Washington D.C.– I was at home minding my own business last Tuesday, when I got the tip-off via Twitter from friend and neighbor Mike Elk: Paula Broadwell was holed-up in her brother’s house just around the corner, hiding out from a mob of journalists that had the joint surrounded.

How could I resist scoping out the scene?

It was 6.30 p.m. and already dark when I grabbed my camera and bee-lined for the door. I briskly walked down 18^th street towards Park Road – where Broadwell was allegedly staying – before heading west down the alleyway. Elk had tweeted about the press corps being there, refusing his generous offer of beer. And sure enough there they were, digging in for the long haul – five or six of them, keeping a watchful eye on the place.

But there wasn’t much to see. The house sits behind roughly seven-foot high walls and a sizable garage. People and supplies can be ferried to and from the manor somewhat stealthily. The place could host an orgy with the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff without neighbors hearing a single “sir, yes, sir!”

Later in the week, I had heard a rumor from a cameraman that Broadwell had been exfiltrated in the trunk of a car. It was entirely believable. Indeed, Broadwell is now back in North Carolina, with photographers having obtained no evidence of her departure.

It wasn’t for lack of effort that visual evidence of Broadwell’s D.C. trip was kept to a minimum, however. The cameramen from ABC, CBS and the AP were perched on top of a wall just across the alleyway from the seven-bedroom multi-million-dollar hidey-hole. But there was not much going on. They were all just sitting there waiting for something to happen, having been there since 3 p.m.

The time passed standing in the frigid November air didn’t seem to give them much of an idea of what angle they were after, though, other than pure documentation. I asked one (Cameraman? Producer? Both?) what sort of question he’d ask Broadwell, if she came out of the house. He responded that he wasn’t really sure, gave it a moment, and said he’d probably ask what her plans are.

“What are your plans?” That the best he could come up with?  It’s understandable that he wouldn’t lead with a probing query, but he didn’t have a single tough question lined up. Not one about whether pillow talk contained any classified information. Not one about the integrity of her Petraeus biography in light of their coitus sessions. Not even the cursory “have you hired a lawyer, yet?” He wasn’t prepared to do proper digging. It seemed like the journalists there were in pure paparazzi mode, interested foremost in snapping peeping-tom photos to satisfy their editors’ voyeuristic need for coverage.

Which is not surprising. From the very first day the Petreaus-Broadwell story broke, it has been mostly covered like a Hollywood sex tape joke-fest rather than the shady scandal it could easily be. Broadwell wasn’t just a fawning reporter/biographer. She was a West Point grad with a high level security clearance and experience working with “the U.S. intelligence community, U.S. Special Operations Command and an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.” She has visited the White House twice since 2009. It has also emerged that she starred in a promotional video for defense contractor Kriss Arms, hawking the benefits of a lightweight automatic weapon. Government watchdogs expressed concerns that the company might have been seeking to leverage Broadwell’s special relationship with Petraeus (you know, as her biographer) to curry favor with procurement officers. How might Broadwell, Petraeus and their friends have otherwise benefited from this relationship (selective leaks for favorable coverage? junket accompaniment?) will be revealed as more information is unearthed. Whatever might have transpired as the affair steamed ahead, however, appeared to be an afterthought to the journos on the scene.

How they even found out that she was staying at her brothers is beyond me. It probably had something to do with the fact that Broadwell’s I.D. turned up in Rock Creek Park that morning. (Sidenote: If Rock Creek Park sounds familiar in the context of the Washington extramarital affair, it’s where the body of Chandra Levy, mistress of former Congressman Gary Condit, turned up in May of 2002.)  Maybe some intrepid investigative reporter with a Lexis-Nexis subscription figured she was staying at her brother’s Mt. Pleasant residence, which isn’t far from the park. Or maybe the info was leaked to the media by a friendly U.S. Park Policeman. Or maybe she had used her brother’s home phone and someone traced her caller ID. Your guess is as good as mine.

One thing is certain, though: If Broadwell was concerned about staying outside of the limelight, she would have avoided a city with the highest concentration of political journalists in the Western hemisphere.

“She must love the attention,” one photog remarked. It was an assertion that seemed true enough.

Your intrepid reporter gets mad-dogged by unnamed DC journalist…

But weighed against how luxurious the house is, perhaps Broadwell merely wanted to hole-up in style. I realized this when it dawned on me that I had been inside the veritable palace. It was way back in 2009, when a friend of mine was a dating an inhabitant, a ranking member of the mostly old money yuppie scum that were renting the place (one of the housemates was a Rockefeller). I went over to the house for a party, which my friends quickly left. They couldn’t handle the hostile upper-crust stuffiness. I, however, decided to stay because the womenfolk were tantalizingly good-looking and the Grey Goose vodka flowed like the Mekong during the rainy season. Needless to say, I left alone. My friends and I called it the Plantation Party afterward.

Ironically, the house was the focal point of a civil rights battle in 1950, when white neighbors unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit to stop a black man from moving into the place. Again, the house was making history – albeit of a relatively more ignoble nature.

Throughout the hour or so I spent in the alley, I saw two cop cars keeping an eye on the situation, making sure it didn’t get out of hand. The Broadwell stalking press corps wasn’t fazed at all. One photog asked a lady cop in the first squad car if she had brought him hot chocolate. She laughed. We all laughed. And then she went on her way.

The unsung heroes of the DC press corps!

That was the stakeout in a nutshell. Frigid boredom characterized by lame attempts at pithy humor:  “I hear that dinner is ‘All In’ the oven.” And that was the best I could personally do, really.

But the monotony was punctuated by moments of tabloid frenzy. Not too long after the hot cocoa remark, an SUV came through the narrow alleyway from where the cop car had exited the scene. The driver prepared to back into the Broadwell hideaway garage. It was Broadwell’s brother! As he pulled “All In” (sorry), cameras snapped away, but never got a good glimpse of his face. He let the garage door shut before leaving the car, refusing to give the photographers the satisfaction of documenting any sort of visible emotion. That’s Washington PR savvy for ya!

The neighbors, however, weren’t so shy about their feelings. At some point, a fifty-something, pudgy, grey-bearded white fellow came out to take photos of us with a dinky point-and-shoot camera. He could barely conceal his disgust behind a forced grin. He engaged us in faux-friendly banter, warning us about “the other neighbors” who wouldn’t be nearly as cordial. He then took photos of the credentials on the news-van dashboards before disappearing into his castle of righteousness.

A little later, we got to meet one of those “other neighbors” the bearded DC liberal warned us about. The man was another middle-aged, upper-middle-class white guy seemingly perturbed by the thought of – heaven forbid – some deviation from his daily routine, and people he didn’t know milling about in his neighborhood. He aggressively approached us, demanding to know who had the temerity to park a van near his back gate in a manner ever so slightly encroaching his property line. He seemed mildly drunk, and went to lodge his complaint to the cops in a second squad car, which had arrived just as the confrontation began to escalate. I couldn’t hear the details of what he was saying, but his yammering seemed to indicate certain Baggertarian tendencies, as if 6 inches of vehicle over a property line violated the U.S. Constitution. The cops, practically sighing at being asked to enforce such a trivial violation of the law, agreed that the man’s inalienable property rights were being infringed upon. The van was moved by the guilty party. Thankfully, no U.N. Special Rapporteurs had to get involved.

The last passerby I saw – a likely neighbor – seemed to have the most reasonable reaction to the whole ordeal. When informed what was going on, he rolled his eyes and uttered an “oh, God,” before getting on with his life. I figured it was my turn to follow suit. I was growing tired of observing what was quite possibly the most uneventful stakeout in the world.

Later that week, however, the mood in the alley lightened up when both the house residents and the photojournalists largely came to terms with the fact that no one on the scene actually wanted the stakeout to take place. At one point I passed through the alleyway to show off the circus to a friend, when we stumbled upon an impromptu alley party. Neighbors were drunk, laughing it up with the few photographers that remained. The cameramen regaled us of tales about Broadwell’s brother ordering pizza for the press corps. He even brought one a glass of bourbon. Classy house, classy man! Wait, or could this be considered a pay-off? Had Broadwell been buying friendly coverage with a few slices of pizza?

But on Night One of that first stakeout, the press was all teeth. Someone spotted Broadwell through the back door window and screamed “there she is!”, launching the journalists into a paparazzi frenzy as they all elbowed and scrambled to capture the exact same Broadwell money-shot.

The photo-journalists had gotten what they had been waiting for all night long in that cold, dark alleyway. Their editors would be proud. They could feign like they had sent reporters to do adversarial journalism, while continuing to give the Petraeuses of the Pentagon enough rusty trombones to outfit an entire Music Man cast.

Judging by the material the journos collected that night, this might be the best reporting DC’s hacks have done all year.

Sam Knight is a freelance journalist living in Washington DC. Follow him on Twitter @samknight1.

On election day, I woke up before dawn, took a dip in the ocean, made coffee and worked until about noon, when I decided to get the thing over and go vote. I walked five blocks to my polling station, located in the lobby of the Santa Monica Shores apartment towers sitting right on the beach.

It was a warm clear Southern California day. Outside the polling station, long-stemmed palm trees swayed softly in the light ocean breeze.

I could see through the glass doors that there was a long line stretching diagonally across the lobby. I swung the doors open and didn’t take more than two steps inside when I was hit by a gut-wrenching smell–a musky, nauseating mix of rancid beer, rotten fruit and anchovies. The lobby was filled to the brim with pensioners—and one of them had a yeast infection that had gone rogue.

I remembered that smell very well. I became intimately familiar with it on a long  Greyhound bus trip I took across the Midwest a decade ago, during which I and a few dozen poor souls spent a whole night cooped up with a sick, obese woman suffering from a gnarly yeast infection in full bloom. I had plenty of time to ponder and try to figure out the source of that rancid smell as the bus made its way from Denver to St. Louis, and had my suspicions confirmed by a woman sitting one row over: “I think she got a bad yeast infection.” People started trying to figure out what the stench was and who it was coming from almost as soon as the bus got going and the AC system starting recirculating the air.

That bus ride took place many years ago, but the experience was seared into my memory forever. The low-level nausea, the claustrophobia, the helplessness . . . I bought a bottle of cheap wine at a truck stop and downed it to numb my senses and help me sleep . I remember dozing off into forgetful sleep and waking up suddenly, thinking it was all just a bad dream—and realizing that no, it was real and I still had many long, painful hours left to go.

These memories came rushing back to me as I waited for my turn to vote. The line moved slowly on account of all the confused, shuffling old people who had to be carefully herded into their voting booths. And the smell only got worse inside the cramped room where the voting was taking place, wafting in from a nearby booth and adding another layer of misery to the already depressing choices laid out in front of me on the ballot.

First there was a “choice” between incumbent Senator Dianne Feinstein and some unknown Republican challenger who was in the race for purely self-promotional reasons. Senator Feinstein has been successfully using her position to enrich her financier husband Richard Bloom and her big business backers. She’s not going anywhere anytime soon—she’ll probably be there for life.  Then there’s Jerry Brown’s half-assed attempt to shore up California’s budget by imposing a regressive sales tax and boosting income tax rates on people making $250,000—which isn’t even that much in California’s major cities, especially if you’re raising a family. Here’s a tip to would-be populist pols: if you’re gonna tax the rich, then you should tax the rich—not working stiffs who have to show up to work everyday for a living. You’ll get a lot more support that way.

Looking at the various measures and propositions on the ballot, I saw nothing that had anything to do with the real-estate meltdown that’s still raging all across the state. Nor was there anything that would help the masses of unemployed. Instead, there’s a human sex trafficking state proposition designed to lock up illegal immigrants, and a Los Angeles County measure that’s trying to force condom use on San Fernando Valley’s porn industry. Yep, this is the kind of degenerate politics we’re dealing with here, folks.

The only votes I felt good about were the ones I cast against: a handful of ballot measures put in by various oligarchical forces. Just about all of them were in one way or another greased with Koch blood money, included the infamous Proposition 32 that was designed to destroy the ability of labor unions to raise money from their members. Proposition 31— although lesser known, was my personal favorite. You know how Republicans and libertarians are always screaming about the sanctity of states’ rights over the evil federal government? Well, this proposition, which was underwritten by a bunch of shady front groups and the “homeless” Burger King billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, was trying take the “rights” debate one level down. It wanted to give counties the constitutional right to ignore California’s strict environmental regulations. No joke. Next thing you know, they’ll be trying to convince us it’s all about “School District Rights” and “Neighborhood Watch Rights.” Then there was Proposition 33, an obscene measure funded by billionaire George Joseph, owner of Mercury Insurance. He dished out over $17 million—yes, 17!—of his loot on a simple proposition that was designed to do one thing: raise auto insurance rates on most California drivers.

The choice on these was easy—and felt good, too. I even forgot the fungal stench for a few moments while I was making sure to punch the right holes.

Having done my duty as a naturalized American citizen, I scrambled out of the lobby and into the cool beach air, breathing deeply to get the horrible smell out of my nose and lungs.

But the unpleasantness came flooding right back at night—after I started hitting the whisky heavily at home and then went out to a local bar to watch final election results.

Sure, Obama won. The Democrats made a few good gains in the Senate. A few Koch-funded Tea Party goons got booted hard from the House—that’s always good for a few feel-good moments. But on the whole, the election was a depressing spectacle, leaving us with the same old set of greedy technocratic hucksters. As I got drunker and drunker watching Wolf Blitzer and John King on mute present the elections results, parading the same bland prompt jockeys, trying to look dignified as they swiped and scratched at their gee-whiz blue and red maps . . . those Greyhound Bus memories kept getting stronger and stronger until there was nothing. I was back on that bus, forced to breath airborne vaginal yeast infection spores, fighting nausea at every breath. I closed my eyes and hurtled through darkness . . .

I woke up the next morning with a bad hangover and the following words scrawled on a piece of paper next to my bed:  ”We’re still on the bus. No way out…suffocating…helplessness, claustrophobia…for four more years. Four more years. We’re gonna be on that bus….no getting off now.” Looking at the note, it was clear that I was severely inebriated on election night and, not unreasonably, must have convinced myself that the end had come. I was glad I no longer kept my .357 Magnum loaded and ready within easy reach of my bed, like I did in Victorville.

But the most important thing was that the yeast smell was gone and . . . as soon as I get over this nasty hangover, it’ll be time to get to work.

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled and co-founder of the S.H.A.M.E. Project. Read his book: The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

Click the cover, buy the book!

Be libertarian one time? Is that the same thing as "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas"?

Author’s note: I wrote this brief dispatch about my run-in with libertarian pro-marijuana activist/former judge James P. Gray back in March of 2011. But the piece disappeared into the black void of my computer hard-drive, and I forgot all about it—until now. I’m glad the text turned up, because Judge Gray’s sleazy efforts to bring lefties and progressives into the Libertarian Party fold under the innocuous banner of pot legalization is much more relevant today than it was 2011. After all, Judge Gray is now the running mate of Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson is using the weed wedge issue to siphon off votes from Obama.  —YL

Last Friday, I tagged along with a friend to a community center/Methodist Church in Hollywood for a documentary screening and panel discussion about California’s marijuana legalization movement. The film was a continuous stream of talking heads—interviews with aging hippies, baby-boomer marijuana patients suffering from cancer, former drug addicts, inmates, a few policy wonks, mystical Ibogaine practitioners and a bunch of assorted lefties and new agers involved in the marijuana legalization movement. All in all, it was a predictable set of people, and people in the audience seemed to be of the same activist demographic. But when the lights were turned on and people started talking, a cold chill ran down my spine: it was as if everyone around me had suddenly turned into a libertarian.

There were a bunch of them in the audience, including a quiet, mousy intern from Antiwar.com and her hippy bohemian writer chick friend who had been recently been converted to libertarianism, who admitted that she thought libertarianism was “really cool,” as people stood outside on the stairs and passed around a joint. The panel of experts was also stacked with libertarians, including a retired libertarian judge from rightwing Orange County who shared the stage with pot activists spewing new age gibberish about a “spiritual evolution” putting an end to the War on Drugs. New age stoners, crusty lefties and wonky progressives getting along with free-market extremists? Yes, sir. They were on the same team—and proud of it. They had risen above “mere” politics and put aside “petty” ideological differences to engage in a nonpartisan effort for the greater good of Gaia…or something like that.

I knew that libertarians have come to dominate the drug legalization movement, but I had never seen the spectacle up close and personal. And what I saw was deeply disturbing. Because from where I sat, it didn’t look like bipartisanship in action: it looked like a straight up con and a perfect example of how America’s oligarchy infiltrate the gullible leftie ranks and bootstrap liberal/progressive issues to the freemarket/anti-regulation cause.

My journalist buddy, who’s been watching and reporting on California’s drug legalization movement for the past decade, said this was not new. Libertarians have wormed their way into the drug scene in a major way, and were a big reason why marijuana legalization had suddenly gained so much mainstream credibility over the past five or six years. It made sense: the Koch-funded thinktank-industrial-complex has limitless cash, connections and access to media outlets. The Kochs also have a major objective that fits right in with the stoner scene: cloaking libertarianism with a liberal veneer and attracting lefties and progressives to the dark side.

"Three Strikes! You're out for life!"

The libertarians at this discussion were not trying to hide and operated right out in the open, starting with the keynote speaker, the Honorable James Gray. He had spent years working as a rightwing judge in Orange County, locking people up for petty drug crimes, but had suddenly seen the light and was now a vocal proponent of marijuana legalization. A former Superior Court judge coming out strongly against drug criminalization? It’s no small thing—his presence gave the stoner-dominated weed legalization movement a huge boost in credibility and respectability, and made Judge Gray a celebrity, a hero among liberal legalization activists.

Up on the stage, Judge Gray talked a lot about the failure of America’s drug policies. He talked about the stupendous amounts of taxpayer wealth wasted to no good effect. He talked about the insane incarceration rates for non-violent offenders, and the unnecessary suffering and misery caused by the War on Drugs, breaking up families, robbing young people of opportunity and leaving kids to grow up without fathers and mothers. It all made sense. And given that Gray had spent 25 years as a real life judge putting away all those people he now talked about with such empathy and feeling added some serious moral heft to his words. I gotta admit it was hard not be moved.

There was one problem with the act: it was full of shit. As a libertarian true believer, Gray has no problem with legalizing child labor, scrapping welfare, letting people die on the street for lack of healthcare and allowing companies to turn our air and drinking into into toxic sludge. So why the empathy for moochers and losers rotting in jail? It didn’t any make sense.

When I got home, I looked this guy up and it didn’t take long to figure how much he really cares. All I had to do was go the “About” section of his website. It’s all right there, down to the photo of him posing with his hero Milton Friedman, that great defender of the common man.

"Ha ha ha! Those liberal suckers think we're against the War on Drugs!"

Gray started his legal career as a JAG at the U.S. Naval base in Guam—which by the way is a government job. Next he was appointed to the bench in 1983—yep, another government position—right when Reagan’s war on drugs started picking up steam. California’s prison population tripled under his watch. Which might make you say: “Hey, you know, he saw the debacle with his own two eyes and now wants to stop it. What if he really does care about the poor and the oppressed? Give him a chance, will ya?” Sure, he cares. That’s why three years after he was appointed to the California Superior Court, he won the Business Litigation Judge of the Year award from the Orange County Bar Association— you know, because he sided with the common man.

