Wally Shawn: My Favorite Bourgeois Marxist

Whether you know it or not, you know Wally Shawn. He’s that funny, round-faced guy in Woody Allen’s Manhattan and a hundred other movies like The Princess Bride, My Dinner with Andre, Clueless and TV shows like The L Word and Gossip Girl.

His signature nasal voice, which elicits peels of laughter even if he’s just reading a menu, brings to life Rex the dinosaur in Toy Story movies, the diminutive boss in The Incredibles and characters in so many other kids’ flicks.

Wally is the quintessence of a great character actor. He can morph into any part and manage to steal a scene with a nod or a look — equally magnificent as a space alien or a Hollywood producer, or perhaps they’re not so dissimilar. He is that rare artist-actor who more famous names pretend to be on chat shows and more pretentious fare like The Actors Studio.

I first met Wally in the audience sitting next to author Arundhati Roy at St. John the Divine cathedral in Manhattan listening to a discussion about the antiwar movement and the elections with Naomi Klein and my editor at the International Socialist Review, Ahmed Shawki, in 2004.

It wasn’t at all surprising to see him there because to watch him in movies and on TV you know immediately that this is not some vacuous Hollywood twit. His humor is too deep and biting, his smile is playfully ironic in that way people who are taking it all in seem to project. He was immediately likable.

I’ve gotten to know Wally over a few late-night conversations at the ISO’s annual Socialism conference in recent years where he’s become a regular attendee, whether he’s speaking or not. Wally’s as avid a participant in discussions on LGBT liberation as he is at the talks on Jackson Pollack or Leninism. Mostly he asks questions, and he appears to absorb the responses as the philosopher-playwright that he, in fact, is.

Last night I saw him read his Obie Award-winning play, The Fever, in a packed small theater whose audience included Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History co-author/producer Anthony Arnove, Capitalism Hits the Fan author Richard Wolff, Zinn’s son Jeff, several leading members of Jewish Voices for Peace and an assortment of New York’s left-wing theater crowd, as well as a good bunch of young Occupiers.

The Fever gripped me in a way few plays do. Not just because Wally manages to   thread Marx’s theory of “commodity fetishism” and musings on guerrilla war tactics into an hour-and-a-half-long Kafkaesque meditation about class privilege and its discontents. But because there’s something mesmerizing about a self-conscious bourgeois reckoning with the contradictions of his life — and the system that makes his lifestyle possible.

Growing up the Manhattan-dwelling scion of The New Yorker editor, William Shawn, Wally is a don of the literary New York bourgeoisie. I’m glad he rejected his intended life’s course as a diplomat after Oxford — Wally would have made a terrible professional equivocator. But then, don’t they all?

Now in his late sixties, Wally occupies a unique position in the world of the 1%’s intelligentsia. Whereas most self-reflection of that caste tends toward the moral imperative of charity, Wally’s performative musings lead us to broader social conclusions. He is a man of privilege whose aim is to question the entire edifice that allows privilege to rule the world, or even exist.

No wonder the New York Times critic Charles Isherwood thought The Fever was a “corrosive exercise in theatrical conscience-baiting.” Incapable of delving beneath moral indignation — the plague of the self-conscious rich — Isherwood refuses to acknowledge the scathing critique of a system, not just the roles of individuals in it.

A systemic critique is far more dangerous to the rich than a personal one — individuals can alter their behaviors, but a system based on inequality can only be uprooted to cut out the pervasive cancer. In essence, that’s what Wally is talking about. And he even throws in nods to MLK as well, with a Why We Can’t Waitesque indictment of the limitations of reforms. Not just their snail’s pace, but the fact that their realization must be the work of the powers that be.

In The Fever, Wally has an interesting insight on Marx, also born the son of a Jewish bourgeois. He notes, Marx became a follower of the poor, not the other way around, as it’s usually perceived. One-percenters flatter themselves by presuming the top must precede the bottom; Wally grasps the essence of Marxism lies in that biblical incantation: The first will be last and the last will be first.

The self-satisfaction of the arts is even taken down a peg. Wally writes that this play will change nothing, that shifting consciousness alone will change nothing. That until ideas take on a material force, they are just ideas. It is a humble acknowledgement that this wonderful play will change nothing at all.

