Mayor Calls OWS Terrorists, Congress Calls On Military To Arrest U.S. Citizens

Terrorist or CEO? (Image by puuikibeach)

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan called OWS protestors economic terrorists for shutting down the Oakland Port on Monday. Such bombast would be laughable if we weren’t currently slaughtering thousands of people throughout the world, assassinating, torturing and incarcerating suspects in secret prisons without trial, all in the name of fighting terrorism.

Her comment is even more threatening in light of recent Congressional legislation that would allow the U.S. military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens anywhere in the world without charge or trial, including on U.S. soil (in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act), for suspicion of being a terrorist. The new rules are part of a new $662 billion military spending bill that has been criticized by several Obama administration officials, human rights groups and even some Tea Party members, according to Democracy Now.

While it is unlikely that any OWS protestors will be sent to Gitmo, the rhetoric is clearly intended to discredit them and turn public sentiment against their cause. It also belies a commonly believed misconception that “Excessive” profits by the wealthy are bad, but the wealthy themselves are good because they create jobs and keep the economy running. Therefore, anything that hinders their ability to run their businesses and make a profit is seen as an attack on the 99% and their ability to go to work and earn an income.

According to this line of reasoning, workers who go on strike are terrorists. Consumers who boycott a business or product are terrorists. Shoplifters are terrorists. Little old ladies who refuse to engage with phone solicitors are terrorists. But employers who maintain unsafe working conditions, illegally dump toxic waste, pollute the air and water, pay starvation wages, or implement dangerous speedups are simply doing business.

Even if we ignore the absurdity of the “terrorist” epithet, the theoretical basis for it is still absurd. How can it be bad for a person to make an “obscene” profit, but okay for him to make a “not-so-obscene” profit when all profits arise by paying workers far less than the value of their labor? Aren’t the workers being exploited in either case? And how can one distinguish between obscene and not-so-obscene profits when all profits contribute to inequities in wealth and social power.

There are other absurdities, too. Workers and activists who try to halt profits for a day are terrorists, but Congressional leaders who want to slash unemployment benefits and require recipients to have a GED or college degree and submit to drug testing are simply encouraging lazy shirkers to stop horsing around and get jobs quicker (never mind that there aren’t anywhere near enough jobs available). Congressional leaders should not be seen as engaging in any sort of economic violence, blackmail or threats when they tie tax cut extensions for the middle class to the fast tracking of a Tar Sands pipeline running from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico and deregulation of mercury emissions from coal power plants, because they are only trying to preserve jobs and we should certainly appreciate that, even if the riders on the bill will kill us through pollution.

Thankfully I have a job as a teacher and therefore protection against the military’s witch hunt for terrorists, except I’m also a member of the NEA, which was declared a terrorist organization back in 2004, by George Bush’s Education Secretary Rod Paige.

Liars, Thieves & Lunatics Guarding the Hen House

From Our Load of Malarkey Department

Michelle Bachman, defending her stint as an employee of the IRS, told supporters that she had infiltrated the IRS to better learn about “the enemy” so she would be better able to dismantle the evil enterprise (see Democracy Now). Clearly, this lie was a lame attempt to mollify her anti-tax Tea Party supporters who were considering jumping ship at the thought that she was a carpet bagging tea bagger. Regardless of her motivations, the statement is an admission that she opposes a fundamental branch of the government she intends to lead. (Will Rick Perry accuse her of treason, too?)

Speaking of Rick Perry, he not only denies that climate change is real or even a threat, but believes that the Earth is likely only 10,000 years old and that creationism should be taught in science as a legitimate theory (again, see Democracy Now). In other words, here is another contender for chief of the most powerful nation in the world, who happily admits that he is dumb, superstitious and crazy.

Politics and Capitalism Make Kids Stupid

While pundits, billionaires and politicians continue to scream that the educational sky is falling because of teachers’ selfishness, laziness, poor training and lack of accountability, they simultaneously erode the chances that our students will believe anything they learn at school by bombarding them with pseudoscience and other absurdities.

In one of the latest instances, Gov. Rick Perry, of Texas, has called climate change a hoax, according to the Guardian. This is a man who is considered a serious contender for president, despite the fact that he unabashedly pronounces his stupidity, gullibility and superstition. Then again, he has also suggested that Fed Chair Ben Bernacke could come to great physical harm should he step foot in Texas, a threat that would land most other people in prison, or least earn them a visit from the FBI. So perhaps public displays of stupidity and violence are now considered legitimate and inspirational.

Of course Perry is not as stupid as his climate denials would have him seem. He knows which side his bread is buttered on (the oily side). Perry has received $11 million in donations from Big Oil, according to ThinkProgress.org. If Big Oil says climate change is an unproven “theory” (by which they mean opinion, since theories, by definition, are considered satisfactorily proven), then it must be the case. And if the real estate lobby, which gave him nearly $8 million, says there is no foreclosure crisis, then by god, the housing market must be peachy keen, as well. And if the liquor lobby, which gave him more than $2 million, says that drinking is good for your driving, then dang nammit, Americans need to carry open containers in their cars more often, like they do in Texas.

