Gilets Jaunes Act IV Tomorrow

Tomorrow the Yellow Vest rebellion in France stages "Act IV."

Macron has promised a major address to the nation next week. He has already capitulated on the fuel tax which sparked the uprising. Prominent Yellow Vest demands now include an increased minimum wage, a more robust retirement and Macron's resignation.

Close to 100,000 police will be on duty Saturday. It's conceivable that another violent weekend could prompt a state of emergency. Macron is running out of options. His approval rating is at 18%. He's promoting the idea that tomorrow will be violent.

Another indication of how dire things are for Macron is a story by Adam Nossiter, Paris correspondent for The New York Times. "How France’s ‘Yellow Vests’ Differ From Populist Movements Elsewhere" could have appeared in Jacobin. It's one of those rare instances where the mainstream mirrors the fringe. What makes it even more noteworthy is that Nossiter, though not as rabid in defense of the zombie neoliberal status quo as NYT's Rome bureau chief Jason Horowitz, puffed Macron shamelessly from the outset of the last presidential campaign. Now, as you can see, things have turned:

The uprising is instead mostly organic, spontaneous and self-determined. It is mostly about economic class. It is about the inability to pay the bills.

In that regard, it is more Occupy than Orban — more akin to the protests against Wall Street driven by the working poor in the United States than the race-based, flag-waving of Hungary’s increasingly authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban.

[snip]

“There’s this social distress that exists more or less everywhere,” said Marc Lazar, a specialist in Italian history at Sciences Po. “Of people who are very worried about the future, not only are they suffering, but they have profound distrust of institutions and political parties. This is what we are seeing everywhere in Europe.”

Comparing the four countries — Britain, France, Italy and the United States — Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer who has studied the demographics of the “left-behinds,” said “the sociology of the people in revolt is the same.”

“These are the people who feel endangered by the current economic model,” which doesn’t “integrate the greatest number,” he said.

[snip]

But [Macron's] base, then and now, was exceedingly small, presaging his current wide rejection by the French, not just by the Yellow Vests. He won only 24 percent of the vote in the first round of voting last year — while his opponents on the far right and far left together won over 40 percent of the vote. Those numbers have now come home to haunt Mr. Macron in a political landscape where nearly eight out of 10 French citizens no longer support him, according to a recent poll.

Occupy never went away. It has always been here since 2011. The Brexit vote got defined as primarily a response to the refugee crisis in Europe, which was less an issue of immigration and more about warfare run amok in the Middle East thanks to United States; but the Brexit vote had just as much to do with the Brussels-backed, German-enforced regime of neoliberal austerity as it did immigration. Now Briton Leavers are waking up to the fact that the people in charge of Brexit have no intention of working towards equality in a new Little England.

I have been telling people that the events in France and England offer a ray of sunshine as we head into winter. Though we seem to be hurtling back to the medieval, with hostage-taking of rival economic royals, the dialectic is churning forward away from zombie neoliberalism.

Iran's Occupy

I try to keep my eye on Thomas Erdbrink' s dispatches from Tehran because they're generally free of the "official enemy" deceit that taints New York Times reporting from Russia and Venezuela. Erdbrink's explanation (see "Deadly Iran Protests Prompt Warning of Harsher Response") of the protests roiling Iran makes it sound like Iran is experiencing its own version of the Occupy Wall Street protests that frightened neoliberal leaders in 2011. Activists in the U.S. figured out that Obama was not going to deliver "Change We Can Believe In"; Iranians who voted (twice) for Hassan Rouhani are now coming to the same conclusion. The body count in Iran leads one to conclude that Iranian protesters are more committed than their American counterparts:

The death toll from the clashes was up to at least 21, and in the central province of Esfahan, one police officer was reported killed and three wounded in a gunfight. “An agitator exploited the current situation, and using a hunting rifle, opened fire on police forces,” state television reported.

[snip]

In all, about 450 people have been arrested in Tehran alone since the protests began on Saturday, the semiofficial news agency ILNA reported, citing Ali Asghar Naserbakht, the political security deputy for the Tehran governor’s office. There were also arrests in provincial towns.

Mr. Rouhani has urged demonstrators to avoid violence but defended their right to protest. He did so again on Monday on Twitter.

“People want to talk about economic problems, corruption and lack of transparency in the function of some of the organs and want the atmosphere to be more open,” he wrote. “The requests and demands of the people should be taken note of.”

The protests are not just the largest in Iran since 2009. They also suggest a rejiggering of some traditional divisions.

People who live in rural provinces, long viewed as supporters of the authorities, are now leading most of the demonstrations. And while people in Tehran have also taken to the street, the capital is not the center of the protests, as it was during the so-called Green Movement in 2009. In Tehran, many middle-class Iranians share the discontent but also fear insecurity.

The frustrations that led to the protests also appear different from the sentiments in 2009.

That year, a wave of demonstrations broke out after the contested election of a hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and then turned into a wider protest movement against Iran’s leaders.

This time, it is the failure of President Rouhani, a moderate, to deliver greater political changes and economic opportunity, despite the lifting of some of the sanctions against Iran as part of the nuclear deal. Young people are especially angry. The average age of those arrested is under 25, one official said.

The poor economy especially affects Iran’s young people — more than 50 percent of the population is under 30, according to official statistics. Officially, youth unemployment is near 20 percent, but experts say it is really closer to 40 percent.

When the protests started last Thursday in the city of Mashhad, demonstrators chanted slogans about the weak economy.

But as the protests spread, they have taken on a far more political cast. Increasingly, they are being directed at Iran’s entire political establishment. Some demonstrators have even called for the death of Mr. Rouhani and of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The strength and volatility of the protests have caught Iranian politicians by surprise. Some have denounced them as “riots,” while others have acknowledged that the widespread frustrations at their root can no longer be ignored.

What we know is that Obama was able to co-opt the protest message of the 99% for his campaign against Mitt Romney. But in the end it was a police crackdown on the main encampment at Zuccotti Park that ended Occupy Wall Street. The same thing will happen in Iran, sooner rather than later.

****

My mantra has been to make it to year-end. That accomplished, my new mantra is make it to February 3. During the holidays there was a brief lull in workplace demands. With the New Year here, it's back to weekend work. So activity on this page is going to continue to be sporadic. Hopefully sometime in February I can return to "Hippies vs. Punks."

Pussy Riot Reappraised

Pussy Riot, the punk-rock/guerilla-protest collective, was in the business page yesterday, interviewed by the soft-spoken Jim Rutenberg for a piece titled "A Warning for Americans From a Member of Pussy Riot." The member, Nadya Tolokonnikova, was in Miami for Art Basel, the annual jet set international art fair.

Based on her new video, “Make America Great Again,” Tolokonnikova has left her ski mask and her faux-punk behind and is now angling in a Madonna/Lady Gaga direction. She is trying to hit the jackpot in the United States.

It is easy to make fun of Pussy Riot, at least the solemn expressions of concern for the group's artistic freedom belched out by the USG/NGO nexus, but Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina did support Occupy Wall Street, visiting imprisoned Cecily McMillan on Rikers Island. Plus, Tolokonnikova publicly backed Bernie Sanders. So it is doubtful that Pussy Riot is a creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Rutenberg, a champion of internet censorship in the form of policing Fake News, steered the conversation towards the dangers of authoritarianism and the crisis of belief in objective truth.

But truth cannot break through if people never find it or believe it when they do. And the problem in Russia is the same one we’re seeing here, Ms. Tolokonnikova told me. “A lot of people are living really unwealthy lives so they have to work not one but two jobs, so they don’t have time to analyze and check facts, and you cannot blame them,” she said.

And, after so many years in which the “lift-all-boats” promises of globalization didn’t come to pass, she said, “they don’t trust bureaucrats, they don’t trust politicians, and they don’t really trust media.”

That’s why the top Russian propagandist Dmitry K. Kiselyov can assert that “objectivity is a myth” and, here in the United States, the paid CNN Trump-supporting contributor Scottie Nell Hughes can declare: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts.”

