Of Savages and Man: Taking Defense of Israel to the Depths

 

The Politics of Power: Burying Truth through Resolutions

by William A. Cook

“In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel Defeat Jihad”

(Pamela Geller, San Francisco ad campaign)

The California Assembly’s resolution passed on August 23, 2012, HR 35, purports to condemn “anti-Semitism” in public post-secondary institutions of higher learning by denying expression of opinions or statements that might be construed as expressing hatred of the Jewish people or critical of the state of Israel. Pamela Geller’s ad campaign quoted above, and placed in public vehicles in the city of San Francisco, expresses an opinion that demeans a group of people who are unquestionably Semitic by blood and language, yet would not be protected by the Assembly resolution since the term as defined is based upon the European Union’s definition that is exclusive, protecting Jews only.

The ad has created considerable reaction; a parallel poster expresses the same statement with a change of wording: “in any war between the colonizer and the colonized, support the oppressed, support the Palestinian right of return.”

In short, Geller’s ad campaign began a dialogue that has illumined quite opposing perspectives: what is the meaning of civilized man on the one hand and what is the meaning of colonized on the other. Perhaps out of this dialogue understanding will arise. Freedom of expression triumphs.

Unfortunately, the Assembly sought a different end, an end that would stifle discussion and oppose open expression that allowed for understanding and research that would be critical of one side. Two actions were sought by the passage: the Assembly “unequivocally condemns all forms of intolerance, including anti-Semitism, on public postsecondary educational institution campuses in California, and;

 “calls upon …(officials) of those institutions to increase their efforts to swiftly and unequivocally condemn acts of anti-Semitism on their campuses and to utilize existing resources, such as the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights’ working definition of anti-Semitism, to help guide program discussion about, and promote, as appropriate, educational programs for combating anti-Semitism on their campuses.”

Condemning all forms of intolerance on the campuses of public postsecondary educational institutions in California would appear to be a desirable goal, and with the additional reference—“including anti-Semitism”—a furtherance of explicitness to guide deliberations, but only helpful if that term can be defined specifically and concretely to achieve meaningful discussion.

However, the context for this “working definition” comes from the EU where freedom of speech is not free if it can be alleged to be “hate speech.” This is the working definition:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non­Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.''

(Summary overview of Antisemitism in the European Union (Dec 2006), Anti-Semitism Reference Center, Zionism on the Web).

Geller’s ad could not be considered “hatred toward Jews” and hence safe from condemnation by the EU definition the university officials would use to “guide program discussion…”; however, it certainly could be considered “hatred of Palestinians” expressed through her use of “savage” people. The irony here of course is obvious since it is the Palestinian people who are Semites and who suffer the consequences of occupation. The victim becomes the offender.

I bring attention to this control of thought not because I condemn Geller’s uncivilized advertisement; on the contrary, I support her right to express her views. By openly advertising her hatred of the Palestinians, Geller reveals for all how civilized she is, supporting as she does the actions of a state that has been condemned year upon year for 63 years by the overwhelming majority of nation states in the community of nations, the United Nations, as denying the rights of the true owners of the land of Palestine as proposed in UNGA Resolution 181. In short she supports, and wants the people of San Francisco to support, a state that defies international opinion and International Law. Impunity for crimes comes with control of minds, and hence control of the U.S. Congress, of communications and of rights of freedom of speech by voting denial of the very free expression she so brazenly demands. But that in her mind is civilized behavior.

The action by the Assembly is of interest to me because I have edited a volume, The Plight of the Palestinians: a Long History of Destruction, published by Palgrave Macmillan world-wide publishers of academic texts; the volume carried the title when first presented to Macmillan, As the World Watches: Genocide in Palestine. Macmillan did not favor that direct statement.

On the other hand, the promotional blurb on the back of the book states: The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction is a collection of voices from around the world that establishes in both theoretical and graphic terms the slow, methodical genocide taking place in Palestine beginning in the 1940s, as revealed in the Introduction. From Dr. Francis A. Boyle’s detailed legal case against the state of Israel to Uri Avnery’s “Slow Motion Ethnic Cleansing,” Richard Falk’s “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” and Ilan Pappe’s “Genocide in Gaza,” these voices decry in startling, vivid and forceful language the calculated atrocities taking place, the inhumane conditions inflicted on the people, and the silence that exists despite the crimes—nothing short of state sponsored genocide against the Palestinians.”

The entire content of this book, the very concept imbedded in it, that genocide is taking place in Palestine in the first decade of this new century, is condemnable under the Assembly resolution. Over twenty writers from Israel, Palestine, Australia, the Netherlands, London, Canada, America, and the UN would be condemned for contributing to such a text. The Resolution in effect denies freedom of expression to those who critique the state of Israel for actions that defy International Law. The only law that pertains to Israel is Israeli Law and control of International Law by U.S. veto power of UN resolutions that would bring Israel before the UNCHR and/or the International court of Justice.

Years ago, I prepared a paper for an international conference held at Oxford University titled “Blinded by Belief,” the application and abuse of religious and political mythologies in current political policy in the West, most damningly in Britain, Canada, Israel and the United States. The paper forced me as a researcher to search out conditions that prevailed in Mandate Palestine when Britain had international authority to govern the strip of land we call Palestine. That authority was relinquished on May 15th, 1948. Of particular interest was the period from November 1947 when the UNGA proposed the partition of Palestine to May 15 when Britain left Palestine. During that period, the terrorism undertaken by the Zionists against the British authorities from 1939 to November became even more brutal than it had before, since the Jewish Agency and its affiliate organizations, the Irgun, Stern and Hagana armed groups (armies) saw the mandate Police and Soldiers as lame ducks incapable of stopping the Zionists from aggressively taking by force the whole of Palestine regardless of the UNGA Partition Plan. The details and evidence to establish these points is presented in the Introduction to The Plight of the Palestinians.

A review of this period, the silence about the British Mandate Period even in Britain, and almost until this day, has been deafening. Why? No reasoned individual who knows the extent of the savagery committed by the Zionists against the Brits and the Arabs in Palestine could call their behavior “civilized” and seek support from the American people for their civilized behavior. What civilized people could secretly break a peace agreement with the people of Deir Yassin, a small village between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, surround the village, attack them in their homes, rape the women and massacre virtually the whole population with the exception of about a 100, shackle them in trucks and parade them through Jerusalem to demonstrate how fierce the Jewish fighters could be to put fear in the hearts of the Palestinians, and then drive them back and kill them. Is civilized behavior the determination to plan the destruction and theft of the towns and villages of the Palestinians, that had been portioned for them by the UN, before the stated date for that partition plan would take effect? Does civilized behavior include the many massacres committed by these Zionist armies, including torture and rape, as reported by the Israeli historian Benny Morris?

Does kidnapping British soldiers, hanging their bodies from trees and booby trapping those bodies to mock their comrades who came to rescue them for burial while they laughed to see even more Mandate soldiers assassinated. Is civilized behavior the deception of false flag operations like that which blew apart the King David Hotel as Zionists dressed as Arabs entered the basement with milk containers filled with explosives? Richard C. Catling dove beneath the admission’s desk when the bombs went off and lived to testify about the rapes that took place in Deir Yassin.

Richard C. Catling, Deputy Head of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Jerusalem Mandate Police, kept a “Top Secret” file in the archives of the Oxford Rhodes House Library, filled with close to 500 pages of evidence that conclusively demonstrated the savagery of the Zionist powers that clandestinely controlled the Israeli immigrants entering Palestine. Two reports illustrate the terrorism inflicted by these people against their hosts, the British government that made possible the eventual “home” of the Jewish people. I have presented that evidence in numerous articles and the Introduction to The Plight of the Palestinians. Is it important that the truth hidden away these many years be brought into the discussions that should and must be presented before the students of California’s public institutions if they and the politicians that govern this state and this nation are to govern with justice for all?

