[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Novelist, playwright, and activist Ariel Dorfman’s new memoir, Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, begins with his own “death” in Chile in 1983. A UPI reporter tracks him down to ask about it. “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” he replies, feeling inordinately pleased with himself for delivering Mark Twain’s classic line -- until he realizes that there’s still a body in a ditch in Chile, that someone else’s throat has been slit, that someone else’s mother is missing a son or already grieving. And that’s just page one! This is Dorfman at his usual best.
Today, TomDispatch is offering his just-published memoir -- your own signed, personalized copy of it -- in return for a $100 contribution to this site. I hope it’s an offer you can’t refuse. The money will be a boon for us as we plan our future. The offer will last only a single week. To find out more, visit our donation page by clicking here. Tom]
On Wednesday afternoon, we marched out of Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have bedded down for the duration. Drums were pounding and shouts of “Whose streets? Our streets!” “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street,” and “This is what democracy looks like, that is what hypocrisy looks like!” rang out as we headed directly into New York City’s version of a police state. The helicopters with the high-tech sensors and high-resolution cameras hovered in the distant sky, the security cams peered down from walls, the barriers the police had set up hemmed us in -- no street, just sidewalk for these demonstrators -- and the cops, scores of flexi-cuffs looped at their belts, were lined up all along the way, while empty buses wheeled past ready for future arrestees. This was not exactly a shining Big Apple example of the “freedom” to demonstrate. It was demonstration as imprisonment and at certain moments, at least for this 67-year-old, it was claustrophobic. This is the way the state treats 15,000 terrorist suspects, not its own citizens.
Still, the energy and high spirits were staggering. The unions were out -- nurses, teachers, construction workers -- the bands were lively (“… down by the riverside, ain’t gonna study war no more…”), and hand-made signs were everywhere and about everything under the sun: “Crime does pay in the USA -- on Wall Street,” “When did the common good become a bad idea,” “4 years in college, $100,000 in debt, for a hostess job,” “Eat the rich,” “Arab Spring to Wall Street Fall” (with the final “L” in “Fall” slipping off the sign), “We are the 99%,” “Legalize online poker, occupy Wall St.”
Amid the kaleidoscopic range of topics on those signs and in those chants and cries, one thing, one name, was largely missing: the president's. In those hours marching and at Foley Square amid the din of so many thousands of massed people, I saw one sign that said “Obama = Bush” and another that went something like “The Barack Obama we elected would be out here with us.” That was it. Sayonara.
It’s as if the spreading movement, made up of kids who might once have turned out for presidential candidate Obama, had left him and his administration in the dust. Like big labor, the left, and the media, the administration that loved its bankers to death (and got little enough in return for that embrace) is now playing catch-up with a ragtag bunch of protesters it wouldn’t have thought twice about if they hadn't somehow caught the zeitgeist of this moment. (Don’t forget that the Obama administration was similarly left scrambling and desperately behind events when it came to the demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo last January.)
The best Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner could say a few days ago, when asked about his sympathies for the Occupy Wall Street movement, was: "I feel a lot of sympathy for what you might describe as a general sense among Americans that we've lost a sense of possibility." Really? White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley didn’t know if the movement was exactly “helpful” for the White House agenda. Truly? And White House press spokesman Jay Carney commented blandly, “I would simply say that, to the extent that people are frustrated with the economic situation, we understand.” Do you?
In some ways, Zuccotti Park, the campsite, the Ground Zero, for the Occupy Wall Street protests couldn’t be more modest. It’s no Tahrir Square, but a postage-stamp-sized plaza at the bottom of Manhattan only blocks from Wall Street. And if you arrive before noon, you’re greeted not by vast crowds, but by air mattresses, a sea of blue and green tarps, a couple of information tables, some enthusiastic drummers, enough signs with slogans for anything you care to support (“Too big to fail is too big to allow,” “The American Dream: You have to be asleep to believe it,” “There’s no state like no state,” etc.), and small groups of polite, eager, well-organized young people, wandering, cleaning, doling out contributed food, dealing with the press, or sitting in circles on the concrete, backpacks strewn about, discussing. If it were the 1960s, it might easily be a hippie encampment.
