A Strange Sense of Optimism

For the first time in years, I am actually feeling a glimmer of hope about politics in this country. I’ve been writing on this blog for five years now, and it has generally been about depressing things. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has changed the picture.

I have forgotten where I read it, but a media watchdog recently noted that while a few months ago the number one word in the headlines was “deficit,” now it is “jobs,” along with “inequality.” The talking heads on the news purport not to understand what OWS is about, but as a friend of mine pointed out, they are occupying Wall Street, not a shoe store. It seems that a large and growing portion of the population understands what OWS is about. This growing portion of the population overlaps with the percentage facing financial ruin and watching the agents of that ruin getting bonuses instead of indictments.

A man named Edward Dowling once said, “The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.” That widespread delusion is eroding, and an understanding of the true mechanisms of our politics is spreading.

My optimism doesn’t include the idea that OWS will sweep the country, driving the forces of evil before it. I think that OWS will both succeed and fail, in unexpected ways.

In some ways it has already succeeded. The flavor of the month in the news media has been shifted 180 degrees, and may remain the flavor for a few months more. It has also broached the idea of class in this country in a way that is concise and powerful and hard to ignore. Class consciousness has always been lacking on this side of the Atlantic. We have always cherished the myth of equal opportunity, even as it was disproved before our eyes. However, socioeconomic class is one of those big and true ideas that is analogous to a parachute. Once the ripcord is pulled, it blossoms, and once out it is hard to stuff back in the bag.

The fact that the words “class warfare” are being tossed around tells me that an alarm has sounded somewhere in the halls of power. The term is used as if class warfare is a new issue, initiated by these unruly occupiers. However, people are starting to slowly warm up to the concept in terms of “Oh, so that’s what has been happening to us.” The 99% vs. 1% meme is a useful one, as it draws the line in a reasonably accurate way between those who make their money primarily from work and those who make their money primarily from investments, and the stark difference in economic interests between the two. It also draws a reasonable line between that fraction of a percent who donate large sums to candidates and those who don’t.

I don’t expect an uninterrupted path of growth and success for OWS, however. The financial power will get over its surprise, find its center, and start to counterpunch. Police brutality will be the least of it. The inept blusterings on Fox are just an overture. We can expect more sophisticated propaganda to come, along with dirty tricks and opposition research. Every minor failing of the movement and its participants will be trumpeted in the corporate media. We’ll see smears. We’ll see internal divisions, grandstanding, and ill-considered strategies. We’ll see provocateurs and disruptive idiots. I’ve been involved with groups that work by consensus, and although the process insures that everyone is dedicated to a policy or a tactic, it takes time, trust, and cooperation. The process can be fragile, especially among people who don’t know each other.

In the end, the biggest enemy of political movements is everyday life: families that need support, jobs that need energy and attention, getting the kid to a doctor’s appointment, washing the dishes, getting a moment to relax. The economic distress that provoked the movement denies people spare time and energy. OWS is also facing a long winter outside. The movement is based on physical presence, so a symbolic or virtual presence won’t do.

And yet, and yet, some mainstream politicians, including a few on the right, are trying to maneuver their way into a semi-neutral-plausible-deniability-triangulated-meaningless-pseudo position of support. I believe the phrase is “recognizing the frustration” of the people involved. By recognizing the frustration a politician can sort of get behind the movement without actually approving of anything specific. It reminds me of a saying about the aftermath of WW2 in France: Somehow it turned out that everyone was working with the Resistance. The finely tuned political senses of the hackoisie are detecting, what? A shift in the wind?

Afterword:

Your Minor Heretic is involved in one facet of the movement; the formulation of a couple of constitutional amendments that would eliminate corporate personhood and get the big money out of politics. This is organized though Cenk Uygur’s WolfPAC, allied with OWS. Visit the forum here.

