Can We Govern Ourselves?

The declaration by the Congressional "Supercommittee" that it expects to fail in its manadate to arrive at a budget compromise by its deadline this week does not bode well for the state of the union. Under our constitution, no task is more fundamental than the passage of a federal budget, and while stalemate and conflict are built into the system, the current impasse arises mostly from the choice of the Republican Party to avoid the basic responsibilities of government.

The very existence of the Supercommittee stems from the intransigience of the GOP in debt ceiling negotiations this summer. Choosing rhetoric over rationality and experience, Republicans cowed by the TEA Party movement -- led by that corrupt hack, Mitch McConnell --  insisted that the recession demanded budget cuts. This declaration makes no sense, since the problem in the economy now is a lack of cash and investment, and the only entity capable of pushing enough of either into the system now is the federal government. But because the focus of the House is re-election rather than leadership, it was able to lead us into potential disaster and still feel good about itself.  Now the Republicans on the Supercommitee demand that no be raised, even on the wealthiest Americans.

Never mind that this is the perfect time to pour money into a deteriorating infrastructure, or that Republicans themselves agreed as receently as a year ago that some tax increases would be necessary. The urgency of the next election cycle overrides all.

Another Look at Occupy Wall Street

In the end, every movement has to have a target or a discernible -- not to say concrete -- goal. Steven Zunes, quoted in my last post, is right to say that protests do not in themselves make a movement. SNCC wanted the repeal of certain laws in the segregated southern United States, PORA wanted fair elections in Ukraine, Gandhi wanted changes in India's caste laws. To maintain momentum and purpose, a movement must point to outcomes.

But in the beginning, such clear, concrete goals may not be the purpose of a movement. In Montgomery, Alabama in 1957, the boycott movement began as a series of inchoate meetings of black citizens who were anngry and wanted to support each other. Right now, Occupy Wall Street is trying to figure itself out. People with something in common have rallied together in many places and have put together a program of behavior. Once they determine exactly what it is they share and what they might do about it, the movement can change.

Here's what a friend of mine, who observed the branch in Denver, wrote to me. (She gave me permission to quote her, but not to give her name.)

I hope you're teaching about the occupy together movements because they're insane. It's actually blowing my mind. Like ten years ago the Dalai Lama wrote a book called Ethics for the New Millenium and spoke about this spiritual awakening that everyone was or was going to experience whether or not they wanted to. And as a result there would be this incredible paradigm shift and I'm prettty sure thats what's happening. People everywhere are supporting each other in solidarity to fix not just their economic problems but all of their problems. It is spreading to everything ( which is mostly all still due to large corporations but still ). And while "authority" figures may stand there with the media and criticize Occupy Wall Street and say that they're protesting and protesting but not saying what they want it's because they just want change. No one can continue to survive in this type of society. People with college degrees are starving because they have student loans to pay and its disgusting. So now It's like america is waking up and realizing the difference between dependency and interdependency. They're understanding that capitalism and neoliberal free trade policies are wrong, they're the problem.


There's an Occupy Denver and basically what is happening is a true democracy. Whenever there is a problem such as sanitation or recycling or electricity the people will go directly to the GA ( General Assembly) and tell them what they need help with and the GA will have someone go and take care of it within an hour or two.You dont have to go through representative after representative you go directly to this board of people and they fix it because people are beginning to realize it's not about who has the most power, it's about us all having a community to live in that we can love and appreciate. It's crazy too because everyone is realllly supportive; people from Denver support the UCD kids and the Denver kids all support the Boulder kids and everyone shows up at each others meetings and protests and its just crazy.

She's saying that the real target in this movement is the participants themselves. They're talking to each other, not someone else. The key line is this description is that "it's not about who has the most power, it's about us all having a community to live in that we can love and appreciate." They don't like the world as it is, so they are making a small piece of the world more to their tastes.

I don't know whether this program will succeed or whether it even can. But if my friend is right, and the people in Zucotti Square are sensing or pushing a paradigm shift, they will be at the front of something quite dramatic.