Well, except to remind us how some of the best cultural works can make us feel and think in ways that embolden us to act. And for that Wally Shawn is my favorite bourgeois Marxist.

You can catch Wally’s next NYC performance on Saturday, March 3, 7PM, when he reads from his book Essays on “Why I Call Myself a Socialist.”

I’ll be speaking Thursday, Feb. 16, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 8PM Angell Hall Auditorium of Pinkwashing: Israel’s Queer Propaganda War

Equality’s Racism: Using LGBT Rights to Veil Apartheid

Imagine the magazine Good Housekeeping awarding the Texas Department of Corrections its seal of approval for the cleanliness of its death row — pristine conditions, though the seating’s a bit clunky!

There is something obscene about an organization devoted to equality planning to feature at its national summit a theocratic police state whose existence is founded on the expulsion and ongoing repression of its indigenous population.

Equality Forum, a nonprofit organization whose mission “is to advance national and international lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights through education,” is hosting Israel’s ambassador to the United States as their keynote speaker and featuring Israeli artists at their May conference in Philadelphia. Its celebration of Israel’s purported LGBT civil rights is truly an elaborate expression of totally missing the point.

Even the international human rights expert UN Special Rapporteur Miloon Kothari condemns the policies of the Israeli state that systematically discriminates against its non-Jewish population: “the basic theocratic character of the Israeli legal system establishes ethnic criteria as the grounds for the enjoyment of full rights.” In other words, the oppression of 20 percent of Israel’s population who are Palestinian — LGBT and straight — as well as the dispossession of the millions who are virtually imprisoned behind hundreds of miles of militarized walls in the Occupied Territories, expose the lie of Israel’s supposed democracy.

Despite Israel’s ongoing defiance of international law in the service of its 64-year occupation of Palestine, its institutionalized brutalization and daily humiliation of its native population, Equality Forum is embracing a campaign by Israel’s marketers known as pinkwashing. According to Palestinian LGBT activists, “‘Pinkwashing’ is the appropriation of queer voices in order to shift focus from human rights and international law violations committed by the State of Israel, to an image of Israel as progressive, tolerant and ‘gay-friendly.’”

If Equality Forum goes ahead with this vile charade, they will not only play into the hands of those who wish to cleanse the crimes of Israel by extolling the virtues of having openly gay soldiers crack Palestinian heads, but they will make themselves the target of an international boycott campaign.

I wrote to Equality Forum’s director, Malcolm Lazin, as soon as I read of their selection of Israel as their “featured nation” this year. Mr. Lazin replied by listing Israel’s LGBT reforms, that in reality only fully exist for Jewish LGBT citizens, and he cited Tel Aviv’s status as “Best Gay City of 2011,” according to GayCities.com. He concluded, “Like the U.S. and other nations, Israel has not fully realized its promise of equality to all its citizens. These important issues and others are being debated under freedom of speech, press and assembly in Israel and elsewhere.”

I suppose “not fully realized its promise of equality,” could refer to the “apartheid regime” which “discriminates daily against Israeli Arabs and other minorities,” according to Jewish-Israeli politician, Roman Bronfman. Or it could be interpreted as “a political arrangement that limits democracy to a privileged class that keeps others behind military checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls,” as former head of the American Jewish Congress, Henry Seligman, puts it.

But that would surely be the most inexplicably polite way of describing a nation which has been under an official “state of emergency” since its founding in 1948. This allows for extra police powers in order to do things like arrest and detain hundreds of children, many as young as 12 years old, for throwing stones at tanks and armed soldiers, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem. Israel launches frequent bombing raids into the Gaza Strip, under the pretext of security — attacks punctuated by outright massacres, as in Operation Cast Lead in 2008–09, when more than 1,400 Gazans were murdered; whereas 13 Israelis died, mostly soldiers, 4 from friendly fire.

It is a sad reflection of the primitive consciousness of a swath of the LGBT movement that the Equality Forum would justify highlighting Israel’s LGBT rights despite growing international exposure of that nation’s racist policies, including from LGBT voices within Palestine.

As Palestinian LGBT activist Haneen Maikey explains, “It doesn’t matter what the sexual orientation of the soldier at a checkpoint is, whether he can serve openly or not. What matters is that he’s there at all.” Sami Shamali, also a member of the Palestinian LGBT group, Al Qaws, agreed, “the apartheid wall was not created to keep Palestinian homophobes out of Gay Israel, and there is no magic door for gay Palestinians to pass through.”

