One Year Later: a Former Occupier's Dissenting View

Samuel Farber's “Occupy Wall Street and the Art of Demanding,” published by Truthout on 13 September 2012, is the best analysis I have yet seen of Occupy's tragic but mostly self-inflicted failure,  the magnitude of which was painfully apparent in the collapse of the demonstrations planned for downtown Manhattan on the 17th, the first anniversary of  the movement's emergence.

Carefully sidestepping assignment of blame, Farber wrote that Occupy's avowedly “anarchist” refusal to formulate a program of demands “might have been beneficial initially in that it might have created a more welcoming atmosphere to newly radicalized people.”

As I noted repeatedly during my own involvement with Occupy Tacoma,  encouraging the articulation of grievances is the first step in any effective organizing campaign. 

“But as  movements develop and mature,”  Farber continued, “they need to state more clearly what they stand for and not only what they stand against. Movements need to develop some kind of theory to guide their actions, not as an obscure, technical body of thought only accessible to the select few, but as the clearest possible ideas about the nature of the enemy and of the movement.”

Again, Farber is absolutely correct. And it was in these pivotal functions – formalization of grievances into demands, formulation of supportive ideology – that Occupy failed so abysmally, betraying not only its initial promise but the (briefly) bolstered hopes of the 99 Percent it claimed to represent.    

Which brings me to the one huge flaw in Farber's work: his obvious reluctance to forthrightly address the broader reasons for those betrayals. Thus – apparently as a byproduct of an admirable but misguided effort to avoid confrontation – he omits the two most vital factors in the historical and psychodynamic processes that, in retrospect, probably made Occupy's downfall inevitable.

One of these is global, the fact the death of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has removed all the restraints that previously compelled the capitalists to ameliorate or conceal their innate savagery.

Though the U.S.S.R. was never the workers' paradise it claimed to be, its official Marxism nevertheless provided an obvious alternative to capitalism. The socioeconomic democracy promised by Soviet-backed Marxian revolution so terrified the denizens of Wall Street and comparable enclaves elsewhere, they cunningly erected a  seductive facade to hide capitalism's darkest and most murderous reality – the fact it is based on the overthrow of all humanitarian morality and, in its place,  the elevation of infinite greed to maximum virtue, with Ayn Rand's impossibly turgid prose as the latter-day equivalent of Mein Kampf.   

Underlying the Ruling Class response was its fearful recognition the Soviet intelligence agencies – the variously-named KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security) and the lesser known but infinitely more formidable GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye or  Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff) -- were genuine cadres of professional revolutionaries.  It is in this context Communism's explicit threat to capitalism – backed not just by rhetoric but by the overwhelming might of the Red Army –  explains all the humanitarian successes of the 20th Century. What empowered organized labor, gave birth to the New Deal and fostered the now-forever-dead American Dream, what enabled the victories of Gandhi in India and King in the U.S. South, was not the (nonexistent) beneficence of capitalist overlords but rather the capitalists' terror of the violent consequences were the forces of non-violence defeated.

Painfully ironic as it may be to admit, the Red Army was thus the ultimate protector of the American experiment in constitutional democracy, just as organized labor was the only real defender of the  American Dream.  Hence, with the labor movement nullified and the Soviet Union consigned to history, we suffer the unabashed brutality with which the capitalists now routinely suppress their adversaries,  particularly here in the allegedly "democratic" United States. Such (steadily intensifying) brutishness would never have been allowed when the Soviets were prepared to foment revolution whenever the Big Lie of "capitalist democracy" was revealed, as it nearly was, for example, in the Bankers' Plot or 1934 or in the atrocities committed against the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s.     
      
The second factor Farber omits in explaining in Occupy's failure is implicit in his mistaken choice of “anarchist” to describe the movement's primary ethos. Anarchism, despite the capitalist propaganda that associates it with maniacal bomb-throwers in Tsarist Russia, is an avowedly humanitarian ideology developed logically from approximately 2,600 years of grievances; one of its exemplars was Mikhail Bakunin, who no doubt would have been appalled by Occupy's fanatical rejection of reasoned analysis.

Precisely because it generally despised intellectuals and angrily rejected intellectuality in any form, Occupy was therefore not “anarchist” at all. It was instead a nationwide uprising by nihilists, a  typically short-lived expression of the self-centered  nihilism unique to the United States. It embodied the widespread USian belief human society has become so oppressive – or so evil – we can achieve liberation only by its total destruction, and it shared with the Ayn Randers the fervent conviction that self – and selfishness – are the only truths. But the latter is not just a singularly USian restatement of the existential paradox that meaning is meaningless; it is also – what else? – the enabling precept of the moral imbecility essential to capitalism and capitalist growth.   

Like the Teabaggers, Occupy was thus a manifestation of the psychological condition unique to the United States,  something I long ago labeled the Moron Nation syndrome – the carefully induced anti-intellectuality  intended to guarantee We the People of the most oppressed realm in the industrial world never again  formulate an effective program of humanitarian change and resistance to capitalist tyranny, much less evolve an ideology of actual revolution. 

We are brain-soaked in these anti-intellectual reflexes literally from birth, so much so they have become the defining characteristic of  the U.S. population.  Venomous even in its most casual everyday expressions, it is the toxic legacy of the political purges that began the moment World War II ended, peaked during the McCarthy Era and continued well into the 1960s. Though the targets were presumably only Communists, in bitter truth the victims were socialists of every persuasion. Eventually (and obviously just as the Ruling Class intended), the persecution was expanded to demonize anyone deemed an “egghead” – that is, an intellectual.

"Intellectual" thus eventually became synonymous with "subversive" and even "traitor," a hostility so intense during the 1950s, the children of families with substantial home libraries, myself included, were instructed by our parents never to publicly admit the presence of books in our homes. The cultural result (or more aptly the anti-cultural consequence) is one of the major psycholinguistic perversions of all time – the intellectual as a bad guy, intellectuality as a sin if not a demonic trait –  shibboleths that rule even avowedly secular U.S. society to this day.   

The national mindset so imposed includes unconditional rejection of ideology, analytical thinking and even logic itself. As already noted, the same irrational bigotries – and bigotries is precisely what they are –  are found on both Left and Right, whether in New Age, Deconstructionist,  Teabagger or Christian fundamentalist movements. And the associated fanaticism is again increasing, just as it did during the years of the Purge, perhaps now fueled by our species' (impotent) rage at its betrayal-unto-extinction, seemingly by all modern (logic-based) institutions.
     
Not surprisingly, the same kinds of frenzies appear to have motivated the nihilistic disruptions that nullified Occupy as any sort of meaningful force for change, whether ameliorative or revolutionary,  which soon silenced the movement's ability to express the common grievances of the 99 Percent it claimed to represent.

This was as dismayingly apparent in Occupy Tacoma, in which I was among the earliest activists, as it was elsewhere throughout the U.S. Unlike many local Occupy groups, we did – after  exceedingly bitter infighting – produce a statement of purpose, never mind by the time of its publication it had been reduced to meaninglessness by nihilistic obstructionism.

We also managed – just once – to confront an eel-slippery politician with a well-formulated list of demands.   

But we were already discovering any thoughtful exercise of our constitutional rights invariably came at a price of internal hatefulness many of us were unwilling to endore. The following excerpts are from “OT Blues: a Clash with 'Important' Helps Me Occupy My Mind,” published via Blogger on 7 December 2011, during the time Outside Agitator's Notebook was banished from TypePad:

When I heed Occupy Tacoma's best slogan to date – “Occupy Your Mind” (for which thanks to Nikki Weatherhead, Joy Bonney and Autumn Jacobs) – the resultant introspection insists that above all else I am still a journalist, whether with camera or keyboard or both.

My commitment to journalism is nearly lifelong. It dates from 1952, when my father gave me a Kodak Brownie Reflex for my 12th birthday. Two years later he gave me a Polaroid Land Camera. In 1955, via the what-will-I-be-when-I-grow-up unit of my 10th grade English class, I declared myself a future reporter and photographer. Late the following year I was hired by The Grand Rapids Herald, a Michigan daily. I was a combination copyboy and stringer, in the latter role a regular contributor to the sports and youth sections. That's also when I got my union card, becoming – at age 16 – a fiercely proud member of the American Newspaper Guild.