The Librarian keeps me informed about the 99% Declaration, a set of principles being formulated by a working group of OWS. When I read them I thought, “This is exactly what I’ve been thinking for years!” There is a plan for a national convention next year to ratify the declaration and present it to Congress. When the hacks ignore it, Plan B is to run a slate of third party candidates against them. Visit their site here.

And, of course, there is OWS itself.

The Secret Committee

Thanks to a few highly placed government officials we now know how the Obama administration came to the conclusion that the murder of Anwar al-Awlaki was permissible. Through Glenn Greenwald’s always excellent column at Salon I found a Reuters article about the secret committee in the bowels of our (?) government that decides who lives and who dies.

From the Reuters article, quoting the anonymous government officials:

“They said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC "principals," meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval. The panel of principals could have different memberships when considering different operational issues, they said.”

Great. A bunch of faceless suits halfway down the hierarchy at the NSC and the intelligence agencies are making a hit list.

And further:

“Several officials said that when Awlaki became the first American put on the target list, Obama was not required personally to approve the targeting of a person. But one official said Obama would be notified of the principals' decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified, the official said.

A former official said one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to "protect" the president.”

If the arbitrary killing of U.S. citizens is such a wonderful, justifiable thing, why does the President need protecting? Because those involved know that they are violating every basic principle of our Constitution and are doing it anyway. They are doing it for political gain and just because they can get away with it.

Of course, if there is a secret committee, there must be a secret memo. The New York Times reports on a 50-page memo, written last year, that laboriously justifies the zero-due-process killing of a U.S. citizen.

“The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis. The memo, however, was narrowly drawn to the specifics of Mr. Awlaki’s case and did not establish a broad new legal doctrine to permit the targeted killing of any Americans believed to pose a terrorist threat.”

No broad new legal doctrine for arbitrarily killing us? Right. Read the first sentence of that excerpt again. The murder of Anwar al-Awlaki wasn’t a one-off. What we are witnessing is a new direction for the military/security-industrial complex. The dirty work, or “wet work,” as the practitioners so elegantly call it, is being brought out in the open. Justification is easier and more effective than concealment.

I have written before about the fact that torture is a technique of terrorism. When a government uses torture, the practice is never supposed to be completely secret. A partial disclosure of the horror works to chill opposition. In this case, the arbitrary assassination of a U.S. citizen (and its justification) serves the same purpose. It rallies the bigots and proto-fascists and makes everyone else look over their shoulders.

It’s a grim joke to have to ask the President to live up to his oath of office and uphold the Constitution. It’s another grim joke to see the right wingers discomfited by a Democrat who is willing to outflank them to the right on both militarism and disregard for constitutional law. Obama has tasted the power of the imperial presidency handed over by Bush, and he’s finding it useful.

The question of this administration’s respect for rule of law has been answered in the negative. It is merely a continuation of previous practices under a new headliner. We should not expect the President to change course or suddenly have a change of heart. That is, unless the political realities of the situation change dramatically.

I don’t have any clear or easy answer as to how we change the political reality. Looking at history, such changes have always been a messy struggle. Those involved generally have a well defined goal, but the path and the ultimate destination only reveal themselves in hindsight. It takes longer than expected, and the movement never quite gets there. Liberty is always unfinished business.

In light of these painful, shameful, and frightening developments I can only say, do something. Do what you think is right to reverse this trend. Keep doing it. Either you are doing something against it, or in your silence and passivity you are cooperating with it.

Symmetry

The United States government recently killed a U.S. citizen named Anwar al-Awlaki with a missile fired from a drone aircraft. The man was riding in a group of vehicles going down a road in Yemen. There was no battle going on. There were no U.S. or NATO soldiers present, or even within the borders of Yemen.

Anwar al-Awlaki was born and raised in the United States. He retained his U.S. citizenship until his death. He was neither indicted for nor convicted of any crime by any U.S. court.