A recent delegation of LGBT activists, artists and cultural workers from the United States traveled to Israel-Palestine and published a poignantly detailed eyewitness account of their trip in an open letter. To the great credit of this delegation, they rise above the aggressively narrow viewpoint lauded by Equality Forum, which appears to judge human rights through the lens of sexuality issues alone.

In one sentence they skewer the implicit racism and colonial mindset behind pinkwashing’s attempt to shine a light on LGBT rights in Israel versus the homophobia of some Arab societies. They write, “It is our view that comparisons of this sort are both inaccurate — homophobia and transphobia are to be found throughout Palestinian and Israeli society – and that this is beside the point: Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine cannot be somehow justified or excused by its purportedly tolerant treatment of some sectors of its own population.”

Bravo to the sisters and brothers who penned these words!

In Malcolm Lazin’s e-mail to me, he noted that there is a healthy debate about these policies in Israel and elsewhere. Unfortunately, that’s not true. Equality Forum’s own program, in fact, makes no mention of the devastated lives of Palestinians, queer and straight, and, not surprisingly, there is no Palestinian speaker on the program to expose these harsh truths.

I believe the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which aims to expose and punish Israel’s criminal behavior and demand an end to their apartheid policies, should put out a call to boycott Equality Forum’s conference in May 2012.

More than anything right now, Israel fears “delegitimization,” especially in the eyes of Americans whose government finances the apartheid state to the tune of at least $3 billion every year. Yet Israel’s own actions delegitimize that state in the eyes of anyone with a whiff of social conscience.

It is up to activists — Jewish lesbians like myself, straight gentiles, everyone who cares about social justice — to stand up to Israel’s racist policies and those who help to veil them.

Sherry Wolf, author of Sexuality and Socialism, will be speaking on pinkwashing alongside Palestinian activists at the UPenn BDS conference Saturday, February 4, 2012. Wolf is available as a public speaker on Palestine, sexuality, socialism  and many other issues.

Lessons Learned From the Occupy Movement

I was invited to speak on Lessons From the Occupy Movement at Grand Valley State University near Grand Rapids, MI, on January 23, 2012. Before the evening’s event, I was asked to stop by for a chat with veteran activist and videographer, Jeff Smith. His video of our conversation about Occupy is posted below.

In two frenetic days of discussion, debate and meetings I came away with even greater hope for the Occupy movement. Not because radicals don’t face enormous challenges ahead of us, we do.  But because even in small cities where political life is dominated by hard-right fanatics, there are often groups of organized radicals — anarchists, socialists, social democrats and budding rebels of every sort. They rarely make it into the media, but they are among the stars in a global struggle for justice.

Huge thanks to the inspired organizing work of the gang in and around Grand Rapids, especially Colette Seguin Beighley who leads GVSU’s LGBT Center. People like Colette and her Change U crew are debating and organizing to make the world fit to live in. Thank you.

NY’s Deadly Deal with Apartheid

A DEADLY drone, modeled on the dragonfly insect, with a 9-inch wingspan. Four-wheeled mini-robots with panoramic video-imaging capabilities that perform surveillance without risk of harm to their human monitors. Unmanned armored bulldozers that can demolish property without exposing their distant operators to retaliation.

These are just a few of the weapons in an arsenal developed or under development by New York City’s newest partner–the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

A few days before Christmas last year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans for a $2 billion research campus to be constructed in partnership with Cornell University, Technion and the City of New York.

Proclaiming that “New York City’s goal of becoming the global leader in technological innovation is now within sight,” Mayor Bloomberg pledged $100 million in taxpayer money for the new venture. It will be added to a $350 million gift to Cornell from alumnus Charles F. Feeney to fund construction of the 2 million-square-foot state-of-the-art research institute to be built on Roosevelt Island, which lies in the East River between Manhattan and Queens.

New York’s media, including its “paper of record,” the New York Times, ran with the giddy story of the estimated 20,000 construction jobs, 600 new businesses, billions in projected revenue and 30,000 permanent jobs that will supposedly result from the research campus. Touting sophisticated environmental standards of construction and energy use, press releases have also heralded the educational opportunities this campus could offer not just experts, but budding scientists in New York’s public schools.

