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This story was also featured on today’s episode of Democracy Now! Check it out for an interview with Brendan Dunn, member of Olympia Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Spy for the US Military Exposed: Spent Last Two Years Spying on Activists
Brendan Maslauskas Dunn
July 27, 2009
“John Jacob” was an activist well liked by many in Tacoma and Olympia, WA.
He was active in the anti-war and anarchist communities in both towns. He
did extensive work with the group Port Militarization Resistance (PMR)
which blocks military shipments to and from Iraq and Afghanistan through
Northwest ports. He went to numerous Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) events and actions, was interested in starting a chapter or Movement
for a Democratic Society, worked closely with Iraq Veterans Against the
War, but spent most of his time with anarchists. Aside from attending
meetings, events and actions organized by activists, he spent much
personal and leisure time with other anarchists in the area.
But some recent records requests done through the City of Olympia, asking
the City for any information on anarchists/anarchism/anarchy, SDS and the
radical union Industrial Workers of the World, surfaced an email from a
John J Towery II from Fort Lewis Force Protection with a daily force
protection update for Fort Lewis. Interested in this email and the name
attached to it, several activists did some research that eventually
confirmed the identity of “John Jacob” as John J Towery II.
Two anarchists met with John Towery after this information was confirmed.
By his own admission, John Towery spent the past two years spying on
anarchists, Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans, SDSers and anti-war
activists in Tacoma, Olympia and the Pacific Northwest. He admitted that
he reported to an intelligence network that included county sheriffs from
Pierce, Thurston and other WA counties, municipal police agencies from
Tacoma, Olympia, Seattle and elsewhere, WA State Police, the US Army, FBI,
Homeland Security, Joint Terrorism Task Force, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency among other agencies. Read the rest of this entry »
“The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”
by Naomi Klein
2007 Metropolitan Books
I feel confident saying that The Shock Doctrine is one of the most important political non-fiction works of the last decade. This should be a high school textbook, or at least required reading in college. Naomi Klein applies her extensive vision and intellect to present us with a way of seeing our world that is extremely relevant and powerful: in the pursuit of enormous profits, those running the global economy intentionally exploit terrible catastrophes, or even create them, to take things for themselves that only shocked and traumatized populations would give up. This ambulance-chasing strategy of those in power is defined as the “shock doctrine,” and “disaster capitalism”, alternatively known as “neoliberalism” is the dominant social paradigm it has created.
Although there are flaws here, which I will mention, this book is both timely and well-written; Klein carries the reader through a story about grandiose topics like neoliberalism, torture, psychology, and international politics that is fundamentally readable.
The most important contribution made by this book in my view is the dismantling of the myth that capitalism’s global dominance is a function of democracy or destiny. This is the notion that with the defeat of the Soviet Union, all alternatives to “the free market” have naturally faded into history, presumably because capitalism is so irresistible. To the contrary, Naomi Klein provides numerous case studies to show us the exact opposite is true – the temporary triumph of global capitalism has been fertilized by the victims of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, wars, campaigns of torture, and economic calamity. In short, alternatives to capitalism have been shocked into submission wherever they’ve appeared.
This is no accident, it is part of a conscious crusade by market fundamentalists, those devoted to the pseudo-religious belief that “the market solves all.” Klein explains that the shock doctrine was developed (at least in part) by the patron saint of neoliberalism, free-market economist Milton Friedman. In his words, “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” And he intended to provide those ideas. It was Friedman’s opus “Capitalism and Freedom” that proclaimed neoliberalism’s core edicts: deregulation, privatization and cutbacks to social services.
Since the 1970s, these teachings have been vigorously applied across the globe by the “holy trinity” of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Read the rest of this entry »
For up-to-date coverage of these events, check out Narco News.
As the demonstrations in Iran continue despite mounting repression, another dramatic showdown between military and public has broken out in Honduras after a violent coup organized by the country’s wealthy elites kidnapped left-leaning president Manuel “Mel” Zelaya and removed him from the country. This action has not only been condemned by much of the international community, it was immediately resisted by Hondurans taking to the streets in large numbers.
Image from Narco News
Image from School of Americas Watch
Image from the BBC
Even before the coup had taken place, anxious pedestrians shouted and cursed the approaching soldiers. In this video, one woman hits every soldier passing her. The surging protesters than begin to block military vehicles and surround a tank!
I’ve also reposted an article giving some background on the situation, this one from the School of Americas Watch. The “School of Americas”, now called the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation,” is a combat and torture training institute in Fort Benning, Georgia that has trained thousands of Latin American paramilitary soldiers to return to their countries and terrorize peasant and student movements. Many of these “graduates” have gone on to become fascist generals or dictators in their home countries, as in the current coup in Honduras. The institute remains open to this day, but every year SOA Watch organizes large protests to shut it down.
