INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Occupy's Nathan Schneider on Anarchy and Radical Catholicism

Nathan Schneider, June 17, 2012. Photo from Occupy.

Interview with Occupy’s Nathan Schneider:
Anarchy, activism, and radical Catholicism

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2013

"It's hard to pick a revolution about which one doesn't have major misgivings. But they also have peak moments: the nuns kneeling before Marcos' tanks in the Philippines; the queer crusaders emerging out of the Sixties; the cacophonous assemblies at the Paris Commune; the pockets of anarchist rule in Catalonia; the Christians and Muslims in Tahrir guarding one another's prayers." -- Nathan Schneider

If Nathan Schneider had a middle name it might be “Contrary” or “Confrontational.” There isn’t a sentence that he writes or speaks that’s not provocative. In that sense, he’s a child of the Sixties, though he wasn’t born until the Reagan 1980s, and more precisely in 1984, the year that George Orwell warned us against.

“Half Jewish,” as he calls himself, he grew up in the free-floating spiritual environment that characterized the end of the twentieth century in America, which meant that he was touched by secular Judaism, secular Christianity, and “a strong dose of Eastern Spirituality” -- through his mother. Not surprisingly, given his family and background and the force of his own quest for a spiritual matrix, he converted to Catholicism at the age of 18.

After he graduated from public schools in Virginia, he attended Brown and then the University of California at Santa Barbara, but gave up on academia to pursue his “education through journalism.” Schneider has been connected, as an observer and a participant, to the Occupy Movement for two years, beginning in 2011 and continuing until the present.

He tells the story of his conversion to Catholicism in God in Proof, and the story of his engagement with Occupy in Thank You, Anarchy which Rebecca Solnit calls, in her introduction, a “superb book.” It’s not the first book about Occupy but perhaps it’s the most comprehensive.

On the cusp of 30, Schneider has quickly become one of the “best and the brightest” -- to borrow a phrase from the 1960s -- in a generation of intellectuals and activists who are reinventing the American radical tradition. In the under-30 crowd, there’s probably no one with a deeper affinity for the Sixties than Schneider, and no one more eager to question the legacies of the Sixties than he — all of which makes his books and articles provocative and entertaining.

Nathan Schneider, March 19, 2012. Photo from Occupy.

Jonah Raskin: An Old Left friend of mine -- Alexander Saxton -- used to say that there was a gene for utopia. Do you think that there’s a gene for anarchy?

Nathan Schneider: Maybe it's the same gene. Or maybe it's a mood or a moment. Many people who were talking the anarchist talk during Occupy are now more or less back to doing the same-old-same-old. The Occupy mood or moment was caused partly by a failure -- from the Democratic Party of Obama to radical left organizations -- to bring young folks into the fold. A few years after Obama's election - - with no limits on Wall Street or the security state -- there were no viable alternatives. So, there was a craving to do away with everything, take over a square and start from scratch.

My Catholic friends tell me that I’m a closet Catholic. I’m motivated by guilt and by the need to confess. There’s more to Catholicism than guilt and confession isn’t there?

Guilt motivates me, too, but I don't attribute that to Catholicism. Despite evidence to the contrary, thanks to 2,000 years of baggage, the Catholic Church is supposed to be a durable institution that helps people live out the gospel of faith, hope, and love. I've found a great deal of inspiration and support in communities of radical Catholics such as the Catholic Worker. But my faith is enlivened just as much by acts of witness that aren't done by Catholics -- and Occupy was chock full of them.

Do you wish you had been alive in 1968? If so what might you have done?

I might have kept to the sidelines. My mother was in France that year and my father in Southern California, yet their proximity to rebellion didn't seem to impact them appreciably. Occupy could just as well have passed me by if I hadn't happened to be in on it from the beginning. I had time on my hands.

What if you were alive in Paris in, say, 1789?

I would have liked to be a pamphleteer.

Or in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944?

I probably would have died, as members of my family did.

I remember Tom Hayden popularizing the notion that repression leads to resistance. In Chile, for example, repression lead to the death of a movement that had culminated in the election of Salvador Allende. Is there a more nuanced view of repression and resistance in Hayden’s?

In Occupy, repression inspired wider resistance only for the first few weeks. Occupiers, especially in early 2012, got addicted to repression and couldn't understand why their arrests stopped inspiring the public. Movements in far more repressive regimes tend to understand this dynamic instinctively. Activists need to be strategic about how much to invite the repression of the state and how much to circumvent it.

What you attribute to Hayden is related to the horrible notion that "things have to get worse before they get better." No Thanks!

When you say in Thank You, Anarchy that the revolution isn’t far off, what are you actually saying? What do you mean by “far off” and what do you mean by “revolution”?

I was thinking of a conversation I had with an Egyptian activist. I asked whether, she expected that Mubarak would be out of power. She said, "Not in a million years." Social transformation is hard; when it happens it can seem so easy and inevitable, until it gets really hard again. In the passage you're quoting from, I'm trying to play with the dialectic. As for what we mean by revolution, take your pick. I'm trying to talk about the way in which revolution can't be talked about.

You have published two books this year? What other books do you have in the works?

My goodness, two's not enough? They've got me plenty busy. But I am also working on an essay about dispensationalism, a popular form of apocalyptic theology.

What political writers have taught you the most about writing about politics?

Jeff Sharlet -- who also writes at the intersection of politics and religion -- has long been a mentor, though I can't come close to imitating him. He introduced me to JoAnn Wypijewski who guided me at a formative time. As the initial occupation approached, I was reading Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night -- about the 1967 anti-war march on Washington -- which I loved and hated, because all that seems to matter to Mailer is what he’s thinking. At times his thoughts are brilliant. Lastly, I've learned a lot from Joan Didion, especially how her thinking is less important than what she reveals.

How white was Occupy Wall Street?

Schneider on Occupy.

It started out pretty white, and then became less white and then white again. We saw some of the wrinkles in our supposedly post-racial society when it turned out that people didn't know how to relate to each other across racial lines.

The other day, I saw a young black man in my neighborhood wearing one of Jay Z's "Occupy All Streets" T-shirts. The movement forced Jay Z to discontinue those shirts. In Occupy Atlanta, John Lewis, a civil rights hero, was denied a chance to speak. A lot of the beauty in us and in our society that’s normally hidden under a bushel was allowed to shine in Occupy. So was a lot of ugliness.

Can you say more about Jay Z and the T-shirts?

People were very sensitive to rip-offs and co-optation. It was a tough decision because if the shirts had been around they might have led to more connections to communities of color.

Is there a revolution from the past that inspires you more than any other?

It's hard to pick a revolution about which one doesn't have major misgivings. Every revolution betrays. But they also have their peak moments: the nuns kneeling before Marcos' tanks in the Philippines; the queer crusaders emerging out of the Sixties; the cacophonous assemblies at the Paris Commune; the pockets of anarchist rule in Catalonia; the Christians and Muslims in Tahrir guarding one another's prayers. Still, it's hard to pick one that I'd be willing to wish on anyone.

The Left used to have a monopoly on the word “contradictions.” Now it’s everywhere. What would you say were the main contradictions, in the Marxist/Maoist sense, of Occupy?