With rare exceptions like WBAI’s Law and Disorder and the website Mondoweiss, the media neglected to mention Technion’s extensive military and political connections to apartheid Israel. Shir Hever, an Israeli researcher, explains that Technion “has all but enlisted itself in the [Israeli] military.”

Technion is a sort of MIT and Harvard rolled into one. Founded in 1923, before the state of Israel, Technion’s first palm tree was even planted by none other than Albert Einstein. The Haifa-based university schools the military and academic elite of Israel.

According to Montreal-based social justice collective Tadamon, 80 percent of Israel’s NASDAQ companies and 74 percent of its electronic companies are run by Technion graduates. Active-duty Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, officers and reservists are granted a range of perks by the university–none of which are available to Palestinians, who do not serve in a military that largely exists to maintain and extend Israel’s 64-year occupation of Palestinian land.

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UNDER THE anodyne classification of “applied sciences,” Technion’s research accomplishments read like a what’s what of science fiction, full of unmanned drones, pilotless surveillance gizmos and driverless bulldozers.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Technion’s D9 unmanned armored tank performed so magnificently during Israel’s massacre of 1,400 Gazans in the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead that the IDF doubled its order.

Journalist Max Blumenthal reported about the drone plane based on the dragonfly, with a 9-inch wingspan and 8-inch body. According to a quote Blumenthal cited from the American Technion Society website, “The plane’s relatively low speed enables it to easily enter rooms through small windows and to send back photos from a miniature camera.”

Technion personnel have worked on means to track human eye movements–in collaboration with Elbit, a key developer of Israel’s apartheid wall, illegal under international law, that slices through the occupied West Bank.

Technion is also a global expert in developing mini-robots capable of traversing rubble and planting bombs, as well as building “surveillance snakes”–whose goal is to explore the tunnels that are crucial for transporting desperately needed banned goods into blockaded Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians barely scrape by.

In this era of neoliberalism, Technion’s invention of clever military gadgets that require minimal labor is a budget-cutter’s dream come true.

Not surprisingly, Palestinians aren’t the only victims of Technion’s “applied sciences.” North America’s own apartheid wall along the U.S.-Mexico border uses surveillance technology developed by Technion. And stealth drones that the U.S. has used to such deadly effect in Pakistan are also developed by Technion.

With U.S. unemployment still devastatingly high–even the right-wing New York Postadmits real unemployment is 15.6 percent–it’s hardly surprising that news of this enormous construction and research project is widely viewed as a boon to New York’s economy.

But under the guise of research, this deal would cement a lucrative bond between the financial capital of the U.S. empire and Israel’s military-industrial complex.

Protest against this deal has already appeared from the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). Calling on Cornell to scrap its joint campus project with Technion, the USACBI argued:

They provide the knowledge that undergirds Israel’s ongoing colonial project. Technion, like all Israeli academic institutions, is deeply complicit with Israel’s military, providing it with the technological infrastructure to maintain and expand its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land.

Is it any wonder that an institution best known for stealth technology is hiding its real actions, in cahoots with the billionaire mayor and other city officials, beneath a cloak of academic respectability?

What is true of Cornell’s collaboration with Technion is also the case for New York City. Since New Yorkers are being asked to pay $100 million toward this deal, we should at least be able to debate whether we want to bankroll apartheid’s wars and ghettos.

We have to question the reason for this research in the first place. Why must there be unmanned contraptions used to spy on and target a hungry, dispossessed population? Why are billions of dollars and great mental effort being directed toward developing machines that kill or maim–or help to do so–surreptitiously anywhere in the world?

True, many major research institutions have contracts with military and espionage outfits the world over. But the architects of this colossal deal, which would use significant public funds, have been mute about the nefarious activities of one of its partners.

Why? If they have nothing to hide, let them pitch the deal for what it is–a contract with apartheid’s enforcers.

Why, we have to ask, in a city known the world over for its multiculturalism and diversity, is a research institution that will serve ethnic cleansing even tolerated?

New York City is home to the world’s largest Jewish community living outside of Israel–around 2 million people. It is also home to one of the largest Arab communities in the U.S.–more than 370,000, according to U.S. Census figures.

