Obama: Drastic Times Require Drastic Measures: Fire Geithner

Drastic Times, Drastic Measures Fire Geithner It is no surprise that Wall Street is recovering, since the US taxpayer has shelled out trillions of dollars to save the financiers who brought our economy to its knees. The rest of us are still waiting for the economy to turn around. Considering the challenges that face us, it will be quite a long wait, unless the President takes some drastic steps to alter our course. Any number of things could have been done to stimulate our economy, but under the advice of Timothy Geithner, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers, President Obama chose to throw our eggs into the Wall Street basket. In a not so stunning turn around, the rich are once again getting rich while the rest of us are losing our homes, jobs, health coverage, life savings, and retirement benefits--everything we've worked for our entire lives. Drastic times call for drastic measures. In order to right the ship of state, President Obama should hire new financial advisors whose main concern is creating a working economy for all Americans, rather than padding the pockets of their former employers. It's time to fire Geithner, Summers, and Rubin. We encourage you to use your own words to alter the title and text at this link.

The Obama Disarmament Paradox

By Greg Mello
February 11, 2010

Published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Last April in Prague, President Barack Obama gave a speech that many have interpreted as a commitment to significant nuclear disarmament.

Now, however, the White House is requesting one of the larger increases in warhead spending history. If its request is fully funded, warhead spending would rise 10 percent in a single year, with further increases promised for the future. Los Alamos National Laboratory, the biggest target of the Obama largesse, would see a 22 percent budget increase, its largest since 1944. In particular, funding for a new plutonium "pit" factory complex there would more than double, signaling a commitment to produce new nuclear weapons a decade hence.

So how is the president's budget compatible with his disarmament vision?

The answer is simple: There is no evidence that Obama has, or ever had, any such vision. He said nothing to that effect in Prague. There, he merely spoke of his commitment "to seek . . . a world without nuclear weapons," a vague aspiration and hardly a novel one at that level of abstraction. He said that in the meantime the United States "will maintain a safe, secure, and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies."

Since nuclear weapons don't, and won't ever, "deter any adversary," this too was highly aspirational, if not futile. The vain search for an "effective" arsenal that can deter "any" adversary requires unending innovation and continuous real investment, including investment in the extended deterrent to which Obama referred. The promise of such investments, and not disarmament, was the operative message in Prague as far as the U.S. stockpile was concerned. In fact, proposed new investments in extended deterrence were already being packaged for Congress when Obama spoke.

To fulfill his supposed "disarmament vision," Obama offered just two approaches in Prague, both indefinite. First, he spoke vaguely of reducing "the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy." It's far from clear what that might actually mean, or even what it could mean. Most likely it refers to official discourse--what officials say about nuclear doctrine--as opposed to actual facts on the ground. Second, Obama promised to negotiate "a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty [START] with the Russians." As far as nuclear disarmament went in the speech, that was it.

Of course, Obama also said his administration would promptly pursue ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, an action not yet taken and one entirely unrelated to U.S. disarmament. The rest of the speech was devoted to various nonproliferation initiatives that his administration planned to seek.

On July 8, Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced their Joint Understanding, committing their respective countries to somewhere between 500 to 1,100 strategic delivery vehicles and 1,500 to 1,675 deployed strategic warheads, very modest goals to be achieved a full seven years after the treaty entered into force. Total arsenal numbers wouldn't change, so strategic warheads could be taken from deployment and placed in a reserve--de-alerted, in effect. The treaty wouldn't affect nonstrategic warheads. It wouldn't require dismantlement. As Hans Kristensen at the Federation of American Scientists has explained, the delivery vehicle limits require little, if any, change from U.S. and Russian expected deployments.

Ironically, it's possible that the retirement of 4,000 or more U.S. warheads under the Moscow Treaty and other retirements ordered by George W. Bush may exceed anything Obama does in terms of disarmament. As for the stockpile and weapons complex, Bush's aspirations were far more hawkish than Congress ultimately allowed. Real budgets for warheads fell during his last three years in office. Now, with the Democrats controlling the executive branch and both houses of Congress, congressional restraint is notable by its absence. What Obama mainly seems to be "disarming" is congressional resistance to variations of some of the same proposals Bush found it difficult to authorize and fund.

Last May Obama sent his first budget to Congress, calling for flat warhead spending. At that time, the administration was still displaying a measured approach toward replacement and expansion of warhead capabilities.

That said, in last year's budget the White House did acquiesce to a Pentagon demand to request funding for a major upgrade to four B61 nuclear bomb variants--one of which had just completed a 20-year-plus life-extension program. Just one day before that budget was released a grand nuclear strategy review previously requested by the armed services committees was unveiled. It was chaired by William Perry, a member of the governing board of the corporation that manages Los Alamos, and recurrent Cold War fixture James Schlesinger. [Full disclosure: Perry is also a member of the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors.]

The report's recommendations for increased spending and weapons development quickly began to serve as a rallying point for defense hawks--surely the point of the exercise. Overall, it was largely a conclusory pastiche of recycled Cold War notions, entirely lacking in analysis and often factually wrong. But neither the White House nor leading congressional Democrats offered any public resistance or rebuttal to its conclusions.

More largely, opposition to nuclear restraint within the administration quickly emerged from its usual redoubts at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Pentagon, STRATCOM, and interested players in both parties in Congress. Plus, Obama left key Bush appointees in place at NNSA while the Pentagon added some familiar faces from the Clinton administration, leaving serious questions about the ability of the White House to develop an independent understanding of the issues, let alone present one to Congress.

Either way, potential treaty ratification is surely a major factor in White House thinking. Senate Republicans, as expected, are demanding significant nuclear investments prior to considering ratification of any START follow-on treaty. Democratic hawks, especially powerful ones with pork-barrel interests at stake such as New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman, also must be satisfied in the ratification process. All in all this makes the latest Obama budget request a kind of "preemptive surrender" to nuclear hawks. So whether or not the president has a disarmament "vision" is irrelevant. What is important are the policy commitments embodied in the budget request and whether Congress will endorse them.

Investments on the scale requested should be flatly unacceptable to all of us. The country and the world face truly apocalyptic security challenges from climate change and looming shortages of transportation fuels. Our economy is very weak and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The proposed increases in nuclear weapons spending, embedded as they are in an overall military budget bigger than any since the 1940s, should be a clarion call for renewed political commitment in service of the fundamental values that uphold this, or any, society.

