British “counter terror” agents try to intimidate Greenwald and investigative journalists

The true press vs. the corporate state—
Obviously in full partnership with and quite probably at the behest of their American counterparts, event though as usual the HYPOCRISY WALL remains high in top US circles. Below a sampler of reports on this critical issue.
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‘It’s a total abuse of the law’

By Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog

Mon Aug 19, 2013 8:00 AM EDT

Associated Press
Glenn Greenwald, right, with his partner David Miranda

In what appears to be an outrageous abuse, journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner was detained for nine hours at London’s Heathrow Airport yesterday, with officials relying on a British counterterrorism law as a justification for specious harassment.

[pullquote] It’s clear that when it comes to the needs and interests of the “Security State” —an instrument created to defend the global corporatocracy—democracy and freedom count for little or nothing, starting with those nations that shout the loudest about their allegiance to such ideals. Britain’s open complicity with the US, demonstrated in its shabby treatment of Julian Assange, and now Greenwald’s partner, are eloquent proofs that democracy is dying or already dead, even in what many call its very cradle.  [/pullquote]

Mr. Greenwald’s partner, David Michael Miranda, 28, is a citizen of Brazil. He had spent the previous week in Berlin visiting Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who has also been helping to disseminate Mr. Snowden’s leaks, to assist Mr. Greenwald. The Guardian had paid for the trip, Mr. Greenwald said, and Mr. Miranda was on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

Mr. Miranda, Mr. Greenwald said, was told that he was being detained under Section 7 of the British Terrorism Act, which allows the authorities to detain someone for up to nine hours for questioning and to conduct a search of personal items, often without a lawyer, to determine possible ties to terrorism.

As Michael Isikoff reported, Miranda was questioned about Greenwald’s work, was asked for the password to his laptop computer, and had his laptop, mobile phone, camera, memory sticks, and other electronics confiscated. The devices have apparently not been returned.

Greenwald said yesterday, “It’s a total abuse of the law. This is obviously a serious, radical escalation of what they are doing. He is my partner. He is not even a journalist.”

Look, I realize Glenn Greenwald and his work generate some pretty strong opinions, and he has his share of spirited detractors. I’m aware of the fact that many folks who consider themselves on the lefty/liberal/progressive side of most debates aren’t always fond of Greenwald’s efforts. I also understand that if you look back through Glenn’s archives, he’s occasionally had unkind things to say about my work.

But here’s the part to keep in mind: none of this matters. Not even a little. Whether you love Glenn or hate him, whether you celebrate his work or condemn it, yesterday’s incident at Heathrow is ridiculous.

Put it this way: if we remove the names from the story, would Greenwald’s critics endorse what’s transpired? A journalist doggedly covers an important story and publishes classified information (which is legal), prompting a worthwhile national debate. Soon after, prominent federal U.S. lawmakers speak openly about arresting the journalist, while British officials subject his partner to harassment without cause.

Why would anyone defend this?

I’ve seen some suggestions that Miranda was acting as a proxy for Greenwald, likely traveling to Germany to meet with Poitras on his partner’s behalf. Even if this were true, what difference would it make? How would that provide a justification for this misapplication of the British Terrorism Act?

British authorities haven’t elaborated on what led them to detain Miranda, though officials were probably looking for more information on what classified information Snowden had provided to Greenwald. Whether, and to what extent, the confiscated electronics will shed light on these questions is unclear.

Regardless, this fiasco is plainly outrageous.

Maddow: ‘Journalism is not terrorism’

Rachel Maddow excoriates U.S. and British authorities for harassing journalists like Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, and squandering U.S. credibility on questions of government overreach.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy




America’s assault on a free press moves into high gear: Detention of Greenwald Partner Clearly Came on US Orders

The detention in a London airport of reporter Glenn Greenwald’s partner by Brit police was ordered in Washington, says TCBH! journalist Dave Lindorff

miranda-greenwald-63-20130820-444

Glenn Greenwald (r) with just-released partner Miranda ( by ThisCantBeHappening!)

by Dave Lindorff, ThisCantBehappening

It is becoming perfectly clear that the outrageous detention of American journalist Glenn Greenwald’s Brazilian partner David Miranda by British police during a flight transfer at London’s Heathrow Airport was, behind the scenes, the work of US intelligence authorities.

British police and the British Home Office (the equivalent of America’s Department of Homeland Security) are claiming that the action was taken by them on the basis of an anti-terrorist statute, passed in 2000, with the Orwellian name “Schedule 7.” The give-away that this was not something that the British dreamed up on their own, however, is their admission that they had “notified Washington” of their intention to detain Miranda, a Brazilian national, before the detention actually occurred.