So many: autonomy and accountability, sanity and madness, order and mischief, creativity and frustration, occupation and colonization, relief and recovery, grievance and self-sufficiency, ecstasy and failure. The moment these contradictions resolved themselves, and one element in them came to dominate over the other, the dynamism went away.

Why do you think it is that every generation in America over the past 60 years or so has wanted to define itself in opposition to an earlier and an older generation? Why not emphasize continuities between generations?

Occupy had the potential to be powerfully cross-generational. From the outset, young folks were driving it, but they were very eager to hear from elders. They wanted advice, support and help. Many leading organizers had grown up in political families, and, while they viewed their parents as more moderate than themselves, they credited their upbringing for their politics.

Sounds like you have a theory on this. 

I think that the Sixties generation of radicals had to rebel so hard against their parents that, when they became the new establishment in left wing groups, they had an Oedipal fear that later generations would do the same to them. So they didn't make a priority of raising young leaders.

If you look around at the established radical organizations, especially in New York City, you'll be hard-pressed to find more than a tiny minority of young people involved. But as those who turned out for Occupy showed, it's not for lack of young activists. Before and after Occupy, young folks eager to get involved in radical politics had to hustle to find mentors and material support. Friends of mine affiliated with the political right don’t seem to have this problem.

Are you calling for defiance against older generations?

I’m trying to bridge the gaps between generations. I tend to get along with older people.

My favorite political quotation is from Gramsci about the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. What’s yours?

Mine is the entirety of the commencement speech that the poet-priest (and friend) Daniel Berrigan once gave at a Catholic prep school in Manhattan: "Know where you stand and stand there." Not that I follow it, really -- I just like it.

What’s your connection to Berrigan?

We met about five years ago. I started going to his monthly community suppers. We talked and saw that we had common interests. I see him regularly now, but his health is deteriorating rapidly. I don’t know how much longer he’ll be around.

In a nutshell what does anarchy mean to you?

A society in which some people don't wield unnecessary power over others, and one in which the needs of all are put before the privileges of a few. "Anarchy" has so many connotations, and in the book I like to play off of several of them at once. It's a very ambidextrous word: chaos, freedom, organization, and structurelessness. I want them all.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Todd Gitlin : The Wonderful World of Informers and 'Agents Provocateurs'

Old school spying. Image from Outside the Beltway.

Close encounters of the lower-tech kind:
The wonderful American world of
informers and agents provocateurs

Here is a preliminary attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could be the next big story about government surveillance and provocation in America.

By Todd Gitlin / The Rag Blog / July 4, 2013

Sociologist, mass media critic, and political writer Todd Gitlin will discuss issues raised in this article and more with Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio, Friday, July 19, 2013, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live to the world. The show is rebroadcast by WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. (EDT), and all podcasts are posted at the Internet Archive.

Only Martians, by now, are unaware of the phone and online data scooped up by the National Security Agency (though if it turns out that they are aware, the NSA has surely picked up their signals and crunched their metadata). American high-tech surveillance is not, however, the only kind around. There’s also the lower tech, up-close-and-personal kind that involves informers and sometimes government-instigated violence.

Just how much of this is going on and in how coordinated a way no one out here in the spied-upon world knows. The lower-tech stuff gets reported, if at all, only one singular, isolated event at a time -- look over here, look over there, now you see it, now you don’t.

What is known about such surveillance as well as the suborning of illegal acts by government agencies, including the FBI, in the name of counterterrorism has not been put together by major news organizations in a way that would give us an overview of the phenomenon. (The ACLU has done by far the best job of compiling reports on spying on Americans of this sort.)

Some intriguing bits about informers and agents provocateurs briefly made it into the public spotlight when Occupy Wall Street was riding high. But as always, dots need connecting. Here is a preliminary attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could be the next big story about government surveillance and provocation in America.


Two stories from Occupy Wall Street

The first is about surveillance. The second is about provocation.

On September 17, 2011, Plan A for the New York activists who came to be known as Occupy Wall Street was to march to the territory outside the bank headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. Once there, they discovered that the block was entirely fenced in. Many activists came to believe that the police had learned their initial destination from e-mails circulating beforehand. Whereupon they headed for nearby Zuccotti Park and a movement was born.

The evening before May Day 2012, a rump Occupy group marched out of San Francisco’s Dolores Park and into the Mission District, a neighborhood where not so many 1-percenters live, work, or shop. There, they proceeded to trash “mom and pop shops, local boutiques and businesses, and cars,” according to Scott Rossi, a medic and eyewitness, who summed his feelings up this way afterward: “We were hijacked.” The people “leading the march tonight,” he added, were

clean cut, athletic, commanding, gravitas not borne of charisma but of testosterone and intimidation. They were decked out in outfits typically attributed to those in the "black bloc" spectrum of tactics, yet their clothes were too new, and something was just off about them. They were very combative and nearly physically violent with the livestreamers on site, and got ignorant with me, a medic, when I intervened... I didn’t recognize any of these people. Their eyes were too angry, their mouths were too severe. They felt "military" if that makes sense. Something just wasn’t right about them on too many levels.

He was quick to add,

I’m not one of those tin foil hat conspiracy theorists. I don’t subscribe to those theories that Queen Elizabeth’s Reptilian slave driver masters run the Fed. I’ve read up on agents provocateurs and plants and that sort of thing and I have to say that, without a doubt, I believe 100% that the people that started tonight’s events in the Mission were exactly that.

Taken aback, Occupy San Francisco condemned the sideshow: “We consider these acts of vandalism and violence a brutal assault on our community and the 99%.”

Where does such vandalism and violence come from? We don’t know. There are actual activists who believe that they are doing good this way; and there are government infiltrators; and then there are double agents who don’t know who they work for, ultimately, but like smashing things or blowing them up.

By definition, masked trashers of windows in Oakland or elsewhere are anonymous. In anonymity, they -- and the burners of flags and setters of bombs -- magnify their power. They hijack the media spotlight. In this way, tiny groups -- incendiary, sincere, fraudulent, whoever they are -- seize levers that can move the entire world.

On May Day 2012, an Occupy rump group trashed San Francisco's Mission District, instigated and led, many were convinced, by agents provocateurs. Image from The Wren Project

The sting of the clueless bee

Who casts the first stone? Who smashes the first window? Who teaches bombers to build and plant actual or spurious bombs? The history of the secret police planting agents provocateurs in popular movements goes back at least to nineteenth century France and twentieth century Russia. In 1905, for example, the priest who led St. Petersburg’s revolution was some sort of double agent, as was the man who organized the assassination of the Czar’s uncle, the Grand Duke.

As it happens, the United States has its own surprisingly full history of such planted agents at work turning small groups or movements in directions that, for better or far more often worse, they weren’t planning on going. One well-documented case is that of "Tommy the Traveler,” a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organizer who after years of trying to arouse violent action convinced two 19-year-old students to firebomb an ROTC headquarters at Hobart College in upstate New York. The writer John Schultz reported on likely provocateurs in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968.

How much of this sort of thing went on? Who knows? Many relevant documents molder in unopened archives, or have been heavily redacted or destroyed.