It would be a sick tribute to the militarized profit system if America’s foremost urban symbol of ethnic diversity and cosmopolitanism, New York City, winds up home to an institution devoted to stealth warfare to achieve ethnic segregation.

This article originally appeared in SocialistWorker.org. 

The Subway’s Biggest Rats

The financial capital of the U.S. empire cannot function without its subway system, which is the savior and curse of every New Yorker’s existence.

More than 5 million people ride it on an average weekday. Though it can be maddeningly packed, filthy, delayed or suddenly stalled anywhere along its 842 miles of track, the Americas’ most extensive and busiest subway will take you pretty much anywhere in the city’s 5 boroughs, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.

It is a marvel of 19th-century engineering, which forces a degree of social interaction among office workers, homeless people, tourists and Occupiers in a way that few American cities can match. The subway is a hygienist’s nightmare, and an anthropologist’s delight. Today it is facing a hidden crisis.

The disgusting infestation that’s inspired Spot the Rat games among riders cooling their heels on platforms across the city may grab headlines, but the more troubling rodents aren’t making off with a pizza crust along the third rail. Like the culprits of the housing crisis, these rats wear Armani.

Michael Stewart from the grassroots community coalition, United NY, in co-sponsorship with the Center for Working Families and the Strong Economy for all Coalition, has prepared a 20-page report called “Money for Nothing: How interest rate swaps have become golden handcuffs for New Yorkers.” In detailed charts and blessedly jargon-free prose, the report explains how New York’s taxpayers are being legally bilked out of billions of dollars. Our storied transit system is being gutted to appease Wall Street’s insatiable lust for profits.

In essence, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), a public company which runs the city’s subways and buses, entered into agreements with Wall Street’s biggest banks in hopes of protecting itself against financial instability. Instead, the very banks that engineered the global crisis and were later bailed out by taxpayers, have trapped the MTA “in a web of toxic swaps,” writes Stewart.

As someone barely capable of balancing a checkbook, I’m hardly qualified to explain complicated financial doings in the lingo of economists, though Stewart’s report does an admirable job. “Money for Nothing” details how Wall Street will collect hundreds of millions of dollars more from taxpayers through these swap deals than it paid out to the MTA in the first place.

The scam lies in the fact that the economic turmoil created by the banks, which led to a dramatic drop in interest rates, is what turned the MTA’s financial planning into a windfall for Wall Street. It amounts to a second bank bailout, in this case, from the riders, workers and all the rest of the taxpayers of the city of New York.

Like a Third World nation that appeals to the IMF for desperately needed aid and later finds itself starving its population to service the debt, the MTA is in  hock to men for whom inconvenience is having to actually walk between their limo and private jet.

Today, 16 percent of the MTA’s revenue goes toward servicing this debt. That means that nearly $17 of what a straphanger pays for a $104 monthly MetroCard goes toward paying off a set of financial products that will cost at least $1.3 billion by the time they expire — in 2030.

In a deal the envy of a Soprano, the MTA would have to pay $714 million in termination fees to stop the hemorrhaging, an amount that went up more than 40 percent in just three months this past fall.

To grasp the enormity of this boondoggle — currently padding the pockets of 1%ers at AIG, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and others —  “Money for Nothing” lays out the impact of swap payments in 2010, the year of the deepest cuts and most layoffs in decades of the transit system.

The MTA’s net swap payments in 2010 alone, if spent on transit instead of payments to banks, could have spared the riding public from deep subway and bus service cuts and cleaning reductions, as well as 1,012 MTA workers at New York City Transit from layoffs and the elimination of 749 positions associated with these cuts — with over $40 million to spare.

The Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 is facing a contract deadline January 15, 2012. Workers are told they must agree to steep givebacks that, in the union’s words, “would cost the average transit worker thousands of dollars per year and significantly degrade the quality of work life.” None of this is necessary.

As the report itself concludes, deals can be renegotiated. Just as the federal government upended what was perceived as financially possible to save the banks’ profits in 2009, workers and riders, who are, of course, also largely workers, can force a new deal on these institutions.

Occupy Wall Streeters are planning solidarity actions to stave off these cuts, including a possible day of action where riders will refuse to pay. These bankers — most of whom never deign to ride the subway — cannot be allowed to hijack the budget of the nation’s largest transit system, and certainly not without a fight.

