Obama's Pentagon Strategy: A Leaner, More Efficient Empire

By Charles Davis and Medea Benjamin

In an age when U.S. power can be projected through private mercenary armies and unmanned Predator drones, the U.S. military need no longer rely on massive, conventional ground forces to pursue its imperial agenda, a fact President Barack Obama is now acknowledging. But make no mistake: while the tactics may be changing, the U.S. taxpayer – and poor foreigners abroad – will still be saddled with overblown military budgets and militaristic policies.

Speaking January 5 alongside his Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the president announced a shift in strategy for the American military, one that emphasizes aerial campaigns and proxy wars as opposed to “long-term nation-building with large military footprints.” This, to some pundits and politicians, is considered a tectonic shift.

Indeed, the way some on the left tell it, the strategy marks a radical departure from the imperial status quo. “Obama just repudiated the past decade of forever war policy,” gushed Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, calling the new strategy a “[s]lap in the face to the generals.”

Conservative hawks, meanwhile, predictably declared that the sky is falling. “This is a lead from behind strategy for a left-behind America,” cried hyperventilating California Republican Buck McKeon, chairman the House Armed Services Committee. “This strategy ensures American decline in exchange for more failed domestic programs.” In McKeon’s world, feeding the war machine is preferable to feeding poor people.

Unfortunately, though, rather than renouncing empire and endless war, Obama's stated strategy for the military going forward just reaffirms the U.S. commitment to both. Rather than renouncing the last decade of war, it states that the bloody and disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan – gently termed “extended operations” – were pursued “to bring stability to those countries.”

And Leon Panetta assured the American public that even with the changes, the U.S. would still be able to fight two major wars at the same time—and win. And Obama assured America's military contractors and coffin makers that their lifeline – U.S. taxpayers' money – would still be funneled their way in obscene bucket loads.

“Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow,” the president told reporters, “but the fact of the matter is this: It will still grow.” In fact, he added with a touch of pride, it “will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration,” totaling more than $700 billion a year and accounting for about half of the average American's income tax. So much for the Pentagon's budget being slashed – like we were promised – the way lawmakers are trying to cut those “failed domestic programs.”

The U.S. could cut its military spending in half tomorrow and still spend more than three times as much as its next nearest rival, China. That’s because China, instead of waging wars of choice around the world, prefers projecting its might by investing in its own country. On the other hand, the U.S. under the leadership of Obama is beefing up its military presence in China's backyard, more interested in projecting its dwindling power than rebuilding its economy.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower once noted that every dollar going to the military is a dollar that can't be used to provide food and shelter for those in need. Today’s obscene amount of military spending isn't necessary if the administration wished to pursue the quaint goal of simply defending the country from invasion. Maintaining “the best-trained, best-equipped military in history,” as Obama says is his goal? That's a different story – for a different purpose. Indeed, as Madeline Albright observed, possessing that kind of military might is no fun if you don't get to use it, as Obama has with gusto in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Uganda.

The truth is that the Obama administration's “new” strategy is more of the same—a reaffirmation of the U.S. government's commitment to militarism for the all the usual reasons: to promote American hegemony and, by extension, the interests of politically connected capital. And U.S. officials aren't shy about that.

Indeed, throughout the strategy document the ostensible purpose for having a military -- to provide national security -- repeatedly takes a backseat to promoting the economic interests of the U.S. elite that profits from empire. Repositioning U.S. forces “toward the Asia-Pacific region,” for instance – including the stationing of American soldiers in that hotbed of violent extremism, Australia – is cast not just as a means of ensuring peace and stability, but guaranteeing “the free flow of commerce.” Maintaining a global empire of bases from Europe to Okinawa isn't necessary for self-defense, but according to Obama, ensuring – with guns – “the prosperity that flows from an open and free international economic system.”

Of course, that economic considerations shape U.S. foreign policy is nothing new. More than 25 years ago, President Jimmy Carter – that Jimmy Carter – declared in a State of the Union address that U.S. military force would be employed in the Persian Gulf, not for the cause of peace, freedom and apple pie, but to ensure “the free movement of Middle East oil.” And so it goes.