There is something sacred about freedom of speech; it is the secular equivalent of “Let there be Light.” Chris Hedges opened a book review years ago, a review of two books about the Vietnam War, with the words “The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war. The vanquished know the essence of war—death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction.”

The Zionists knew during the Mandate Period how to abuse the glory of words: to make massacres actions of their enemy, to hide every atrocity they committed under the rubric of self-defense, to turn patriotism into a word responsive only to their cause, to hide the deafening cries of women and children in utter silence, to erase memories from the living by burying towns and villages beneath mounds of earth, to confiscate deeds and birth certificates, to bulldoze mosques and schools, to literally wipe people from existence even as they walked the earth. They wrote the history; they controlled, yea they created, the mythologies of Exodus that have become the truth of Palestine, and they became the victims surrounded by millions who wanted to destroy them to steal the land they were given by their G-d regardless of the passage of centuries and millennia and the existence now of International Law governed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Conventions that determine Justice and War.

In time a researcher realizes that the subject of his quest contains a narrative of its own. In my years studying Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work, Hawthorne himself emerges as the narrator, a mind seeking understanding of his time and place even when he writes of Padua or Rome. As an American, he lives in constant sensitivity that the equality so eloquently expressed in the nation’s Declaration of Independence and its Bill of Rights is a fantasy since one fifth of its people are enslaved, women have virtually no rights despite their nature that demands expression as Hester conveys in The Scarlet Letter, and another people who wander the American landscape, an incalculable number, ethnically isolated on reservations that shrink as more land theft is confiscated by his government, a government that he has served as Custom House Officer and Consul. Always in quest, he seeks more and more the substance of this existence.

In March of 1862, Hawthorne, along with the Atlantic Monthly publisher, William Ticknor, headed to Washington to see the nation at war firsthand. Perhaps it was this last attempt to comprehend the contradictions present in this new nation that brought him to express through the voice of old Doctor Grim, a man roughly the age of Hawthorne as he penned Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, these caustic and cynical words that capture the essence of human darkness, aloneness and ultimate meaninglessness:

"Whence did you come?” the good doctor says to his young ward, Ned,
“Whence did any of us come? Out of the darkness and mystery; out of
nothingness; out of a kingdom of shadows; out of dust, clay, mud, I
think, and to return to it again. Out of a former state of being,
whence we have brought a good many shadowy revelations, purporting that
it was no very pleasant one. Out of a former life, of which the present
one is the hell!--And why are you come? Faith, Ned, he must be a wiser
man than Doctor Grim who can tell why you or any other mortal came
hither; only one thing I am well aware of,--it was not to be happy. To
toil and moil and hope and fear; and to love in a shadowy, doubtful
sort of way, and to hate in bitter earnest,--that is what you came
for!"

I think of this perspective when I search through the “Top Secret” files of Sir Richard C. Catling, a man of simple background, son of a small town butcher in England, who became Deputy Head of the CID for Britain as the Zionists went to war, their words, against the British Government that had promised them a home within the limitations of their authority to both the natives of Palestine and the immigrants arriving at its shores. He lived to witness the Zionists become terrorists as early as 1941 when, as Harold MacMichael, High Commissioner in Mandate Palestine, wrote “A second matter which deeply impressed me is the almost Nazi control exercised by the official Jewish organization over the Jewish community…” The evidence in Catling’s file attests to the reality of that observation.

These men and their soldiers and police were forced to survive as the Zionist controlled armies destroyed eventually 418 towns and villages belonging to the indigenous people, killed thousands and drove out of their land close to 800,000, the sons and daughters of whom live in refugee camps in sundry mid-east countries. These were the soldiers who became the lost soldiers of Britain, forgotten men whose diligence and endurance and patriotism have yet to be recognized by the British government. Why should research of this nature, which tells a different story than our controlled media has presented, not receive the exposure it should so the citizens of the United States and the students at California’s public institutions can determine for themselves what is true and what is not.

Without freedom of speech, truth will never be told. Let people open their minds and their souls to the light of human judgment, and as Jesus noted, few will step forward to throw the first stone because they are pure in spirit. The Gellers of this world will step forward to expose themselves as vulgar, as barbaric, as heedless of their fellows because they care for none but themselves-- heartless, soulless, lacking “human sympathy” which alone can bring peace into this world.

William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His most recent book is Decade of Deceit, 2002-2012: Reflections on Palestine, published in June by Lambert Academic Publishing of Germany. His other works include Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, The Rape of Palestine, and The Plight of the Palestinians all dealing with the crisis in Israel/Palestine. His fiction works include The Chronicles of Nefaria, a morality tale, The Agony of Colin Powell, a one act play, and a co-authored tragedy written with his wife Darcy, The Unreasoning Mask. He also has a Book of Psalms published by Mellon Poetry Press, Psalms for the 21st Century. He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu.

Winning Palestine

 Is Palestine a Lost Cause?

by Alan Hart

A long version of the question “Is Palestine a lost cause?” would be something like this:

Given that in the 46th year of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank Jewish settlers are continuing to consolidate their hold on the territory’s land and water resources by stealing more and more of both, thus demonstrating not only Zionism’s contempt for international law but, also, that the only peace Israel’s leaders are interested in is one that requires a complete Palestinian surrender to Zionism’s will, is there any real prospect, in any foreseeable future, of justice for the Palestinians?

Two-state non-solution and ethnic cleansing

It is probably still the case that, in the name of Arafat-like pragmatism, a majority of the oppressed Palestinians would regard the establishment of a state of their own on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem its capital as an acceptable minimum amount of justice.

They are, of course, fully aware that in such a scenario the right of return for those dispossessed of their land and their rights in 1948 and again in 1967 would have to be limited to return to the territory of the Palestinian mini-state, which would mean, because of the lack of space, that only a relatively small number of the dispossessed Palestinians and their descendants would be able to return. (Arafat and his leadership colleagues calculated that initially not more than 100,000 would be able to return.) The rest would have to settle for financial compensation.

“Though not yet buried, the two-state solution has long been dead, killed by Israel’s colonization with the complicity of the major powers and, by default, the regimes of an impotent Arab order.”

Beyond that the Palestinians of a mini-state would entertain the hope, as Arafat did when he persuaded the institutions of Palestinian decision-making to accept the need for unthinkable compromise with Israel (peace with it in return for only 22 per cent of their land, thus legitimizing Israel’s occupation of the other 78 per cent) that a genuine two-state solution could lead in one or two generations to one state by mutual consent. In that event there would be greater scope for more diaspora Palestinians to exercise their right of return.
But it isn’t going to happen. Though not yet buried, the two-state solution has long been dead, killed by Israel’s colonization with the complicity of the major powers and, by default, the regimes of an impotent Arab order. As I document in detail in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, the Arab regimes never had any intention of fighting Israel to liberate Palestine or using the leverage they have to press the US to require Israel to end its occupation of land grabbed in 1967.

As I also reveal in my book, the most explicit statement about why the two-state solution has long been dead was made to me in early 1980 by Shimon Peres. He was then the leader of Israel’s Labour Party, in opposition and hoping to win Israel’s next election and deny Menachem Begin a second term in office as prime minister. I was then acting as the linkman in a secret and exploratory dialogue between Peres and Arafat. At a point in our very first conversation for this initiative, Peres said that he feared it was “already too late”. I asked him why. He replied:

Every day that passes sees new bricks on new settlements. Begin knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s creating the conditions for a Jewish civil war. He knows that no Israeli prime minister is going down in history as the one who gave the order to the Jewish army to shoot large numbers of Jews [to end the occupation. Pause.] I’m not.

Obvious question. If it was too late in 1980 when there were only about 70,000 illegal Jewish settlers on the occupied West Bank, including Arab East Jerusalem, how much more too late is it today when they number in excess of 500,000, with that number rising on an almost daily basis, thanks in large part to funding assistance from America’s Christian fundamentalists?

In passing, it is interesting to note that the US State Department has now defined Israeli settler violence against Palestinians as “terrorism”.