Since then I have tried to live in accordance with journalism's oldest creed: “to comfort the afflicted...and afflict the comforted.”

It was in the latter context I wrote a blistering retort to two posters on the OT Forum.

The two were trashing a thread-starter who was trying to alert us to the huge danger implicit in the National Defense Authorization Act, which is wending its way through Congress bearing a concentration-camp provision that would turn stateside-stationed armed forces into national police, enable the imprisonment of citizens without trial and thus move the United States that much closer to becoming the de facto Fourth Reich.

Because the trashers' onslaught against this latter-day Paul Revere seemed not only unfair but vindictive, I opened the ball accordingly:

“The reactionary anti-intellectuality implicit in (the first respondent's) attack is surprising even here in the region of the United States most noted for its vindictive xenophobia and venomous anti-intellectuality.”

The first trasher, clearly enraged, misquoted me to the forum's moderator, then withdrew in a huff after the moderator pointed out the distortion.

Meanwhile the second trasher, whose screen name is “Nobody Important” and who claims to be an Occupy Seattle website moderator, was already boiling over with self-important arrogance.

Important had been subtly protecting the One Percent by denying the ruined state of our constitutional democracy, telling us the system was working and we had nothing to worry about – a tactic typical of capitalist-party operatives whether DemocRat or GOPorker.

My response was intended to end what I already recognized as pointless confrontation: “It seems – please correct me if I'm wrong – your underlying purpose is to defend the status quo, including the infinity of betrayals perpetrated by Barack the Betrayer. That being the case I see little point in debating you.”

But this gentle rebuke provoked an on-line tantrum that lasted nearly two days, with Important repeatedly proving the screen name to be not just devoid of its implied humility but a classic example of passive-aggressive camouflage.

In the parlance of the old-time newsrooms in which I learned my craft, obviously I drew blood.

Important then asserted a despotic sense of privileged entitlement, demanding ever more fiercely I be banished for “hate speech.” Apparently  Important searched not just the OT Forum but even Outside Agitator's Notebook to cobble together a less-than-literate denunciation based on my characterizations of our neo-feudal politicians (Barack the Betrayer, Christine the Cruel); our treacherous political parties (DemocRats, GOPorkers); and my factually correct, historically proven statement Nazism (and fascism in general) are logical fulfillments of capitalism.

But one brave moderator persisted in defending my right to write as I see fit, and Important finally left in a hissy, still spewing venom, a trail of petulantly self-deleted posts littering the path of departure.

***

Despite the Occupation Movement's outspoken commitment to transparency, the forum incident was not my first encounter with OT's would-be censors.

When OT was formed, Tacoma's First Methodist Church offered its facilities as an indoor locale for meetings of OT's governing body, the General Assembly. The offer was gratefully accepted; the frigid rains characteristic of winter on the Pacific Northwest Coast are of such monsoonal intensity as to discourage extended outdoor meetings – and GA sessions tend to last two, three, even four hours.

But not long after OT took its first collectively approved policy stance – a list of formal demands it presented to Washington state's U.S. Sen. Patty Murray – the church withdrew its offer, forcing the GA outdoors in the rain and cold and thereby effectively excluding most elderly and disabled people from the decision-making process.

The reasons for the church's sudden reversal have never been adequately explained, though it should be noted most OT activists emphatically assert the cause was nothing more ominous than administrative error and organizational confusion.

Nevertheless it's difficult to overlook the fact the excluded seniors and disabled people had been amongst those most active in shaping the demands OT addressed to Murray. Citing Murray's position as co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, OT insisted she block proposed cutbacks in Social Security and prevent further slashing of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits and federal aid to education.

Coincidence? Probably – though the demographic identity of the chief victims of the church's sudden denial of its meeting facilities surely arouses my investigative reporter's suspicion.

***

Since the beginning of my involvement with OT I have sensed – particularly amongst its younger leaders – an underlying bias against those of us who are elderly, especially those of us who are lower-income elderly.

What brought this into sharp focus was OT's decision to center itself on a 24/7 on-line presence and on computer technology in general.

Recognizing the prohibitive nature of computer costs, I spoke up at several GAs citing current statistics that fully half the nation's lower-income households are economically denied computer access and thus remain cut off from an increasingly computer-oriented world. I myself, I admitted, am nearly at the economic bottom of the 99 Percent; I live in constant fear my computer will die and leave me irremediably isolated. I have no funds with which to replace a computer and short of a miracle will never have such funds again.

To exclude me and all the others who are in these dire circumstances, I said, is to nullify the core purpose of the Occupy Movement.

Again I was told I was being divisive.

The expressions on the faces of those around me left no doubt it was the majority opinion...

***

Thus, by fomenting intellectual and physical vandalism –  whether under the mindless banner of "anarchy" (as in Occupy's suicidal hostility toward analysis and ideology), or in reflexive obedience to the Ayn Rand doctrines with which we in the United States are conditioned from birth (as demonstrated by the foregoing indifference of self-proclaimed “progressives” to legitimate concerns of elderly, disabled and lower-income people) –  does the Ruling Class sustain its ever-expanding despotism. Thus too, at least partly because of Occupy's nihilistic rejection of politics,  we are once again allowed only the most limited electoral choice, the greater evil of the unapologetic neo-Nazism offered by the Republicans versus the lesser evil of the stealth fascism the Democrats hide behind compellingly progressive but demonstrably untrustworthy slogans.  Such is “change we can believe in.”  

LB/17 September 2012

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What's at Stake in Moron Nation's War against Knowledge

LIKE MOST AMERICAN intellectuals, I instinctively trust and respect librarians. They are, after all, the priestesses and priests of Knowledge, a realm I hold infinitely more sacred than any edifice of Abrahamic rites whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic. 

Even now, after 72 years learning the cynicism we in the 99 Percent soon discover is the chief prerequisite of emotional survival here in the Slave World the late Thomas Wolfe so aptly described as “this most weary unbright cinder,” Knowledge remains my Light-Bringer.  Its grail-quest is my only act of faith, its amelioration of ignorance my only act of true contrition. I enter libraries with a secret silent genuflection of the mind as fervent as the overt gesture of obeisance devout Catholics make when they approach their altars.

The only other locales I ever regarded with comparable awe are the long forgotten but eerily potent shrines of vanquished cultures one sometimes discovers in remnants of the American wilderness. These places, their ancient holiness preserved by isolation, are sanctuaries not just of Knowledge but of forbidden divinities and the uniquely sustainable alternatives for living they yet represent, their never-printed texts preserved in the ancient Mother Tongue of our collective unconscious – the lost but vital glimpses of past and future I sometimes blessedly encountered in the years before physical disability combined with our nation's new dystopian locked-gate exclusiveness to banish me  from Nature's own biblioteka: the back country I so loved to explore, usually under the guise of fishing or hunting.

I freely admit it; not just people but books and –  yes –  dogs and ravens and even trees and troutly waters and abandoned roads and standing stones sometimes speak to me. In the City I was always loquaciously a-prowl for new ideas, new songs,  new sensations, new intensities of love, new depths of human connection. But in the country I was silent, capable of extended motionlessness, ever alert to the messages of the environment, ever receptive to the soft barely discernible heartbeat of the forest, ever a-listen for the seductive voices of the river, which are so like women talking fondly in some adjacent room. That is the sort of man I am, a person for whom Knowledge is life itself, for whom the worst most terrifying aspect of death is that it is the end of Knowledge.       

Hence I approach librarians not just as my potential friends but as fellow conspirators in the resistance against censorship and the induced ignorance that fosters  our imprisonment in Moron Nation.  Only twice in my life have librarians disappointed me. One these disappointments was a sadly comical demonstration of ignorance by an employee of the Bellingham Public Library:  when I asked why there was nothing by Tacitus in the BPL card catalogue, the librarian responded by asking me if this classical Roman was a “current author” and if his  works were “current books.”  The other disappointment was  far worse, an astonishing act of anti-Knowledge treachery by one or more politically motivated librarians in New York City, about which I'll elaborate in a moment.    