As the Boston marathon bombing illustrates, there are homegrown terrorists capable of producing the weapons they need and killing Americans without the slightest help from the U.S. government. But historically, it’s surprising how relatively often the gendarme is also a ringleader. Just how often is hard to know, since information on the subject is fiendishly hard to pry loose from the secret world.

Through 2011, 508 defendants in the U.S. were prosecuted in what the Department of Justice calls “terrorism-related cases.” According to Mother Jones's Trevor Aaronson, the FBI ran sting operations that “resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants” -- about one-third of the total. “Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur -- an FBI operative instigating terrorist action. With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings.”

In Cleveland, on May Day of 2012, in the words of a Rolling Stone exposé, the FBI “turned five stoner misfits into the world's most hapless terrorist cell.” To do this, the FBI put a deeply indebted, convicted bank robber and bad-check passer on their payroll, and hooked him up with an arms dealer, also paid by the Bureau. The FBI undercover man then hustled five wacked-out wannabe anarchists into procuring what they thought was enough C4 plastic explosive to build bombs they thought would blow up a bridge. The bombs were, of course, dummies. The five were arrested and await trial.

What do such cases mean? What is the FBI up to? Trevor Aaronson offers this appraisal:

The FBI's goal is to create a hostile environment for terrorist recruiters and operators -- by raising the risk of even the smallest step toward violent action. It's a form of deterrence… Advocates insist it has been effective, noting that there hasn't been a successful large-scale attack against the United States since 9/11. But what can't be answered -- as many former and current FBI agents acknowledge -- is how many of the bureau's targets would have taken the step over the line at all, were it not for an informant.

Perhaps Aaronson is a bit too generous. The FBI may, at times, be anything but thoughtful in its provocations. It may, in fact, be flatly dopey. COINTELPRO records released since the 1960s under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that it took FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover until 1968 to discover that there was such a thing as a New Left that might be of interest.

Between 1960 and 1968, as the New Left was becoming a formidable force in its own right, the Bureau’s top officials seem to have thought that groups like Students for a Democratic Society were simply covers for the Communist Party, which was like mistaking the fleas for the dog. We have been assured that the FBI of today has learned something since the days of J. Edgar Hoover. But of ignorance and stupidity there is no end.


Trivial and nontrivial pursuits

Entrapment and instigation to commit crimes are in themselves genuine dangers to American liberties, even when the liberties are those of the reckless and wild. But there is another danger to such pursuits: the attention the authorities pay to nonexistent threats (or the creation of such threats) is attention not paid to actual threats.

Anyone concerned about the security of Americans should cast a suspicious eye on the allocation or simply squandering of resources on wild goose chases. Consider some particulars which have recently come to light. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has unearthed documents showing that, in 2011 and 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies were busy surveilling and worrying about a good number of Occupy groups -- during the very time that they were missing actual warnings about actual terrorist actions.

From its beginnings, the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong places. In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked its regional affiliates to report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations, in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and ‘significant criminal activity.’”

Aware that Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 coordination centers known generically as “fusion centers,” was busy monitoring Occupy Boston daily. As the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff recently reported, they were not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook pages and websites but “writing reports on the movement’s potential impact on ‘commercial and financial sector assets.’”

It was in this period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the future Boston Marathon bomber. That city’s police commissioner later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there’s no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either. The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period, they were paying close attention to the internal workings of… Code Pink and Veterans for Peace.


Public agencies and the 'private sector'

So we know that Boston’s master coordinators -- its Committee on Public Safety, you might say -- were worried about constitutionally protected activity, including its consequences for “commercial and financial sector assets.” Unsurprisingly, the feds worked closely with Wall Street even before the settling of Zuccotti Park. More surprisingly, in Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, intelligence was not only pooled among public law enforcement agencies, but shared with private corporations -- and vice versa.

FBI gave 'heads up' on OWS.

Nationally, in 2011, the FBI and DHS were, in the words of Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, “treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity.” Last December using FOIA, PCJF obtained 112 pages of documents (heavily redacted) revealing a good deal of evidence for what might otherwise seem like an outlandish charge: that federal authorities were, in Verheyden-Hilliard’s words, “functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

Consider these examples from PCJF’s summary of federal agencies working directly not only with local authorities but on behalf of the private sector:

• “As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.”
• “The FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to... [22] campus police officials... A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.”
• An entity called the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector,” sent around information regarding Occupy protests at West Coast ports [on November 2, 2011] to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report contained “a ‘handling notice’ that the information is ‘meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…’ Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) reported to DSAC on the relationship between OWS and organized labor.”
• DSAC gave tips to its corporate clients on “civil unrest,” which it defined as running the gamut from “small, organized rallies to large-scale demonstrations and rioting.” It advised corporate employees to dress conservatively, avoid political discussions and “avoid all large gatherings related to civil issues. Even seemingly peaceful rallies can spur violent activity or be met with resistance by security forces.”
• The FBI in Anchorage, Jacksonville, Tampa, Richmond, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Birmingham also gathered information and briefed local officials on wholly peaceful Occupy activities.
• In Jackson, Mississippi, FBI agents “attended a meeting with the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private banks and the Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed an announced protest for ‘National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day’ on December 7, 2011.” Also in Jackson, “the Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a ‘Counterterrorism Preparedness’ alert” that, despite heavy redactions, notes the need to ‘document…the Occupy Wall Street Movement.’”

Sometimes, “intelligence” moves in the opposite direction -- from private corporations to public agencies. Among the collectors of such “intelligence” are entities that, like the various intelligence and law enforcement outfits, do not make distinctions between terrorists and nonviolent protesters.

Consider TransCanada, the corporation that plans to build the 1,179 mile Keystone-XL tar sands pipeline across the U. S. and in the process realize its “vision to become the leading energy infrastructure company in North America.“ The anti-pipeline group Bold Nebraska filed a successful Freedom of Information Act request with the Nebraska State Patrol and so was able to put TransCanada’s briefing slideshow up online.

So it can be documented in living color that the company lectured federal agents and local police to look into the use of “anti-terrorism statutes” against peaceful anti-Keystone activists. TransCanada showed slides that cited as sinister the “attendance” of Bold Nebraska members at public events, noting “Suspicious Vehicles/Photography.”

TransCanada alerted the authorities that Nebraska protesters were guilty of “aggressive/abusive behavior,” citing a local anti-pipeline group that, they said, committed a “slap on the shoulder” at the Merrick County Board Meeting (possessor of said shoulder unspecified). They fingered nonviolent activists by name and photo, paying them the tribute of calling them “'Professionals' & Organized.”

Native News Network pointed out that “although TransCanada's presentation to authorities contains information about property destruction, sabotage, and booby traps, police in Texas and Oklahoma have never alleged, accused, or charged Tar Sands Blockade activists of any such behaviors.”


Centers for fusion, diffusion, and confusion

After September 11, 2001, government agencies at all levels, suddenly eager to break down information barriers and connect the sort of dots that had gone massively unconnected before the al-Qaida attacks, used Department of Homeland Security funds to start “fusion centers.” These are supposed to coordinate anti-terrorist intelligence gathering and analysis. They are also supposed to “fuse” intelligence reports from federal, state, and local authorities, as well as private companies that conduct intelligence operations. According to the ACLU, at least 77 fusion centers currently receive federal funds.