Far from affecting change, Obama is ensuring continuity. “U.S. policy will emphasize Gulf security,” states his new military strategy, in order to “prevent Iran's development of a nuclear weapon capability and counter its destabilizing policies” — as if it's Iran that has been destabilizing the region. And as Obama publicly proclaims his support for “political and economic reform” in the Middle East, just like every other U.S. president he not-so-privately backs their oppressors from Bahrain to Yemen and signs off on the biggest weapons deal in history to that bastion of democracy, Saudi Arabia.

Obama can talk all he wants about turning the page on a decade of war and occupation, but so long as he continues to fight wars and military occupy countries on the other side of the globe, talk is all it is. The facts, sadly, are this: since taking office Obama doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan; he fought to extend the U.S. occupation in Iraq– and partially succeeded; he dramatically expanded the use of killer drones from Pakistan to Somalia; and he requested military budgets that would make George W. Bush blush. If you want to see what his military strategy really is, forget what's said at press conferences and in turgidly written Pentagon press releases. Just look at the record.

Charles Davis has covered Capitol Hill for public radio and the international news wire Inter Press Service. More of his work may be found on his website.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and Global Exchange.

Love me, I'm a liberal

(via Nathan Fuller)

Come at me, bro

In a March 2010 address before the American Society of International Law, Harold Koh, the U.S. State Department's top legal rationalizer, explained why Barack Obama believes he is entitled to kill anyone in the world he chooses.

"[T]he United States is in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, as well as the Taliban and associated forces, in response to the horrific 9/11 attacks, and may use force consistent with its inherent right to self-defense under international law," Koh patiently explained. And that right enables the U.S. government to carry out anywhere in the world “lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles.”

So drones, according to Koh, are essentially the U.S. government's industrial-strenght pepper spray, the inhabitants of the rest of the world its swarthy would-be rapists. Yeah . . . about that, courtesy The Washington Post:

Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab is based, is surrounded by American drone installations. And officials said that JSOC has repeatedly lobbied for authority to strike al-Shabab training camps that have attracted some Somali Americans. 

But the administration has allowed only a handful of strikes, out of concern that a broader campaign could turn al-Shabab from a regional menace into an adversary determined to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.

As it turns out, firing missiles at poor foreigners from unmanned killing machines has nothing to do with Defending America, U.S. officials readily conceding that al-Shabab is but a "regional menace." But firing missiles at poor foreigners from unmanned killing machines could cause said foreigners to strike back, meaning -- god this is good -- that in the future there may actually be something to the U.S.'s claims to be acting in self-defense, albeit only to counter a threat it created.

"Sweet," says every military contractor and general in Washington.

It's a good thing there isn't the same threat of blowback from the U.S. government's broad campaign of drone warfare in Pakistan or Afghanistan, otherwise we might be in trouble!

Occupy North Pole

Institutional racism: The sine qua non of ethnic cleansing

"So, if the underlying sine qua non for any acceptable policy proposal is the long-term preservation of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people . . . ."

And if it isn't?

HOLIDAY BONUS: It sure takes a lot of chutzpah to include the following in a piece that calls for ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank:

This leads to the second element of the proposal: The grave ethnic discrimination against the Palestinians resident in the Arab world where, as I recently pointed out, severe restrictions are imposed on their freedom of movement, employment and property ownership.

But most significant, they – and they alone – are denied citizenship of the countries in which they have lived for decades.

Palestinians overwhelmingly want to acquire citizenship of the countries of their long-standing residence, opinion surveys indicate.

'Israeli drones save lives'

A couple weeks ago the editors at The Washington Post did something rather out of character: they published a piece by reporter Scott Wilson on the impact Israeli drones have had on the residents of Gaza, noting the hundreds of civilians killed in the past few years and detailing the way it has impacted every aspect of daily life -- you may not want to go over to a friend's house if there's something hovering outside armed with missiles and programmed to eliminate anybody wearing a keffiyeh. Obviously, this is outrageous. Clearly. This is the Post we're talking about: its Pulitzer Prize-winning team of journalists is supposed to be focusing on the quiet, turgid courage of those pulling the trigger, not on the torments of the targeted.

