Neutralization

There are days when I’m afraid that the white hot fervor of revolution was all burned up by eight years of Bush, and now, when we need it most, in the midst of a major economic downturn and governmental austerity, it’s seen as passe.

If you look at a lot of recent movies and media, popular leaders (Tom Zarek of Battlestar Galactica, Amon of The Legend of Korra, Bane in The Dark Knight Rises) are generally portrayed as violent, selfish charlatans. The people who follow them are ignorant sheep. The heroes are those who preserve the status quo against the barbarians at the gate. Given that these portrayals come from major corporate media outlets, I think I am rightfully disturbed. Now, when we most need inspiring tales of successful popular uprising, none are found.

In cultural terms, backlash against cliches is inevitable. Enough Bad Boys-style movies will give you Hot Fuzz. Enough teenage college students wearing Che Guevara t-shirts will give you Tom Zarek. But the timing of this backlash couldn’t be worse.

Maybe it was easier to generate indignation when the actual issues of Iraq and Afghanistan were thousands of miles away. When the biggest problems are homegrown – economic inequality, unemployment, and lack of opportunity, exacerbated by governmental austerity and budget cuts – paradoxically, it’s a lot harder to muster a revolutionary spirit. The lives of the intellectual liberal class are at stake now, and any major disruption to “business as usual” stands a chance of seriously limiting our future options – in the form of arrest, legal proceedings, jail, and felony arrest records.

I”m not saying this as an unattached individual who would mindlessly urge people to get in the streets regardless of dependent spouses and children – rather, I *am* one of the people neutralized by this threat. I’m comfortably uncomfortable. My income has stagnated, but I can afford a decent apartment in a decent part of town and the company I work for is reasonably decent. But if I were arrested or my job was lost, I would lose my apartment – which means my fiancee and my roommate would lose their apartment. We have backup plans (mostly involving living with parents), but they would radically alter our current paths, careers, and lives in profoundly undesirable ways.

Our generation has no workable blueprint for struggle. The oft-imitated, never-replicated 1960s has proven to be an unworkable model – The Iraq War proceeded unabated, and Obama has left many thousands of private contractors in Iraq. The Afghanistan War continues to claim lives, despite rosy predictions to the contrary. Most people don’t even seem to know or care about the CIA drone program, slaying civilians far outside of the control of any legislative or judicial oversight. Indeed, after Bush decided to send troops into Iraq, the movement seemed to collectively throw its hands up in the air and go home, assuming fait accompli.

Meanwhile, Americans seem to lack the stomach (or perhaps our stomachs are too full) for the Tahrir Square model of revolution. Indeed, given that Egyptian youth unemployment was at 25% in 2011, we are far from that point at a mere 7.9%. Regardless of the brave youths Occupying Everywhere, he illusion of the American Dream, and it’s accompanying delusions of social mobility and meritocracy, seem alive and well, despite evidence to the contrary.

A lot of people ask me where we should go from here. I wish I had an answer to the big questions. For myself, I continue to involve myself in my local slam poetry organizing committee and try to provide arts programming that enriches my local Jersey City community. For the last four years, I’ve worked as part of The Spoken Word Almanac Project, responding critically and poetically to current events. I post about politics on Facebook and try to connect with likeminded individuals – it’s been a real treat to see my friends and I evolve together, intellectually and politically, seven years after college. I’m trying to stay connected, and engaged in the civic process. After Sandy hit, I did a bit of volunteer work (and if I had more time on my hands, I would be at the Barrow Mansion, 8am-8pm every day). I don’t have a blueprint, and I think anyone claiming to have one is probably trying to sell you a Communist newspaper or a Tea Party slogan. But damn if that doesn’t feel like nearly enough most of the time.

But hey, maybe the lack of blueprint is a strength. You can’t tell us we’re doing it wrong. You can’t tell us that this doesn’t fit pre-existing models – through trial and error, we’ve found that they don’t work. Maybe the key is keeping our moral and intellectual compasses active and engaged. Maybe we just need to keep listening, and trying new things, until we find something that works. And hopefully, we’ll do it before it’s too late.

SWAP 2012: Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will

“It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

Here in cowboy country,
we are a spinning cylinder
a poet finding truth
in gun metaphors
even though he’s never fired
a real one before.
This is the land of the quickdraw.

When all you read
are Westerns
and spy thrillers,
you can only write stories
of James Bonds
and dusty bandits,
of clean lines
unblurried by journalism
or the search for truth
or bodies
or anything else
more uncomfortable
than the queer thrill
of the hero
lighting a match
and walking away
from an explosion.