But don’t be fooled. Not only does the park begin to fill fast and the conversation become ever more animated, but this movement already spreading across the country (and even globally) looks like the real McCoy, something new and hopeful in degraded times. Of the demonstrators I spoke with, several had hitchhiked to New York -- one had simply quit her job -- to be present. Inspired by Tunisians, Egyptians, Spaniards, and Wisconsinites, in a country largely demobilized these last years, they recognized what matters when they saw it. As one young woman told me, “A lot of people in my generation felt we were going to witness something really big -- and I think this is it!”
It may be. The last time we saw a moment like this globally was 1968. (Other dates, like 1848 in Europe and 1919 in China, when the young took the lead in a previously dead world, also come to mind.) It’s the moment when the blood stirs and the young, unable to bear the state of their country or the world, hit the streets with the urge to take the fate of humankind in their own hands.
It’s always unexpected. No one predicted Tahrir Square. No one imagined tens of thousands of young Syrians, weaponless, facing the military might of the state. No one expected the protests in Wisconsin. No one, myself included, imagined that young Americans, so seemingly somnolent as things went from bad to worse, would launch such a spreading movement, and -- most important of all -- decide not to go home. (At the last demonstration I attended in New York City in the spring, the median age was probably 55.)
The Tea Party movement has, until now, gotten the headlines for its anger, in part because the well-funded right wing poured money into the Tea Party name, but it’s an aging movement. Whatever it does, in pure actuarial terms it's likely to represent an ending, not a beginning. Occupy Wall Street could, on the other hand, be the beginning of something, even if no one in it knows what the future has in store or perhaps what their movement is all about -- a strength of theirs, by the way, not their weakness.
It’s true, as many have pointed out, that they don’t have a list of well thought out demands, but the demand to have such a list is just their elders trying to bring them to heel. The fact is, they don’t have to know just what they’re doing, any more than a writer or filmmaker has to understand the book being written or the film shot. It’s not a necessity. It’s not the price of admission. If there’s one thing that’s obvious and heartening, as my friend, the novelist Beverly Gologorsky, said to me while we oldsters circumnavigated the park, “The overwhelming feeling I have is that no one here is planning to go home any time soon.”
Never have they been more needed. Theirs is certainly a movement, like the ones in the Middle East, inspired in part by economic disaster and aimed at an airless political as well as corporate/financial system controlled by the 1% left out of the signs in the park hailing the 99% of Americans whom Occupy Wall Street hopes to represent. It’s a world set on screwing just about everyone in that vast cohort of Americans without compunction, shame, or even, these days, plausible deniability.
The young face a failing world -- and if you want the proof of just how thoroughly it's failed all of us in recent years, check out TomDispatch Associate Editor Andy Kroll’s post today. Nowhere else can you find assembled such a range of evidence of an American world on the decline, one which doesn’t work and shows no sign of being capable of righting itself.
If, on a planet in crisis, their government has repeatedly failed them, the Wall Street demonstrators deserve a small, hopeful cheer for their efforts. They may not be the perfect size and shape for the movement of everyone’s dreams, but they’re here and, right now, that says the world. Tom
Flat-Lining the Middle Class
Economic Numbers to Die For
By Andy KrollFood pantries picked over. Incomes drying up. Shelters bursting with the homeless. Job seekers spilling out the doors of employment centers. College grads moving back in with their parents. The angry and disillusioned filling the streets.
Pan your camera from one coast to the other, from city to suburb to farm and back again, and you'll witness scenes like these. They are the legacy of the Great Recession, the Lesser Depression, or whatever you choose to call it.
In recent months, a blizzard of new data, the hardest of hard numbers, has laid bare the dilapidated condition of the American economy, and particularly of the once-mighty American middle class. Each report sparks a flurry of news stories and pundit chatter, but never much reflection on what it all means now that we have just enough distance to look back on the first decade of the twenty-first century and see how Americans fared in that turbulent period.