And after he retired, Gray got a cushy job making $400 an hour at ADR Services Inc., a firm that handles out of court arbitration for corporate clients. Arbitration is a loophole created by corporate America to scam people out of their constitutional right to a fair trial by jury, bypassing the public legal system altogether and forcing Americans into a rigged private justice system. A 2007 Public Citizen report revealed that arbitrators working for outfits like Gray’s ruled against consumers 94 percent of the time:

“Many consumers will find themselves forced into the shadowy world of binding mandatory arbitration, where their chances of successfully defending themselves are slim to none. . . . Safeguards built into the justice system are not found in binding mandatory arbitration. For example, arbitrators decide most credit card cases on the basis of documents supplied by the company without the presence – and sometimes without the knowledge – of the consumer. Consumers must pay to have a hearing. Hearings are not open to the public, no transcripts are produced . . . And appeal is nearly impossible. ”

Looking through the articles and press clippings amassed on Gary’s site, it’s clear where he stands on the issues. On top of getting rid of government social programs and minimum wage, he wants to enact the “FairTax” (hint: it’s only fair to billionaires) and get rid of restrictions on political donations, freeing Americans to contribute as much as they want want to political candidates—money is speech, after all.

But what about the War on Drugs? Well, no matter what he tells his progressive stoner groupies, Judge Gray sees nothing wrong with the War on Drugs per se, as long as it was being waged by the states and not the federal government. The semantics may be a bit too complicated for the legalize it crowd to follow, but let’s take a look anyway.

On his “Primary Issues” page, Gray does not actually say that he is against drug prohibition, nor the heavy handed sentencing requirements. Instead he is against the federal government meddling with the affairs of local governments:

Repeal the failed and hopeless War on Drugs by restricting the role of the federal government to assisting each state to enforce its chosen laws. Crime was reduced by more than 20 percent within one year after we pursued this course with the repeal of Alcohol Prohibition, and the same results will be realized when we finally repeal Drug Prohibition. People must be held accountable for their actions, instead of for what they put into their bodies. The War on Drugs has directly created an enormously large and lucrative black market that has corrupted institutions, people in all walks of life, and, most especially, children, here and all around the world.

He said the same thing on Bill O’Reilly in 2008:

If I was the drug czar, I would advocate letting each state decide what to do with regard to this critical issue. Invoke the concept of Federalism and get the federal government out of the equation, except to allow them to help each state to enforce its own rules.

You hear that stoners? Drug legalization is all about states rights. As in, the state can do whatever it feels like. And my current home state of California has been doing a bang up job managing the largest, most overcrowded prison gulag network in the whole country.

Remember that when you go to the polls and feel your hand drifting towards the Libertarian Party checkbox.

PS: Read David Sirota’s analysis of the GOP-LP “marijuana conspiracy” in Colorado that Mitt Romney’s hoping will siphon off enough of the progressive pro-pot vote away from Obama and hand him the state.

PPS: On top of everything, Judge Gray’s not even a real libertarian. He was a lifelong Republican until 2004, when he suddenly switched to the Libertarian Party to run for Senator Barbara Boxer’s seat.

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled and co-founder of the S.H.A.M.E. Project. Read his book: The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

Click the cover, buy the book!

Cross-posted from Frying Pan News

It’s an unreasonably warm October day, and I’m milling about awkwardly with a handful of suits at a mixer in a small banquet hall at Newport Beach’s Pacific Club—which, according to its website, is the gathering place of choice for the “distinctive life-style of Orange County’s business and professional leaders.”

An incredible thirst suddenly overwhelms me, as I look down and see I’ve practically sweated through my cheap suit. I try my best to keep control of my decorum, but when a busser passes by with a lone Arnold Palmer on his tray, I snatch it greedily from the outstretched hands of another guest and suck the saccharine concoction down in one gulp.

The hot weather may be playing a small role in my odd behavior, but my discomfort is mainly due to the fact this is no ordinary mixer. I’ve successfully infiltrated one of the most powerful and secretive Republican organizations in the country: The Lincoln Club of Orange County. Back in September, I discovered a chink in its otherwise iron-clad armor with this note on the group’s website:

This election year is the most pivotal in recent memory. Will we continue on the path toward expanding government or will we change course and choose liberty? In California, will we stand by while special interests bankrupt our state or will we finally return Sacramento to the voters?

Whether it’s supporting conservative candidates and issues locally or at the national level, Lincoln Club membership gives you an opportunity to put your beliefs into action and to stay informed about crucial happenings in local, statewide, and national politics.

Learn more about how you can make a difference this election year.

Join us! Members are encouraged to attend with their prospective member guests.

The organizational brains and bucks behind Citizens United and Proposition 32 was looking for new members. Who was I to say no?

Easier said than done.

The club only has a few hundred members—none of whom, certainly, would be willing to drag a strange journalist to an event unless the writer were on the Koch brothers’ payroll.

So I RSVP’d independently, hoping that anyone coherent enough to string together a few sentences would be welcome. The contemporary Republican Party isn’t exactly loaded with William F. Buckley-types. If James O’Keefe can occupy an elite niche in the GOP pantheon, surely I could squeeze my way in.

And here I am, in the teeth of the Conservative movement, surrounded by power suits and blonde bouffants, trying to be the best Republican I can be. In preparation, I shaved my sideburns up above my ears, and slicked my hair to the side–a Chappelle’s Show parody of a white guy. I must look the part, as I spy the blondest, most-intimidating bouffant of them all making its way toward me. It belongs to Teresa Hernandez, a onetime Republican congressional candidate who tried to take Hilda Solis’ seat after Obama appointed her Secretary of Labor. Almost as soon as I sign myself in, Hernandez introduces herself.

“Hi, I’m Teresa. I’m a member.” She lets that settle in. “So… ‘Allen,’” she says, staring skeptically at my pseudonymous name tag. “Where are you from?”

“Glendale,” I tell her, which is true, even though it’s an hour’s drive north in L.A. County – which has its own Lincoln Club.

“Glendale, huh? That must have been quite a . . . schlep.”

I breathe a sigh of relief. She doesn’t suspect me of being a journalist. I must have merely set off her Jewdar.

“Oy,” I say, laying it on thick, “a schlep indeed. No traffic, thank heavens.”

“So what brings you all the way down here, Allen?”

“Well,” I tell Hernandez, “if you want to become active in the conservative movement in California, this is the place. The Lincoln Club of Orange County is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.”

This too, is true. Since the days of Richard Nixon, the Lincoln Club has been the Matrix-like ideological birthing chamber of California Republicanism, whose grandees and arbiters once guided Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson, George Deukmejian and Arnold Schwarzenegger when their political careers were in their larval stages. That same Lincoln Club gave us the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court victory—which paved the way for Super PACs and unlimited, anonymous corporate donations—and, over the past year, had been instrumental in pushing Proposition 32 onto the California ballot. (The measure would permanently gut the clout of California’s unions by prohibiting automatic payroll deductions from being used for political purposes.)

“Well…that’s good,” Hernandez replies, suddenly uninterested and looking for an exit strategy. I wasn’t ready to let her go.

“So, how are the Prop. 32 efforts looking?” I ask, opening my eyes as wide as possible in my best simulacrum of Republican excitement. “Does it still have a shot?”

Her face immediately brightens: “We’re up to $60 million. We’re outspending them now! I think we’re going to do it.”

With that, more attendees filter in and Hernandez excuses herself to greet them. Many, quite honestly, seem like wealthy retirees with little else to do, although there are some GOP farm league players too, including Garden Grove city council candidate Phat Bui.

But make no mistake: The Lincoln Club is the real deal. And if they have their way, Citizens United is just the beginning of their political ambitions for the country.

Kingmaker of Southland Republicans

When Richard Nixon famously declared, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” after losing the 1962 California Governor’s race to Pat Brown, he may also have been predicting the future of his state’s Republican Party. The social revolution of the ’60s would eventually render the party a shrinking minority in an increasingly liberal state. But a group of Orange County businessmen, spurred on by Nixon’s defeat, vowed to never let a champion of conservative values suffer such an embarrassing defeat in California again. Lead by Walter Knott, the founder of Knott’s Berry Farm, and Si Fluor of the Fluor Corporation, they formed the Lincoln Club of Orange County to advocate for the interests of the business community–and the club has been playing kingmaker of Southland Republicans with grand ambitions ever since.

In 1978, the Lincoln Club helped launch the landmark California anti-tax initiative Proposition 13—which capped property taxes at an absurdly low rate and demanded all future tax raises in the state be approved by the legislature by a two-thirds margin. The initiative portended the anti-tax revolution that hangs over the country to this day.

Through the 1990s and early aughts, the Lincoln Club made several attempts to pass “paycheck protection” measures in California—which would have banned unions from taking automatic dues from members. These failed miserably, as voters were sophisticated enough to realize they spelled the political death of California’s 2.5 million union members

In 2007, with union power still too strong for any massive statewide overhauls, the Lincoln Club set their sites on the national election fray, by providing seed money for Hillary: The Movie—an anti-Hillary Clinton political documentary/screed they hoped would ultimately lead to a John McCain presidential victory in 2008. They were even given an executive producer credit on the film.

Hillary was scheduled to air on cable TV in the run-up to the election—but never did, after the Federal Election Commission declared it to be political propaganda and blocked it from being advertised or paid to be shown on television 30 days before the 2008 Democratic primary. The group that produced the film, Citizens United, sued and won its case before the Supreme Court—paving the way for Super PACs and unlimited, anonymous corporate donations to the political process. Where the money came from to support such a massive legal endeavor remains largely unknown, but many suspect the Lincoln Club dug fairly deep into its members’ pockets for the cause.

This year, the Lincoln Club was instrumental in qualifying and pushing onto the California ballot Proposition 32, which proposes limiting “special interest” political donations to elections by eliminating mandatory union and corporate payroll deductions from being used for political purposes – although there don’t seem to be many, if any, state businesses that politically tithe their employees.

Yes, the group that opened the floodgates for unlimited corporate donations to political campaigns, now purports to be interested in “stopping special interest” money from entering politics. Even more cynically, they’ve done so by appropriating Occupy Wall Street-inspired anti-corporate messaging into the political campaign. If passed, the law will likely be used as a model to quash unions in other states.

“A Small Group of People With Just a Little Bit of Money”

Back at the club, the banquet room has slowly filled, and 20 or so attendees sit at three small tables to feast on fried-chicken salad. A skeleton crew of stealthy Latino bussers ferries Arnold Palmers to the tables—one of which revolves around Teresa Hernandez, the other around Lincoln Club chairman and RKW Development president Richard Wagner. Then there’s the third, which revolves around, well, me I guess. It’s nearly empty, as the two other people sitting with me are together and largely engaged in their own conversation.

I’m clearly the reject of the room.

My fortunes, however, change instantly when Lincoln Club president Richard Loewen arrives, sits directly next to me, and begins attacking his fried chicken.

“Sorry I’m late everyone,” he announces to the room after a few bites. “Why don’t we go around and introduce ourselves?”

My palms are so sweaty that by the time my turn comes around I can barely hold on to my silverware.

“Hi, uh, I’m Allen Fleischer. I’m here because I have these, uh…conservative principles buried…uh…deep inside me. And I want to…let them out…”

This is going badly. I need to channel my inner Sean Hannity.

“Liberty and freedom are obviously under assault in America, and they won’t fight for themselves. Myself and other conservatives like to rant about the state of America’s political affairs in casual conversation or to our televisions, but we don’t do anything about it. So I’m here to get involved. And I can’t think of a better place to do that than the Lincoln Club of Orange County…”

Holy shit, that was smooth. Time for the big finish.

“The Lincoln Club is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.”

Bingo!

Like Loewen, most of the guests are buried in their chicken, though I can’t help but notice the approving nods of several cougars. (Still got it!)

After introductions, a brief history video of the club is shown. The topic of Citizens United gets a particularly lengthy discussion.

Richard Wagner, who was club president during the initiative, gets off a good line: “We backed Citizens United to bring down Hillary Clinton, which we did…and we got Barack Obama instead.”

Remorseless laughter fills the room. There’s a very obvious understanding that the sweep of Citizens United goes well beyond Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

After the video, Loewen takes the stage to talk up the current pride of the organization: Proposition 32.

“This measure is really a game-changer,” he says, smiling. “Over the past 20 years, we here at the Lincoln Club have tried getting paycheck protection passed in California three different times with no luck. The measures have just gotten killed by the public unions. Whenever the unions put their full support behind something, no one can beat them.

“But a couple of years ago, we figured, hey, let’s give it another shot. People said we were crazy. And they were probably right. But we started off slow, just to see what would happen. So we gave [conservative journalist] Steve Greenhut $75,000 to write his bookPlunder, about how public employee unions are bankrupting the state. It did pretty well.

“Okay, we thought. How about qualifying this thing for the 2012 ballot? Once again, people said we were crazy. But the Tea Party suddenly became interested. With absolutely zero money, they got about 30,000 signatures. A long way off, but we figured it showed some serious interest. Our testing showed the key [to success], unlike our last paycheck protection measures, was including corporations in the measure.

“So we put a little money behind it—about $100,000–and, what do you know, we qualified for the ballot. The unions went ballistic. At first, we were getting killed on spending. But then, out of the blue a massive $4 million donation showed up and the money has been rolling in ever since. People are calling Prop. 32 the second most important vote in the country in this election cycle, after the president.

“So there you have it. A small group of people, with just a little bit of money and the right connections, can have a huge impact.”

We’re Not Racist

After Loewen’s ode to 32, Hernandez stands up to discuss the club’s next big political endeavor—luring Latino voters to the Republican cause.

“Latinos are 39 percent of the population in California and growing,” she says. “And they almost all vote Democrat. We’re never going to win unless we reach this demographic.”

Of course, with state Republicans historically allied with groups like the Minutemen and 1994’s Proposition 187—which, among other things, sought to prevent undocumented immigrants from having access to health care in California—it’s little wonder Latinos are skeptical.

“Even though they agree with us on many social issues, when Latinos think about the Republican Party, they’re thinking about us deporting their grandma or their cousin,” says Hernandez. “When Democrats call us racist—which we’re not—we have no response, no plan we can point to that Latinos can rally behind.”

That is where the Lincoln Club stands poised to jump in with a three-point plan: Securing the border, workplace enforcement and a guest worker program. Of course, Hernandez’s guest worker program doesn’t include a path to citizenship. It’s simply about using immigrants to drive labor prices down and then sending them on their way back home. Unions too, will reject the idea of guest workers, and fight against the plan at all cost. However, should Prop. 32 pass and cripple its ability to fund-raise for political purposes, there will be little labor can do.

Gloria Romero: “Isn’t She Great!”

With the event ending, I flag down Loewen.

“Mr. Loewen, I have to ask: How did you get a liberal like Gloria Romero to front for Prop. 32? That was really a stroke of genius.”

Indeed, nothing in this election season has been more surprising than the decision of Romero, an East L.A. Latina progressive and former California State Senate Democratic majority leader, to join with the Lincoln Club on 32. Romero won a hotly contested run for the California Assembly in 1998, largely by fighting the Lincoln Club on Prop. 32′s progenitor, Proposition 226–the first ‘paycheck protection’ initiative. Now, suddenly, not only is she in favor of 32, she’s become its primary spokesperson.

“Isn’t she great!” Loewen tells me. “We don’t even have to coordinate with her. She just goes for it.”

“Really?”

“She and Teresa are friends. Teresa and her husband own a restaurant in El Monte and a lot of political players tend to eat there—including Democrats. We approached her about 32 way back—maybe a year and a half ago. She told us she’d think about it. We didn’t hear from her for a while. Then, six months ago, she finally called Teresa and said ‘I’m in.’ She’s been 100 percent committed ever since

“We tried to get Common Cause to jump on board too. Their president, Bob Edgar, was actually for it. He’s a friend of mine. But the board ultimately came out against it.”

With that, Loewen flashes me a toothy “oh well” smile, and excuses himself to head outside into the endless Orange County summer.

“You Get a Lot of Wackos on Our Side”

Loewen’s response was typical of the mood at the meeting–a warm, good-humored affair, not tainted by the shrill chest-thumping of Fox News or the life-or-death rhetoric of the Tea Party. Most of those present were absolutely delighted just to be able to speak about these issues strategically, without getting ridiculed by their liberal Southern California colleagues, or having the conversation descend into uneducated birtherism.

“You get a lot of wackos on our side,” one prospective member admitted to me.

That said, of course they’re all good-humored. They’re rich, they’re powerful and they’re pretty much all white. Their only stake in the larger political battle is holding on to a few extra tax dollars. But the fact is that being rich, white and sophisticated just isn’t enough to stay in control in the 21st Century. With America’s changing demographics, you need to be mercenary. So you plug away, peeling off your opponents’ key allies and hoping voters are foolish enough to vote for your Trojan Horse measures, or apathetic enough to ignore them.

If you lose, there’s no real worry. You finish your chicken salad with a smile, and go home to your wealthy suburban home to fight another day. Two weeks after the election, the Lincoln Club has a sleepover field trip planned at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, where they’ll peruse the new and bizarrely random “Treasures of Walt Disney” exhibit before enjoying a power dinner with Wisconsin’s union-busting Governor Scott Walker.

“Yes on 32, Huh?”

As I head to my car with a fistful of Prop. 32 bumper stickers, I catch one of the parking attendants, an elderly Asian man, dismissively eyeing my political propaganda. I turn to face him, expecting he’ll look away, but he doesn’t.

“Yes on 32, huh?” he asks.

“Oh, you betcha,” I say, channeling my whitest, inner white guy. “We’re going to take the state back from those special interests.”

He pauses for a moment, scanning me up and down. “I’ll be voting no,” he finally says, before walking away.

“What’ll it take to change your mind?” I shout after him.

He doesn’t even turn around.

I smile, hop in my car, and drive as fast as I can back to Los Angeles.

§§§

Want to know more? Read Matthew Fleischer’s last dispatch: Progressive Turncoats: Pro-Labor Politician from East Los Angeles Fronting For Koch Brothers, Wall Street Fraudsters and Wal-Mart Oligarchs…

This article is cross-posted from In These Times

On September 13, two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof penned an op-ed titled “Students Over Unions” bashing the Chicago Teachers Union’s current strike. Kristof writes,

I’d be sympathetic if the union focused solely on higher compensation. Teachers need to be much better paid to attract the best college graduates to the nation’s worst schools. But, instead, the Chicago union seems to be using its political capital primarily to protect weak performers.

Ironically, when Kristof started off at the Times in the 1980s, he was protected by similar job-security provisions as a member of the Newspaper Guild of New York. When Kristof become a columnist for the paper, he ceased being a union member. Now that Kristof is a star, union members say that he has given them the cold shoulder when they have asked for help in restoring pensions to the foreign overseas employees who have very likely helped Kristof in his reporting.

In January, the New York Times froze the pensions of its non-U.S.-citizen overseas employees, many of whom work in dangerous hotspots as translators and fixers. The move greatly upset New York Times reporters, especially with two recent deaths of foreign employees: the 2009 killing of reporter Sultan Munadi (a former Times interpreter) in Afghanistan while he was trying to protect a Times reporter, and of Times translator Khalid W. Hassan outside of Baghdad in 2007.

More than 600 New York Times employees condemned the pension freeze in an open letter to New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr, last December. “Our foreign citizen employees in overseas bureaus have just had their pensions frozen with only a week’s warning. Some of these people have risked their lives so that we can do our jobs,” read the letter. “A couple have even lost them. Many have spent their entire careers at the Times—indeed, some have letters from your father explaining the pension system—and deserve better treatment.”