[pullquote]

The ironically named new White House press secretary, Josh Ernest, denied any involvedment by the US in the detention of Miranda, saying, “This is a decision that was made by the British government without the involvement – and not at the request – of the United States government. It is as simple as that.” He was not pressed on the matter by the assembled members of the White House press corps–a group that is not known for its aggressiveness even when its own interests are at stake.

[/pullquote]

Note that they did not notify Brazilian authorities. It was the Americans who got the call. Why would British police notify American authorities about the detention of a Brazilian citizen except to ask what US authorities wanted done ? Clearly, Miranda was on one of America’s “watch lists” and the British police called because they needed instructions from their superiors in the US regarding whether to detain him and what to do with him once they had him. The ironically named new White House press secretary, Josh Ernest, denied any involvedment by the US in the detention of Miranda, saying, “This is a decision that was made by the British government without the involvement – and not at the request – of the United States government. It is as simple as that.” He was not pressed on the matter by the assembled members of the White House press corps–a group that is not known for its aggressiveness even when its own interests are at stake.

Miranda subsequent to the UK police’s call to the US, was detained and held, without access to a lawyer, for nine hours — the maximum amount of time allowed under the draconian terms of Schedule 7 — and was during that time questioned by at least seven security agents, whom Miranda says threatened him with jail and asked him about his “entire life.” Never was there any suggestion that he was a terrorist or that he had any links to terrorism. Rather, the focus was on journalist Greenwald’s plans in relation to his writing further articles about the data he had obtained from US National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, now living in Russia under a grant of political and humanitarian asylum.

British police confiscated Miranda’s computer, his computer games and memory storage devices he was carrying. (In a related action, police also went to the offices of the UK Guardian newspaper, which is where Greenwald works, though from his home in Brazil, and, in an act of wanton destruction reminiscent of Nazi storm troopers or Chinese public security bureau thugs, destroyed hard drives of the newspaper’s computers containing leaked documents provided by Snowden [1]. The paper’s editors said that this particularly ugly police action against the news media was pointless since the paper has copies of those documents elsewhere, but then, the “point” was the act of destruction, not elimination of the leaked information itself.)

It makes no sense that British authorities would have taken these outrageous police-state actions against Miranda, against Greenwald and against one of the UK’s most prestigious newspapers, on their own. The issue after all is Snowden’s leaks, which are primarily of concern to the US and the NSA — the source of the documents.

US intelligence authorities these days maintain enormous files on American and foreign citizens, and track their movements by air. Many people are regularly subjected to special searches at US airports, and in some cases have their computers confiscated and searched by immigration authorities. Some are also detained for hours and are denied the right to get on a plane, though they are never charged with any crime. When I investigated the TSA’s watch lists and its “no-fly” list, I learned that there is no way to find out if you are on such a list, or to get your name removed if you are on one. There is not even a right to learn how such lists are compiled, or which agency might be the source of information that is putting you on a watch list.

No doubt Miranda was placed on such a watch list by the US because of his relationship with Greenwald. No journalist himself, Miranda had just met in Germany with journalist/filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has been working in collaboration with Greenwald on the Snowden documents exposé. According to the Guardian, which was paying his airfare, he was bringing back to Rio de Janeiro some materials in her position for Greenwald’s use in writing further articles. (Knowing that the NSA is monitoring their every electronic communication, Poitras and Greenwald understandably preferred to use a trusted courier, rather than sending the records electronically.)

We have entered a very dark period in terms of freedom of the press, not to mention the basic freedom of travel, association and privacy, when people like Miranda are detained in this manner. No one has suggested that Miranda, Poitras or Greenwald has broken any law. They are doing what good journalists in a free society are supposed to do. But the US security state, which has its tentacles now spread through most of the world, with client state secret services, such as the police in Britain, doing its bidding, isn’t going after “criminals” or “terrorists.” Like tyrants everywhere, it is engaging in repression, pure and simple.

“Terrorism” laws are now being overtly used to repress basic freedoms without the state even bothering to pretend that the police actions taken have anything to do with combating “terror.” The only terrorism at this point is the actions of the state. The only terrorists are government authorities.

What started out as malignant universal monitoring by the NSA of all electronic communications is now metastasizing into arrests of journalists and their assistants at the airport. This will no doubt in no time metastasize further to night-time SWAT raids on journalists’ homes and offices. We’ve already seen such things being visited upon political activists, so the new development should not come as much of a surprise.

This latest escalation of the US government’s assault on truth and journalism exposes the puerile sham of President Obama’s claim to want to “reform” the National Security Agency’s spying program and to limit the “Justice” Department’s invasive actions against journalists. The detention of Miranda was an act of war on the whole concept of press freedom.

Absent a public outcry — and I see none — it will only get worse.


