Month: September 2011

Wall St. Occupations

September 26, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Inspired in part by popular uprisings in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, the “Occupy Wall St.” has managed to maintain a presence in NY’s financial district for 10 days. Meanwhile, corporatist/nationalist “mainstream” media ignores the movement as the police brutally crack down on the non-violent mostly young protesters.

Anthropologist and Activist David Graeber (whose books I highly recommend) has an essay in the Guardian suggesting that what we are watching are “the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans” who are demanding “a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008″:

There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world’s financial architecture, when anything seemed possible…

It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an “economy” is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.

Meanwhile, members of the emerging defiant generation who take action against Wall St. crime are met, predictably, with the heavy cloven hoof of the pigs — witness this video of these peaceful young women getting corralled and pepper-spayed for daring to express their 1st Amendment Rights:

NYPD spokesliar Paul Browne asserted that this use of pepper spray was “appropriate“.

Various other coverage on the Web:

A solidarity movement is starting to manifest in Los Angeles (#OccupyLA), with a demonstration planned today (Monday) at 2Pm at Santa Monica and Crescent Heights to coincide with Obama’s fundraising visit.

Local Activists are also planning an occupation of Downtown beginning October 1.

Injustice System

September 22, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Last night the State of Georgia executed Troy Davis, despite lacking any physical evidence linking him to the crime for which he was convicted, and despite the fact that 7 of the 9 witnesses recanted their testimony against him, and despite the fact that they claimed that their original testimony was a result of police coercion.

Davis maintained his innocence until the very end, and among his last words were these directed at the family of the off-duty police officer killed in 1989:

I’d like to address the MacPhail family. Let you know, despite the situation you are in, I’m not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother, I am innocent.

Here, btw, is a list of exonerated death row inmates in the United States since 1970. (h/t a35mmlife)

Obama did nothing to stop the state lynching, claiming through his spokesliar that it wouldn’t be “appropriate” to weigh in on the situation since it is a state prosecution — even though earlier this year he had done precisely that in the Texas case of Humberto Leal Garcia Jr. (h/t scahill)

A last minute emergency appeal was presented to Supreme Court Justice Uncle Clarence Thomas, but the Court rejected the appeal with no explanation in a one line decision, aptly described by Jeremy Scahill as exemplary of the “banality of evil”:

To the right is an image of the slain cop’s mother thanking Merciful White Jesus for making the State of Georgia kill some random black guy as revenge for the death of her son.

Other notes:

Micheal Moore is asking his publisher to “remove all copies” of his new book “from every bookstore in Georgia”, and calling for a general boycott of the state of Georgia.

DN has an hour long special of the aftermath of Davis’ execution.

Here is the ACLU’s statement.

Here is a message from Troy Davis himself to his supporters:

The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me.

Get involved in the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, and/or sign this Amnesty Petition.

And here is Billie Holiday on the Situation:

Decennial Notes

September 15, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The Decennial of 9-11 has come and gone, and the nationalist narrative of victimhood continues to be cynically employed by political elites to justify the incoherent and expanding Global War On Terror, originally a radical neocon enterprise that has been continued and defended and rendered into bipartisan consensus by a thoroughly corrupt Imperial Figurehead, who absurdly but dutifully declares that the past decade of war and war crimes and surveillance and detentions and economic crises have “made America stronger.”

Another way to describe this state of strength is as a state of exception of political leaders from established domestic and international law in pursuit of domestic and international wars of aggression — wars that have already spilled more innocent blood than could ever have been hoped for by the most misanthropic nihilist among the leadership of al-Qaeda.

Still, establishment liberals are given room in the New York Times to lament how “memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned” because of how it was used by “fake heroes” like George Bush et. al. “to cash in on the horror” and “justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.”

Such sentiments are nonetheless attacked even by mouthpieces of the left for politicizing such a somber occasion, as if “9-11 Day” wasn’t thoroughly politicized already.

The war criminals themselves, safe from all but editorial ire, call such sentiments “repugnant” while they tout the value of repugnant acts of torture on “news” networks.

The current administration defends the prior administration’s torture regime from legal accountability, according to its Orwellian “look forward, not backward” position — a position that only applies to political and economic elites, it should go without saying.

Mike Davis, author of the indispensable L.A. history City of Quartz, asks a question that answers itself:

Indeed, from the perspective of the future, which will be deemed the greater crime: to have created the Guantanamo nightmare in the first place, or to have preserved it in contempt of global popular opinion and one’s own campaign promises?

And not only is the torture regime of the prior administration defended, but torture itself, despite the Nobel Peace Laureate’s prohibition, continues to be outsourced to Afghan militias or Somali Black Sites, etc.

Dirty Energy Trifecta

September 8, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The Obama Administration's Environmental Vision: Green Lighting Arctic Drilling, A Pipeline from the Alberta Tar Sands, and Delaying Carbon Emissions Regulations

The Obama Administration has recently made three moves that undermine the possibility of a green future by supporting dirty energy projects and deregulation.

1.  ARCTIC DRILLING:

Though Congress has passed no new oil drilling safeguards following the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dept. of the Interior last month gave Shell the green light to start their plans to drill in the Arctic, despite how dangerous it is.

2.TAR SANDS and the KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE:

The State Department is fixing to approve Keystone XL Pipeline that would transport oil from the Alberta Tar Sands across the U.S to Texas Refineries.

James Hansen, NASA scientist and the first person to warn Congress of the dangers of climate change, lists the negative impact from tar sand development:

The environmental impacts of tar sands development include: irreversible effects on biodiversity and the natural environment, reduced water quality, destruction of fragile pristine Boreal Forest and associated wetlands, aquatic and watershed mismanagement, habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, disruption to life cycles of endemic wildlife particularly bird and Caribou migration, fish deformities and negative impacts on the human health in downstream communities.

But worse still is that exploitation of the tar sand’s dirty produce would “make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”  Hansen concludes that if the oil from tar sands is burned together with conventional oil and gas and coal, “it is essentially game over” for our species.

Other scientists also agree that the pipeline sucks.

But nothing to worry about, agrees the company who wants to build the pipeline — what could go wrong? Meanwhile the State Department is following the Corporate Script, asserting without meaningful investigation that there will be “no significant” environmental impact.

Lots of protesters getting arrested in front of the White House, meanwhile. For more, see here.

3. EMISSIONS STANDARDS:

On September 2, Obama announced his decision to delay the implementation of emissions regulations that would have, according to the National Resources Defense Council, “saved up to 4,300 lives and avoid as many as 2,200 heart attacks every year.” This, in order to reduce “regulatory burdens” on the richest corporations in the history of humankind.

This decision means that the Obama administration will accept the Bush Era standards, which Lisa Jackson, the current EPA manager, wrote were “not legally defensible.”

The American Lung Association is pissed, and so is this asthmatic (former?) Obama supporter.