From: SOA Watch <info@soaw.org>
Date: June 28, 2009 1:26:08 PM EDT
Subject: Military Coup in Honduras
Military Coup in Honduras
A military coup has taken place in Honduras this morning (Sunday, June 28),
led by SOA graduate Romeo Vasquez. Read the rest of this entry »
“American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”
Chris Hedges
2006 Free Press
Are right-wing Christians in America developing a potentially fascist movement that would discard democracy for the sake of security and conservative values? This is answered affirmatively by Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, in his newest book.
We all know the worst of the evangelical movement, which Hedges calls the “dominionists”: they’re militantly anti-abortion and promote abstinence-only education, they hate queer and trans people, they don’t believe in evolution or environmentalism, they’re racist against immigrants and support US warfare and imperialism, and they can be violent, potentially terroristic. This book explores all of these themes, but it also exposes the frightening strength these people have in our society.
For example, “There are at least 70 million evangelicals in the United States attending more than 240,000 evangelical churches… Polls indicate that about 40 percent of respondents believe the Bible is ‘to be taken literally, word for word.’ .. Almost a third of all respondents say they believe in the Rapture.” Clearly this movement has developed a mass base by hiding behind Christianity.
But are these folks organized? Hedges says yes, quite so. He points to their dominance over the Republican Party, as well as billions of dollars received in the form of “faith-based” grants. This governmental power is matched by media influence, as the Christian Right also owns several national television and radio networks, as well as many local media outlets. Further, right-wing organizations such as Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition are controlled by wealthy white male elites who claim to be “close to God” and are followed with feverish obedience by millions of supporters.
The best parts of the book are the interview sections which delve into the lives of the people drawn to, and spit out by, this movement. By humanizing the participants, we come to understand that their immersion into this Christian reality is often a flight from an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness and despair, genuine emotions which develop from real-world sufferings like unemployment and abuse.
However, much of the book does not live up to this potential and consists of Chris Hedges sending forth litanies of blanket indictments against the ideology of the Christian Right, and attaching a somewhat monolithic character to what in reality is probably a more scattered and heterogeneous right-wing Christian population. In other words, by attacking them as potentially all-powerful, do we not in fact imbue them with powers they do not actually possess?
Worse, although the author rightly argues we must not tolerate a movement which does not tolerate us, he leaves us with little useful ammunition for that struggle. Condemnations of fundamentalist thinking and similarities to Nazism will only get us so far, we need to locate the weak points in the armor of these Crusaders, and this book unfortunately serves little in developing such a strategy.
In a present and future marked by severe crises of an economic, ecological and social nature, the seductiveness of movements urging apocalyptic violence unfortunately may become quite great, and only an alternative movement that appeals to the best in humanity can prevent the emergence of a dictatorship of fear. That great Christian principle of love must be the guiding force as we address the mounting grievances of those left behind by this society and point towards a better future.
[Below are excerpts from Kevin Carson of the P2P Foundation responding to someone who claimed, “post-capitalism talk is largely Utopian fantasy”. I agree with the thrust of Kevin’s argument, capitalism faces collapse on a global scale – but the key social question of our age will not be “can capitalism survive?” but “what new social system(s) will outlive it?”
There are powerful forces seeking to deny us the possibility of relocalizing and democratizing our own economic networks, and which favor a re-nationalization of economic organization and a more brutal resource imperialism. In short, using the State to protect wealth and privilege from the economic chaos, commonly referred to as fascism. Social change is not deterministic, we are faced with widely diverging paths. How we win this struggle and create a post-capitalist world worth living in is the subject of my work. – alex]
“Is post-capitalism a fantasy?”
P2P Foundation, June 7, 2009.
Quotes by Kevin Carson.
I believe that within a generation we’re going to see a radical shortening of supply and distribution chains from Peak Oil, a combined relocalization of most production and an explosion of LETS and barter networks as official money and wage employment dry up for a major part of the population, and a collapse of the old corporate proprietors in the culture and software industries.
…
The growth of the financial sector compared to physical assets is a major symptom of the problem. Given corporate capitalism’s chronic tendency toward overproduction and overinvestment, you can’t invest the surplus in plant and equipment that will generate even more goods when people can’t consume existing output. So you pile up the surplus investment capital in a FIRE sector that only works until the ponzi scheme collapses.
…
[O]ne reason for the growth of the FIRE economy from the ’90s on was that the export of industrial capital had reached its limits as a strategy for solving the crisis of overinvestment. China is saturated with more industrial capital than there is a market for. And second, there’s not much future in shipping goods overseas from Chinese factories when fuel costs two or three–or more–times what it did this time last year.
…
Had oil stayed at its summer 2008 prices indefinitely, some 20% of airline routes would have shut down and a comparable percentage of long-haul trucks left the market. And this was indeed a “hiccup” compared to what we can expect from Peak Oil in the future. Even a supply shortfall of a few percent can cause prices at the pump to double. What can we expect when supply falls by half or two-thirds over the next generation? I expect we’ll see a total collapse of intercontinental supply chains except in vital minerals, and an order of magnitude of reduction of continental supply chains for most manufactured goods.