But I never regarded either of  those dismal episodes to be anything more than anomalies.  Save in Bellingham (where the city's librarians were also infamous for serving the secret police by compiling lists of who borrowed which books), librarians have always my natural allies. Sometimes, by providing vital information, librarians have been my saviors as well – especially in Manhattan.  Hence when I saw Melissa Gira Grant's “Occupy Wall Street Librarians Strike Back,” I read it knowing I would learn something very important, as indeed I did, for the  text detailed an atrocity about which I had hitherto  seen only the most fragmentary reports:  how New York City – allegedly the cultural epicenter of the Western World – maliciously destroyed the 5000-volume free library assembled by Occupy Wall Street. 

Obviously this newest assault on our right to know was ordered because someone (again) adjudged Knowledge to be “dangerous,” an intolerable source of radical agitation. It hardly matters who gave the order or whether it was given at City Hall, at Gracie Mansion or in some clandestine enclave of the Homeland Security Department's secret police;  the salient fact of this story is the wanton destruction of the books, which by its undeniable truth is now proven to be an official policy of governance in the United States.

If this sort of action evokes a troubling deja vu – as surely it might – be assured your mind is not playing tricks;  the deliberate trashing of libraries is nothing new.   But libricide –  that is the proper term for it – is not just a Nazi German outrage. It was also popular in Pinochet's Chile, which makes its appearance on Wall Street hardly a surprise given the Central Intelligence Agency's Nazi, Chilean and New York City Police Department connections. Thus the following comment:   

Anyone who questions the need for a People's Library –  not just in NYC (which allegedly has the finest "public" library in the U.S. and one of the best in the world),  but everywhere else throughout our ever-more-oppressed nation –  should go to my blog for a glimpse of the significant radical history maliciously suppressed by the New York City Public Library itself. 

As I reported in my blog last year, The East Village Other published a fully detailed extra covering the riot, but by 1983 the extra had been removed from NYCPL archives by city librarians –  obviously cut from the microfiche files and the film then professionally re-spliced.  

No doubt the censorship was imposed because the 1967 incident was a genuine police riot –  an outrage in which the cops launched an unprovoked attack (note my photos in the above link) on a group of musicians who had obtained an NYC troubadour permit for their outdoor performance.

Also –  because the cops initially admitted their attack was triggered by two or three  complaints from the Lower East Side's small but disproportionately influential community of Ukrainian immigrants –  the incident raised an enormously embarrassing question.  How was it a few complaints from a notoriously fascistic, adamantly theocratic (Eastern Orthodox) minority had nullified,  for several hours on 30 May 1967,  not just a city-issued permit, but the rights guaranteed by the New York State and United States constitutions?  

The question was especially relevant since a substantial number of those immigrants had allegedly fled the Soviet Union to escape war crimes charges for their collaboration with the Nazis and were  said to be under the sponsorship and protection of  the Central Intelligence Agency.  Then as now, the answer might have revealed disturbing details about the relationship between the NYPD and the CIA, itself already infamous as a haven for Nazi war criminals.   

Though at first it appeared Ruling Class Media would adequately report the details of this atrocity –  note for example my photo in Newsweek –   the reportage quickly deteriorated back into oppressive conformity with the cops-as-heroes/hippies-as-demons motif  that characterized all "mainstream" coverage of the Countercultural rebellion in any and all of its forms –  anti-war, feminist, back-to-the-land, new music, alternative press, alternative spirituality etc. –  with EVO's unprecedented extra the sole documentation of what actually obtained that dreadful day in Tompkins Square. 

The extra's deliberate destruction by the city's librarians –  another act reminiscent of "the worst regimes imaginable" –  is therefore not just a ruinous loss, but a damning example of how "public" libraries can be co-opted to serve the will of the One Percent. Hence it might be revealing to know how many of the destroyed People's Library books had already been "disappeared" from NYCPL, whether catalogued (but never available for circulation) or deleted entirely. 

Obviously, the Ruling Class intends to keep our minds imprisoned in Moron Nation –  the 21st Century's artificially induced equivalent of the ignorance that paralyzed the peasants of  pre-Revolutionary Russia –   even as our bodies are herded ever closer to de jure enslavement.

                                                    ***

Apparently it is this unspeakable purpose – the imposition of ignorance so paralytic it cannot be overcome even by collective effort and so bottomless it cannot ever be escaped – that has clandestinely motivated much of the domestic policy inflicted on us by the One Percent since the end of World War II.

First was the demonization of intellectuals – psycholinguistic warfare that made “intellectual”  synonymous with “subversive” and even “traitor.” This brainwashing – or, more accurately, “brain-warping” – was cleverly sandwiched within the purges of Communists and socialists that began literally hours after the Japanese surrender.

For people too young to remember those years, one fact should suffice as portraiture: throughout the 1950s, my younger half-siblings and I were sternly instructed never to reveal to anyone our household included a substantial library, our father's lifetime collection of books. Even then, possession of Knowledge – unless of course one was part of the Ruling Class – was already a de facto crime: just ask the hundreds of thousands of classroom “brains” who were jeered, beaten, raped, and otherwise bullied into feigned stupidity.  The public elementary schools and junior highs were bad enough, but public high schools – in which vicious children had grown sufficiently large and strong to inflict severe and sometimes fatal wounds –  were realms of genuine horror, a topic to which we shall return. 

Meanwhile the quality of public education deteriorated steadily, a decline so obvious it was triggering school-reform controversies even before the Soviet Union orbited Sputnik I in the fall of 1957 and thus forever claimed for Communism the title “First into Space.” 

Though post-Sputnik panic brought about momentary improvements in public education under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the rebellions of the 1960s once more frightened the One Percent with the power of Knowledge to inspire and agitate, and by the end of the decade, the deliberately induced decline in educational quality was again evident. The conservatives, especially the more overtly fascist John Birchers, loudly blamed “Communists” and “Com-symps,” but the outcry – as always – merely functioned to conceal how capitalism was transforming public education to serve its long-range goal of reducing the United States to its United Estates – eventually a realm of the corporate equivalent of antebellum plantations, literally a nation of slaves. The real villains were of course the One Percent, their malevolent Ayn Rand influence clandestinely applied at every level, a do-not-dare-tell-it truth recognized at least subconsciously by any reasonably perceptive reporter who was assigned to cover public education during those years.

                                                   *** 

As I implied above, we cannot discuss the origins of Moron Nation without discussing bullying, a manifest hellishness I encountered in every public school I attended.

It was especially prevalent in the southern public high school where I endured ninth and tenth grades. Throughout my freshman year and into the first weeks of my sophomore year, I was bullied relentlessly: not only had my “Yankee” origins taught me to “talk funny”;  I was also smallish and slender, dyslexically clumsy and  dark-haired enough to be suspected of being Jewish. But I finally taught my slow-learning tormentors a sufficiently discouraging lesson:  attack me, I'll fight you;  and even if you win the fight, I will damn well inflict substantial hurt. In eleventh grade I attended school in urban Michigan, where a variety of factors combined to ensure I was not bullied.  But familial dysfunction involuntarily returned me to the South for twelfth grade,  and though I was in the same semi-rural district where I attended ninth and tenth grades, my enrollment in a newly constructed school apparently nullified my reputation for violent response. 

Because the act of writing is so often also an act of vivid recollection, working on this essay brought back the following long-forgotten incident in all its wrenching fear, anguish, rage and mortification:  

During class change maybe the first week of that final high-school September, a gang of at least a half-dozen football players attacked me in the hallway, forcibly yanked down my pants and hurled me into an adjacent girls' restroom, a vicious “prank” the purpose of which was to get me caught in pantless trespass by the school authorities and thus branded a pervert. But the hateful scheme failed. I fought my assailants with anything-goes ferocity,  inflicting enough pain they were unable to de-pant me completely, and when I was flung through the forbidden door, it was with one leg still trousered.  Then – much to my surprise – the girls themselves not only aided my escape but refused to rat me out. When word got around I was again carrying the modified bicycle chain with which I had notoriously avenged myself on a bully two years earlier, the jocks quickly found other targets.     

