OWS evicted from Zucotti - not over yet

Thank you for the invitation. I give you, a post!
OWS was evicted in the dead of night early 11/15. I can't imagine who thought it would be a good idea. From Twitter:
" 'NYPD Counter Terrorism' unit sent in. Unfuckingbelievable when the terrorists are @ Goldman Sachs. http://twitpic.com/7eehku"
"#OWS RT @NewYorkObserver: Here with credentialed photogs from NYT, WSJ and Reuters they're also being barred from #occupywallstreet"
"Isn't it against the law for the NYPD to bar credentialed press from entry to Zuccotti and #occupywallstreet? What are they trying to hide?"
"#OWS NYPD breaking domestic and international laws right now. livestreams: 1. tinyurl.com/3t7np8x 2. tinyurl.com/68yxafj"
"Watching NYPD laugh as they tear up the library. This is like Fahrenheit 451. Or Clockwork Orange. #ows http://redgreenandblue.org/2011/11/14/o ... t-by-nypd/"
‎"@wilw @occupywallst BBC reporting NYPD barred press from observing. Reporter quoted saying "I'm Press", Officer: "Not tonight"."
"FRONT PAGE of the @nytimes using the #OccupyWallStreet livestream as media is denied entry into Zuccotti Park #OWS"
"Residents near Zuccotti Park not being allowed out of building to watch; NYPD telling doormen to lock up, per reporter Melissa Russo."
"NYPD has closed the airspace above the park to prevent news helicopters from filming them. It's an unprecedented violation of free press."

Capital has used their mercenary arm to remove the inconvenience in Zucotti Park, the nexus of the OWS movement. They are, perhaps, under some illusion that this will be the end. Clearly they are not inhabiting the same reality as the rest of us. You do not kill a story about the fascist takeover of our economic and political process with a fascist takeover, particularly when you go out of your way to violate Constitutional rights.

You see, there's an ever bigger fuck-up in all this than the jackbooted thugs themselves, and that's the barring of the news media from covering it. Who the hell thought that would work? The NYPD seems to think they can boldly restrict information and cover up major actions and nobody will notice. They think they can kill a story just by blocking news coverage of it. That's a bold violation of Freedom of the Press, and corrupt though they may be you can be certain the Press in NYC will notice and react. On top of that, smartphones were on hand, and in hours the activities of the fascist army of Capital will be all over the internet in video and picture form. They will also be all over the traditional media, because the media won't have its own materials and will instead be going to the "citizen journalists".

So then, if the goal was to kill OWS and end public opposition to private ownership of our government, this eviction will be a massive failure. That should not be a surprise. Every time Capital has reacted to the existence of opposition to it, they have overreacted. I don't think they can help it. I don't think they know how to have a measured and reasonable response to opposition, perhaps because it has been so long since they truly faced any.

Capital should have called up their old puppet George W for some advice. When people were protesting his ridiculous and costly illegal war in Iraq, he just ignored them. When Cindy Sheehan was occupying space along a road near Bush's ranch in Texas, he just ignored them. And for the most part it worked. Bush was able to stay in Iraq, funnelling contracts to his buddies in the defense industry, until he left office. Obama, himself an ally of Capital and the 1% (populist costuming to the contrary), was able to use opposition to the war to get himself elected. Then he started another war, kept Gitmo open, and expanded a pattern of illegal drone-based assassinations (lately even of minors and US citizens), but that's neither here nor there.

Point being, the only way for Capital to fight a movement like this, the only way that will ever succeed, is to ignore it. Period. If you mention it at all, decry them as whining kids, and leave it at that. Of course, I wholeheartedly support OWS and the Occupy events and camps throughout the country. I only provide the method of the movement's defeat because of my absolute certainty that this method will not be used by the forces of Capital. They can't. It's not something they are capable of doing, restraint is not a word in their vocabulary.

Instead we will see the mercenary police forces (and when they receive massive donations from Capital and ignore the will of the public to carry out the will of Capital, could they be described as anything other than mercenaries?) continue to overreach. They will continue to trample Constitutional rights. They will continue to react disproportionate to the situation. And in return, the movement will continue to grow. Like steel tempered by blows, the resistance will make it stronger. It may even come to a revolution.

Now, I mention constitutional rights not because I think there's an mystical sacred significance to the document, but because most Americans do, and most Americans are under the illusion that it means a damn. It's easy to believe you have freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, when nobody is trying to remove these freedoms from you. What Capital is doing is they are dispelling the notion in the mind of the public that the public actually possesses these freedoms in anything other than name. But when you provide the public with clear physical evidence that they do not have freedom, you make the condition ripe for a revolution to gain the freedoms we've been told we have.

