Power Systems (7 page)

 

Of course not. Well, maybe our clients do. If Israel invades Lebanon and kills a thousand people and destroys half the country, okay, that's all right. It's interesting. Barack Obama was a senator before he was president. He didn't do much as a senator, but he did a couple of things, including one he was particularly proud of. In fact, if you looked at his website before the primaries, he highlighted the fact that, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, he cosponsored a Senate resolution demanding that the United States do nothing to impede Israel's military actions until they had achieved their objectives and censure Iran and Syria because they were supporting resistance to Israel's destruction of southern Lebanon, incidentally, for the fifth time in twenty-five years.
³⁷
So they inherit the right. Other clients do, too.

But the rights really reside in Washington. That's what it means to own the world. It's like the air you breathe. You can't question it. The main founder of contemporary IR theory, Hans Morgenthau, was really quite a decent person, one of the very few political scientists and international affairs specialists to criticize the Vietnam War on moral, not tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book called
The Purpose of American Politics
.
³⁸
You already know what's coming. Other countries don't have purposes. The purpose of America, on the other hand, is “transcendent”: to bring freedom and justice to the rest of the world.
³⁹
But he's a good scholar, like Carothers. So he went through the record. He said, when you study the record, it looks as if the United States hasn't lived up to its transcendent purpose. But then he says, to criticize our transcendent purpose “is to fall into the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds”—which is a good comparison.
⁴⁰
It's a deeply entrenched religious belief. It's so deep that it's going to be hard to disentangle it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near hysteria and often to charges of anti-Americanism or “hating America”—interesting concepts that don't exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian societies and here, where they're just taken for granted.

C
AMBRIDGE
, M
ASSACHUSETTS
(J
ANUARY
17, 2012)

As someone who is interested in the political deployment of language, you must appreciate the irony of “occupy” and “occupation,” which are extremely negative terms, being used in a very positive way by the Occupy movement.

 

It's an interesting usage, and it took off. Occupy now means taking something over for popular goals. Occupying public space has been a very successful tactic. I would have never guessed it would have worked, frankly. There is an incipient movement called Occupy the Dream. It was formed by representatives of the Occupy movements and surviving leaders of the original civil rights movement, including Benjamin Chavis.
¹
The dream that they're talking about is not the one that people refer to on Martin Luther King Day, the civil rights dream. It's King's real dream: end war, end poverty, deal with the real suffering of people, not just civil rights, which is hard enough.

 

There has been an increase in the use of terms such as “income inequality,” “concentrations of wealth,” “CEO pay,” “poverty,” “unemployment” since the Occupy Wall Street movement began in September 2011.

 

The idea of the 1 percent and 99 percent has become common. The Occupy movement has succeeded in tapping feelings, attitudes, and understandings that have been latent, hidden right below the surface. They brought it out. All of a sudden it exploded. It's interesting, if you take a look at the business press, the
Financial Times
, which is the most important business daily in the world, has been surprisingly sympathetic to the Occupy movements. Not to their longer-term goals—they don't talk about those—but the short-term ones. They use a lot of this imagery now quite freely, and in quite a sympathetic way.

There are enormous propaganda efforts to try to denigrate it and undermine the movement, to say it's the politics of envy. Why don't you shower and get a job? And this has its effect, undoubtedly. But still Occupy lit a spark, and it's changed the substance, as well as the tone, of national discourse on crucial issues.

But as with any movement, you have to keep thinking through what you're doing. The Occupy tactic has been extremely successful. It was a brilliant tactic, not just for raising issues but also for creating communities—something very important in a society like ours, which is so atomized. People are alone. They sit alone in front of their TV set. You don't “consult your neighbor,” to use the old Wobbly phrase. That atomization is a technique of control and marginalization. One of the real achievements of Occupy has been to bring people together to form functioning, supportive, free, democratic communities—everything from kitchens to libraries to health centers to free general assemblies, where people talk freely and debate. It's created bonds and associations that, if they last and if they expand, could make a big difference.