He was a man of conservative religious belief, a man who opposed U.S. foreign policy (especially in the Middle East and Central Asia), and a man with a wide following among Muslims who support attacks against the West. He had publicly advocated attacks against the United States, and allegedly corresponded with Major Nidal Hassan, the Army officer who went on a shooting rampage on a U.S. military base, as well as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the inept “underwear bomber.” He is said to have inspired many Muslims living in the West to join jihadist movements. Please note that everything you will read about al-Awlaki’s ties to terrorists or terror organizations will contain the words “alleged,” “believed to be,” “suspected,” or the like.

What he wrote and spoke was obnoxious to almost all his fellow citizens, including me. This is irrelevant. The First Amendment is there to protect obnoxious speech. Uncontroversial speech needs no protection.

What he had done was speaking, writing, and thereby inspiring people to join criminal organizations and perhaps commit criminal acts. The U.S. government suspected (there’s that word again) him of becoming “operational” as a leader in al Qaeda. Theoretically, for the speaking and writing we can actually confirm, he could have been convicted of supporting terrorism, which carries a 15-year sentence. That is, if he had been arrested and brought to trial.

Instead, our government tracked him down in a foreign country and fired a missile at his car. He was not arrested or arraigned. He received no trial, no chance to confront witnesses against him, no discovery of evidence, none of the due process that U.S. citizens are supposed to have by right. I should expand on this – all human beings deserve due process. It’s not right because it is in the Constitution; it’s in the Constitution because it is right. The most heinous criminals and the people we hate need and deserve due process most of all, because the persecution of the hated is the weak point in any system of justice, the hairline crack where total failure begins.

You are not safe. When you get up in the morning and eat breakfast you are not safe. When you go to work you are not safe. When you walk down the street or drive in your car you are not safe. You are not safe when you go to bed at night. I am not alluding to terrorism originating in the Middle East. You are not safe because the U.S. government has crossed a line and decided that it can blast a U.S. citizen to bloody rags because of what he said and what he wrote. The U.S. government decided that it could arbitrarily kill a man because of as-yet unproven allegations and personal contacts with people who later committed crimes.

You may brush this off and think, “Whatever. I’m not a Muslim cleric with a big mouth and bad connections.” When I reach out through the internet and write to you, individual reader, that you are not safe, I am not engaging in hyperbole. If the government truly focused its many eyes on you, what would it find? With whom would you be associated, and by how many degrees of separation? The notorious Cardinal Richelieu once said that if you gave him just six lines written by an innocent man he could find something in them to damn him. What have you said or written carelessly in an angry moment? And if some Homeland Security operative with an attitude found something he didn’t like, what would he do? What would he be allowed to do?

 Remember the terrible symmetry of the law. Anything that the government can do to Anwar al-Awlaki it can do to you. 

The Good Corporate Citizen

Apple Computer (Stock symbol APPL) makes a metric buttload of money. They make a gross margin of 60% on their computers, roughly five times what any other computer company makes. Their stock price is plump as a result. One of the many reasons they make this kind of money is that they have close control of their supply chain, one end of which is in China. Having 100,000 workers in one place, working for peanuts and putting in 40 hours of overtime a week results in great cost savings.

Now, I don’t want to pile on Apple over their sweatshop suppliers. The use of sweatshop labor in the electronics industry is universal. It isn’t my point. Let me illustrate my idea with a fairy tale.

Steve Jobs, the founder and CEO (now former CEO, but this is a fairy tale) looked upon the teeming masses at Foxconn and the teeming masses of unemployed people in the U.S. and had an epiphany. He went before the board of directors of Apple and said “I have had an epiphany!” The board of directors Googled the word “epiphany” and then said, “Ok Steve, did you get religion, or what? Are we going to market an iPray?”

“No,” Steve responded, “I have had an epiphany about sweat labor and U.S. unemployment. I am a compassionate man and a loyal and patriotic American. I propose that we move all our iPhone production from China to the parts of the U.S. that need jobs the most. We’ll have to knock our margin from 64% down to 50%, but we’ll still be making four times as much per computer than any other company. Then our potential domestic customer base will be expanded and the dead end of the U.S. trade deficit will be slowed.”