Those values are now gravely threatened--not least by a White House uncertain about, or unwilling or unable to fight for, what is right.

Greg Mello cofounded the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), which since 1989 has endeavored to provide leadership on nuclear disarmament and related issues in New Mexico. Based in Albuquerque, LASG's work includes research, organizing, education, litigating, and providing information on nuclear weapon issues for journalists. A former supervising hydrogeologist for the New Mexico Environment Department, Mello was a visiting research fellow at Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security in 2002.

Home Underwater? Walk Away from Geithner's Perverse 'Homeowner Relief' Plan

Home Underwater? Walk Away from Geithner's Perverse 'Homeowner Relief' Plan

February 10, 2010

Take Action: Tell Pres. Obama "Fire Geithner"

Published by AlterNet.

The plan to supposedly aid homeowners drowning in debt adopted by Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is just a money trough for the banks.

The homeowner relief plan adopted by President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has not been working for a full year now. What's worse, as the program is currently structured, its chief benefits accrue directly to the nation's largest banks, leaving troubled borrowers to twist in the wind. But despite the administration's indifference, underwater borrowers can still take matters into their own hands. If you owe more than your house is worth, just walk away.

"The rational thing for these people to do is to send the keys to the bank and say, 'Good luck,'" says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research. "Every month that you keep that person in their home paying that mortgage, that's a gift to the bank. So if you could keep a lot of people from sending their keys to the bank, and keep sending their checks instead, that helps the banks directly."

According to the administration's latest update on the Home Affordability Modification Program, just 66,456 borrowers have received a permanent mortgage modification from their bank over the past year, out of about 900,000 trial modifications. Even judging from the trial-stage figures, the program barely making a dent in the actual problem. Data from First American CoreLogic indicate that for 10.7 million U.S. homes, borrowers owe banks more than their house is worth (they're "underwater"). That's a full 23 percent of all mortgages in the country. Another 2.3 million borrowers are down to their last slivers of equity.

But the primary problem is not that the administration's program isn't reaching enough borrowers—it's that the "relief" offered by the plan is actually worse for a lot of borrowers than outright foreclosure. And despite heavy criticism from community groups and borrower advocates, Geithner's Treasury Department—which oversees the plan—has refused to alter HAMP's core objectives, opting instead for a series of minor paperwork processing tweaks.

HAMP attempts to keep people in their homes by reducing how much they have to pay every month. Banks can make all kinds of revisions to the loan contract to bring down this payment, and on the few permanent loan modifications that have been agreed to, borrowers have seen their monthly payments go down by about $500. But buying a home is so expensive, especially at bubble-level prices, that even borrowers receiving this aid could usually rent a comparable home for less. Still more troubling, this payment assistance does nothing to address borrowers' overall debt burden. The total amount the borrower owes to the bank—the loan principal—is still exactly what it was when the mortgage contract was first signed. If you bought your house for $280,000, but the house is now worth only $210,000, paying off your mortgage in full, even with help from HAMP, will mean losing $70,000.

"You can't make a significant dent in mortgage defaults without reducing principal," says Raj Date, a former Capital One executive who now heads the Cambridge Winter Center for Financial Institutions Policy.

The average underwater borrower today owes about $70,000 more than their home is actually worth, according to CoreLogic. Since 10.7 million mortgages are currently underwater, the banking system could see losses of up to $749 billion from problem mortgages—and the number gets much bigger if home prices decline further. Banks have probably already booked some of those losses, but it's still a huge hole, one many banks will not be able to fill. The entire U.S. banking system only has about $1.25 trillion to absorb losses, according to the Federal Reserve ($11.58 trillion in assets minus $10.33 trillion in liabilities). So while most large banks booked big profits and paid out huge bonuses in 2009, the potential for serious financial trouble has always been right around the corner. We have not, in fact, fully revived the U.S. financial system. We've just helped banks book profits on the backs of troubled borrowers. With HAMP, we've even encouraged borrowers to waste their money on irrational payments.

A New Strategy for Labor and the Left

A New Strategy for Labor and the Left

By Richard Wolff
February 11, 2010

Published by Professor Richard D. Wolff.

We are overdue for a new strategy. Labor and the Left are at low points in long declines. One cause has been adherence to a failed strategy. We need to acknowledge that reality and answer two linked questions. First, what part of getting into this situation was our own doing? Second, what changes in labor’s and the Left’s strategy could revive the two groups and rebuild their coalition into a powerful political force? To answer the first question: labor’s and the Left’s strategic attitude toward capitalism undermined both partners and their coalition. To answer the second: changing their attitude toward capitalism could, I believe, revive them significantly in the near future.

With rare exceptions, the strategic orientation of labor and the Left toward capitalism has been one-sidedly macro-focused on the nature and extent of state economic interventions. Thus it emphasized taxing enterprises rather than workers, the rich rather than the middle- and lower-income earners. It generally favored state regulation of the private economy rather than laissez-faire, public over private enterprises, and state planning/controls over private/free markets. The welfare state, social democracy, socialism, and communism were all understood chiefly in the macro sense of state intervention. Differences among them concerned the extent of those interventions (ranging from regulation, to control, to state ownership of enterprises and productive resources).

In contrast, labor and the Left paid far less attention to capitalism at the micro level, the internal organization and operation of the enterprise. They did not challenge the basic position of corporate boards of directors as appropriators and distributors of the surpluses produced by other people, the workers. They accepted—or simply presumed—that those boards would exclude workers from the appropriation and distribution of the enterprise’s surpluses (or profits). Rarely did Left forces seriously raise the goal of workers themselves becoming, collectively, the appropriators and distributors of enterprise surpluses. When that idea surfaced, it was usually dismissed as unworkable, utopian, and irrelevant to workers’ practical interests. The Left restricted itself to demanding state-enforced employers’ exploitation of workers, deception of customers, and abuse (both socially and environmentally) of surrounding communities.

Labor’s and the Left’s implicit micro-level strategy with regard to the enterprise thus became reduced to improving the terms of the employer-employee relationship for the workers, not eliminating that relationship altogether. Unions were to bargain collectively for better wages, benefits, and working conditions, leaving employers to receive and distribute the surpluses. Such (micro) bargaining within enterprises was to be allied with leftist political (macro) struggles for state interventions to benefit workers (via tax reforms, market regulations, greater welfare payments and/ or subsidized public services, and socialized medicine).