When there is no truth, invasions are “liberations” and internment camps are “relocation centers.”

But, as Ms. Tolokonnikova said, “There is always a way if you really want to tell the truth.”

Doing so, for her, has come at a cost, even after prison. Informal Cossack security forces beat her and other Pussy Riot members as they prepared to perform in Sochi during the 2014 Olympics. That same year, a youth gang attacked her with trash and a green antiseptic chemical in Nizhny Novgorod, where she was protesting prison conditions. The men were clearly identifiable but, she said, police made no arrests.

Ms. Tolokonnikova has also co-founded a news site called Media Zona. She said it avoided opinion so that readers would accept it as a just-the-facts counter to disinformation.

“You are always in danger of being shut down,” she said. “But it’s not the end of the story because we are prepared to fight.”

Her counsel for United States journalists: You better be, too.

I am not so sure about Media Zone. There appears to be a lot of stuff on Navalny's ongoing legal battles, but there is also a feature on the recent prison strike in the U.S.

What struck me was Tolokonnikova's critique of globalization to a newspaper, The New York Times, whose entire mission is to spread the gospel of globalization.

Black Lives Matter: The Only Game in Town

There is a good story, sort of a roundup, on Black Lives Matter by John Eligon ("One Slogan, Many Methods: Black Lives Matter Enters Politics"). At this point, as I see it, Black Lives Matter is pretty much "the only game in town," if you exclude efforts to struggle in the Augean Stables of the duopoly. The $15 Now movement has largely been adopted by the mainstream. Efforts continue to raise the minimum wage at the city level and for large university systems, but by and large $15 Now has carried the day.

Ferguson, where Black Lives Matter took off, is now almost a year-and-a-half gone, but Black Lives Matter, as Eligon's piece makes clear, is still going strong. It has plenty of grass-roots mojo, as well as insider chops. In a potentially troubling sign, a Black Lives Matter super PAC is being set up, as Eligon reports, to raise money from wealthy Democrat funders:

“At this point, marching and protesting, it’s not going anywhere,” said Tarik Mohamed, treasurer and a founder of the super PAC. “So we’re trying to find new avenues of engaging people for change.” 

And, in a sign of its growing influence, the movement is attracting the attention of deep-pocketed Democratic donors, who met with activists in Washington this week to discuss how they can support the budding movement.

*** 

The Black Lives Matter Super PAC, in addition to contributing to campaigns next year, hopes to capitalize on new technology, such as virtual reality software, to help people understand experiences like solitary confinement, Mr. Mohamed said.

Members of the Democracy Alliance, an influential club of liberal donors, met on Tuesday with groups allied under the Black Lives Matters banner — including ColorOfChange.org, Black Youth Project 100 and the Black Civic Engagement Fund — to discuss possibly directing funds to the movement, said Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an alliance member. The organizations represented only a sample of the groups that donors wanted to shed light on, she said.

“It was just a really real conversation about the complexities of funding movements and the need for more infrastructure, especially black-led infrastructure,” said Ms. Hunt-Hendrix, who has inherited wealth from an oil company her grandfather started. 

Specific funding commitments were not made, she said, and it would be up to individual donors to follow up with organizations they want to support.

“We don’t want to raise expectations that this is a secretive group of donors hoping to raise tons of money,” she said.

As soon as "gee whiz" whiz-bang technology is trotted out as a growth strategy for a social movement run for the hills, preferably the Sierra Maestra.

Nonetheless, Black Lives Matter has been around now and is organizing, growing and influencing perception and governance longer than Occupy Wall Street, an organization I thought would be able to successfully redefine itself with its Occupy Sandy volunteerism after its main encampment was demolished. No such luck,

There needs to be an egalitarian mass movement that is not appropriated by one of the two devilish hands of the duopoly. Obama's legacy will be that he proved adept at suckering people back into belief and participation in a corrupt and failed political system. There are no avatars of the mainstream who will better our lot because the mainstream is choked with lies and is sped along by warfare and concentrated wealth.

There is a powerful, expanding understanding that the system has failed. Black Lives Matter so far has walked the talk.

The Spectacular Failure of Syriza

The Associated Press has a succinct roundup of Syriza's abject failure in "Greece Gets First Batch of New Bailout Loans, Avoids Default," while the Gray Lady's Alison Smale provides a lifeless puff piece, "An Architect of the Latest Greek Bailout Navigates Germany’s Dual Roles," on Germany's victorious finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble.

Syriza's capitulation is complete now that the third bailout agreement has been finalized and the money from the creditors to the creditors is starting to flow. Nothing has changed, as the AP story makes clear. The chairs on the Titanic have been rearranged:

ATHENS, Greece — Greece received the first 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) from its new bailout package on Thursday, allowing it to pay a debt of 3.2 billion euros to the European Central Bank and avoid a messy default.

Greece could not have afforded Thursday's debt repayment, which was confirmed by the debt management agency, without the rescue funds from 18 other European nations that share the euro currency. Missing the payment would have raised new questions about the country's ability to remain in the euro.

European bailout fund supervisors approved the release of the first batch of loans on Wednesday evening. Twelve billion euros are earmarked for repaying debts and the remainder for settling arrears to public sector suppliers.

The new three-year bailout package — Greece's third bailout in little more than five years — is worth a total of 86 billion euros ($96 billion), and the gradual disbursement of funds depends on the Greek government implementing a series of reforms, including steep tax hikes and spending cuts.

Accepting the conditions was a major reversal of policy for Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and the coalition government between his radical left Syriza party and the small nationalist Independent Greeks. It has cost him a major rebellion within Syriza that threatens to split the party and could lead to an early election as soon as next month.

Tsipras has been contemplating his options after a parliament vote to approve the bailout conditions led to dozens of his own party lawmakers voting against him. Among the options being discussed are for him to call a vote of confidence in his government or to call an early election outright, potentially in September.

The government has said its main priority was to secure the bailout funding and to repay the ECB loan on Thursday, after which it would announce any further action.

The prime minister was holding meetings with his ministers, and there was speculation an announcement could come as soon as Thursday afternoon.

The political uncertainty took its toll on the market, with the Athens Stock Exchange down 2.8 percent in early afternoon trading.

Tsipras won general elections in January on promises to repeal similar austerity measures attached to Greece's two previous bailouts. But he has said accepting creditor demands for yet more reforms was the only way to ensure his country remains in the eurozone, which opinion polls have shown the vast majority of his population wants.

Hardliners within his party have accused him of capitulating to unreasonable demands that will plunge the Greek economy further into recession.

Hopefully Tsipras will be tossed from power. The dominant neoliberal paradigm survives because politicians say one thing to the electorate -- promising to tax the super-rich and invest money in social programs; economic justice, basically -- and then when they govern they refuse to do what they were elected to do. Tsipras is a prime example. Obama is another. It also explains why Hillary Clinton has a lot of name recognition but very shallow support. Voters know what they are going to get -- a lot of articulate remedies delivered at campaign events, but nothing or next to nothing once on the throne. It is why there has been a Trump boom. His pandering seems to have ruptured the conventional boundaries of neoliberal discourse. Trump is critical of free trade and by demonizing immigrants he is trying to frack what is left in the played-out well of white backlash. Maybe Greece will lurch rightward in a Trumpist direction after Syriza's spectacular failure.

Whither the dialectic? Can the dialectic, the engine of history, be stemmed? That is what we are seeing in our present history. The rulers are refusing to budge. They are trying to roll back the tide, whether it is the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street or Syriza. Neoliberalism will out.

The 2011 Arab Spring has been, at least temporarily, successfully subverted at the cost of destroying the Sykes-Picot Middle East. Instead of an efflorescence of democracy, the region now has a caliphate which has re-legalized slavery.

Occupy Wall Street was successfully razed and then co-opted by Obama 2012. But Obama in his second term was quickly a disappointment. By 2013 the faithful were deserting en masse.