As the union’s campaign slogan to save subway maintenance workers’ jobs goes, “New Yorkers deserve a rat-free subway.”

Hide the good china, protect the kids, I’m back in action for 2012 and will be speaking on my book, Sexuality and Socialism, as well as on lessons so far from Occupy Wall Street at Grand Valley State, Michigan, Jan. 23rd and 24th.

It Was the Best of Times…And Not

I don’t know how to sum up an extraordinary year like 2011, so I won’t bother. Revolutions, general strikes, occupations — it’s a radical’s dream come true. 

But as I head off the grid for a couple of days to read and begin writing for Truthout’s new blog site, Speakout, I cannot help thinking about the conditions driving these global rebellions from Cairo to Oakland. After all, these historic upheavals would be unthinkable without the mass immiseration of the last decades. 

Sorry to bring a turd to the picnic, but walking through Penn Station late last night on my way to the subway home I could not ignore the rows and rows of homeless people bedding down on the hard floor for a semi-sleepless night in the financial capital of the empire. 

Looking at them, I thought once again of the words that have echoed in my head for months now. They’re the opening lines of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, his 1859 classic set in Paris and London before and during the French Revolution. So it is Dickens, the great Victorian critic of social stratification, who best sums up this past year:

 

IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way —  in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

 

Not too bad for literary technique either, eh?

All the best in 2012!

 

 

Can Newt Beat Obama?

I had assumed that the Star Wars bar of Republican wannabes would have winnowed down by now to exclude Newt. Instead, the cast of characters from the paleoreactionary wing of U.S. politics proves that you could walk into any bar in Brooklyn and find 7 drunks more qualified to run the country. I mean no disrespect to my favorite borough’s barflies.

Michele Bachmann is clearly a woman who, in my mom’s words, can’t find her ass with both hands. Perry is a mass murderer on Percocet — or whatever other back pain meds he’s on that renders his Bush Jr. retread routine dopier than the original. Mitt’s an unrepentant 1%er with the temerity to actually commission a $12 million tear-down on his La Jolla beach house while running for president in a depression. Santorum’s homophobia is so repellent to millions that his last name is best associated with sexual fecal matter. Ron Paul actually says out loud what the rest believe: we should all have the freedom to be homeless, uneducated and drop dead without health care. And Huntsman is a political dust mite on a flea’s ass.

Then there’s Newt. His abilities were best summarized by Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in a definitive journalistic smackdown: Newt is “a stupid man’s idea of what a smart man sounds like.”

Nonetheless, the cultural Lilliputians and economic dingbats of our era have canvassed their ranks and offered up the crème de la crème of their ilk: Newt.

Lest we forget — and for those of you too young to know — Newt’s last foray into national politics in 1994, when he swept into Congress as the head of the “Republican revolution,” didn’t go so well. Here’s a snippet from an excellent piece by Alan Maass on “The rise and fall of Newt Gingrich”:

Gingrich claimed that the election results represented a “political sea change”–and a mandate for the Republican right. He vowed to pass the Contract with America–a 10-point program of right-wing proposals that included tax cuts for the rich, welfare “reform,” harsh restrictions on government spending and various other items that had been on the Republican wish list for years–within the first 100 days of their reign.

The mainstream media hung on every word from the Gingrichites and produced countless stories familiar to us today–about how the Republicans would be free to do whatever they wanted in Washington for years to come.

It didn’t turn out that way. Not a single bill from the Contract with America became law. The popularity of the Republicans steadily faded. And Newt Gingich, the leader of the “revolution,” became the most hated man in American politics.

Lately, coworkers and family ask me if there’s any chance Newt could trump Obama in the 2012 election. Just to be clear, I don’t believe we should vote for anyone or party that expands wars, including the one against the 99%, which both Democrats and Republicans have done with vigor. We should protest, petition, #occupy, mic check, picket, sit in and organize till our dying breath, but I do not believe that the 99% have a dog in this race.

That said, barring a politically cataclysmic development, I believe the odds of Newt (or any other Republican) winning are bad. Not because he’s a moron, that’s never disqualified anyone for public office in this country (See: Ronald Reagan, Bush Sr. and Jr.) And not because Obama will inspire anything like the movement feel of Election 2008, when tens of thousands took off work and school to actively campaign for a man they truly believed in.