Dan Arbell, deputy chief of mission for the Israeli embassy in Washington, agrees. In a letter to the editor, he writes:

Oddly, The Post devoted a massive front-page headline and two full pages of print not to the tens of thousands of terrorist rockets aimed at Israeli neighborhoods or to the rapidly nuclearizing Iranian regime that routinely threatens to wipe Israel off the map but to Israeli drones over the Gaza Strip.

More inexplicably still, most of the article deals with the drones’ impact on Gaza residents while mentioning only in passing the trauma and devastation wrought by the more than 13,000 rockets and mortars fired at millions of Israeli civilians since 2000. Not one of these Israeli victims was interviewed for the article — in contrast to the numerous quotes from Palestinians — nor was any Israeli government source cited. Rather, the article relies solely on the infamously biased Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

Israeli drones save lives. They protect Israelis from terrorist attacks and reduce the need for large-scale ground operations in Gaza. This fact, too, was overlooked in an article that failed to meet Post standards.

Dan Arbell, Washington
The writer is deputy chief of mission for the Embassy of Israel.

Dude's right about the "standards" thing.

Bradley Manning and the American empire

My first of what I'm hoping will be a regular bi-weekly column is now up over at Al Jazeera. Read it. Tweet it. Love it.

So free yourself

I could keep you all for myself
I know you gotta be free
So free yourself
I could keep you all to myself
I know you gotta be free
To kill yourself

Never forget

Never forget that the war in Iraq and the ensuing occupation, which isn't really ending no matter what the president says, were horrific crimes against humanity -- that hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children died horrific, violent deaths because the Washington establishment chose to exploit the horrific, violent deaths of 3,000 Americans in order to carry out a horrific, long-planned "shock and awe" invasion of a country that had nothing to do with it. Anyone who supported that war and hasn't spent the last eight years begging forgiveness should be treated as a pariah, their lives made miserable as every day they are loudly and impolitely reminded that they have the blood of countless innocents on their hands.

It's often said -- by assholes -- that other cultures not lucky enough to be considered a part of the enlightened "West" do not value human life as much as those of us who, through the accident of birth, ended up being raised in the land of hormone-infused milk and tainted honey. But, you know: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq again, Yemen, Somalia...

That's the macro level. Here's the micro version courtesy of the New York Times and one of its reporters who found a trove of U.S. military documents in an Iraqi garbage dump detailing an investigation into the 2005 Haditha massacre, in which more than 20 civilians -- including babies and grandmothers -- were coldly and calculatingly murdered by U.S. troops. One might be as struck as I at the, dare I say, almost oriental manner in which American soldiers and their commanders deal with human life. And, like me, one might tremble with rage at the regrettably startling fact that none of the top-level fucks responsible for the Iraq war has to worry about anything more than where their next six-digit speakers' fee will come from:

Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.

The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.

#####

“When a car doesn’t stop, it crosses the trigger line, Marines engage and, yes, sir, there are people inside the car that are killed that have nothing to do with it,” Sgt Maj. Edward T. Sax, the battalion’s senior noncommissioned officer, testified.
He added: “I had Marines shoot children in cars and deal with the Marines individually one on one about it because they have a hard time dealing with that.”

#####

When the initial reports arrived saying that more than 20 civilians had been killed in Haditha, the Marines receiving them said they were not surprised by the high civilian death toll.

Chief Warrant Officer K. R. Norwood, who received reports from the field on the day of the events at Haditha and briefed commanders on them, testified that 20 dead civilians was not unusual.

“I meant, it wasn’t remarkable, based off of the area I wouldn’t say remarkable, sir,” Mr. Norwood said. “And that is just my definition. Not that I think one life is not remarkable, it’s just —”

An investigator asked the officer: “I mean remarkable or noteworthy in terms of something that would have caught your attention where you would have immediately said, ‘Got to have more information on that. That is a lot of casualties.’ "

“Not at the time, sir,” the officer testified.

General Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, said he did not feel compelled to go back and examine the events because they were part of a continuing pattern of civilian deaths.

“It happened all the time, not necessarily in MNF-West all the time, but throughout the whole country,” General Johnson testified, using a military acronym for coalition forces in western Iraq.

Given that the same establishment that backed the Iraq war remains in power today -- please, don't be fooled by nominal party affiliations -- chances are it will happen again. And again.