Syriza following its election victory in January became the vehicle for change. Instead, it ended up implementing neoliberal austerity. More of the same, even though the people voiced support to break free of the paradigm in the historic "Oxi" vote.

The hubris of the power brokers is the belief that history can be mastered, toyed with, subverted -- that neoliberalism can be maintained, despite enormous costs, with a tweak here and there.

But it cannot.

U.S. Hedges on Syrian Peace Talks + Minsk Ceasefire Fiction Evaporates + Garrow Maligns Black Lives Matter & Occupy Wall Street

I took the three-day holiday weekend as an opportunity to catch up on sleep. That's why this page has had only two short posts since Saturday. I slept. I exercised. I watched the conference championships on Sunday. Yesterday, rather than participating in the annual Martin Luther King Day rally and march, I stayed home and cleaned. I find that since my place of employment moved out of the city, lengthening my daily commute from 35-minute walk each way to a 90-minute walk-train-&-bus-ride both to and from the office, that I need a holiday just to scrub my stove top, dust and whatnot. Pretty pathetic.

The holiday weekend turned out to be a good one to hibernate. Anne Barnard did report a lethal Israeli strike on Hezbollah forces in southern Syria, which also managed to kill an Iranian general. Interpreted as part of the March 17 Knesset election campaign, a way for Netanyahu to look tough, Iran and Hezbollah will not overtly respond.

"U.S. Signals Shift on How to End Syrian Civil War," by Anne Barnard and Somini Sengupta, prominently featured on the Gray Lady's web site for the better part of a day, is obviously intended to announce USG's retreat from its Geneva II diktat that "Assad Must Go." It strikes me as nothing more than rhetoric though, an adjustment in State Department public diplomacy in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. People are once again awake to the role of key U.S. ally Saudi Arabia in exporting Wahhabism. It is difficult for the Unites States to be seen as on the side of jihadis now when the United Nations is working on an Aleppo ceasefire and Russia is holding peace talks on Syria. As Barnard and Sengupta write,

Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Mistura [Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations envoy for the crisis in Syria], said that his plan would not resemble the past cease-fires, and that the United Nations, not the Syrian government, would be the guarantor. Yet even the modest Aleppo proposal is on shaky ground. While Mr. Assad has said he will consider it, his government has not signed off on the plan; Mr. de Mistura’s deputy arrived Sunday in Damascus for consultations. 

The Moscow talks are arguably in worse shape. While Mr. Kerry said he hoped the talks “could be helpful,” several crucial opposition groups have refused to attend and say the United States has not pressured them to go. 

That leaves American policy ambiguous, offering only modest verbal support to the new mediation efforts while continuing to finance some Syrian insurgents, yet not enough to seriously threaten Mr. Assad. Even a new program to train them to fight ISIS will not field fighters until May. 

Critics argue that Washington is simply trying to disengage and offload the Syria problem to Mr. Assad’s allies, Russia and Iran, even at the cost of empowering them. 

Still, any attempt to bring the parties to the table should be considered constructive, another Western diplomat said. “You can’t say to the Russians, ‘Go to hell.’ ”

Also in the news this weekend is increased fighting for the airport in Donetsk. Reports have gone back and forth. First, that DPR forces had finally gained control from the Ukrainian junta; then the junta counterattacked with tanks. An indication that the September Minsk ceasefire agreement is now largely worthless is that the Gray Lady is starting to report on the armed conflict in the Donbass again and doing so in terms found in Andrew Kramer's latest, "Ukraine Accuses Russia of Sending More Troops and Artillery to Aid Rebels":

MOSCOW — In as clear a sign as any of the unraveling peace process in eastern Ukraine, the authorities in Kiev accused Russia on Monday of again sending regular army soldiers into Ukraine to prop up pro-Russian separatists who were losing a battle. 

About 700 soldiers crossed Russia’s western border into the snowy war zone in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council said in a statement that was not possible to verify independently. 

They came armed with a wide array of heavy weapons, Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk told journalists in Kiev, the capital. The country’s intelligence agencies “confirm that men and equipment entered from Russia,” he said. Howitzers and other artillery and antiaircraft systems were said to have crossed the border.

This repeats a well-worn pattern from last summer's fighting: the junta suffers a setback, a military defeat, and immediately a keening that "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!" commences in Kiev, in this case from the chief putschist and U.S. lackey, "Yats." I interpret this to mean that things are not going well for the Kiev junta.

Finally, a word about present-history and the Black Lives Matter protest movement. Tanzina Vega had a faintly praising, mostly critical assessment of the Mike Brown/Eric Garner police accountability/racial justice protests. One quote from her "Protesters Out to Reclaim King’s Legacy, but in Era That Defies Comparison" caught my eye; it was from David Garrow, establishment academic and Pulitzer-winning biographer of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

What is far less clear is whether today’s protesters have the ability, or even the intention, to build an organized movement capable of creating social change. 

David J. Garrow, a historian and the author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” said the impromptu protests that had erupted in recent months were not comparable to the strategies used by civil rights groups of the 1960s, which had clear goals such as winning the right to vote or the right to eat at a segregated lunch counter. 

“You could call it rebellious, or you could call it irrational,” Mr. Garrow said of the new waves of protests. “There has not been a rational analysis in how does A and B advance your policy change X and Y?” 

Mr. Garrow compared the protesters to those of Occupy Wall Street. “Occupy had a staying power of, what, six months?” Mr. Garrow said. “Three years later, is there any remaining footprint from Occupy? Not that I’m aware of.”

Remaining "footprint from Occupy?" What about Obama's second term? During my hibernating weekend I watched a couple Frontline documentaries from a few years back. One was "Cliffhanger," about how Obama's failed "Grand Bargain" negotiations with Boehner ended up creating the "fiscal cliff" trade-off that was supposed to be resolved by whomever won the 2012 presidential election. What the Frontline documentary skipped was how Occupy Wall Street sprang to life after the 2011 debt-ceiling standoff that created the "fiscal cliff," and how Occupy Wall Street completely changed the frame of reference from a preoccupation with "crippling debt" to income inequality and how the system is rigged by the 1% against the 99%. Obama appropriated the Occupy Wall Street message for his general election campaign, siphoned off some of its activist energy, and went on to win his second landslide.

So don't accept elite dismissals of Occupy or Black Lives Matter. They are movements that are here to stay and will continue to have an impact.

"The Kids of Today Should Defend Themselves Against the 70's"

At certain airports, one will come across sections of the concourse and find himself/herself suddenly transported back to the the early 1970s. It is an architectural vision of the future that is blank, invisible, non-partisan. No expectations. I must say I love this feeling when it happens. Because, now, today the future is all filled in, and it is dystopian.

Benjamin Mueller and Nina Bernstein had an article, "Targeted Attack on New York Police Officers Reopens Wounds From the Militant 1970s," in Tuesday's paper, not the first one by the Gray Lady, stoking fear of a Big Apple returned to the violence and upheaval of the bad-ass Black Power early 1970s. Fear of the 1970s. This is a preoccupation of the power elite. When change is in the air and it looks like people aren't going to take it anymore, the '70s are dangled in effigy as a time of chaos and death and failure.

For some members of the New York Police Department, the ambush killing of two officers over the weekend roused memories of a far darker chapter in the department’s past, the 1970s, when violence on the streets and anger at the police erupted into the deliberate murder of some officers. 

There were other similarities — public protests roiling the city and the nation; the police blaming politicians for fomenting antipolice sentiment; and city leaders scrambling to defuse a dangerous divide between law enforcers and the communities they serve.

The drug dealing and rampant crime that characterized that era have faded, but the shooting of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos on Saturday shifted the Police Department into the kind of defensive pose more reminiscent of decades past.

Then, as now, officers were being told to take precautions against the risk of targeted attacks, even though the threat from the Brooklyn gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, appeared to stem at least in part from a history of mental illness and recent expressions of despair.

Forty-six police officers were killed in the line of duty in the 1970s, and 41 more in the 1980s. Before Saturday, the last time an officer was killed in the line of duty was in 2011. 