The board of directors of Apple paused for a moment with their mouths open and then nearly pissed themselves laughing. One of them, wiping tears from his eyes and catching his breath, managed to say, “Steve, Steve, that’s why we love you. Not just a great designer, but a great comedian. Damn, I think I pulled a muscle. 50% margin, oh god!” He collapsed in merriment.

Steve Jobs stood up, put his hands on his hips and glared at the board. “I’m serious!” he shouted. “Americans need jobs! Our trade deficit is climbing! In-sourcing is the morally right thing to do! I insist!”

The directors sobered up fast at that. They looked back and forth at each other. They exchanged significant looks, raised eyebrows, and subtle nods. Finally, one of them spoke.

“You’re serious about this, Steve? In sourcing the iPhone and accepting a 50% margin?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, Steve, we know you’ve been ill, and you’ve been dealing with the specter of end-of-life issues, and you’ve still been working really hard. Maybe too hard. Maybe you deserve some time off.”

Do I even need to continue the story at this point? Steve gets the heave-ho, the shareholders keep the 64% margin, U.S. workers stand in the unemployment line, Foxconn employees keep their 80-hour weeks, and the Apple juggernaut rolls on.

As I said before, I don’t mean to pile on Apple, except that they have margin to spare compared to their competition. CEOs at Dell or HP would sell their mothers for even 20% margin. And maybe that’s the point.

Imagine Tony Heyward, the former CEO of BP, getting religion after the Macondo oil spill and proposing that BP go all environmental to the detriment of profit. Same result. Same result at any corporation. This is no shock to anybody.

It’s the concept of fiduciary responsibility that is the problem. Fiduciary responsibility is part of corporate law. It means that the officers of a corporation are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value, meaning stock price and dividends. It also means that corporate officers need to practice fiduciary psychopathy, the choice of corporate profit over human life and health.

Consider the infamous Ford Pinto memo, where Ford executives pointed out to the Highway Safety Administration that letting a predicted 180 people burn to death in their cars was less than half the cost of fixing the Pinto’s fuel tank problem. In the end, it turned out that the Pinto wasn’t any more dangerous than other similar vehicles, but the execs were willing to make that calculation.

Consider Kellogg, Brown, and Root, the Halliburton subsidiary and military contractor. KBR had a fuel trucking contract in Iraq and got paid by the mile. KBR managers decided to run empty trucks up and down the dangerous highways of Iraq, risking (and sometimes sacrificing) the lives of drivers and soldiers. (The soldiers called it “sailboat fuel.”) It was a singular combination of greed, fraud, cold-bloodedness, and disloyalty.

That’s wishful thinking. It wasn’t singular. It was, and is, all too common.

It is why there is no such thing as a good corporate citizen. If you get the impression that a corporation is behaving morally, it is due to one of several factors:

The corporation is too small to get away with much.

In this instance the corporation has been successfully restrained by regulation.

The interests of the corporation have momentarily aligned with those of society; a chance event.

The corporation is engaged in effective public relations.

A corporation is not just incapable of moral judgment. It is actively bent in the direction of immoral behavior. Acting morally requires some amount of self denial and self restraint, and those concepts act against shareholder value. A corporation pursues ever more resources, preferential laws, pointless subsidies, low wages, and unrestrained polluting, among many other wretched things.

I cringe when CEOs and the politicians they selected go on about lifting regulations off the backs of business. Yes, let the saber-toothed beast root about in our guts more freely. Businesses do more for us when they are properly regulated. They innovate instead of monopolizing. They create real products instead of defrauding. If you want to ponder the results of eased regulation, look no further than the derivatives market that just collapsed our economy. If you are a nostalgic type, look back to Enron or the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s. Bolster your blood pressure with thoughts of the speculative oil market that probably adds a 20% premium to our gasoline and heating bills.