It is now clear beyond any doubt that the most any Zionist leadership will offer the Palestinians for peace is a maximum of 35-40 per cent of the West Bank (the Sharon plan) in the shape of two, three or four bantustans which the Palestinians could call a state if they wished. This is and always will be totally unacceptable to all Palestinians.

“As things are and look like going, I believe the course is set for a final Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

As things are and look like going, I believe the course is set for a final Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
I mean that when Israel’s leaders conclude that their policy of making life hell for the occupied Palestinians in the hope of causing them to abandon their struggle and leave in large numbers has failed, and that they can’t bring on a puppet Palestinian leader who will force his people to accept crumbs from Zionism’s table, they will create a pretext to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into Jordan or wherever. One possible pretext could come about with a classic false flag operation – Mossad agents posing as Palestinian terrorists to plant bombs and kill Israeli Jews.

What about the Palestinians of the blockaded Gaza Strip? According to the latest UN report, it will not be “a liveable place” by 2020 unless action is taken to improve basic services in the territory. My guess is that, in Zionism’s plan for the future, the Gaza Strip’s Palestinians will be left to sink deeper and deeper into poverty, misery and despair in the hope – Zionism’s hope – that this will eventually cause large numbers of them to flee and seek a new life elsewhere. If that doesn’t happen, Israel’s leaders will have the option of creating a pretext for a Gaza Strip ethnic cleansing operation by military means.

After months of reflection, my conclusion is not only that the Zionist state of Israel is a monster beyond control but that Palestine IS a lost cause UNLESS... The main purpose of this article is to put some flesh on the bone of what I see as the “unless scenario”.

In it there are two initiatives for the Palestinians themselves to take.

Strategy for salvation

Dissolving the Palestinian Authority

The first is to demand and insist upon the dissolution of the impotent and discredited Palestinian Authority (PA) in order to make Israel completely responsible and therefore fully accountable for its occupation.
without the PA’s American-trained security forces to keep the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank (Hamas supporters especially) under control for Israel, having to take complete responsibility for occupation would be costly financially and in terms of the additional call on Israel’s own security resources.

More to the point, if the Zionist (not Jewish) state had complete responsibility for the occupation, calling and holding it to account for its defiance of international law and its occupation policies would be, in theory, less than what it is at present – a mission impossible

But if theory is to be turned into practise, something very significant has to happen.

Only governments can call and hold Zionism to account for its crimes, but they won’t act unless they are pushed to do so by informed public opinion. The problem, as I never tire of saying and writing, is that public opinion, in the U.S. especially, is too uninformed - too conditioned by Zionist propaganda – to do the pushing in big enough numbers. So here’s the question: With the mainstream media unwilling to come to grips with the truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, how can the citizens of nations be informed and empowered to do the pushing in big enough numbers?

Universal lobby for Palestinian rights

There are hundreds of groups of all faiths and none around the world which call and campaign for justice for the Palestinians, but (generally speaking) they are each and all doing their own little things in isolation, which makes them like flies to be swatted away by Zionism. In that light, I think the informing to mobilize public opinion to push governments can only be done if groups of all faiths and none everywhere which call and campaign for justice for the Palestinians collaborate and form one (Zionist-like) universal lobby. The internet makes the necessary collaboration and coordination perfectly possible.

The strategy of a universal lobby for Palestinian rights should be determined by asking and answering one question. Why, really, has Zionism succeeded to date?

The short answer is its success in selling propaganda lies about the making and sustaining of the conflict as truth; an amazing achievement that was assisted by having the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust to play as a blackmail card.

It follows, or so it seems to me, that the first priority of a coordinated, universal lobbying campaign for justice for the Palestinians should be to present in forums and on platforms of every kind the documented evidence which exposes Zionism’s propaganda lies for the nonsense they are.

Four of the many essential truths to be communicated are:

• That almost all if not all the Jews who went to Palestine in answer to Zionism’s call had no biological connection whatsoever to the ancient Hebrews and therefore no claim on the land;
• That Israel was created mainly by Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing;
• That Israel’s existence has never been threatened by any combination of Arab force – i.e. Israel has not lived in constant danger of annihilation, the “driving into the sea” of its Jews; and
• That it was Israel not the Arabs which closed the door to prospects for peace time and time again.

I am assuming (am I guilty of wishful thinking?) that if the citizens of nations, Westerners especially and Americans in particular, were aware of the truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of the conflict, they would insist that their governments called the Zionist monster to account – not only for the sake of justice for the Palestinians but also to best protect the interests of all, including the Jews of the world…

Now to the second initiative the Palestinians could and, in my view, should take if they are to play their part in preventing Palestine becoming a lost cause.

Engaging the Palestinian diaspora

“…if the Zionist colonial project is to be contained and defeated, the incredible, almost superhuman steadfastness of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians must be supplemented by practical, effective and coordinated Palestinian diaspora action.”

Obviously, the dissolution of the PA will only happen if enough Palestinians demand it. But in my view it’s not only the occupied and oppressed Palestinians who need to do the demanding. In my view, it’s time for Palestinians everywhere to become engaged by peaceful and democratic means in the struggle to end the Zionization of their homeland. Put another way, if the Zionist colonial project is to be contained and defeated, the incredible, almost superhuman steadfastness of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians must be supplemented by practical, effective and coordinated Palestinian diaspora action. For what purpose?

Not only to bring about the dissolution of the PA but to have it replaced as soon as possible by a restructured and reinvigorated Palestine National Council (PNC). Once upon a time this now sidelined parliament-in-exile represented Palestinians nearly everywhere in the world and was the supreme decision-making body on the Palestinian side. Even Arafat was accountable to it…

For the PNC to be brought back to life restructured and reinvigorated there would have to be elections to it in communities throughout the Palestinian diaspora.

The composition of the Palestinian diaspora by countries and numbers of Palestinians resident in them is roughly the following: Jordan – 2,900,000; Israel – 1,600,000; Syria – 800,000; Chile – 500,000; Lebanon – 490,000; Saudi Arabia – 280,245; Egypt – 270,245; United States – 270,000; Honduras –250,000; Venezuela – 245,120; United Arab Emirates – 170,000; Germany –159,000; Mexico – 158,000; Qatar – 100,000; Kuwait – 70,000; El Salvador – 70,000 Brazil – 59,000; Iraq – 57,000; Yemen – 55,000; Canada – 50,975; Australia – 45,000; Libya – 44,000; Denmark – 32,152; United Kingdom – 30,000; Sweden – 25,500; Peru – 20,000; Columbia – 20,000; Spain – 12,000; Pakistan – 10,500; Netherlands – 9,000; Greece – 7,500; Norway – 7,000; France – 5,000; Guatemala – 3,500; Austria – 3,000; Switzerland – 2,000; Turkey – 1,000; and India – 300.

The prime task of a restructured and reinvigorated PNC would be to debate and determine Palestinian policy and then represent it by speaking to power with one credible voice. That could only assist the task of empowering the citizens of nations with the truth of history.

There is also a joint initiative which a universal lobby for Palestinian rights and a restructured and reinvigorated PNC could embark upon that would of itself be a game changer. Just imagine what would happen if a million or more diaspora Palestinians, other Arabs and peoples of all faiths and none marched peacefully on Greater Israel from Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

I can see only two ways in which any Israeli government could react. It could order the army to shoot to kill in unthinkable numbers – a reaction that would so horrify the world that governments, including the one in Washington DC, would have no choice but to take whatever steps were necessary to bring Zionism’s colonial enterprise to an end; or it, the Israeli government, pushed perhaps by a majority of its own people, could say something like: “We are now ready to be serious about real peace even if the outcome of negotiations is one state for all, provided only that the wellbeing and security of all its citizens,. Arabs and Jews, is guaranteed.”

I have suggested the need for such a march in the past. It really could be organized if the groups of all faiths and none everywhere who call and campaign for justice for the Palestinians put their act together.