K Street is scared

Someone forwarded me an email that is apparently being circulated to lobbying firms on K Street. It's long, so I've pasted it after the jump:

'The Democrats are not your friends'

Salon.com: "Occupy DC distances from Democrats. Or does it?"

A young man named Charles Davis, 27, took to the floor and called out for the group’s attention. Davis told the occupiers he had ridden in an elevator with Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois.

“And he joked that he is the 1 percent,” Davis hollered. Boos all around. “And he called us anarchists!”

“The Democrats are not your friends!”

The group cheered — but not as loudly as they had for Edwards. Davis’ message, meant to reinforce the theme of the night, seemed to fall flat in the excited aftermath of Edwards’ appearance.

*****

Edwards had somehow knocked the group off its message.

“She’s turning this into a campaign stop,” Davis said, after he addressed the group.

Occupy DC’s Action Committee had been at odds lately, he said, deciding two nights earlier to reverse a previous decision to join former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones’ group Rebuild the Dream, MoveOn.org, and SEIU in protests on the Mall. Occupy, the committee concluded, would run separate events.

*****

Davis worries that Occupy DC could become a subsidiary of the Democratic Party, much like the Tea Party was for Republicans.

“It’s been kind of a problem, especially here in D.C.,” he said. “People think the Democrats are their friends, and they’re kind of willingly being co-opted. A lot of the people involved in the Action Committee, for instance, are paid to elect Democrats.”

Such may be the nature of protest in the political city, where most everyone falls into one of two categories. Of course, there aren’t many Republicans living in D.C.’s two Occupy Wall Street encampments.

“I think it’s just the culture,” Davis said. “It’s maybe a little bit more politician-friendly than other Occupies around the country.”

A clarification: I, of course, am an anarchist. But when Democratic politicians use the word, they're using it as a thoughtless slur -- like "nihilist" or "commie" -- not because they think occupiers are just inspired by the works of Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin.

We're being heard, but who's listening?

The concerns about co-option are being heard. But another concern still remains to be addressed: the fact that many of those hearing those concerns are the co-opters.

About two dozen people showed up at the Tuesday night meeting of the Occupy DC action committee, twice as many as were at the first one I attended a couple weeks ago, a sign that people are grasping how powerful the committee is -- it can still approve or reject actions without seeking any form of consensus at a general assembly -- and how important actions are in terms of defining the movement.

Overall, the meeting was positive: the same facilitator who announced at a general assembly earlier in the week that the committee had endorsed a series of actions sponsored and planned by the SEIU, MoveOn.org and Van Jones' Rebuild the Dream -- adjuncts of the Democratic Party all -- at the meeting sought consensus on instead doing an Occupy DC action that would explicitly be separate from those groups.

Conscious of appearances, the de facto leadership of the committee clarified that they hadn't intended to endorse the week of actions those groups are busing people into town for, but rather a single day of action on December 7. Consensus was quickly reached on the idea of doing a separate set of actions that day, with many people talking about specifically targeting Democrats and their allies on K Street as a way of making clear Occupy DC does not endorse the partisan, anti-GOP-only agenda for the week of protests asserted by SEIU President Mary Kay Henry.

Score one for the rabble rousers.

There was, however, some passive-aggressive hostility. One woman angrily spoke of how she didn't like "outsiders" coming in and spreading discord by raising fears about co-option. "Occupy DC can't be co-opted," she said, launching into a diatribe against the folks at the rival camp in Freedom Plaza, which isn't really part of the Occupy movement. We're the real People's Front of Judea. Yawn.

The same woman also spoke out against the need to do an event separate from the SEIU and MoveOn.org targeting the Democrats in particular. And when it came time to discuss an action targeting a $1,000-a-plate Democratic fundraiser this Thursday, she argued that it was unfair to hold the blue faction of the ruling establishment equally to blame as the red faction for the war and welfare for Wall Street status quo, going so far as to say "people will die" if the Democrats lose power.

*cough* Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia . . . *clears throat*

This being DC and all, you're bound to find people here who still believe in the comforting fairy tale of lesser evilism, who think that the problem isn't the institutions of power -- the authority a couple hundred folks in Washington have to start wars and imprison more than 2.3 million Americans -- but those who control them. However, this being DC and all, a higher percentage of these lesser evilers, as well as those who think the Democrats are actually doing Obama's god's work, have certain unique incentives to believe the things they do.