Just don’t ever, ever, fall for the myth of the good corporate citizen.

Helping Out after the Floods

Here are some opportunities for helping Vermont, collected by the Seven Days blog Blurt (If you know of others, please make a comment with the information):

DONATIONS

• Text FOODNOW to 52000 to donate $10 to Vermont Foodbank. The Foodbank will turn each donation into $60 for families in need.
• You can donate to the United Way's Vermont Disaster Relief Fund online, or buy sending a donation to your local United Way. Just make sure your donation is marked for the "Vermont Disaster Relief Fund".
• You can also donate to the American Red Cross of Vermont and the New Hampshire Valley. The Red Cross set up shelters immediately after Irene hit for flooded-out families to stay in.
• The VT Irene Flood Relief Fund is raising money to help people and communities affected by flooding. 100% of all donations will be distributed to businesses and families. The fund is being administered by Todd K. Bailey.
• Vermont Baseball Tours has set up the 8/28 Fund to raise money. Donations of $20 or more get you a cool t-shirt.
• The MRV Community Fund has been reestablished to help Mad River Valley farmers who saw devastating crop losses due to the flooding.
• Independent Vermont Clothing is selling a special "I'm With VT" t-shirt. All profits from sales of the shirt will go to relief efforts.
• Across the lake, upstate New York got hit hard by Irene, too. Donations are being coordinated on the Irene Flood Drive Facebook page.
• Burr and Burton Academy has started a fund to help relief efforts in the Manchester area.
• The Preservation Trust of Vermont is taking donations to help rebuilding and cleanup efforts for the historic buildings and bridges damaged by Irene. Make a donation on their site and be sure to note "Hurricane Relief" in the Comments section.
• The Intervale Center has started a fund to help the farmers at Burlington's Intervale who lost their crops to flooding. To make a contribution, donate to the Intervale and designate your donation to the "Intervale Center Farmers Recovery Fund." Or mail a check payable to Intervale Center Farmers Recovery Fund to the Intervale Center, 180 Intervale Road, Burlington, VT 05401.
• NOFA Vermont is also accepting donations for their Farmers Emergency Fund to help aid the state's hard-hit farms.
• The Deerfield Valley Rotary Club is taking donations to help businesses in Wilmington rebuild. Wilmington was one of the hardest-hit towns, and FEMA funds won't cover much of the damage to private businesses.
• Buy an "I Am Vermont Strong" t-shirt and all proceeds will go to relief efforts.
• City Market in Burlington will donate 1% of sales from Saturday, September 3 through Friday, September 16 to the Intervale Farmers' Recovery Fund.
• The Waterbury Congregational Church has set up the Waterbury Good Neighbor Fund, to help residents who need immediate financial assistance.
• The Stratton Foundation has set up a relief fund to help the towns of Londonderry, Jamaica, Stratton, Weston, and Winhall.

VOLUNTEERING

• VTResponse.com is working to connect volunteers ready to help with those that need assistance. The site includes a frequently-updated blog and a forum. If you're looking to help clean up and rebuild, or if you're in need of assistance, visit their site.
• The Red Cross is in desperate need of blood donations. Stop by their donation center at 32 North Prospect Street in Burlington, or the Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital Blood Donation Center at 125 Mascoma Street in Lebanon, NH.
• Montpelier Alive is coordinating volunteer efforts in that city through their Facebook page.
• Volunteer and cleanup efforts are also being coordinated on Twitter via the #VTresponse hashtag.
• The Vermont Flooding 2011 page on Facebook is functioning as a community bulletin board of sorts.
• Vermont Helping Hands is also coordinating relief efforts via Facebook.
• Upper Valley Haven is operating with considerably fewer volunteers due to road closings. They're looking for volunteers who are able to travel there.
• The state is setting up a call center in Burlington to deal with Irene recovery efforts. If you're in the Burlington area and you can man the phones for a few hours, email governorvt [at] state.vt.us or call 802-828-3333.