Source URL: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/1925

Links:
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/20/us-usa-security-snowden-guardian-idUSBRE97I10E20130820

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of the collectively-owned, journalist-run online newspaper www.thiscantbehappening.net. He is a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books (“This Can’t Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy” and “Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal”). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is “The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin’s Press, May 2006).  




Visions: The Fall of Empire

By William T. Hathaway

surrealist-bedroom-dressing-table-modern-Livingetc

TAs with many icons of the 1960s, the story and the unpatriotic tone it embodied fell out of favor in the 1990s. By then, the USA had recovered from its defeat by the Vietnamese and seemed headed for full-spectrum global dominance, the insurrectionary threat of groups such as the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party had been dissipated by assassinations, imprisonments, and token reforms, and mainstream feminism was more interested in joining the establishment than in overthrowing it. The story’s predictions of the empire’s demise seemed false, and its style that had once been groundbreaking seemed dated.

But now the USA is again mired in an imperialist war, millions of whites are joining blacks and natives in an expanding and increasingly militant underclass, and women are realizing that female politicians and corporate executives are serving the dominant system rather than changing it. These groups are beginning to combine into a major threat to the establishment, so the story has gained new relevance. The collapse of the power structure now seems prophetically close at hand, even cause for celebration, and the story’s style is once again refreshing.

“The Indian Uprising” is widely anthologized and is available on the internet at http://chrismart.luporz.com/Materials/UOD/LEVEL_6/Short_Story_Portfolio/study_pack/the_indian_uprising.html. This essay is intended as an aid to appreciating it and its postmodern view. As a prerequisite, we have to accept that we won’t totally understand the story or the postmodern view. One of the tenets of the postmodern is that totally understanding anything is impossible. Its writers tend to resist the impulse to define it, because definition serves the thought system they are challenging. For similar reasons they reject the term “postmodernism”; they are trying to avoid all “isms.” Like Zen Buddhist teachers, they prefer an oblique approach that can lead readers out of their usual mental framework into an experience of another worldview.

Postmodern writers create confusion in their works as a way of undermining conventional concepts of understanding and truth, our received intellectual heritage. They attempt to dissolve the connections between words and what they represent, between name and form, signifier and signified. They are trying to show that meaning is shifting and impermanent, that knowledge and communication are dubious and subjective, not dependable.

Most of them shun any unifying principles which other people use to understand the world, such as generalized theories of human nature, psychology, religion, and history. But at the same time they are very theoretical themselves. Although they focus on the immediate world about them, they do so in a highly abstract way. They also emphasize the importance of random differences over apparent unity, of flux and entropy over stability and continuity. In “The Indian Uprising” Barthelme uses these elements to create a bizarre and crumbling world.

Like much postmodern art, this story communicates primarily through feelings and associations rather than rational thought. Donald Barthelme lived in New York City, and he tried to duplicate the swirl of city life in his language. He was inspired by contemporary paintings and art films, and he wrote in a similar kind of disjointed, collage style — just placing interesting images together and letting the reader impose a structure on them. He also loved music and said people should read his fiction like they listen to music — stay with it in the moment and be open to whatever it stirs up inside them. So the story communicates more through our subjective, connotative reactions than through objective, denotative meanings.

Although meaning is viewed as contingent, not rooted in any a priori absolutes, it is still possible. Lodged amid the confusion of “The Indian Uprising,” like a pattern of tiles emerging from a chaotic mosaic, is a narrative that makes sense. The story can be read as a parable of attacks on the US power structure by revolutionary forces, from the outside by guerrillas and from the inside by women and minorities.

It’s appropriate that the guerrillas are represented by the Comanches. To figure out how to fight the war in Vietnam, the US military studied the strategies and tactics they had used against the Native Americans in the nineteenth century. They tried to apply these against the Vietnamese; this time they didn’t work, of course.

Barthelme was politically left wing and opposed the USA invading Vietnam and killing millions of people to keep it from going communist. He felt the USA and the anti-communists of South Vietnam were losing the war and deserved to lose it.

In this story there’s no trace of that confident winner attitude that used to be so typical of the American spirit. Now the mood is not of victory but of well-earned defeat. America’s past triumphs are faded history, commemorated by the naming of streets and squares after World War II generals. The only hint of past achievement is in the baffled attitude of the narrator. From his first words, when he says, “We defended the city as best we could,” his attitude seems to be, “How could this happen to me? I’m supposed to be on the winning side.”

The intelligence and skills of the white males now wield no power. They are useless, turned inward, effete. They take the form of a cultural sophistication that is irrelevant to the struggle they are caught in.

