Setting Examples

Portland— Natalie Behring/Getty Images
caption: Police in riot gear work to remove remaining protesters from the streets around the Occupy Portland encampment November 13, 2011 in Portland, Oregon. Portland police have reclaimed the two parks in which occupiers have been camping after a night of brinksmanship with protesting crowds of several thousands.

Not Portland—another image from Bag News Notes, where Michael Shaw compares the two— Khalil Hamra/AP
caption: Egyptian riot police beat a protester during clashes in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011. Thousands of police clashed with protesters for control of downtown Cairo's Tahrir Square on Saturday after security forces tried to stop activists from staging a long-term sit-in there. The violence took place just nine days before Egypt's first elections since the ouster of longtime President Hosni Mubarak in February.

Word is out today; here via David Atkins—

Two people were killed in Cairo and Alexandria this weekend as Egyptian activists took the streets to protest the military's attempts to maintain its grip on power. And guess how the state is justifying its deadly crackdown.

"We saw the firm stance the US took against OWS people & the German govt against green protesters to secure the state," an Egyptian state television anchor said yesterday...

And why would they not draw that conclusion? Stopping the lower orders by whatever means is the goal of the owners everywhere, so the message is dutifully promoted by their media servants.

Our superstar versions of the latter are so very well cared for: defaming activists is all in a day's fabulously overpaid work for them, as they ignore or excuse police brutality and use of "pain compliance" against peaceful protestors. Demonizing protest applies to US streets, at least; similar demonstrations abroad may get better PR, depending on a regime's current branding by the owners.

Yet world-wide austerity for the 99% is a sacred cow of the pundit class.

Again: why not? It's a mere abstraction, this drive to destroy what little is left of a safety net not needed by anyone they will ever have to know.

99% Reason For Thanks

Some reasons to be thankful, right now: Scott Olsen's continued improvement, since the October 25 police attack on Oakland occupiers.

And for the many committed and ingenious participants who have brought OWS this far.

That's in only two months, and in the face of stepped-up brutality around the country, as the owners and their "public servants" lose patience with the movement's continued growth.

Matt Taibbi hits a few key points about the powerful motives for OWS, despite demonstrators' alleged lack of focus on issues—

... Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

...

What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.

We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.

...

There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.

But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.

Photo: Sarah Seltzer, Alternet

Taibbi's piece in the new Rolling Stone was online a week or two ago; it was before the heightened police violence of November 17 that Taibbi wrote—

And here's one more thing I was wrong about: I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.

But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.

This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.

Photo: sirmitchell

Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images, via Bag News Notes

Same as it ever was—

The Feast of Pure Reason (193?)
Jack Levine
NYT: November 2010 obit and slide show

The Day After

New York, yesterday:

Last night:
"99%" was among the slogans projected on the side of the Verizon building. Boing Boing has stunning pictures accompanying an interview on how it was pulled off; including this background—

Opposite the Verizon building, there is a bunch of city housing. Subsidized, rent-controlled. There's a lack of services, lights are out in the hallways, the housing feels like jails, like prisons. I walked around, and put up signs in there offering money to rent out an apartment for a few hours. I didn't say much more. I received surprisingly few calls, and most of them seemed not quite fully "there." But then I got a call from a person who sounded pretty sane. Her name was Denise Vega. She lived on the 16th floor. Single, working mom, mother of three.

I spoke with her on the phone, and a few days later went over and met her.

I told her what I wanted to do, and she was enthused. The more I described, the more excited she got.

Her parting words were, "let's do this."

She wouldn't take my money. That was the day of the eviction of Zuccotti, the same day. And she'd been listening to the news all day, she saw everything that had happened.

"I can't charge you money, this is for the people," she said.

She was born in the projects. She opened up her home to us.

She was in there tonight with her 3 daughters, 2 sisters. The NYPD started snooping around down on the ground while the projections were up, it was clear where we were projecting from, and inside it was festive.

"If they want to come up they're gonna need a warrant!," her family was saying. "If they ask us, well, we don't know what they are talking about!" They were really brave and cool.

Alternet has reports and crowd estimates (Foley Square last night at over 30,000). Coverage of police actions includes this—

One protester, however, had a hard time getting the NYPD to take him into custody. Retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis, in full dress uniform, was almost begging to be arrested -- kneeling in front of a line of cops, with his hands behind his back at the southwest corner of Nassau and Pine --as he decried corporate exploitation. The police made feints at arresting him for a time, almost toying with the retired cop, but wouldn't actually do it -- at first. After he moved back through the crowd and up toward Broadway, they pounced, turning Lewis into a full-fledged OWS folk hero. Walking ramrod straight with his hands behind his back, the retired police captain was led by two NYPD officers through the intersection to the whoops, whistles and applause of the crowd.