But a tactic has a half-life. It works for a while, and then you see diminishing returns. It's inevitable. So it's important at some stage, maybe now, to ask whether the Occupy tactic has essentially lived its life and it's time to turn to something else, like the Occupy the Dream movement. Around New York, Boston, other places, there have been Occupy the Hood movements in poor and minority neighborhoods, where people get together to deal with their own problems, drawing inspiration from the downtown Occupy movements but saying, “We'll do it here.” That's really important.

Also, I think there should be a lesson from Tunisia and Egypt, and from the 1930s here. Unless the labor movement is revitalized and becomes a core part of the movement, I don't think it's going to get very far. Revitalizing the labor movement may seem like a real long shot, if you take a look at the country today, but conditions now are actually no worse than they were in the 1930s. Remember that by the 1920s the American labor movement, which had been militant and successful, had been virtually crushed.

The Red Scare and the Palmer raids had crushed labor and independent thought and created an end-of-history mentality, a utopia of the masters, rather like the early 1990s. But the labor movement was resurrected. In fact, if you go back to the 1920s, visitors from abroad, including conservatives, were just appalled at the treatment and the status of American workers. There was nothing like it in other major industrial countries. But in the 1930s labor revived and you had the formation of the CIO, sit-down strikes. It could happen again. The seeds of it are there.

 

In 1968, a slogan was raised in France to “demand the impossible.” What do you remember about that particular period that might have some relevance to what's going on today?

 

What happened in France was significant. The most significant part, at least for me, was the fact that there was an incipient student-worker alliance, which could have meant something. Actually, it turned out it didn't, but it really could have meant something. That's an example of a spark that didn't lead to a conflagration.

 

In order to mount resistance and challenge power, it's necessary to overcome the barrier of fear. It seems that the Occupy movement has done that.

 

It has. It's costly to oppose power. No matter if you're a graduate student, a child in school questioning something that's happening, a union organizer, or a political dissident, whatever you may be, it's going to carry a personal cost. Power systems, whatever they are, very rarely abdicate their power cheerfully. They usually resist. In a society like ours, they have many means at their disposal. We have a very class-conscious business class in the United States. They're always fighting a bitter one-sided class war and if they meet any opposition they will react. So yes, there's a cost. And fear is understandable. If you attempt to organize a union at some workplace, you can be easily subjected to punishment. The punishments are illegal, but when you have a criminal state, that doesn't matter. The state doesn't enforce the laws. In fact, just the very act of breaking out of discipline to begin to organize people carries a cost.

So fear is understandable. Nowadays it's being enhanced by pretty severe attacks on basic civil liberties. A system of control and repression is in place—it's not being excessively used, but it's in place and it can be quite punitive.

 

Indefinite military detention, for example.

 

The new National Defense Authorization Act
²
isn't as bad as it's been described on the Internet by some, but it's bad. Essentially, it codifies practices that have been carried out regularly by the Bush II and Obama administrations without particular objection. In fact, they're bipartisan. But now these practices have been codified, and that's worse. Also, the act allows for the military to be involved in domestic policing, which violates principles that go back to the late nineteenth century. And it makes military detention mandatory for people who are called terrorists or enemy combatants. For U.S. citizens, military detention is left in the law as an option but is not mandatory.
³
All of those are dangerous steps.

Still, I don't think the act is the worst attack on civil liberties under the Obama administration. There are worse ones. Maybe the worst is the Supreme Court decision in
Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project
.
⁴
The case, which didn't get too much attention, was brought to the court by the Obama administration and argued by former solicitor general Elena Kagan, his latest Supreme Court appointment. The Humanitarian Law Project was giving advice to a lot of groups, including some that are on the official U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
⁵
They were talking to them about strategies of nonviolence.
⁶
The Obama administration argued in the Supreme Court that advice is “material support,” and won. There already were laws against material assistance to groups on the terrorist list. You can't give them arms. But Obama expanded it to talking. So, for example, the wording of the judgment suggests that if you talk to somebody they call a terrorist and urge them to turn to nonviolence, you're guilty of giving material assistance to terrorist groups. The potential scope of that is incredible. These are executive decisions—without review, without recourse.

