10 March 2012

Anonymous exposes Long Beach city officials

A recent article in the Long Beach Post reveals some interesting but obvious things in our elite narrative and the direction current activism is taking, and they are worth noting.

Our elites have always responded harshly to signs of dissent, often disproportionately. So a peaceful protest as what happened in the infamous Kent State antiwar march in 1970 saw Ohio state militia shooting and killing activists. The Democratic Convention in Chicago, 1968, is commonly accepted to be a "police riot." And of course, most recently, Oakland Police shot a protestor in the head, seriously wounding him [that he happened also to be an Iraq War veteran seemed to garner him special attention by the mainstream media, as if any other activist might have deserved this brutality].

So it goes without saying that what Anonymous claims to be doing in exposing malfeasance in the Long Beach, CA, city government is characterized as a "warning" by elite thought, as if it is activists and organizers who are menacing officials.

You rarely read such headlines as Long Beach Police "warn" Occupy Long Beach activists; or Long Beach city council "warn" medical marijuana advocates; or Long Beach Mayor Foster "warns" free speech rights of photographers.

What elites do is - by mafia standards - by definition correct.

It's one thing for the insular, pro-corporate world of the political beltway to think this of themselves; it's quite another when our media do it for them. But this is why our mainstream media is so dreadful: it serves the elites on bended knee.

The elites hold the convention that "the king can do no wrong," which is an obsolete, medieval method of protecting the power structure from popular scrutiny.

Seventeenth century British elites re-established the monarchy after Cromwell's interregnum to keep popular demands out of reach of the power structure: the monarchy was the one institution able to keep itself away from the public; or as the British elites are fond of saying, "above politics."

The US and its allies have rammed through similar institutions under the guise of global "free" trade that are also "above politics," like the World Trade Organization. These institutions make decisions for the financial industry, the 1%, and are insulated from the demands of people.

The Long Beach Post's headline is by far not the most egregious example of elite narrative, and as an alternative news source to the Long Beach Press-Telegram, it must be commended for even featuring the item. But the question remains why our newspapers of record do not scrutinize such behavior as a city police force detaining photographers: such behavior would warrant a White House Press Conference if done by one of the US's official enemies.

Obviously, even in a sleepy suburb of Los Angeles, like Long Beach, is culpable of serving elites, and is not above scrutiny by activists.

Bottom line, our elites are only continuing a class war, and their overall intention has been loudly expressed in the business press. They want to make the US better for business, not for workers; so they break unions [Indiana being the 23rd state to ban closed-shop trades unions, aka, right-to-work]. The elites want to bring the 19th century sweat shops back home, because they want to compete with places like China.

Should we even be competing with such a labor atrocity as China is never asked among elite media; only "how" can we compete.

So it is encouraging that groups like Occupy, Wikileaks, Anonymous, and Black Bloc tactics are employed. In an open democratic society, such tactics and non-hierarchical organizations would not be needed. We wouldn't need subversive organizations to expose what our governments were doing, at home and abroad: the civil rights abuses, like those alleged against the city of Long Beach, the anti-labor practices like compromising collective-bargaining rights; the war crimes, like those of Abu Graib, Guantanamo, etc., or the broken United Nations conventions to which the US itself is signatory.

These dissident groups are not brick-and-mortar, IRS-ordained groups, like the ACLU or Human Rights Campaign, which can do meaningful work but are often beholden to the same financial industries our mainstream politicians, and Long Beach officials, are beholden to for funding.

So the radical changes we need are not likely to come from above, from these elites and their clients.

It will be the persistent work of these insurgent groups and their tactics that will bring the radical change we need, not more handouts to the elites.

02 March 2012

Keeping the rabble in their place

The most recent developments in Greece should not surprise anyone familiar with the historical record. The elites and the management class have always responded in proportion and to excess against any popular, democratic movement. These movements have always been a direct threat to the existence of elite culture and the so-called profit motive. And the historical record is clear that the elites, its managers - the little Eichmanns - and their police powers are forever on the watch to stamp out the menace of popular will and participation.