Much is not known about these centers, including just who runs them, by what rules, and which public and private entities are among the fused. There is nothing public about most of them. However, some things are known about a few. Several fusion center reports that have gone public illustrate a remarkably slapdash approach to what constitutes “terrorist danger” and just what kinds of data are considered relevant for law enforcement.

In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee learned, for instance, that the Tennessee Fusion Center was “highlighting on its website map of ‘Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity’ a recent ACLU-TN letter to school superintendents. The letter encourages schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during the holiday season.” (The map is no longer online.)

Fusion command center.

So far, the prize for pure fused wordiness goes to a 215-page manual issued in 2009 by the Virginia Fusion Center (VFC), filled with Keystone Kop-style passages among pages that in their intrusive sweep are anything but funny. The VFC warned, for instance, that “the Garbage Liberation Front (GLF) is an ecological direct action group that demonstrates the joining of anarchism and environmental movements.” Among GLF’s dangerous activities well worth the watching, the VFC included “dumpster diving, squatting, and train hopping.”

In a similarly jaw-dropping manner, the manual claimed -- the italics are mine -- that “Katuah Earth First (KEF), based in Asheville, North Carolina, sends activists throughout the region to train and engage in criminal activity. KEF has trained local environmentalists in non-violent tactics, including blocking roads and leading demonstrations, at action camps in Virginia. While KEF has been primarily involved in protests and university outreach, members have also engaged in vandalism.” Vandalism! Send out an APB!

The VFC also warned that, “[a]lthough the anarchist threat to Virginia is assessed as low, these individuals view the government as unnecessary, which could lead to threats or attacks against government figures or establishments.” It singled out the following 2008 incidents as worth notice:

• At the Martinsville Speedway, “A temporary employee called in a bomb threat during a Sprint Cup race... because he was tired of picking up trash and wanted to go home.”
• In Missouri, “a mobile security team observed an individual photographing an unspecified oil refinery... The person abruptly left the scene before he could be questioned."
• Somewhere in Virginia, “seven passengers aboard a white pontoon boat dressed in traditional Middle Eastern garments immediately sped away after being sighted in the recreational area, which is in close proximity to” a power plant.

What idiot or idiots wrote this script?

Given a disturbing lack of evidence of terrorist actions undertaken or in prospect, the authors even warned:

It is likely that potential incidents of interest are occurring, but that such incidents are either not recognized by initial responders or simply not reported. The lack of detailed information for Virginia instances of monitored trends should not be construed to represent a lack of occurrence.

Lest it be thought that Virginia stands alone and shivering on the summit of bureaucratic stupidity, consider an “intelligence report” from the North Central Texas fusion center, which in a 2009 “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” described, in the ACLU’s words, “a purported conspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the anti-war movement, a former U.S. Congresswoman, the U.S. Treasury Department, and hip hop bands to spread tolerance in the United States, which would ‘provide an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish.’”

And those Virginia and Texas fusion centers were hardly alone in expanding the definition of “terrorist” to fit just about anyone who might oppose government policies. According to a 2010 report in the Los Angeles Times, the Justice Department Inspector General found that “FBI agents improperly opened investigations into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and put the names of some of their members on terrorist watch lists based on evidence that turned out to be ‘factually weak.’”

The Inspector General called "troubling" what the Los Angeles Times described as “singling out some of the domestic groups for investigations that lasted up to five years, and were extended ‘without adequate basis.’”

Subsequently, the FBI continued to maintain investigative files on groups like Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker, and the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, cases where (in the politely put words of the Inspector General’s report) “there was little indication of any possible federal crimes… In some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its 'acts of terrorism' classification."

One of these investigations concerned Greenpeace protests planned for ExxonMobil shareholder meetings. (Note: I was on Greenpeace’s board of directors during three of those years.) The inquiry was kept open "for over three years, long past the shareholder meetings that the subjects were supposedly planning to disrupt." The FBI put the names of Greenpeace members on its federal watch list. Around the same time, an ExxonMobil-funded lobby got the IRS to audit Greenpeace.

This counterintelligence archipelago of malfeasance and stupidity is sometimes fused with ass-covering fabrication. In Pittsburgh, on the day after Thanksgiving 2002 (“a slow work day” in the Justice Department Inspector General’s estimation), a rookie FBI agent was outfitted with a camera, sent to an antiwar rally, and told to look for terrorism suspects. The “possibility that any useful information would result from this make-work assignment was remote,” the report added drily.

The agent was unable to identify any terrorism subjects at the event, but he photographed a woman in order to have something to show his supervisor. He told us he had spoken to a woman leafletter at the rally who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, and that she was probably the person he photographed.

The sequel was not quite so droll. The Inspector General found that FBI officials, including their chief lawyer in Pittsburgh, manufactured postdated “routing slips” and the rest of a phony paper trail to justify this surveillance retroactively.

Moreover, at least one fusion center has involved military intelligence in civilian law enforcement. In 2009, a military operative from Fort Lewis, Washington, worked undercover collecting information on peace groups in the Northwest. In fact, he helped run the Port Militarization Resistance group’s Listserv. Once uncovered, he told activists there were others doing similar work in the Army. How much the military spies on American citizens is unknown and, at the moment at least, unknowable.

Do we hear an echo from the abyss of the counterintelligence programs of the 1960s and 1970s, when FBI memos -- I have some in my own heavily redacted files obtained through an FOIA request -- were routinely copied to military intelligence units? Then, too, military intelligence operatives spied on activists who violated no laws, were not suspected of violating laws, and had they violated laws, would not have been under military jurisdiction in any case.

During those years, more than 1,500 Army intelligence agents in plain clothes were spying, undercover, on domestic political groups (according to Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1967-70, an unpublished dissertation by former Army intelligence captain Christopher H. Pyle). They posed as students, sometimes growing long hair and beards for the purpose, or as reporters and camera crews. They recorded speeches and conversations on concealed tape recorders. The Army lied about their purposes, claiming they were interested solely in “civil disturbance planning.”

Years later, I met one of these agents, now retired, in San Francisco. He knew more about what I was doing in the late 1960s than my mother did.


Squaring circles

In 2009, President Obama told the graduating class at the Naval Academy that, “as Americans, we reject the false choice between our security and our ideals.” Security and ideals: officially we want both. But how do you square circles, especially in a world in which “security” has often enough become a stand-in for whatever intelligence operatives decide to do?

Obama at Naval Academy.

The ACLU’s Tennessee office sums the situation up nicely: “While the ostensible purpose of fusion centers, to improve sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different levels and arms of government, is legitimate and important, using the centers to monitor protected First Amendment activity clearly crosses the line.”

Nationally, the ACLU rightly worries about who is in charge of fusion centers and by what rules they operate, about what becomes of privacy when private corporations are inserted into the intelligence process, about what the military is doing meddling in civilian law enforcement, about data-mining operations that Federal guidelines encourage, and about the secrecy walls behind which the fusion centers operate.

Even when fusion centers do their best to square that circle in their own guidelines, like the ones obtained by the ACLU from Massachusetts’s Commonwealth Fusion Center (CFC), the knots in which they tie themselves are all over the page. Imagine, then, what happens when you let informers or agents provocateurs loose in actual undercover situations.