---

OWS Demiversary Tale

My OWS Six-Month Anniversary Story

by Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

“Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.” --Patti Smith

When I was recently asked to share my M17 story for an OWS project, images of occupiers, cops, dancers, drummers, and so much more flooded my memory. But since the dozens of photos I posted from that day convey already many of those images, I’ve opted to reveal a more personal angle.

My mother's side of the family is Irish and, about a million years ago, I attended St. Patrick's grammar school here in New York City. So, for me, March 17 once meant corned beef and cabbage and a day off from school.

Fast forward: I’ve been a vegan for more than 17 years and I’m not often seen anywhere near a church... unless I’m protesting against it.

As a result, since my Mom passed away in 2008, I’ve struggled with how to observe St. Patrick's Day in a manner meaningful to me.

I attended the parade again but the cop and soldier worship nauseated me.

I tried a delicious recipe for vegan “corned beef” but that was a one-time novelty.

This year, however, the universe smiled upon my half-Irish eyes.

In 2012, March 17 not only fell on a Saturday but also marked the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), a movement that’s become a big part of my life.

On St. Patty’s Day, I instinctively knew where I was meant to be. I also instinctively knew how I was meant to be.

As a naturally shy person, I’d been living up to my blog name -- Cool Observer -- during my OWS interactions: friendly at arm’s length, ever-present, taking it all in but not always joining in the action and/or conversations. On M17, I decided to step out from behind my camera and change all that.

This mission began by choosing to say hello to every Facebook friend I saw that day in the park. This simple act helped me recognize that through my steady OWS presence and longtime commitment to radical activism, I had earned a place of trust.

Regardless of age, gender, skin color, or sexual preference, everyone I spoke with was comfortable with me approaching them. On top of that, I was able to spread the word about my March 23 (Occupy for All Species) at JivamukTea Café -- an event that further introduced me to occupiers.

In the months since M17, my association with OWS has subsequently evolved into a full-blown relationship, and as more time passes, my memories of that roller coaster day at Liberty Square will surely have less and less to do with the joyous re-occupation or the ensuing police brutality.

What will remain with me from M17 are the friends I made and the communities I joined and the lessons I learned -- and this is precisely what will help OWS endure and evolve.

The occupation transcends any specific action, arrest, meeting, anniversary, or road trip. More than a movement, OWS is a state of mind. It’s an environment being constructed just outside the alienating and isolating dominant culture.

OWS is a setting in which connections can be more easily made and solidarity can develop and thrive.

Mic Check: All you gotta' do is take a chance and step outside the norm... as I did on M17.

(Share your M17 stories, photos, videos, etc. here)

***



 
Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.

© WorldNewsTrust.com -- Share and re-post this story. Please include this copyright notice and a link to World News Trust.

Traveling Through the Sunshine Police State

Travels Through the Police State

by DAVID ROVICS

Tampa.

I’m pretty sure I have just experienced the most disproportionate reaction to a protest in a supposedly democratic society ever, at least since labor organizer Mother Jones faced off all by herself with one hundred members of the National Guard around a century ago. As someone who has personally been fairly actively attending protests since the early 1980′s, and as a student of the history of social movements that happened before my time as well, it seems difficult to put what just happened in Florida into some kind of relevant context, but I’ll just share my own story of the past week in north Florida and attempt to make sense of it, for whatever that’s worth.

I suppose a place to begin might be with my last trip to Florida, in October of last year. It was soon after the birth of what became known as the Occupy movement. After participating in the protest on Wall Street on September 17th, I had gigs further south, and by early October I was in Florida. Going to Disneyworld inevitably includes experiencing certain things along with the roller coasters, such as bad food, bad parenting, and long lines. While waiting with my family in the long lines I engaged in my own, slightly more subtle form of bad parenting, spending much of my time staring at my phone, reading the endless stream of articles in the news related to Occupy protests and encampments that were starting up all over the US, Canada and elsewhere. As the day progressed and the long lines continued, I moved from reading about the news to writing about it, in the form of a song, which I finished by the pool at our hotel the following day.

I debuted the song at Occupy Tampa soon thereafter, where several dozen people of all ages, from all walks of life, had just set up a tent city, as people had done in hundreds of other cities throughout the continent and beyond, at the same time. The first police raid against this apparently very threatening group of peaceful urban campers happened the next day, and was repeated ad nauseum at almost every Occupy site in the US over the next few weeks, involving innumerable cases of unprovoked police brutality and a national total of 7,000 arrests by the end of the fall.

While I was in Florida last fall, many local activists in Tampa, St. Pete, and elsewhere were beginning to make preparations for various protests and other activities to welcome the upcoming Republican National Convention to Florida, which was still a long way off, but you gotta start early with making such plans, and folks were excited that something of national significance was going to be happening in their neck of the swamp, with lots of advance notice. I was asked by many people if I was planning to come, and of course, having no plans yet for August 2012, I said yes, as long as I can line up a couple of paying gigs to cover my travel expenses. The gigs came together, and I made plans for August in Florida.

Of course Florida, like North Carolina, is a “swing state,” which might be the main explanation for why the Republicans decided to have their convention there. It did occur to me, though, that given the extreme paranoia of the various US authorities about protests of any kind, especially ones that might not involve a permit and might potentially feature civil disobedience or maybe even a couple of misguided kids throwing a rock at a window (oh horror of horrors, not that!), Florida in August was the next best thing to holding the convention in a bona fide dictatorship somewhere – but given that this was a convention for a US political party, Florida was the best they could do.

For people in what we might call the activist community, Florida, at any time of year, is not the most welcoming location. Although it is a state full of transplants from New York and Massachusetts, it is otherwise in what we call the “deep south,” which is more known for gun-toting Republicans in oversize pickup trucks than for leftwing organizations. And sure enough, most of the folks coming in to protest were from places like New York, Illinois and California much more than from neighboring states such as Georgia or Alabama. Also, unless you’re from Louisiana or Missisippi or somewhere subtropical like that, the heat and humidity of Florida in August is something most sensible people would tend to avoid. Add to that the fact that, as anyone who remembers Hurricane Katrina would know, August is hurricane season in that part of the world, and what you get is a good formula for very small protests.

There are many other reasons anyone paying attention would have known not to expect much of a protest crowd in Tampa over the past week. The Republicans, while even more terrifying than the Democrats, are in opposition right now – not the ruling party and thus somewhat less of a target for public ire than, say, four years ago. Also, since the Occupy movement fizzled out in most cities for the most part by the end of last autumn, there hasn’t been anything anyone could reasonably describe as a militant mass movement happening in the US. And unless you believe every anonymous statement of anarchist bravado written by suburban teenagers on Infoshop.org, you would have known beyond any doubt that there was not going to be any mass migration of insurrectionary elements to Florida any time soon.

But the authorities were taking no chances. And although there have been dozens of massacres carried out by wingnuts with automatic weapons just over the past couple years, no attempt was made to limit the carrying of concealed firearms near the convention center – to have a few machine guns and a few thousand rounds of ammunition in your trunk while driving around downtown Tampa would have been perfectly legal. The concern on the part of the authorities was clearly not about terrorism of one kind or another. The concern was all about people who might dare to march without a permit, what kinds of dangerous items someone might hide inside a puppet, or whether there might possibly be a handful of black-clad youth who might dare to smash a window or – gasp – set a dumpster on fire or – scariest of all – make and perhaps even use a molotov cocktail. None of which would seem to even approach the chaos that could ensue if someone decided to fire into a crowd with an AK – however, the laws passed in Tampa related to puppets, placards and face masks, not rapid-fire, high-calibre weaponry. That’s protected under the Second Amendment (the First Amendment apparently just being an annoying afterthought not worth anyone’s concern).