Capitalist employers have always responded by deploying the surpluses they kept appropriating to evade, weaken, and undo whatever reforms and gains labor and the Left could win. They did so at both the micro and macro levels. They distributed portions of their appropriated surpluses at the micro level to support intrusive supervisors, to alter technologies, and to outsource production. They distributed other portions of their surpluses to support think tanks, build mass media connections, finance selected academics, and buy politicians to improve their macro-level conditions. Such dispositions of capitalists’ surpluses eventually undid most of the gains that the Left and labor won via Roosevelt’s New Deal. Examples include the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, as well as the subsequent undermining of progressive taxation in favor of profit-oriented deregulation, and so on. Capitalists’ surpluses today fund all the major efforts to block or weaken reforms initiated by Obama’s administration.

Thus, in the U.S. and beyond, the old strategy that allowed corporate boards of directors to keep appropriating and distributing the surpluses of enterprises had repeatedly disastrous consequences for labor and the Left. Similarly, in countries such as the U.S.S.R. and China, “socialist” strategies—that replaced corporate directors with state officials the internal employer-employee structures of state enterprises initial gains won by their revolutions. Yet Left and labor forces in both situations seem unable to criticize their parallel old strategies and draw the lessons for a new strategy. Today, they again demand reforms, especially in response to the current global capitalist crisis. And once again, those reforms leave largely unchallanged the employer-employee relationship within enterprises.

A new strategy would not leave in place an adversary with the incentive and the resources to block, minimize, and then undo what labor and the Left can win. The key new strategic component is micro-focused in two parts. First, enterprise boards of directors must no longer be non-workers or elected by shareholders. Second, their functions—the appropriation and distribution of surpluses—must henceforth be performed instead by the workers collectively. The new object for struggle is thus the internal transformation of each enterprise. The goal is a fundamentally transformed job description for each worker, one that would involve both: (1) the realignment of particular tasks within an enterprise’s division of labor; and (2) full participation on that enterprise’s collective board of directors. No worker could meet one part of such a job description without also meeting the other.

Making this new strategic goal a central part of Left, labor, and socialist and/or communist programs would radically transform them from what they have long been. To the macro focus on state interventions (via reforms and regulations) would be added this new micro-level goal. By achieving it, workers would acquire the requisite status, incentives, and resources to make enterprise policies support their traditional macro-level goals (such as economic planning, social welfare, and greater wealth and income equality). However “radical” the new strategy may be considered, it offers the only real hope to secure any future reforms won by labor and the Left.

This new strategy is unapologetically anticapitalist. It aims to challenge the essence of the capitalist organization of production—the employer-employee relationship—and replace it with a communitarian organization. On that basis, all the other dimensions that are characteristic of capitalist societies would open up for democratic reconstruction as well. Will the distribution of resources and products be achieved by market exchanges, or by other mechanisms (e.g., decentralized economic planning based on combinations of democratically defined social and individual needs)? Will there be private ownership of enterprises—by individuals, groups, or communities—or will there be regionalized, nationalized, or internationalized ownership? What success criteria will govern investment decisions: enterprise profits, progress toward social objectives, local community goals? Raising and answering these questions would finally become the business of everyone, as befits any genuinely democratic society. As workers’ different perspectives and evolving preferences gradually inform these questions, their long exclusion from democratic decision-making within capitalist economic systems will finally come to an end.

This new strategy’s brand of anti-capitalism is distinguishable from mainstream socialism or communism. Those traditions, both theoretically and as seen in the regimes they established once in power, also left in place the micro-level exclusion of workers from the appropriation and distribution of the surpluses they produced. Socialist and communist traditions were chiefly macro-focused: on transformations of property—from private to public—and on distribution mechanisms, from market to state planning. Their microlevel goals were to improve the conditions of employees within enterprises rather than end those enterprises’ employer-employee relationships. The failure of “actually existing socialist and communist economies” to overcome that internal enterprise division eventually undermined them and enabled their greater or lesser reversions back to private capitalist economies.1

This new strategy, if successful, would do more than democratically transform production. Workers who also served on their own boards of directors would make different decisions—about what to produce, how and where to produce, and what to do with the surpluses their labor generates—than traditional boards elected by shareholders. Their decisions would, for example, be far less likely to relocate production across the country or the globe, or install technologies harmful to workers’ health, or use enterprise surpluses to bulk up on intrusive supervisory staff. Worker-directed enterprises would much more likely establish funds to retrain and reposition workers in response to changes in technology or altered demands for output. The capitalist conception of unemployment would end, as jobs and individual incomes finally become basic human rights and labor is considered everyone’s shared social obligation. Workers’ broadly defined well-being (an inclusive standard) would displace individual enterprise profits (a narrowly exclusive standard) as the prevailing objective of enterprise decisions.

Because workers live in the communities that surround their enterprises, the decisions they make as collective directors will continuously monitor and improve local economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts unlike the decisions made purely on behalf of the capitalist enterprises’ boards of directors and major shareholders. Indeed, because residential communities are complexly interdependent with enterprises, new political mechanisms would be needed to share final social decision-making authority democratically between worker-directed enterprises and their community-based counterparts. That could end the capitalist pattern by which enterprise directors and major shareholders prevail over residential communities by channeling their disproportionate resources toward bribery, public relations, or other manipulations of community decision-making. Government at all levels, from local to international, would be transformed into more collaborative structures based conjointly on enterprises and those residential communities that are interdependent with them.

By democratically reorganizing enterprises at the micro/internal level, this new strategy builds a foundation for a society-wide transition from today’s merely nominal democracy to the real thing. Workers functioning in and responsible for democratically structured enterprises will more likely understand, demand, and lead a social movement for parallel democracy and responsibility within their communities. When workers themselves dispose of the surpluses generated from within their enterprises, they are likely to use them to further the macrofocused policies that they supported as citizens. No longer would a separate group of people (a social minority comprised of boards of directors and major shareholders without any democratic obligations to their employees) be able to sabotage the macro-level policies supported by the majority of those employees.

The new strategy calls upon workers to recognize the need and take responsibility for the implementation of change in the places where they work, inside the enterprises where they spend most of their adult waking hours. It gives workers the sequential tasks of first transforming production within each enterprise, and then maintaining and developing the new production organization. Workers themselves become the self-conscious and self-directed foundation of society’s economic development. This could lead to the concrete realization of longstanding commitments of labor and the Left to workers’ empowerment, liberation, and self-actualization: commitments that had long been only vague, rhetorical gestures. This new strategy might inspire a revival of the labor movement, as well as other Left movements. Continued adherence to the old strategy has failed to do that for a long time, and it promises nothing better for the future.