The woman who voiced concerns about protesting the Democratic fundraiser and criticized those damn dirty outsiders raising concerns about co-option? On Friday -- the day after that fundraiser -- she will be a featured "networking professional" at the Democratic GAIN Career Fair, "the place where progressive organizations, Democratic campaigns and consultants will be to collect resumes and talk about what they’ll be doing to help Democrats in 2012." That she would object to Occupy DC doing a day of action separate from the SEIU & Friends also makes a little more sense when you realize she works for the SEIU, a job she took after being a paid organizer for the Obama campaign.

This is a problem. Careerists with an incentive to pursue a Democratic agenda -- in addition to the aforementioned woman I saw the co-founder of the Democratic Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) -- are weighing in on how, or even whether, to target the Democrats. They are weighing in on questions of whether Occupy DC should participate in events being put on by the organizations that employ them. And they're not disclosing their conflicts of interest.

There's a simple solution: require that disclosure. That's not too much ask. Indeed, Occupy Wall Street already has such a requirement:

We acknowledge the existence of professional activists who work to make our world a better place. If you are representing, or being compensated by an independent source while participating in our process, please disclose your affiliation at the outset.

One man who worked for the SEIU did just that. When commenting on the series of SEIU-planned actions, he gave us all a heads up: "Hey guys, just so you know I work for the SEIU." Cool, man. People who work for less-than-perfect organizations have a right to participate in the Occupy movement -- lord knows it's tough trying to find a good anarcho-vegan feminist collective to work for -- but the rest of us have a right to know if they work for the very organizations they are trying to get us to protest with. Or the groups we're actually protesting.

What do they have to hide?

Occupy DC partners with the SEIU and MoveOn.org

The Democrats and their allies in the liberal establishment are trying to co-opt the Occupy movement. This isn't paranoia: it's what they do (see: the antiwar movement).

Van Jones, who served as “green jobs” czar in the Obama White House and says he'd like to see his former boss serve an illegal third term, openly talks of exploiting the movement for electoral purposes, likening it to the Tea Party. The SEIU has straight up stolen Occupy's language, labeling the same president who told Wall Street bankers that “I'm protecting you” the candidate of the 99 percent. MoveOn.org . . . well, MoveOn.org is doing what MoveOn.org always does: exploiting the movement to build its email list and pocket more money from idiot liberals who think evil Republicans are entirely to blame for the status quo.

Many people within the Occupy movement have expressed fears about this attempted co-option. It's particularly a problem here in Washington, DC, where people paid to elect Democrats are some of the most active participants at the McPherson Square camp. While I was out of town this past weekend, I'm told concerns about co-option and Democratic infiltration were voiced by several folks at this past Saturday's meeting of the action committee – a committee that includes employees of the SEIU's Washington lobbying office as well as the co-founder of the Democratic Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

But were those voices heard? At the Monday general assembly, members of the action committee – which in the name of Occupy DC as a whole can approve or reject actions without seeking any form of consensus from the camp as a whole – announced that they had some news for us. Oh boy: they had agreed to back an upcoming “national day of action” sponsored by none other than the SEIU, MoveOn.org and Van Jones' Rebuild the Dream. The last such "day of action" resulted in the SEIU/Occupy DC rally at the KeyBridge calling on "obstructionists in Congress" to boost infrastructure spending -- by passing Obama's jobs bill, of course.

Same shit, different day.

“Some people think these groups are trying to co-opt the Occupy movement,” acknowledged one member of the committee who I know agrees with that assessment but, for whatever reason, doesn't view that as a reason not to cooperate with them.

“I think we should be co-opting them,” said another member of the committee.

That the issue of co-option is even being acknowledged is, I suppose, progress. But more than anything necessarily nefarious, the decision to embrace the co-opters -- aided, one can assume, by the fact one of the SEIU organizers of the event is on the action committee -- suggests there is some serious naivete at the McPherson camp, or perhaps just on the committee. Just as with the Key Bridge protest, occupiers will not be co-opting a rally they have had no hand in planning. Rather, they will be helping these liberal groups further their preferred narratives about what the Occupy movement stands for. It is their press releases that lazy journalists and pundits across the country will be relying on when discussions "what this all means," not some occupier's clever sign. It is Van Jones who will be invited on CNN to talk about the movement's "next steps.