If you look at the record of who is designated a terrorist, it's shocking. Maybe the most extreme case is Nelson Mandela, who just got off the terrorist list about four years ago.
⁷
The Reagan administration, which supported the apartheid regime in South Africa right to the end, condemned the African National Congress as one of “the more notorious terrorist groups” in the world.
⁸
So Mandela is a terrorist because they say so. He's only now for the first time free to come to the United States without special authorization.
⁹
Saddam Hussein was taken off the terrorist list in 1982 so the United States could provide him with agricultural and other support that he needed.
¹⁰
The whole record is grotesque.

But extending the concept of material support to conversation—most of us could be tried under that. And the ruling was applied right away. As soon as the Supreme Court case was decided, the FBI was sent to raid apartments in Chicago and Minneapolis to collect information about people who were suspected of giving material support for the Palestinian groups and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), like maybe urging them to negotiate and turn to nonviolence.
¹¹
That's a pretty severe attack on civil liberties.

So there are reasons for fear. The government has instruments at hand, which it shouldn't have.

We're soon going to be commemorating the eighth century of Magna Carta. Magna Carta was a huge step forward. It established the right of any freeman—later extended to every person—to be free from arbitrary persecution. It established the presumption of innocence, the right to be free from state persecution, and the right to a free and fair speedy trial. That later was expanded into the doctrine of habeas corpus and became part of the U.S. Constitution. This is the foundation of Anglo-American law and one of its highest achievements, but it's now being cast to the winds.

One of the most remarkable examples is of Omar Khadr, the first Guantánamo case to come to a military commission—not a court—under Obama. The charge was that he had tried to resist an attack on his village by American soldiers when he was a fifteen-year-old boy.
¹²
That's the crime. A fifteen-year-old tries to defend his village from an invading army. So he's a terrorist. Khadr had been kept in Guantánamo and, before that, Bagram in Afghanistan for eight years. I don't have to tell you what Guantánamo is like. He finally came to a military commission, where he was given a choice: either plead not guilty and stay here forever or plead guilty and just spend another eight years in detention.
¹³
This violates every international convention that you can think of, including laws on treatment of juveniles. Of course, it grossly violates any principle. He was fifteen. But there was no public outcry.

In fact, particularly striking in some ways is that Khadr is a Canadian citizen. Canada could extradite him and free him if it wanted to, but they didn't want to step on the master's toes.
¹⁴

 

Talk about the dangers of sectarianism, which historically drove a number of wedges into social movements in the 1960s. Some of this sectarianism was engineered by the state through COINTELPRO, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Counter Intelligence Program, and other efforts.

 

Sectarianism is very serious. The core of U.S. popular activism in the 1960s was the civil rights movement. But by the mid-1960s it had basically shattered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society were the center of a lot of the student activism and other activism of young people. Around 1968, the student Left split into two major groups. One of them was Progressive Labor (PL), which was Maoist. So PL says, “Let's stand outside the G.E. factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, and hand out leaflets to recruit them for a Maoist revolution.” I'm being a little unfair, but that's basically what it was. The other split was the Weathermen, which said, “Things are so awful and horrible that we have to start a revolution. And the way we do it is by breaking windows of banks and attacking people”—robbing Brinks trucks, things like that. It's hard to know which was more destructive. They were both destructive.

It was a real struggle to help young people escape these tendencies. Some did on their own, but a lot were caught up in them. There were a number of personal tragedies. Friends of mine spent years in jail as a result. And it effectively destroyed the movement.

COINTELPRO was part of the story, but we shouldn't exaggerate. A lot of the sectarianism was coming from inside.

 

One of the criticisms leveled against the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it is leaderless, anarchic, nonideological. What do you think about its decision-making process, which is non-hierarchical. These general assemblies, for example, operate on consensus.

 

Consensus certainly has its value, but it's also dangerous. All of us who have been around for years know that consensus decisions can turn out to be highly authoritarian. Some small group will be really dedicated to taking the movement over, and they'll hang around after everybody is bored silly and end up running it. That happens over and over. So consensus can be a good thing, but you've got to understand its limits.