Some of the assassinations of police officers in the early 1970s were stoked by a militant strain of the black liberation movement, including the explosive killing of Officers Rocco Laurie and Gregory Foster in 1972. 

Officer Foster, 22, of the Bronx, and Officer Laurie, 23, of Staten Island, who had fought together as Marines in Vietnam, were shot dead after walking out of a diner in the East Village just before 11 p.m. on Jan. 27, 1972. They had asked to be placed on patrol in the East Village because it was riddled with crime. 

Killings of police officers have dwindled, and the city has sought to rub out the stain of drugs and violent crime, but people in the law enforcement community say the fatal shootings on Saturday ripped open old wounds. 

“The drive to Bellevue Hospital, the chaos, and the sea of uniforms in and out,” Officer Laurie’s wife, Adelaide Laurie, recalled.

“Please don’t let it be that we are retrogressing to that horrible time in the ’70s,” Ms. Laurie said in an interview on Sunday. She added: “It’s the same idea. No one trusted the police; they were called pigs. I’m just kind of reliving that tragedy all over again.”

The text of story refutes the headline, a sure sign that we are dealing with propaganda here. There is very little that is similar between now and then. Drug use and crime is not the issue it was in the 1970s. I can't remember the last time I walked the streets of a big city and was either hassled or felt menaced. Police are not nearly as at risk. But the theme of the piece nonetheless is "Poor, poor police," and its underlying message is, "The police are feeling afraid and maligned. So don't protest."

Pitiful and woeful as this reasoning is, it will definitely have an impact on the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. The question becomes, Will the murders of NYPD's Liu and Ramos mark the beginning of the end for the Black Lives Matter upheaval much the same way that Bloomberg's razing of Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park encampment spelled doom for the global Occupy movement?

I don't think so. Why? The political system is non-functioning; it is not providing society a way to release steam through legislation. The U.S. political system is completely captured by money. Money is brittle, inflexible; it wants to maintain or increase dollarocracy even if it is the costliest of all options.

Obama was able to capture, to a large extent, Occupy. Hillary will not be able to yoke Black Lives Matter.

From Cairo to Ferguson a Shift in Consciousness is Creating Fear in the Power Elite

We need a change in consciousness, and there is plenty of evidence that such a change is underway. When I got out of the train station last night I stepped into one of the many Ferguson protests that occurred nationwide yesterday. I didn't see or hear any protesters, but there were lots of police, and they were guarding the entrances to the big downtown shopping malls. My feeling is that these protests are not going softly into the night; they are a continuation of the Occupy Wall Street movement for economic justice but with the added powerful message of racial equality, not to mention a critique of excessive state force.

Why it is a safe bet to say that these protests are not going away one merely has to think back three years. Occupy was zapped because there were still enough people who believed that Obama represented a progressive trend in politics that had to be defended; hence, when the main Zuccotti Park encampment was rolled up by Gotham's finest in November of 2011, energy shifted to the 2012 presidential campaign and defending Obama from GOP attacks. Obama marshaled some of the Occupy rhetoric and ended up trouncing a weak Republican standard-bearer, Mitt Romney.

Now, besides some Democratic Party apparatchiks, there is no wellspring of support for Obama's presidency. He has alienated the peace wing of the party; I don't believe his "too little, too late" immigration overhaul is anything more than a chess move to checkmate Republicans, and I think that Latinos sense this; finally, his dissembling, feckless treatment of the Ferguson protests have finally splintered his bedrock constituency, blacks.

This was clearly on display yesterday at Obama's White House summit on Ferguson. Mark Landler has an excellent summary of the event in "Obama Offers New Standards on Police Gear":

Among those in the White House meetings on Monday were Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York and Mayor Michael A. Nutter of Philadelphia; the president of the National Urban League, Marc Morial; the Rev. Al Sharpton; and two civil rights leaders from Ferguson, Rasheen Aldridge and Brittany Packnett.

Besides the photo op, there were three items of substance that Obama announced yesterday: 1) a change in federal programs dispensing military hardware to local police departments; 2) federal funding for police body cameras; and 3) a creation of a task force to provide answers on how to improve policing.

But as it turns out the first item of substance is really not substantial at all. All Obama proposed was a change in reporting and an undefined training requirement:

WASHINGTON — President Obama, grappling with how to respond to the racial unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and a wave of anger at law enforcement officials across the country, said Monday that he would tighten standards on the provision of military-style equipment to local police departments and provide funds for police officers to wear cameras. 

But Mr. Obama stopped short of curtailing the transfer of military-grade gear to local law enforcement authorities and continued to put off a visit to Ferguson. Instead, the White House tried to channel the rage over the fatal police shooting of a black teenager there into a national debate about how to restore trust between the police and the public.

Administration officials said they concluded after a review that the vast majority of transfers of military-style equipment strengthened local policing, even after the police in Ferguson were criticized for heavy-handed use of such gear to quell protests last summer. But the officials said local authorities needed common standards in the types of hardware they requested and better training in how to use it.

All told, the changes were modest, and Mr. Obama himself was circumspect in remarks about Ferguson after an orchestrated day of meetings at the White House with civil rights and religious leaders, big-city mayors, and law enforcement officials. The president seemed eager to keep the focus not on what happened in Ferguson but on its broader lessons for the country.

***

Curtailing those transfers, experts said, would be a reversal of years of policy and would have scant support in Congress. The militarization of police has been part of a broader counterterrorism strategy of fortifying American cities, which took root after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has become a reliable source of federal largess for local authorities.

With no legislation likely, Mr. Obama has instead focused on standardizing regulations across the multiple federal agencies — primarily the Department of Homeland Security — that supply this equipment to cities and towns. He would also seek to improve training and require “after-action” reports for incidents involving federal equipment. 

The report, the White House said, found “a lack of consistency in how federal programs are structured, implemented and audited.” Criticism of the practices swelled after the police in full body armor, on heavily armed vehicles, confronted protesters in Ferguson with assault rifles.

*** 

To bolster local policing, the government also announced a $263 million program that will provide up to 50,000 body cameras for police. The video footage from these cameras could clarify disputed incidents like the deadly encounter between the teenager in Ferguson, Michael Brown, and the police officer, Darren Wilson.

***

The president also announced on Monday the formation of a task force to improve local policing. Leading the panel will be Charles H. Ramsey, the commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department, and Laurie Robinson of George Mason University, a leading criminal law scholar.

Don't get your hopes up that the task force is anything other than a cosmetic effort by Obama because as Landler reports at the end of his story,

The White House also faced skepticism in its choice of Commissioner Ramsey as a co-chairman of the task force. During his tenure as police chief in the District of Columbia from 1998 to 2007, he was criticized for the mass arrest of people protesting International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings. 

“We were just dumbfounded when we heard they had chosen Chief Ramsey,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which brought suits against Mr. Ramsey in Washington. “You’d be hard pressed to find a more inappropriate choice.”

Obama is spent. He can't keep the indians on the rez anymore. We are at the beginning of a great conflict. The established political parties are absent legitimacy. There will be a tendency to reassert the legitimacy of the state by means of a display of force -- like the pools of police officers I saw guarding department stores last night. This will have the opposite effect, diminishing the government's legitimacy even more.

In the United States we are heading in the direction of what I have been calling the "Sisi option" -- a sunlighting of the Deep State, a public embrace by the power elite of a massive police state. Thailand is already there.

Apropos of this it is worthwhile to read the Gray Lady's unsigned editorial on Mubarak's release from prison, "In Egypt, a Verdict Turns Back the Clock":

The Egyptian court that threw out the murder charges against former President Hosni Mubarak may have closed the final chapter on the Arab Spring. After the country’s brief, flawed attempt at democracy, the army and its supporters put in place an even more authoritarian system than the Mubarak regime. 

Now, in a final insult to the hundreds of protesters who were killed in the 2011 uprising, Mr. Mubarak apparently will go free, and there will be no justice for those who died or accountability for the decades of human rights abuses by his government.