Mr. President,
you were a constitutional lawyer once.
Tell me which Amendment includes
“kill them all, let god sort them out.”
You told the New York Times
that every man in the blast radius
of your American vengeance
is named terrorist
unless posthumously discovered otherwise.

It’s like stop and frisk
except the cops don’t search for drugs,
they just shoot all the black men in the head
and call them drug dealers.
Do you fail to see the irony
in your actions, Mr. President?

Barack Hussein Obama,
did you know you share your middle name
with a Shia martyr killed
for refusing to swear allegiance
to an unjust caliph?

Did you know that Iraqi Shiite men
wound themselves
on the crowns of their head
for failing to save him?
The blood runs into their eyes,
until they cannot see.

Last night I stood at the mirror
holding a knife,
pondering the metaphor,
Mr. President.

Here in cowboy country,
for years,
I have shouted facts
into faces
whose rolled eyes
and grimaces
settle for an evil
they name lesser.

It’s a tale we’re used to telling.
These colors don’t run.
Two presidents taught me
they just bleed
when you try to wash them,
into an indistinguishable lavender
that no one follows anymore.
I am running out of metaphors
for this despair.

Here in cowboy country,
we’re all just Marlboro men
taking long drags
on bad stories
that kill us slow.

Obama’s drone tactics mirror the Taliban’s suicide bombers.

Thank you to Glenn Greenwald for bringing this to my attention.

“In a horrifying suicide attack this week in Afghanistan, the Taliban first detonated a bomb at a truck stop outside a military base, killing numerous civilians, and then moments later detonated a second bomb as bystanders “had rushed in to help the bloodiest and most helpless of the victims of the first thundering explosion.” Compare that repellent tactic to this and this.”

When are we going to realize that America has no moral authority in its intervention in international affairs? It’s enough to make me scream.

Check out the rest of the article, which explores the one-way pro-Obama leaks to the media re: the drone program, while simultaneously proclaiming that it cannot confirm nor deny the existence of the drone program when the ACLU comes knocking. Add to it the fact that Obama mercilessly prosecutes government whistleblowers, and you have a potent stew of hypocrisy that we’ve been fed repeatedly throughout the last four years.

Change you can believe in, indeed.

More on Obama’s kill list

Fuel for the fire, by Glenn Greenwald: http://www.salon.com/2012/05/30/how_extremism_is_normalized/singleton/

“Attorney General Eric Holder then publicly claimed: “‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” Both of those episodes sparked controversy, because of how radical of a claim it is (Stephen Colbert brutally mocked Holder’s speech: “Due Process just means:  there’s a process that you do”).”

“Here we have the Obama administration asserting what I genuinely believe, without hyperbole, is the most extremist government interpretation of the Bill of Rights I’ve heard in my lifetime — that the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that the State cannot deprive you of your life without “due process of law” is fulfilled by completely secret, oversight-free “internal deliberations by the executive branch” — and it’s now barely something anyone (including me) even notices when The New York Times reports it (as the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer asked yesterday: “These Dems who think executive process is due process: Where were they when Bush‬ needed help with warrantless wiretapping?” — or his indefinite detention scheme?)”

“A couple of months ago, I spoke at Purdue University in Indiana about civil liberties in the post-9/11 era, and several high school students drove from Kentucky to attend. They were aspiring journalists who worked on their high school newspaper and were battling their county School Board officials who were attempting to censor some of their articles on gay equality; they interviewed me after my speech in the hope that I would provide critical quotes about those officials (which I happily supplied). One of the student-journalists, a girl in the 11th grade, said something to me that was striking, something I knew rationally but had not quite internalized viscerally: she pointed out that much of my speech was grounded in post-9/11 erosions of civil liberties, but that for people her age — she was 6 years old at the time of the 9/11 attack — the post-9/11 era is basically all they know.

The post-9/11 era comprises the entirety of their political experience. They have no different American political culture to which they can compare it, at least from personal experience. The post-9/11 U.S. Government is the only one they know. The rights that have been abridged in the name of Terrorism are ones they never experienced, never exercised, and thus do not expect.“

“In 2006, Al Gore gave a speech on the Bush/Cheney assault on the Constitution and asked: “If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?” What prompted Gore’s denunciation was mere eavesdropping and detention without judicial review. That’s no longer controversial. Now we have this question: if the U.S. President can openly declare the power to order even the nation’s own citizens executed by the CIA in total secrecy, without charges or a whiff of transparency or oversight, what can’t he do?”