The first several paragraphs set up an opposition that follows throughout the story. The public world of war and anarchy is set against a private world of frustrated love and domestic disintegration. The city is being invaded and its defenders seem helpless. They are frightened individuals obsessed with their unstable emotions and deteriorating relationships. The consumer objects that clutter their lives give them little comfort. We alternate between these two arenas, the public and the private, both of which are collapsing.

The public world doesn’t matter much to the narrator. His reports of fighting and torture are delivered in an impersonal, matter-of-fact tone. He doesn’t directly participate in the battle.

His private world, however, has his full attention. It is his refuge from the fighting in the streets, but it too is failing. When it is gone, he will have nowhere to hide, and this fills him with anxiety. He cares most about affairs of the heart, but he can only approach them analytically by giving a scientific description of the heart as a physical organ.

He and Sylvia are educated consumers of culture, very concerned with aesthetics. They keep up with all the latest art, and they pride themselves in being connoisseurs, collectors of quality.

Sylvia is an actress in erotic movies for whom the narrator is making a table out of a door. He has made one of these for each of his other relationships, all of which failed. A door is what you close behind you when you leave, and what you use to shut things away out of sight. It can be a symbol for repressing problems into your subconscious. It is the opposite of communication — not a very appropriate gift to a lover. One of the women apparently threw the door he gave her onto the barricades, so she didn’t appreciate it.

At one point he states: “Not believing that your body brilliant as it was and your fat, liquid spirit distinguished and angry as it was were stable quantities to which one could return on wires more than once, twice, or another number of times I said: ‘See the table?'” The narrator views his lover more as an unstable object than as a human being, so he tries to attract her by showing her an object he has made: the door he turned into a table. Maybe he hopes that if she likes it, that will make her a more stable presence in his life.

There are echoes here of early childhood, the infantile stage before object constancy is developed. With babies it takes awhile before they realize that their mother is always the same person, she is simply going away and coming back each time — she doesn’t cease to exist whenever she disappears. The narrator’s insecurity is similar to an infant’s.

The references to clothing — such as to Sylvia being in love not with Kenneth but with his coat — point up the importance of fashion in their consumer values. Trends and appearances are crucial. The other cultural artifacts — works of composers, writers, architects, and film makers — fall into the same category of consumer objects. As he does with women, the narrator wants to cling to these beautiful objects rather than to confront the battle raging outside.

The women in his life are revolutionaries on the side of the Comanches. Sylvia predicts the narrator will be killed soon by the rebel forces she is part of. But the yellow ribbon Sylvia wears indicates she may be in love with a cavalry soldier, who is fighting against the Indians. Since she had supported the Indians earlier, this makes the narrator ask, “Which side are you on?”

 

When he enters a new, masochistic relationship with Miss R., the house where they meet has steel shutters to block the outside world; that’s the only way they can feel safe.

Miss R. distrusts abstract language. To her, the only true words are the names of things, the litany she recites. It’s similar to the list of stuff on the barricades — just things without any context of meaning or relationship. Since a litany is a form of prayer, this passage could indicate that all she can pray to are the dissociated names of things on her list.

The poet William Carlos Williams had an artistic credo that is appropriate here. “No ideas but in things,” was Williams’ advice to writers. He felt that grand ideas had gotten the world into nothing but trouble; we should abandon them and stick to the simple facts around us.

The barricades the defenders are hiding behind are built of fashion items such as window dummies and silk, the litter of a consumer society, all that the city people have to protect themselves with. Also on the barricades are lots of liquor and “thoughtfully planned job descriptions (including scales for the orderly progress of other colors)”. These discarded job descriptions could be a rejection of the liberal hope that people of color can gradually progress in society.

After the inventory of the barricades and a description of the treatment of the wounded, the narrator can only repeat, “I decided I know nothing.” He can’t react to the wounded emotionally or help them practically. Unable to understand the situation, he feels numb, cut off, ignorant. The name of his friend “Block” is appropriate here. Both men have blocked feelings as if an inner door has shut them off from any deeper caring.

The narrator is trying to understand his situation with an intellectual curiosity but is not able to. He is unhappy but is not sure why. His world is strange; it almost seems to be rotting: instead of the pavement being hard and black, it is soft and yellow. The war clubs, however, still clatter against its yellow softness. Things aren’t right here.

The story fuses together elements that aren’t logically related. We jump from image to image, unconnected except on the page. This juxtaposition challenges our linear logic, our established meaning systems, our mental boundaries. The inventories and Miss R’s litany consist of words thrown together in a way that undermines the usual associations readers would make with them. This causes us to reconsider our assumptions about the objects around us and about our own use of language.