And yet the verdict couldn’t be more clear-cut. For the American middle class, long the pride of this country and the envy of the world, the past 10 years were a bust. A washout. A decade from hell.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The offer of a signed, personalized copy of Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren's remarkable new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, is still open, but only until Thursday afternoon. The response has been little short of staggering and books will be in the mail later this week. In the meantime, thanks to all of you who contributed. What a difference it makes! For those still interested, you can read Van Buren's vivid account of how the State Department treats a truth-teller by clicking here and an excerpt from his book by clicking here. To learn more about the offer or make a donation, click here.]
Usually it’s the giant stories that catch your eye. The wars, the uproars, the Arab Spring -- the things you can’t miss. But every now and then, news stories about easily overlooked subjects somehow manage to shine the strongest light on a changing world.
The Cohn sisters, Claribel and Etta, from a wealthy Baltimore family, arrived in Paris in 1905, spent time with Gertrude Stein, and soon began buying the work of unknown artists with names like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse for a song. Before they were done, they had amassed a remarkable collection of modern art (and artistic objects from around the world), now lodged permanently at the Baltimore Museum of Art. They were art admirers, collectors, and at heart early global shoppers par excellence. It was, of course, the beginning of what would soon enough be known as the American Century and American writers, artists, and shoppers, too, were flocking to the Old World for solace, refuge, and kicks.
They have their surprising equivalents today, the New York Times reported recently, even if the newest shoppers to hit Paris en masse evidently aren’t buying the art of obscure painters. We’re talking here about Chinese tourism (rising in the French capital at a 15% clip annually). The latest round of tourists to climb the Eiffel Tower are spending, on average, $1,800 each on shopping. The money is mainly going for luxury brand products, often at large department stores like Galeries Lafayette, which now have Chinese-language briefings, “Chinese-speaking personal shoppers, and Chinese public-address announcements.”
China’s Atlantic Century? Crazier things have happened in history.
American Publisher Henry Luce announced the coming of the American Century in Life, his own magazine, in 1941. Americans, he wrote, were to “accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.” Luce, the son of American missionaries born in China, had no doubt that it would be a Pacific Century. In those years, Americans, in fact, liked to refer to the Pacific as an “American Lake,” and in World War II we did indeed take ownership of it. (As a Tin Pan Alley song title of the era put it, “To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific.”)
Seventy years later, TomDispatch regular and co-director of the website Foreign Policy in Focus John Feffer suggests that, despite all our military bases in the region, the Pacific is now anything but an American lake and -- just in case we hadn’t noticed -- election year 2012 will make that so much clearer to us. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Feffer discusses the 2012 election season in Asia click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Why 2012 Will Shake Up Asia and the World
Can Washington Move from Pacific Power to Pacific Partner?
By John FefferThe United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899 and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It faced down the Chinese and the North Koreans to keep the Korean peninsula divided in 1950, and it armed the Taiwanese to the teeth. Today, America maintains the most powerful military in the Pacific region, supported by a constellation of military bases, bilateral alliances, and about 100,000 service personnel.
It has, however, reached the high-water mark of its Pacific presence and influence. The geopolitical map is about to be redrawn. Northeast Asia, the area of the world with the greatest concentration of economic and military power, is on the verge of a regional transformation. And the United States, still preoccupied with the Middle East and hobbled by a stalled and stagnating economy, will be the odd man out.
Elections will be part of the change. Next year, South Koreans, Russians, and Taiwanese will all go to the polls. In 2012, the Chinese Communist Party will also ratify its choice of a new leader to take over from President Hu Jintao. He will be the man expected to preside over the country’s rise from the number two spot to the pinnacle of the global economy.