No, Obama has squandered that option for 2012. People may trudge to the polls out of fear of the barbarians at the gates — though many will join me in abstaining, I suspect — but nobody is projecting anything like a repeat of 2008.

My belief is primarily based on the political and economic facts of our Not-So-Great Depression. As the economy worsens and Europe’s debt crisis reverberates back on the homefront, even steeper austerity measures will be called for by the 1%. What could possibly compel the ruling class in this nation to dump their financial and political support for an imperial and political leader who’s proven his worth to them?

Obama’s bailed out the banks, pushed through a health care plan that leaves private insurance intact, allowed industry to remain unregulated, expanded occupations and wars under the pretext of ending them (including the one on immigrants, with record deportations) — all while making it seem, at times, as if he is actually doing something for ordinary working-class people.

Add to that the explosion of the Occupy movement, which is now taking over foreclosed homes, shutting down ports and mobilizing workers, unemployed and students to fight cuts and it seems that the 1% need Obama today even more than they did in 2008, when Wall Street was among his biggest backers. They don’t even mind Obama’s few rhetorical snipes at the 1%, since it keeps the charade in play:

One top banking executive who raises money for Obama, discussing fundraising efforts on the condition of anonymity, said reports of disaffection with the president “are exaggerated and overblown.” He said a strong contingent of financiers in New York, Chicago and California remains supportive of Obama and his economic policies, even as some have turned on him.

But, this donor added, “it probably helps from a political perspective if he’s not seen as a Wall Street guy.”

It turns out that even the private-equity firm co-founded by Mitt Romney has  donated more to Obama’s campaign than to their old boss’s. Bain Capital’s employees have so far given $34,000 to their old CEO, but as of September Obama’s taken in $76,600 of Bain’s beneficence, according to the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Obama’s fundraising appeals to the rich, which consume at least 12% of his time one year out from the election, are garnering him a fair amount of ready cash, as Tom Englehardt details in his report, “The 1% election.”

The sideshow taking place among Republicans is not at all where progressives’ attention should lie. No, we have real fights to wage and lessons from this extraordinary year to assimilate.

See you at the occupations, and bring a book, this may take a while.

Join me and other authors at our publisher’s 10th anniversary bash in Washington, D.C., this Saturday, Dec. 17, Busboys and Poets, 7:30PM. Haymarket Books — weapons for the 99%, details here.

This is What Radicalization Looks Like

Thursday, Nov. 17, was a day of protest, civil disobedience and unity. I’m proud to have participated in the day’s events in New York City and this video captures the dynamism, defiance and radicalization of the Occupy movement.

Though I’m not familiar with the videographer of this excellent 7-minute clip, he does a great job showing many of the highlights of the day — resistance to repression, optimism, a cultural reawakening, youth and numbers.

Several friends of mine are in this video, and I’m in the large socialist contingent carrying signs seen pushing aside metal barricades and pulling back a protester from police.

Though I’m a hopemonger myself, I love the sign one young protester carried on the Brooklyn Bridge, shown in the clip: “I’m tired of being cynical.” It speaks to a new generation of budding rebels. This video is a great antidote to any notion that Occupy is a flash in the pan. It’s transforming U.S. politics, movement strategy and the participants themselves. Happy Thanksgiving!

Downwardly Mobile Whites Meet the Police

Last night, a father walking with his daughter of about 5 pointed to a policeman and said: “That’s a cop, sweetheart, stay away from them. They have big sticks and pepper spray that can hurt you, they are bad men.” RIP Officer Friendly.

I overheard this exchange en route to Brooklyn’s main transit hub, Atlantic Terminal, to see my own dad, who earlier in the day had e-mailed me the UC Davis video of cops pepper spraying peaceful student protesters. The fact that my 72-year-old white father and my partner’s 11-year-old Black daughter sent me the same link is telling about our new Occupy era.

American police forces, militarized to the hilt and more repressive domestically than in decades, are exposing to all — especially downwardly mobile white Americans — what many in the world have known for years: the U.S. will act as a police state to defend power and profit at the expense of any expression of democracy.

The Sunday New York Times even ran an op-ed from the former poet laureate, Robert Hass, who was clubbed along with his wife at Occupy Berkeley last week. The next day, students carried signs reading, “Beat poets, not beat poets.”