Given the perspective of 55 years and work on several in-depth education stories, I now recognize   schoolyard bullying as a central part of U.S. education: it is how we are psychologically prepared to function under capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – whether we are destined to be predators or prey. It is also how we are all taught to behave under capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for everyone else. Schoolyard or workplace, the bullies maintain the capitalist order: executive attire, athletic jerseys or badges and uniforms, under capitalism they are all licenses for savagery and sadism, differing only in price and permissiveness.  That's why all the official pronouncements against bullying are ultimately nothing more than Big Lies – additional examples of the same sort of propaganda by which this Nation of Falsehood hypocritically denounces the savagery its policies intentionally perpetuate.

Indeed, bullying IS capitalism, the perfect micrososm of its predatory psycho-dynamics. But to connect capitalism and bullying (or to name capitalism as the perpetrator of its many other atrocities) is to commit heresy, to utter a statement so subversive, so taboo,  none dare do it publicly: a topic on which Richard D. Wolff has a great deal to say in a new book entitled Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism, about which more in a moment.   


                                                  *****

A Chris Hedges Essay We Should All Read at Least Once

Apropos our slave-pen economy, a month ago Chris Hedges published a provocative essay entitled “The Implosion of Capitalism,” which I bookmarked for recommendation and comment but then set aside as events later dictated. Now though in the aftermath of Memorial Day, which presumably   turned our thoughts to the costs inflicted on ourselves, our fellow humans and our planet by capitalism's relentless quest for “growth,” I offer it as an appropriate meditation.

Here, in the hope they will encourage you to read the essay from start to finish, are a few significant lines in which Hedges suggests the direction we must take if our species is to survive:
 
“Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies...Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels.”

                                                   *****

Shameless Promotion of What I Hope Will Be a Vital Book

A few paragraphs ago I mentioned Wolff's Occupy the Economy, a chapter of which was printed recently by Truthout. Here is a sample paragraph:

“Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.”

I have not yet read the book, but I surely will. Wolff's potentially widespread public exposure of the taboo against naming capitalism as our adversary – a topic of Outside Agitator's Notebook since its inception in 2009 – is long overdue.

Perhaps now we've at last begun the national discussion that is prerequisite to our liberation.

LB/28 May 2012

                                                    -30-  

Occupy Tacoma: Prime Target of Secret Police?

Note: I wrote the following report two months ago for the research branch of Occupy Washington D.C. Since then, the events of May Day have proven Occupy Tacoma and indeed the entire Occupy Movement are very much alive, which makes this material relevant not just to Occupiers but to all other emergent protest movements, especially in the ever-more-openly fascist United States. Hence this, edited only slightly for presentation here:

I. SUMMARY: Typical of Occupy Wall Street and its local offshoots throughout the United States, Occupy Tacoma was from its inception vexed by disorganization and chaos. The resultant obstructions – especially in planning and communications – prevailed from OT's birth-period (the last week of September through the first week of October 2011), until 26 February 2012, when the few remaining campers evacuated Occupation Park in peaceful compliance with a state eviction order. How much of the disruption that plagued OT during those five months was merely typical of newly formed grassroots movements? How much was caused or intensified by clandestine operatives working on behalf the One Percent – agents provocateur and other sorts of infiltrators? The question is impossible to answer at this point. But at least a dozen episodes or incidents, each of which is described in more detail below, display one or more characteristics that identifies them as the product of hostile operations.

II. BACKGROUND: In startling contrast to the protest movements of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, where from the beginning there was sufficient awareness of the oppressor's ultimate malevolence (and therefore a magnitude of paranoia that was both profound and entirely rational), Occupy Tacoma seemed dominated by an almost childish naivety – an attitude all the more astonishing given how the protest movements of yesteryear operated under constitutional protections that have since been notoriously abolished. As a consequence, the identification of possible infiltrators within OT was left largely to elderly women who are veterans of the Feminist Movement and a handful of aging males who are, as I am, veterans of the Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam War, Back-to-the-Land and Alternative Press movements. Alas, because of a new and far more politically damaging generation gap – the enormous contempt with which younger U.S. Caucasians so often view those of us who are in our 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond – our cautions typically fell on deaf ears.

Though I was involved with the Occupy movement in Washington state even before the organization of Occupy Tacoma – I had posted on the Occupy Olympia website seeking information about Occupy activities in Tacoma several days before the Tacoma group was formed – by January all save one of the original approximately 14 movement-veteran seniors, myself included, had been quietly ousted. The primary means of our ouster, which may or may not be relevant to the infiltration question, was the refusal of what emerged as OT's dominant faction to accommodate our very real, health-mandated need for General Assembly meetings in spaces that were both heated and protected from the incessant and dangerously chilling rains typical of Pacific Northwest coastal winters. Rather than grant us the sheltered space we demanded, the OT core faction continued to meet in frigid and often torrential downpours until all but one of us stopped participating. Only then – after we were gone (and thereby silenced) – was a community tent erected in Occupation Park. Whether this was coincidence or something darker could not be determined.

The following report is therefore the product of two kinds of sources. Its primary source is my own on-the-spot observation through mid-December 2011, which given my 55-year background in investigative reporting, photography and journalism in general is definitively the work of a trained observer and analyst. (For details of my qualifications, see the resumé I sent with my e-note of 1 March 2012). The secondary sources, none of whom I am at liberty to identify, are a few people within Occupation Park and OT in general with whom I remained in contact from mid-December until the encampment's formal demise on 26 February 2012.

III. VITAL HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: When reading the following it is imperative to bear in mind the reluctant admission by Watergate felon John Ehrlichman that Washington state and the Puget Sound region¹ in particular is the One Percent's favorite domestic laboratory for perfecting its techniques of oppression. The late Ehrlichman, a Seattleite who climbed the Republican ladder to achieve infamy as one of All the President's Men, testified during the Watergate hearings, and it was there he revealed his home state's hitherto-secret rat-lab role. This disclosure made headlines in Seattle, particularly in the alternative press. But the news reports of Ehrlichman's revelations have all seemingly vanished down the proverbial Orwell hole. Hence no verification links exist – at least none I've been able to find. Moreover my own Watergate reference files – clippings and notes on the Seattle area's many connections to various Nixon outrages – were destroyed in 1983 by the same mysterious house fire that burned up all my life's significant work including two books in progress. Nevertheless Ehrlichman's description of the state and especially the Puget Sound area as a Ruling Class proving ground might explain a curious paradox of Washington's Occupy history: the astounding tolerance the authorities granted Occupy Tacoma, this in contrast to the anti-Occupy violence of the police elsewhere in the region, especially in Seattle, where the cops were so brazenly brutal they attacked an 84-year-old woman.

IV. TWELVE RELEVENT EPISODES: Here in chronological order are a dozen examples from Occupy Tacoma's first five months that strongly suggest infiltration or infiltration attempts, the activities of agents-provocateur and a miscellany of other hostile actions:

(1)-In angry, significantly unionized working-class Tacoma, the two-fingered peace sign of the 1960s is considered a symbol of silliness (if not outright submissiveness), and in union circles it is generally viewed with contempt. But this symbol mysteriously ousted the clenched fist of today's economic rage and thus – undoubtedly to Occupy Tacoma's detriment – became the movement's defining logo. Just how this came about is a mystery I was never able to solve, and I pursued it with reportorial diligence for several weeks. But the answers to my questions were always variants of “it just happened.” Indeed the peace sign, which I as a socialist have always found objectionable, was seemingly cemented in place even before OT became functional. (I was the first contributor to OT's “why I joined” testimonials, this on 6 October 2011.)  Indeed by then the peace sign had already become sacrosanct, so that every attempt to challenge it was shouted down – never mind that (in the words of one of my more articulate neighbors), it publicly declared OT, “nothing more than a bunch of kids trying to be hippies and relive the '60s.” The result was that OT was never taken seriously by the community at large. Was this curious choice of symbols – self-defeating in any context and downright inexplicable in working-class Tacoma – the product of infiltration? I don't know. But I regard it with profound suspicion. (Update: sometime after I filed this report with Occupy Washington D.C., OT did indeed replace the two-fingered peace sign with the clenched fist [scroll down to May Day], though the peace sign persists in all its insipid self-defeating obnoxiousness on OT's Facebook page. )

 

(2)-A few individuals whose online comments marked them as likely agents provocateur were evident from the moment the OccupyTacoma.org website opened its forum; the identities of these individuals will be obvious to anyone who peruses the forum's contents. Indeed many OT activists, myself included, stopped posting there because of its domination by posters whose sole purpose seemed to be antagonism and provocation. (Update: OT's website was destroyed by hackers in mid-March but was rebuilt by the end of the month.)