The factories in China and Vietnam will become useless for anything but producing goods for people in–well, in China and Vietnam. Production of spare parts and modular accessories will grow massively at the expense of production of new goods, and the growth in such production of spare parts and modular accessories will occur mainly in flexible manufacturing nets in relocalized industrial economies. In-season produce will be almost entirely relocalized by backyard gardening and market gardening, and a much larger percentage of our diets will be either in-season or canned local stuff.
We’re barely two years into the real crisis: two years from when real estate prices began to slide, a year from when Peak Oil first became a household word, and nine months since inventories and employment began a free-fall.
To say “everything’s OK so far” this early in the process is IMO about like saying, immediately after Alaric’s first repulse from the gates of Rome, “Well, the system’s still got a lot of life in it.” Or the old joke about the optimist who fell off a 100-story skyscraper and shouted to the people on the 99th floor, “OK so far!”
To say that things look good for capitalism except for Peak Oil is a bit like saying your uncle is just like your aunt except for his testicles.
In 1995, multinational oil corporation Shell conspired with the Nigerian government to brutally suppress a popular nonviolent social movement that called for environmental justice in their polluted land. A key moment in this campaign of violence was the military show-trial of Ken Saro-Wiwa, leader of the Ogoni people and nonviolent advocate, which led to his execution.
Shell is currently facing trial in New York in a lawsuit brought by the Wiwa family, charging the oil company with “requesting, financing, and assisting the Nigerian military which used deadly force to repress opposition to Shell’s operations in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta.”
This short video tells the story of Ken Saro-Wiwa and how corporate and state power merge to violently suppress grassroots social movements in order to protect the exploitation of the environment and workers.
“The Mass Psychology of Fascism”
by Wilhelm Reich
1946 The Noonday Press
First written in Germany in 1932 as Hitler was coming to power, then revised in the US in 1944, this is a classic study of the characteristics of fascist movement. Reich, a former Marxist from the Frankfurt School, emphasizes that fascism is not unique to Germany or Japan or Italy, but is instead “the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life.”
In other words it’s not enough to blame Hitler or the Nazis or any political party for the rise of fascism, we have to understand why millions of people have been, and continue to be, drawn to Right-wing movement (its mass character is what distinguishes fascism from simple authoritarianism). Finding its base in the Middle Classes, fascist movement feeds upon authoritarian patriarchal social structures, especially the father-dominated family, which prepares children to obey and even revere a harsh “leader.”
But what was most interesting to me about this book is the politics of sexuality. Reich as a psychiatrist observed that the repression of sexuality, especially from a young age, prepares people for lifetimes of neurotic self-hatred as some of their most basic and healthy life functions become embedded with deep shame and guilt. I would add, sexual assault and child abuse add much fuel to this fire. Reich stresses that children, adolescents and women are perpetually denied control over their sexual desires and bodies, which is what gives the patriarchal father so much power in the family, and therefore the sexual repression of masses of people becomes the seeds that grow fascist political movements.
I will write more on this train of thought in my review of Yes Means Yes!, and it’s also something I’ve been sparked to consider after watching the film The Handmaid’s Tale, about a dark future where pollution has made most women sterile, and a Christian fascist movement seizes control of society to make the remaining fertile women into the sex slaves of powerful male leaders. It’s surprisingly realistic in some scary ways, because it builds from the sad truth that the patriarchal Christian Right is a real force in society and continues to attack the rights of women to control their own bodies and sexuality. This tendency must be overcome, by women and trans folks taking back their body sovereignty and proclaiming their sexuality as no one’s but their own.
Part 1 of The Handmaid’s Tale. Read the rest of this entry »
The US government is becoming more and more a tool for huge corporations and banks to eliminate their risk despite insanely short-sighted and self-serving policies. The American public will not accept our money being handed to those who don’t deserve it, and never intend to pay us back. That is fascism.
“We, the people” need a bailout too. Today I attended a rally in Philadelphia, to stop the mayor from making budget cuts to close down 11 libraries around the city. How are you supposed to provide educational opportunities for inner-city youth if you’re closing libraries? Closing doors, eliminating opportunities for advancement – this fuels the cycle of violence and crime.
We have to demand money for human needs, not corporate greed! It’s our government, it must work for us, not just the rich. [alex]
Originally published by Forbes.
Washington’s $5 Trillion Tab
Elizabeth Moyer, 11.12.08
Fighting the financial crisis has put the U.S. on the hook for some $5 trillion a report says. So far.
For all the fury over Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion emergency economic relief fund, it seems downright puny when compared to the running total of the government’s response to the credit crisis.
According to CreditSights, a research firm in New York and London, the U.S. government has put itself on the hook for some $5 trillion, so far, in an attempt to arrest a collapse of the financial system.
The estimate includes many of the various solutions cooked up by Paulson and his counterparts Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve and Sheila Bair at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., as the credit crisis continues to plague banks and the broader markets. Read the rest of this entry »
The End of Capitalism 
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