I can think of few moves worse for Capital to have made than to boldly attack the freedom of the Press as they did in Zucotti last night.

Invention vs. Intervention

I'm not speaking on any particular concrete basis today - I don't have any specific articles to back me up. But I did read on the cover of the Wall Street Journal today that "US sees stalemate in Libya." Yet I cannot accept that there will be anything so cut and dry as an East Libya/West Libya separation.

There are no superpowers to draw and uphold such lines now. This isn't the Cold War. Qaddafi has no imperial backer.

And he won't accept anything less than a reassertion of his power, and the annihilation of the rebel movement. If anything like a stalemate develops, even over the course of years, it will simply mean protracted bloodshed and victory to the side that develops new tactics. Even with superior firepower on the side of the tyrant, my money is on the rebels. Qaddafi has 1970s' tactics and some planes and helicopters and a heart of ice. But the rebels are honing their wits day after day.

The US is still trying to decide its angle. It still frets over the "character" of the rebellion. We know it will support a re-establishment of the monarchy (if its assessment of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are indicators). But blocked on the UN and so far unable to parse through international law, it looks like the world's police force may be sitting this one out, for the time being.

No easy parallels, not even a 38th.

There is no substitution for a people's revolution.

The United States and the "international community" (read: global state capitalists) are attempting to hijack Libya's revolution, in a sense. To poor effect. The imperialist powers are scrambling to make their voices heard now that madman Muammar Qaddafi met his people's democratic demands with extreme violence and repression.

The problem? Once again: too fucking little, too fucking late.

(Not to mention the fact that this total arsewipe has no interest in playing by any rules but his own and their treatment of him sounds like dialogue from a work of absurdist theater. "The United States, France and other Western powers are trying to remove Libya from the 47-member Human Rights Council." Really? What the blue fuck was Qaddafi doing on there in the first place??)

Libya is a complicated situation in that Qaddafi does not represent Western neo-colonial interests, but is instead a fossil of the anti-colonial movements that swept the "third world" after the rise of the Soviet Union. He is, of course, no less a despot, and so his half-baked claims to Marxism are about as laughable as his allegations that Al Qaeda drugged his rebelling population, or that Wikileaks is a CIA conspiracy to overthrow the enemies of the United States (you know, enemies like Hosni Mubarak....).

So history, as history so often does, is cleaning house, deposing the archaic despots of the Middle East with little regard to their allegiances. It is a "combined and uneven" housecleaning, of course, one that has so far spared the monarchs in favor of the pretenders to democracy. But "Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi — neither a king nor a president" (sez NYT, accurately), responds in his own idiosyncratic way, ie, mowing down demonstrators with machine guns and hiring mercenaries to plug the holes left by defectors to his regime.

The Obama administration gained an unfavorable reputation during the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Bahraini uprisings. O didn't have much to say about Tunisia until Bin Ali fled. He stood on the sidelines with Mubarak and let his administration make conflicting assessments; Biden and Clinton painted the Egyptian despot as a stable ally, for example. That was egg on the admin's face almost as soon as the words were out of their mouths.

Granted the response to Libya, where Qaddafi has long operated as a gadfly to the West and attempted to woo African and Middle Eastern radicals for decades, might have required a little more consideration. How and when do you intervene when an antagonistic nutcase turns on his own people? The Obama administration seemed to want to find straight historical precedents ("it's like Somalia, or wait, we don't want this to be like Rwanda ... or can it be more like Kosovo....) when they ought to have been thinking a little more dialectically (what are the historical forces in play in Libya and the region and how do they interact).

For example, I think few of the instances where the United States has been involved in the last century showcase such bravery, determination, and agency on the part of the population involved. The mistake is in how anti-Qaddafi forces have been characterized.

These are not helpless demonstrators. These are not Kuwaitis clamoring for outside aid. As far as I know, no forces inside Libya have yet called on the "international community" for help. Some of Qaddafi's strongmen have defected and are training the rebels - and effectively. The rebels are seizing government weapons caches and pushing back the Colonel's forces.

They are creating a provisional government in Benghazi.

This isn't a humanitarian crisis for the United Nations to intervene in. This isn't even a civil war with two sides bogged down and exchanging blows. This is a revolution, the beginning of a whole new order.

not so bored now, are ya, asshole?