The emphasis herein has been on strategy partly because that, rather than tactics, is what most needs change. Tactical adjustments and innovations, as well as exemplary creativity, have often been strengths of both labor and the Left. Owning up to fundamental strategic problems has not. The tactical roles involved with advancing the proposed new strategy that will be taken by trade unions, political parties, and/or social movements outside electoral politics thus remain open questions. They will likely be resolved variably, in line with the different social histories that have shaped workers and the conditions they confront. So, for example, it might be best, under some circumstances, to initially demand that about half the seats on corporate boards of directors be worker-based.

Another tactical question is whether the initial focus should be on workers becoming their own boards of directors at the decentralized level of the individual productive unit (i.e., at the factory or office) or at the centralized level of the enterprise or entire industry. These tactical choices require risks and advantages to be weighed. Beyond the economy, another tactical question would address how education would need to be reorganized and refocused to prepare young people for future jobs that include serving on collective boards of directors.

Imagine the promise of a strategically reoriented labor movement, no longer stuck in an ineffective, defensive rut.

1. See S. Resnick and R. Wolff, Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the U.S.S.R. (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).

See: Taking Over the Enterprise pdf version

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne).

Obama Administration: US Forces Can Assassinate Americans Believed to Be Involved in Terrorist Activity

By Amy Goodman
February 11, 2010

Join PDA's Accountability and Justice Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here.

Published by Democracy NOW!

The Obama administration has acknowledged it’s continuing a Bush-era policy authorizing the killing of US citizens abroad. The confirmation came from Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in congressional testimony last week. Blair said, “Being a US citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives overseas if the individual is working with terrorists and planning to attack fellow Americans.” We speak to Rep. Dennis Kucinich and blogger and attorney Glenn Greenwald.

Guests:

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), last week he wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting an explanation of the Obama administration’s legal basis for the extrajudicial killing of US citizens.

Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com. He wrote a widely circulated piece for Salon last week called ‘Presidential Assassinations of US Citizens’

Transcript of interview (Watch it here.):

AMY GOODMAN: The Obama administration has acknowledged it’s continuing a Bush-era policy authorizing the killing of US citizens abroad. The confirmation came from Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in congressional testimony last week.

Blair told the House Intelligence Committee US forces can assassinate Americans believed to be involved in terrorist activity against the United States. Blair said, quote, “Being a US citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives overseas if the individual is working with terrorists and planning to attack fellow Americans.” He added, “We don’t target people for free speech; we target them for taking action that threatens Americans.”

Blair’s comments came one week after the Washington Post reported at least three US citizens are on “hit lists” maintained by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command. The most well-known target is the US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is accused of having ties to the failed Christmas Day airline bombing and the shooting at Fort Hood.

My first two guests have been among the most vocal critics of the continued assassination policy. Democratic Congress member Dennis Kucinich joins us from Washington, DC. Last week he wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting an explanation of the Obama administration’s legal basis for the extrajudicial killing of US citizens. And we’re joined on the telephone by Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com. He wrote a widely circulated piece for Salon last week called “Presidential Assassinations of US Citizens.”

Let’s begin with Congress member Dennis Kucinich. Explain what you wrote to Attorney General Holder.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, I think it’s incumbent upon the Attorney General to explain the basis in law for such a policy. Our Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, our Seventh Amendment, our Fourteenth Amendment all clearly provide legal protections for people who are accused or who would be sentenced after having been judged to be guilty. And what’s happened is that the Constitution is being vitiated here. The idea that people are—have—if their life is in jeopardy, legally have due process of law, is thrown out the window.

And, Amy, when you consider that there are people who are claiming there are many terrorist cells in the United States, it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to imagine that this policy could easily be transferred to citizens in this country. That doesn’t—that only compounds what I think is a slow and steady detachment from core constitutional principles. And once that happens, we have a country then that loses its memory and its soul, with respect to being disconnected from those core constitutional principles which are the basis of freedom in our society.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, you’ve been writing about this extensively. Can you talk about your major objections and where you think this policy is going?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, look at the controversies that Democrats and progressives were so vocal about during the Bush years. They objected vehemently over the Bush administration’s wiretapping of American citizens without any court warrants or judicial oversight. They objected when the Bush administration put, not American citizens, but foreign nationals into cages at Guantánamo, merely on the say-so of the President that these people were terrorists.

Here, you’re talking about the worst elements of those policies, but even more extreme. You’re talking about American citizens not being merely wiretapped by the President with no oversight, but murdered, assassinated, killed, based solely on the unchecked say-so of the President.

And I think what really has to be emphasized is, look at how many times over the past decade that the administration—both first the Bush administration, then the Obama administration—has accused people of being terrorists, the worst of the worst, and it turned out that they were completely wrong. Hundreds of people who were at Guantánamo ended up being released because there was no evidence of wrongdoing print. Ever since the Supreme Court in 2008 granted habeas corpus rights to detainees, thirty-three out of thirty-nine Guantánamo detainees who brought their cases before a court were ordered released by federal judges on the grounds that there was no evidence to justify the accusations against them.

So there are few things more dangerous than allowing the executive branch to label people terrorists and treat them accordingly, and that danger is compounded severely when you’re talking about American citizens who have constitutional rights and talking about not merely eavesdropping on them or imprisoning them, but actually murdering them.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, you quote a 1981 executive order signed by Ronald Reagan.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, you know, assassinations have a very long and sordid history in the United States, and the reason is, is that the CIA has used assassinations as a major weapon in its arsenal, so much so that they’ve assassinated people who ended up being wrongly killed, who ended up causing great controversy because it’s extrajudicial killings. And even Ronald Reagan, who engaged in all sorts of extreme policies in Central America waging covert war, declared political assassinations, assassinations of political leaders, to be illegal. Now that applies only to political assassinations, not necessarily to assassinations of people accused of terrorism, but the principle is the same, that these kind of extrajudicial killings, which we condemn when virtually every other country does, was so extreme, so contrary to our values, that even Ronald Reagan issued an executive order banning it.