Participating with such openly partisan organizations can only taint the movement, seemingly confirming not entirely unfounded suspicions that Occupy Wall Street and the occupations around the country it has inspired are but patchouli-infused get-out-the-vote operations for the Democrats. And for what?

The last action with the SEIU at the Key Bridge was a flop. The only message most Washingtonians received was courtesy local news station WTOP: avoid the Key Bridge, commuters, traffic's going to be a mess out there. That and the implication that the Occupy movement is an arm of organized labor and the Democrats.

Groups like Rebuild the Dream and the SEIU need the Occupy movement much more than it needs them. These groups need the appearance of energy and grassroots authenticity th movement can lend them; the SEIU, after all, has to bus people in to chant "sí se puede" at its boring rallies. The Occupy movement, by contrast, has nothing to gain by working with these groups. Indeed, it only stands to lose by associating itself with adjuncts for the Democratic Party and their brand of establishment-friendly, wave-a-sign-from-the-sidewalk activism.

In the comments to my last piece about Occupy DC's action committee, someone from the camp downplayed my concerns about the liberal-heavy makeup of the committee and its infiltration by people paid to elect Democrats. "Since the Key Bridge action, Occupy has not done a horizontal action with SEIU," they wrote, "so I would suggest people get past that issue [co-option] until someone tries to partner Occupy DC with another SEIU action."

Can we admit there's a problem now? Enabling a small group of people on the action committee to endorse events in the name of Occupy DC as a whole isn't working; the best actions, such as the occupation of Franklin School, were carried out by activists who avoided it altogether, while the actions that have come out of it are at best a mixed bag. There's no reason a major action of this nature -- one that need not be shrouded in secrecy -- should not have been presented at a general assembly.

Maybe trying to reach 100 percent consensus is a bad idea -- I'd like to see a requirement that major actions be agreed to by 80 to 90 percent of those attending a general assembly -- but then so is outsourcing control over which actions are "official" Occupy DC events to a committee composed of but 1 percent of the movement.

UPDATE: From The Washington Post's Greg Sargent, who spoke with SEIU President Mary Kay Henry about the planned protest:

One goal of the protests, Henry says, is to pressure Republicans to support Obama’s jobs creation proposals.

***** 

“The reason we’re targeting Republicans is because this is about jobs,” she said. “The Republicans’ insistence that no revenue can be put on the table is the reason we’re not creating jobs in this country. We want to draw a stark contrast between a party that wants to scapegoat immigrants, attack public workers, and protect the rich, versus a president who has been saying he wants America to get back to work and that everybody should pay their fair share.”

Born free

Occupy the action committee

I was confused. After standing around for three hours in solidarity during the occupation of Franklin School, here I was dining at the finest Indian buffet in the city surrounded by about a half-dozen comrades, all self-described socialists and anarchists whose disdain for the Democrats made me look like a closet Obamabot.

"What gives?" I wondered. After spending the last two weeks fairly disappointed with most of the major actions officially endorsed by Occupy DC -- protesting liberals' very boogeymen the Koch brothers, rallying with the pro-Obama SEIU at the Key Bridge -- I had figured the problem was the folks at McPherson Square as a whole. After all, consensus had to be reached before these big events could be proclaimed "official" Occupy events and the consensus was to focus on targets that fit the standard Democratic agenda. While I longed for a radical movement demanding systemic change, I was surrounded by meek liberals calling for incremental, establishment-friendly reform.

Sigh.

So what about the radicals I dined with -- were they just not attending the general assemblies? Or perhaps the action committee was approving the various rallies and protests without fully explaining them when presenting them to the camp as a whole; I could see many occupiers, for instance, endorsing a rally for "workers" alongside a labor union not knowing the politics behind the SEIU's decision to "call on Congress to create jobs" at the very site that Barack Obama chose just weeks before to call on Congress to pass his jobs bill.

I assumed wrong.