The reference to Alfred Korzybski, a writer on logic and semantics, raises the postmodern theme of the inadequacy of our conventional thought systems to accurately reflect the world. Korzybski’s work tries to free language from the shackles that he felt were put on it by the logic of Aristotle and the dualism of Descartes. Both of these tend to divide the world into opposing categories such as either-or, subject-object, cause-effect. Korzybski and Barthelme were trying to break out of the these categories, which they felt were false separations, a conceptual straitjacket that we should abandon.

The war offers the narrator no stability either. He can’t understand it, it’s not dependable. It has transformed itself into a kind of football game, with referees running out onto the field. If it’s a game, then it’s entertainment, not to be taken seriously.

The soldiers halfheartedly fighting for the city are drawn from the immigrant working class: Zoaves and cab drivers. This parallels the US Army in Vietnam, which was disproportionally from the working class. Also on their side is the Irish Republican Army, but it’s not very reliable.

The people of the ghetto have joined the rebels. The city rulers have been trying to pacify them with heroin, but it hasn’t worked, so now they are revolting too.

The garbage starting to move could be a reference to the lower class, now in full rebellion and about to take over, being looked down upon as garbage. At the end of the story the neat middle-class suburbs are being shattered by the rainstorm of revolution. The orderly life there is being swept away. The government officials are now prisoners of the rebels.

To the cruelties in society the narrator can react only abstractly. He suffers from what a psychologist would call lack of affect: he’s cut off from his feelings, his responses to other people have been anesthetized. Rather than empathizing with the victims of torture, he can only approach their suffering as an academic or an aesthetic topic, as when he describes the barbed wire as “sparkling.”

Socially, he can’t see any connection between the way people live in the city and the Indian uprising. He accepts no responsibility for the way the world is. His link between cause and effect is shattered. Perhaps any kind of knowledge is impossible.

The narrator is excited by the possibility that Miss R. will abuse him while other people watch. Kinky sex such as masochism and voyeurism is another form of sophistication for him. It’s exciting and stimulating, and he craves that.

The “new, cool color” that the flies are gathering for may be an oblique reference to blood. The fact that blood actually has a warm color, not a cool one, is another sign of the narrator’s dissociation. He is cool, unable to feel compassion. To him, atrocities have become a new form of art or a subject for scholarship.

The fact that “young people … run to more and more unpleasant combinations as they sense the nature of our society” is commonplace today, but it was a recent development when the story was written in the 1960s.

When the narrator advises his leaders to “Pack it in” and stop the fighting, he reflects the protests that many liberals made against the war in Vietnam. His leaders just ignore him, and their nonreaction shows that these protests were futile. But notice that he refers to them as the men in charge of the uprising. This indicates that the establishment must be running both sides of the war.

This is an expression of conspiracy theory, that everything, even the rebellion, is controlled by the same power structure. Another expression of conspiracy theory occurs earlier when the narrator says it’s the government that is sending heroin into the ghetto, rather than organized crime as most people think.

This creates confusion: things are becoming their opposite, contrary categories are switching places, distinctions are becoming blurred. The door being made into a table is an example of this. Which is it really — a table or a door? That depends on how you look at it and what you use it for. Meaning is contingent, not inherent.

Another instance of uncertainty is when the captured Comanche becomes Gustav Aschenbach, the Thomas Mann character. Death in Venice is similar to this story in that they are both about frustrated passion and impossible love.

The narrator of “The Indian Uprising” tries to forget about torturing the captured Comanche by escaping into drunkenness and love, but it doesn’t work, he can’t blot out the cruelty. Since he can’t escape from it, he tries to reduce it to images, associations, tropes — anything rather than having to face the human reality. Maybe reality doesn’t even exist, he’s beginning to think.

These incidents and many others in the story raise the theme of skepticism, of being unable to know the truth about anything. Barthelme, like most postmoderns, was a skeptic and agnostic. He felt we can know very little about the world but somehow we have to keep trying to figure it out.

Although the narrator attempts to withdraw into his personal life of art and romance, he is finally captured. Miss R., who is on the side of the Indians, tells him to strip naked, and he stares into the eyes of his captors, about to receive their judgment. His last words in the story are another fashion inventory: “paint, feathers, beads,” all things both women and Indians wear. The implication may be that feminists are part of the same revolutionary force as guerrillas.

After this, we don’t know what happens. Maybe one of the women takes her revenge for “the white, raised scars” he put on her back. Maybe the Indians take revenge for the torture. But maybe they are benevolent conquerors and send him to a reeducation camp. We can’t be sure.

And that’s an appropriate ending for the story, considering that one of its themes is the difficulty of knowing anything. This doubt of all systems of knowledge, this negative epistemology, is the prime characteristic of the postmodern.