And now here’s President Obama doing it again, not with regard to foreign nationals or to foreign leaders who we accuse of all kinds of extremities, but United States citizens, in the case of al-Awlaki, born and raised and educated in the United States. And it’s as severe and extreme a policy as can be imagined.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Congress member Dennis Kucinich, what can you do about this in Congress?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, Congress has the authority, under a joint resolution, to challenge any presidential directive. It’s not widely known, Amy, but there are at least three states of national emergency that we’re operating under right now by presidential declaration: one relating to 9/11, another one relating to the war on terror, and a third one relating to Iran. You know, this idea of being governed by an edict, of being locked into this war on terror, poses all kinds of challenges to our Constitution. I take an oath to defend the Constitution. And when I see in the Fifth Amendment where it says that no one should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, I want to know what’s the constitutional basis for suspending this provision for anyone, even for a moment, because if this is—if this, in any sense, can be set aside, then we are on a slippery slope to anti-democracy.

And I think that the reason why this is important for the Attorney General to reflect upon is that the President and all federal officials take an oath to defend that Constitution. This is the Constitution. If they’re saying that the authorization for the use of military force passed after 9/11 is the basis for this action, we should know that they’re saying that. But a fair reading of that said it applied only to those who were involved in 9/11, not someone who joins an organization later on, no matter how misguided or wrongheaded that that may be, that is seen to be a threat to the US, that someone can just say, “Well, you know, you’re done. You’re dead.”

You know, what about the right to be able to be told of the charges against you? What about the right to a trial? What about the right to be able to have—be presented by your accusers? This is—this is a dangerous moment. And either—I see it as a constitutional crisis. And Congress has to start stepping up to review these actions without regard to whether it’s a Democrat or Republican administration.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you have support among your colleagues, Congressman Kucinich?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: I just raised this issue in the last week, and it’s been snowing here, so I’ll be speaking to my colleagues about that when I see them. I’m here. I’m hopeful that this week there will still be some sessions of Congress, so we can begin the discussion.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, thank you for making your way into the studio today. On another issue, I wanted to ask you about the Supreme Court decision. You ran for president. You were part of the Democratic primary. In fact, wasn’t it true that ABC News stopped following you when they said you hadn’t raised enough money? I wanted to ask you about the Supreme Court decision opening the floodgates for corporate money in politics.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: We’re working on a constitutional amendment right now, Amy, that would address this—the core issues in not only the Citizens United case, but the Buckley v. Valeo case. Our government right now is like an auction, where policy is—goes to the highest bidder. And this pay-to-play environment is destructive of any hope that people could have to have their practical aspirations addressed by the government. You know, the idea that Wall Street is now moving its smart money over to the Republicans is quite instructive. The idea that health insurance interests could raise money during the very—for members of Congress, during the very time that legislation is before the Congress that would change the way that they do business, these are things that reflect on the danger to our democracy.

And I think this Citizens United case, which gave the corporations the ability to interfere in elections in a major way, through their money, puts us at risk of openly having a corporate-dominated government. Now it’s kind of a secret, I suppose, in some places. But it’s now—you know, once Citizens United was decided by the Supreme Court in the way it was, now it’s basically open season on anyone who challenges these corporate interests and a free pass for anyone who supports them. A real danger to our democratic tradition calls out for constitutional remedies, and there are many that are now being considered, and I’m certainly working on some.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, you know, it was interesting because I was—I agree with Congressman Kucinich completely with regard to the constitutional arguments he was making about the presidential assassination program. If you look at the Fifth Amendment, it really does say no person shall be deprived of life without due process. It says that in clear terms. To me, the First Amendment is just as clear, and it says Congress shall make no law abridging free speech. And as Justice Hugo Black said, I read that to mean Congress shall make no law abridging free speech.

So, I certainly agree that corporate dominance of our Congress—you know, Senator Durbin recently said the banks own the place, an extraordinary statement for the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate to make. I think the corporate dominance of our political process is one of the two or three greatest threats we face. But I also think that whatever solutions we try and find for that need to be consistent with the clear constitutional prescriptions of the First Amendment, and allowing the government to ban or regulate corporations from speaking out on elections, to me, seems very problematic.

So I think there are ways around it. I think public financing of campaigns can equalize the playing field. I think some constitutional amendment might be viable, but I do think it’s a very difficult question constitutionally to allow the government to start saying who can speak about our elections and who can’t. So, I think the First Amendment needs to be just as honored as the Fifth Amendment when we talk about these issues.

AMY GOODMAN: Congress member Kucinich?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, I would agree with Mr. Greenwald and also thank him for the three important articles he wrote in the wake of Dana Priest writing in the Washington Post about this assassination program.

With respect to corporate contributions, let’s take for example anyone who gets a contract from the government. Why should they be permitted to plow the money they get from taxpayers back into political contributions? Because since money is fungible, that is what would happen. There should be restrictions there. That would go a long way to stopping these interest groups from being able to compete for government contracts and then turn around and rewarding those who give them money. I mean, take, for example, the bailouts. You know, we have an—will have an unending bailout culture, if you can have Wall Street continuing to give money to politicians who will then vote for bailouts for them. When does it stop?

This is why the only remedy is constitutional. And certainly one of the factors that has to be in there is public financing. I mean, if you have public financing of campaigns, you have public ownership of the political process. You have private financing of campaigns, you have private ownership of the political process. So, again, we have to—we’re continuing in this experiment in government to decide what kind of government we want. Do we want government of the people? Do we want government of the corporations? Right now, with two Supreme Court rulings, we have moved towards the balance towards government of the corporations. This is something that Jefferson feared, something that Lincoln feared, something that Eisenhower warned about. And we should find out, in this time, in 2010, whether or not we truly believe that this Declaration of Independence and Constitution is a living testament or whether it’s just, you know, a document gathering dust in some place in antiquity.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, in this last minute, Congress member Kucinich, the death of your close friend, Congress member Murtha.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: You know, when you see someone like John Murtha, who had the capacity to listen carefully and to watch carefully what was happening in Iraq and to come forward as he did in 2006 to change and to challenge the war, that was an important moment. Congressman Neil Abercrombie and I spent many long discussions with John Murtha talking to him about the war and expressing to him, in 2004, 2005, our deep concerns about the direction that the war had gone, and John Murtha listened carefully. And that really was the measure of Mr. Murtha.