One union member says he wrote to Kristof–who has won two Pulitzers for his overseas reporting and surely worked with New York Times’ foreign employees–and asked him to sign the letter. He says Kristof ignored him.

“I was one of the several authors of the letter. At the time, I wrote individually to all the columnists [except Krugman] asking them to consider signing it. Because some had been foreign correspondents and had depended on those people who were being unilaterally screwed out of their pensions and who had no union protection, I hoped they would step forward,” says New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil. “But not one signed. Not one even answered my note. Since then, I’ve hoped that at least one or two would weigh in on our struggle here. But nothing. Silence.”

Nicholas Kristof did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Currently, the New York Times is locked in an ugly contract struggle with the union that Kristof once belonged to, the Newspaper Guild of New York. The reporters at the New York Times have worked without a contract for nearly a year and a half, since their previous contract expired on March 31, 2011. (Full disclosure: I am an associate member of the Newspaper Guild (TNG-CWA).)

As the contract battle heats up at the New York Times, union leaders such as O’Meara are hoping more star reporters and columnists speak up. He fears that the New York Times is going to seek an impasse in bargaining with the National Labor Relations Board in order to unilaterally impose a concessionary contract on unionized reporters.

“People think they are stars and don’t need a union. Unfortunately, what happens is there is a change in management and their star dims a bit, and they do need a union,” says Bill O’Meara. “It’s a real shame.”

Life’s good at the top!

As someone who attempted to organize reporters myself as part of the Newspaper Guild, I can tell you that solidarity can be difficult to find in reporters whose job security comes from their byline and not their union clout. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon for star reporters or columnists to stay out of union struggles, feeling that their jobs are protected by the power of their brands. Reporters as popular as Kristof, who has over 1 million Twitter followers, are the least likely to suffer a pay cut or a layoff, as the New York Times could ill afford to lose them.

But other Times reporters may face a tougher situation.

“I think it is going to come to a head in the next month,” says O’Meara. “The struggle is going to get very difficult. Various things are going to happen. Nobody is ruling out a strike. Obviously we want to avoid it and get a contract.”

This article is cross-posted from In These Times

Mike Elk is an eXiled comrade and a staff writer at In These Times. Read his labor reporting…

Steve Klein, right-wing extremist and consultant for Islamophobic cinema

Crossposted from MaxBlumenthal.com

The US Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three US diplomats were killed in attacks and rioting provoked by an obscure, low-budget anti-Muslim film called “The Innocence of Muslims.” The producer of the film is a real estate developer supposedly named “Sam Bacile”who claims to be an Israeli Jew. Bacile told the AP the film was made with $5 million raised from “100 Jewish donors.” He said he was motivated to help his native country, Israel, by exposing the evils of Islam.

While Bacile claims to be in hiding, and his identity remains murky, another character who has been publicly listed as a consultant on the film is a known anti-Muslim activist with ties to the extreme Christian right and the militia movement. He is Steve Klein, a Hemet, California based insurance salesman who claims to have led a “hunter-killer team” in Vietnam.

Klein is a right-wing extremist who emerged from the same axis of Islamophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik and which takes inspiration from the writings of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes.

Islamophobic Actors Guild: That fat hick with man boobs on the bottom left is supposed to be one of Mohammed’s disciples

It appears Klein (or someone who shares his name and views) is an enthusiastic commenter on Geller’s website, Atlas Shrugged, where he recently complained about Mitt Romney’s “support for a Muslim state in Israel’s Heartland.” In July 2011, Spencer’s website, Jihad Watch, promoted a rally Klein organized alongside the anti-Muslim Coptic extremist Joseph Nasrallah to demand the firing of LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, whom they painted as a dupe for Hamas.

Klein is also closely affiliated with the Christian right in California, organizing resentment against all the usual targets — Muslims, homosexuals, feminists, and even Mormons. He is a board memberand founder of a group called Courageous Christians United, which promotes anti-Mormon, anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim literature (including the work of Robert Spencer) on its website. In 2002, Klein ran for the California Insurance Commissioner under the American Independent Party, an extremist fringe party linked to the militia movement, garnering a piddling 2 percent of the vote.

Klein has been closely affiliated with the Church at Kaweah, an extreme evangelical church located 70 miles southeast of Fresno that serves as a nexus of neo-Confederate, Christian Reconstructionist, and militia movement elements. The Southern Poverty Law Center produced a report on Kaweah this spring that noted Klein’s long record of activist against Muslims:

Over the past year, Johnson and the church militia have developed a relationship with Steve Klein, a longtime religious-right activist who brags about having led a “hunter killer” team as a Marine in Vietnam. Klein, who calls Islam a “penis-driven religion” and thinks Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca is a Muslim Brotherhood patsy, is allied with Christian activist groups across California. In 2011, as head of the Concerned Citizens for the First Amendment, he worked with the Vista, Calif.-based Christian Anti-Defamation Commission on a campaign to “arm” students with the “truth about Islam and Muhammad” — mainly by leafleting high schools with literature depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a sex-crazed pedophile.

Klein, based in Hemet, Calif., has been active in extremist movements for decades. In 1977, he founded Courageous Christians United, which now conducts “respectful confrontations” outside of abortion clinics, Mormon temples and mosques. Klein also has ties to the Minuteman movement. In 2007, he sued the city of San Clemente for ordering him to stop leafleting cars with pamphlets opposing illegal immigration.

Like many other activists who fashion themselves as “counter-Jihadists,” Klein has organized against the construction of mosques in his area. While leafleting against a planned mosque in Temecula, California, which he claimed would herald the introduction of Shariah law to the quiet suburb, Klein remarked, “It all comes down to the first amendment. I don’t care if you disagree with me. Just don’t cut off my head.”

What used to be a U.S. consulate in Libya…

Klein appears to be allied with the National American Coptic Assembly, a radical Islamophobic group headed by Morris Sadik. Sadik claims to have discovered the film and began promoting it online. Once it went viral, the trailer was translated into Arabic, sparking outrage in the Middle East, and ultimately, to the deadly attacks carried out by Muslim extremists today.

Klein claims credit for inspiring “Sam Bacile” to produce “The Innocence of Muslims,” promising him he would be “the next Theo Van Gogh,” referring to the Dutch columnist and provocateur who was murdered by a Muslim extremist. Of the attacks in Libya, Klein said, “We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen.”

Crossposted from MaxBlumenthal.com

Would you like to know more? Check out Max Blumenthal’s previous posts: Progressive Democratic hero Elizabeth Warren enlists to serve AIPAC’s pro-war agenda . . . Mitt’s Foreign Policy Team Run By Ultra-Neocon Loons & Failures Itching For Nuclear War With Iran . . . Washington Post Scrubs Quote Smearing Iran War Critics, But Ex-Camp Guard Jeffrey Goldberg Runs With It Anyway

From today’s edition of NSFW Corp

SALT LAKE CITY, UT—I have some explaining to do. As you know, I went missing for roughly 36 hours — no phone, no email, no nothing — roughly from the time of Clinton’s Satanic speech Wednesday night until the time which you receive this. First, let me tell you that I am fine, alive, and though a bit shaken up and haggard looking from sleeplessness, I was not mistreated or molested in any way.

In my last panicked correspondence to the outside world, I was begging the NSFW Corp’s Paul Carr to arrange some sort of commando mission to Charlotte to rescue our man-on-the-ground there, James Kotecki. I was terrified that the Tracy Flickites who gathered in their numbers in Charlotte would get into James’ brain and swallow his soul. That if James so much as fell asleep for five minutes, the Flickites would sneak a pod next to our Convention Correspondent’s bed, and he’d wake up full of hope and optimism. Or worse.

So as dusk approached Wednesday evening here in the greater Salt Lake Basin, and I was racing down I-15 to my secure hilltop location after playing poker with a bunch of middle-aged local jazz musicians, I fired off a series of increasingly panicked emails to Paul: “We need to get him out of Charlotte ASAP. Send him to Chicago to cover the teacher’s strike, where they’re fighting Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan. Or maybe that’s too close to the heat: Send James to the Caymans to get some rest. Or to Moldova, or Costa Rica. Anywhere but Charlotte! Whatever we do, don’t let James go to sleep!”

I realize now that it wasn’t James I was panicking over. It was me. As soon as Clinton took the stage Wednesday night, blathering for hours about how he and Barack Obama had done everything the Republican Right had told them they should do, only better and more competently than the Republicans themselves manage to, so why aren’t the Republicans happy? Why aren’t they patting Bill and Barack on the head and telling them “Good job, Bubba!” — feeding them Milk Bones treats like they promised? When I heard Clinton tape-looping that same rancid 1990s New Democrat theme, that’s when it all came crashing down for me.

Let me step back a moment for our readers. Some of you might be wondering what I’m doing in Salt Lake City… (Continued…click here)

To read the rest of this article by Mark Ames on the the harmful effects of sleep deprivation in the Mormon Zion, while being forced to watch the 2012 Democratic Party Convention like that Clockwork Orange guy, click here (open viewing).

This article was published at Not Safe For Work Corp, where I’m now Senior Editor. Subscribe, or face eternal damnation: http://www.nsfwcorp.com/subscribe

Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

This article is cross-posted from In These Times…

For the last two years, I have covered union busting efforts by Honeywell, their close connections to President Obama and how federal agencies have assisted Honeywell in three different labor struggles since Obama came to power.  In particular, I covered a 14-month lockout at Honeywell uranium plant in Metropolis, Illinois, where Honeywell cheated on tests for replacement workers, who later caused several releases of radioactive gas into the atmosphere. Instead of their picket line with the striking workers as he promised to do during his campaign, Obama decided to fly with top Democratic donor and Honeywell CEO David Cote to India while the lockout was still going on. (Today, Obama and Cote will appear at Honeywell’s Minneapolis facility for an event on the economy).

Recently, on May 10, at around 2 p.m., managers walked into Honeywell’s uranium conversion plant in Metropolis, Ill., and told workers—both union and nonunion—they had to leave the plant immediately. Multiple workers present say a manager told them the sudden dismissal was because the company had to investigate “sabotage” of plant equipment. Honeywell has since allowed non-union contractors and salaried employees and managers back into the plant to operate it as the company’s investigation continues, but still hasn’t allowed the full unionized workforce to return.

Then on May 14, according to United Steelworkers Local 7-669 President Stephen Lech, an engineer—manning a post typically manned by a union employee—caused a release of highly toxic radioactive UF6 gas for over seven minutes. Contrary to company policy, no alarms were sounded informing the community of the release of this deadly gas. Fortunately, no one was hurt by the accidental release of UF6 gas. Yet another leak of the same gas occurred at the Metropolis plant yesterday, although again it appears that workers fortunately escaped serious injury.

I had attempted to get Honeywell to comment on the matter, but as the company has done throughout the two years I have covered their union-busting, they refused to answer the question. Earlier in May, Plant Manager Larry Smith hung up the phone on me when I contacted him.  So when I heard Honeywell CEO Dave Cote would be talking at a forum on “Revitalizing America: Encouraging Entrepreneurship,” hosted by Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), I decided to go ask him a few questions about Honeywell’s various labor disputes.

Yesterday morning, I showed up at the event in the basement of the U.S. Capitol Building’s Visitor Center where Cote was speaking. I identified myself as a reporter for In These Times and gave my card to a Republican House staffer, who then handed me a media badge for the event.  It was one of the most bizarre events I have ever covered, as if those secret meetings between congressman and CEOs that union guys always talk about actually existed.

The assembly included lobbyists, corporate executes and GOP congressmen, talking about how they were going to push for deregulation and lower taxes. Even Rep. Hansen Clarke (D-Mich.) showed up to brag about how he was working with the Heritage Foundation to find ways to lower corporate taxes. Clarke was met with wild applause from the suit-clad room.

Cote spoke for about 15 minutes on how he was able to make Honeywell a successful company through “innovation,” and said he could make it more successful if corporate taxes were lowered even further. When it was time for questions for the panelists, I stood up and was called upon. I began to ask Cote about the uranium release caused by a non-union engineer working a job performed by a union worker. Cote began to frown and looked annoyed with my question. Immediately, I started getting dirty stares and smirks from the room of assembled corporate lobbyists and allies. The moderator of the panel interrupted me to say “Sir if I can interrupt. This is to hear from entrepreneurs”.

Within a few seconds, Nicolas D. Muzin, a senior adviser for Rep. Scott, grabbed me and attempted to physically remove me from the room. I informed Muzin that I had never been treated like this as a reporter.

Later, Rep. Scott, who is the sponsor of a bill to deny food stamps to the families of workers on strike, very politely took me aside in the hallway. Rep. Scott explained that after the panel there would be some time where I could ask the panelists some questions. After the panel ended, I went up to Cote and told him “I want to talk you about Metropolis, Illinois.” Cote immediately ran out a fire exit with an entourage of people following him. An unidentified man who was with Cote blocked the fire exit and shoved me as I attempted to walk through it. I informed him that this was an illegal to block a fire exit like this.

I saw another fire exit that was nearby and ran through it to find Honeywell CEO David Cote in a room behind the set of doors. Upon seeing me, Cote and his entourage immediately began to run away and quickly exited through another set of doors. I attempted to follow Cote through that set of doors, but was blocked by the same unidentified man and another man, whose nametag identified him as Honeywell External Communications Director Rob Ferris.

Ferris barricaded me in the room for several minutes and atferwards had the Capitol Police detain me. They released me after 10 minutes when they realized I had done nothing more than try to follow a CEO down a hallway. Indeed, Capitol Police asked me if I wanted to press charges against Ferris for false imprisonment for barricading me into the room, but I declined.

President Obama is doing an event with Honeywell CEO Dave Cote today in Minneapolis if any reporters want to ask about this incident. A better question might be why has Honeywell been able to use the federal government to attempt to bust unions in three different major labor disputes. Either way, try to make sure you’re in a room with multiple exits.

Editor’s note: After siccing his goons on Mike Elk, Dave Cote met President Obama in Minneapolis, where the two bold leaders toured a Honeywell factory and laughed at the workers.

“Tell me again how much do you get paid? Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Seal of the President of the United States sponsored by Honeywell International…

Crossposted from MaxBlumenthal.com

When activists from the Israeli group Zochrot set out into the heart of Tel Aviv’s “Independence Day” festivities to educate revelers about these facts, they were accused of engaging in criminal activities.

As soon as the activists attempted to exit an office building to place small placards on Ibn Gvirol Street memorializing Palestinian villages destroyed during the Nakba, riot police surrounded them with metal gates, blocking them inside. The police informed them that they would be arrested if they attempted to interact with the crowds celebrating Israel’s birth. “We will not allow you to enter the celebrations with your pictures or your fliers,” a cop told Zochrot’s Eitan Bronstein. “We will not allow this form of protest. It might disturb the peace so we won’t allow it.” Another police officer told Bronstein his placards represented “inciting material.”

Though the police repression can hardly be excused, there is some reason to believe the Zochrot activists could have been subjected to harsh violence if they had been allowed to proceed with their action. While caged behind the metal gates, passersby surrounded the activists and held forth. “You’re lucky the police is here. You should thank them,” said a bald, beefy man who had to be led away.

Another hulking character who identified himself as a member of Unit 51 from the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade paratrooper corps barked at the activists, “The only thing you are is a bunch of traitors. Every day people here are fighting… This is unbelievable. You are traitors and if we had the chance we would shoot you one by one. One by one we would shoot you…”

The demonstration concluded with police violently arresting three participants including one man for the crime of reading aloud the names of destroyed Palestinian villages.

Lia Tarachansky of the Real News Network filmed the melee. Her footage is below:

The repression of Zochrot’s educational action was the street level manifestation of the campaign the Israeli government has waged to mute discussion of the Nakba and punish those who violate the code of silence. Last year, the government passed a law that allows the denial of state funding to NGO’s that participate in Nakba commemorations. In 2009, it banned the use of the term “Nakba” in school textbooks. Limor Livnat, a right-wing Knesset member who co-sponsored the so-called Nakba Law and banned textbooks using the word during her term as Israel’s Education Minister, declared that merely allowing students to learn about the mass expulsion of Palestinians during 1947 and 1948 would encourage them to work against the Jewish state.

The images of brawny riot cops — literal thought police — roughing up the small band of Zochrot members for publicly reading “inciting” facts recalled a passage from a widely publicized book about the importance of promoting democracy around the globe. “If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm,” the book read, “then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society.”

The book is called “The Case For Democracy.” One of its authors, Natan Sharansky, was a former Soviet dissident who currently heads the Jewish Agency, a key arm of Israel’s settlement enterprise. The other author is Ron Dermer, an advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu known as “Bibi’s brain.” Together, the two called for overthrowing repressive regimes around the world, inspiring former US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to quote their so-called “Town Square Test,” while they actively guided Israel’s descent into authoritarianism.

Prom date?

How could Sharansky and Dermer fail to see the irony in their actions? As the scenes from Zochrot’s demonstration illustrated, reflection is never an option in a fear society.

Want to know more? Check out Max Blumenthal’s previous posts: Progressive Democratic hero Elizabeth Warren enlists to serve AIPAC’s pro-war agenda . . . Mitt’s Foreign Policy Team Run By Ultra-Neocon Loons & Failures Itching For Nuclear War With Iran . . . Washington Post Scrubs Quote Smearing Iran War Critics, But Ex-Camp Guard Jeffrey Goldberg Runs With It Anyway

Crossposted from MaxBlumenthal.com

The Spectator I have in front of me shows Steyn posing with ex-Prime Minister John Howard and Murdoch columnist Janet Albrechtsen. That’s what I mean by “head over heels.”

The really curious thing, though, is the magazine’s cover:

You read that right; “Rowan Dean on why Mark Steyn must not be silenced.”

Well, I was stupid enough to pay $9.95 (AUD) for an issue.

I thought, “Hey, the world is going to shit, we’re living in the 1930s, version 2.0., and I’m stuck in the Eastern Suburbs of Perth, lugging tins of cat food around and playing Smithers to my Boomer mother while she recovers from a spiral tendon rupture – at least give me the pleasure of watching a tick like Steyn facing the Spanish Inquisition. I’d pay $9.95 for that! Cheaper than a movie ticket; and let’s just say I don’t have much time for movies right now. Mark Steyn vs. Torquemada! Steyn getting pegged by some Canadian she-commissar! Hoo boy! This is gonna be good! This is gonna be good! Bring out the gimp! Bring! Out! Da! Gimp!”

But, hoo boy, it was a fucking rip off.

Rowan Dean’s actual article didn’t give a single case of anyone threatening to “silence” Steyn. The closest example Dean can cite is an old 2007 case where the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal wagged its finger at him:

In 2007, Steyn ‘fell afoul of the Tolerance Enforcers and Diversity Compliance Regulators of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal,’ who ‘devoted an entire day to analysing the “tone” of my writings,’ even flying in a professional stand-up comic to give an appraisal of his wit. In the end, they ‘let him off the hook’ but nonetheless accused him of flagrant Islamophobia. As Steyn quips: ‘How is flagrant Islamophobia any different to normal Islamophobia?’

Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic. British Columbia could easily be the most militantly PC place in the Western World and Steyn still couldn’t manage to get persecuted there. You Tories should be ashamed of yourselves – applauding a third-rate wannabe hater who can’t get busted for hate speech in Vancouver!