But here’s the real surprise in store for Washington. The catalyst of change may turn out to be the country in the region that has so far changed the least: North Korea. In 2012, the North Korean government has trumpeted to its people a promise to create kangsong taeguk, or an economically prosperous and militarily strong country. Pyongyang now has to deliver somehow on that promise -- at a time of food shortages, overall economic stagnation, and political uncertainty. This dream of 2012 is propelling the regime in Pyongyang to shift into diplomatic high gear, and that, in turn, is already creating enormous opportunities for key Pacific powers.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Today’s twisted treat for you is a slightly adapted chapter from Peter Van Buren’s new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. I’m sure you remember Van Buren. Last Tuesday, he wrote a vivid first-person piece for this site, perhaps the first by a government truth-teller, on what it’s like to be harried by the government you’ve served for 23 years. It can be read by clicking here or you can catch him discussing it here. (Or you can listen to him talk about his book and experience in Iraq on Fresh Air by clicking here.)
Keep in mind that the offer I made then -- your own signed, personalized copy of Van Buren’s remarkable book in return for a $100 contribution to TomDispatch -- is still open, and your contributions, believe me, are deeply appreciated! To get your book or find out more, click here. Those of you who already gave, please be patient. There was such a run on the book that we weren’t able to get our expected shipment. It will be in soon and I hope the books will be winging their way toward you by week’s end.
What follows is a favorite excerpt of mine from Van Buren's new book. Like nothing else I’ve read, it catches the particular madness of the American occupation and “reconstruction” of Iraq. And here’s a rarity at this site: I thought it made sense to ask Van Buren himself to introduce the excerpt and he’s done so in his own inimitable fashion. Tom]
Who doesn’t like roasted chicken? Fresh, crispy with a little salt, it falls off the bone into your mouth. It’s a great thing, unless the price is $2.5 million of your tax dollars.
As a Foreign Service Officer with a 20-year career in the State Department, and as part of the George W. Obama global wars of terror, I was sent to play a small part in the largest nation-building project since the post-World War II Marshall Plan: the reconstruction of Iraq following the American invasion of 2003. My contractor colleagues and I were told to spend money, lots of money, to rebuild water and sewage systems, fix up schools, and most of all, create an economic base so wonderful that Iraqis would turn away from terrorism for a shot at capitalism. Shopping bags full of affirmation would displace suicide vests.
Through a process amply illustrated below, in my neck of rural Iraq all this lofty sounding idealism translated into putting millions of dollars into building a chicken-processing plant. It would, so the thinking went, push aside the live-chickens-in-the-marketplace system that Iraqis had used for 5,000 years, including 4,992 years without either the Americans or al-Qaeda around. It did not work, for all sorts of reasons illustrated in the story below. We did have great ambitions, however, and even made a video to celebrate opening day. Don't miss the sign at the very the beginning thanking us Americans for "the rehabilitation of [the] massacre of poultry." We sure paid for the sign, but the quality of the proofreading gives you an idea of how much thought went into the whole affair.
If the old saying that there is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action is true, you should be terrified after reading this excerpt from my new book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. And keep in mind that it all happened on your dime. What follows catches my experience of what was blithely called “reconstruction” in post-invasion Iraq. I can assure you of one thing: the State Department isn’t exactly thrilled with my version of their operations in Iraq -- and they’ve acted accordingly when it comes to me (something you can read about by clicking here). For this excerpt, I suggest adding only a little salt. Peter Van Buren
Chickening Out in Iraq
How Your Tax Dollars Financed “Reconstruction” Madness in the Middle East
By Peter Van BurenVery few people outside the agricultural world know that if the rooster in a flock dies the hens will continue to produce fertile eggs for up to four weeks because “sperm nests,” located in the ovary ducts of hens, collect and store sperm as a survival mechanism to ensure fertile eggs even after the male is gone. I had to know this as part of my role in the reconstruction of Iraq.
Like learning that Baghdad produced 8,000 tons of trash every day, who could have imagined when we invaded Iraq that such information would be important to the Global War on Terror? If I were to meet George W., I would tell him this by way of suggesting that he did not know what he was getting the country into.
I would also invite the former president along to visit a chicken-processing plant built with your tax dollars and overseen by my ePRT (embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team). We really bought into the chicken idea and spent like drunken sailors on shore leave to prove it. In this case, the price was $2.58 million for the facility.