(3)-At OT's second GA, a longtime (and therefore presumably credible) local activist repeated in seemingly good faith a warning Tacoma City Council had recently amended its ordinances so that if anyone in a demonstration was charged with a felony – say felonious vandalism or assault on a police officer – everyone who had any connection with the demonstration (even non-demonstrating members of participating organizations) could be identically charged and arrested. That such a measure is reportedly being urged on states and municipalities by the Department of Homeland Security made the warning all the more believable – and all the more terrifying. But it was patently false. My own investigation revealed that no such measure had been considered – much less enacted – whether by Tacoma, Pierce County or any other municipality within the county. Nor could I trace the warning to its source; it was always “so-and-so said,” and then when I questioned “so-and-so,” the source was invariably somebody else. The fact similar rumors spread through Occupy organizations elsewhere suggests a classic combination of disinformation and psychological warfare – this of a sophistication that in turn evidences the most skilled sorts of military or secret police operations.

(4)-OT's communications were constantly disrupted. The email addresses of key work-group personnel were mysteriously blocked. E-messages went astray; important information was never delivered. At least one OT activist was worked into a state of psychological exhaustion by the associated frustrations. These obstructions clearly suggest communications countermeasures that, again, are indicative of military or secret-police capabilities.

(5)-I heard stories of several supposedly obvious infiltration attempts and encountered one such effort myself. A young man presented himself to the Media Work Group as a graphic artist with a heavy professional background but seemed, by attitude, physique and a certain characteristic look in his eyes, more like a special-forces guy than a cultural worker. I as a key member of the work group thus began questioning him about his education and accomplishments. As we talked I asked if he was familiar with Art Direction magazine, the now-defunct international commercial-art journal of which I was editor-in-chief in 1985 and 1986. He replied that he was indeed familiar with the publication, but did so with the vagueness that invariably reveals falsehood. Shortly afterward he left the meeting – and was never again seen on Occupation circles. Opportunist seeking to hitch his metaphorical wagon to the Occupation star? Infiltrator? I'd guess the latter – emphatically so – but again there's no definitive proof.

(6)-In late October an individual hitherto unknown to OT brought to a GA a proposal the group's communications be restructured to exclude anyone without Internet access. I instantly objected, vehemently so, pointing out that such economically-based discrimination is specifically the kind of class warfare Occupy is protesting. A few others, typically single mothers or elderly people of both genders, expressed their agreement with me. The exclusion advocate sneeringly replied that Internet access was available to anyone willing to make the effort to go to a public library. One woman's response was especially memorable: “How can we go to the libraries when the transit system is being shut down and the libraries are all being closed?” The exclusion advocate merely smirked, saying nothing. Soon however his proposal, though never formally adopted, had become the OT norm, with the result the methodical exclusion of a major part of OT's natural base. Infiltrator? Ayn Rander? I'd say maybe both – because why else would an Ayn Rander be interested in OT?

(7)-When OT was formed, Tacoma's First Methodist Church offered its facilities as an indoor locale for GAs. The offer was gratefully accepted; the frigid rains characteristic of winter on the Pacific Northwest Coast are of such monsoonal intensity as to discourage outdoor meetings – and GA sessions tend to last two, three, even four hours. But not long after OT took its first collectively approved policy stance – a list of formal demands it presented to Washington state's U.S. Sen. Patty Murray – the church withdrew its offer, forcing the GA outdoors in the rain and cold and thereby effectively excluding most elderly and disabled people from the decision-making process. The reasons for the church's sudden reversal have never been adequately explained, though it should be noted most OT activists emphatically assert the cause was nothing more ominous than administrative error and organizational confusion. Nevertheless it's difficult to overlook the fact the excluded seniors and disabled people had been amongst those most active in shaping the demands OT addressed to Murray. Citing Murray's position as co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, OT insisted she block proposed cutbacks in Social Security and prevent further slashing of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits and federal aid to education. Was the church's ouster of OT a deliberately hostile action (perhaps ordered by the church's state or national hierarchy in response to some DHS edict)? Or was it mere coincidence? In this case it seems to have been the latter – though the demographic identity of the chief victims of the church's sudden denial of its meeting facilities is surely cause for continued suspicion.

(8)-Soon after ouster from the church facilities limited OT to outdoor meetings, a story spread through OT's dwindling ranks that the Teamsters (a union to which I have strong social and familial connections despite the fact I have never been a member), had been kind enough to offer its local auditorium as a permanent meeting place. But one of the leaders who had emerged within allegedly “leaderless” OT was said to have arbitrarily turned down the offer without bothering to consult the membership. If true, this was an anti-union coup. Indeed – especially since there was already growing tension between union members and anti-union “progressives” – I suspected the perpetrator was either a Green or a member of MoveOn.org. Both groups had self-identified members within OT, both share the anti-blue-collar bias that has characterized the nation's so-called “Left” since the class conflicts of the Vietnam Era, and each group is therefore as anti-union as any of its hard-right counterparts. Hence – hoping to blow the cover of an anti-union activist within OT – I telephoned several local union officials in an effort to ferret out the facts. (Disclosure: I am a member of the National Writers Union AFL/CIO, a former member of the American Newspaper Guild.) After maybe a half dozen conversations it became clear no such offer had been made – not by the Teamsters, not by any other union, not by the Pierce County Central Labor Council. Another classic example of what the Russians call dezinformatsiya? In this case I'd bet on it.

(9)-A self-proclaimed Iraq War veteran who belligerently identified himself as an OT activist was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine, this in Olympia during a confrontation between Occupy Olympia and Olympia cops. Ruling Class Media throughout Washington state seized upon the arrest to begin a Josef Goebbels-type campaign of characterizing Occupiers as undesirables. Coincidental? I doubt it – especially since three or four OT people later told me the man had been ousted from Tacoma's Occupation Park for offering free cocaine to campers.

(10)-By the end of December, the sociology of Occupation Park's approximately 30 overnight campers was changing dramatically; the park was increasingly becoming a homeless camp. Sources there told me some of the chronically homeless people – about half of whom were also severely mentally ill – claimed they had been sent to the park by (unnamed) local social service agencies to obtain free food and lodging. Meanwhile – again hardly a coincidence – the Ruling Class Media's hate campaign continued, portraying Occupiers as habitual drunks, drug addicts and mental patients who refused medication.

(11)-By the end of January, threats of violence by hard-core homeless people had driven so many of the original OT protesters out of the park, OT itself was recommending the park be evacuated, cleaned up and given back to the state.  Concurrent with the (imposed?) increase in numbers of chronically homeless people, Ruling Class Media reported a groundswell of complaints from (invariably anonymous) merchants that Occupiers were intimidating their customers and trashing the downtown Tacoma neighborhood around the park. Significantly, Ruling Class Media reporters ignored what – if my sources were correct – would have been a Pulitzer-class story: an equally dramatic increase in numbers of people flung into homelessness by the downsized economy. Typically, I was told, the newly homeless who came to Occupation Park were (bitterly angry) youths whose parents had been first thrown out of work and then evicted from their homes. It was in this context – conversion of Occupation Park into a homeless camp – the state issued its official eviction notice, with which OT then complied.

