­ers and sis­ters.  But one thing couldn’t be clearer: com­pas­sion is our new cur­rency.

Noth­ing has been more mov­ing to me than this de­sire, re­al­ized im­per­fectly but re­peat­edly, to con­nect across dif­fer­ences, to be a com­mu­nity, to make a bet­ter world, to em­brace each other. This de­sire is what lies be­hind those messy camps, those rau­cous demon­stra­tions, those card­board signs and long con­ver­sa­tions. Young ac­tivists have spo­ken to me about the ex­tra­or­di­nary rich­ness of their ex­pe­ri­ences at Oc­cupy, and they call it love.

In the spirit of call­ing things by their true names, let me sum­mon up the de­scrip­tion that Ella Baker and Mar­tin Luther King used for the great com­mu­ni­ties of ac­tivists who stood up for civil rights half a cen­tury ago: the beloved com­mu­nity. Many who were ac­tive then never for­got the deep bonds and deep mean­ing they found in that strug­gle. We — and the word “we” en­com­passes more of us than ever be­fore — have found those things, too, and this year we have come close to some­thing un­prece­dented, a beloved com­mu­nity that cir­cles the globe.

Read Tom En­gel­hardt’s re­sponse here.

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ABOUT REBECCA SOLNIT

San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit is the author of thirteen books about art, landscape, public and collective life, ecology, politics, hope, meandering, reverie, and memory. She has worked with climate change, Native American land rights, antinuclear, human rights, antiwar and other issues as an activist and journalist. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a contributing editor to Harper’s and frequent contributor to the political site Tomdispatch.com and has made her living as an independent writer since 1988.

Occupy All!

Published on Monday, December 5, 2011 by Adbusters

Occupy Love: Show Me Your Face

“Love is what emerges when we give each other our face.” —Michael Stone

The Shocking Truth About the Crack down on Occupy

OWS protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after clashes with police during the eviction of Zuccotti Park. (photo: Allison Joyce/Getty Images)

 

By Naomi Wolf, Gurdian UK, 26 November 11

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class’s venality.

S citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in acoordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that “New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers” covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that “It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk.”

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on “how to suppress” Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors’, city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, “we are going after these scruffy hippies”. Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women’s wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the “scandal” of presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s having been paid $1.8m for a few hours’ “consulting” to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies’ profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists’ privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can’t suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.