After a festive pre-RNC party at the venerable Civic Media Center in Gainesville last Friday night, I headed into Tampa on Saturday. As with other major meetings of the elites in recent years where some kind of protest was anticipated, the corporate media stenography machine had been going full-tilt for weeks, fueled of course by the propagandists in government who they obediently echo, telling all who would hear them that violent anarchists from the west coast were coming to destroy the city. The propaganda is clearly meant to scare all but the hardest hardcore of activist types from showing up, as well as to psychologically condition the local population to fear the streets, to fear the protesters, and to sympathize with the police, who are there to protect the law-abiding citizens of Tampa from the crazed, bomb-toting revolutionaries from Oakland and Seattle and corrupt places like that where most people don’t go to church enough anyway.

Upon arriving in Tampa on Saturday, I headed downtown to see what was happening. The RNC was not scheduled to kick off until two days later, but the lockdown of the city was well underway. Every government building, whether or not it had anything to do with the RNC, was surrounded by ten-foot-tall, black steel fences. Entire areas of downtown were blocked off to all traffic except for Republican delegates and others directly involved with the convention. Thousands and thousands of police on foot, on bicycles, and in cars, vans, buses, open-air Jeep-type vehicles, and in helicopters were everywhere. To overstate the police presence would be very difficult. If you were anywhere near downtown Tampa, which is a very large, spread-out, car-oriented city, you were always within view of at least a few cops – always. And usually you were within view of several dozen cops wherever you went. And if you were participating in a march or something like that, you were, without exception, going to be “escorted” by hundreds of cops – dozens within view, and hundreds in bullet-proof riot gear hiding around every corner, waiting for the orders to pounce. (And in case you think I’m being metaphorical here, I’m not – I literally mean hundreds of cops hiding around the corner, trying – and failing – not to be too obvious about it, by virtue of the fact that the larger number of cops were generally carefully staying on the other side of the block from the march itself.) Almost at all times during the entire week, wherever I was in Tampa, there was at least one helicopter directly overhead or within view, and very much within earshot – the damn things are very loud, and almost every outdoor event involving a sound system was badly affected by this constant noise.

In the wake of 9/11 and the almost weekly massacres that have been happening in the US more recently, one might think these helicopters would be hovering over the convention center or other places where Republican delegates were having meetings and cocktail parties and such, looking out for Al-Qaeda or something. But no, the helicopters were invariably hovering over us, the peaceful protesters, waiting to see if we left the park and decided to take a collective stroll around town, so they could tell their Ninja Turtles to “escort” us, and, if we were marching without a permit, to surround us, box us in, and generally prevent us from getting very far. (Note that nowhere in the First Amendment does it stipulate that a group must have a permit in order to peaceably assemble, and in most democratic countries this is not necessary.)

As I walked around the deserted ghost town that was the center of Tampa for the past week I had many conversations with police officers. With most of the groups of police there was always a majority of red-faced white men who had an unmistakably aggressive expression on their faces, as if they were just itching to break some bones. When you look someone like that in the eye with a friendly expression, inviting them to relax just a bit, and they don’t change their expression in the least, you know what’s going on – it’s blatant intimidation is what it is. But in every group of cops that I talked to there was always a minority (which usually included a greater percentage of nonwhite cops, but also white ones) who were friendlier-looking and ready to engage in conversation, often initiating it themselves when they saw by my facial expression that I was open to it – unlike a lot of the protesting youth who were as aggressively unfriendly to the cops as some of the cops were to them, which seems to me to be entirely counterproductive. (Remember Tunisia, where the cops switched sides? It can happen here, too. But this would seem like a more distant prospect if too many people are treating them like they’re subhuman.)

What I learned from talking to the cops who were willing to engage with me was they had all watched the same video, presumably shown to them by their superiors, of a molotov cocktail being thrown by a black-clad youth in Oakland last May 1st. What was also clear was that the police had been told that not all of the protesters planned on doing stuff like that, but that those who were intent on doing such things would always be lurking amongst the ranks of unsuspecting, nonviolent-type protesters, so they needed to be ever vigilant, watching out for anyone who might do something unspeakable like cover their face with a bandana and break a window or worse – throw a bottle at an armored vehicle perhaps! What they clearly hadn’t been told was that the one case of a molotov being thrown at a riot cop in Oakland happened only after months of terrible, unprovoked police attacks on the Occupy movement that had resulted in some very serious injuries, repeatedly.

But what if there had been a contingent of young people intent on trashing corporate property, as happened a couple years ago at the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh, where the police presence was similarly overwhelming? How many cops were required to deal with the 80 or so kids who marched down the street beside the University of Pittsburgh, set a dumpster alight, and smashed three or four store windows? How much was the value of those windows altogether – maybe a thousand dollars? Maybe two thousand dollars? As I recall from my time there in Pittsburgh, the response of the police at the time was to collectively punish – and I mean physically punish – anyone who happened to be on or near the college campus that night, whether they were black-clad kids with masks on, or sorority girls fruitlessly trying to defend themselves by chanting cheerleader slogans that the cops might recognize from local football games (the cops beat them anyway, as they chanted their Pitt slogans). And it didn’t require more than a couple hundred cops to savagely put a lid on that riotous mini-mob. (Among those who were hit with a police baton that night was yours truly – and I was just as innocent of any window-smashing or dumpster-burning as those sorority girls, though at least I was actually wearing black clothing…)

As counterproductive as window-smashing generally is (although quite cathartic, therapeutic, etc., no doubt), nobody in Pittsburgh got hurt by that incident, nor has anyone been hurt (except by cops) at any protest that I know of in the US for decades. The cost of those windows would be a tiny fraction of the cost of just one of those fences that surrounded so much of downtown Tampa. But nevertheless, preemptive collective punishment of any potential protester was the order of the day, and is the new norm throughout the USA.

I attended most of the planned and unplanned protests in Tampa over the past week, I think, including the biggest protest events, and by my count none of the protests involved more than 300 people. I probably have a tendency to under-count, and many other estimates of the crowds generously involved numbers like “500 to 1,000,” but I think in all cases, 500 was probably an exaggeration. The fear-mongering, the massive police presence, the season, the location, and the impending hurricane had done what I had expected it to do, and kept most people away.

Romneyville was an encampment taking up one square block of private land maybe a bit less than a mile from the center of the Republican storm in the center of town. It was run largely by a combination of folks from Cheri Honkala’s Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, plus two buses full of folks from Occupy Wall Street in New York City, who were thriftily and wisely spending the money many people had donated to the campaign to rent two buses and take everybody to Florida and North Carolina to protest the two corporate parties that rule our land on behalf of the 1%. Romneyville had a squad of cops watching over it at all times, and more often than not, a helicopter hovering directly overhead.

Nearby Romneyville, on the way to downtown, was a fabulous Arabic restaurant. Me and my friend Jun, a fellow musician from St. Pete, went in there for dinner one evening, and while we ate we did some people-watching, which mostly meant cop-watching. Two small marches passed by, each accompanied by many times as many police. We were talking with the owner, who told us that a few weeks before some men in dark suits had visited and explained to her that because of the RNC she could assume she’d have approximately three times as much foot traffic in front of her establishment than normal. Predictably, what really happened was a serious loss of business and revenue due to the police state, not just for her but for most downtown establishments aside from the 5-star hotels.

The Food Not Bombs World Gathering was happening in the days leading up to the RNC in Tampa, which involved a fair number of dedicated Food Not Bombers from around the country, plus at least one from Russia. Keith McHenry, a co-founder of Food Not Bombs who had, along with several others, spent time in prison recently for daring to feed the hungry in the very image-conscious, poverty-stricken (Disney-stricken) city of Orlando, was there too, participating in workshops and marches and feeding lots of people. One of the last events of the FNB gathering before the RNC kicked off was a concert that took place at a spacious bar in the Ybor City neighborhood, an area that’s fairly deserted during the day but at night is packed, teeming with bar-crawlers of all description – well-off people dining in fancy restaurants, toothless street dwellers trying to panhandle enough money for a meal, gobs of college students, strippers, and others. It was striking that aside from the six or seven cops standing directly across the street from our bar all night, the rest of Ybor City had a relatively low police presence – although I think I can confidently say that far more drunken idiocy, violence and property destruction probably takes place in Ybor City on any given Saturday night than occurred throughout the week of the RNC, as far as us protesters were concerned. (As far as I know, nobody was hurt and no property destroyed by protesters at all during the whole week, and there were a total of three arrests.)