The first indication this was all chicken shit was the smell as we arrived at the plant with a group of Embassy friends on a field trip. The odor that greeted us when we walked into what should have been the chicken-killing fields of Iraq was fresh paint. There was no evidence of chicken killing as we walked past a line of refrigerated coolers.
When we opened one fridge door, expecting to see chickens chilling, we found instead old buckets of paint. Our guide quickly noted that the plant had purchased 25 chickens that morning specifically to kill for us and to feature in a video on the glories of the new plant. This was good news, a 100% jump in productivity from previous days, when the plant killed no chickens at all.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just to let you know, a little memoir of my growing-up years, “Movies Saved My Life, A Young New Yorker Meets Foreigners in Film,” is in the October Harper’s Magazine and on your local newsstands now. Check it out. In addition, in May I wrote a piece for TomDispatch, “Welcome to Post-Legal America,” about ways in which, in the name of protecting American “safety,” the very concept of legality has ceased to be applied to our National Security Complex -- other than, of course, to whistle-blowers who want to tell Americans what’s going on inside it. Think of today’s piece as part two in an ongoing post-legal series, this one focused on the administration's war policy. Tom]
Sex and the Single Drone
The Latest in Guarding the Empire
By Tom Engelhardt
In the world of weaponry, they are the sexiest things around. Others countries are desperate to have them. Almost anyone who writes about them becomes a groupie. Reporters exploring their onrushing future swoon at their potentially wondrous techno-talents. They are, of course, the pilotless drones, our grimly named Predators and Reapers.
As CIA Director, Leon Panetta called them “the only game in town.” As Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates pushed hard to up their numbers and increase their funding drastically. The U.S. Air Force is already training more personnel to become drone “pilots” than to pilot actual planes. You don’t need it in skywriting to know that, as icons of American-style war, they are clearly in our future -- and they’re even heading for the homeland as police departments clamor for them.
They are relatively cheap. When they “hunt,” no one dies (at least on our side). They are capable of roaming the world. Someday, they will land on the decks of aircraft carriers or, tiny as hummingbirds, drop onto a windowsill, maybe even yours, or in their hundreds, the size of bees, swarm to targets and, if all goes well, coordinate their actions using the artificial intelligence version of “hive minds.”
“The drone,” writes Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service, “has increasingly become the [Obama] administration's 'weapon of choice' in its efforts to subdue al-Qaeda and its affiliates.” In hundreds of attacks over the last years in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, they have killed thousands, including al-Qaeda figures, Taliban militants, and civilians. They have played a significant and growing role in the skies over Afghanistan. They are now loosing their missiles ever more often over Yemen, sometimes over Libya, and less often over Somalia. Their bases are spreading. No one in Congress will be able to resist them. They are defining the new world of war for the twenty-first century -- and many of the humans who theoretically command and control them can hardly keep up.
Reach for Your Dictionaries
On September 15th, the New York Times front-paged a piece by the estimable Charlie Savage, based on leaks from inside the administration. It was headlined “At White House, Weighing Limits of Terror Fight,” and started this way:
“The Obama administration’s legal team is split over how much latitude the United States has to kill Islamist militants in Yemen and Somalia, a question that could define the limits of the war against al-Qaeda and its allies, according to administration and Congressional officials.”
Lawyers for the Pentagon and the State Department, Savage reported, were debating whether, outside of hot-war zones, the Obama administration could call in the drones (as well as special operations forces) not just to go after top al-Qaeda figures planning attacks on the United States, but al-Qaeda’s foot soldiers (and vaguely allied groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and al-Shabab in Somalia).
That those lawyers are arguing fiercely over such a matter is certainly a curiosity. As presented, the issue behind their disagreement is how to square modern realities with outmoded rules of war written for another age (which also, by the way, had its terrorists). And yet such debates, front-paged or not, fierce or not, will one day undoubtedly be seen as analogous to supposed ancient clerical arguments over just how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. In fact, their import lies mainly in the fascinating pattern they reveal about the way forces that could care less about questions of legality are driving developments in American-style war.