(12)-As I noted in the section entitled “Summary,” the degree of tolerance displayed by local law enforcement toward Occupy Tacoma is – especially given the unrestrained brutality unleashed against other Occupations in Washington state – not just astonishing but markedly suspect. The apparent coordination between state welfare bureaucrats, some non-profit social service agencies, Ruling Class Media and other state agencies including the Washington State Patrol (which despite its name is a de facto state police force) is strongly suggestive of a carefully planned and coordinated operation. It is especially significant to note that only the Department of Homeland Security possesses the requisite combination of capabilities and authority to impose such coordination. Hence – particularly given the Ehrlichman testimony – it's difficult to escape the conclusion the curious treatment of OT was part of an experiment, probably by DHS, to determine the most effective strategy and tactics (complete with the peace sign's symbolic ouster of the clenched fist) for dealing with rebelliousness sparked by the public's awakening to the savagery of capitalism and the murderousness of fascist governance. OT by its very existence also underscores the Father Gapon factor: providing the authorities with a unique opportunity to identify the largest possible number of activists and potential activists of all ages, genders and ethnicities who live in or near Tacoma.

V. AFTERTHOUGHTS – IDENTIFYING INFILTRATORS AND COMBATING HOSTILE ACTION: The questions of how to identify infiltrators, informants and/or agents provocateur, and what countermeasures to employ against them, were hotly debated during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. Since these matters are obviously relevant again today, here is list of five principles from the '60s, updated to reflect present-day political and technological realities: 

(1)-Given the escalating imposition of fascist governance², most U.S. locales have longstanding communities of nonviolent resistance from which local Occupations drew their initial membership. The sudden appearance of any self-proclaimed activist who is a total stranger within these communities – particularly a stranger whose claims of radicalism cannot be confirmed – should be viewed with grave suspicion.³

(2)-Given the overwhelming military and police power of the fascist state – which possesses the capability of destroying our entire movement – the absolute necessity of maintaining the often-difficult disciplines of nonviolence is (or should be) obvious to even the most unseasoned protester. Any other course of action gives the authorities the propaganda by which to justify assaulting us with maximum lethal force. In this context, anyone who publicly advocates violence (as in General Assembly meetings or on discussion threads), is almost certainly an agent provocateur.

(3)-Given the Occupy principle of working toward consensus, individuals or groups of individuals who persistently disrupt the consensus-building process should be viewed with grave suspicion. This includes disruptive mentally ill or homeless persons whose presence may have been maliciously encouraged by the Ruling Class authorities.

(4)-Given our extreme dependence on social media (and the huge vulnerability that results from that dependence), we are easy targets for interdiction (outright blockage of communications), disinformation (incorrect dates and times), and illegal acts advocated by agents provocateur who have infiltrated our web sites. Hence people given moderator-access to Occupy websites and other communications media should be screened very carefully. Indeed each local Occupation should develop an access-screening working group.

(5)-Given our vulnerability to entrapment, we should be especially wary of anyone who makes a point of inviting us to break even seemingly minor laws, for example drinking alcohol on public property where alcohol consumption is forbidden. Such a person is best scorned as an agent provocateur. Otherwise – once arrested – we are in the hands of authorities who now today not only have the power to detain us indefinitely but to torture us into whatever confession fulfills their fascist objectives.

In keeping with the non-violent nature of our movement, our single most effective countermeasure is to deliberately plant false information with a suspected infiltrator – for example that 500 people intend to demonstrate in front of a bank. Then when the riot police show up for what turns out to be a non-event, we know the person on whom the false information was planted is indeed an infiltrator. Camera phones are superbly effective too: when the young man who 15 minutes ago was demanding violence is photographed laughing with his cop or soldier buddies around the corner, the evidence is irrefutable.

Above all else we should never forget the United States is no longer the nation into which even the most youthful Occupiers were born. “The Land of the Free” is but a memory. In bitter truth we are the subjects of the most oppressive, most relentlessly policed, most mercilessly punished nation on Earth.

***

¹The Puget Sound area or region includes the cities of Bellingham, Everett, Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia. 

²It should be noted that fascist governance is in fact capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for everyone else. Capitalism – infinite greed exalted as ultimate virtue – has always been a powerfully compelling doctrine in the United States, particularly in matters of foreign policy. But after the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and the decade's subsequent political murders (Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy), the nation lost the will to resist capitalism's inevitable transformation into fascism, hence the escalating tyranny at home and the brutal – indeed Nazi-like – imperialist policies abroad. The domestic imposition of fascism and the brazen re-emergence of capitalism's innate viciousness was further bolstered by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Though the U.S.S.R. was never the “workers' paradise” it claimed to be, its official Marxism appeared to offer an avowedly humanitarian alternative to capitalism. The resultant competition for “hearts and minds” forced capitalism to conceal its savagery, hence the unprecedented growth of the U.S. middle class c. 1945-1973, a pretense brazenly dropped after the U.S.S.R. was destroyed in 1990.

³This is a modern-day affirmation of the affinity-group principle that evolved during the '60s: the fact collectives of people with long mutual histories are extremely difficult to infiltrate. The protection granted by the longstanding solidarity of the affinity group is, by the way, precisely why the capitalists are forever engaged in the destruction and/or prevention of communities.

L.B./4 March 2012, rev. 13 May 2012

-30-

Our Worst Enemy Is Our Cult of Closed-Minded Optimism

Just as the dark undertow of Russian history drowned the bright promise of Soviet democracy, so now the revolutionary potential of the Occupy Movement, which hopes to resurrect itself on May Day, is being smothered by the Polly Anna conditioning to which we in the U.S. 99 Percent have been subjected since birth.

Of course it is not just Occupy that is so afflicted. It is our entire nation. We persist in telling ourselves lies about how good things are – how bright is our future, how great is our potential, how fortunate we are to have been born Americans – when by every statistical measurement the United States has become the most oppressive nation in the industrial world.

At least though events have now begun to disclose our true philosophical heritage – capitalist hucksterism as personified by Dale Carnegie's tactics of manipulation, Ayn Rand's gospel of maximum greed as ultimate virtue and – let us not forget – Norman Vincent Peale's self-obsessed Christianity of “positive thinking,” as if the Roman imperial death-warrant on the old crucifix were now replaced by a Smiley Face: “have a happy day,” never mind the twisted agonies of the alleged Messiah or the oppressed minions for whom he supposedly died.

The resultant attitude – an aggressive, cultoid optimism reinforced by the same lock-box closed-mindedness that defines the zealotry of fundamentalist Christians, Muslims and Jews – has become the dominant trait of the U.S. citizenry. It transcends all class distinctions. It imposes submission in welfare lines (“this is America I might win big”) as effectively as it fuels greed on Wall Street (“this is America mine for the looting”). Indeed it is the quintessence of the Moron Nation psyche. But its Disneyland notion of happiness turns quickly to hostility, anger and even violence whenever it is confronted by criticism, questions or legitimate differences of opinion.

And the Occupy Movement – as I learned during my involvement with Occupy Tacoma – is no exception. One of OT's original participants, I repeatedly urged during general-assembly efforts to formulate a local statement of purpose that OT recognize its function as a vehicle for articulating the grievances of the 99 Percent. Typically the first step in organizing a union, the formalized voicing of grievances could also begin a local, national and finally international process by which we might evolve an effective ideology of resistance to capitalism. Obvious as all this seemed, my proposal was resoundingly denounced by a number of OTers who, for reasons they never made clear, apparently found it profoundly threatening. Soon afterward I was ever more excluded from OT activities. Hence my eventual realization I can serve the broader cause of Occupy far better as a supportive albeit independent observer – in other words as a journalist – than as one of its activists.

Hence too the relevance of a book-review/author-interview by Michael Busch that was published a couple of weeks ago in Truthout. Busch wrote that Chris Faraone's new book on Occupy Wall Street, 99 Nights With the 99 Percent, presents “a broadly rendered portrait of a national movement” that accurately depicts all its “diversity, beauty and self-contradiction.” Among those contradictions, as Faraone himself noted during the interview, is the same “you're either with us or against us” rejection of criticism that seemed refreshingly absent from OT at its beginning but later became increasingly oppressive, whether at general assemblies or on the OT website.