I have to tell you, on a personal note, I mean, despite the fact that he and I may have had some, you know, fundamental differences of opinion about the great mass of money that went—that goes into the Department of Defense, he was someone—because of his openness, he was someone who was really loved by members of Congress. And my—[no audio]

AMY GOODMAN: We just lost Congress member Kucinich. But we’re going to go to break, and when we come back, we’re going to play a brief conversation I had with Congress member Murtha in 2006. It was about the killings in Haditha. It was about the war in Iraq. Congress member Kucinich, joining us from Ohio, and Glenn Greenwald, joining us on the phone, constitutional law attorney and legal blogger at Salon.com.

Progressive Democrats of America Wants War Money for Healthcare

By Ralph Lopez
February 11, 2010

Take Action: Eat lunch for peace--become a "brown-bagger"

Published by Daily KOS.

Unveiling a potentially powerful campaign which goes beyond pointless marching in the street on a Saturday in DC when no one is around, and the march is roundly, thoroughly, even aggressively ignored by the media, Progressive Democrats of America has come to a realization that International ANSWER has not. It's our house.

With the cost of a robust public option put at about $50 billion, it turns out we spend that in about 5 months on military operations (not civilian help) in Afghanistan. This is major motion for the Anti-Waste-on-War Movement, my own tongue in cheek moniker which is intended to reflect that if attacking a bunch of 19 year-old-Afghans kids who joined the Taliban because there were no other jobs were buying us security, it might not be waste, though it would still be immoral. The fact is it is buying us the opposite. Hatred, astonishment at our government's will toward war. And more hatred. 100 Al Qaeda in the country at most, according to the Pentagon's own estimates, who Afghans would willingly dispatch themselves given the chance.

But that's how Lockheed and General Dynamics, Halliburton and Blackwater-XE like it. When you are an executive or a shareholder looking at your starter castle, your vision can get blurred. You don't care about the educational system. Your kids will go to private school. And those bloody fools out there, My God, they think this is about security. PDA is calling for citizens to join its Brown Bag lunch series, every third Wednesday of each month, in which like-minded folks will be going into congressional district offices, relaxing with their sandwiches in the spaces their taxes are paying for, and asking congress members to commit publicly to voting against further war funding. So far about 36 District Offices are on tap. They'll be talking to each other via cellphone, by Skype, and having all kinds of fun.

"Further war funding," obviously, does not preclude the minuscule amount, relatively, for orderly withdrawal or economic stabilization ($5 a day jobs for for former and potential Taliban, they would jump at it.) No one is talking about letting soldiers run out of bullets in the middle of a battle, a ridiculous response it's time to take head-on.

This beats shouting in the streets where no one, and I mean absolutely no one, gives a rat's a%#.

Add this to plans being made for constant, regular actions in DC, including civil disobedience, and by God we've got a real chance of stopping this thing. We're bringing camcorders and Skype video connections to beam back to the constituents just why Congressman A would rather finance Lockheed than your prescriptions that you can't afford or even a basic coverage plan. If you are a conservative some of it could go toward deficit reduction. The dirty little secret, that many people are just starting to wake up to, is that what we spend on insecurity is so golddarned much we wouldn't even have to choose. We could, literally, have it all. Jobs, healthcare, deficit reduction. $9 billion a month is the "burn rate" for more insecurity. Burn rate is the term recently used by General Barry McCaffrey for the cost of Afghan war operations. I'm not making this up. Burn, as in money into a fireplace.

Join PDA's Brown Bag Vigils here. Make new friends. Meet the love of your life even! Democracy is fun, once we realize IT'S OUR HOUSE.

SEE HOW MUCH IN CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS YOUR CONGRESS MEMBERS TAKE FROM THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY (aircraft makers here)

The diarist is co-founder of Jobs for Afghans.

Take Action: Eat lunch for peace--become a "brown-bagger" http://pdamerica.org/articles/misc/2009-11-13-12-49-50-misc.php

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Published by t r u t h o u t.

Give Peace Spending a Chance

By Maya Schenwar
February 11, 2010

Take Action: Tell Congress "Stop funding war"

Published by t r u t h o u t.

Last week, when President Obama requested thelargest-ever military budget since World War II, hardly anyone batted an eyelash. The Bush years immunized many of us to the shock of colossal defense spending bills skating across the table--and zipping through Congress to sure passage--regardless of shriveling public approval.

Perhaps, more eyelashes would have started batting if Americans realized that this year the US will spend more on its occupation of Afghanistan alone than any other country except China spends on its entire defense budget.

There's no question that war spending for Iraq and Afghanistan will top $1 trillion after Obama's request is implemented. That's enough money to stretch--in dollar bills--from the earth to the sun. It's also enough to pay for ten years of universal primary education for all of the world's children, according to UN statistics.

It costs $1 million to keep one soldier in Afghanistan for a year. The same amount of money could build 30 or 40 girls' schools in Afghanistan--one surefire way to reduce the number of men joining the Taliban over the long term.

This simple numbers game begs a painful question: as we fling ever more money toward war and occupation, where's the funding for peace?

The answer: it's there, but you'll miss it if you blink. US defense spending has long been notoriously imbalanced between military and nonmilitary priorities, and Obama's 2011 budget is no exception. In fact, it's even worse than usual. Military spending towers over spending on preventative measures by a ratio of 12 to 1, according to statistics from the Institute on Policy Studies. Last year, it was 11 to 1 - roughly the same as the ratio under Bush.

Despite a Democratic Congress and administration--and a Nobel Peace Prize-winning president--nonmilitary security funding is still being squashed by its nasty counterpart.

Maybe, our leaders have lost sight of what "security" means beyond violent defense. What can we do to prevent potential threats besides bombing the hell out of them before they get us? Travis Sharp of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation has some good ideas:

With the additional $30 billion to be spent in Afghanistan during 2010, the United States could:

• Double the amount spent on nuclear nonproliferation, anti-terrorism [focusing on specific terror threats] and de-mining ($1.6 billion)
• Double US support of migrants and refugees throughout the world ($3 billion)
• Quadruple the Civilian Stabilization fund for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq ($1.5 billion)
• Triple federal funding for renewable energy research and development ($7.4 billion)
• Double overall contributions to international institutions like the WHO and IAEA ($2.1 billion)
• Double federal funding for DHS First Responder and CDC Disease Prevention programs ($4.2 billion)
• Strengthen capacity of Coast Guard to close off the far-more-likely route of nuclear weapons coming into the United States - through ports ($6 billion)

Steps like providing disaster assistance, aiding refugees and contributing to international health care would go a long way toward deterring potential terrorist wannabes. Plus, decreasing our dependence on oil, shoring up our homeland security and finding safe ways to reduce nuclear weapons could deter future hawkish US leaders from waging war for stupid reasons.