Instead, the Spectator article just recaps Steyn’s speech about how anti-racism is the biggest threat to Western liberal democracy since Lenin.

I’m not kidding:

Steyn maintains that we are losing the war on free speech: ‘The lights are going out all over the world on core western liberties; one light at a time, one cartoonist at a time, one novelist at a time, one filmmaker at a time, one newspaper columnist at a time.’ Steyn’s mission, he says, is to ‘relight those lamps.’

[…]

‘The lofty ideal of anti-racism is going to be to this century what communism was to the last,’ opines Steyn. ‘It is happening in UK [sic], Canada, the Netherlands, Austria, Scandanavia and now Australia,’ he says, referring to the recent federal court case in which columnist Andrew Bolt was found guilty under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Was I shitting you? I wasn’t shitting you! Steyn-enitsyn here is comparing Murdoch columnist Andrew Bolt’s racial vilification trial (in which a group of Aborigines sued Bolt for calling them “white” in a newspaper column) to some kind of Soviet gulag persecutions.

Just one tiny problem. The worst that Bolt got served with – this is pissant civil law we’re talking about, not the criminal stuff – was an order to apologise to the Aborigines and a ban on the republication of his offending column. As far as I know, he hasn’t been sent to a hard labour camp in Magadan Oblast or locked in a psych ward and pumped full of insulin (which is what real Stalinists would’ve done to a real dissident). Maybe, if Andrew Bolt is brave enough, he’ll get charged with contempt of court and sent to the Aussie-Minimum-Security-Prison-Farm Archipelago – maybe, but I doubt it.

But wait, Steyn has more examples of dastardly PC Stalinism. According to The Spectator’s fawning two-page article:

Just as ludicrous is the story of Constable Sam Adams in Britain, where, as Steyn jokes, ‘everything is policed except crime.’ [R.G.: Zounds, never heard that one before! This guy is truly the Great Right-Wing Humorist of our time! Rest in peace Saki, you queer old josser! You finally have an heir in Mark Steyn and his smirking Canuck jokes!] The gay constable, who happens to be his local area’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Community Liason Officer, overheard street preacher Dale McAlpine chatting about the Bible’s disapproval of homosexuality. McAlpine was promptly carted off to the nick, booked, and held for several hours. As Steyn puts it, ‘Constable Adams arrested Mr McAlpine for offending Constable Adams.’

Truly, this is the Nazi apartheid communist Inquisition of our time – a schizo vagrant getting lightly kettled for trolling a gay cop with ye olde Leviticus. Forget Obama’s new anti-Occupy laws; unmedicated street preachers is where da persecution’s happenin’!

The Spectator takes it even further. If you look at their cover, it’s Steyn who’s getting “silenced” by the fuzz – see that cartoon of him, gagged and hog-tied by a mullah and a gay constable? (We know he’s gay, see, because he’s wearing stockings.)

Rich white male victimhood doesn’t get more imaginary than that.

P.S. In case you think this is an isolated event, here’s a similar cartoon, of Mark Steyn getting “muzzled,” from the anti-Islamic blog Wings of Jihad.

Let me repeat. Steyn couldn’t even get persecuted in Vancouver, but the Right are intent on turning him into the next Salman Rushdie.

Ramon Glazov lives and writes in Perth, Western Australia. Email him at “ramonglazov at gmail dot com”

Click here for a photo essay of graffiti in Exarchia

I arrived in Athens only hours after the February 12 anti-austerity riots, the acrid odor of burnt-out banks still lingering downtown, and checked into a familiar haunt, the Hostel Zorbas on Victoria Square. The last time I stayed there, in the summer of 2001, the place still took drachmas and buzzed with backpackers just returned from Piraeus, where the ferries fan out to the pleasure islands of the Aegean. A decade later, those memories felt like the flashback scenes in The Road. This time the hostel had only two other guests. There was Anas, a young Syrian refugee planning his way north to Sweden — “They called me up for military service, and I’m not going to shoot my own people,” he was telling the desk clerk when I arrived — and there was Guy, an 18-year-old anarchist from Brooklyn. Guy was in town to forge relationships with his brothers in black and study Greek riot tactics.

Welcome to the Austerity Athens hostel scene.

Just before my arrival, a hundred thousand Greeks made international headlines with a day of rage against the terms of the latest ECB/IMF bailout. The terms required Greece step inside a familiar Iron Maiden of structural reform: deep cuts to public services, wages, and pensions; major privatizations; some Constitutional edits. Sitting atop it all was a Eurocrat baby-sitter clause that will place veto-wielding EU monitors — shadow ministers — inside each Greek government ministry. This last bit seemed designed for humiliation. The riots occurred the day the unelected government signed the deal, and it’s hard to find Greeks willing to condemn without qualification the destruction caused by the kids who took their anger out on anything that reminded them of international finance, and a few things that didn’t.

YouTube clips of those street fights were dramatic by any standard. But none captured February’s most cinematic moments around Syntagma Square. What no cameras caught was Greek anarchists using Ewok tactics on the streets of Athens. More than one proud anarchist told me of the trip-ropes and oil slicks used to neutralize a new motorcycle-based riot police unit called the Zeus-Deltas. Such innovations straight out of the Seven Samurai are of a piece with the deep lore of Greek anarchist protest. Among the war stories I heard in Athens, my favorite came from a well-known veteran anarchist named Alex Aristopoulus. In the early 1980s, during the annual November 17 protests commemorating the 1967 colonels’ coup, anarchists lured seven cops down a dead-end street, surrounded them, made them strip, and frog-marched them out naked. Later that night the uniforms were burned in an oil-drum in the heart of Exarchia, Athens’ anarchist quarter.

This is the stuff that had drawn my Zorbas bunkmate Guy to Athens. Last August, Guy was among the handful who gathered at the Bowling Green bull and participated in the small assemblies that became Occupy Wall Street. There he met and was enraptured by the Greek-born artist and anarchist Georgia Sagri. He decided to experience for himself the culture of resistance that produced people like her. With Occupy in winter hibernation, he bought a one-way ticket to Athens just after the anti-austerity riots. Guy was a junior high school dropout, but his plan was to return to New York with a master’s in mayhem, ready for the series of actions he referred to collectively as the “Spring Offensive.”

Among the architectural victims of the February 12 riots was this old theater in downtown Athens

As a “Day Two” Occupy activist, Guy was a popular kid in Athens. It was strange to see how the movement has become the Greeks’ first connection to the States. Not Serbia, not Iraq, not NATO — but Occupy. It was a reminder that in Greece, Most Hated Foreign Power (MHFP) has always been a revolving honorary. After a long run, we’ve finally ceded it back to the Germans. When the CIA helped institute military rule in 1967, we displaced the Brits, who had themselves displaced the Germans by returning King George to power after the war and refusing to recognize the leftist guerilla government which fully functioning by 1944 in the mountains of central Greece. When the country began sliding towards civil war, British troops participated in the violent crushing of leftist demonstrations around the country and even deployed machine-gun squads in armed clashes in the center of Athens. Just to make sure everyone knew where they stood, the Brits shipped thousands of leftist anti-Nazi partisans to concentration camps in Eritrea and Libya, where most of them died.

In any case, now the Germans have regained MHFP status with force. There’s Merkel, of course. But the secondary figures associated with the most extreme austerity measures, such as delaying elections, also have names like Wolfgang Schäuble. The European Commission task force representative in charge of the shadow minister program is actually named Horst Reichenbach. And the German tabloids have been New York Post brutal.

Greeks are not in the mood for insult on injury. Everywhere you turn you see signs of a country in collapse. On the day I arrived, a state mortgage agency had just closed around the corner from my hostel, and an employee was threatening to jump from the top floor, screaming about losing her insurance and being unable to care for a sick child. A couple days later, thieves waltzed into the Olympia Museum in broad daylight and stole dozens of ancient artifacts. The Minister of Culture offered to resign, but nobody cares anymore about the Minister of Culture.

Walk around Athens with a local, and within a few minutes they’ll point at something and say, “That’s new — you never used to see that before.” Usually it’s a sight Americans have long grown inured to, but in Greece still causes pain and wonder. Like an old woman rummaging through garbage for food. Often these “That’s new” moments are the spark behind the new forms of mutual aid and self-organization spreading throughout Greek society. This was the case of a 47-year-old former Internet marketer that I met one afternoon named Kostas Polychronopoulus. I found him in a downtown park called Klafthmonos, or Square of Tears, while he was giving away food to the newly hungry.

In December, Polychronopoulus had been unemployed for more than a year when he came upon two young Greek boys fighting over scraps of rotten food in a garbage can. The sight was too much for him. He went home and made ten sandwiches and tried to hand them out in the streets. He discovered that hungry people were often too ashamed to accept the handouts, so he got some friends together and started cooking communal meals on the streets. Slowly, people began to gather and join. Now he cooks almost every day in different places around city, including overcrowded refugee centers. His kitchen is part of a widening network of street aid institutions.

“Poverty is more in your face than ever,” he says. “We are a team of unemployed and they can call us what they want — socialist, anarchist. But we don’t care about labels. We believe in social justice and employment.”

Like most Greeks I spoke with, Polychronopoulus thinks the threat of bankruptcy is a bankers’ bogeyman made of straw. “They try and threaten us with bankruptcy,” he says. “We’ve already gone bankrupt! What is bankruptcy if not hungry people in the streets? For years the banks and the politicians shared the profits with themselves, but now that there are losses we have to pay for them?”

Embracing bankruptcy is steadily becoming less of a radical position. The other week the influential Financial Times editor and columnist Wolfgang Munchau wrote in favor of bankruptcy as the only way to save Greek democracy, and criticized the other Wolfgang for suggesting Greeks postpone elections. But elections seem beside the point in Greece. Trust in institutions is depleted.

Take the media. When Greeks watch state television now, they see the aliens from They Live! mouthing someone else’s empty words. Blatant corruption has been uncovered inside every studio and under every signal tower. The financial editor of a major tv station promoting austerity medicine was recently exposed for being on the payroll of a company handling the privatization of state property. Athens municipal radio, meanwhile, has been tied to the press office of the Eurobank.

“There is a corrupt triangle of interest between the banks, the media, and the politicians,” says Maria Louka, a reporter with Eleftherotypia (Press freedom), the first leftist publication to emerge after the restoration of civil rule in 1974. Like many Greek media organs, the paper is currently striking, though staff has managed to publish two strike issues.

“Pundits are often on the payroll of political interests or the press minister, and they all press the message of ‘There is no alternative’,” she says. “But the measures have taken such a violent form that the propaganda has lost its power. The media has been discredited along with the unions and the parties. One-time celebrity journalists are now verbally attacked on the street.”

It is one of the few silver linings of the crisis that the Tom Friedmans of Greece now live in fear of yogurt. And the programming in some cases has improved. When striking workers took over the studios of ALTER TV, a private television station, they broadcast a radical documentary called Debtocracy. It got a 35 percent share in prime time, the highest rating in the station’s history.

* * *

Exarchia is the seat of anarchist power in Athens. Legend has it the name comes from the neighborhood’s first settler, a farmer who gave away food to the poor. Its modern reputation for radical activism stems from its proximity to the Polytechnical, Law, and Economics universities. The Polytechnical is where tanks rolled through the campus gates in 1973 and crushed the student democracy movement organizing under the banner “Bread, Education, and Freedom.” A large sign emblazoned with the same slogan continues to hang over a monument to the crushed gate.

Stencil History of Greek Dynastic Corruption

Along with squats and people’s parks built from abandoned lots, Exarchia is home to some of the hippest cafes and bars in Athens. It’s as if the Lower East Side had managed to keep rents down and maintain its 1910 traditions. It was in Exarchia that in December of 2008 the police shot and killed a 15-year-old activist named Alexandros Grigoropoulos. The murder sparked riots across Europe. In Athens, anarchists issued a warning that shops in the tony shopping district that did not place black ribbons in their windows in honor of Alexandros would have their windows smashed. There was near 100 percent compliance.

Exarchia has arguably surpassed East Berlin for the most vibrant graffiti scene in the world. Just about every wall in the neighborhood bursts with bubble tags of “A.C.A.B.” (All Cops Are Bastards), Greek accented neo-Situationist slogans, and well-crafted murals and stencils satirizing the political history of modern Greece. The unifying strand is anti-capitalist philosophy. A growing number of images feature gas-masked anarchists.

Athens is the new graffiti capital of Europe; and the gas mask has become a major motif

Among the artists whose work colorizes the walls of Exarchia is a 30-year old dentist named Petros, who is better known around Exarchia by his stencil signature, “Mapet”. Petros first encountered street art as a dentist in Bristol, where he passed early Banksy pieces on his way to work. He began stenciling a couple of years ago after he returned to Athens and his practice began to deteriorate as the crisis deepened. “My customers used to get whatever needed done,” says Petros. “Now they’ll get a tooth pulled rather than get it crowned. Whatever’s cheaper. I try to lower my prices, offer payment plans, anything to keep the patients I have. I got involved in stenciling and activism to work off my anxiety.”

I met up with Petros one afternoon at a new street art studio in Exarchia called Stigma Lab. He had just finished spraying a run of his most recent work: a Valentine’s themed piece that featured Cupid over the slogan, “Make Love and Class War.” As with all of his stencils, he cut the lines with an old dentist’s drill. After he sprayed some posters for me, we joined his friend in the Stigma offices and talked about the crisis.

“What they should do,” said his friend, “is put coffeehouses on the islands — turn them into floating Amsterdams. So many of them are uninhabited. Everyone in Europe would come.”

Petros said his girlfriend was beginning to talk about leaving Athens and trying subsistence agriculture on an island where her family had a small plot. “She just wants to get out for a while,” said Petros, who was beginning to warm to the idea. But he was worried about the rumored deposits of oil and gas in the Aegean, which he said companies were already lining up to prospect. “The Aegean would be so easy to destroy,” he said. “All it would take is one disaster and all of those coasts — I swear if they ruin the sea I will move to Africa and just never come back. I don’t care.”

Before I left, Petros gave me a few posters and made me promise to put them up on the streets of New York. I was struck by how he thought of the city as an important street art capital. He didn’t seem to know that graffiti in New York was a thing of the past; that in Bloomberg’s fiefdom, even the subway billboards get respect; that kids lack the common decency to drag a Big Boy across the face of Sarah Jessica Parker. I promised to wheat-paste his class-war cupids when I got the chance.

***

On demonstration days, police patrol the edges of Exarchia and conduct searches of anyone entering and exiting the neighborhood. On the Sunday after the February 12 riots, I was walking through Exarchia on my way to Syntagma Square, where a coalition of unions and leftist parties had organized something, though nobody really knew what to expect. I was stopped at the perimeter by a clutch of cops who searched my backpack and wanted to know what I was doing in Athens. “You’re on holiday? Anarchist holiday?” asked a cop whose eyes were disturbingly close to being on the side of his head. When he examined my Florida license, he grinned widely and started pantomiming a shotgun. A few long seconds passed before an embarrassed colleague explained, “He went duck hunting in Florida once.”

Guy, 18-year-old anarchist and riot-shield designer

My bag was clean, and half an hour later I met up with the Brooklyn anarchist, Guy, on the square. He had been waiting for the demonstration all week, was almost desperate to witness some action. The scene on Syntagma did not bode well. It was just a beautiful clear day with lovers strolling amid a few protestors and stalls selling meat on a stick. It was hard to imagine any action exploding out of such tranquil beauty, but then every Greek said the same thing: you never knew how a protest will develop. It can happen in a second.

Over a lunch of Greek rolls, Guy explained to me his plans for building riot shields for the Spring Occupy events. He was going to use giant traffic cones he’d picked up off the Long Island Freeway. Each cone could produce three shields, he explained, for which he had already sketched three different prototypes. Once he settled on the most efficient shield design, he was going to make peace signs out of electrical tape and spray paint the shields black. When he removed the tape, they would be branded with peace signs in the cones’ original reflective orange.

“This spring we’re going to stop calling ourselves the Anarchist Caucus and start calling ourselves the Rebel Alliance,” he said.

I told him the reflective orange would fit well with the Star Wars sound of it.

“Yeah, I know,” he smiled. “I thought of that.”

When Guy lay down on the fountain for nap, I struck up a conversation with two guys sitting near us. Their names were Michalis and Tasos, and I had been in Athens long enough not to be surprised when I learned they were Marxist-Leninists in their early 30s who had recently begun publishing a radical newspaper called Kontra. Like Guy, they had come ready to riot. They carried gas masks in plastic bags and a few other things they didn’t show me. “I just loaded up with fresh Israeli charcoal filters,” said Michalis. “They’re the best.”

Michalis and Tasos: faces of the radicalized Greek ex-middle-class

Theirs was a new organization, one of several young Greek revolutionary communist groups born out of hatred for the KKE, the establishment Communist Party often described as “Stalinist Bourgeois.” Michalis and Tasos had recruited about 60 members so far and were growing every week. Along with producing a newspaper, they had a space for movie nights, lectures, and social events. They had just launched a stencil art unit and a theater group. “We have many weapons, not just sticks and Molotovs,” explained Tasos.

When I asked their take on the crisis, Michalis did most of the talking. His words were familiar. He was a trained architect, unable to find work, and had been radicalized in recent years. “I have two master’s degrees and studied at Polytechnic and the University of Rotterdam,” he said. “Five years ago, I could have found a good job. I came back from Rotterdam and everything collapsed. Now I’m 30, unemployed and living at home with my parents. They’re just as angry as I am.”

“Their plan is to reduce the European periphery to a cheap labor zone,” he continued. “It’s not just us, but Ireland, Portugal, Spain. They tell us we’re lazy and must accept austerity or we won’t eat. It’s lies and blackmail. Our short-term strategy is to fight the austerity measures, take back what they took, and defend what we’ve fought for over the years. Long-term, our goal is the end of capitalism.”

He said there was a palpable sense of momentum toward this goal across Greek society.

“Last Sunday was the first time in my life I saw so many people so angry, radical, and fearless,” said Michalis. “Most of the people were simple workers, not professional revolutionaries or anarchists. And trust me, they supported the violence. When it comes to it, they’ll support breaking into supermarkets. Before austerity, everybody was still sleeping. They thought the coalitions in power mattered. Now they don’t. They’re conscious of class. The old ways of thinking are collapsing, it’s no longer possible to just look out for yourself and forget about the people around you. Our priority is to explain the structure and logic of capitalism. Without revolution, reforms of the system are just more Sisyphean rolling the boulder of reform — up and down, up and down.”

Guy woke up and walked over to join the conversation. Michalis and Tasos had no use for anarchism, but told Guy they welcomed them for the moment. “Right now it’s all about the united front,” Tasos said.

“But you’d shoot me against a wall after the revolution,” Guy said.

“Yes,” said Tasos without smiling.

Tasos went on to voice his disappointment with some of the younger Greek anarchists he had seen on the streets the previous week.

“A lot of anarchists hit-and-run even when they have the numbers,” he said. “When you have the numbers, you press the advantage — you stand and fight, you keep hitting. I’ve been in four sustained hand-to-hand battles with the police. My record is two and two. Two of them remember me, I am sure of that.” And he laughed from deep down for a long time, a Zorba laugh.

Nearby, a group of Critical Mass activists were joining the protest in their own way. We watched as they pedaled up in their clown wigs, rainbow stockings, and face sparkles.

“They make me despair,” said Tasos. “They’re skipping the revolution and going right to the celebration, acting as if they’ve won.”

“In the States we call them the ‘pink-and-silver bloc,’” said Guy. “They can be useful as distractions, you know, to block streets.”

Michalis and Tasos seemed to consider the idea but did not pursue it. After a long silence, Michalis spat on the stones of Syntagma Square.

“Soon we’ll be eating the pigeons,” he said.

Alexander Zaitchik, a former eXile editor, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance…

Want to know more: Read Zaitchik “River’s Edge Redux: Interview With Jared Lee Loughner’s Tucson Friends”

The co-ruling PASOK party had its national conference today. Its goal is to elect the new party leader who will succeed George Papandreou and will lead the Socialists in the coming elections. The candidates are Christos Papoutsis and Evangelos Venizelos. At some point, an old man, member of PASOK himself, approached Venizelos, complained about the cuts in his pension and then threw him a yogurt before being carried out by bodyguards outside the hall.

This is the latest in a series of food throwing that has reemerged during the past two years of the crisis as a means of political protest.

Originally, “yogurt throwing” was a means of protest against authority by Greek youngsters in the late 1950s. They were called “Teddy Boys”, a name borrowed from the homonymous British subculture. You see, food throwing was traditionally a form of protest (preferable rotten eggs or tomatoes) but it was only in 1950s when the plastic cup substituted yogurt’s classic ceramic pot, a marketing move that made yogurt a non-lethal weapon. The trend of yogurt-throwing was fiercely fought by the authorities with the legendary “Law 4000/1958″ according to which offenders were arrested, had their heads shaved and paraded through the streets of Athens.

A teddy boy is paraded in the streets of Athens with his head shaved.

The law also inspired a movie (Law 4000). Here’s a great excerpt that needs no subtitles.

The law was withdrawn in 1983, by Andreas Papandreou. In 1997, a builder who was member of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) threw a yogurt on the then Minister of Employment, Miltiadis Papaioannou (now Minister of Justice) and his then Deputy Minister Christos Protopappas (now PASOK’s Parliamentary Group Representative) . The court decided that yogurt throwing was not an offense that had to be tried automatically but only if a lawsuit is filed by the victim.

During the past two years of the Greek crisis, attacks by angry citizens against politicians have become a frequent phenomenon. At the beginning there were verbal attacks, in restaurants and in the streets. Politicians began to walk less freely in the street without bodyguards, especially after Kostis Hatzigakis, a New Democracy MP, was brutally attacked by protesters in December of 2010.

The verbal attacks are still the norm wherever politicians appear in public (e.g. see what happened in the 28th October military parades – btw these days the government had a meeting to assess the security situation in view of the 25th of March Independence Day parades) Soon food throwing reappeared. The most popular “weapons” have been yogurt, eggs and, at times, tomatoes.

According to an article of Eleftherotypia newspaper, written by Georgia Linardou, in 2011 two members of the government and one MP have been attacked with yogurts. Last March, the vice president of the government Theodoros Pangalos was attacked while having dinner at a town just outside Athens. Some months later, Minister of Interior Haris Kastanidis was attacked in a similar fashion while watching “Midnight in Paris” at a cinema in Thessaloniki. Liana Kanelli, an MP with the Communist Party of Greece, has also been attacked with yogurt in June 2011, while she was trying to get through a block of protesters in order to reach the Parliament for the vote on the Mid-Term Program.

As for attacks with eggs, the list is longer, probably thanks to the different characteristics of this sort of food when used as a missile (their position on the day of the attack):

• Manolis Othonas, Deputy Minister for Citizen Protection
• Ilias Mosialos, Minister of State
• Kostas Skandalidis, Deputy Minister of Agriculture
• Andreas Loverdos, Minister of Health
• Anna Diamantopoulou, Minister of Education
• Giorgos Petalotis, Government Spokesman

Also:

• Asterios Rontoulis, MP with LAOS
• Dora Bakoyanis, Democratic Alliance party leader
• Spiros Taliadouros, MP with New Democracy

In 2010 Alekos Alavanos was also attacked, with yogurts, during SYRIZA’s campaign for that year’s local elections.

Many politicians have criticized this form of protest. KKE’s leader, Aleka Papariga, has said that yogurt-throwers are people who have voted for PASOK or New Democracy and that the act itself is not some particular act of resistance but rather a bourgeois reaction that defuses the social discontent. Deputy Minister of Regional Development, Sokratis Xinidis, preferred some self-criticism when he said “The time has come for all of us to pay the price. I am ready to be thrown a yogurt…”

There’s a great article about the presence of food in Greek politics. It’s called “Bread, Milk, and the Greek Parliamentary Record” and is written by Leo Vournelis, here. Another interesting aspect can be read in “Eating in Times of Financial Crisis” also hosted on the website of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition.

Finally, let me remind the readers of a historical recurrence. This is the second time that Evangelos Venizelos is trying to win the leadership of PASOK. The first time was back in 2007, in a mutiny-styled manoeuvre when he appeared as a candidate practically on the same night his party, then led by George Papandreou, lost the elections. In the following days few cared about the newly elected government – the top story was what was happening inside PASOK. In those polarized (for PASOK supporters) times, another party member threw a coffee on Venizelos while he was entering the party offices.

What I still remember from that video is Venizelos’ reaction. See at 1:33 for a better a view of it. Scary isn’t it?

UPDATE: Another interesting read is “The Dangers of Yoghurtification as a Political Movement in Greece“.

Kostas Kallergis is freelance journalist from Athens who runs the blog When the Crisis Hits the Fan…

A year ago this week, a 22-year old Army reject with a shaved head and a 9mm opened rapid-fire on a Congressional meet-and-greet outside a Tucson shopping mall, killing six and wounding 14, including a non-fatal headshot against Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The day after the shooting, I flew to Tucson to look for stories. Upon landing I found my way to Sportsman’s Wharehouse, the massive gun-shop where Loughner had purchased his Glock as easily as buying a bagel. At the counter I saw two kids Loughner’s age with sleeve and neck tattoos indicating current or past membership in one of the area’s many white power gangs. When I asked the guy behind the counter if the shooting had impacted sales, his manager cut me off and said staff weren’t allowed to talk to press.

The fact that Tucson is considered “Arizona’s Austin” says everything you need to know about the state. Tucson may be funkier than Phoenix, but it’s still way too dark, way too Arizona, to ever attain Third Coast status. There’s a big skinhead scene. The local airwaves are full of small-time nativist hate jocks. And the border is close, which means lots of cheap drugs, trafficking gangs, and dirty cops.

On my second night in Tucson, I was working in a ratty cafe called Shot in the Dark, an all-night worker cooperative around the corner from the Congress Hotel, where they cornered John Dillinger. I struck up a conversation with a scratched-up kid who was roughly Loughner’s age. Tucson is a small town, and I asked him if he had known the killer. He said no, but for a six-pack and a box of smokes he’d introduce me to his brother’s friend, who knew Loughner well. The next morning, in the blazing sun outside a taco joint, I met up with the brothers Taylor and Lance Sinclair (aged 19 and 22). They told me their story of having a ringside seat to Loughner’s crack-up.

A Shot In The Dark Cafe, Tucson AZ

I was sidetracked soon after conducting the interview, and never did do anything with it. I’m publishing the raw transcript here on the one-year anniversary of the shooting. It offers a snapshot of Tucson that’s like a border-town version of Larry Clark’ s Kids, with a gruesome Arizona ending.

eXiled: How did you guys meet Loughner?

Taylor: I met Jared Loughner at a party house in Copper Creek. It was the Burds’ house. On any day there’d be anywhere from 10, 15, 30 people there, mostly skate kids having a good time, experimenting. A lot of us came up in dysfunctional families and we were thrown in together. A bunch of us worked at the same fast food joint, so we’d carpool. It was a place to hang out, play Xbox, drink, smoke weed. The mom was an ex-tweaker turned alcoholic. There was also an older son, a Marine, just back from Afghanistan who was an alcoholic, too. He was a little messed up in the head, violent, always getting into fights. The parties started out pretty small, but when he came back the scene got really big. There were no rules. You could come and go as you please. Jared had friends in that scene and drifted in. We didn’t know him before that. We hung out there my freshman and sophomore years, from 2005 to 2007. The last time we really hung out there with him was summer of 2007.

Do you remember him always talking politics?

Taylor: Jared was pretty normal when I met him. He seemed quiet, kind of a jock. He was fine when he was sober, but when he was hammered he just started ranting on about the government and you could just tell there was something wrong with him. I didn’t think he knew what he was saying. I thought he was too fucked up to even know what he was talking about.

Jared Lee Loughner in high school

Where was he getting his information?

Taylor: He was listening to AM radio, I’m not sure which talk shows they were. But he was listening to talk shows about political stuff. When he tried to talk to us about it, we were like, “Whatever, let’s go chase some girls.” I just remember it was about the government, basically, but we weren’t interested. He didn’t trust the government. He didn’t trust anybody, really. And he was also into all the different religions. He’d say random things about different religions all the time. He was way into the 2012 thing. This was years ago, so it meant nothing to us at the time. The politics came out when he was messed up. When the drugs got more intense, it made it worse. It was like he was hiding it, but once he got messed up, he couldn’t hide it anymore. It would come out and no one could shut his ass up. As time went on, drugs, the combos of drugs made it more intense. Drugs magnified it. After we left that house, I’m sure it just got worse.

Lance: He was pretty quiet at first. He got deeper into drugs, like us. Our drug use completely evolved. It started out with just smoking weed and drinking on weekends, then to every day, and then experimenting with harder stuff and psychedelics. Meth, mushrooms, heroin, coke, ecstasy.

Taylor: There was one year where it wasn’t like any other year. There hasn’t been a year like it since. In 2005-6, that winter, there was a huge crop from the mountains and the mushrooms were everywhere. That year could have been the year that [Loughner] just fucking went nuts, and crossed the line. People were mixing stuff that didn’t even make sense —cocaine and ‘shrooms? For months and months, ‘shrooms were around like candy, you know. Kids ended up in hospital or juvie, cuz they were tripping and throwing rocks through houses, on a bad trip.

Lance: Unlike my brother, I didn’t take ‘shrooms at that house, except for once, cuz I wasn’t comfortable there. I knew from past experiences that I needed to be comfortable. If one guy is freaking out, it throws everybody else off.

Taylor: I don’t know if it influenced Loughner, but it messed with our heads. One Cinco de Mayo I ate a half-ounce of mushrooms. It was a huge party, there were like 150 people there, I’m sure Loughner was there. One guy started running around naked, the cops showed up. The cops were at this house so much it wasn’t even funny. They got abusive at times. They knew the family is letting kids party there. But the neighbors let it slide, cuz their kids were there. All it took was that one night. I haven’t been right since then. I get panic attacks. Anxiety. I’m on Benzo which is a really strong medication, and that’s the only way I can go out into public and work. Loughner got caught up in the scene started doing the same drugs. Lots of psychedelics and other drugs was an average day at the house. The same thing could have happened to him.

Lance: You build tolerance to mushrooms. You need to keep taking more.

Taylor: He lived near there. We were trying to escape reality, and he was trying to open up parts of his brain. His thing with religions, him claiming that he understood them all — I’m 90 percent convinced that was because of the hallucinogens, and he was way into the whole 2012 thing. He was also into uppers. He got into tweak [meth] or something. He just lost it. He was nothing like he used to be, and no one wanted to hang out with him cuz they were scared, they were just terrified of this kid, starting around 2006. The process took like a year. Loughner hung out at the house even after we stopped in 2007. We last saw him summer of 2007.

Lance: I knew a kid who lived on Loughner’s street. He said his dad and him both had schizophrenia. And they were so crazy or what-not, call it what you want, that one of their neighbors actually moved away. I never met his family, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was genetic, if his dad gave it to him [the mental problems] and the drugs opened that, triggered that. Almost all of us would do anything that came our way, but he really got into psychedelics.

Taylor: I always thought Loughner was on steroids. He was a big kid. He was into sports but he also partied. If you mix steroids and psychedelics and speed, you go on ‘roid rages… Around 2006, he changed. People started making fun of him and stopped hanging out there so much. He isolated himself. What happened [wasn’t anyone’s fault], it was him and him alone, there’s always the chance. I have a feeling, those are the devil’s drugs, psychedelics and meth, and you are going to lose your mind.

Lance: He just went on his own study or something. A lot of people from that scene have gotten in trouble, maybe not politically, but with violence, with guns, or have OD’d. There’s a lot of kids who died. We’ve lost more friends than we can count. They’re dropping like flies. Tucson is an export city, the first city in. The drugs flow through here to the rest of the country. It’s everywhere and cheap. All sorts of organized crime. I don’t know if Loughner knew any cartels or anything. If he did come across them and got fronted money and drugs, he could have been offered to do this shooting. He obviously knew he was gonna get caught. The cartels use kids. They make drops. They do whatever they gotta do. For drugs, to clear debts. We’re right next to Mexico and all you gotta do is know the right people. There’s a lot of money. I remember Loughner bragging about, not the 9mm that was used, but some kind of rifle once. After we stopped hanging out at the Burds we heard Loughner’s name here and there, but not much.

Taylor: Years passed on. I ended up on juvenile intensive probation, juvenile drug court, then I’d drop dirty [test positive for heroin in urine tests] and end back up in juvie. I was basically a ghost in Tucson. I’d pop back up randomly for a couple of months, then be sent away again. Happened like 14 times.

Lance: When we got high it made us feel like when our family was back together, and that’s how we dealt with our emotions. If I hadn’t been locked up in 2009 I’d be dead. I was happier in prison after I detoxed there. Because even with the money [from dealing] and the car, I was miserable. I lost a lot of friends, the girl I loved. I had no heart and no soul. I think that’s how a lot of people were on these drugs. We were trying to kill ourselves.

Taylor: I went to prison when I was 18. I told them I wanted to do my time, and come out with methadone as a safety net. My next probation officer wouldn’t let me do methadone. Three weeks later I was back in, the youngest person in yard with a year sentence. I’m done. I’m on a good path now. Still in shock over what happened. My little sister was friends with the girl who died. She called me and asked me if I knew the shooter. I couldn’t lie. I said, “Yeah. I’m so sorry for what happened. The devil got to him.”

Alexander Zaitchik, a former eXile editor, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance…

Read Yasha Levine’s account of LAPD’s appalling treatment of detained Occupy LA protesters…

On Friday, December 2, the Los Angeles Police Department finally decided to release most of 200+ Occupy LA protesters who had been held in detention for more than 48 hours. Many of them were expected to show up at the General Assembly scheduled for 7:30 p.m on the south steps of City Hall. So I cruised down to see what I could find out…

I parked two blocks away and walked to City Hall on foot. It was almost unrecognizable. The park/square in front of the building, as well as the grassy areas running along the perimeter, were now completely blocked off with concrete barriers and a high chain-link fence. It was an eerie sight. What had been filled with tents, people and activity just a few days ago was now empty and scrubbed clean. The area looked condemned.

And there were cops everywhere. Some stood in packs around their police cars, others patrolled the fenced-off perimeter on foot while motorcycle cops circled the block in pairs. There were reinforcements outside LAPD’s massive headquarters, conveniently located across the street from City Hall. Cops eyed me suspiciously as I walked by, and there were at least a half-dozen uniformed cops perched on the stairs above the assembly, listening to the GA proceedings. It was as if the city expected a surprise guerrilla raid.

LAPD’s death-star HQ is conveniently located across from the now-raided Occupy LA camp…

But the GA must have been a letdown for the cops. There was no riot, no guerrilla raid. The meeting was chaotic and unfocused–more of a social gathering than anything else. People ate, greeted each other and traded the latest news and gossip. By the time I took off at around 10 p.m., the assembly was over and everyone had begun to disperse…

But while not much happened at the meeting, I did manage to meet up with a few of my jail buddies and get more info on some of the abuses I had witnessed and described in my last post. [Read Yasha Levine's account of LAPD's appalling treatment of detained Occupy LA protesters.]

For instance: Remember the seriously injured protester, who had been shot with a shotgun beanbag round and had an oozing bloody welt the size of a grapefruit just above his elbow, but denied medical attention for five hours? I was only able to speak to him for a few minutes when we were locked up at Metro jail and never got his name, but it turns out he was one of the guys who constructed a makeshift tree house between three tall palm trees and sat up there for hours with two other people, refusing to come down. He said they were the last to be arrested, sometime around 4:30 a.m., when the cops finally got hold of a cherry picker platform, and a cop in full-on riot gear forced them down at gunpoint. From what I understand, it was at this point that Chad was shot with a beanbag round.

Chad and his buddies kept the LAPD busy for hours. The cops must have been pissed off, and making an injured kid squirm on a concrete floor with a bleeding wound, hands handcuffed behind his back for hours on end, must have felt like the perfect payback…

So now that most of the detained protesters have been released, what is our legal status? Are we going to be prosecuted? Well, that’s not very clear.

I’ve been charged with misdemeanor# 409PC: failure to disperse (or, as my booking officer put down on my prisoner’s receipt, it’s “fail to disclose”). My court date is set for early January, so I guess I’ll find out then. But apparently I shouldn’t expect the city to drop the charge. Here is what LA Weekly reported on Friday evening:

City Attorney’s criminal branch Chief Earl Thomas tells the Weekly virtually no one is getting off scot-free.

He said that while about 175 people were released today they could still be charged. Those folks were determined to be eligible for the Alternative Prosecution Program, a 90-day love fest in which suspects can enroll and avoid prosecution.

Thomas said a special agenda would be formulated for the Occupy arrestees, one that would focus on First Amendment education:

We’ll include a First Amendment law component about having to stay within the law in terms of conduct. We don’t care what the message is but we are concerned about illegal conduct.

Those people don’t have the accept the program and can chose to duke it out in court.

Ha! So there you have it, folks. Not only does the City of Los Angeles arrest those who exercise their constitutional right to peacefully protest (or in my case simply to report on a peaceful protest), apparently it now requires anyone caught exercising that right to enroll in a political reeducation camp.

***

PS: I want to thank readers for all your support, now and over the past few years. Many have asked if there’s something you can do to help, and there probably will be. I’ll be talking to the National Lawyers Guild on how to proceed, but I plan on fighting this bullshit charge all the way. So I might need to hit you up for some legal help…

PPS: Some of you have already donated a bit of dough, and that is always greatly appreciated.

Want to know more? Read Yasha Levine’s account of LAPD’s appalling treatment of detained Occupy LA protesters.

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.

Yasha Levine was forced to surrender his freedom, as well as his shoe laces…for his own protection

I finally got home Thursday afternoon after spending two nights in jail, and have had a hard time getting my bearings. On top of severe dehydration and sleep deprivation, I’ve got one hell of pounding migraine. So I’ll have to keep this brief for now. But I wanted to write down a few things that I witnessed and heard while locked up by LA’s finest…

First off, don’t believe the PR bullshit. There was nothing peaceful or professional about the LAPD’s attack on Occupy LA–not unless you think that people peacefully protesting against the power of the financial oligarchy deserve to be treated the way I saw Russian cops treating the protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg who were demonstrating against the oligarchy under Putin and Yeltsin, before we at The eXiled all got tossed out in 2008. Back then, everyone in the West protested and criticized the way the Russian cops brutally snuffed out dissent, myself included. Now I’m in America, at a demonstration, watching exactly the same brutal crackdown…

While people are now beginning to learn that the police attack on Occupy LA was much more violent than previously reported, few actually realize that much—if not most—of the abuse happened while the protesters were in police custody, completely outside the range of the press and news media. And the disgraceful truth is that a lot of the abuse was police sadism, pure and simple:

* I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.

* The bus that I was shoved into didn’t move for at least an hour. The whole time we listened to the screams and crying from a young woman whom the cops locked into a tiny cage at the front of the bus. She was in agony, begging and pleading for one of the policemen to loosen her plastic handcuffs. A police officer sat a couple of feet away the entire time that she screamed–but wouldn’t lift a finger.

* Everyone on my bus felt her pain–literally felt it. That’s because the zip-tie handcuffs they use—like the ones you see on Iraq prisoners in Abu Ghraib—cut off your circulation and wedge deep through your skin, where they can do some serious nerve damage, if that’s the point. And it did seem to be the point. A couple of guys around me were writhing in agony in their hard plastic seats, hands handcuffed behind their back.

* The 100 protesters in my detainee group were kept handcuffed with their hands behind their backs for 7 hours, denied food and water and forced to sit/sleep on a concrete floor. Some were so tired they passed out face down on the cold and dirty concrete, hands tied behind their back. As a result of the tight cuffs, I wound up losing sensation in my left palm/thumb and still haven’t recovered it now, a day and a half after they finally took them off.

* One seriously injured protester, who had been shot with a shotgun beanbag round and had an oozing bloody welt the size of a grapefruit just above his elbow, was denied medical attention for five hours. Another young guy, who complained that he thought his arm had been broken, was not given medical attention for at least as long. Instead, he spent the entire pre-booking procedure handcuffed to a wall, completely spaced out and staring blankly into space like he was in shock.

* An Occupy LA demonstrator in his 50s who was in my cell block in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center told us all about when a police officer forced him to take a shit with his hands handcuffed behind his back, which made pulling down his pants and sitting down on the toilet extremely difficult and awkward. And he had to do this in sight of female police officers, all of which made him feel extremely ashamed, to say the least.

* There were two vegetarians and one vegan in my cell. When I left jail around 1:30 pm, they still had not been given food, despite the fact that they were constantly being promised that it would come.

* There were 292 people arrested at Occupy LA. About 75 of them have been released or have gotten out on bail, according the National Lawyers Guild. Most are still inside, slapped with $5,000 to $10,000 bail. According to a bail bondsman I know, this is unprecedented. Misdemeanors are almost always released on their own recognizance, which means that they don’t pay any bail at all. Or at most it’s a $100.

* That means the harsh, long detentions are meant to be are a purely punitive measure against Occupy LA protesters–an order that had to come from the very top.

***

Update: Read Yasha Levine’s latest post on Occupy LA arrest scandal: A Visit to the Raided Occupy LA Camp, Updates From Freed Protesters and Bad News About Our Legal Situation…

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.

Want to know more? Read Mark Ames’ appeal for Yasha Levine’s release, as well as the post Levine published just a few hours before he was arrested.

These days, tourism is worth about $15 billion and 230,000 jobs to Berlin, Germany, and with 20 million annual hotel stays the city jumped past Rome last year to become the third most visited European city, trailing only Paris and London. For a town that has struggled economically since the fall of The Wall, this might sound like welcome news. And it is for tourism industry types, but not for a lot of other Berliners, where low-cost bohemianism has practically defined Berlin, whose mayor famously described it as “poor but sexy.” The tourism boom has become such a problem for locals that today, the German capital is practically covered with stickers declaring “Berlin doesn’t heart U” and posters warning “Tourists face fists!” And there have even been public calls for attacks on the tourism industry’s infrastructure there.

Anti-gentrification agitation has been at a fairly constant loud-level pitch since unification in Berlin; organizers of large-scale street protests against the city’s 1993 bid to host the 2000 Olympics rallied East Berliners to their side after showing them statistics on how Barcelona’s rents soared following its Olympic games. Pubs in the early-1990s would post “no latte” signs in their windows in protest over the chic new cafes opening in formerly working class neighborhoods. Since then, though, the best-preserved sections of East Berlin, where attractive 19th century residential buildings line block after block, have been completely transformed by an influx of new menschen and money.

More recently, anti-gentrification sloganeering began in Prenzlauer Berg, the district of East Berlin that underwent the fastest and most dramatic changes after the fall of The Wall. In the space of a decade, Prenzlauer Berg went from a dingy haven for East German literary and art types to a luxury parking-lot for BMWs and Audis with Stuttgart license plates, as posh cafes and restaurants mushroomed around its leafy squares.

Domestic sources of gentrification were the first to draw ire; the most commonly identified culprits are Schwaben, people from a prosperous southwestern part of old West Germany near the Black Forest, mostly in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg. By the second half of the 2000s, signs started sprouting up in Prenzlauer Berg saying things like, “Schwaben, what do you want here?” or “The country needs new walls,” and sarcastically thanking West German cities for all the parking spaces left behind when the district’s new residents returned home for Christmas.

Next came action: as Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte continued to see skyrocketing rents, and the restaurant and bar scenes took off in another central Eastern borough, Friedrichshain, a  website called brennende-autos.de tracked over 600 anti-gentrification car fires set between 2007 and 2010.

Though flames billowing from the writhing metal remains of cars has been a regular feature of Berlin nightlife for years, the rate of arsons in late August of this year attracted international media attention. In the space of a few weeks, nearly 100 autos were torched. Most reports either dismissed any political motivation behind the car-torchings (an AP piece quoted a police spokesman as saying “a political intention really can’t be seen,” for instance) or attributed the uptick in fires to the rioting in the UK earlier in August. But of course, the fires were completely in keeping with the increasingly rancorous anti-gentrification activism that also spawned the new anti-tourism movement.

Full-blown anti-tourism—as distinct from more general anti-gentrification—exploded last year. In December, 2010, an alternative paper called Interim published a piece urging readers to attack hotels and tour buses and to steal wallets and cell phones from the tables of tourist cafes. Then in February of this year, a local chapter of the Green party organized an event called “Help, the tourists are coming!” Even the businesses benefitting most directly from the tourist boom—hotels—are apparently not immune to the sentiment. Michelberger Hof on Warschauer Strasse, steps from clubs like Watergate and Berghain—key destinations for the EasyJet set—currently displays a sign describing itself as a place for “everyone,” everyone, that is, “except Schwaben, English, and Irish in groups numbering more than 5 or in Superman costumes.”

It’s important to note that the anger expressed in the signs, stickers, and calls for action against tourists comes from the opposite end of the political spectrum from anti-immigrant crowd. Still, you might think twice about ordering a bottle of Rothaus Tannen Zaepfle, the suddenly ubiquitous beer “imported” from Baden-Wurttemberg.

The coming weeks could have a major influence on development and the extent to which the city continues to court tourist dollars. September 18 brings a mayoral election and, despite recently downward-trending poll numbers, Renate Kuenast, a prominent member of the Green party’s parliamentary faction, still has a shot at taking city hall. Berlin, which is technically a Land, or state, has been run since 2001 by Social Democrat Klaus Wowereit, who is campaigning for a third term.

Though the these two front-running contestants are ostensibly from the same side of the political spectrum—that is, the left—the mayoral race represents a significant culture clash. After all, a Berlin chapter of Kuenast’s party staged an event echoing anti-tourist rhetoric. Meanwhile Wowereit is floating the idea of another Olympic bid—the very thing that first galvanized anti-gentrification forces shortly after reunification—and is apparently happy to let the transformation of the cityscape by hotel blocs continue.

Ironically, one criticism of the Greens—particularly in eastern Berlin—is that its membership is “too bourgeois,” attracting just the sort of people whose organic food shops sprout as working class residents are priced out of neighborhoods. They are, it would seem, Berlin’s version of limousine liberals.

Still, the Greens already took over the state of Baden-Wurttemberg this past April. That’s the election credited with forcing Chancellor Angela Merkel to reverse her position on nuclear power and support a ban she had previously overturned. So despite Kuenast’s sagging poll numbers the timing seems auspicious for a Green takeover in Berlin, which, to hear it from anti-gentrification activists, is overrun with people from Baden-Wurttemberg anyway.

Tim Mohr is an award-winning translator of German novels, including most recently The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, by Alina Bronsky.

Would you like to know more? Read Tim Mohr’s piece “How The West Hijacked The Berlin Wall Revolution.”

They think that things are all right/For the deer and the dachshund are one.
– Wallace Stevens

I just came back from two days of snubbery at a conference in Budapest, and I’m here to tell you that even in middle age, getting snubbed is mighty uncomfortable.

You think it’s the kind of thing that only hurts in high school, but nope; all the old pain receptors are in place and ready to start throbbing. Of course, I was out of pain-shape and that made it worse. The past few years, people have been so nice to me I forgot what a primate quorum can do to the odd ape out, how easily they can make him feel like the unworthiest chimp in the jungle.

It was my own fault. It’s always my own fault. I’m getting tired of that. Never mind the old whinge, “Where is the justice?” My question: where the Hell is the injustice? A little injustice would warm me up no end. Instead I just go around getting what I deserve.

The conference was called “the Culture of Periodicals,” organized by a Budapest University. They wanted the eXile to take part, us being such a cutting-edge e-zine and all. To be honest, they wanted Brecher, but he doesn’t go outdoors when he can avoid it, let alone make road trips to Europe. So I offered myself to the conference organizers as substitute. I figured it’d be a free trip to Budapest and — may as well admit it — a chance to stand at a lectern again, doing a few of the old moves for a new audience.

If it had only been Hungarians, there wouldn’t have been a problem. The Hungarians were great. But the organizers had invited about ten English-speaking academics — and boy did they snub the Hell out of me! Lordy, they snubbed me stupid!

What happened was, I overreacted to the opening speech. The speaker irked me from the start. He was all too familiar in look and sound. One Geoffrey Nunberg, from Stanford. Geoffrey (the spelling should’ve tipped me off) was a small white man, any age between 45 and 60 (they take good care of themselves, successful academics), with a fussy beard and a surprising collection of gold adornments: gold watch, cufflinks, big gold ring. His talk was called “Publics after Print? The Communities of Electronic Discourse.”

The speech was hard to bear, because I was catching the nuances. He spoke American-pedant dialect, my own patois — and the nuances were appalling. See, the great thing about being an expat, always struggling with somebody else’s dialect, is that you miss the nuances. And since the nuances are always revelations of cruelty, hypocrisy, groveling and shame, missing them is a godsend. I’ve been away from California for 11 happy years, wandering in places where the nuances pass harmlessly through me like neutrinos. Then, listening to this Stanford professor, I was hearing them clearly, like the bad old days were come again.

Even his jokes were familiar, little markers of upper-middle-class solidarity: how big and heavy the Sunday NY Times is, how an English friend of Geoffrey’s, seeing that big ol’ Sunday edition, was astonished and thought Geoffrey had brought back several newspapers.

And that was what worried Geoffrey: that the comforting heft of America’s paper-of-record might be lost in a swarm of insolent, non-peer-reviewed blogs. He tried to reassure us, and himself, that blogs would never “displace” academic journals; that the rise of invented identities online was typical of new media, and would subside; and that the experimenters are mostly adolescents who “won’t pursue the genre.”

It seems we’re in danger of losing the “balance” provided by mainstream media — the “balance” which Geoffrey illustrated by the way the NY Times puts Maureen Dowd on one page and William Safire on the other.The new media, he felt, could not be trusted to maintain this “balance”; they had no sense of responsibility to the Public. In fact, Geoffrey asked, “Can we talk about a public in the case of blogs?”

At this point in his speech, I was gripping my pen like an ice pick, trying to think up the most annihilating question I could ask. An academic talking about a “public”? The average academic article has exactly three readers: the author, the editor who accepted it, and the copy editor who checked it. No one else will ever glance at it; it will pad the author’s CV, cement a bond of mutual obligation between author and editor, and fill a millimeter of space on university-library shelves — and that’s all. Yet this professor, his resume swollen with dozens of unread and unreadable articles like this, dares to ask whether blogs actually have a public!

I could feel the old rage lurching up out of my gut like a surge of vomit. Part of being a coward (and I’m the biggest coward alive, with the possible exception of the entire leadership of the Democratic Party) is the way postponed anger comes out all at once, in a disastrous way, at the wrong target. And here it was, getting ready to barf out of me at Geoffrey up there at the podium.

At fatal moments like this, you know exactly what you’re doing. You know it’s a bad idea to alienate the whole conference at the very start. And time slows so radically that you have forever to reconsider. But you know that even if you had a Groundhog-Day series of chances to do the smart thing, you’d still stand up, trembling, frightened and furious, and ask the one question certain to convince everyone else at the conference you’re a raving lunatic.

And sure enough, when they called on me I blurted in an aged shriek, “I find it typical of the Beigeocracy — the rule of the Beige — [see, I was afraid Nunberg might not know he was being insulted, so I had to explain the word] that you imagine ‘balance’ as Dowd vs. Safire, that’s…that’s like, uh, a one-millimeter range! …Um, of opinion!! [I was now speaking in two exclamation marks per sentence]…”

You academics in the audience can probably guess how a successful American prof like Nunberg dealt with this belch from the cheap seats: he coopted it. He said, “I absolutely agree with you.” There was more after that, but I was too stunned to catch it. He couldn’t agree with me; that would ruin my suicidal outburst. So I went further, shrieking, “…So, speaking for ALL THE CRAZIES, I say, thank God for the Net!”

A vast silence settled on the hall. That was when they started snubbing me. They could hardly have done less.

And yet — another typical feature of berserker/coward psychology — I was truly, deeply hurt — shocked! — that the Americans and English at the conference were dodging me at the coffee break. Didn’t they see that I had meant “all the crazies” in the kindliest possible sense?

Saturday evening was particularly awkward, because the only other visitor who went on the free tour of Budapest with me was…Geoffrey Nunberg. We shook hands and formally introduced ourselves on the minibus. “Hello, I’m the aged loony who disrupted your talk!” It was a long tour. Lotsa big buildings in Budapest. Old. Lotta statues. I couldn’t tell you much more than that because I was cowering against the bus window, hoping he wouldn’t talk to me. We got out of the bus to see some victory monument on top of a hill, right in the middle of a lightning storm. I was hoping to get hit; it would’ve eased the awkwardness considerably. But happy endings like that don’t happen in real life.

The sessions flowed on and on. I blurted something stupid in every Q & A. You start watching yourself with morbid fascination: what screeching rant will I come up with this time? Some of them surprised even me, as when I ended up arguing animal behavior with an egomaniac from Montreal.

But some of the things the Americans said really deserved excoriation. I remember Nunberg saying in all seriousness, at another session, that new media might not let us “preserve the slowness” of academic discourse. God, they’re admitting it these days! I always knew slowness was their key trait, but now they ADMIT it!

Finally it was my turn at the lectern. Last session, last day. Before me came one Lisa Brawley, a professor at Vassar, already schmoozed up with Nunberg and the Montreal egomaniac. She delivered the very worst conference paper I have ever heard.

Brawley spoke in the hushed, pious tone of the secular priest — the true function of politicized academics like her. She was supposed to talk about something involving “communicative space,” and started out with a Mark Strand poem:

In a field
I am the absence of field.

It went on in that vein: coy boasting with linebreaks. She read it slowly; then, in a trancey, maundering voice began to pick at it, looking for auguries. They were slow coming. Each sentence came separately, with a Quaker silence before and after. Nothing became clear except Brawley’s deep, virtuous dislike and incomprehension of the world — the whole world and everything in it, starting with powerpoint and including all recent culture. I managed to write some phrases from her speech:

“What is called flow is actually a sequence of embodied images, 16 frames per second.”

She doesn’t like movies, it seemed: “…we sit there in the dark, taking it all in.” Apparently we should turn the lights on, get out in the fresh air more.

After piously deploring 110 years of films, Brawley already has to start regretting the Internet. She showed a diagram of connectedness: Africa was left out of the web. This was sinful, apparently. It spoke for itself, she said. Then she spoke for it. Slooowly.

Sentences dwindled. Heads nodded. She ended with another secular prayer, something about “a way to be in the world with political hope.”

Nunberg and the Montreal behaviorist applauded wildly, then left–for good.

Too bad, because I was ready to take them on. I put the War Nerd’s first column on the screen, thinking, that’ll shut’em up.

Then Brawley came back in. She looked at the screen slowly — so slowly! She was as slow as a Victorian sloth — and slowly frowned. After a minute or so of frowning and having a think about it, she turned around and departed. She wasn’t a fast thinker, but she knew one thing: any talk involving something called “the War Nerd” was not for her.

It kind of summed up my experience of academia: slow always wins. They must have something going for them, the Lisa Brawleys. It ain’t brains, that’s certain. It ain’t charm, because…well, just take my word for it: it ain’t charm. So what the hell is it?

After easily wiping out a British spy network, Michael Collins asked a very similar question: “How the hell did these people ever get an empire?”

I keep asking myself that question about the Brawleys and the Nunberg, and getting no bright ideas for an answer. How did the sloth evolve? It reminds me of a scrap of biology textbook I somehow remember: “This was adaptive once.”

This article was first published in The eXile on May 27, 2004.

Would you like to know more?

Buy John Dolan’s novel “Pleasant Hell” (Capricorn Press).

Buy John Dolan’s novel “Pleasant Hell” (Capricorn Press).

eXiled Online Special UK Correspondent

LONDON–As you’ve perhaps completely failed to notice, Russia recently won the prize of hosting the 2018 World Cup finals. Any ignorance about this on your part is understandable since a) you’re likely to be American and take pride in not giving a shit about soccer and b) this site isn’t some where anyone comes to get their sporting fix, but the competition to win the bid has been fascinating for a range of reasons that have very little to do with guys kicking a ball about the pitch but plenty to do with what’s happening in international relations.

I like football, but even if you don’t, you ought to know that most of the world outside North America is far more interested in football than politics. By the way, one of the first people to realise the implications of this was wily old Rupert Murdoch. His canny understanding of this is one of the main reasons reason he’s now more powerful than God. The extensive reporting of sport in general and football in particular in British newspapers, such as The Sun and News of the World was a crucial but often overlooked factor in the paper’s massive appeal to the proles. Murdoch then used the vast profits these rags generated to start his satellite empire which locked exclusive rights to show English football. This proved to be a licence to print money which in turn funded the early days of the Fox network. Yes, that’s right: you largely have obsessive English football supporters to thank for making Fox News the American institution it is today…

In more recent years, the political class have started catching up with Murdoch and paying far more attention to soccer. It’s become a huge global business and it’s also inevitably become increasingly political and tied to national pride to a much greater extent than, for example, the Olympics. The latest and most vivid examples of this trend have been the races to host the next two world cups.

The voting process to win hosting rights to the cup, an event that happens every four years, is similar to that for the Olympics. It’s a secret ballot, so countries try to win by persuading unelected executives of football’s international governing body, FIFA, to vote for them. Votes are won with the time-honoured mix of wining, dining, flattery, backhanders and hookers although since voting is opaque, the voters can and do lie, promising their votes to multiple parties. Under such circumstances, dishonesty and double-crossing are an inevitable part of the battle to win precious votes. This time around though, there were even more opportunities for back-room deals than usual owning to the fact that the competition to host 2022 at the same time was also being decided, for hazy reasons. Hence since all the competitors for 2018 were European and all the competitors for 2022 came from everywhere else, there were vote-swapping deals cut between the participants.

The climax of the bidding process was a series of presentations in Zurich which was also a chance for various bid teams to do some last minute lobbying and show off some national celebrities, (you’ll be proud to know that you had Bill Clinton and Morgan Freeman trying their hardest to win the 2022 world cup for the US) and try to win a few more last minute votes.

Not all countries could be arsed with the schmoozing though. Putin didn’t turn up adding to the speculation that Russia’s bid was already dead and claims that he was being a bad loser. Reasons Russia didn’t have a hope of winning included claims that they had too many racist supporters and that they were lacking the infrastructure needed to host the event. Furthermore Russia was also the main topic of that morning’s batch of wikileaks, which was full of all that stuff about the country being a ‘autocratic kleptocracy’ and a ‘mafia state’. Commentators suggested that FIFA couldn’t award the event to such a corrupt regime without tarnishing the institution so it was deemed to be a straight battle between England and Spain, the current world cup holders.

The English bid team, on the other hand, sent out a very high profile team of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, David Beckham and Prince William, who’s been basking in the adoration of the world’s media since he announced he’s planning to marrying his bird, a few weeks ago.

Prince William, Prime Minister David Cameron, David Beckham: The Rodney Dangerfields of World Cup lobbying

Bringing the Prince along was supposed to be a sneaky way of making sure voters who said they’d vote for England kept to their word on the basis that ‘No one would lie to the future King of England’. I do realise just how ridiculous that sounds, but our bid team clearly didn’t…

But that was typical of the whole of England’s surreal bid. Unlike the bids from all the other nations which revolved around extensive, carefully media-coordinated sucking up to FIFA, the British media decided to go in for an innovatively sadomasochistic approach. The BBC and the Sunday Times did very high profile investigations on how corrupt and in need of reform FIFA was and they had even had forced the resignation of six officials, apparently convinced FIFA would award us the tournament in gratitude for bringing this all their sleazy practices to the world’s attention. And we even had a bit of good old fashioned football rioting at an English game the night before the vote, from the Birmingham-Villa derby beamed around the world just for good measure to convince any doubters.

It was pretty obvious to any observer that England’s chances of hosting the cup were not good. So the oddest question about England’s bid is what possesed the prime minister to get so closely involved in something that was always so likely to end in defeat?

The answer to that is an unjustified arrogance about the way Britain is perceived by the rest of the world. And that, I think, tells you a lot about our newish Prime Minister, David Cameron. He’s one of those deeply irritating breed of politicians who decided they were going to rule their country at the age of about fourteen; he probably had his butler type out an immediate memo to that effect. Imagine a republican version of Al Gore, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the measure of the man. And like Gore, his vast amounts of self confidence seem to blind him to the problem that people don’t actually like him much.

You’d think he might have some awareness of this, given he couldn’t win an election against Gordon Brown, one of the most unpopular British Prime Ministers in recent times, in the middle of the worst recession in a generation, with almost the entire print media on his side. After the election, he had to scramble around doing some deals with another party, the Liberal Democrats, to get the majority he needed, this was the first time a Prime Minister has had to resort to forming a coalition since the 1920s.

That said, he’s been an alright Prime Minister so far, at least as Tory leaders go. They’re pushing through some harsh spending cuts, but that’s happening most places these days, even Cuba! The coalition agreement has at least so far forced them to go easy on some of that nasty ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality that lurks beneath the skin of the Conservative Party, although that may be changing now the cuts are starting to kick in. And I even found myself momentarily respecting the man when he gave a passionate, honest apology for the disgusting behaviour of the British army in the Bloody Sunday Massacres (when they murdered twenty six civil rights protesters in public, an event which lead to the formation of the modern day IRA). And, to his credit, Cameron even took part in the ‘It gets Better’ campaign. He might be a bit of an oily cunt, but can you honestly imagine any Republican leader doing something like that?

Nevertheless his involvement with the bid has revealed he’s a bit of an idiot who’s out of his depth in international affairs. Cameron presumably craved winning some of the kudos Tony Blair got for snatching the 2012 Olympics from the French. Unfortunately for him, while Blair might be a cynical warmonger, he’s a far sharper operator than Cameron. Judging by Cameron’s petulant response afterwards, it clearly hadn’t even occurred to him that England might not win and he’d be left looking like a pathetic failed sales-man. You might think any politician would have the common sense not to expose themselves as a hostage to fortune, let alone to someone like Cameron who has a background in public relations? Apparently not.

All of which goes some way to explaining why, come the vote, England crashed out in the first round. Prince William had been assured of five of the twenty two votes, but discovered to his horror that actually some vermin, presumably oiks of lowly breeding, were prepared to stoop so low as to deceive a Prince! Which is why we only got one vote. Well, we actually got two, but one was from England’s FIFA representative so doesn’t count. That’s like getting a valentine card from your mum.

So it turned out that the much trumpeted ‘charm offensive’ of the handsome but overrated footballer, a cocky Prime Minister and the genial but dim King-to-be could only muster a single vote between them and they were so full of themselves that they didn’t even seem to see it coming. Even though I’d have loved to win, the entertaining way we lost almost made up for this. If, as the old saying goes, ‘The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’, the famous school attended by both the Prime Minister and the Prince, then it’s fair to say that England’s World Cup bid was lost on those same playing fields.

It later turned out that Russia knew they’d won days before, which is why they hadn’t bothered turning up to try to mop up any last minute votes. Most of the insiders had realised this too, Putin had even elliptically alluded to it in his reasons for not attending, but we’d done such a good job of pissing off the FIFA executives, that we didn’t have any friends left there to warn us about this. So FIFA were happy get their own back by letting our Prime Minister make a dick of himself on the international stage and inadvertently make it clear to everyone that Russia currently has a lot more friends in the world than the UK does.

Most of the other losing nations took losing in good grace. After the US lost the 2022 bid in the final round to Qatar, Obama responded, ‘I think it was the wrong decision’, completely failing to sound like he cared very much. Even Spain, which deserved to win, having won the world cup last time around, a national team that plays football in a fluid way that’s terrific to watch and plenty of good infrastructure in place, were philosophical about losing.

In the UK however, the English media are still whining about it, days later. Radio phone-ins are full of people moaning about FIFA corruption and how upset and humiliated poor Prince William must be to have had people looked him in the eye and promptly lied to him like that. I’m sure he’ll get over it though and it’s bound to have been an invaluable lesson in how not to go about pimping for your country, which should stand him in good stead…

Most of the English media have naturally been in denial that their rubbishing of FIFA had anything whatsoever to do with the failed bid while at the same time boasting about the relative positions on the Press Freedom index of England and Russia, (#19 and #140 respectively, with the US at #20, in case you were wondering). This is completely at odds with the fact that the FIFA Chairman explicitly mentioned that our uppity media is the main reason had no intentions whatsoever of holding the event in Britain, but I suppose that’s denial for you.

Instead everyone is blaming it on FIFA being totally corrupt, (‘only three of the FIFA executives even bothered to read our brilliant technical report!’) and the national mood seems to be that if losing the rights to host the occasional world cup is the price we have to pay for a free media then so be it. That’s true as far as it goes, but it glosses over the inconvenient fact that Britain did manage to win the equally corrupt competition to hold the upcoming Olympics back in 2005. The difference was that we had more influence on the global stage back then than we do now. When the US was top dog, it was able to lay down the law on the way business should be conducted and we in the UK were able punch above its wait by riding on the coattails of that. But as the economic global balance of power shifts, that power and influence is visibly slipping away.

So that’s the losers. What about the winners? Russia easily won the 2018 contest, coasting to a majority of the votes in the second round, whereupon Putin flew into Zurich and told FIFA the pretty cool story about how Russians loved football so much that it had played an important part in keeping their spirits up during the bombardment of Leningrad in the Great Patriotic War. Mind you, be that as it may, I remember passing through Moscow during the 2006 World Cup and not noticing any enthusiasm at all for the tournament or even being able to find anywhere showing the games with the inevitable exception of Irish bars…

Even the English conceded, albeit very, very grudgingly, that Russia’s not actually a bad place to host the tournament. That’s more than can be said for the other winners, Qatar. The desert is a ridiculous place to play football. It’s going to be far too hot to kick a ball around and Qatar are so rubbish at football, they even manage to make our English team look good at it; they’re the first country since 1934 to host a world cup without EVER qualifying to play in one. All of the indoor stadiums they’re going to have to build are going to be disposable ones that will have to be dismantled afterwards. This is likely to be the most energy intensive project in the history of the world, yet they’ve boasting about the green ‘zero carbon cooling solutions’ they’re going to use for the stadiums while keeping admirably straight faces.

Of course, what won Qatar the bid and lets them get away with talking this sort of bollocks is that, as with Russia, they’re sitting on lots of natural gas resources and are financially in much better shape than most of the other competitors. As wikileaks has just revealed, the nation has also been sensibly using its Al Jazeera TV station as leverage to improve its diplomatic profile. Stuff like this helps a lot when competing in these sort of global beauty contests these days, far, far more than any claims to have a democratic society.

But the most important reason it matters that Russia and Qatar won these contests is that it’s one of the clearest and most public signs of that long promised prophecy that power and influence is moving away from the West is coming to pass. For a few years now, political geeks have been discussing the rise of East Asia and the BRICs, (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the corresponding decline of the west, but most people haven’t really been paying much attention to arcane things like the G8 being extended. That’s because they’ve had less nerdy things to do, like following football. Russia’s international profile has been pretty much non existent outside its backyard since the end of the Cold War, aside from endless stories about gangsters, oligarchs and spies. That’s going to change. Having witnessed the way Russia swatted away all the other European bids, the public’s been given a potent signal, using football, a language most of the world understands, that after a rough couple of decades, Russia is definitely ready to start strutting around on the world stage again. This is one of those very, very public signs that the world is changing, akin to the way China won and hosted the Beijing Olympics, but because Americans don’t follow football, you’re going to be the last ones to know this…

From The eXiled’s Special Australasia Correspondent

PERTH, AUSTRALIA–A few hours ago (as of writing this), Julian Assange released his first US Embassy cable regarding Australian politics. It’s still too early for me to make my mind up, but it’s never too early to speculate. If the cable is genuine, it might be the most delicious disgrace in Prime Ministerial history – my brain’s tall poppy receptors are already tingling at the idea that it’s a real communiqué. Still, the whole thing is a little too perfect.

According to the cable, our former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made some unfortunate comments about China in a 75-minute meeting with Hillary Clinton. According to Rudd, China’s leaders are “sub-rational” and America should be ready to “deploy force” if diplomacy fails. Even more damning (at least, supposedly) is his claim that Australia’s plans to expand its submarine fleet were “a response to China’s growing ability to project force.”

I should explain, before anything, why this is so delicious. Kevin Rudd came to power in Australia in late 2007, just over a year before Obama’s election victory. Like Obama, he replaced a long-standing conservative government while presenting himself as a progressive, and, like Obama’s, his government was a carbon copy of his predecessor’s in almost every area, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

I wouldn’t normally use “tall poppy” as a slur, but if Rudd wasn’t a soulless vegetable with a waxy disproportionate head, then what was he? He certainly didn’t resemble Gough Whitlam, Australia’s last real Labor Prime Minister (whose election victory, if you believe Kwitny, made the CIA panic “almost as if our Australian ally had actually fallen to communists”). If he had one personality quirk, it was phoning random public servants during the early hours of the morning – this got him the nickname “Kevin 24/7.” Unfortunately, Prime Minister Crystal Dick seemed to spend most of his time tinkering with Howard policies to make them even more evil. In 2007, Howard gave families a free piece of Internet filtering software that cost $90m to develop… and could be bypassed by teenagers in less than 10 minutes. Rudd decided a software-based filter wasn’t enough and tried to extend Howard’s idea to an ISP level. It would never have worked, but like the current TSA scandal in America, it gave instant brownie points to all sorts of Penn & Teller loudmouths who’d be otherwise unemployed.

The other thing Rudd is famous for is China. He speaks Mandarin, had a long career as a Beijing diplomat in the 1980s, and Australian newspaper cartoonists occasionally like to draw him in a Chairman Mao suit. Playing up his sensitivity to Chinese culture was a crucial part of his 2007 campaign strategy. Earlier in the year, his party caucus forced him to resign and gave the PM job to his deputy, Julia Gillard. Now, imagine a political machine full of cold, convictionless little Adrian-Lamo-style nerds (plus a few jocks who happen to wear glasses) and you’d have a good picture of Rudd’s “Labor Right” faction. As a consolation prize for losing the Prime Minister job, they gave Rudd a cosy position as Foreign Minister in the “new” Gillard Government, figuring his Chinese credentials would carry him.

And that’s hardly the best piece of irony.

As Foreign Minister, you see, Rudd is the default head of ASIS, Australia’s equivalent to the CIA. If this morning’s cable is genuine, then Julian Assange has just caused our foreign intelligence agency one of its biggest ever embarrassments. It was only yesterday that the Wikileaks founder accused Australia’s government of betraying him “so that Australian diplomats and politicians can be invited to the best US embassy cocktail parties.” It looks like he’s finally bitten back.

It’s a pleasant scenario, but there’s still every chance the cable was a selective leak. For starters, it makes Rudd look suspiciously tough and uncompromising, which is exactly the bullshit West Wing image every Labor hack wants to cultivate. I’ve known a few. The scene of an Australian Prime Minister telling an American Secretary of State when to “deploy force” is even fishier, almost like a propaganda script to disguise Australia’s lackey status. Several readers of The Age website have already responded positively, claiming Rudd is “one of the few politicians around the world to approach China with some honesty” and is “only telling the truth.” If it’s a ruse, it might just work. (And it’s not like One Nation racists are the only voters Rudd could grab with a bit of Sinophobia: there are plenty of right-wing Chinese anticommunists still around.) The question is whether Rudd gave Beijing advance warning: to answer that, Assange would have to find some Australian or Chinese cables.

There’s also the matter of Rudd’s daughter Jessica, who happens to be married to a Hong-Kong-born banker called Albert Tse (also the former President of the Labor Club at QUT, the Queensland University of Technology). In 2008, Jessica moved to Beijing with her husband, apparently quitting her job in PR to become a full-time socialite. Rudd obviously has a pretty significant stake in China – that’s another thing that makes the cable a bit too perfect. There’s no shortage of failed Labor politicians who’ve badmouthed their former associates for profit – Google “Mark Latham” if you’re American – but dissing China while your son-in-law is doing business there makes no sense to a careerist unless the Chinese are in on the whole thing. That’s why, if it isn’t staged, it’s one hell of a clusterfuck.

The Rudd Family: (l-r) Son-in-law Albert Tse, daughter/author Jessica, Daddy & Mommy

Ms. Rudd’s career comes with a few other unanswered questions. Less than two months after her father’s forced resignation, she brought out a “political chick-lit” novel called Campaign Ruby. The writing itself was mediocre, the usual plot about shoe-shopping and whatever, but the book had one claim to fame – predicting Crystal Dick’s resignation and replacement by Australia’s first female Prime Minister. The mainstream media called this “freakily prescient.” The really freaky part, though, is seeing Jessica Rudd in an interview. She claims to have barely finished two chapters before getting a book deal. She also claims to have gotten a deadline to complete the book by December 2009, despite being a first-time writer. Why December? Did the Labor hacks tip her off about her father’s resignation months ahead? (After her father’s demotion, getting to predict a major political event would make a nice consolation prize.) And could you imagine her writing a political novel if her father wasn’t about to get booted? A novel about a PM, getting ratfucked, published while he’s still in office? By his own fucking spawn? In the middle of an election year? Finally, she says the book was “so much fun” to write. I don’t think anyone who’s actually tried to write a novel would describe the process as “fun” – unless you’re handing outlines to a ghost writer, that is.

In short, Kevin Rudd has had plenty of incidents in his career that were about as spontaneous and unscripted as an All Saints episode, though I’m yet to issue a final verdict about Assange’s latest leak.

Or, as Jessica Rudd would put it: “I know, such a coincidence.”

Ramon Glazov lives and writes in Perth, Western Australia. Email him at “ramonglazov at gmail dot com”

Maybe what’s happening in America today will seem funny to some other culture in some future time—how it happened that in the depths of America’s decline, Liberals, the great opposition to everything mean and ruthless in this culture, couldn’t muster up a get-together for anything better than a mock-in. Led by a clown.

I confess, I couldn’t hack it. I came to the rally–saw those two pastry chefs from the Mythbusters show get all the Liberal Elites to hold a post-modern human wave, an ironic human wave allowing all the self-conscious Liberal Elites to play like Real America, while salvaging their vanity because it was all ironic and post-modern… And to make sure that everyone knew they were not really human-waving but rather meta-human-waving, the Mythbusters duo deconstructed the human wave. And all the Liberal Elites smiled and laughed knowingly, because all 150,000 were in on the biggest inside-joke wankathon in American history. And that was it for me–I was outta there.

A century-old ideological movement, Liberalism: once devoted to impossible causes like ending racism and inequality, empowering the powerless, fighting against militarism, and all that silly hippie shit—now it’s been reduced to besting the other side at one-liners…and to the Liberals’ credit, they’re clearly on top. Sure there are a lot of problems out there, a lot of pressing needs—but the main thing is, the Liberals don’t look nearly as stupid as the other guys do. And if you don’t know how important that is to this generation, then you won’t understand what’s so wrong and so deeply depressing about the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity.

That’s what makes this rally so depressing and grotesque: It’s an anti-rally, a kind of mass concession speech without the speech–some kind of sick funeral party  for Liberalism, in which Liberals are led, at last, by a clown. Not a figurative clown, but by a clown–and Liberals are sure that this somehow makes them smarter and less lame–and indeed, they are less lame, because they are not taking themselves too seriously, which is something they’re very, very proud of. All great political struggles and ideological advances, all great human rights achievements were won by clown-led crowds of people who don’t take themselves too seriously, duh! That’s why they’re following a clown like Stewart, whose entire political program comes down to this: not being stupid, the way the other guys are stupid–or when being stupid, only stupid in a self-consciously stupid way, which is to say, not stupid. That’s it, that’s all this is about: Not to protest wars or oligarchical theft or declining health care or crushing debt or a corrupt political system or imperial decay—nope, the only thing that motivates Liberals to gather in the their thousands is the chance to celebrate their own lack of stupidity! Woo-hoo!

It’s the final humiliating undoing of Enlightenment Idealism that made Liberalism possible–imagine if Jefferson, Diderot, Montesquieu, Madison et al reduced the entire Enlightenment’s struggle against the old feudal order to “I’m against the monarchy because the monarchy’s stupid…but then again, Rousseau makes a fool of himself with his Romanticism, and Tom Paine is so serious with his ‘Rights of Man’, the Revolutionaries are just as crazy as the Monarchists, so rather than join either side and risk opening myself to mockery, I’m just going to stand back and laugh at them all and say, ‘Really? Independence? Everyone is created equal and has the right to pursue happiness? Really, TJ? You sure you want to say that about Bluebeard? Really?” [LAUGH TRACK]…

It’s not Stewart’s or Colbert’s fault, let’s be clear on that—they’re the only ones doing their job here. They’re the only ones fighting this battle, and the only way they’re surviving is by elaborately pretending they’re not really fighting anyone’s battle over anything, they’re just having a laugh—it’s the same rationale that jesters used in medieval times, and Stewart and Colbert play the same role as the jesters did then…and we’re also playing our role as powerless peasants reduced to self-mockery and snickering at our Masters behind their backs. It’s not their fault that Liberalism today has as its highest priority not looking stupid—and that its premiere rally is framed in such a way that everyone who came to this rally is somehow indemnified from looking foolish precisely because it’s not really a political rally, it’s more like a mockery of a political rally—in a self-consciously smart sort of way. And the Daily Show Democrats who gathered celebrated themselves for this amazing achievement: that they didn’t make fools of themselves standing for something that some other guys could then use to mock them. That’s the biggest sin of the other side, the Tea Partiers especially, at least as the Daily Show fans see it: they look silly, and worse, they’re not shamed into suicide from looking silly, the way Liberals would be shamed into OD’ing on Ambien if they opened themselves up to that sort of mockery.

It was this same lack of ironic self-awareness (or rather, this absence of any sort of mockery-avoidance technology) that led my generation to pillory the hippies and progressives–that’s why we were South Park Republicans before we were Daily Show Democrats: because back then, standing for liberal values meant something, and that made you look lame. Only now, when Liberal ideals have vanished into mythology and all they stand for is “not as crazy or stupid as Republicans” is it safe to camp out with the Democrats. They put nothing on the line ideologically, which perfectly jibes with this generation’s highest value. And that makes it perfectly safe to go to something like a large political rally like Stewart’s—you side with a hollow movement stripped of ideology or purpose, and then you gather to celebrate your own hollowness at a rally whose one promise is “You won’t open yourself up to mockery if you attend this rally” and whose goal is to show how not-stupid “we” are compared to the mockable activists on both the right and the left–the Beckites and the Code Pinkers.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this has been the Great Dream of my generation: to position ourselves in such a way that we’re beyond mockery. To not look stupid. That’s the biggest crime of all–looking stupid. That’s why they’ve turned Stewart into a demigod, because he knows how to make the other guys look really stupid, and if you’re on the same team as Stewart, you’re on the safe side of the mockery, rather than dangerously vulnerable to mockery.

In fact, I think this is why so many Gen-X/Yers turned against Obama: because he made them look stupid. They made themselves vulnerable to looking stupid by believing in him–and he jilted them. That’s how they see it–not that politics is a long ugly process that has nothing to do with self-esteem and everything to do with money and brawling–it was more like an “indie” consumer choice: They bought into the Obama brand, wore it, and suddenly discovered that the label wasn’t as cool as it seemed at the time, especially after the sentimental high of electing a half-black president wore off to the hard slog of what came after… so they threw the Obama jeans away and went to work trying to salvage their coolness creds for having made that fashion mistake. It’s captured best in this Awl essay by Tom Hanks’ daughter–E. A. Hanks, of all people: “Dear The Left: A Breakup Letter” which begins with her reaction to the special Senate election that Scott Brown won:

Dear The Left,

It’s interesting that you couldn’t keep Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat. I’m taking it for granted that you understand that I don’t mean “interesting” at all, but rather “detestable.”

So little Miss Hanks is not joking in her title for the essay–it really is written like a breakup letter. Leaving aside for now the question of “What the fuck is Tom Hanks’ daughter doing talking as if she and ‘The Left’ ever had a deal?”–or the other issue of “Why does your father make shitty Romantic comedy movies that turn decent people into anti-American suicide bombers?”–because we’ll get nowhere if we try answering those…anyway, leaving that aside…By framing her disillusionment as a breakup letter, she reduces the political struggle to a kind of frivolous private-school irony for 20-something Heathers, indemnifying her against Gen-X/Y reader suspicions that her break with Obama might mean she’s one of those Lefties who “have a cow.” She’s not–she’s cool and ironic and has a “Scott Brown? Really? You lost to Scott Brown? No, Really?” attitude, just like all the people who read her have.

E. A. Hanks (second from left) with Megan McCain and her friends from “The Left”

Keep in mind that this E.A. Hanks “break-up letter” wound up becoming a hugely popular, heavily-e-forwarded article earlier this year among all the Daily Show Democrats, as embarrassment swept across the Liberal egosphere following Scott Brown’s surprise victory in the Senate race. She is the voice of the Rally today.

So now ask–who writes breakup letters? What’s the point of that? If you’re breaking up with a lover whom you just want to get away from, you won’t publish a breakup letter, you just want it to go away. But if you’re breaking up with a lover because s/he humiliated you, or you’re worried somehow how this will affect your reputation among the cool crowd (the obsession of Gen-Xers and –Yers), then you DO write a letter and publish it, so that you make HIM look like the fool, you transfer the mockery and humiliation out of your hurt little feelers and restore your public image as someone who is cool, who is self-aware, who never gets too excited about things but this one time you did and you got burned and that sucks dude….It’s an elaborate Gen-X/Y rhetorical strategy to abandon a movement or a trend that’s in serious danger of making its fans look stupid. And it’s even worse than that—there’s something very 1950s about her peevishness and selfishness, a kind of Ayn Rand cheerleader dumping the QB because he lost the Homecoming game—all the while she waited it out beneath the bleachers to see who’d win, but she’d foolishly placed her bets a bit too early with the new black QB…

What E. A. Hanks didn’t realize–what no one at the Rally today celebrating their coolness realizes– is that this isn’t about cheerleading for the sentimental favorite and getting rewarded for it by some kind of Liberal Hollywood God—she’s supposed to fight a long dreary battle that goes on and on, long after the credits roll. But that’s not what she signed up for: She saw it as Obama escorting her to the Prom after he made all those hard-hearted Randian cheerleaders weep into their pom-poms at how he overcame adversity and realized the American Dream…only it turned out he can’t win the Big Game, he’s got no Red Zone O. I mean, like, where’s my The Blind Side black man? If Christians can have their Blind Side, why can’t we have our Liberal Blind Side too? The idea that Ms Hanks and the Gen-X cheerleaders looking over her shoulder are supposed to help win the game by any means necessary is as far from her petulant thoughts as possible here.

Instead, as the wounded party, what’s first on her mind is making sure she’s the first to dump, the easiest way to restoring her cool credibility:

Which is to say, we’re over. Yep, sorry. We’re through.

It’s not even that I don’t agree with you, because I do, on all the big ones, at least: Teddy Kennedy’s legacy, gays, abortion, endless wars for the profit of private companies, drowning polar bears, the works. I’m not running off to declare nonsense as truth like, “Health Care Will Kill Us All!” or anything like that.

But, you know what? I don’t think you’re good for me. Or for America, for that matter.

Here’s where something much more sinister about what passes for “Liberal” in my generation is revealed: the totally-selfish Ayn Rand activist, the petulant Libertarian protagonist who has a brand manager’s understanding of what it means to be “Liberal” or “Left”. It is this brand manager’s disillusionment with the brand that is fuelling the Jon Stewart rally—by identifying herself so closely with something that turned out to be not nearly as cool as the buzz claimed, she made herself vulnerable, and mockable. Which may seem frivolous to you old folks out there, but for her and for Gen-X/Yers, exposing yourself like that is the equivalent of a decade of marching for Civil Rights and against the war, getting arrested, beaten, jailed, negotiating with authorities, teaching, etc….here is the Gen-X/Y equivalent of “laying it all on the line”:

There was a moment, after the inauguration of Barack Obama as our 44th President (the one you take credit for) when there was an in-coming wave of people singing.

As the noise got closer, those words made famous by Bananarama became clear and rang out, golden over the Mall: “Na Na Na / Na Na Na / Hey Hey Hey / Goodbye!”

Countless people were waving up at the sky, and when I craned my neck back I could see Marine One was taking the previous President away, forever. His time was done.

I started to wave and sing too, but before I could really give it my best, I burst into tears, The Left. You would have been proud.

When I looked up to try to chip off the frozen snot and salt water from my face, I noticed something: the 100 people in my immediate vicinity were also crying.

And I don’t mean quiet, private, attractive tears.

People were sobbing, really going for it. There was more choking and heaving than a seventh grade girl’s bathroom.

I caught an evanescent understanding of the meaning of catharsis.

It’s not a pleasant, tidy emotional process, wherein one gets closure by having neat conversations that make you feel okay-it’s the violent purging of the cancer that’s been pulsating wetly in your guts for eight years.

Now you might be thinking here, “Hey wait a minute, this sounds just like something Meg Ryan would say, straight out of Sleepless in Seattle or You’ve Got Mail!” Except that it’s worse: like so many disillusioned, spurned Daily Show Dems, she’s flustered that it didn’t all turn out the way a movie would—Obama got her all hot ‘n’ wet, and then somehow things got messy and ugly, it didn’t follow a 3-act dramatic plot. It just turned into work, with no credits ever rolling signifying the end, period. Work is supposed to be compressed into a 30-second montage because work is boring and lame—fuck this shit! It’s the purest expression of a profoundly hollow mindset, devoid of ideology, devoid of purpose beyond protecting her brand.

Why couldn’t Obama be more like him?

Hanks’ “break-up letter” wouldn’t matter here if it hadn’t been so popular, and such an early expression of the same mentality fueling the Jon Stewart rally. Somehow, far, far poorer Liberal Elites from the coasts identified with the far richer, privileged Hanks girl because everyone’s stuck in the same rhetorical rules and mindset that were formed in a more prosperous era, when being petulant and frivolous and ironic made a bit more sense, economically speaking. Now we’re fucked, and we’re incapable of adapting to our own desperate, declining circumstances with a more serious rhetorical style that matches our desperation and decline—we’re stuck rolling our eyes like we did in the good ol’ days, but rolling our eyes now is just plain bizarre for everyone but a privileged, selfish crypto-Randroid like Hanks. And not only have we learned to talk and act like celebrities, but we have absorbed the stupidity of their stock plots, in which a happy ending like the Obama Rally stays happy after the credits roll—nothing changes or gets complicated or ugly, it’s just over—over, goddamnit, like in the movies! That’s just not fair, you’re not supposed to cut to a new set of struggles after the happy ending—what kind of movie is that?

So even though we’re jobless and on food stamps, we’re afraid of coming off looking stupid complaining about it–whatever dire situation we’re in, the main thing is not to look stupid when complaining about it. the best way not to look stupid is to blame the guy who made you look stupid:

But I standing [sic] on the National Mall, crying in the arms of that stranger from Georgia, I realized that the anger I had for President Bush gave me was nothing in comparison with the rage I felt for The Left.

The Left.

DailyKos and MoveOn and CodePink and yes, that other one, too. Grand-standing Congresspeople, bandana-ed prostesters and pontificating talking heads.

So much talking! So much feeling! And yet… nothing changed!

Yes, where’s that permanent change! It’s not supposed to be an ongoing struggle—change happens, it’s over, you get up and leave the movie theater. It’s not supposed to be like this! Fuck you, Code Pink!

Like Stewart, she hates on CodePink as much or more as the crazies on the right. That’s been misinterpreted by earnest Lefties as false equivalency–”How can you compare the war crimes and the tens of thousands of deaths caused by one side to shrill protests by CodePink on the other side?” they cry. But you see, that’s not what the Daily Show Democrats are talking about when they equate the two–what makes them equally bad is that they’re equally lame. And siding with either side makes you siding with lameness. That’s worse than any alleged war crime, by my generation’s standards.

You focused so much attention on beating Fox! All of your energy was spent on seeing who could win the spin war, and suddenly we were all shouting “You’re wrong! You’re wrong! You’re wrong!” together, to the point where we were just as hysterical and terrified as the other side! Probably even more!

In other words, “you” started to become effective. Not in the way a petulant Gen-Xer wanted it to be though, because one had to look lame to be effective. One had to be like CodePink–and CodePink isn’t cool. Gen-X/Y didn’t sign up for lame, they signed up for Obama, the sentimental favorite!

And then of course comes the requisite Gen-X self-awareness and self-mockery, preventative-mockery, the most popular rhetorical strategy of my Generation:

And yet here I go, changing everything between us. If I’m being honest, our relationship was all about placating my ego. All of it: the marches, the sit-ins, the phone trees, the whole shebang.

It was about glorifying my personal beliefs, and convincing myself that I was more against the war,more for gay rights, more serious about securing abortion rights, than anyone else.

If you think about it, it was pretty nifty thinking: It’ll look like I’m selflessly placing myself in harm’s way to make a point about how fucked up things are! Then everyone will know how serious I am, how serious I take things. Everyone will be super-impressed.

The only word I can think to describe it is masturbatory. My relationship with The Left was masturbatory.

The only purpose this part of the essay–and it’s the most important part of her argument–is that it serves to bolster what rhetoricians call her “ethos”: She’s establishing herself as self-aware and cool enough to mock herself in-advance, because only lame people or people who take things too seriously or weirdos are incapable of self-mockery. It’s a reverse-helix trick that answers the reader’s inevitable question: “Wait, is she just whining because she got dumped first? Because if she got dumped first, then someone’s a-gonna make fun of her…But no, she must be the one doing the dumping, because she’s showing that she can laugh at herself, and that means she’s not in any sort of emotionally-committed state. She’s not very mockable, which is exactly where I see myself.”

Then comes the ending of her essay, in which she winds up making the exact wrong choice that my generation made when it went “libertarian” as the fake-alternative to Democrat liberalism and Republican conservativism: going it alone.

And that’s why I’m taking this post-Kennedy moment to break up with you, The Left. I don’t want to talk about how I want America to change. I want the inevitable changes that mark American’s great march toward freedom for everyone to be manifested by my individual actions-by everyone’s individual actions.

What’s the point in being a voice in a crowd that’s screaming so loudly that no one has any idea what everyone’s saying? (Even if it’s a crowd I agree with!)

Like a petulant whiner, she wants things to happen without getting her ego dirty. Going it alone is the least-dangerous choice for someone whose politics are driven by vanity, but like the fashionable libertarianism of my generation, the most dangerous choice of all when you consider that politics is all about power struggles over how to order a particular civilization, what to prioritize, how to allocate, and so on. If the ruling class has enormous amounts of money and power and collectivizes in a variety of billionaires’ unions and special interests unions, and your answer is, “I’ll go it alone, at least I won’t look stupid” then you’re just fucking stupid.

It all becomes grotesquely clear with her zinger-conclusion, which equates the Left with “That Lame Guy” whom college wits would always make fun of:

Someone who comes to mind, The Left, is Bob Dylan. (See, I told you we’d still agree on things!)

You know what you’re like? You’re like the people who booed him when he went electric. You’re the pouting kid demanding more “protest songs,” when they’re all protest songs,

And who the hell boos Obam-I mean, Bob Dylan-anyway?

At this point, the Gen-X/Gen-Y stance becomes downright depressing. This is how far we’ve declined: a Gen-Y privileged hipster can’t even muster a zinger from her own era, so she reaches back to some barely-talented rat-cunning jerk from the 60s as her idea of a real cultural hero, if only because he’s managed to avoid being savagely mocked—and then she pulls her zinger from that generation’s “moment,” which was mocked by the next generation, and recycled by her generation…Cultural stagnation is the underlying theme of this whole mess, and that’s what leads back to the Rally to Restore Sanity. America and Liberalism have stagnated and decayed so much that they have to pull their zinger references from 40-year-old put downs that predate E. A. Hanks’ birth. And it still works–because  the people who booed Dylan for going electric–their biggest sin is that they “took Dylan too seriously” and made fools of themselves for decades to come. That is her devastating evaluation of how the Obama movie went bad. That’s the lesson–bail out of anything that threatens to make you look lame. The big zinger is borrowed from a hipster put-down so old it predates Ms. Hanks birth—citing an old mockery-favorite like this. But everyone got it. And everyone agreed with her.

You see, this is why so many cool Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers were so jazzed up about going to the Stewart rally–by definition, they were guaranteed not to look stupid by going to it, because it’s not really a rally. They’re not putting anything on the line. They’re just going to chant the equivalent of that annoying Saturday Night Live Update skit “Really?” No generation ever looked so cool so late in their lives as my generation. We did it! We achieved our dream! We don’t look as stupid as the hippies did when they were in their 40s! Woo-hoo! We still mock ourselves and we’re still self-aware, but best of all, we don’t look stupid by devoting ourselves to ideas or movements that other people might one day laugh at. We won! We won the least-stupid-looking-generation competition! Let’s gather together in an ironic, self-aware way, and celebrate how we’re not really rallying or laying anything on the line–not even now, not even when the whole fucking country is collapsing. What’s our prize, Don?

Meanwhile, behind Door Number 1, the country is in two losing wars and the worst economic crisis in 80 years, behind Door Number 2, over 40 million Americans are on fucking food stamps, behind Door Number 3, millions are being land-transfered out of their property like landless peasants in a banana republic–yeah, it’s bad, whatever dude, it’s always been bad, nothing ever changes much, don’t have a cow, deal with it…

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say a few things that might sound stupid, but bear with me:

1. Collective action is the only possible way to change shit. Large numbers of collectivized nobodies rallying to demand what they want–a better cut of the pie, and a better world to live in. It’s the only thing that power-elites fear and the only way to get them to negotiate. There must be thousands of billionaires’ unions—whether the Chamber of Commerce or the gazillions of libertarian networks—and the only thing they hope and dream about and invest their effort into is planting a seed into your vain Gen-X brain that makes you think it’s lame to collectivize. That’s it, that’s the only thing they care about while they’re plundering away. You’ll have to stomach being around people who are lame, and who say lame things, and you’ll feel lame—so you’ll have to decide which is lamer: the fear of being lame, or forming an alliance with people lamer than you in order to struggle against people far meaner, far more greedy and destructive than the lame people you hate—people who have no qualms about being lame when they collectivize, so long as they destroy you and grab everything they want. Tough choice, I know.

2. The problem with the Left wasn’t that they were too fixated on proving they were right, or that they didn’t make enough noise before the war about the lies that led us into that war…the problem is that the Left doesn’t stand for anything Big because it’s not guided by a vision or an Ideal. What does the Left stand for? Let me suggest a few things in people’s own personal interests in these decaying times that the Left should stand for: first, people need money. Then if they have money, they need Life. Then they might be interested in “ideals” set out in the contract that this country is founded on. Ever read the preamble to the Constitution? There’s nothing about private property there and self-interest. Nothing at all about that. It’s a contract whose purpose is clearly spelled out, and it’s a purpose that’s the very opposite of the purpose driving Stewart’s rally, or the purpose driving the libertarian ideology so dominant over the past few generations. This country, by contract, was founded in order to strive for a “more Perfect Union”—that’s “union,” as in the pairing of the words “perfect” and “union”—not sovereign, not states, not local, not selfish, but “union.” And that other purpose at the end of the Constitution’s contractual obligations: promote the “General Welfare.” That means “welfare.” Not “everyone for himself” but “General Welfare.” That’s what it is to be American: to strive to form the most perfect union with each other, and to promote everyone’s general betterment. That’s it. The definition of an American patriot is anyone promoting the General Welfare of every single American, and anyone helping to form the most perfect Union—that’s “union”, repeat, “Union” you dumb fucks. Now, our problem is that there are a lot of people in this country who have dedicated their entire lives to subverting the stated purpose of this country. We must be prepared to identify those who disrupt and sabotage our national purpose of creating this “more perfect union” identifying those who sabotage our national goal of “promoting the General Welfare”—and calling them by their name: traitors. You who strive to form this Perfect Union and promote General Welfare—You are Patriots.

3. Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare.

4. A slogan, a line from Blade Runner: “Then we’re stupid, and we’ll die.”

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

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