Article One
Edit out Obama’s name and image, and you might be excused for thinking a lot of the “national security” news in the press these days is two years old or more.
For example, who among the Change enthusiasts on David Plouffe’s email list a couple years ago would have expected to see Obama’s name in conjunction with a story on the “plenary presidential right to assassinate?” That’s what the Obama administration claimed last spring: The right to assassinate any American citizen, anywhere in the world outside the United States, if the president summarily judges they’re supporting terrorism in some (unspecified) way.
National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair tried to reassure the American people by pointing out that any U.S. operatives assassinating American citizens overseas would “follow a set of defined policy and legal procedures that are very carefully observed.” You’ll have to take his word for it, because the administration refuses to disclose the actual legal standards used to put anyone on the target list. “National security would be compromised” if they described the actual criteria used. So they claim to be doing everything by the book — but the book’s classified. And of course they can always rewrite the book without telling you.
In the past few days, the administration argued in federal court that its power to assassinate American citizens, as one of the national security prerogatives of the executive, is beyond judicial oversight.
But don’t worry. You really think the government would do crooked stuff and lie about it, just because its officials can do anything they want with no risk of getting caught? Shame on you. Surely you don’t think the government would falsely accuse someone it wanted out of the way for questionable political reasons. If somebody’s accused of something they must be guilty, just like Nancy Grace says — that’s why we didn’t clutter up the Bill of Rights with a bunch of pinko “due process of law” stuff.
But at least Obama’s in the process of maybe, someday, sort of closing down Gitmo, right? Or headed vaguely in that direction, anyway? Well, yeah — and he’s got executive orders in place for shutting down the CIA’s worldwide network of torture sites, as well.
Only he’s expanded the “Black Jail” at Bagram, a sort of Gitmo in Afghanistan. That’s under less oversight than Gitmo because it’s not technically on American soil, so the spooks can do anything they want there. Namely, according to the Open Society Institute, “holding detainees in cold cells, forced nudity, physical abuse, detaining individuals in isolation cells for longer than 30 days,” and refusing access to the Red Cross.
And he’s refused to rule out “extraordinary rendition” in principle.
But hey, it’s a lot less embarrassing to have the torture happening on the other side of the world, instead of right next door to Miami (although even at Gitmo military judges, on orders from Obama, heard testimony extracted from a 15-year-old under threat of gang rape and death).
Here at home, where — theoretically at least — the government doesn’t yet claim plenary authority to assassinate American citizens on their own soil, federal law enforcement engages in the somewhat less alarming activity of spying on American citizens who exercise their right of protest. You know, like J. Edgar Hoover did to Martin Luther King. The FBI, pursuant to an ongoing Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation, in late September raided the offices and homes of anti-war activists in Minneapolis. One such activist, who had protested U.S. military aid under Plan Colombia, was allegedly suspected of ties to FARC. Which, in the unlikely event she actually was, is a Bad Thing because, you know, only the U.S. government should be deciding which terrorist organizations to support in Colombia.
I know what you’re thinking: Somehow, the U.S. still isn’t quite enough like East Germany. But fret no more! Thanks to the Suspicous Activity Reporting program, you too can turn your neighbors in to the Stasi! And the beauty of it is, you don’t have to limit yourself to reporting actual criminal behavior — just “suspicious activity,” like stuff that’s perfectly legal but might or might not indicate intent to commit a crime. Because you can never be too careful about rounding people up based on stuff they might be planning to do!
Seriously: Do you ever wonder whether Yoo and Gonzales were secretly funding the Obama campaign in hopes of a “Nixon to China” thing?
Of all the stuff that tickled my funny bone this election season, complaints from the Right that Obama “campaigned as a moderate” in 2008 and then revealed some sort of “hard-Left agenda” are perhaps the most gut-bustingly funny of all.
Yeah, Obama’s imposing a regular Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution on the country, all right. Continuation of the Bush version of TARP, doubling down on the war in Afghanistan, a scorched earth battle to defend Bush-era war criminals from their rightful punishment, new claims of plenary Executive power … His most “progressive” innovation is a national version of Romneycare (you can almost hear the insurance CEOs crying “Please don’t fling me in that briar patch!”).
Obama’s an even more dedicated managerial centrist than he let on during the campaign. He was entirely truthful when he called himself a moderate. The real lie is the ideology of moderation itself.
Obama lied when he said, “There is not a rich America, and a poor America … We are one nation, one people.”
No, we’re not. As Howard Zinn said, the U.S. political leadership talks as if there was some single “national interest” that “applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.” But it’s a lie.
I don’t belong to the same people as the rentier classes who make their money off of other people’s labor through political capitalism.
I don’t belong to the same nation as Bill Gates, living off monopoly rents on his so-called “intellectual property.” I don’t share a common “national interest” with the Copyright Nazis at the RIAA and MPAA.
The same goes for the bankers who collect interest on money they created from thin air, the military contractors who profit from selling instruments of murder to the wicked, or the Fortune 500 CEOs who downsize their workforces and then give themselves bonuses.
The slave-owner and the slave don’t belong to the same “American Club,” or share the same interest, just because they both happened to be born between the Rio Grande and the 49th parallel.
The Iraqi worker is my fellow countryman. The American plutocrat is my enemy.
The notion that Obama is “hard-Left” is utterly laughable. There is no Left in mainstream American politics. Nancy Pelosi’s husband is an investment banker. Joe Biden was the Senator from MBNA, and now he’s the Vice President from the MPAA.