Most Black and Brown Americans have developed at least a healthy skepticism of the police, if not outright hostility, which comes from any number of quotidian nasty and humiliating encounters with the cops. This has not been the experience of most middle-class whites in the United States, though poorer whites, too, have often been victimized by the police. Here are the incarceration stats:

Of the 2.3 million inmates in custody, 2.1 million were men and 208,300 were women. Black males represented the largest percentage (35.4%) of inmates held in custody, followed by white males (32.9%) and Hispanic males (17.9%).

The fact is, the American state hasn’t needed to use this type of daily force and brutality in the recent past. In times of relative economic stability, or at least perceived stability, the state does not need to crack 20-year-old students over the head — or aging poets, for that matter. But these are not ordinary times, and the days of economic stability are past.

Last week, when I joined hundreds in the middle of the night to defend Occupy Wall Street from police eviction, the terror meted out by riot cops in every direction was stunning, even to a movement vet like me. The overwhelming numbers of cops and their wanton use of violence from coast to coast is the U.S. ruling class’s way of warning us: this is what will happen if you continue to challenge our priorities.

With ideological cracks developing in the face of massive austerity alongside vast concentrations of wealth, how else can 1% defend their interests against 99%?

In ordinary times, the 1% rely on ideology to pacify us; brute force is not usually necessary. But in the end, survival of this colossal inequality requires a gobsmacking display of force by their 800,000 police troops nationally, paid a median salary of $51,020 plus benefits, as opposed to a national household median income of $41,900.

For weeks now, like thousands of others, I have found myself in street battles against police who suddenly and without provocation impose crackdowns on all expressions of free speech. Last night, police simply shut down Mayor Bloomberg’s whole block on the Upper East Side to stop a drum circle from disrupting his dinner, creating a “no First Amendment zone,” according to civil rights attorney Norman Siegel.

What strikes me is how even in the face of out-and-out state repression, many activists — not all — still insist that the cops are part of the 99%. In fact, as cops pepper sprayed and used their truncheons with wild abandon the night of the eviction, many people at first chanted at them: “You are the 99%, too.”

I disagree. Whatever class they emerge from, once they put on that uniform police MUST, regardless of personal conviction, act in the interests of the 1%. That is their job.

Are they all sadistic pigs, like Officer Pike, captured on video casually and purposefully pepper spraying UC Davis students in the face? No, not likely. Some enter the force to help their neighborhoods and even bring diversity to the force in hopes that it will change police behavior and minorities’ perception of them, instead, they are changed by becoming cops.

Intentions and personal character are not what are called upon when a superior officer demands cops suit up and crack heads. If police do not perform their job as commanded, their peers will not trust them, they will not back them up in violent situations and they risk getting sacked. These are facts every cop understands all too well.

Think about this: what are most laws? They are tools for protecting private property. So we have laws against stealing food, but none against starving. We have laws to protect homes from burglary, but none against homelessness. The police exist to enforce these laws, they are a goon squad for those with property to defend, the 1%.

Police are set apart from the working class in salary, benefits and perks; they often live in cop-dense neighborhoods and drink in cop bars. They are encouraged to think of the civilian population with suspicion; racial profiling is taught, even to Black cops — how else can we explain the extraordinary imbalance of who gets stopped and frisked and who does not. In NYC alone, around 86% of those stopped for no reason other than living in a high-crime area are Black or Brown.

When cops don’t conform to cop think, they can be punished and shunned among their kind until they either get in line or resign.

Our Occupy movement has accomplished many things so far, especially winning the idea that we can resist inequality and win some gains. Now we must learn a new lesson to advance our struggle, because if we’re unclear about who is on our side and who is against us we can make decisions that are dangerous and naive. We’ve come too far to be fooled.

Cops are theirs, not ours.

Join a discussion about this Tues., Nov. 22, 7:30PM: Our Enemies in Blue: Why the Police are Not Part of the 99%, Walker Stage, 56 Walker St., sponsored by the International Socialist Organization.

Joy and Defiance: A Song for #OccupyWallStreet

Today, as we mobilize for the mass direct actions for Thursday, Nov. 17, I wanted to share a new protest song by Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, filmed at the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park, New York City.

There is music in resistance! All out Nov. 17.