***

The public prosecutor could appeal the murder case to the Court of Cassation, Egypt’s highest criminal court. But, on Sunday, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army general who overthrew the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013, seemed to rule that out. Meanwhile, Mr. Morsi and thousands of his Muslim Brotherhood supporters still languish in prison. 

Mr. Sisi said Egypt must “look to the future” and “cannot ever go back.” It appears that the Obama administration feels the same way. In a bizarre response, a State Department spokeswoman offered diplomatic pablum when asked to comment on the verdict and referred queries to the Egyptian government.

*** 

Since Saturday, protests against the ruling have drawn hundreds of participants and involved numerous clashes with security forces. Two demonstrators were killed. While the demonstrations have been smaller than those in 2011, the venues — university campuses across the country — suggest that it may be harder for Mr. Sisi to erase the past than he thinks. Among other challenges, Egypt is struggling with a depressed economy, an insurgency in Sinai, and an Islamic State affiliate that late Sunday took responsibility for killing an American oil worker in Egypt’s Western Desert in August. 

Half of Egypt’s population is under the age of 25, and many of those young people were at the heart of the Arab Spring movement and its demands for jobs, education, housing and greater freedoms. 

Those aspirations won’t go away. And while Egyptians may want stability, repression and a lack of accountability will produce only more discontent. The Mubarak verdict is another shift away from long delayed hopes for a productive and just society.

The same goes for the United States.

**** 

Update on Missouri Governor Jay Nixon's call for a special session of the legislature to find ways to pay for the lengthy deployment of the national guard and state highway patrol. Turns out he doesn't need a special session -- which would have allowed for a spirited public debate on the wisdom and effectiveness of martial law; he can fund by fiat. According to Monica Davey, John Eligon, Jess Bidgood in "A Week Later, Protesters Remain Vocal on Ferguson, Partly With Silence":

Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri said on Monday that there was no longer a need for a special legislative session, which he had called to authorize more money for Ferguson-related expenses by the National Guard and the State Highway Patrol. He and senior legislative leaders agreed that he could use his budget authority to cover the payments.

Bad as It Is, Failure of Umbrella Movement's Straw Poll Is Even Worse Than It Looks

The Umbrella Movement is one-month old. 

At some point the Gray Lady stopped referring to the Hong Kong pro-democracy sit-in as a "Revolution" and started calling it a "Movement." I thought that by the end of the sit-in's first week it was basically over because by then it was clear that the police were not going to make the mistake they made initially, which was the police mistake made during the Seattle WTO ministerial of responding to peaceful protesters with massive amounts of tear gas and pepper spray and flash-bang grenades. When the police respond with massive force to a non-violent demonstration it actually brings more people into the streets.

By the end of the first week in Hong Kong the crowds were thinning. The first burst of enthusiasm had spent itself.

At this point there are two main encampments: one in the Admiralty district and one in Mong Kok. The Zuccotti Park encampment, the hub of the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement, managed to survive for two months, from September 17 to November 15, 2011 before Mayor Bloomberg's police force broke it apart early one morning.

I'm sure the leaders of the Umbrella Movement are aware that the clock is ticking and something needs to be done soon to avoid the fate of Occupy Wall Street; hence the planned straw poll designed, most likely, to generate momentum to get officials back to the bargaining table. Unfortunately, as Chris Buckley and Alan Wong report in "Pro-Democracy Movement’s Vote in Hong Kong Abruptly Called Off," the vote crashed on the launch pad:

HONG KONG — Organizers of a planned vote among Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators abruptly canceled it on Sunday, exposing tensions and confusion over how to sustain the movement a month after protesters occupied major streets to demand free elections. 

Student leaders and organizers of Occupy Central With Love and Peace, the group that laid the groundwork for a civil disobedience campaign for democracy, had urged people to vote at protest sites on Sunday and Monday as a way of registering their support for student negotiators seeking political concessions from the government. 

The referendum boiled down to two simple questions: Did voters endorse demanding that the Hong Kong government press Beijing to make democratic concessions on election rules, and did they agree that the changes should apply to city Legislative Council elections in 2016 and the race for chief executive in 2017?

But hours before the balloting was due to start on Sunday night, organizers announced it was off and apologized. They said there was too much disagreement over the wording and value of the vote. “We acknowledge that there was not enough consultation with the public,” they said in an emailed statement. 

At a news conference, some organizers were contrite, while others cast their surprise move in the best possible light.

“It won’t affect the morale of this movement,” said Alex Chow Yong Kang, the secretary general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students. “This decision can rebuild the trust between us and the protesters. Protesters have all along shared a single goal; it’s just that they may have different views about the execution.”

But even before the cancellation, the vote, intended as a display of unity, had brought into focus tensions among protesters over how to hone their broadly shared aspirations into durable demands and strategies. Such strains could deepen as the protesters face fatigue in their own ranks and the refusal of the Hong Kong government and Chinese Communist Party leaders to make the major concessions demanded by demonstrators, said David Zweig, a professor of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 

“The question becomes: What’s the endgame?” he said in a telephone interview from Toronto, where he was visiting. “Once they didn’t pull out earlier and declare victory, they needed something from the government to be able to declare victory. Now they need to find some endgame, and I think that they’re not going to find it without compromise.”

Although supporters of the protests were unlikely to disagree with the two wordy propositions on the canceled ballot, some feared the vote could pave the way for unacceptable compromise or premature withdrawal from the street occupations in three parts of the city. Benny Tai, an associate professor of law who is a co-founder of Occupy Central, earlier denied that intention and said he had no power over deciding when protesters left the streets. Occupy Central had initially envisioned a much smaller, briefer protest in Central, the main financial district of Hong Kong.

At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Tai said that he could not say how to sustain the protests into a second month. “You can just go down to the plaza and ask the protesters who have stationed there for so many days, how long do they prepare to stay. I think you can get a good answer.” 

But protesters have voiced a range of opinions on the future of their grass-roots movement. Some have wavered from the demand that voters be allowed to put forward candidates for chief executive without vetting from Beijing, while others said that demand, called civic nomination, could not be weakened.

Peter Lee wrote recently on the Counterpunch web site, "Democracy in Hong Kong: The Unelected Battle," about a document dump "of the meeting minutes of the Alliance for Democracy, a grouping of pro-democratic organizations engaged in Occupy-related issues."

In the minutes, Benny Tai, the chief legal mind for Occupy Central with Love and Peace, frets that direct nomination -- the goal of the Umbrella Movement -- is not an international legal standard:

Unless the [document dump] report is repudiated, the pro-dems don’t have a legal leg to stand on within the framework of the Basic Law and the NPC; what’s more surprising is that they recognize that they don’t even have a particularly strong legal case for direct nomination under the “international standards” for democracy the students are currently trumpeting.

Claudia Mo, a Civic Party stalwart and ex-AFP reporter (which might explain why she has appeared a few times in AFP’s Occupy coverage as a quotable notable), observed that “international standards” seemed unclear.

Benny Tai, whose job is presumably to make an airtight legal case for the action, instead observed that international practices don’t demand popular nomination. In fact, the UK doesn’t have direct nomination, as a HKSAR representative pointed out during the student dialogue. The key stipulation is a matter of principle: Do citizens have real choice? Do the candidates represent different needs and backgrounds? The best he could say was that popular nomination would unequivocally meet international standards, not that it was the only way.

Even more problematically, perhaps, the UK opted out of the Article 25 of the Universal Covenant of Civil and Political Rights for universal suffrage and direct elections for Hong Kong during its merrily undemocratic colonial years, and the PRC succeeded to that treatment when it took over in 1997. The OHK legal case rests on the rather frail legal reed that Beijing inadvertently surrendered its reservation by holding legislative elections.

And that is the best that the cream of the Hong Kong legal profession and the NED—whose job it is to twist Beijing’s knickers on these kinds of treaties—has been able to come up with after over a decade of determined lawyering. 