This sense of unknowing contributes to the narrator’s anxiety about relationships. He views these as being based only in the physical world, which is always changing. He says, “You can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.” He is anxious, then, because he can’t hold onto the sensation of his lover’s touch, can’t fix her in his perceptions. Their happy moments together are fleeting. Nothing lasts.

This uncertainty and skepticism result from defining reality as that which can be perceived through the senses. His world is limited to what his nerve endings come into contact with, what can be measured. And that is always in flux.

Barthelme’s view, though, isn’t quite that confined. He would say that in addition to matter and nerve endings, we have art and language on our side. These are humanity’s great defenses against an incomprehensible universe. In what has become a much-quoted statement of the postmodern vision, the story says, “Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole”. But does language really do that? What is it that actually binds the world together? Depending on their orientation, people might answer, ethical human relationships or divine will or the law of gravity. But here, in the world of the postmodern story, it is language. Words themselves become more important than what they refer to.

While most people try to extract patterns of meaning from their experience, to figure out what life is all about, postmodern writers claim that is merely an attempt to read significance into a meaningless chaos. They say believers in meaning are trying to comfort themselves with illusions. Their art is intended to break through these illusions and reveal the void underneath.

Chaos is certainly revealed in “The Indian Uprising”, but not much is revealed about the Indians themselves. They serve as projections of a generalized anxiety the narrator feels. They don’t exist as people but as ferocious exotics, personified threats from the outer world. They could be creatures out of a dream or a guilty conscience. They are there to comment on the narrator and his world, the white world. The reality of the Comanche nation is ignored in favor of a stereotype which exploits the image of Native-Americans. In postmodern fiction the characters are often highly artificial. They don’t have the feel of real people because the very concept of “real” is being challenged.

With the exception of this stereotyping of the Comanches, the story’s social criticism and moral engagement, its implied opposition of the narrator’s world have enduring value for us. They are pleas for a more humane, less superficial way of life. One criteria of good art is its ability to last beyond its time. Reading “The Indian Uprising” now, 45 years after it was published in Barthelme’s collection Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, we see how it reflects our current situation. The empire is once again under siege, but the outcome isn’t yet clear. It may manage to defend itself behind its current barricades of Homeland Security, PATRIOT Act, and PRISM. It may succeed in crushing this latest uprising and continue on its quest for dominance. That’s possible. But Barthelme’s story, our own stories, and the stories of its burgeoning billion enemies around the globe say the defeat of the white patriarchal capitalist empire is inevitable … and desirable.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His latest book, Radical Peace: People Refusing War, presents the experiences of peace activists who have moved beyond petitions and demonstrations into direct action: helping soldiers to desert, destroying computer systems, trashing recruiting offices, burning military equipment, and sabotaging defense contractors. Chapters are posted on a page of the publisher’s website at http://media.trineday.com/radicalpeace. He is a member of the Freedom Socialist Party, a red feminist organization (www.socialism.com). A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.




Cory Booker, the Next Black Corporate Presidential Contender

Booker: not a shred of principle. Sounds familiar?

Booker: not a shred of principle. Sounds familiar?

Now that his billionaire buddies have spent his way into the U.S. Senate, “Booker will immediately start running for president, staking out a position to the right of the current occupant and of Obama’s likely successor, Hillary Clinton.” Booker and his friends in the 1% take care of each other.

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

Booker has always been a sycophant of the rich and devotee of their most reactionary causes.”

Cory Booker, the obnoxious and joyously cynical Newark, New Jersey mayor and soon-to-be U.S. senator, perfected the role of stealth Black corporatist Democratic politician years before Barack Obama was elected to national office – although he’s eight years younger than Obama. If anything, Booker has more friends in high rightwing places at this stage in his career than did Barack Obama when he was running for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, ten years ago. Obama came out gradually as a servant of the corporate class; Booker has always been a sycophant of the rich and devotee of their most reactionary causes.

While Barack Obama waited until he was president to fully display his school privatization colors, Cory Booker began his public career as an operative in the corporate-funded private school vouchers game. At the age of 33, and with only one term as a city councilman under his belt, Booker used his rich contacts in rightwing [11], mainly Republican circles to vastly outspend, and almost defeat, the most powerful Black politician in New Jersey, Newark mayor Sharpe James. Four years later, in 2006, after a very large Republican U.S. Attorney and now governor, Chris Christie, had put James on the path to prison, Cory Booker walked into City Hall with an army of Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires behind him.

Once he steps into the U.S. Senate, to serve out the remainder of the late Frank Lautenberg’s term, Booker will immediately start running for president, staking out a position to the right of the current occupant and of Obama’s likely successor, Hillary Clinton. In the last presidential race, Booker infuriated the Obama camp by coming to the defense of Bain Capital, the Wall Street investment firm where Mitt Romney made his fortune. Booker said it was “nauseating [12]” to see all those good people in high finance held up to scorn in an election campaign.