Other diplomatic priorities, such as foreign service personnel and intercultural educational exchange programs, could also use a raise. A November report from Foreign Policy in Focus cites a sobering example of our diplomatic deficiency:

During the violent conflict that erupted in Kenya during its 2007 national elections, an American NGO called the State Department to consult with the appropriate people on the Kenya desk. They were told that these people were out of the office and not available. Asked when they would be available, the person on the phone replied that only two people covered Kenya, and both were on extended leave. In other words, nobody was home at the US government, it appeared, to be "first diplomatic responders" to this crisis.

Nobody home to respond to an international crisis, in a government whose "security" budget now reaches solar-systemic proportions? It's time to redivvy up this pie.

Nonmilitary programs are the true security measures. Not only are they a whole lot less likely to kill innocent people, but they also offer further-reaching, longer-term rewards.

In this age of never-ending wars, military spending is band-aid money, in a ghastly sort of way: as conflicts erupt, we continually attempt to bandage them with bombs, instead of addressing the root cause of each injury.

If we want to salvage "security" policy, we must reconceptualize what it means to keep our country safe. Otherwise, we risk simply reapplying the bloody band-aid until the money runs dry.

Showdown in Vancouver: The Olympic Industrial Complex Meets Gold Medal Resistance

By Jules Boycoff
February 11, 2010

Published by Counterpunch.

Upon arrival at Vancouver International Airport everything was smooth, suave, and sparkly. I immediately encountered colorful billboards splashed with 2010 Winter Olympic Games ad copy blending gold medals, commercial merchandise, and sports clichés. I was barraged with offers of assistance by friendly folks donning shiny nametags and chartreuse vests emblazoned with the official Olympic logo.

But as I took mass transit into downtown Vancouver—where the Olympic Games opening ceremonies will take place on Friday—I began to sense what activist Harsha Walia of No One Is Illegal and the Olympic Resistance Movement described as “the overall militarization of Vancouver, an encroaching police and surveillance state.”

Within sniffing distance of official venues like the Olympic Village this militarization is palpable, with a multiple-cop-a-corner mentality the norm. Chain link fences sheathed in teal-colored Olympic banners block off massive swathes of the urban center from public access. Police perpetually patrol the perimeter, handguns jutting from holsters. Helicopter buzz above, punctuated by the occasional whoosh of a CF-18 Hornet fighter jet.

Just behind the slick, smiley-faced façade of Olympic spirit, the Canadian state is flexing its militarized muscles, employing an array of tactics designed to suppress political dissent in the lead-up to the Olympics.

Meanwhile a parallel universe of anti-Olympic resistance thrums full-throttle. This movement marked by creative resistance and cross-class solidarity has achieved significant rollback of repressive measures, setting the stage for a showdown with state forces in the days to come.

Repressive Measures

The International Olympic Committee’s official charter forbids the expression of anti-Olympic dissent, stating in Rule 51,“No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”

The City of Vancouver followed suit, issuing synergistic “2010 Winter Games By-laws” that demonstrated to the IOC its willingness to squelch free-speech rights. For instance, the “Sign By-Law” outlawed placards that were not “celebratory,” though one could still tote “a sign that celebrates the 2010 Winter Games, and creates or enhances a festive environment and atmosphere.” That meant anti-Olympic signs were a no-go and Canadian authorities had the right to remove such signs, even from private property.

After a legal challenge from the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) and plaintiffs Chris Shaw and Alissa Westergard-Thorpe, the city backed down, amending the by-laws to allow for anti-Olympic signage (though signs that don’t chime with the logos of Olympic corporate sponsors are still not permissible).

In 2003 Olympic boosters low-balled their estimate for the Olympic security budget at $175 million. Since then, security costs have ballooned to almost $1 billion, with taxpayers on the hook for a huge chunk of it. Much of this money has been spent on the Vancouver Integrated Security Unit (ISU), created specifically for the Olympics in 2003 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Comprised of groups like the Vancouver Police Department, the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS—Canada’s top spy organization), and the Department of National Defense, the ISU patently shatters the thin glass wall between policing and military activity.

As the Olympics approach, the ISU has made numerous moves to intimidate activists and gather intelligence on them. For starters, there is a concern among activists and civil libertarians that ISU officials are infiltrating activist groups and that these undercover agents lack proper safeguards guiding their actions. In February 2009 B.C. Civil Liberties Association President Rob Holmes wrote letters to CSIS and the ISU asking for assurance that agents would not inflame tensions and tactics as agents provocateur or attempt “to influence the political direction, policy positions, or internal discussions of any organizations infiltrated by security forces.” In clipped, written responses, both CSIS and ISU officials refused to rule out the possibility that their infiltrating agents would break the law or try to assume leadership positions within anti-Olympic groups.

Law enforcement officials have also frequented the homes and workplaces of anti-Olympics activists as part of their “threat assessment” program. On January 20, 2010, ISU personnel visited the workspace of Vancouver-based dissident Franklin Lopez. An hour earlier, Lopez had filmed a public talk that political sportswriter Dave Zirin delivered at the Maritime Labour Centre in Vancouver. “To be honest,” Lopez told me, “I was not surprised, being that most people that I have been involved with either through friendship or through organizing have been visited, some multiple times.”

First Nations activist Gord Hill was also visited by the ISU’s Joint Intelligence Group after he offered strongly worded criticism of the Olympics in the media. It should be noted that the Olympics are taking place on unceded indigenous territory—hence, the slogan “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land” is plastered on kiosks across Vancouver, which sits on unceded Coast Salish territory. ISU officials visited Hill’s residence in October 2009, leaving their business cards when they did not find him home. Hill, from the Kwakwaka’wakw nation, promptly plunked images of these cards online along with an account he penned, “Statement by Gord Hill Regarding Visits by Olympic Police Agents.”

As David Eby, the Executive Director of the BCCLA, points out, treating activists as a “threat assessment” sends the message that anti-Olympic activists are neither to be trusted nor taken seriously: “The net effect is that the public has the perception as a result of the visits that the police are properly investigating these people because of their dissent. It becomes equivalent in the public mind to a threat to security.”