 And before you dismiss the idea of a paradigm shift, think on this: is the basic idea that we can run the world on internal combustion really working? We have to make so many radical maneuvers, some of which are extraordinarily destructive, to maintain this view of the world that we can't help but fail. And if the internal combustion engine goes away, what does the world look like? More like it does now, or like Zucotti Square?

Occupy Wall Street -- Who's the Target?

As Stephen Zunes of the University of San Francisco noted recently, the protests now known around the world as "Occupy Wall Street" are not a movement just because they are protesting. He argues that

The revolutionary pretensions of a youthful counter-culture aside, Occupy Wall Street must become genuinely representative of the vast majority of Americans now struggling as a result of inordinate corporate power and political influence, reflecting also the legitimate aspirations of small business owners, small farmers, and working families of the poor and middle-class majority whose voices in the established political process are too often drowned out by powerful corporate interests.

In other words, it's not enough to be angry or frustrated, or even to act on that anger in an organized way. If the people occupying downtowns across the country have accomplished anything, it's the articulation of a particular kind of anger at unequal distribution of wealth and the ways in which government promotes it. The protests serve as an outlet for people, especially yong people, to draw attention to the sense of helplessness they feel in the face of huge multinational corporations.

But the protests so far have only highlighted the helplessness, rather than alleviating it or addressing it. Some have compared the protests here to those in Tahrir Square in Cairo, where the mere presence of protesters toppled a regime. Both groups appear to be following the script of an elderly American named Gene Sharp, who has received a fair amount of attention recently. His central tenet, according to one account (I have not read his book myself)

is that the power of dictatorships comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern – and that if the people can decide together to withhold that obedience, a regime will crumble. “Dictators are never as strong as they tell you they are,” says Sharp, “and people are never as weak as they think they are.”

What's happening in Zucotti Square, however, can't really apply this idea. From whom are they withholding obedience? The police? The mayors? When protesters break curfew, are they highlighting the injustice of such rules? Are they trying to demonstrate that the government is incapable of enforcing such rules? If so, the efforts have been a dismal failure, because the latter is false and the former would not be widely accepted even among sympathetic Americans.

If the "movement" is achieve anything, then, it has to do something fundamentally different from what happened in Egypt or Tunisia, something even more radical and much more difficult.

I don't know whether they can pull it off, but in the next post I'll tell you what I think the aim is (or ought to be).

Foreign Affairs and the G.O.P.

The Republican Party likes to look tough. The latest indication of this desire was its effort to bar all non-US citizens from the judicial system in terrorism cases.

Their argument is that  "it would be dangerous to let terrorists exercise the protections against self-incrimination and other rights of civilian courts that they might use to avoid surrendering critical information to investigators." As the "investigators" involved keep saying, though, this line of reasoning is badly mistaken. Neither the Justice Department nor the DoD wants to lose the option of criminal trials because that option can get people into and throught the system more effectively and efficiently. Law enforcement and even spooks get better information that way.

Mainly, though, the push was an effort to look like the baddest boys on the block at a time when the president is looking pretty damn bad. Bush could not find or kill bin Laden, but Obama did. And has has been remarked on this blog on several occasions, Obama has killed more terrorists in one-to-one operations than any president in history. Not only that, but Obama did exactly what he said he would do in Libya: kick out a brutal dictator and then go home. Neither Bush did that.

That makes Republicans hopping mad. Michele Bachman reportedly complained that

Now we have a mess in Libya. We don't know who the ruling party will be going into Libya....There's tremendous uncertainty and chaos. And of course, when there's uncertainty and chaos in a nation, that's when you see trouble and potentially extremist elements that could come into power.

I suppose she can't see the desperate irony in these complaints, given her protrayal of Obama as wishy-washy compared to Bush, but I hope her audience can.

I don't much like the fact that Obama is trigger-happy; I think his policies are illegal and therefore not helpful in the long run. But the GOP has to get itself in order here.