Remarkably, Benny Tai also voiced the concern that another popular referendum might be necessary to legitimate OHK’s demands and allow it to achieve standing as a negotiator, another tip that the case is not a legal slam dunk. (I might point out parenthetically that I approve of this state of mind, since otherwise we’re left with the metaphysical, undemocratic, and dare I say borderline-putschlike idea that the students can claim the right to speak for “Hong Kong” simply by putting feet on the street.)

So the struggle is in its essence political, not legal. 

Without a solid legal strategy, therefore, OHK has turned to a political strategy, that is, to create a rumpus in Hong Kong sufficient to discredit the HKSAR report and reopen the issue.

In other words, absent any legal standing, a popular vote, even a straw poll held in the main protest encampments, became a necessity. The fact that it couldn't get off the ground bodes ill for the Umbrella Movement. Judged by the standards of Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park, it has a month left.

The highly politicized U.N. Human Rights Committee in Geneva weighed in with an assist for the Umbrella Movement late last week. Michael Forsythe reported, "U.N. Human Rights Panel Urges China to Allow Free Elections in Hong Kong," that

The United Nations Human Rights Committee urged China on Thursday to allow elections in Hong Kong without restrictions on who can run as a candidate. The move appeared likely to draw strong criticism from Beijing, where officials decided in August to set strict guidelines for the 2017 election of the city’s next leader, prompting mass sit-in protests.

The 18-member panel in Geneva said that Hong Kong needed to do more to ensure that its people had not only the right to vote, but also the right to run for office. 

“Hong Kong China should take all necessary measures to implement universal and equal suffrage in conformity with the covenant, as a matter of priority for all future elections,” Cornelis Flinterman, a member of the rights panel from the Netherlands, said on Thursday, referring to an international agreement on political rights.

The committee focused on the Aug. 31 decision by China’s Communist Party-run legislature to adopt guidelines for the 2017 election that would effectively keep anyone not approved by Beijing from appearing on the ballot for chief executive, the city’s top post. 

Under the guidelines, candidates must get the approval of more than half the members of a 1,200-person nominating committee, which includes many of Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing tycoons as well as representatives of other social groups friendly to the central government. The city, Asia’s most important financial center, was transferred from British to Chinese control in 1997, and its legal and administrative system is separate from that of the rest of China. 

Yuval Shany, a member of the rights panel from Israel, said the nominating committee was “not fully representative of the Hong Kong population.”

The irony of Israel lecturing China about providing full representation for Hong Kong passes, of course, without comment by Forsythe. One wonders why the Human Rights Committee doesn't implore the United States to allow candidates to run without restrictions. Better yet, why not an official U.N. rebuke for the myriad voter identification laws being passed by Republican legislatures to disenfranchise poor people?

One possible silver lining is that the Umbrella Movement is creating a new international standard, "Civic Nomination," one that is not practiced in the industrialized core Western democracies. This can be used, as it is in London, to reignite Occupy Wall Street.

Umbrella Revolution Folding Up After Only a Week

I should be clear. I am not opposed to the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

What I am opposed to is the official narrative of the protests as told in the Western mainstream media. That narrative goes something like this: a peaceful, industrious, capitalist people struggles to free itself from the tentacles of a totalitarian Communist China by embracing the kind of democratic reform we enjoy in the egalitarian, modern West.

It is a crock of shit, a lie, part of the larger narrative of official enemies. There are bad actors on the global stage, according to the Gray Lady, and these number Iran, China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, as well as others. The official enemies found in the mainstream media almost always align with those that the U.S. State Department considers antagonists.

Take today's paper for instance. the number of major stories devoted to Occupy Hong Kong equal that of the West African Ebola outbreak. All this week there have been saturation levels of coverage of the pro-democracy protests; Occupy Wall Street never garnered anywhere near the attention.

So what are we to make of this? The obvious, I would think: We are dealing with an official enemy here, the People's Republic of China; so no expense will be spared. In the case of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the enemy in question was the be-all and end-all of the U.S., "capitalism in one country" state itself, a nominally democratic massively plutocratic neoliberalism.

As the Hong Kong Occupy protests begin to splinter today, it is interested to note the differences and similarities with Occupy Wall Street. Of significant differences, I think there are two. First, Occupy Wall Street was very careful never to articulate specific political demands, as have the two main student groups and Occupy Central With Love and Peace have in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong the two demands are that chief executive Leung Chun-ying resign and that going forward his successor can be elected by popular vote without first being approved by a nominating committee selected by Beijing. OWS was a Utopian movement, a grand gesture rejecting pretty much the entire cultural project of the West -- its consumerism, its pay-to-play representative democracy, its pauper's wage slavery careerism. There have been indications that this sensibility is also at work in Hong Kong. Good.

Second, the street occupations in Hong Kong are more akin to what went on in Bangkok in the run up to the military coup there than Occupy Wall Street and its various epigones across the United States. OWS was very careful to choose parks, usually located downtown and relatively small, for its occupations. Marches would proceed from those spaces. But mass sit-ins at several locations of the type that protesters in Hong Kong are undertaking were never a feature of Occupy Wall Street -- for the simple reason that, without a doubt, the police would crack down quickly and harshly and be applauded in the prestige press for doing so.

The main similarity between OWS and Hong Kong is the commitment to leaderlessness and consensus in decision making and a lateral rather than hierarchical social structure. This is creating the obligatory splintering and chaos, as Austin Ramzy and Keith Bradsher describe in "Hong Kong Leader Refuses to Resign, but Deputy to Meet With Protesters":

“We don’t have a leader,” said Irene Ng, an English major at Hong Kong Baptist University. “This is trying to be a democracy, but then you try to reach a decision and you can’t. Nobody can decide. The ultimate problem is it might split us apart.” 

The protesters interviewed gave no indication that a retreat was imminent. But many wondered how long they could sustain the turnout necessary to block crucial roads in the city and just what would constitute an acceptable victory. 

Tim Lam, an engineer who said he had joined the sit-ins every day since Sunday, said he expected the occupation to last another week at most. “That’s about how long the protesters’ passion can last,” he said. “After one, two weeks of occupation, protesters would start to think about how it affects the economy, the everyday lives of people.” 

Further escalation by the protesters could alienate members of the public resentful of a demonstration that affects their daily lives. But without more aggressive steps, the protests could fade. “If we take rash actions, we may lose people’s sympathy,” said Niko Cheng, a recent college graduate and protester in Mong Kok, a densely populated area of Hong Kong on the Kowloon Peninsula. “But if this drags on — it’s already turning into a carnival, with people dancing, singing and all that — people may forget what they’re here for.” 

Prominent voices in the pro-democracy campaign have indicated that there is no consensus on what, short of an unlikely reversal of the central government’s position, would lead to an end of the protests.

Umbrella Revolution Through the Prism of Occupy Wall Street

It started in Tunisia in December 2010 when a food vendor set himself on fire to protest his treatment by a local government official. Mass protests over joblessness, inflation, corruption -- the whole hopeless condition we have become familiar with over the last 20 years -- followed, leading to president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fleeing to Saudi Arabia in January 2011.

That same month protesters occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo. By February president Hosni Mubarak had stepped down, handing power to the Council of the Armed Forces.

There was a feeling of jubilation. Old, rotten systems could be swept away by people power. That was the feeling the Arab Spring inspired.

In September 2011 the Occupy Wall Street movement began in Lower Manhattan in emulation of the Tahrir Square protests. “America needs its own Tahrir.” Copycat Occupy encampments shot up all over the United States and Europe. We were all giddy with hope.

Once Zuccotti Park -- the central protest site of Occupy Wall Street -- was cleared early one morning in November by NYPD, the party was over. Other Occupy encampments would linger on, but without the central, symbolic site of resistance in Wall Street, the movement shuffled off the stage.

I was a supporter of Occupy Wall Street; I supported financially and participated modestly in the activities of the Occupy Seattle.