As I said on the associated comment thread:

Mr. Busch's most important disclosure reveals the extent to which reflexive Ayn Rand values – values in which most of us have been conditioned since birth – yet lurk beneath Occupy's rhetorical radicalism:

“And finally, the observation I keep coming back to - which is obvious, but we rarely talk about it - is that the problems the camps had to confront - homelessness, drug addiction - are not new problems as anyone who has lived in a city can tell you...And not surprisingly, the reaction from a lot of people was 'yuck, go back to where you came from.'”

A textbook example of identification with the oppressor, the “yuck” reflex reflects an attitude that – if uncorrected by self-criticism – will be Occupy's undoing. For the camps did indeed become magnets for chronically homeless mental patients, drug addicts and alcoholics. And the response of the occupiers themselves was too often immediate revulsion and subsequent retreat.

In Occupy Tacoma, which I served via its Media Workgroup, there were persistent reports social-service people were telling the street-dwelling drunks, junkies and psychotics our Occupation Park was the best place in town to get free food and shelter. Whether these referrals came from state welfare bureaucrats or elsewhere could never be determined.

But the long-term impact was the destruction of the camp, certainly slower than by the police violence employed elsewhere on the West Coast, but nevertheless as inevitable. Which suggests the problem may not have been accidental but was instead an experiment in the tactical use of afflicted populations as a weapons of disruption.

There's no doubt the associated chaos prevented Occupiers from building solidarity with another far more vital group of homeless people – bitterly angry, formerly middle-class youth whose parents have been thrown out of work, then foreclosed and evicted. It is precisely this sort of experience with oppression that combines with ideological discipline to produces a formidably effective activist. But the potential of newly homeless people was nullified by the disruptions inflicted by the chronically homeless.

Meanwhile the presence of so many junkies, drunks and psychotics was pounced upon by Ruling Class Media to slander the entire Occupy Movement as nothing more than a rebellion by petulant and often demented misfits.

The lesson should be obvious. To the extent Occupiers remain entrapped by the undertow of bourgeois values, the afflicted-populations tactic will obviously succeed – with far less expense to the One Percent than the brute force utilized elsewhere.

But I doubt the lesson will be learned. As I can personally attest, the “rarely-talk-about-it” response was in truth a rigidly enforced taboo, resulting even in the censorship of my own Occupy Tacoma reports by one of Truthout's rival news services. Thus – to the entire movement's possibly terminal loss – the requisite self-criticism will probably never take place.

As if that were not disheartening enough, there was an even worse example of Occupy's penchant for PollyAnna self-delusion evident in an obnoxiously self-congratulatory piece by Douglas Schoen that Reader Supported News published yesterday morning: 

“(I)t is becoming increasingly clear that Occupy Wall Street (OWS)—while less visibly active in recent months following clashes with the police, infighting, and eviction from its flagship encampment in New York’s Zuccotti Park last November—is nonetheless seizing control of the political debate in America this election year.”

“Occupy Wall Street’s rhetorical dominance of Democratic messaging,” the advertorial essay continues, “fulfills one of the clear goals its followers articulated last October, when my firm, Douglas E. Schoen, LLC, conducted a survey of OWS protesters. At that time, a clear plurality (35 percent) of the Occupy Wall Street protesters interviewed said their top goal was for Occupy Wall Street to move the Democratic Party distinctly and boldly left.”

To which – accompanied by the virtual jeers and hisses of many RSN readers – I responded with a harsh dose of reality:

Mr. Schoen's claim – that Occupy is "seizing control" of the 2012 political debate – is not just a shameless advertisement for his business. It is also utter nonsense.

Worse, it typifies our crippling penchant for self-deception.

As we learned from Obama the Orator's transformation into Barack the Betrayer, the U.S. political debate is meaninglessness. Note how "change we can believe in" became the biggest Big Lie in our national history.

Indeed the only discernible impact Occupy is having on U.S. politics is giving the One Percent a rationale for expanding the Gestapo powers of its Department of Homeland Security. Without Occupy, it's probable the abolish-the-constitution sections of the National Defense Authorization Act and Trespass Act would not have been demanded of Congress.

That's not Occupy “seizing control.” That's the One Percent “seizing” the means to crush us.

Note too how these laws received nearly unanimous approval – undeniable proof the two parties are in truth one.

Also – were Occupy influencing U.S. politics – the Buffett Rule would not have been filibustered to death. Had it passed, Mr. Schoen's claim might have a solid foundation. But unless such change takes place, to assert Occupy is “seizing control” is no more than delusional self-indulgence.

Which – precisely as Sun Tzu noted 2600 years ago – is the most fatal mistake such a movement can make.

*****

VIPRs on Buses Prove Oppressive Truth Denied by Occupy Optimists

The true extent to which Occupy is “seizing control” of our national politics is glaringly reflected by a report first broadcast by the superb English language news service of Russia Today (RT.com/USA), then published by RSN.

The Transportation Security Administration, say RT and RSN, is morphing into the national transit police, harassing even riders of local buses with stop-and-frisk intrusions.

“No surprise, really,” the RSN story adds. As soon Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano “established groping in airports,” she “expressed her desire to expand TSA jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit. In the past year, TSA's snakelike VIPR (Visual Intermodal Prevention and Response) teams have been slithering into more and more bus and train stations - and even running checkpoints on highways - never in response to actual threats, but apparently more in an attempt to live up to the inspirational motto displayed at the TSA's air marshal training center since the agency's inception: 'Dominate. Intimidate. Control.'”

Given how the VIPRs who were frisking bus riders in Houston, Texas last week were reportedly accompanied by drug-sniffing dogs, it seems another purpose behind TSA's expanded reach is to seize more slaves for the for-profit prison system.

Which prompted my response:

“Dominate. Intimidate. Control.” That says it all, the appropriate dicta not of dutiful cops who protect and serve but rather of concentration-camp guards and Gestapo agents.

But I doubt even the Gestapo was so bluntly outspoken – “Dominate-Intimidate-Control” – about its tyrannical purpose.

Hence, precisely as the dicta imply, we witness the transformation of TSA from airport guards to national transit police, soon from national transit police to national police and thence to recreation of the original Geheime Staatspolizei.

Somewhere in Hell, Heydrich, Himmler and Hitler are all smiling. Meanwhile here on Earth it's “Dominate-Intimidate-Control”: welcome to the Fourth Reich.

Later in response to another poster I added:

More to the point, what does the "Dominate-Intimidate-Control" paradigm tell us about our future?

In bitter truth it proves beyond a scintilla of doubt that "recovery" (whether of our jobs or our constitutional rights – is the ultimate Big Lie. Instead what the One Percent has in store for us is national enslavement, for details of which see “Prison Labor as the Past and Future of American 'Free-Market' Capitalism.” 

And capitalism it is – infinite greed as maximum virtue (as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be) – its smirking masters enabled by ever-more-savage capitalist governance: absolute power and infinite profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

For how else but by exploitation of "human capital" – the enslavement of us all – will the capitalists maintain their obscenely lavish lifestyle in a time of dwindling natural resources and a planet raped to increasing rebellion against human survival?

*****

Deluded Washingtonians Think Republicans Might Be Better 

 

As I said in this week's lead item, it's not just Occupy that suffers from self-destructive optimism. A report in The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, describes a consequence of the idiotic delusion a Republican governor might somehow prove more humanitarian than the state's Democrats who – though no different from the GOPorkers in unspeakable cruelty to impoverished and disabled people – have nevertheless steadfastly protected women's reproductive freedom and defended gay rights.  

Here's the story:

“Washington's gubernatorial race is the third hottest in the nation, according to national political news site Politico. The site led off its latest rankings with an unrhetorical question about Democrat Jay Inslee's campaign: 'Can it possibly be successful with such an unwelcoming reception from the local media?'”