The genuine American Left was virtually destroyed, as a major political force during Woodrow Wilson’s War Hysteria and Red Scare. Since then, popular anger has been effectively distorted and channeled by the myth of America as a “middle class country” with a common “national interest.”
A lot of people are hurting and angry after forty years of stagnant pay and a decade of chronic underemployment. Karl Rove politics has been devilishly effective at directing that anger toward targets of opportunity like “illegal aliens,” gay marriage, abortion, and ACORN. As Chris Hedges said at Truthdig (“The Phantom Left,”), the Tea Partiers
can use hatred as a mobilizing force because there are tens of millions of Americans who have very good reason to hate. They have been betrayed by the elite who run the corporate state, by the two main political parties and by the liberal apologists … who keep counseling moderation as jobs disappear, wages drop and unemployment insurance runs out. As long as the liberal class speaks in the dead voice of moderation it will continue to fuel the right-wing backlash …
Where Hedges goes wrong is in believing that a genuine Left can achieve anything by participating in mainstream politics, or that those controlling the state will ever speak in anything but “the dead voice of moderation.” There has never been a time when the so-called “Left” party in our two-party system represented a genuine alternative to the ruling class. Always, at all times, it has represented the “liberal” wing of the ruling class. The state, by its nature, cannot be controlled by a majority. It’s an instrument for extraction of wealth from the producing majority by a ruling class.
The phenomena Hedges points to are, if anything, an indictment of the ineffectiveness of political action.
I have no quarrel with those who think they can achieve something, however miniscule, by voting for the lesser evil. But as Zinn said, once you finish that two-minute act it comes back to the stuff that can make a genuine difference: Building a new society by our own efforts and choices, outside the political process, without waiting for permission from the state or from political parties.
It’s customary at this time of year to take stock of all the things we’re thankful for. Although like most other people I’ve got plenty of good things in my own life that I don’t appreciate nearly as much as I should, that kind of personal material about other people doesn’t really hold much interest for most of us.
But putting on my columnist hat, I see a lot of things of general political and economic interest that give me reason for gratitude. Just following the news, I frequently find myself humming that line from Cat Stevens: “I’ve been smiling lately, thinking about the good things to come….”
Since Orwell (at least), it’s been a recurring theme in speculative fiction that the technofascists will take advantage of new technologies to put society under total lockdown and transform our lives into authoritarian hells. But fortunately, the forces of freedom are a lot more creative and efficient in making use of technological possibilities than are the forces of authoritarianism.
Everywhere we look, we see new technological developments, new ways of organizing ourselves, to cooperate with one another and secure livelihoods outside the controlling frameworks of the state and the corporation.
In the past year Wikileaks has emerged as a leading example of the potential for decentralized information warfare against large organizations. Wikileaks has released a cache of sensitive and embarrassing official documents on Iraq and Afghanistan that dwarfs the Pentagon Papers. It’s a distributed network, with servers in numerous countries, so no single government can shut it down.
More generally, we see a proliferation of whistleblowing and “culture jamming” activities all over the Internet. The communications media, in the broadcast age, were once dominated by a handful of giant gatekeeping organizations. The only time the internal workings of one large organization (like the Pentagon) were exposed to the public was when the gatekeepers at another large organization (like the Washington Post or CBS News) decided it was in their own interest.
No more. This is the network age, baby. Three billion people have a CBS News on their desktop or phone. We can talk, and they can’t shut us up.
Taco Bell has been fought to a standstill by the Imolakee Indian Workers, Wal-Mart has encountered the Wal-Mart Workers’ Association, and the TSA is just now making its first acquaintance with WeWontFly.com.
The file-sharing movement has also continued to grow in the past year, and to destroy the business models of the Copyright Nazis at the RIAA and MPAA. The same thing is happening to the eBook, as Kindle DRM is hacked. And thanks to encryption and proxies, their threats of punishment are becoming increasingly laughable.
If you work in the information and cultural fields, you probably find that you can produce better quality work at home using free desktop or browser-based software than you can at work using expensive proprietary “productivity software” (and with a boss demanding status reports).
Even though the micromanufacturing movement is in its very early stages, a garage equipped with homebrew digitally controlled machine tools can do most of what once required a mass-production factory — at a cost two orders of magnitude cheaper. We’re now seeing a reversal of the technological shift that brought about the concentration of economic power and the predominance of wage employment two centuries ago: a shift from expensive machines affordable only by large organizations, back to general-purpose craft tools affordable by individual workers.
Projects like Open Source Ecology are rapidly expanding the range of tools that can be built cheaply for the garage factory, while 100kGarages is continuing its pioneering efforts in networked micromanufacturing. We’re approaching a time when most of the stuff we consume can be produced in a microfactory with under $10k worth of tools, using open-source digital designs, and marketed to the surrounding neighborhood. When the cost of a factory is three months’ wage, “how ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm?”
Daniel Suarez, in his science fiction novels “Daemon” and “Freedom,” described a society of decentralized local economies, based on micromanufacturing technology and intensive agriculture and linked together by darknets, functioning off the grid. Now asymmetric warfare specialist John Robb is anticipating a real-world version of it (“Completely New Economies as a Software Service,” Global Guerrillas, November 4), with resilient communities made up of producers and consumers linked together in opt-in economic networks governed by software-based rules.
In area after area of life — covering more and more of the goods and services we depend on — new technology is giving individuals and small groups capabilities previously only within the reach of bureaucratic hierarchies with billions in capitalization. For a growing share of our needs, the giant organizations that used to control our lives are finding that we don’t need them any more.
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