Sending Hilary Clinton to Geneva for international talks will end up being a waste of federal money. By the time the talks wind down, Qaddafi will be swinging from a lamp post (Allah willing). For Chrissake! Compared to the capacity of working people and activists to coordinate these actions in a democratic and nearly real-time manner through social media, international talks are like watching a brontosaurus wake up from a nap.

The best thing the "international community" can do is freeze Qaddafi's assets. By the time they've done anything else, they'll be dealing with a whole new government. Who are you going to impose a no-fly zone on then, huh? Yeah. S'what I thought.

Wake up and smell the incense, guys. The cutting edge of democratic change in the world has done a radical shift and the West is in danger of getting left behind. Without an urgent reassessment, the capitalist democracies are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history, much like Qaddafi - not any time soon, but too soon for comfort.

The support of democracy ought to be a geopolitical strategy.

Of course all this underlines how antiquated our whole political system has become, not just our foreign policy paradigm (which is still influenced by Cold Warriors, sadly). To address the necessary changes in our domestic structure is a task for another day.

Egypt And Tunisia: This Is How You Make A Revolution

The workers, youth, and the poor of Tunisia and Egypt are doing what average people everywhere else dream of doing: they are pushing back against corrupt and oppressive governments. And they are winning.
The tried and true tactics pioneered by progressive movements through the last two centuries are being used again with devastating effectiveness: mass protests, solidarity among working people, and the general strike. These weapons are the reason why our own corrupt and increasingly oppressive corporate government in Washington fear the progressive Left far more than the reactionary Right. It is because only the Left encourages solidarity amongst workers, all workers, while the extreme Right only makes " revolution" with support from factions in the Establishment.
The Fascists in Italy took over Rome in 1922 after a farcical march. Mussolini and his thugs would have been wiped out in five minutes if one company of Italian soldiers had stood up to them. But the officer corps, the industrialists, and the aristocracy of Italy tacitly approved of Mussolini's coup: they knew Il Duce was going to crack down hard on unions, striking workers, and socialists. They were absolutely delighted with the Blackshirt " revolution".
The Nazis took longer to get into power but once again a Right- wing populist party was granted power with the blessings of conservative politicians, capitalists, and the German officer class. Once in power, the " socialist " trappings of Hitler and his cronies were speedily discarded- Hitler even going so far as to murder his former associates in the Sturmabteilung ( a.k.a. the SA, or " Brownshirts"), partly to eliminate a potential threat to his leadership, but also very much because the SA contained genuine revolutionary elements with roots in working class organizations. Even this small amount of working class solidarity made big business nervous.
Now we come to the modern day and the Tea Party ( I can already hear the howls of outrage: " What! You dare compare the Tea Party to the Nazis?!?!" Hey, if it walks like a fascist, quacks like a fascist, and shows up at political rallies with a rifle slung over its shoulder, your goddam right I'm going to associate it with fascists). Let's be blunt- the Tea Party would have never gotten past a few crackpots meeting in someone's basement if it wasn't for support from the highest levels of the Establishment. FOX News pundits, billionaires, and the Republican Party all threw their support behind this " movement". There is nothing spontaneous or genuine about it, except its white hot anger against what Teabaggers perceive as the Other. The Tea Party, for now, exists at the pleasure of its backers.
This is exactly why a Right- Wing movement cannot be considered revolutionary. To establish a revolution, you have to overturn the class in power and make a wholly new and better way for people to live and think. Our own American Revolution did that, much to the later chagrin of many of its instigators. The idea of every citizen having political liberty and a say in the way the country was run was a startling concept in the 18th century. Similarly the idea that economic liberty, in the form of the democratization of the workplace, remains a bold idea even today. The only truly revolutionary movements of the 21st century that promise that are Progressive ones. And the only Progressive movements that have the vision, organization, and discipline to carry through that promise are Socialist ones.
So, to return to our brave friends in Egypt and Tunisia, the revolutions they are carrying out are not supported by any faction of their ruling classes. It appears these revolts were spontaneous and genuine uprisings of working people, the poor, and students. They are deploying the classic weapons of the street- fighting Left: the protest, the strike, and solidarity. I can never imagine the Tea Party, or a similar Reactionary populist movement doing the same. Instead of reaching for a sign, their first instinct is to reach for a gun. The crazies who do the violence on the behalf of their masters in the Establishment are easily controlled by law enforcement. The Tea Party is nothing more than a madly barking dog- sometimes it bites the hand that feeds it but a quick slap on its nose brings it to heel again.