The Evergreen State press corps, never the brightest bauble on the money-tree of Ruling Class Media, is curiously convinced Inslee will lose the gubernatorial election to Republican Rob McKenna, who is not just an anti-health-care-reform state attorney-general but is already weasel-wording on women's rights.

As I wrote in response:

Ruling Class Media supports McKenna because that's what it is: Ruling Class Media, hence Republican, hence fascist.

 

The question is whether Washington voters understand that McKenna (or any other Republican) in the governor's mansion will turn our state into Wisconsin, Ohio and Arizona: war against workers, JesuNazi Jihad against women, genocide by abandonment against anyone elderly, disabled or chronically impoverished.

 

This is not speculation; it's proven fact. The new GOPorker gubernatorial tactic is to run as a moderate Rightist, then rule like Wisconsin's Scott Walker, channeling Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy and of course occasionally even der Führer himself.

 

Perhaps though it's the will of the electorate to impose the will of the One Percent: turn Olympia into another Madison and the entire state into another Arizona, where all wombs now belong to that divine sadist the Christians hail as their god.

 

You'd think Washingtonian women, at least, would have better sense.

 

But maybe the ideology of Ayn Rand has poisoned politics here as hopelessly as it has amongst the DemocRats in general – note the prevalence of anti-union “progressives.” Note too the Ayn Rand influence within the U.S. feminist movement and the subsequent triumph of its unique ideology: capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – as maximum "liberation" as well.

 

It's a terrifying likelihood, especially for somebody like me, old, crippled and permanently impoverished by the One Percent's malicious contractions of the economy.

And likelihood it is: look how the state's voters have already bought the Big Lie “mass transit is welfare” and would rather terminate public transport – anything to torment the poor – than pay tiny sales tax increases of two or three pennies on a ten dollar bill.

 

Admittedly the DemocRats are hardly a utopian alternative. There's no denying the lessons taught us by Barack the Betrayer and Christine the Cruel. But at least Inslee (might) spare us the imposition of Christian theocracy so characteristic of Republican rule.

 

Sure a McKenna Regime could wake people up. But by then it will be too late – especially for all of us elderly and disabled people he and his fellow GOPigs will have deliberately murdered by cutting off our Medicaid and food stamp stipends: genocide – the elimination of unprofitable humans – without the international embarrassment of death camps.

*****

National Fat Epidemic: Illness as Enslavement, Health as Liberation 

 

Phil Rockstroh, a New York City poet and essayist to whom I'm going to pay more attention, has spelled out what is probably the ultimate illness-as-metaphor hypothesis:

“The corporate food industry wrought epidemic of obesity in the U.S. is a microcosmic representation of a global-wide system of macro-imperialism...As the one percent has acquired their grotesquely bloated assets, large segments of the American middle and laboring classes have acquired larger and larger amounts of excess body fat. As corporate executives have sweetened their salaries with limitless perks and multimillion dollar bonuses, their workforce has sucked down copious portions of high fructose-based soft drinks and obesity-engendered disease has increased accordingly...Addiction to fattening food speaks of our inner emptiness; so called Reality Television relates to our hunger for social engagement and communion; the images that haunt the corporate state media hologram attract us because we long for the images that rise from the soul.”

I presume Rockstroh understands, as I do, not all obesity comes from willful overeating.

That said, I know precisely of what he speaks, and why he describes it with such disgust. I ride the bus each week with young single-mothers, women who were probably once beautiful, whose eyes have become opaque with hopelessness, whose bodies are not just swollen from compulsive eating but are morbidly, suicidally, grotesquely fat – literally circus obese.

These mothers, who are invariably White, spitefully hog the scanty bus space nominally reserved for cripples like myself. They often glare hatefully at those of us who are elderly and genuinely disabled, especially if we happen to be of a minority race, and they always defy the transit authority regulations that require them to fold their giant perambulators, which are invariably filled with Wal-Mart hoards of potato chips and other eat-yourself-to-death convenience foods, even as their infants, some only months old, already bear the mortal taint of caloric excess.

Such parenting disgusts me, not the least because my own post-smoking weight gain is largely the legacy of a vindictive mother who force-fed me into a repulsively fat child – this her ultimate vengeance against my father, against me and against anyone born with a penis. Though I shed this burden of blubber very quickly after I started smoking (spring 1955, age 15), the fact my mother's curse is literally inescapable became apparent two weeks after my first day as a true non-smoker, 23 September 1995. It was then, 7 October, I discovered I had already gained 12 pounds – never mind my food intake had remained unchanged. (I should weigh 160 and in fact weighed 158 when I began the ten-year battle against nicotine addiction that culminated with my last cigarette the day before 1995's autumnal equinox.) But my post-smoking weight, the personification of ugly, has gone as high as 265, nominally varying between 225 and 245 – in any case completely beyond any known means of control.

Though no less contemptible than the fat of compulsive overeating, weight-gain of this sort is assuredly not a defense against existential angst. Indeed it intensifies such misery, all the more so because its source, the long-term metabolic chaos inflicted by the excruciatingly endless process of nicotine withdrawal (already nearly 17 years) and intensified by my age (72), defines it as an inescapable loathsomeness I will bear into the grave.

Yet I cannot but pity these transit-tyrannizing mothers the dread emptiness against which they blanket themselves with bloat. I am sorry for them even when – as happens so often – they subject us to their own microcosmic version of the venomous disregard with which the macrocosmic capitalists routinely savage us all, forcing those of us who are elderly and/or legitimately disabled out of our allegedly reserved seats and into the awkward painfully sardined devil-take-the-hindmost hurly-burly of a standing-room-only rush-hour bus.

My pity is no doubt intensified by the fact I recognize morbid obesity as genocide – conveniently self-inflicted of course – another of the diabolical tactics by which the One Percent rid their United Estates of surplus workers. Why else the war against health-care reform? Denied access to medical sustainment, the obese will perish all the more quickly. Again I reflected on my personal slogan: in these times, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance. Then I wrote the following, hoping Rockstroh himself would read it:

Were it still the '80s – were Mr. Rockstroh another regular at the Lion's Head, and were we to converse in another of those memorable dialogues so characteristic of that long-ago and still lamented realm three steps down from Christopher Street – I would ask him only one question.

I would ask if he too feels himself forced by the ever-more dire circumstances of our ever-more-enslaved species on this ever-more gang-raped planet to acknowledge our only salvation lies in an as-yet-unformulated hybrid of Jefferson, Marx and the Gaia Hypothesis.

But I cannot fault his “Hungry Ghosts.” It seems to thrust us in the very direction I dare name: Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx and an underlying ethos formally absent from the Earth since the sack of Knossos – seemingly triple heresy whether from Jeffersonian, Marxian or Gaian viewpoints, yet (ironically) each the only possible facilitator of the others.

Meanwhile and however one reads its multi-leveled meaning, “Ghosts” is also quite possibly the best piece of writing – “best” in its painterly use of language – Common Dreams has ever published.

I merely wish Mr. Rockstroh's prose were a bit more Hemingwayesque, the better to catapult his life-preserving vision – “a resonate relationship with the world at large” – to more of those slave-ship castaways who have been seduced by the siren-song of trinket materialism and are now drowning in the predatory seas of Moron Nation.

Not that I have any right to criticize: I have too many times indulged myself with the complexities and potential of Faulknerian sentence-structure rather than discipline my prose into the easy-to-comprehend Ernest-ness rightfully demanded by every editor at every publication that ever paid me wages: “ El Sordo was making his fight on a hilltop.”

The quote – its nine words a perfect who-what-when-where-why daily-newspaper lead – is the opening line of a now-forbidden Hemingway short story, “The Fight on the Hilltop,” a heart-rending portrait of those who courageously resisted the fascists in Spain.

Juxtaposed with Mr. Rockstroh's work, it illustrates the writers' dilemma, especially in the unprecedented circumstances of now. For whom do we write? Do we write only for our Muse – or at least for those who might become our lovers? Or do we write for those we would never let into our dwellings, much less invite into the naked-soul intimacies of our beds?

Alas to make a revolution we must learn do the latter.

LB/29 April 2012

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