But Mr. Dunn, aren’t you being a little bombastic? Isn’t Perry just a Tea Party hack, with no influence over our children’s education?

Perry is just the tip of the iceberg, the most visible and newsworthy climate denier of late.

The latest issue of Science wrote about the Los Alamitos School Board, in California, which has ordered that environmental science classes include “both sides of the climate debate.” This is kind of like Flat Earthers demanding that geography classes provide both sides of the “debate” on the shape of the Earth, or English classes presenting both sides of the “debate” about “ain’t.” There is no debate or question about whether or not climate change is happening or its causes. The facts are clear and the data overwhelming. What might be considered debatable is what we should do about it, but only if you stand to lose financially, should regulations and limits be placed on the extraction and use of fossil fuels. For the rest of us, the solution is pretty obvious: stop burning fossil fuels, reduce energy consumption and massively invest in carbon-neutral energy sources.

It is certainly bad enough to have your school board meddling in curriculum decisions, particularly when their meddling forces you to present pseudoscience to your students as if it were legitimate science. However, the abuse does not end there. The board also voted 4-0 to require that teachers make an annual presentation on how they are teaching the class in order to demonstrate that they aren’t skewing the lessons with their “liberal” biases (see Los Alamitos Patch). This will be the only course in the district in which teachers must prove they are providing politically balanced lessons.

America’s Billionaires’ Coup Part II

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Yesterday, in America’s Billionaires’ Coup Part I, I examined an article in Der Spiegel, claiming that the U.S. was becoming a banana republic and that it should no longer be considered part of the West. Today I examine an article by George Monbiot, in the Guardian, UK, on the billionaire’s coup in the U.S.

While Monbiot’s piece makes a much better analysis than the one in Der Spiegel, it suffers from the same faulty premise that things today are substantively different than they were in a romanticized past. A coup implies an illegal or extrajudicial takeover of the state, which is not at all what has happened. The wealthy have (as they always have) used their wealth and power to influence policy in their favor. While there are a few billionaire politicians, most are mere millionaires and humble one-hundred-thousandaires.

Regardless, all three classes of individuals are members of the same ruling class. They are bosses, bankers, financiers, corporate attorneys and entrepreneurs. They share the same interests and they rule to protect those interests. What is different today is that they have become more aggressive and overt in their attacks on the rest of us than they have in several generations.

You can read Monbiot’s article below, with my comments in italics.

Anger, Deceit and a Billionaires’ Coup

 By George Monbiot/ Guardian UK (Britain) / August 2, 2011

Anger and deceit has led the US into a billionaires’ coup. The debt deal will hurt the poorest Americans, convinced by Fox and the Tea Party to act against their own welfare.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 True—the deal will hurt the poor the most and Americans have been convinced to act against their own welfare. However, there has not been a coup. American politics is functioning the way it always has—as an instrument of capital.

There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich.

A point of clarification: Income taxes theoretically harm the wealthy more than the rest of us as they have higher incomes and more money to lose. However, relative to overall wealth, they can also afford to lose much more and still come out on top. Furthermore, the marginal tax rate is at its lowest level in decades, with the result that the wealthy get to keep much more of their bloated incomes than they have in the past. In the 1930s, the marginal rate was 64%. From 1940 until 1963 it ranged from 80-92% and never dropped below 50% until 1986, during Reagan’s second term. Nevertheless, the wealthy believe they shouldn’t have to pay any taxes. Emboldened by Reagan and then George W. Bush, they have been screaming and hollering for greater and greater tax cuts. And they have received these cuts in numerous forms, including cuts to the other taxes that primarily affect the rich (e.g., corporate taxes, capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes). The corporate taxe rate, for example, has declined from 52%, in 1952, to 35% today, and most companies pay much less after taking advantage of loopholes. GE, for example, only paid 7.4% last year. Capital gains and inheritance tax rates are also at historical lows.

Government spending benefits the rich and the poor. Spending on the military and on subsidies to oil companies, Big Pharma and Big Ag all benefit the wealthy and amount to transfers of wealth from the working and middle classes to CEOs. The rich by and large support this kind of spending and never refer to it with disparaging terms like “entitlements,” which is reserved for spending that has little or no benefit to them at all (e.g., education, Medicare, social security).

So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.

All democracies are essentially systems that allow the rabble to vote for their rulers and encourage them to vote against their own interests. The entire basis of the state is to create and defend the conditions necessary for capitalists to increase their profits. The only difference between the U.S. today and whatever alternative that Monbiot is comparing it to, is the severity and intensity (and perhaps transparency).

Partly as a result of the Bush tax cuts of 2001, 2003 and 2005 (shamefully extended by Barack Obama), taxation of the wealthy, in Obama’s words, “is at its lowest level in half a century.” The consequence of such regressive policies is a level of inequality unknown in other developed nations. As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.