 

“The Philadelphia Daily News‘ Will Bunch makes a very provocative though important point about that last passage. As I wrote about yesterday, the most significant new revelation from The New York Times article is that the Obama administration now considers “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants,” on the ground that such individuals “are probably up to no good.” As Bunch points out, this was the exact language used by George Zimmerman in his 911 call about Travyon Martin (“it looks like he’s up to no good”). Moreover, at exactly the time that President Obama was poignantly observing that Martin looks like a son that Obama might have had, he was classifying all males in the vicinity of suspected Terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — including teenagers — as “militants” and “combatants,” and deeming them fair game to be killed solely by virtue of their physical location, gender and age. Those are someone’s actual sons. Bunch writes: “Since they chanted ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ at the 2008 RNC, maybe they could chant ‘Kill, baby, kill’ at the 2012 DNC when they re-nominate President Obama.””

Obama’s Secret Kill List.

Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&r1

“A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.”

“It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent”

“It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.”

“Yet the administration’s very success at killing terrorism suspects has been shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, only one has been taken into American custody, and the president has balked at adding new prisoners to Guantánamo.”

“That record, and Mr. Awlaki’s calls for more attacks, presented Mr. Obama with an urgent question: Could he order the targeted killing of an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial?

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.“

 

Someone once told me that the job of liberalism is to hold a mirror up to society and government and say “You can do better than this.” We have to do better. Obama was the guy who was supposed to stop all this, not expand it, not create a secret list of assassination targets. There has been zero transparency on this issue, and zero legal recourse. The entire operation is a closed, black box, and that black box is killing people all over the world. I don’t think it is too strong to say that I feel a profound moral imperative to alert people to the fact that this is happening.

Taibbi and NYTimes remind us that presidential cadidates don’t give a damn about us.

So, if it wasn’t abundantly clear to you yet, here are some wonderful visual graphics explaining why our presidential candidates and sitting incumbent haven’t addressed the massive corruption of the banks.

The New York Times was good enough to show us exactly who is behind the major Super PACs that support each candidate. A completely unsurprising 98% of Romney’s PAC funds come from donors giving over $25,000. Obama received 99% of his PAC funds from similarly large donors.

I know what you’re going to say. “But Romney received money hedge funds and the Swift Boat veteran guys while Obama received money from nice folks like Stephen Spielberg and the Dreamworks Animation guy!” First, do I need to remind you of SOPA and PIPA? Hollywood is not your friend. Second of all, check out Matt Taibbi’s latest blog. He links to Zero Hedge, a site dedicated to fiscal corruption.

Here’s the most relevant thing that Taibbi links to. Bush, Obama, and Romney all received truly insane amounts of money from Goldman Sachs, everyone’s favorite vampire squid, who bears more blame than most for the recession. JP Morgan Chase, General Electric, the incredibly depressing list goes on.

The vast majority of every electable candidate’s campaign funds come from major donors who are either corporations or asshole rich people. These people do not care about us. If Occupy Wall Street hasn’t been able to prove it’s point to you yet, these articles should do the trick.

The debt ceiling and a pivotal moment

Okay. For the first time, in a long time, I’m rooting for Obama. Boehner pulled out of debt ceiling negotiations, citing Obama’s intractability (Yeah, right – he did everything but bake him a cake) and tried to force his own plan through, to force a Senate vote, and possibly a presidential veto. But Boehner failed to get the necessary votes, even from his own party. Boehner wanted to force a Senate vote on his plan, throwing the blame for default onto the Senate Democrats for voting it down, or Obama for vetoing it. But Boehner wasn’t able to pull this off, and it put Obama in a great position to negotiate a strong bill that preserves Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid as well as raises the debt ceiling.

This gives Obama the opportunity to play the role of the negotiator, the man in the middle, and finally WIN. It’s like an actor finally getting a shot at the Broadway role he always wanted. It’s a role that, in my opinion, he’s played too often throughout his presidency, but this time, it’s necessary, and might actually produce results.

Obama has pissed me off on so many things in the last two years, but this time, I’m rooting for him. I’ve got a grandmother who is on Medicare, and a mother with a terminal illness, and if something awful happened to my father, she’d be on Medicare as well. These are vital programs. Real living, breathing people need them to live and preserve a quality of life worth living. I cannot even begin to emphasize how personal of a fight this is to me.

We are gauged, as a society, by how we treat our oldest and our youngest. We can prioritize raw dogma or basic compassion. Do the right thing, America.