“Undercovers,” writes the Massachusetts CFC, “may not seek to gain access to private meetings and should not actively participate in meetings… At the preliminary inquiry stage, sources and informants should not be used to cultivate relationships with persons and groups that are the subject of the preliminary inquiry.” So far so good. Then, it adds, “Investigators may, however, interview, obtain, and accept information known to sources and informants.” By eavesdropping, say? Collecting trash? Hacking? All without warrants? Without probable cause?

“Undercovers and informants,” the guidelines continue, “are strictly prohibited from engaging in any conduct the sole purpose of which is to disrupt the lawful exercise of political activity, from disrupting the lawful operations of an organization, from sowing seeds of distrust between members of an organization involved in lawful activity, or from instigating unlawful acts or engaging in unlawful or unauthorized investigative activities.” Now, go back and note that little, easy-to-miss word “sole.” Who knows just what grim circles that tiny word squares?

The Massachusetts CFC at least addresses the issue of entrapment: “Undercovers should not become so involved in a group that they are participating in directing the operations of a group, either by accepting a formal position in the hierarchy or by informally establishing the group's policy and priorities. This does not mean an undercover cannot support a group's policies and priorities; rather an undercover should not become a driving force behind a group's unlawful activities.”

Did Cleveland’s fusion center have such guidelines? Did they follow them? Do other state fusion centers? We don’t know.

Whatever the fog of surveillance, when it comes to informers, agents provocateurs, and similar matters, four things are clear enough:

• Terrorist plots arise, in the United States as elsewhere, with the intent of committing murder and mayhem. Since 2001, in the U.S., these have been almost exclusively the work of freelance Islamist ideologues like the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston. None have been connected in any meaningful way with any legitimate organization or movement.
• Government surveillance may in some cases have been helpful in scotching such plots, but there is no evidence that it has been essential.
• Even based on the limited information available to us, since September 11, 2001, the net of surveillance has been thrown wide indeed. Tabs have been kept on members of quite a range of suspect populations, including American Muslims, anarchists, and environmentalists, among others -- in situation after situation where there was no probable cause to suspect preparations for a crime.
• At least on occasion -- we have no way of knowing how often -- agents provocateurs on government payrolls have spurred violence.

How much official unintelligence is at work? How many demonstrations are being poked and prodded by undercover agents? How many acts of violence are being suborned? It would be foolish to say we know. At least equally foolish would be to trust the authorities to keep to honest-to-goodness police work when they are so mightily tempted to take the low road into straight-out, unwarranted espionage and instigation.

[Note: Thanks to the ACLU’s Michael German and Matt Harwood and TomDispatch’s Nick Turse, for research help on this piece.] 

This article was cross-posted to and originally published at TomDispatch. Copyright 2013 Todd Gitlin.

[Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, the chair of the PhD program in communications, and the author of The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left; The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; and Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Mike McGuire and Lisa Fithian on Occupy Movement and 'We Are Many'

Mike McGuire, left, co-editor of We Are Many, and activist/writer Lisa Fithian.
Rag Radio podcast:
Mike McGuire and Lisa Fithian
reflect on the Occupy Movement
and the book, We Are Many

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / January 23, 2013

Writer/activists Mike McGuire and Lisa Fithian were Thorne Dreyer's guests Friday, January 18, 2013, on Rag Radio, a syndicated radio show produced at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas.

On the show, McGuire and Fithian discuss the legacy and future of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and, more specifically, the 2012 AK Press anthology, We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. Mike McGuire was co-editor of the book, and Lisa Fithian contributed the essay, "Strategic Directions for the Occupy Movement."

Listen to the interview, here:


According to The Rag Blog's Ron Jacobs, the book -- which compiles the work of more than 50 writers, artists, and photographers -- has the "best overall take to date on the meaning of Occupy, its shortcomings and strengths, and its potential future."

Baltimore native Mike McGuire is a builder and organizer with a background in labor, Latin America, global justice, direct action, and creative protest. He has been working within the Occupy movement since its birth on September 17, 2011.

Lisa Fithian, an Austin-based social justice activist, community organizer, and nonviolence trainer, has for the last 35 years worked with peace, labor, youth, immigrant, environmental, and racial justice groups, and has taught creative nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience tactics. Lisa organized relief efforts with the Common Ground Collective in New Orleans and has served on the National Steering Committee of United for Peace and Justice.

The Rag Blog's Jacobs wrote about We Are Many :

Away from the intensity of battles with police and the day-to-day reality... These writers take a hard look at manifestations of racism and sexism in the movement; they discuss the nature of violence and its role in popular movements; and they discuss these and other questions from a perspective that represents the grassroots democratic and anti-capitalist philosophy that motivated the movement.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, January 25, 2013: Robert Pollin, author of Back to Full Employment.

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Bill Fletcher, Jr. : 'Flip the Script': Jobs over Deficits

Image from The Fiscal Times.
The Republican lock on Congress
means a strategy for the cities

If we are to fight it out on the economy, this will not happen in the Republican Congressional Districts. It is a fight that we will have to take up in cities around the country. It means social protests which are disruptive.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2013

There is a strategic question that faces progressives, one that is receiving increased attention. Due to the 2010 elections and the Republican domination of state legislatures, Congressional Districts have been gerrymandered in order to guarantee a lack of any significant electoral challenges. In other words, these Districts have Republican Congresspeople who are not worried about opposition.

As we saw in the lead up to the "fiscal cliff" negotiations/resolution, most Republicans felt no internal pressure to compromise. It is quite likely that they will feel little pressure in their districts for at least 10 years. As a result the sort of pressure that they must feel must transcend their districts and actually be more at the societal level.

What this means is that while progressives absolutely need an independent electoral strategy that builds locally-based organizations capable of successfully running candidates for office -- both inside and outside of the Democratic primary system -- that is insufficient.

In fact, it is the Occupy Movement that pointed us in the direction of the other leg of such a movement. What the Occupy Movement accomplished, among other things, was to change the social discourse. Despite every effort by the mainstream media to dismiss the Occupy Movement, it not only grew but forced the country to start to address the question of economic inequality.

In the current context the implications should be clear. If, for instance, we are to fight it out on the economy and specifically on unemployment, this will not happen on the basis of fights in the Republican Congressional Districts. It will be a fight that we will have to take up in cities, including but not limited to state capitols, around the country. It means social protests which are disruptive.

In order for this to happen we must actually re-train many social movement activists and thinkers in the lessons of the 1930s labor movement, the 1950s-1960s freedom movements (including but not limited to the Civil Rights Movement), the movement against the Vietnam War, and the work of the early environmental movement.

Occupy, in that sense, was onto something. We must carry out a fight for space as part of the fight for power. Land occupations, eviction blockades, boycotts, as well as mass demonstrations, are all critical. [Note: in fact, we need, right now, a series of REALLY mass marches for jobs.] In other words, the sort of pressure that needs to be brought about must be something that Republicans AND Democrats feel, and in fact, becomes a serious source of concern.

Before we find ourselves wallowing in self-pity as we worry about the Republican "lock," let’s rethink our strategy and tactics. We may be able to flip the script, and sooner rather than in the distant future.

This article was originally published at billfletcherjr.com and was distributed by Progressive America Rising.

[Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a racial justice, labor, and international writer and activist. He is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com, the co-author of Solidarity Divided, and the author of They’re Bankrupting Us: And Twenty other Myths about Unions. He can be reached at billfletcherjr@gmail.com. Read more articles by and about Bill Fletcher on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : 'We Are Many' Offers Thoughtful Analysis of Occupy Movement

From occupation to liberation:
A review of 'We Are Many'

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / December 11, 2012

This aesthetically pleasing volume has the best overall take to date on the meaning of Occupy, its shortcomings and strengths, and its potential future.

[We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation, edited by Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, and Mike McGuire; Afterword by David Graeber (2012: AK Press); Paperback; 355 pp; $21.]

Despite a myriad of obituaries for the movement that began in Manhattan in September 2011, the people of Occupy refuse to let it die.

There are hundreds involved in the Occupy Sandy effort in the New York City region following the devastation of Tropical Storm Sandy. Individuals and groups connected to Occupy Wall Street have organized relief efforts that are feeding and caring for thousands of people left without power, work, and homes.

Those being helped are primarily the working poor and folks on assistance. They are also those traditional relief efforts tend to ignore, precisely because of their income status and, in the USA, also perhaps because of their skin tone or ethnic origin.

The vastness of the Occupy Sandy effort is testament to the Occupy movement's most obvious strength: its ability to organize rapidly and from the ground up.

Since the advent of Occupy and the demise of its encampments, there have been millions of words written about the movement. From Fox News to the Revolutionary Communist Party's journal Revolution; from Le Monde to the Jerusalem Post; and numerous journals, websites, blogs and television networks, Occupy Wall Street and the movement it spawned provoked a storm of commentary.

Some of it was sensationalist and some of it perhaps overly academic. It was occasionally overly laudatory and often overly critical. Overall, however, the press coverage did something that one could argue no left-leaning movement since the 1960s and 1970s had done. It changed the nature of the national conversation.

Like the black liberation and antiwar movement of those decades long past changed the way mainstream America thought about the treatment of African Americans and the nature of its foreign policy, Occupy changed the way mainstream America thought about its economic system. Or, maybe it just vocalized thoughts people had held but did not know how to vocalize in a way that would draw some attention.

A year later there have been a number of column inches written about Occupy and its meaning. The articles written in the mainstream press tend to acknowledge Occupy's influence in the national conversation. At the same time, these articles tend to diminish its long term role. Perhaps because it is too early to tell. Perhaps because they hope it doesn't have one.

Occupy was the greatest manifestation of anti-authoritarian organizing in the United States in recent history. It proved that spontaneity can work. The taking of property and occupying it is a radical act in itself and obviously one the powers that be find threatening.

The involvement of the houseless was and is important. Their presence and involvement not only made the gross shortcomings of monopoly capitalism real, they also provided food and a reaffirmation of value to those on the streets and an experience at self organizing for all. Yet, it suffered from some of the same ills present in the larger society: racism, sexis, and questions around violence and leadership.

Occupy was/is not a movement that began with highly defined politics. This was its strength and its weakness. Many different philosophies set up camp under its banner. Anarchists, socialists, libertarians, and liberals. Even the occasional tea partier and Democrat.

Yet, despite this multitude of philosophies that came to share the Occupy camps, the one that was its impetus remains a generally defined type of left anarchism. Somewhat situationist like the poster artists of Paris in May 1968 while also derivative of the squatters' movement of the 1970s and 1980s in Europe, Occupy also drew from the anarchism of the Yippies, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the punk culture that came later. Therefore, it would seem that the best analysis of Occupy would come from folks that had similar roots.

Guess what? The best analysis of Occupy does come from such folks. Titled We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation and published by AK Press, this aesthetically pleasing volume has the best overall take to date on the meaning of Occupy, its shortcomings and strengths, and its potential future.

Never shortchanging the arguments within the movement, the writers collected in We Are Many take on the questions of racism, sexism, the Black Bloc, and the cops, and they do so in an intelligent and lively manner. No other group of writers has done so well in exploring the Occupy movement from within its ranks. In fact, no other group of writers has done so well in exploring the Occupy movement, period.

Unlike earlier books about Occupy, most of which were published either during the life of the encampments or immediately after, We Are Many has the perspective a little time often provides. Away from the intensity of battles with police and the day-to-day reality of camping in the middle of some urban space, this book presents the reader with thoughtful essays designed to raise questions about strategy and politics that might have been pushed aside in the aforementioned day-to-day reality.

Earlier writings about Occupy were often chronicles of organizing; sometimes those chronicles were objective attempts to describe the daily life of the writer and those around them; other times they were impressionistic attempts to do the same thing.

We Are Many has its share of these essays, yet even those indicate a deeper reflection and understanding of Occupy's historical meaning and the potential it unleashed for the future of oppositional and extra-parliamentary movements, especially in the United States.

Writers who appear in this volume include some names fairly well known in anti-authoritarian and left circles: Cindy Milstein, Vijay Prashad, Frances Fox Piven, Andy Cornell, David Graeber, George Cicciariello-Maher, and the Crimethinc Collective, to name just a few. This list is a small representation of the more than 50 writers and artists collected here.

AK Press has done a great service by publishing them together in this volume. Like so many of the publications released by this collective, not only is this book filled with good, thoughtful writing and great art, it is attractively presented. These writers take a hard look at manifestations of racism and sexism in the movement; they discuss the nature of violence and its role in popular movements; and they discuss these and other questions from a perspective that represents the grassroots democratic and anti-capitalist philosophy that motivated the movement.

We do not know what will happen next with the movement awakened by that first presence in lower Manhattan back in the autumn of 2011. In Europe, general strikes and daily protests continue to occur as neoliberal capitalism takes its ransom from governments across the continent. In the Middle East and Central Asia, wars continue to flare and military occupations continue to be challenged.

In North America, the corporate and financial elites continue to ravish the economy and politicians conspire to destroy the remaining social welfare and retirement systems previous generations fought hard to build. WalMart workers are organizing unions and Quebec students fought against university privatization moves and won.

It is not the end of the battle, but the beginning. Onward.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Daniel Coshnear's 'Occupy' Stories Are as Contemporary as the Latest Tweet

Daniel Coshnear's
'Occupy and Other Love Stories'

As contemporary as the latest tweet, Coshnear’s men, women, and children cry out for the lost soul of America itself.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 23, 2012

[Occupy and Other Love Stories by Daniel Coshnear; art by Squeak Carnwath (October 2012: Kelly’s Cove Press); Paperback; 135 pp; $20.]

The characters in Daniel Coshnear’s political short stories read Stephen King and Raymond Carver. They smoke Camels and marijuana, drive Sentras, work at Safeways, and as school janitors. Preoccupied and in denial, they’ve survived trauma and now they’re suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a host of social and psychological ills.

As contemporary as the latest tweet, Coshnear’s men, women, and children cry out for the lost soul of America itself.

The 12 stories in Occupy and Other Love Stories take place in Santa Rosa, California, and along the Russian River in Sonoma County, though one is set in New York, and the very last conjures up Berkeley during the Occupy Wall Street Movement last spring. It’s an overtly polemical tale and might well be called revolutionary romanticism.

Coshnear’s heart is with the rebels and the in-your-face citizens who refuse to be silenced or sit still. For the most part, however, his characters don’t give speeches or march in the streets. They’re part of the 99% and too busy dealing with death, divorce, depression, and suicide to be distracted by leaflets, posters, and slogans.

Years from now a Ph.D. student writing about the culture of the Occupy Movement will surely point to Occupy and Other Love Stories as an example of the fiction that emerged from the protests against Wall Street immorality and criminality. It’s also fiction that stands on its own merits without ties to Occupy or any social movement.

Coshnear’s stories are compact with vivid descriptions of people and places, and with crisp dialogue that’s practically audible. Reading them is like watching a series of video clips that depict domestic life with images of Iraq on TV, and real cops lurking on the sidewalk outside the front door.

Parents and children inhabit “Early Onset” and “Custodian” in which a father and his son disconnect and then reconnect. Love, sex, and relationships animate “Avulsion,” “Borscht on the Ceiling,” which takes place in New York, and “Occupy” -- the title story -- in which a professor finds romance with a student.

The characters play their own roles, and speak their minds independently of the author, though sometimes he analyzes them and even describes the medications they take, as in “You Can Put Your Name on It, If You Want to.”

Pills help the characters, though they long for more than legal and illegal drugs. They want to know the answers to all the big questions, such as “if bad things happen to bad people,” and if their own children might one day inhabit “a better world.”

[Jonah Raskin, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, is an author and a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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ELECTION 2012 / Jonah Raskin : A View from California

"California Dreaming." Art by Tom Horner / Dribble. Inset image below from San Francisco Sentinal.
A view from California:
Which way the wind blows

Obama’s reelection is only the beginning. The hard work of transforming the nation lies ahead

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 8, 2012

SANTA ROSA, California -- Watching national politics from the coast of California, where I live, and where nearly everyone votes for Democrats, feels weird. It felt especially weird on the evening of Election Day as I waited and watched to hear whether Obama would be reelected or Romney would waltz into the White House along with Paul Ryan and Karl Rove.

Whomever Californians chose for president didn’t seem to matter at all. It was all decided before the vote was counted in my own state, and almost all of the attention was focused on what the media calls “swing states.”

As it turned out, Obama won the swing states, including Ohio. He lost the South big, lost the heartland -- from North Dakota to Texas -- and lost the white male vote over the age of 50. But he won the rest: the urban vote, the black vote, the Latino vote, and the vote of the 47% that Romney abused in a campaign speech that came back to bite him big time.

It seems clear that the future of American politics belongs to the Democratic Party, which is now clearly the party of youth, Latinos, women, and the working class. (Hey and a few liberal millionaires, too.)

It’s also the party of students with loans, families who love Obamacare, same sex couples, both married and unmarried, and marijuana smokers who voted to legalize weed in Colorado and Washington.

If the Obama victory signals anything it signals the continuing wave of the cultural revolution that began in the 1960s, spread in the 1970s, took a beating under Reagan in the 1980s, and again with Bush I and Bush II, and that came back strong in 2008.

Obama’s reelection in 2012 is a victory for grassroots democracy of the kind that appeared in the streets and in the parks of Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic National Convention and that literally took a beating from Mayor Daley’s police. That old Democratic Party is gone.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement played a crucial role in the reelection of Obama because it made Americans aware of social, economic, and political inequalities and injustices. It helped us to see that Romney belonged to the party of the 1%, the party that would like to cut social security, go back to the greed feed of the Bush years, and let citizens fend for themselves without government help in the wake of unemployment, storms such as Sandy, and human-made disasters, too.

Watching it all unfold from California felt pretty good on Election Day. We may not tip the scales, or count in the political balance of things, but we know how to vote, whom to vote for, and we don’t swing back and forth. We want Obamacare; we want legal weed; we want same sex marriages to be lawful; we want the government to help the poor, the needy, the homeless and the hungry, just as Roosevelt’s government helped Americans in the Depression of the 1930s.

In fact, Californians voted for Governor Jerry Brown’s measure to increase the state sales tax and to levy higher taxes on people making over $250,000 a year. The funds are earmarked for education where they’re definitely needed.

I don’t know if California is the dog that wags the tail of the nation, or the rest of the country is the dog and California the tail it wags. Do we start trends or do we finish them? It’s not clear, though I hope that the rest of the country begins to like and to accept the idea of taxing the rich and the super-rich. It’s about time.

Obama’s reelection is only the beginning. The hard work of transforming the nation lies ahead. We’ve got to stop war, stop Wall Street greed, stop corporations from funding politicians, stop old conservative white men from bullying and beating up their own sons and daughters, nephews and nieces.

Hey, there’s as much of a generation gap now as there was in 1968, though today it’s clearer which way the winds are blowing, and clearer, too, that history is on the side of youth and change, not on the side of the Mitt Romney’s and the Karl Rove’s of the world.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream, The Radical Jack London and Rock ‘n’ Roll Women and a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Chris Hedges : Heartland Resistance to the Pipeline

Treesitters in Winnsboro, Texas. Photo from the Tar Sands Blockade.
Resistance in the heartland:
The Great Tar Sands Blockade

Ranchers, farmers, and enraged citizens, often after seeing their land seized by eminent domain and their water supplies placed under mortal threat, have united with Occupiers and activists to oppose the building of the Keystone XL tar sand pipeline.

By Chris Hedges / Truthdig / October 17, 2012

Also see " Texas landowners take a rare stand against Big Oil," an AP story at Salon.com, "Keystone XL pipeline opponents turn to civil disobedience" at The Washington Post, and this video from Democracy Now!

The next great battle of the Occupy movement may not take place in city parks and plazas, where the security and surveillance state is blocking protesters from setting up urban encampments. Instead it could arise in the nation’s heartland, where some ranchers, farmers, and enraged citizens, often after seeing their land seized by eminent domain and their water supplies placed under mortal threat, have united with Occupiers and activists to oppose the building of the Keystone XL tar sand pipeline.

They have formed an unusual coalition called Tar Sands Blockade (TSB). Centers of resistance being set up in Texas and Oklahoma and on tribal lands along the proposed route of this six-state, 1,700-mile proposed pipeline are fast becoming flashpoints in the war of attrition we have begun against the corporate state. Join them.

The XL pipeline, which would cost $7 billion and whose southern portion is under construction and slated for completion next year, is the most potent symbol of the dying order. If completed, it will pump 1.1 million barrels a day of unrefined tar sand fluid from tar sand mine fields in Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast.

Tar sand oil is not conventional crude oil. It is a synthetic slurry that, because tar sand oil is solid in its natural state, must be laced with a deadly brew of toxic chemicals and gas condensates to get it to flow. Tar sands are boiled and diluted with these chemicals before being blasted down a pipeline at high pressure. Water sources would be instantly contaminated if there was a rupture.

The pipeline would cross nearly 2,000 U.S. waterways, including the Ogallala Aquifer, source of one-third of the United States’ farmland irrigation water. And it is not a matter of if, but when, it would spill. TransCanada’s Keystone I pipeline, built in 2010, leaked 12 times in its first 12 months of operation. Because the extraction process emits such a large quantity of greenhouse gases, the pipeline has been called the fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet.