In addition to such face-to-face surveillance, nearly 1,000 surveillance cameras have been installed in Vancouver. According to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, around 900 CCTV cameras will be used at Olympic venues and another 50 to 70 will be deployed in other urban areas. A majority of the cameras have been leased rather than purchased outright, but normally surveillance camera companies offer the right of purchase at a deep discount, so while Canadian officials have asserted most of the cameras will come down after the Olympics, they may well argue later that it would be less expensive to just keep them installed.

Eby commented, “Our concern is that under the guise of a special state of exception, these cameras will be brought in and then they’ll become permanent.” Am Johal, the Board Chair of a Vancouver-based group called Impact on Community Coalition (IOCC), added, “There’s going to be a net expansion of cameras that will remain after the Games with pretty much little to no discussion of whether we wanted that in the city.” Johal views Olympics as a pretext for the intensification of the Canadian security apparatus.

The ISU has also ramped up its stock of high-tech weaponry, purchasing a Medium Range Acoustic Device (MRAD) for possible use against anti-Olympic activists. The MRAD emits painful, piercing sound that can damage human hearing. After pressure from activists, Canadian authorities have promised to erase the weapon function from the hard drive and only use the MRAD as a public address system—essentially a massive bullhorn, and a pricey one at that. The MRAD’s bigger, louder brother—the Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD—was used in Pittsburgh during the G20 meetings last September, much to the chagrin of protesters and their eardrums. The sonic weapon has also been deployed in Mosul, Iraq. The timing of the MRAD’s purchase—just before the Olympics—is suspicious, to say the least.

To assist in crowd control, the ISU has also planned “safe assembly areas” where protests can occur under the watchful eye of the authorities. In the US these are know as “free speech zones” but dissidents on both sides of the border more commonly refer to them as “protest pens.” The “safe assembly areas” have generated great confusion, as the Vancouver Police Department and RCMP have offered conflicting information about their locations, functions, and the rules that will inform their use.

Canada has also played border games with potential Olympics critics. In a highly publicized incident last November, Amy Goodman and two of her colleagues at Democracy Now! were detained and questioned on their way to Vancouver where Goodman was scheduled to speak at the public library. Suspicious she intended to speak out against the Olympics, border guards rifled through her personal effects and questioned her about the topics she intended to cover in her talk and whether one of them was the Winter Olympics. Just this week, Martin Macias Jr., a freelance radio journalist from Chicago, was held up and grilled by Canadian border officials regarding his knowledge of anti-Olympics activism.

Jittery Citizens and the Downtown Eastside

The police-induced intimidation anti-Olympic activists are experiencing has long been ingrained into the everyday existence of downtown eastside residents—an area often cited as the poorest postal code in Canada. But according to Harsha Walia, in the lead-up to the Olympic Games, the heightened police presence in the neighborhood has clicked into “full-on warfare” mode, “with four to six beat cops on every block in the neighborhood.”

While the mainstream media swarm the downtown eastside to collect poverty porn for middle-class public consumption, the Vancouver Police Department has been working furiously to sanitize the neighborhood so it doesn’t undermine the smooth-surfaced spectacle Olympic organizers so desperately wish to produce.

The number of homeless in Vancouver has more than doubled since the Olympic bid process began, thereby widening the scope of people susceptible to police intimidation and harassment. One element of the state’s legal arsenal is the “Assistance to Shelter Act” which allows police to round up homeless people and use force to remove them from the streets and place them in shelters. Walia dubs it the “Olympic Kidnapping Act” and notes that even if the police don’t use it to move people into shelters, it affords the cops an enhanced opportunity to interact with downtown eastside residents and to snatch them up on other charges, should any conflict arise.

There are also laws already on the books in Vancouver that usually remain either unenforced. Not so as the Olympics approaches. Selective enforcement is now the order of the day.

Take the case of longtime Vancouver activist Ivan Drury. On February 4, he was putting up anti-Olympics posters when he was stopped and handed a $100 ticket for “Defacing Poles (Posting Signs).” Drury reported, “I was confused because I have put up tens of thousands of posters in my life, all in Vancouver, and I have never gotten a ticket before. There were even a couple years where I was trying to get a ticket in order to launch a constitutional challenge against Vancouver’s anti-postering by-laws and I couldn’t get a ticket no matter how hard I tried.” This is clearly a new era: broken-window theory gone wild.

Police recently embarked on a ticketing blitz for minor municipal bylaw infractions like jaywalking and unlicensed street vending, zeroing their attention on the downtown eastside. Given the extreme material poverty of those receiving the tickets, many people are unable to pay the fines. This, in turn, shunts the vulnerable more firmly onto the treadmill of what Walia calls “the criminal injustice system.” In effect many of these laws criminalize who people are as much as what they do, as they’re disproportionately wielded against people of color, indigenous peoples, and the poor. This, notes Am Johal of the IOCC, is part of an intimidation process designed to silence those who might like to speak out against the Olympics.

Five-Ring Catalytic Converter

Despite intensified state suppression, activists have ramped up their resistance, with the anti-Olympics Convergence kicking off today, preempting the Olympic opening ceremony by two full days. The Convergence, which runs through the 15th is designed is to deepen already existing social movements, pressing the Global Justice Movement forward with energy and vision.

Media activists from the Vancouver Media Coop, W2 Community Media Arts, VIVO Media Arts, and other groups have the alternative-media machine firing on all cylinders, providing the public with up-to-date information, politically driven art, and all the news that’s unfit to print in the corporate media. There will be direct actions, mass rallies, festivals, art shows, a tent city going up in the downtown eastside. The Olympics has been catalyst for solidarity—a coalition of coalitions, a movement of movements—with numerous groups expressing their resistance to the Olympic Games. As Johal notes, “It’s about asserting human rights in the urban domain.”

All this hard work is already working. A recent poll found 50% of respondents in British Columbia do not expect the Olympics to have a positive impact on their province. Anti-Olympic activists have created this space of dissent for the population to saunter into.

Pierre de Coubertin, a key figure in the founding of the modern Olympic Games, once said, “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.”

Activists and organizers are taking this advice seriously. The Olympics promises to be a remarkable seventeen days, and it may just be the activists who take home the gold.

Jules Boykoff is the author of Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (AK Press 2007) and The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements (Routledge 2006). He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Pacific University in Oregon.

Jules Boykoff is the author of Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (AK Press 2007) and The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements (Routledge 2006). He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Pacific University in Oregon.