The filthy rich have cultivated a true-blue believer in Cory Booker.”

Nobody can say that Cory Booker doesn’t take care of his friends in the 1%. They certainly take care of him. They have bankrolled all of his electoral efforts, most recently allowing Booker to spend almost three times [13] as much as his top Democratic senatorial opponents, combined. Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to the Newark Public Schools made Booker look like an urban miracle worker – although the transaction was actually more like Booker presenting the schools as a gift to Zuckerbergand his privatizing friends. Other Silicon Valley fat cats set Booker up as head of a start-up Internet company that made Booker a millionaire, at least on paper. Now that Booker is going to Washington, the start-up is going down the tubes [14]. But, there are plenty more self-serving deals to be made on Capitol Hill.

In the recent campaign, Booker sounded positively like an old-style Republican, badmouthing “Washington” in every other sentence.

The filthy rich have cultivated a true-blue believer in Cory Booker, the still-young man from the suburbs of New Jersey. As I wrote in the inaugural issue [11] of the Black Commentator, in April of 2002, “At his age, Cory will be a blight on the political scene even longer than the rest of the Four Cs (colored conservatives counting cash).” I was referring to Condoleezza (Rice), Clarence (Thomas), and Colin (Powell).

He’ll likely be around even longer than his fellow Black stealth corporatist, Barack Obama.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [15]

Listen to us on the Black Talk Radio Network at www.blacktalkradionetwork.com
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Obama Destroys the Middle-Class

The White House’s Economic Agenda

by MIKE WHITNEY

According to a survey conducted by Gallup on August 15, 2013, Obama’s Economic Approval rating has slipped to 35%. A full two-thirds of the American people are now dissatisfied with Obama’s performance vis a vis the economy. The survey mirrors the results of an earlier poll (Aug 12) which found that a mere “Twenty-two percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the direction of the country… Three-quarters of Americans are now dissatisfied with the nation’s course.” (Gallup)

 

The surveys show that people are finally beginning to realize that Obama has been an unmitigated disaster and that the propaganda about economic recovery is just meaningless hype. To underline how bad things really are, consider this:

“Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,” said Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center quoted by McClatchy Washington Bureau. Hall was head of the US Bureau of Labor (BLS) Statistics from 2008 to 2012.

Citing the BLS Household Survey, Hall said that over the past six months 963,000 more people reported that they were employed while 936,000 of them reported they were in part-time jobs. Hall continued, “That is a really high number for a six-month period. I am not sure that has ever happened over six months before.” (“Report: 97 percent of new US jobs are part-time”, World Socialist Web Site)

The only jobs being created under Obama are low-paying service sector positions that don’t pay enough to meet the rent. Which is why a record number of young people are living at home. Have you seen this?

“Last year, a record 36 percent of people 18 to 31 years old — roughly the age range of the generation nicknamed the millennials — were living in their parents’ homes, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. …And despite the frequent stories of recent college graduates stuck on their parents’ couches (or in their basements or above their garages), it is actually young people without bachelor’s degrees who are most likely to be living at home….” (“Millennials, in Their Parents’ Basements”, Catherine Rampell, New York Times)

Don’t kid yourself, it’s nearly as bad for college grads. The only difference is that after you’ve wracked up $40,000 or $50,000 in student loans, you can proudly display your sheepskin on the wall in your Dad’s attic where you spend your days combing the internet for jobs that no longer exist in the good old USA.

And another thing: The only reason unemployment has gone down at all is because so many people have stopped looking for work altogether and fallen off the radar. If the BLS counted these lost souls, we’d be looking at 11.2% unemployment instead of the bogus 7.4 percent figure. But who cares what the numbers are at this point. What matters is that the economy stinks, and the smiling idiot at the top deserves a lot of the credit for that.

Did you know that according to the National Institute on Retirement Security, 45 percent of working-age households have no retirement savings at all? On top of that, high unemployment and hard times have forced more and more people to dip into their 401Ks just to make ends meet, which means that things are worse than the numbers indicate. Has Obama made any effort to address the pension catastrophe facing baby boomers and Generation Xers in the years ahead?

Sure, he has. He appointed a commission of deficit hawks (Bowles-Simpson) to figure out clever ways to cheat people out of their Social Security. That’s why Obama’s approval rating is circling the plughole, because people are finally wising-up to what a phony he is. Check this out from Dean Baker:

“It is unfortunate that President Obama has proposed a budget that has substantial cuts to Social Security. The vast majority of seniors are already struggling. The proposed cuts would be a reduction in their income of more than 2 percent. By contrast, his tax increase last fall cut the after-tax income of the typical wealthy household by less than 0.6 percent…

President Obama has accepted the agenda of the Washington elite, putting cuts to Social Security and Medicare at the center of his budget and offering little that will help to speed the growth of the economy and create jobs.” (“Obama Accepts the Agenda of Misguided Washington Elites”, Dean Baker, CEPR)

Amen, to that, Dean. And have you noticed the strong growth surge under Obama?