In past decades, the authorities in the US have tended to differentiate between different kinds of protests – like if it was the “direct action” crowd they might have a heavy police presence, but if it’s a mainstream labor event they’d tend not to. As far as I know it’s been many decades since there was anything approaching a riot that involved a union rally, and it used to be that the authorities generally recognized this reality, but at the small march held by the Service Employees International Union in Ybor City the police were taking no chances, and were there in their hundreds, covered in body armor, wearing night sticks, pistols and handcuffs as usual.

The SEIU also marched in St. Petersburgh, a small city not far south of Tampa, where the Republicans had an event at a stadium there. St. Pete was an even more eerie scene than Tampa, with most businesses having closed in preparation not for the hurricane, which was still days away and mostly bypassed the area, but for fear of violent protesters. The streets were almost completely deserted except for lots of cops, a few protesters trying to find their way to the rally, having to navigate a ridiculous maze of steel fences that the police had set up, which made both walking or driving through St. Pete very difficult. Every other street was shut down and cordoned off with fencing. For what? Who knows. No pedestrians or cars were permitted to go down these streets. Perhaps they were available for emergency vehicles to use if needed…? Who knows. Eventually the three buses full of union members wound their way to Mirror Lake, where the rally was taking place, and then the 300 or so people who came marched around town a bit, nowhere near where the Republicans were meeting, nowhere near anything or anybody, since the city was bereft of local people or even businesses that were open. Walking down the street after the march, looking at one closed business after another in this normally bustling, normally pedestrian-friendly tourist town on the water, I walked for blocks before I finally found a restaurant that was open. (It was a very good Greek restaurant complete with a real Greek bazouki player playing real Greek music, being thoroughly ignored by all those dining in the restaurant except for me.)

Code Pink did what they do best, repeatedly, every day, to great effect. There were very few of them, mostly folks I knew from lots of other protests in the past. Once again, Medea Benjamin, Ann Wright, Rae Abilae and others managed to infiltrate and disrupt the convention on both days. As usual, as the police are keeping their eyes pealed for masked anarchist youth, the real disruptive types were petite, pink-clad women. Outside the cocktail parties of the Republican elite they flirted with the rich and powerful with bags full of (mostly fake) money in their hands, representing the latest incarnation of Andrew Boyd’s Billionaires for Bush – Millionaires for Mitt. No massive number of police could prevent these women (and some men) from disrupting various events, and with the massive media presence at all of these events it seemed the police decided that attempting to arrest small, pink-clad women for standing on a public sidewalk and verbally harassing rich people was a bad tactic, so they let it go on uninterrupted from what I saw.

While it was more or less impossible to have a protest anywhere in Tampa that could be heard or seen by anybody actually at the convention itself, because the authorities were making sure we were always kept out of sight and out of mind, at least one group – Planned Parenthood – was apparently so freaked out by the police state that they canceled their plans to march, and decided to hold their small (maybe 300 people again) rally in the middle of a park on the other side of the bay from downtown – far away from the action, in what the organizers must have figured would be a safe space. There were a couple dozen cops visible at that event, and I heard one of them say that “the anarchists are trying to blend in with the crowd, but they’re here.” Given the violence certain rightwing, Christian thugs have rained upon pro-choice advocates such as Dr. Tiller, Dr. Gunn, Dr. Slepian, and so many others, perhaps in this one case the police presence served a useful purpose.

For all the overwhelming police presence and the kettling of nonpermited marches, it should be said that the police apparently were under orders to avoid mass-arresting nonviolent protesters as has happened on so many occasions at other protests in recent years, such as the RNC in New York City in 2004 and Minneapolis in 2008. But the scariest thing for me that I experienced in Tampa was that when I engaged local citizens in conversation, most of them seemed to think that when a few hundred people are going to protest in a major city, it is normal and perhaps even necessary for there to be thousands of cops and steel barricades all over the place. As one veteran journalist at WMNF who has lived in Tampa for 33 years pointed out, these were the biggest protests in Tampa he had ever seen. (Maybe he was on vacation in April, 2006, when there were much larger protests in Tampa around the issue of immigrant rights, but I don’t want to split hairs…) Presumably they were the biggest protests that most other local people had ever seen, and so how would they know that this is a completely, outrageously over-the-top police state response to a protest? It’s here, it’s now, not in some dystopic future – the police state is here, the new normal. It’s morning in America all over again.




David Rovics is a musician living in Portland, Oregon. He is on tour throughout Europe and North America for all of September and October. Help him record his new album, Unindicted Co-Conspirator, by donating to his Kickerstarter page.

U.S. Federales Cutting Strategic Deals with the Mexican Drugs Cartels

'Managing' the Plaza: America's Secret Deal with Mexican Drug Cartels

by Tom Burghardt -  Antifascist Calling...

In a story which should have made front page headlines, Narco News investigative journalist Bill Conroy revealed that "A high-ranking Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization member's claim that US officials have struck a deal with the leadership of the Mexican 'cartel' appears to be corroborated in large part by the statements of a Mexican diplomat in email correspondence made public recently by the nonprofit media group WikiLeaks."
A series of some five million emails, The Global Intelligence Files, were obtained by the secret-spilling organization as a result of last year's hack by Anonymous of the Texas-based "global intelligence" firm Stratfor.

Bad tradecraft aside, the Stratfor dump offer readers insight into a shadowy world where information is sold to the highest bidder through a "a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world."

One of those informants was a Mexican intelligence officer with the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, or CISEN, Mexico's equivalent to the CIA. Dubbed "MX1" by Stratfor, he operates under diplomatic cover at the Mexican consulate in Phoenix, Arizona after a similar posting at the consulate in El Paso, Texas.

His cover was blown by the intelligence grifters when they identified him in their correspondence as Fernando de la Mora, described by Stratfor as "being molded to be the Mexican 'tip of the spear' in the U.S."

In an earlier Narco News story, Conroy revealed that "US soldiers are operating inside Mexico as part of the drug war and the Mexican government provided critical intelligence to US agents in the now-discredited Fast and Furious gun-running operation," the Mexican diplomat claimed in email correspondence.

Those emails disclosed "details of a secret meeting between US and Mexican officials held in 2010 at Fort Bliss, a US Army installation located near El Paso, Texas. The meeting was part of an effort to create better communications between US undercover operatives in Mexico and the Mexican federal police, the Mexican diplomat reveals."

"However," Conroy wrote, "the diplomat expresses concern that the Fort Bliss meeting was infiltrated by the 'cartels,' whom he contends have 'penetrated both US and Mexican law enforcement'."

Such misgivings are thoroughly justified given the fact, as Antifascist Calling reported last spring, that the Mexican government had arrested three high-ranking Army generals over their links to narcotrafficking organizations.

In Conroy's latest piece the journalist disclosed that the "Mexican diplomat's assessment of the US and Mexican strategy in the war on drugs, as revealed by the email trail, paints a picture of a 'simulated war' in which the Mexican and US governments are willing to show favor to a dominant narco-trafficking organization in order to minimize the violence and business disruption in the major drug plazas, or markets."

A "simulated war"? Where have we heard that before? Like the bogus "War on Terror" which arms and unleashes throat-slitting terrorists from the CIA's favorite all-purpose zombie army of "Islamist extremists," Al Qaeda, similarly, America's fraudulent "War on Drugs" has been a splendid means of managing the global drug trade in the interest of securing geopolitical advantage over their rivals.

That major financial powerhouses in Europe and the U.S. (can you say Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, HSBC, ING and Wachovia) have been accused of reaping the lions' share of profits derived from the grim trade, now a veritable Narco-Industrial Complex, the public continues to be regaled with tales that this ersatz war is being "won."