Lewis definitely is a new hero of mine; along with Denise Vega, and thousands of people whose names I don't know.

Michael Shaw presents these juxtapositions: pretty Madison Avenue imagery versus the brutality of our militarized police forces.

In all the rush of events, we can't forget about the political shell game being played by the servants to the 1%.

As Digby offered in this morning's entry in her pretty much daily posts on the subject: "Super Committee"; Super Trouble

99%; Devotion, 100%

Via Digby—

"100% American," those Three Rs might sound.

But they inspire the kind of response the authorities never deem necessary for a crowd like those 2009 tea partiers who threatened Democratic congress members' town halls.

This posted by Michael Shaw yesterday—

photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images.
caption: Retired Philadelphia Police Department Captain Ray Lewis (L) stands outside Zuccotti Park after police removed the Occupy Wall Street protesters from the park early in the morning on November 15, 2011 in New York City. Hundreds of protesters, who rallied against inequality in America, have slept in tents and under tarps since September 17 in Zuccotti Park, which has since become the epicenter of the global Occupy movement. The raid in New York City follows recent similar moves in Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon.

More on Ray Lewis' participation in OWS.

Today—Ray Lewis Arrested—

"All the cops are just workers for the one percent, and they don't even realize they’re being exploited," Mr. Lewis said. "As soon as I’m let out of jail, I'll be right back here and they'll have to arrest me again."

Picture here.

Collective Actions

Even without the help of DHS or the FBI, a thorough 1932 job—

Soldiers guard leveled veterans' bonus march camp

David Atkins yesterday, on the NYPD clearance and media blackout—

Watching it unfold has had the same surreal feel as watching the early days of Tahrir Square. As big as the story of the clearing of the park is, one of the interesting side stories is also that all the major news networks, cable and otherwise, were silent...And as with Egypt, by far the best way to learn about events happening on the ground was via Twitter.

...

Media blackout? Check. Transportation shutdown? Check. Needless police brutality? Check. Mayor Mubarak is evidently in control of New York City, and pulled off this entire operation in early morning cover of darkness.

The reporting ban was eluded for a while by Josh Harkinson, who entered the park and reported for Mother Jones via twitter and video here and here.

With evictions going on in cities around the country, Digby quotes this, on Oakland mayor Jean Quan's apparent spilling the beans that city governments and federal authorities coordinated the bust-ups—

...Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC ...casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country.

Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict "Occupy" protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night's move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

Digby notes—

I don't have the answers. But I do know that the Federal, state and local police agencies have a tremendous amount of capability and I have no doubt they have been clamoring for the chance to use it.

Later updates from Digby: more on apparent DHS and FBI involvement.

Lynn Parramore lays out six questions about that involvement.

Michael Shaw at Bag News Notes posts this—

Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Shaw writes of this photo versus images from CNN—

Leading off this rough edit is last night's iconic photo of the White Shirts manhandling Occupier youth as Zuccotti was taken, along with eviction stills from CNN...

What we have here is a massive PR war — the battle for hearts and minds (and noses) —playing out between the protesters and the city in front of the media. So the question, when we get to the end of this 24-hour media cycle, will the Reuters photo win the action for Occupy? or, will the Mayor's gambit pay off? In other words, will more people sympathize with Bloomberg and the police action based on floods of grimy shots of NYC's sanitation force cleaning up the remains?

More Digby, about the role of the "culture war" media setup in deflating public approval of OWS—

...the "controversy" is a direct result of right wing lizard brain propaganda about Occupiers being sub-human beasts. The drumbeat has been loud and constant, particularly on local news, and it was almost inevitable that the notion would take hold among some people. Add to that the sight of heavily armed Robo Cops swarming all over our cities as if they were staging an assault on Falluja and people get nervous. That's not an accident either.

...this thing was bound to run along America's cultural fault line whether it set out to or not and in the end it will likely fall on one side of it... That doesn't mean it won't have the impact everyone seeks. It's just that the idea of the 99% vs the 1% is a great slogan and its certainly valid. But in our culture, we just don't divide that way. ...

Ronald Reagan: The Buck Stops... Anywhere Else

In the index to Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor,
sub-entries below the heading "Reagan, Ronald Wilson" include—

blames Carter
blames Congress
blames the media
blames miscellaneous others

Republican acceptance of "personal responsibility" being what it is, Slansky has the quotes to fit those sub-heads.

After the Tower Report is issued by the administration's hand-picked Iran-Contra investigative committee, Reagan's March 4, 1987 public response includes this rhetorical construction—

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

Slansky summarizes 12-minute speech and its use of the passive voice, whereby Reagan—

• Acknowledges that the Iran-Contra affair "happened on my watch"
• Says nobler aims of long-term peace "deteriorated…into trading arms for hostages"
• Calls the deal "a mistake" (though one that resulted from his excessive concern for the hostages).

As for his "management style," the problem was that "no one kept proper records of meetings or decisions," which led to his inability to recall approving the arms shipment. "I did approve it," says the President. "I just can't say specifically when." Lest anyone remain unnerved, he dads, "Rest assured, there's plenty of record-keeping now going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

The White House mode of damage control was to distance Reagan from events—which only made him sound as disengaged as he was.

And the Iran-Contra speech seems like an odd foreshadowing of Reagan's "I've been told I have Alzheimer's" letter, of November 1994.

[Don't] Watch My Lips

Men With No Lips (Ronald Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Regan, James Baker)
Robbie Conal

November 1986: the first reports reach US news media—and the White House makes its first public statements. From Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor—

11/3 In Lebanon, the pro-Syrian magazine Al Shiraa reports that the US has secretly been pplying arms to Iran.

11/4 Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the Iranian Parliament, says that former NSC adviser Robert McFarlane and four other Americans, carrying Irish passports and posing as members of a flight crew, recently tyraveled to Iran on a secret diplomatic mission to trade military equipment for Iran's help in curbing terrorism. Rafsanjani says the men brought a Bible signed by President Reagan and a cake in the shape a key, which was said to be "a key to open US-Iran relations."

11/13 "For 18 months now, we have had under way a secret diplomatic initiative to Iran. That initiative was undertaken for the simplest and best of reasons: to renew a relationship with tlle nation of Iran; to bring an honorable end to the bloody six-year war between Iran and Iraq; to eliminate state-sponsored terrorism and subversion, and to effect the safe return of all hostages."
—President Reagan addressing the nation on the Iran arms deal, hoping that if he mentions he hostages last, people won't think their release was the prime motivation for the deal

"Now, my fellow Americans, there is an old saying that nothing spreads so quickly as a rumor. So I thought it was time to speak with you directly-to tell you first-hand about our dealings with Iran. As Will Rogers once said, 'Rumor travels faster, but it don't stay put as long as truth.' So let's get to the facts."
—President Reagan preparing to embellish the truth

"During the course of our secret discussions, I authorized the transfer of small amounts of defensive weapons and spare parts for defensive systems to Iran.... These modest deliveries, taken together, could easily fit into a single cargo plane.... We did not—repeat—did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we."
—President Reagan claiming that the arms for hostages swap wasn't really a swap because we didn't give them too much stuff, and besides, the stuff we did give them hardly counts as weapons

11/21 The shredding machine in White House aide Oliver North's office jams.

11/25 A grim President Reagan appears in the White House briefing room to say he "was not fully informed on the nature of one of the activities" undertaken as an off-shoot of the Iran arms deal. He announces that National Security Adviser John Poindexter has resigned and NSC staffer Oliver North has been fired, then introduces Ed Meese to explain why.

"Certain monies which were received in the transaction between representatives of Israel and representatives of Iran were taken and made available to the forces in Central America which are opposing the Sandinista government there," says Meese. "We don't know the exact amount yet. Our estimate is that it is somewhere between $10 and $30 million.... The President knew nothing about it."

As Meese talks, his head is positioned in front of the White House logo (THE WHITE HOUSE/ WASHINGTON) in such a way that the only letters that can be seen on TV spell out WHITE WASHING.

Later, Reagan calls North and tells him, "This is going to make a great movie one day."

11/26 "Does the bank president know whether a teller in the bank is fiddling around with the books? No."
—Donald Regan explaining why his total ignorance of the diversion of funds to the contras is completely justified

Then in 1987:

1/26 The Tower Commission interviews President Reagan... Though he is said by a source to lack a "highly detailed recollection," he acknowledges having authorized the sale of arms to Iran in August 1985. This corroborates Robert McFarlane's testimony and directly contradicts Donald Regan's.

2/11 President Reagan tells the Tower Commission that after discussing it with Donald Regan, he now remembers that he did not authorize the arms sale in advance. Commission members are disheartened when, while reciting his recollection from a staff-supplied memo, he mistakenly reads his stage directions aloud.

2/24 "I'd like to ask one question of everybody. Everybody that can remember what they were doing on August 8 of 1985, raise your hand. I think it's possible to forget. Nobody's raised any hands."
—President Reagan, who would have gotten a different response from reporters had he asked, more pertinently, "Everybody that would remember approving the sale of arms to an enemy nation, raise your hand"

3/10 Asked about the Iran-contra scandal at a photo opportunity, President Reagan feigns laryngitis. "I lost my voice," he says, grinning. "I can't talk."

3/11 Asked again about Iran-contra, President Reagan again feigns laryngitis. "I've lost my voice," he says. Explains [press secretary] Marlin Fitzwater, "This is a new tactic of his."