My assessment is that weather is an issue for peaceful sit-ins/occupations of the type that Hong Kong is embarking on with its Umbrella Revolution. (Thank goodness it has been named something other than another color.) Rain, constant rain in the fall here in the Pacific Northwest, turned the Occupy Seattle encampment, once it had been moved from downtown's Westlake Park up to Seattle Central Community College, into a fetid frigid filthy swamp populated by what seemed to be mostly junkies and homeless youth. It went from being a tightly run, clean, compact encampment with a busy field kitchen serving nutritious hot meals to a post-apocalyptic slum.

The gist of Keith Bradsher's article this morning, "Hong Kong Government’s Strategy on Protesters: Wait Them Out," is that the decision makers, following Sunday's orgy of  tear gas and pepper spray, have gotten a handle on things:

The wait-them-out strategy appears to have the support of the city’s influential tycoons, many of whom are out of town during this holiday week in any case. The tycoons derive the bulk of their income from leasing out their many commercial, office and residential properties, and their tenants have to keep paying Hong Kong’s famously high rents even as protesters restrict access to many businesses.

The hope of the Hong Kong government, and of Beijing, is that this economic pressure will turn owners of small businesses and other members of the middle class against the demonstrators. Local officials hope that the public will come to see the protesters as people who inconvenience others, not as icons of democracy, as the students occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing became in 1989 before China’s brutal crackdown.

“This is a Cultural Revolution revival, this is not Tiananmen — they think they are doing the right thing, so they can infringe on other people’s interests and therefore make the government kowtow to them,” said the person heavily involved in the government’s decision-making. 

The government adviser said officials were actively trying to avoid a Tiananmen-style crackdown. “We cannot repeat the mistake of 25 years ago,” the adviser said.

The rainy season in Hong Kong is in the spring. Autumn is supposed to be pleasant. The cool winter months can be spent easily outdoors with the proper amount of layering. So the Umbrella Revolution could be lengthy. Bradsher hints at a possible concession that the PRC is willing to make:

The central authorities in Beijing have allowed Hong Kong officials to manage the political crisis here as long as they do not promise fundamental changes in how the next chief executive is chosen in 2017. The Hong Kong government has been mulling, with Beijing’s support, a small compromise that might allow democracy supporters to say later that they had achieved something. 

Beijing has mandated that while all adults will be allowed to vote in 2017, only names approved by a nomination committee will be allowed on the ballot. The nomination committee is to be drawn in equal shares from four sectors of society; one of these, for example, is the “industrial, commercial and financial sector,” which tends to be dominated by pro-Beijing tycoons. 

The Hong Kong government is willing to broaden the number of people who participate in each sector’s selection of delegates, said the person heavily involved in local decision-making. But while a few pro-democracy politicians have been willing to discuss such a change, there has been no such interest from protesters. They mainly want the general public to be allowed to nominate candidates, an idea that officials have firmly ruled out.

The primary difference between Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Central with Love and Peace is that OWS rejected the whole neoliberal system where the 99% are ruled by their 1% overlords who controll the predatory casino capitalist economy and the democratically elected representatives. The Umbrella Revolution doesn't want to change the neoliberal system; it just wants to change Hong Kong's Basic Law to allow for direct elections of freely nominated (meaning not pre-selected by Beijing) candidates for chief executive. In other words, the goal of the Umbrella Revolution is no revolution at all.

Hiding in the Basement Wearing Flip Flops and Shorts

On Wednesday The Saker posted a partial translation of an interview with Nikolai Starikov. Starikov is a Russian author and political activist. The segment of the interview that caught my attention is the part where Starikov discusses the relatively small numbers of Donbass citizens who have joined the armed struggle against the Kiev junta:

It’s easy for us here in Russia to discuss these topics, but over there [Novorossia] there are shootings, bombings and killings taking place. The situation is such that the civil war has begun and there are two ways to end it. Either the country of Nazis/fascists side of the illegitimate Kiev junta wins or those who do not want to live under fascist rule win. There is no other way to end this civil war. Because Americans would never agree to negotiations, which would result in separation of a part of Ukraine and they will continue the military operation. Therefore, for the people who live there in the Ukraine there is a choice. A person always has a choice –but a very limited choice. You either continue living your average civilian life, and that’s understandable, we understand why people make that choice, they just want to continue living, no person really wants to go to war, a normal person would never want to kill others. The Right Sector would inevitably start shooting at someone, they go into Mariupol, and they go to Odessa and kill. A normal person does not want to kill anyone, but there won’t be any life in the future if you remain on the sidelines of the conflict, allowing Americans to continue doing what they want. This is the point where you have to choose, dear citizens of Ukraine. Unfortunately the reason why we are separated by state borders, is because of the traitor Gorbachov. Today it is a reality. But I am convinced that sooner or later we will be together as part of a supranational entity. Russia can only provide limited aid today. We cannot do this for Ukraine, that is the paradox. When the reader asked this question, he never even considered to take up arms and defend his native Donetsk. He goes to work, he wants to feed his family, the maximum he would do is leave Donetsk, maybe move to somewhere in Russia. But if everyone leaves Donetsk, who is going to defend it? Volunteers from Russia? The Russian Army? That cannot be. The Russian Army cannot be a part of this conflict, Russia should not be dragged into this. This is exactly what the West wants. Things were done quite elegantly in Crimea. The Russian Army was already stationed there, but did not really take part in the conflict. Everything was done by the Self-Defense Forces. This was done beautifully and it is very difficult to dispute that. In Donetsk today, there are Self-Defense Forces, but they cannot deal with the tasks at hand in their current numbers of men.   They have weapons in Ukraine, with supplies of Artyomovsky warehouse you can arm all Ukraine twice. Not enough people who understand that they have no other choice, but to take up weapons to protect their families and freedom. Look at Slavyansk, so frequently women and children are shown to be leaving, but so often you can see young man leaving. They stand by their ladies in shorts and flip flops telling how they hide in basement. They will continue hiding until victory of state of Ukraine. If they want to see end of shelling they have to go and help militias. There is no other option. 

I think Starikov is right. You have to be willing to fight. Something we have lost sight of here in the belly of the beast. We had the chance at the end of autumn 2011 when most of the Occupy encampments were rolled up by means of police force. The response was largely nonexistent. We decided instead to hide in the basement in shorts and flip flops and consume the televised theatrics of a presidential campaign. And that's the way it usually goes in the United States.

But apparently not so in Iraq. There, reporting from Baghdad, old Afghan hands Alissa Rubin and Rod Nordland, say that "Seeing Their Gains at Risk, Shiites Flock to Join Militias":

Ali, another Shiite militia leader, described the militias more as a recruiting mechanism, and said the members would work full time for the army. “Now we have more than 14,000 volunteers in Muthanna Airport,” he said. “They came from all the provinces, but most of them from Baghdad. What we want is building a companion army from the volunteers, and this army will be supervised, equipped and run by the government. It’s similar to a public army. 

“All Shiite factions have pushed their disagreements away and decided to join this army to protect Baghdad,” he said, adding a note of urgency: “The militants are just outside Baghdad, and even the main road between Baghdad and Diyala is partially under their control.”

The Shia have their holy places, What do we have here in the U.S.? We, as in Cairo and in Odessa, have our football teams. That's about it. We also have our comicbook heroes. But both the stars of gridiron and the comic shop have largely been politically neutered. In the case of comics though there is plenty of subversiveness just below the surface. And occasionally in football reality peeks out, as in the Richard Sherman NFC Championship Game brouhaha.

All in all we are a quiescent mass, attired in flip flops and boxer shorts, preferring the comfort of the basement hideout to the struggle that real as opposed to merely formal democracy demands.

Post-Tiananmen China Good Description of U.S.

The Gray Lady has been churning out the column inches for more than a week commemorating the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, which is today, June 4 (liu si to the Chinese). I've generally been ignoring the coverage because China, like Syria, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, is an "official" enemy and is treated as such by the Times. So the reporting one gets is tendentious. Worthwhile information is imparted but through the screen of U.S. foreign policy.