Shameful, but expected. After all, Obama is the president. His job is to help the rich help themselves to whatever they want. What is truly shameful is the unions’ acceptance of this. The CTA, for example, not only accepted Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to close the California budget gap with regressive taxes, they actively organized their members to fight for it, rather than demanding that the rich pay higher taxes, something that could not only close the budget gap, but provide a sufficient surplus to raise wages and lower class sizes.

The deal being thrashed out in Congress as this article goes to press seeks only to cut state spending. As the former Republican senator Alan Simpson says: “The little guy is going to be cremated.” That means more economic decline, which means a bigger deficit. It’s insane. But how did it happen?

More decline, bigger deficit and more hysteria on Wall Street. It is ironic that the ruling class insists on stuffing their pockets even at the risk of bringing the economy crashing down and despite the fact that this terrifies them to the point that they liquidate their stock holdings.

The immediate reason is that Republican members of Congress supported by the Tea Party movement won’t budge. But this explains nothing. The Tea Party movement mostly consists of people who have been harmed by tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor and middle. Why would they mobilise against their own welfare? You can understand what is happening in Washington only if you remember what everyone seems to have forgotten: how this movement began.

On Sunday the Observer claimed that “the Tea Party rose out of anger over the scale of federal spending, and in particular in bailing out the banks.” This is what its members claim. It’s nonsense.

The movement started with Rick Santelli’s call on CNBC for a tea party of city traders to dump securities in Lake Michigan, in protest at Obama’s plan to “subsidise the losers.” In other words, it was a demand for a financiers’ mobilisation against the bailout of their victims: people losing their homes. On the same day, a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP) set up a Tea Party Facebook page and started organising Tea Party events. The movement, whose programme is still lavishly supported by AFP, took off from there.

So who or what is Americans for Prosperity? It was founded and is funded by Charles and David Koch. They run what they call “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”, and between them they are worth $43 billion. Koch Industries is a massive oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals company. In the past 15 years the brothers have poured at least $85 million into lobby groups arguing for lower taxes for the rich and weaker regulations for industry. The groups and politicians the Kochs fund also lobby to destroy collective bargaining, to stop laws reducing carbon emissions, to stymie healthcare reform and to hobble attempts to control the banks. During the 2010 election cycle, AFP spent $45m supporting its favoured candidates.

But the Kochs’ greatest political triumph is the creation of the Tea Party movement. Taki Oldham’s film (Astro)Turf Wars shows Tea Party organisers reporting back to David Koch at their 2009 Defending the Dream summit, explaining the events and protests they’ve started with AFP help. “Five years ago,” he tells them, “my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It’s beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organisation.”

AFP mobilised the anger of people who found their conditions of life declining, and channelled it into a campaign to make them worse. Tea Party campaigners take to the streets to demand less tax for billionaires and worse health, education and social insurance for themselves.

Are they stupid? No. They have been misled by another instrument of corporate power: the media. The movement has been relentlessly promoted by Fox News, which belongs to a more familiar billionaire. Like the Kochs, Rupert Murdoch aims to misrepresent the democratic choices we face, in order to persuade us to vote against our own interests and in favour of his.

What’s taking place in Congress right now is a kind of political coup. A handful of billionaires have shoved a spanner into the legislative process. Through the candidates they have bought and the movement that supports them, they are now breaking and reshaping the system to serve their interests. We knew this once, but now we’ve forgotten. What hope do we have of resisting a force we won’t even see?

This history of the Tea Party and the influence of the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch is interesting and relevant, but also an incomplete picture. The non-Tea Party Republicans and Democrats have been going along with the Tea Party agenda, and not because of the Tea Party’s strength. The Tea Party is still a minority in Congress. They’ve been going along with it because the Tea Party agenda serves their interests and the interests of their funders and allies.

The Tea Party has identified an historic opening in American politics, with an extremely weak labor movement and left, considerable fear and uncertainty among the populace, and the opportunity to essentially do whatever they wish without fear of resistance. They are taking advantage of this opportunity to massively transfer wealth from taxpayers to the rich, privatize the public sector and crush the labor movement and the left, in general—all things that the rule elite have dreamed about for decades, but have been unable to accomplish, in part because of resistance by labor.

The Democrats and even some liberals in Congress, with no threat of backlash by their traditional constituents, are hedging their bets and going along with the program, thinking this will give them the most leverage in upcoming elections. Sure, many are crying out against the gutting of Medicare or social security, but few are doing anything substantive to defend these and other social programs. They have almost all bought into the hysteria that the deficit must be closed now and are supporting a shrinking of government at precisely the time that government spending must be expanded, not just to extend the safety net to the millions who are still suffering from the recession, but to stimulate the economy sufficiently to end the recession. A reduction in spending will likely prolong the agony or cause a deterioration into a deeper recession.