So Greece is not only bearing severe austerity measures, which even the official press acknowledge will prevent it from making any advances in social development for many years to come, but also the EU and banking elites have successfully imposed a pliable government on the Greek people. What devastating effect this has on the Greek people is not open for serious discussion, no more than the consequence of Western pioneer culture had on indigenous communities in the Western hemisphere.

The rabble do not matter.

But even EU machinations has proven difficult to pacify that ancient country.

Just as the elites of the 17th century found they could not trust even Parliament against popular insurgencies in Great Britain, and so had to re-establish the monarchy as the one institution "above politics" [meaning: outside popular control], the EU and its little Eichmanns have planted a virtual viceroy over the Greek economy, and imposed measures some have compared with the vicious measures imposed on Germany after World War I.

We have to pay attention to this. We cannot be docile to these machinations.

True enough, our brothers and sisters in the global South have endured this sort of disrespect for democratic institutions for as long as the imperial boot pressed on the neck of the real producers of the colonies - the indigenous, the African slaves, the wage-slaves reduced to sweat-shop labor for the "Metropolis" - Madrid, Paris, London, New York, ad hitlerium.

Haitian popular organizations under Lavalas had to be ignored, vilified, or crushed so the US elites could dare go and "teach" that island nation a different kind of democracy - the democracy for the elites.

This perpetuation of failed states - states without any democratic institutions, because those are dangerous - is a practice well developed by elites. It's policy. We could learn a lot from the global South: what they endured and tactics to resist.

Well, me must learn. Greece represents the sort of assault long imposed on our colonies but now imposed on the so-called global North, the West.

It's odd: Reagan haunted us with images of Nicaraguan Sandinista revolutionaries marching up the peninsula to invade Texas, when really it was our own masters who are the threat.

If they came for them at night, they will come for you in the morning.

Austerity measures have been hitting sectors of the global North for more than a generation. Those sectors include racial and ethnic minorities, women (especially single mothers), whites educated for nothing more than to be be factory workers, which means they weren't educated at all.

It is interesting to be hearing this recent angst about our failed public education system, since it was one of the first institutions attacked by the elites in the late 1970s, with such taxpayer-rights initiatives, like Proposition 13. This decimated California public schools for those most needing them; but there was scarcely any talk among official media about the side effects of taking vast sums of money from public education and what this would logically do to the poor.

Now, under Republican and Democratic regimes, we see what was an attack on various sectors of the global North expand to include things like middle-class suburban housing, white-collar service jobs, and university education costs.

Only now, the movement - Occupy this or that - gets a bit of attention.

Well, Greece proves that worse is to come for us.

Our elites and their managers will not impose a monarchy on us - that's very old school. What they have been imposing on us for the last generation are institutions similarly immune from any popular scrutiny or control, like the monarchy. And the rationale for these things is not much different: the rabble can't be trusted to do the right thing.

It's not just Apple Computers, lauded as a Silicon Valley giant when it basically exports its workforce to areas where the US labor, health, and safety standards cannot touch it: to sweat-shops in China that our forbears would recognize as what sparked militant trades-union movements [which of course were responded to with utter brutality and extermination].

It's not just these US-based corporations, with headquarters in our infamous metropolises, outsourcing work beyond the reach of US law and popular will; it is also the creation of global financial institutions, like NAFTA, which impose from beyond "trade" laws to enrich the elites and impoverish wider sectors of the global North.

The jobs we are left with are Target and Starbucks jobs, jobs to sell the products of slave labor.

The only good response to this is to respond at all, first. Like learning to ride a bike, some things can be learned from books, from our forbears, from previous insurrections; but we have to set out in practice and be ready to fall down, re-examine, reflect, and pick up our proverbial or actual weapons and move on in a sustained, organized insurrection of our own, disciplined or not - whatever that means ultimately.

There is no petition to bring about a social and economic revolution, so we can't wait around for it.

If they screw with Greece tonight, drones will come for you at dawn.