This morning on the train to work I decided to jump from the front of the paper to the op-ed page. There I read an interesting opinion piece, Tiananmen, Forgotten, by Beijing-based journalist Helen Gao. Gao argues that after Tianamen the Communist Party successfully depoliticized culture for the educated masses. Young people in China today are mesmerized by status and consumerism and not political transformation.

What struck me about Gao's description of present-day China is how closely it fits the United States:

To my generation, people born in the late 1980s and 1990s, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s at the start of the economic reform period feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades. Chinese leaders, having learned their lesson during the Tiananmen protests, have kept politics out of our lives, while channeling our energies to other, state-sanctioned pursuits, primarily economic advancement. 

Growing up in the post-Tiananmen years, life was like a cruise on a smooth highway lined with beautiful scenery. We studied hard and crammed for exams. On weekends, we roamed shopping malls to try on jeans and sneakers, or hit karaoke parlors, bellowing out Chinese and Western hits.

This alternation between exertion and ennui slowly becomes a habit and, later, an attitude. Both, if well-endured, are rewarded by a series of concrete symbols of success: a college diploma, a prestigious job, a car, an apartment. The rules are simple, though the competition never gets easier; therefore we look ahead, focusing on our personal well-being, rather than the larger issues that bedevil the society.

My optimism in 2011 for the Occupy movement was based on the inability of college-educated youth to find work after the Great Recession. Without the state being able to blinker a new generation with rewarding careers -- "concrete symbols of success" -- youth would turn to political struggle to effect change.

But the truncheons came down and the encampments were cleared, Obama walloped Romney, and we went through a series of theatrical performances in Washington D.C. -- the Fiscal Cliff, the Sequester, last October's government shutdown, the Obamacare rollout, etc. Now we're back to where we were before Occupy Wall Street.

Gao marks the cultural barriers to change in China, but she is also describing the neoliberal West:

If the previous generations learned the cost of political transgression through persecutions and crackdowns, today’s youth, especially those from elite backgrounds, instinctively understand the futility of challenging the system. After all, most of the time, power interferes with our personal lives only in the form of nettlesome restrictions. . . .

Rebelling against these hurdles seems both naïve and unproductive — an understanding that the system has inculcated into us early on — as it would likely achieve little. Circumvention and compromise help us move forward, in a society where the price of falling behind is surely greater than the minor harms in our daily lives caused by state power. 

Over time, such an approach is rationalized, and even defended by the very group of young elites who in previous generations have been the most passionate advocates for change.

Add Thai Coup to Egypt's Last Year -- See What's Coming?

The Sisi coup in Egypt last July represented a turning point. As I said before on this page, I thought a lot of power elite sat up and took note. The trumpeted Arab Spring democracy movement of aspiring youth could be rolled back. All that was required was the requisite amount of ruthlessness.

Today the announcement by Thomas Fuller reporting from Bangkok on the military coup there, "Thailand’s Military Stages Coup, Thwarting Populist Movement," says that the generals in charge have learned their lesson; they're not going to skimp when it comes back to paring back democratic rights:

It was the second time in a decade that the army had overthrown an elected government, but there were signs that this takeover could be more severe and include sharp curbs on Thailand’s freewheeling news media. 

The coup was seen as a victory for the elites in Thailand who have grown disillusioned with popular democracy and have sought for years to diminish the electoral power of Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister who commands support in the rural north. Unable to win elections, the opposition has instead called for an appointed prime minister, and pleaded with the military for months to step in.

As soldiers spread out throughout Bangkok on Thursday, the generals issued a series of announcements, declaring most of the Constitution “terminated,” banning gatherings of more than five people, imposing a curfew and shutting schools. 

The coup was at least the 12th military takeover since Thailand abandoned the absolute monarchy in 1932. But unlike many previous coups, which involved infighting among generals, Thursday’s military takeover had as a subtext the political awakening among rural Thais who have loyally supported Mr. Thaksin and benefited from patronage and policies such as universal health care and microloans.

*** 

After deposing Mr. Thaksin in 2006, the generals put in place an administration that was widely seen as a failure. 

“The lesson they learned the last time was that the medicine they prescribed after the coup was not strong enough,” said Thongchai Winichakul, a former student activist in Thailand who is now a professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin. “There’s a high possibility of very drastic measures and suppression this time.”

In the same national edition of the Gray Lady today there is more information of the extent of the national security state monitoring the Occupy Wall Street protest movement of fall 2011, "Officials Cast Wide Net in Monitoring Occupy Protests":

[C]ommunications, distributed by people working with counterterrorism and intelligence-sharing offices known as fusion centers, were among about 4,000 pages of unclassified emails and reports obtained through freedom of information requests by lawyers who represented Occupy participants and provided the documents to The New York Times. They offer details of the scrutiny in 2011 and 2012 by law enforcement officers, federal officials, security contractors, military employees and even people at a retail trade association. The monitoring appears similar to that conducted by F.B.I. counterterrorism officials, which was previously reported.

The U.S. political system is just about as completely captured as one can imagine. There is occasionally a spot of sunshine, like the vote the other day in Jackson County, OR to ban GMOs. But on the national level, nothing of the sort.

An Occupy movement is going to have to reappear to rejuvenate the system. Know that when it does there will be "no more water but fire next time."

Captain America #17

A telling indicator of the depth of distrust in government is how it is depicted in the pages of Marvel Comics. Invariably the forces of malignancy have co-opted the USG, and it is the role of the superhero to beat it back.

It is a tall order. And no superhero has a tougher pull than Captain America, the putative representative of an increasingly discredited global behemoth. The American Dream is now generally regarded as no longer operative. Income inequality (brought front and center thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement) and a lack of remunerative employment are the new normal. Hand in hand with the economic stagnation of the Great Recession goes a commitment to perpetual war. This is on display currently with our Nobel Peace Prize winning president relaunching the Cold War and actively planning for another lengthy conflict in the Middle East.

But the latest run of Captain America could not be in finer hands. Writer Rick Remender is a true subversive. Marvel has the good sense to realize that the only way to keep Captain America alive is not to avoid reality. Below are seven scans of Captain America #17. The art is by Nic Klein; the colors, Dean White.

Captain America #17 opens with Nuke, a pill-popping Vietnam-era Super Soldier Program knockoff of the original Cap, reduced to a pile of charred meat as Dr. Mindbubble, a super-villain who owes his origin to a combination of self-administered LSD and Super Soldier serum, burbles soothingly to him:

There, there. A beautiful dream to help the passing. 

You should have been the prototype of the next species. But they twisted you up, old friend. And you let them. Let them take your beauty and burn it in effigy to a world ruled by religious and institutional fascism. 

Taught to lay your life on the line for their stubborn warfare  . . .

. . . Instead of interacting harmoniously with this joyful world. All just as I warned you, Nuke.

 But your test is over now, good spirit. I wish you a peaceful journey to whatever reward you've selected. 

Captain America #17 also features the anti-capitalist villain Ran Shen, The Iron Nail. The Iron Nail and Dr. Mindbubble, quite persuasively, break down the current deep state of our permanent government:

And what do we have here? A glittering dragon slithering from the sky.

Hello, Horace.

Ran Shen. What madness. I never imagined our paths to cross again.

I made you a promise.

That you did. How long had I been in there?

Fifty years.

Fifty years falling inward. It was a strange gift, Ran. I discovered complete tranquility within the core of my being.

While the world without fell to the fascist control of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Well, sure. Only possible outcome. A band of humans with so much power, and so little oversight, is destined to grow into a living organism -- with its own goals -- its own greed.

The more a thing grows, the more convinced it becomes that it is right. Why else would it have such success? And at a certain size, no one can control it -- no one can tell the swollen beast it is wrong!

And it falls on us to liberate humanity from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secret dictatorship. What do you say, old friend? Up for a little civil disobedience? 

Let's open their eyes.

In the final three scans, Steve Rogers, a.k.a., Captain America, and his new sidekick Jet Black mix it up with the Shaolin Scientist Squad: