“Perpetuating Itself”: America’s War Machine Sells Fear And Loathing Beyond Ferguson; Black And Brown People Pay The Price
The War Machine is the violent nexus of military and economic forces that grinds us up to perpetuate itself. With politicians of all stripes in its pockets and buoyed by lobbyists, the War Machine is beyond the reach of civil government and easily tramples individual souls, especially when they inhabit bodies of color. War is a big, multi-trillion-dollar business, requiring the sales, construction and operation of guns, drones, missiles, governmental armies, private armies, public prisons, private prisons and the like.
While the War Machine has been operated most obviously overseas in places like the Middle East, and domestically behind bars, it is now increasingly clear that the War Machine is also operating on America’s streets.
The War Machine has always made for strange bedfellows. Even as the conflict in Afghanistan, America’s longest foreign war, ostensibly ends, America’s largest police department and its union are in sometimes open conflict against their civilian commander, supported by a right wing that normally hates public unions.
The NYPD’s beef with its chief? That Mayor Bill de Blasio merely said he had “the talk” about police that all parents of black boys have with their sons. My father had it with me, as did every parent of every black person I know. But the War Machine will accept no criticism, ever: not for torturing brown people overseas, nor for making brown children fear police at home.
Beware she who dares to speak out at such times. When a Fox affiliate selectively edits the words of Baltimore protester Tawanda Jones to make it sound as if she said “kill a cop” when she did not, it is an example of how the War Machine hates dissent. Speech feels as under assault now as it did after 9/11, because it’s one thing for the press to express its belief, however misguided, that the exercise of free speech isn’t warranted. But it should be another for government officials to declare if, when and how dissent is appropriate. In 2001, George W Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, once warned “all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do”; in 2014, de Blasio declared after the shooting of two police officers that it was time to “put aside political debates, put aside protests”. Protest and dissent scare the War Machine.
Moments of crisis are a prime time to sell fear, and “patriotic” policy, and guns. Demanding considerations of peace leading up to a foreign war threaten those sales. Demanding a consideration of the 1,100 people killed by American police last year, even after two police officers have been killed, may similarly threaten the standard narrative – and that’s why it’s so important for protesters to keep forcing this conversation, about real lives and real justice and real reform, right now.
Because Washington won’t. Our national consciousness may now be raised about the dangers of arming of our local police departments with military-grade weapons after citizens across the nation demanded that black lives, indeed, matter. Our eyes may have been opened to torture committed by our military. But neither the right nor the “left” in Washington have any plans to punish the torturers – nor stem the flow of military equipment intended for use against civilians into Ferguson, Brooklyn and beyond – anytime soon.
When I watched, with horror, as the mother of Antonio Martin realized live on Ustream that her son had just been shot by police, I thought to myself, “The War Machine will be gunning for her next.” It will blame her for being the cause of police violence against black bodies, and not examine the context in which that violence occurred. The War Machine does not want us as a society to ask of ourselves the difficult questions about why it is that black people, abroad and at home, have been kept in the margins and away from economic opportunity, employment, education and safety. It prefers that we maintain the status quo and uncritically support the state, no matter how violent and oppressive.
The War Machine will say, at best, that the answer to such violence against civilians is merely technological, because driving up the sale of body-cams and more guns is what it does so well. But, more likely, the War Machine will want to make an example of Antonio Martin’s mother: that she and her son are a good excuse for more surveillance of black bodies, even though we know over-policing does not reduce crime.
Of course, the War Machine doesn’t care particularly about black mothers or black women. The story of a deranged man from Georgia going on a shooting spree has been entirely about the death of two police officers in New York, and hardly at all about the shooting of Shaneka Thompson in Baltimore. Similarly, the War Machine doesn’t care especially about Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos as individuals; like Ismaaiyl Brinsley did, it just sees them as cops. To the War Machine, violence must repeat itself: that’s why those officers’ deaths are being heralded as an occasion to suspend dissent – as a moment of “grieving, not grievance” – and not as a time to question American violence overall.
The War Machine has always had an insatiable need for bodies of color from before the birth of this nation. The genocide of Native Americans, the Atlantic Slave trade of Africans, the conquest of Mexicans, the colonization of Filipinos and Hawaiians, the mass importation of Chinese workers subsequently denied citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act: the War Machine created and then expanded the size of the United States using non-white bodies, waging war against them, and making them second-class citizens (when it deigned to make them citizens at all). Though the 13th Amendment ended legal slavery, it did not end the War Machine’s assault on black people, which has simply morphed from slavery, sharecropping and Jim Crow segregation, to modern day schools which are just as segregated, police violence, economic exploitation and mass incarceration. The War Machine has so effectively decimated the black community, for example, that for the few of us who do manage to get, say, an education, it is almost meaningless as a way to move up in the world.
The Black Lives Matter movement is about more than just justice for our deaths: it’s about the depreciation of black life in the service of accumulation of stuff for white people, from slavery to “security” to shopping. This status quo is protected, often violently, by police. And now as the War on Terror (allegedly) scales down, there is an oversupply of “stuff” used to commit violence in the name of quelling it – and an undersupply of violence to quell. The “ongoing slippage between policing and war that still visibly characterizes the present”, as the historian Nikhil Pal Singh recently observed, shouldn’t be seen as mere coincidence: it’s the War Machine coming home, and coming home as hungry as ever.
By: Steven W. Thrasher, The Guardian, January 5, 2014
“A Crash Course In Congressional Mischief”: Voters Have An Entirely New Reason To Scorn Congress
After years of excoriating Congress for not legislating, Americans got a crash course Tuesday night about the mischief that can transpire when Congress actually fulfills its duties.
With both parties (for a change) committed to passing a spending bill by Thursday to avoid a government shutdown, the comprehensive legislation became a lobbyist’s delight. These omnibus last-minute bills traditionally pass Congress with virtually no debate. And since Barack Obama would never veto legislation to fund the government over minor provisions, anything small snuck into the bill is as good as inscribed into law.
Which brings us to the gem that Matea Gold of the Washington Post discovered on Page 1,599 of the 1,603-page bill. The provision — inserted in the legislation by persons unknown — would suddenly allow a married couple to give as much as $1.56 million to their political party and its committees in a two-year election cycle.
No, that isn’t a typo. Without resorting to Super PACs or taking advantage of a new loophole from the Supreme Court, couples or individuals could give roughly eight times more to their party in 2015 than they could in 2014. As election law expert Kenneth Gross told the Washington Post, “The cost of an ambassadorship just went up.”
Technically, this new giving can only go to three designated areas — convention costs, recount expenses and building funds. But while nothing is certain until regulations are written, it is a safe bet that these categories are likely to be porous. Hypothetically, funds for a new addition to the Democratic National Committee that houses the computers that contain the party’s voter files might also be used to update these registration lists. If nothing else, the parties would no longer have to take money from their general operating funds to pay for these activities.
A case can be made for strengthening the political parties in a Super PAC era. If the parties were too financially powerful in the 1990s when they were the only conduits for unregulated “soft money” contributions, now they are suffering from, in effect, being mere millionaires in a billionaire age. This is especially true as Super PACs are beginning to take on many of the traditional functions of parties like candidate recruitment, voter contact and polling.
It is worth recalling that parties are a force for responsibility and moderation in politics — since their ultimate goal is winning elections rather than enforcing an ideological agenda. Also, as ongoing organizations, the Republican and Democratic National Committees will still be around when the enthusiasms of the current generation of Super PAC donors wane or turn to art collecting and buying sports teams.
As a result, there could have been a robust public debate over the best way to fund political parties in this new electoral environment. Both Republican and Democratic party leaders — as well as the candidates themselves — should come to realize that they are the big losers when the mega-rich dominate campaigns through Super PACs.
It would have been possible to imagine bipartisan legislation in the next few years that would have traded increased legal contribution limits for enhanced disclosure of Super PAC and “dark money” spending. Or even swapped more generous giving for a functioning Federal Election Commission.
Instead Congress in its infinite wisdom decided that “dark money” legislating was a wiser solution. And blaming this one exclusively on the Republicans is probably not true, especially since the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is currently $20 million in debt.
The result is that the McCain-Feingold legislation, signed with such high hopes 12 years ago, is now as outmoded as Morse Code. And voters (or, at least, that small remnant who still care) have an entirely new reason to scorn Congress. Quite an accomplishment for a group of stealth middle-of-the-night legislators.
By: Walter Shapiro, Brennan Center For Justice, December 10, 2014
“Our Democracy Is Dying”: For All Intents And Purposes, Our Government Is Merely The Handmaiden Of Corporations
In case anybody hasn’t noticed, democracy in America is dying now. This isn’t an overstatement; it’s a fact. Corporate interests dominate our politics so much at this point that our government, for all intents and purposes, is merely its handmaiden. Whatever Wall Street wants, Wall Street gets. Corporatism is the new order of the day. One political party stands for it; the other political party won’t stand against it.
The word inertia means the tendency of an object to move in whatever direction its been moving until and unless there’s the introduction of a counterforce, and the Democratic Party is simply not providing the necessary counterforce to the corporatist agenda so exalted by the Republicans. Such a possibility is undermined by Democrats with corporatist agendas of their own. Watch them trying to sideline Elizabeth Warren as I write this. It’s all gotten so terribly predictable.
Some people are pussyfooting around the word, but others are realizing it’s time to say it: we need a peaceful revolution in America. In the words of President John F. Kennedy, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” The American people have simply got to stand up now. This isn’t the time for any of us to go mute – whether it’s those who feel there’s no point in saying anything, or those who feel there’s too big a risk in saying anything. And you know who you are.
The social revolution we need is comprised of two major categories: What we say No to, and what we say Yes to. In the American Revolution, with the Declaration of Independence we said no to what we would no longer accept (living under British rule). In ratifying the Constitution, we said yes to what we would do instead (form our own system of government). The template was genius then, and it’s genius now. Today, we need to say no to a situation in which our government is bought and paid for, and yes to a return to democracy. Nothing short of an historic, nothing namby-pamby-about-it, serious social movement will take us out of our free fall and set America back on the track to real liberty. Today, lobbyists – not the people – are in control. And that is not freedom.
The situation has shaken out – and thank you, Senators McConnell and Reid for adding to the disaster of Citizens United by upping the amount people can contribute to political parties; that really helps (not) – in such a way that nothing short of a Constitutional Amendment will stop the big money flowing into our political campaigns like poison into the veins of our democracy. The best bet now — given the resistance within both major parties to seriously taking down the dastardly “For Sale” sign posted on the front yard of our government — is for the people ourselves to call for a Constitutional Convention, state by state. And that’s what has started to happen.
If something inside you says, “That’s true,” then I hope you get active. We’re in serious straits now and things won’t get better by themselves. In denial about this? Go stand over there. Too cynical to think we can change things? Go stand over there. Too sedated to be upset yet? Go stand over there. An apologist for the system? Go stand over there. Ready to kick ass? Go to http://www.wolf-pac.com/ and express yourself big time. Work with that organization, or with any other you like. But this isn’t a time to sit on the sidelines. Our democracy is sick – it is really, really sick — and all of us are needed now to nourish it and make it well.
By: Marianne Williamson, The Blog, The Huffington Post, December 14, 2014
“Elizabeth Warren Makes A Powerful Case”: Who Does The Government Work For?
Sen. Elizabeth Warren says she isn’t running for president. At this rate, however, she may have to.
The Massachusetts Democrat has become the brightest ideological and rhetorical light in a party whose prospects are dimmed by — to use a word Jimmy Carter never uttered — malaise. Her weekend swing through Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa to rally the faithful displayed something no other potential contender for the 2016 presidential nomination, including Hillary Clinton, seems able to present: a message.
“We can go through the list over and over, but at the end of every line is this: Republicans believe this country should work for those who are rich, those who are powerful, those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers,” she said Friday in Englewood, Colo. “I will tell you we can whimper about it, we can whine about it or we can fight back. I’m here with [Sen.] Mark Udall so we can fight back.”
Warren was making her second visit to the state in two months because Udall’s reelection race against Republican Cory Gardner is what Dan Rather used to call “tight as a tick.” If Democrats are to keep their majority in the Senate, the party’s base must break with form and turn out in large numbers for a midterm election. Voters won’t do this unless somebody gives them a reason.
Warren may be that somebody. Her grand theme is economic inequality and her critique, both populist and progressive, includes a searing indictment of Wall Street. Liberals eat it up.
“The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it,” she said Saturday at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. The line drew a huge ovation — as did mention of legislation she has sponsored to allow students to refinance their student loans.
Later, Sen. Al Franken (Minn.) — a rare Democratic incumbent who is expected to cruise to reelection next month — gave a heartfelt, if less-than-original, assessment of Warren’s performance: “She’s a rock star.”
In these appearances, Warren talks about comprehensive immigration reform, support for same-sex marriage, the need to raise the minimum wage, abortion rights and contraception — a list of red-button issues at which she jabs and pokes with enthusiasm.
The centerpiece, though, is her progressive analysis of how bad decisions in Washington have allowed powerful interests to re-engineer the financial system so that it serves the wealthy and well-connected, not the middle class.
On Sunday, Warren was in Des Moines campaigning for Democrat Bruce Braley, who faces Republican Joni Ernst in another of those tick-tight Senate races. It may be sheer coincidence that Warren chose the first-in-the-nation nominating caucus state to deliver what the Des Moines Register called a “passion-filled liberal stemwinder.”
There once was consensus on the need for government investment in areas such as education and infrastructure that produced long-term dividends, she said. “Here’s the amazing thing: It worked. It absolutely, positively worked.”
But starting in the 1980s, she said, Republicans took the country in a different direction, beginning with the decision to “fire the cops on Wall Street.”
“They called it deregulation,” Warren said, “but what it really meant was: Have at ’em, boys. They were saying, in effect, to the biggest financial institutions, any way you can trick or trap or fool anybody into signing anything, man, you can just rake in the profits.”
She went on to say that “Republicans, man, they ought to be wearing a T-shirt. . . . The T-shirt should say, ‘I got mine. The rest of you are on your own.’ ”
The core issue in all the Senate races, she said, is this: “Who does the government work for? Does it work just for millionaires, just for the billionaires, just for those who have armies of lobbyists and lawyers, or does it work for the people?”
So far this year, Warren has published a memoir, “A Fighting Chance,” that tells of her working-class roots, her family’s economic struggles, her rise to become a Harvard Law School professor and a U.S. senator, and, yes, her distant Native American ancestry. She has emerged as her party’s go-to speaker for connecting with young voters. She has honed a stump speech with a clear and focused message, a host of applause lines and a stirring call to action.
She’s not running for president apparently because everyone assumes the nomination is Clinton’s. But everyone was making that same assumption eight years ago, and we know what happened. If the choice is between inspiration and inevitability, Warren may be forced to change her plans.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 20, 2014
“The Tea Party Was Right About Eric Cantor”: His Job In Congress Was About Doing And Receiving Favors
When former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary, establishment Washington gasped and cried out with surprise. But when he took a job on Wall Street? No. Surprise. At. All.
Let’s think about this for a minute. It appears as though the establishment-types know Cantor pretty well. He’s got friends on Wall Street, and this is the natural course of events in the world of cronies and insiders. Republicans and Democrats have both availed themselves of the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington. No surprise, no big deal.
What insiders don’t know very well is outsiders. To insiders, the unnatural thing — the big deal — was an incumbent losing. Silly outsiders, a.k.a. voters! Didn’t they know that Wall Street and fancy Washington lobbyists just love this guy?
Oh, wait, yes, the silly voters did know. It’s one of the reasons they broke up with Mr. Cantor. He preferred the cool kids to his own constituents and they knew it, so they voted for someone else.
The Cantor-Goes-to-Wall-Street ending to the story was excruciatingly predictable, but it may have some unexpected outcomes in that it could encourage tea-party types to dig in deeper.
You see, when he accepted this job, Cantor proved that his constituents were right. He was out of touch with folks at home, but very much in touch with the rich and powerful in New York. Anyone who can land a job this lucrative in a field where they have zero experience must be getting the job for, ahem, different reasons. It’s about being friends, about doing and receiving favors. Voters understand this, and those who already think Wall Street and Washington are thick as thieves just got their best proof yet.
I suspect that Cantor’s friends inside the Beltway are very happy for him. They may even be thinking, “Good for Eric. The best revenge is living well!” They may secretly think that those silly voters in Virginia will be jealous of their former congressman’s new income, which will be 26 times bigger than their average household income.
But I doubt there is any jealousy at all. I’m guessing the feeling of those who voted against Cantor is more along the lines of: “Good. He’ll be much happier with his friends in New York City and downtown Washington than he was with us here in Virginia.”
The fruition of predictable events can be comforting, but it can also cement convictions. So for those Washingtonians who are toasting Cantor’s success this week, I have a word of caution: Your buddy Eric just proved to the anti-establishment, tea-party types that firing him was a good decision. Other members of Congress in the Cantor mold will not be well served by this. Perhaps that’s why Cantor waited until primary season was safely over before proving his constituents right.
By: Jean Card, Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, September 4, 2014
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