The climate scientist James Hansen warns that successful completion of the pipeline, along with the exploitation of Canadian tar sands it would facilitate, would mean “game over for the climate.”

Keystone XL is part of the final phase of extreme exploitation by the corporate state. The corporations intend to squeeze the last vestiges of profit from an ecosystem careening toward collapse. Most of the oil that can be reached through drilling from traditional rigs is depleted. The fossil fuel industry has, in response, developed new technologies to go after dirtier, less efficient forms of energy.

These technologies bring with them a dramatically heightened cost to ecosystems. They accelerate the warming of the planet. And they contaminate vital water sources. Deep-water Arctic drilling, tar sand extraction, hydraulic fracturing (or hydro-fracking) and drilling horizontally, given the cost of extraction and effects on the environment, are a form of ecological suicide.

Appealing to the corporate state, or trusting the leaders of either party to halt the assault after the election, is futile. We must immediately obstruct this pipeline or accept our surrender to forces that, in the name of profit, intend to cash in on the death throes of the planet.

Nine protesters, surviving on canned food and bottled water, have been carrying out a tree-sit for more than two weeks to block the path of the pipeline near Winnsboro, Texas. Other Occupiers have chained themselves to logging equipment, locked themselves in trucks carrying pipe to construction sites and hung banners at equipment staging areas.

Doug Grant, a former Exxon employee, was arrested outside Winnsboro when he bound himself to clear-cutting machinery. Shannon Bebe and Benjamin Franklin, after handcuffing themselves to equipment being used to cut down trees, were tasered, pepper-sprayed, and physically assaulted by local police, reportedly at the request of TransCanada officials.

East Texas great-grandmother and farmer, Eleanor Fairchild, was arrested Oct. 4 while blocking TransCanada bulldozers on her property. Image from Tar Sands Blockade / Facebook.
The actress Daryl Hannah, along with a 78-year-old East Texas great-grandmother and farmer, Eleanor Fairchild, was arrested Oct. 4 while blocking TransCanada bulldozers on Fairchild’s property. The Fairchild farm, like other properties seized by TransCanada, was taken under Texas eminent domain laws on behalf of a foreign corporation.

At the same time, private security companies employed by TransCanada, along with local law enforcement, have been aggressively detaining and restricting reporters, including a New York Times reporter and photographer, who are attempting to cover the protests. Most of the journalists have been on private property with the permission of the landowners.

I reached climate activist Tom Weis nearly 1,000 miles from the blockade, in the presidential battleground state of Colorado, by phone Friday. Weis is pedaling up and down the Front Range, hand-delivering copies of an open letter -- signed by citizens, some of whom, like Daryl Hannah, have been arrested trying to block the XL pipeline -- to Obama and Romney campaign offices. He has been joined by indigenous leaders, including Vice President of Oglala Lakota Nation Tom Poor Bear, and in Denver by members of the Occupy Denver community.

Weis last fall rode his bright-yellow “rocket trike” -- a recumbent tricycle wrapped in a lightweight aerodynamic shell -- 2,150 miles along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route. He was accompanied by Ron Seifert, now a spokesperson for the Tar Sands Blockade. Weis’ “Keystone XL Tour of Resistance” started at the U.S.-Canada border in Montana and ended 10 weeks later at the Texas Gulf Coast. He recently produced a 15-minute video in which he interviewed farmers, ranchers, and indigenous leaders who live in the path of the project.

“Keystone XL is being built as an export pipeline for Canada to sell its dirty oil to foreign markets,” he said. “This is not about energy security; it’s about securing TransCanada’s profits.”

Weis cited a report commissioned by Cornell University that concluded that the jobs estimates put forward by TransCanada were unsubstantiated and that the project could actually destroy more jobs than it created.

Barack Obama delayed, until after the election, a decision on permitting the northern leg of the pipeline after a series of civil disobedience actions led by Bill McKibben’s 350.org in front of the White House a year ago, as well as fierce opposition from ranchers in states such as Nebraska. The president, by announcing the delay, put an end to the widespread protests.

Obama, however, flew to Cushing, Okla., in March to call for the southern leg of the pipeline to be fast-tracked. Standing in a pipeline yard, he said, “I’m directing my administration to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles, and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done.”

Obama’s rival for the presidency, Mitt Romney, was no less effusive in his support for Keystone XL, saying to a Pittsburgh audience in May: “If I’m president, we’ll build it if I have to build it myself.”

Grassroots organizing along the proposed pipeline has grown, especially as the project began to be put in place.

If completed, the 485-mile southern leg, from Cushing to Nederland, Texas, would slice through major waterways including the Neches, Red, Angelina, and Sabine rivers as well as the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which provides drinking water for some 10 million Texans. The southern section of the pipeline is now the focus of the Tar Sands Blockade.

The invasive extraction of tar sands and shale deposits, as well as deep-sea drilling in the Arctic, Alaska, the Eastern Seaboard, and the Gulf of Mexico, has been sold to the U.S. public as a route to energy independence, a way to create millions of new jobs, and a boost to the sagging economy, but this is another corporate lie.

The process of extracting shale oil through hydraulic fracking, for example, requires millions of gallons of chemically treated water that leaves behind poisoned aquifers and huge impoundment ponds of toxic waste. The process of extracting oil shale, or kerogen, requires it to be melted, meaning that tremendous amounts of energy are required for a marginal return. The process of tar sand extraction requires vast open pit mining operations or pumping underground that melts the oil with steam jets.

Tar sand extraction also releases significantly more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil drilling, meaning an acceleration of global warming. Drilling in the Arctic, with its severe weather, costs as much as half a billion dollars per well.

Tar sands protesters block TransCanada truck on August 29, 2012, in Livingston, Texas. Image from In These Times.
These processes are part of a desperate effort by corporations to make profits before a final systems collapse. Droughts are already sweeping the Midwest. The battle between farmers and fossil fuel corporations for diminishing water sources has begun. Yet our ruling elite refuses to face the stark reality of climate change. They ignore the imperative to find other ways of structuring our economies and our relationship to the environment. They myopically serve a doomed system. And, if left unstopped, the cost for all of us will be catastrophic.

Weis, a former congressional staffer, expects the last section of the pipeline to be authorized by the president once the election is over.

“It is critical that people understand that completion of the southern leg of Keystone XL -- which President Obama and Gov. Romney both fully support -- would give TransCanada a direct line from Alberta’s landlocked tar sands mine fields to refineries in Texas for export overseas,” Weis explained. “By tapping into Keystone I, which has already been built, the southern leg of Keystone XL would open the floodgates to tar sands exploitation in Canada. At a time when the climate is already dangerously destabilizing before our eyes, I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”

He described Obama’s and Romney’s “failure to stand up to this corporate bully” as a “failure to defend America.”

“It is unconscionable to put the interests of a transnational corporation before the health, safety, and economic well-being of the American people,” he said.

Weis sees the struggle to halt the Keystone XL pipeline as a symbolic crossroads for the country and the planet. One path leads, he said, toward decay. The other toward renewal.

There comes a time when we must say to the ruling elite: ‘No more,’ ” he said. “There comes a time when we must make a stand for the future of our children, and for all life on Earth. That time is here. That time is now.”

[Chris Hedges, a columnist for Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.]

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