While the Mexican body count continues to rise (nearly 120,000 dead since 2006 according to the latest estimates published by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, or INEGI, as reported by the Paris daily Le Monde in a recent editorial) the United States is escalating its not-so-covert military involvement in Mexico and putting proverbial boots on the ground as part of the $1.6 billion U.S.-financed Mérida Initiative.

But have such "initiatives" (in actuality, taxpayer-funded boondoggles for giant military contractors), turned the corner in the drug war? Not if estimates published the United Nations are accurate.

According to the 2011 World Drug Report, published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC): "US authorities have estimated for the last couple of years that some 90% of the cocaine consumed in North America comes from Colombia, supplemented by some cocaine from Peru and limited amounts from the Plurinational State of Bolivia. For the year 2009, results of the US Cocaine Signature Program, based on an analysis of approximately 3,000 cocaine HCl samples, revealed that 95.5% originated in Colombia (down from 99% in 2002) and 1.7% in Peru; for the rest (2.8%), the origin could not be determined. The trafficking of cocaine into the United States is nowadays largely controlled by various Mexican drug cartels, while until the mid-1990s, large Colombian cartels dominated these operations."

Despite more than $8 billion lavished on programs such as Plan Colombia, and despite evidence that leading Colombian politicians, including former President Álvaro Uribe and his entourage had documented links to major drug trafficking organizations that go back decades, the myth persists that pouring money into the drug war sinkhole will somehow turn the tide.

But drug seizures by U.S. agencies only partially tell the tale.

As UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov pointed out in the introduction to the agency's 2011 report, Estimating Illicit Financial Flows Resulting from Drug Trafficking and Other Transnational Crimes, "all criminal proceeds are likely to have amounted to some 3.6 per cent of GDP (2.3-5.5 per cent) or around US$2.1 trillion in 2009."

UNODC analysts disclosed that illicit money flows related to "transnational organized crime, represent the equivalent of some 1.5 percent of global GDP, 70 percent of which would have been available for laundering through the financial system. The largest income for transnational organized crime seems to come from illicit drugs, accounting for a fifth of all crime proceeds."

"If only flows related to drug trafficking and other transnational organized crime activities were considered," UNODC asserted, "related proceeds would have been equivalent to around US$650 billion per year in the first decade of the new millennium, equivalent to 1.5% of global GDP or US$870 billion in 2009 assuming that the proportions remained unchanged. The funds available for laundering through the financial system would have been equivalent to some 1% of global GDP or US$580 billion in 2009."

"The results," according to UNODC, "also suggest that the 'interception rate' for anti-money-laundering efforts at the global level remains low. Globally, it appears that much less than 1% (probably around 0.2%) of the proceeds of crime laundered via the financial system are seized and frozen."

Commenting on the nexus between global drug mafias and our capitalist overlords, former UNODC director Antonio Maria Costa told The Observer in 2009, "that the proceeds of organised crime were 'the only liquid investment capital' available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result."

Would there be an incentive then, for U.S. officials to dismantle a global business that benefits their real constituents, the blood-sucking gangsters at the apex of the capitalist financial pyramid? Hardly.

Nor would there be any incentive for American drug warriors to target organizations that inflate the balance sheets of the big banks. Wouldn't they be more likely then, given the enormous flows of illicit cash flooding the system, to negotiate an "arrangement" with the biggest players, particularly the Sinaloa Cartel run by fugitive billionaire Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán?

In fact, as Narco News disclosed last December, a "quid-pro-quo arrangement is precisely what indicted narco-trafficker Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, who is slated to stand trial in Chicago this fall, alleges was agreed to by the US government and the leaders of the Sinaloa 'Cartel'--the dominant narco-trafficking organization in Mexico. The US government, however, denies that any such arrangement exists."

Narco News reported that according to "Zambada Niebla, he and the rest of the Sinaloa leadership, through the US informant Loya Castro, negotiated an immunity deal with the US government in which they were guaranteed protection from prosecution in exchange for providing US law enforcers and intelligence agencies with information that could be used to compromise rival Mexican cartels and their operations."

In court pleadings, Zambada Niebla's attorneys argued that "the United States government considered the arrangements with the Sinaloa Cartel an acceptable price to pay, because the principal objective was the destruction and dismantling of rival cartels by using the assistance of the Sinaloa Cartel--without regard for the fact that tons of illicit drugs continued to be smuggled into Chicago and other parts of the United States and consumption continued virtually unabated."

Those assertions seem to be borne out by emails released by WikiLeaks. Conroy disclosed: "In a Stratfor email dated April 19, 2010, MX1 lays out the Mexican government's negotiating, or 'signaling,' strategy with respect to the major narco-trafficking organizations as follows:

The Mexican strategy is not to negotiate directly.

In any event, "negotiations" would take place as follows:

Assuming a non-disputed plaza [a major drug market, such as Ciudad Juarez]:

• [If] they [a big narco-trafficking group] bring [in] some drugs, transport some drugs, [and] they are discrete, they don't bother anyone, [then] no one gets hurt;

• [And the] government turns the other way.

• [If] they [the narco-traffickers] kill someone or do something violent, [then the] government responds by taking down [the] drug network or making arrests.

(Now, assuming a disputed plaza:)

• [A narco-trafficking] group comes [into a plaza], [then the] government waits to see how dominant cartel responds.

• If [the] dominant cartel fights them [the new narco-trafficking group], [then the] government takes them down.

• If [the] dominant cartel is allied [with the new group], no problem.

• If [a new] group comes in and start[s] committing violence, they get taken down: first by the government letting the dominant cartel do their thing, then [by] punishing both cartels.

"MX1," Narco News revealed, "then goes on to describe what he interprets as the US strategy in negotiating with the major narco-trafficking players in Ciudad Juarez--a major Mexican narco-trafficking 'plaza' located across the border from El Paso, Texas:"

... This is how "negotiations" take place with cartels, through signals. There are no meetings, etc. ...

So, the MX [Mexican] strategy is not to negotiate. However, I think the US [recently] sent a signal that could be construed as follows:

"To the VCF [the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes] and Sinaloa cartels: Thank you for providing our market with drugs over the years. We are now concerned about your perpetration of violence, and would like to see you stop that. In this regard, please know that Sinaloa is bigger and better than [the] VCF. Also note that CDJ [Juarez] is very important to us, as is the whole border. In this light, please talk amongst yourselves and lets all get back to business. Again, we recognize that Sinaloa is bigger and better, so either VCF gets in line or we will mess you up."

I don't know what the US strategy is, but I can tell you that if the message was understood by Sinaloa and VCF as I described above, the Mexican government would not be opposed at all.

In sum, I have a gut feeling that the US agencies tried to send a signal telling the cartels to negotiate themselves. They unilaterally declared a winner [the Sinaloa Cartel], and this is unprecedented, and deserves analysis. If there was no strategy behind this, and it was simply a leaked report, then I will be interested to see how it plays out in the coming months.

Keep in mind that this "analysis" is from a senior CISEN officer describing U.S. "strategy" for managing, not putting a stop to the flood of narcotics crossing the border.

"In a separate Stratfor email dated April 15, 2010," Conroy wrote, "MX1's views on the US strategy with respect to the drug organizations in Juarez, essentially favoring the Sinaloa 'Cartel,' is referenced yet again:"

We believe that when the US made an announcement that was corroborated by several federal spokespersons simultaneously (that Sinaloa controlled CDJ [Juarez]), it was a message that the DEA wanted to send to Sinaloa. The message was that the US recognized Sinaloa's dominance in the area [Juarez], although it was not absolute. It was meant to be read by the cartels as a sort of ultimatum: negotiate and put your house in order once and for all.

One dissenting analyst thinks that the message is the opposite, telling Sinaloa to take what it had and to leave what remains of VCF. Regardless, the reports are saying that the US message to the cartels was to negotiate and stop the violence. It says that the US has never before pronounced that a cartel controls a particular plaza, so it is an unusual event.

"Unusual" perhaps, but not surprising given the secret state's documented history of close collaboration with major drug trafficking networks that serve as unofficial, though highly-effective instruments, for advancing U.S. imperial strategies.

In a recent piece published by Global Research, analyst Peter Dale Scott observed that America's two "self-generating wars" on "terror" and "drugs" have "in effect become one."

"By launching a War on Drugs in Colombia and Mexico," Scott wrote, "America has contributed to a parastate of organized terror in Colombia (the so-called AUC, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) and an even bloodier reign of terror in Mexico (with 50,000 killed in the last six years)."

And by "launching a War on Terror in Afghanistan in 2001, America has contributed to a doubling of opium production there, making Afghanistan now the source of 90 percent of the world's heroin and most of the world's hashish."

"Americans should be aware of the overall pattern that drug production repeatedly rises where America intervenes militarily--Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 60s, Colombia and Afghanistan since then," Scott noted. "(Opium cultivation also increased in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.) And the opposite is also true: where America ceases to intervene militarily, notably in Southeast Asia since the 1970s, drug production declines."

"Both of America's self-generating wars are lucrative to the private interests that lobby for their continuance," Scott averred. "At the same time, both of these self-generating wars contribute to increasing insecurity and destabilization in America and in the world."

In this light, Narco News revelations make perfect sense. As the global financial crisis deepens, brought on in no small part by the massive frauds perpetrated by leading capitalist institutions, they have inflated their balance sheets with a veritable tsunami of hot cash generated by the Narco-Industrial Complex.

In turn, the American secret state, working to recapitalize financial markets beset by a seemingly insolvable liquidity crisis resulting from massive bank frauds, turn a blind eye as these same institutions become major centers of organized crime, monopoly enterprises which could not survive without the trillions of dollars of illicit funds parked in offshore accounts.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

Continuing Military Madness

Class War Chronicles: Crushing Unions

 

The war against unions

by TRNN

Elaine Bernard Pt.2: Legislation in the US a major obstacle to worker organization

Watch full multipart Unions in America

Melbourne Police Mobilized to Attack Workers' Strike

 

Australia: Police attack picketing building workers

by Terry Cook and Mike Head - WSWS

In what business leaders have declared a “major test” of industrial relations, more than 200 police in riot gear were dispatched on Tuesday in a bid to break a construction workers’ picket line outside a large building project in Melbourne. Police horses were used against picketing workers and capsicum spray was fired at them, before workers pushed the police contingent back.

Several hundred workers from other construction sites had downed tools and rushed to the Grocon company’s Myer-Colonial First site after being alerted that police were mustering to escort management personnel and other workers through the picket line.

The police violence sparked solidarity meetings on Grocon and other major construction sites in Sydney and Brisbane, where hundreds of workers from the Abigroup Children’s Hospital project marched through the city yesterday. In the face of this anger, building industry trade union leaders have threatened to call a state-wide strike in Victoria if police try to break the Melbourne picket line again.

Building workers picket Grocon site in Melbourne

Grocon escalated the dispute last week by obtaining an order in the Victorian Supreme Court banning picketing at four of its projects. The Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) has accused the company of provoking the conflict by reneging on a deal, as part of a four-year enterprise agreement signed in June, for the union to nominate health and safety delegates on the site.

Health and safety delegates play a critical role, because they can authorise legal stoppages in the dangerous building industry in the event of a safety violation or imminent risk. Such stoppages are the only form of industrial action permitted under the Labor government’s Fair Work legislation, except for during limited enterprise bargaining periods.

“We thought we had solved the problem in April when [Grocon chief executive] Daniel Grollo shook hands with CFMEU leaders on a deal,” the union stated on its web site yesterday.

CFMEU official John Setka told the Melbourne Age yesterday that when the deal was signed, there was an understanding that the company and the union would sit down about the issue of delegates and find “mutually acceptable people, good for the business.” He told the Herald Sun, “Everyone has realised the unions and builders have to work together…why would we try to bite the hands that feeds us?”

Setka’s comments underscore the basic anxiety of the union: that Grocon has disrupted mutually-beneficial arrangements between the union and the company, whereby the union would help ensure profitable projects.

Grollo, the Grocon boss, has worked closely with the building unions for a decade, since 2002 when he tried to impose a non-union agreement that was overwhelming rejected by workers. It appears that Grocon now may be seeking to spearhead a fresh offensive against building workers, backed by the Labor government and big business groups, under conditions of a slump in the construction industry, and growing signs of an end to the mining boom that has been central to economic growth.

Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten lined up behind the company, saying the government did not condone illegal industrial action, and warned that “unlawful action will be met by a strong response from the government.”

He also accused workers of threatening violence, saying: “Violence is completely unacceptable in the modern day and age.”

Shorten appealed for a resumption of mediation talks in the government’s Fair Work Australia tribunal. But he also made it clear that the government had also ensured that its new building industry watchdog, Fair Work Building and Construction (FWBC), would pursue punitive legal action, possibly involving millions of dollars in damages, against union officials and members.

Shorten told the Australian Financial Review on Sunday that the FWBC was looking into the case. FWBC chief Leigh Johns said his agency had been investigating the Grocon site and “that investigation may lead to civil penalty proceedings against the CFMEU” that would include “the recovery of economic loss suffered by Grocon or any affected subcontractors.”

The FWBC retains all the punitive powers of the former Howard government’s Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), allowing it to impose heavy fines and jail terms on unions and workers.

Grocon’s intransigence points to its escalation of the dispute being part of a broader agenda being pursued by major employers who are demanding an even tougher industrial regime, far lower labour costs, and absolute company control over all aspects of the workplace, including safety.

On its front page today, the Australian Financial Review declared that the dispute was “shaping up as the first major test of the government’s new Fair Work Building and Construction industry regulator and the willingness of police to enforce court orders against picket lines.” Its editorial declared it was “heartening to see the Victorian police yesterday start to do their duty as thuggish tactics once employed by the old Builders Labourers Federation reappeared on the streets of Melbourne.”

The Australian’s editorial demanded that both Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s government and the Liberal National opposition led by Tony Abbott commit to much more decisive measures to “improve flexibility, curb union power, reduce business costs and boost productivity.” It insisted: “As police clashed with militant unionists at a construction site in Melbourne yesterday, having to use horses and capsicum spray to restore order, the need for debate on industrial relations reform could not be more urgent.”

For months, business leaders have been demanding a new wave of “workplace reform” in order to bring wages and conditions into line with those being imposed on workers in Europe, America and internationally under conditions of a deepening economic breakdown. These calls have intensified with much of the Australian economy already in virtual recession—construction activity has declined for 25 months in a row—and major mining projects now being cancelled or deferred because of plunging commodity prices.

Master Builders Australia chief executive Wilhelm Harnisch said the Grocon dispute was clear evidence that industrial relations laws were failing. Australian Mines and Metals Association executive director Minna Knight said “unlawful union conduct” was putting at risk $260 billion worth of approved resource projects.

While the CFMEU has been forced by Grocon’s actions to organise limited industrial action, the unions have opened the road for this offensive. The CFMEU, along with every other union, endorsed the Labor government’s anti-strike laws, and accepted the retention of the punitive powers of the ABCC. The Building Workers Industrial Union (now part of the CFMEU) worked hand in glove with the last Labor government, that of Hawke and Keating, to deregister the Builders Labourers Federation in 1986, as a means of intimidating construction workers and paving the way for a sweeping assault on workplace rights and conditions

Together with the current Labor government, the building unions are appealing for negotiations with Grocon to shut down the dispute, fearing it may get out of their control. If the government uses its Fair Work laws to impose an arbitrated outcome, as it did during last year when Qantas grounded its fleet to break workers’ opposition to its job-cutting restructuring program, there is no doubt the CFMEU will comply. Like the Qantas dispute, the Grocon struggle signals a far-reaching offensive against the working class.