No, of course not, because there hasn’t been one. The second quarter (Q2) GDP just clocked in at a miserable 1.7 percent, most of which was due to an unexpected uptick in inventories. Absent that, GDP would have been below 1 percent which would be an embarrassment for anyone except the narcissist in chief. Get a load of this from Nick Beams at the WSWS:

“Over the past three quarters the US economy has grown at an annualized rate of only 0.96 percent, exposing the claims of the Obama administration that a “recovery” is underway. The fact that the US economy is able to achieve a growth rate just one sixth of the post-World War II average indicates that deep structural changes have taken place within the American economy and anything approaching previous growth rates will not be seen again.” (“US growth and jobs figures point to continuing economic breakdown”, Nick Beams, World Socialist Web Site)

Astonishing! Under 1 percent GDP for the last three quarters. What a joke.

The reason the economy isn’t growing is because the people in charge don’t want it to grow. It’s that simple. I mean, how hard is it to boost GDP: You spend a little money, you run up the budget deficits and “Viola”, the economy grows! It ain’t rocket science. What Obama and his paymasters want, is a subtler form of “structural adjustment”. (Subtler than the Euro-model, that is.) This is typical of the Democrats; they’re always trying to prove they can implement the same hard-right policies with more finesse than their blundering counterparts. But it all amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? Everyone knows that the middle class is getting clobbered while all the gravy is flowing to the parasites on top.

Here’s something else from Beams article concerning the “disconnect between the level of profits and the rate of investment”:

“While pre-tax corporate profits are at record highs, amounting to 12 percent of GDP, net investment is barely 4 percent of output…. Increased profits are not being used to expand production, as took place in the past, but are increasingly being used to finance stock buybacks, so as to increase the rate of return on shareholders’ capital…

This result indicates that rising profits are no longer being produced by an expansion of the market, as they were in the past, but are increasingly the result of cost-cutting, as firms raise their bottom line by grabbing an increased share of a stagnant or contracting market from their rivals. In other words, the once “normal” process of capitalist accumulation—increasing investment leading to an expanding market, higher profits and further investment—has completely broken down.” (“US growth and jobs figures point to continuing economic breakdown”, World Socialist Web Site)

This is more than a minor technicality. If corporate profits are being recycled into stock buybacks and dividends instead of capital improvements and investment, then Obama’s deficit cutting policies are actually squelching growth rather than fueling it. Now take a look at this from Media Matters:

“The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the sequester “will halve U.S. growth in 2013.” MarketWatch explained:

“U.S. economic growth in 2013 will be 1.4%, the Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday….. CBO said however that growth would be about 1.5 percentage points faster in 2013 if not for fiscal tightening including the so-called budget sequester.” (“WSJ Ignores Experts To Downplay Harmful Economic Consequences Of Sequester”, Media Matters)

Looks like the CBO nailed it, doesn’t it? After all, there’s only a small difference between 1.7 percent and the predicted 1.4 percent. For all practical purposes, they’re the same. The economy is still not creating enough jobs, growth, or momentum. The world’s biggest economy is essentially dead-in-the-water, just where Obama wants it to be. That way he can compress wages, increase hardship, and further concentrate wealth and power at the top. Hurrah for Obama, Champion of the 1 percent!

Most people have figured out what’s going on by now. Our charismatic hologram president has led us down the primrose path. All the promises of hope and change were pure malarkey, not a word of truth to any of it. 10 million workers still can’t find a job, 47 million people are on foodstamps, 5 million borrowers are in some stage of default on their mortgages, the share of productivity gains going to workers is smaller now than anytime on record, “four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives” (Associated Press), and according to the Fed’s 80-page tri-annual Survey of Consumer Finances, the median net worth of middle class families in the US fell by 38.9 percent between 2007 and 2010″ while “the median value of a US home dropped by 42 percent.”

Face it, Obama has been a disaster. Discretionary federal spending is lower than it’s been in a half-century, while the budget deficits are falling faster than anytime since WW2. What does that mean? It means Obama is sucking the stimulus out of the economy to put more pressure on wages and to reduce working people to grinding third-world poverty. It’s a stealth version of starve the beast, and it’s working like a charm. The middle class is taking it in the stern-sheets while Obama’s moneybags buddies laugh all the way to the bank.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. Whitney’s story on declining wages for working class Americans appears in the June issue of CounterPunch magazine. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.