The problem, it turns out, is that the action committee is able to approve protests as "official" Occupy DC events without receiving consensus at any general assembly. That means a small group of people -- there were no more than 10 at the meeting I attended the other week -- have the power to decide what events will be endorsed in the name of the hundreds if not thousands of people involved in the movement here in Washington.

That's a problem. The occupation of Franklin School did not go through the consensus process either, yes, but then those carrying it out never claimed to be acting on behalf of "Occupy DC." Rather -- and I think this is a trend that will continue with respect to direct actions -- they acted unilaterally and essentially used those hanging out at McPherson Square as a feeder group, inviting those who agreed with their action to come two blocks over and show solidarity. Ten or so people claiming Occupy DC as a whole has endorsed an action is a very different thing.

Those doing the endorsing also aren't very radical, which is the bigger problem to my mind. Anyone can join the committee, but attending three meetings a week is a lot to ask of people who have other things to do in their lives, a fact that seems to have led it to be more or less captured by a small group of like-minded liberals.

Indeed, on the action committee listserv, I discovered that some of the most active people are in fact paid not just liberals, but paid to elect Democrats, which subconsciously or not is bound to affect the decisions they make. And we're not talking just low-level staffers just trying to make a buck. That rally with the SEIU? By golly, here we have a member of the SEIU, indeed the head of the very "OurDC" front group occupiers were told they were showing solidarity with in an official Occupy DC press release. And over here we have a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which seeks to elect "progressive" Democrats -- and only Democrats -- to the halls of Congress.

And oh, hey, over there is a person who works for a company, NGP VAN, that helps "all the national Democratic committees, [and] thousands of Democratic campaigns," fundraise and reach out to voters (and which, god damn it, is placing ads on this site). It was this particular person that, when a friend of mine at CodePink proposed an anti-war action, lashed out with the amazing claim that "Ending the war is a CodePink objective," prompting me to begin my research into those dominating the action committee conversation.

"The co-option of CodePink [sic] is really annoying and it's not cool that it is happening on this googlegroup," she added. "Please stop."

People paid to elect Democrats pushing a Democrat-friendly, war-ignoring agenda on the Occupy movement? Yeah, we're cool with that.

Even those on the committee who aren't paid to elect the nominally "left" faction of the political establishment come from essentially the same perspective, it having all the appearance of a clique that represents a range of opinion from liberal to center-left. When I linked to the above woman's public LinkedIn page, a "Senior Field Organizer" for the left-liberal group Public Citizen who appointed himself captain of the committee booted me off the list after I refused his unilaterally declared ultimatum to:

- Delete the tweet with the Linked In profile link

- Apologize over Twitter for taking a private conversation online and violating a fellow Occupier's personal boundaries

- Email the group promising to keep matters of internal discussion internal to this list? There are too many reasons to name why an action committee list should be kept private.

- Apologize to the group in person at an upcoming action committee.

 As I wrote in response to the above: Besides there never having been a stated rule that conversations on the list could not be taken off of it -- the very nature of many of the conversations would seem to demand they be discussed with others -- I never revealed anything about upcoming actions, sensitive details of which I was initially told to never share because the list is literally open to whoever wants to join it (if you're in DC, subscribe by sending a request to action@occupydc.org).

Since the action committee has so much power to shape the Occupy DC agenda and its public perception, the broader movement beyond the professional Democrats and liberal think tankers on the list I believe has a right to know that actions are being approved and rejected based on the input of a small group of people, many of whom are paid to pursue a partisan agenda. No one, not even the Guardian of the Sanctity of the Listserv, I venture to say, would have objected had I tweeted about a member of the Koch-funded Club for Growth infiltrating the committee.

That's not to say paid partisans should be outright prohibited from participating in the Occupy movement, which would be hard to do in DC anyway -- although, frankly, if you're paid to elect Democrats and you want to help the movement, your best bet would be to stop helping elect Democrats. But if professional partisans have nothing to hide, there's no reason they should fear transparency, especially given the legitimate fears of many that Democrats are trying to co-opt the Occupy movement for electoral gain.

As it is now, those on the action committee aren't even informing the rest of those at Occupy DC of their decisions. Take the following email about one now-past event:

It has failed to go in front of GA due to facilitation not responding to my emails and no one from Action at the park during GA that is bringing it up. I told _______ to just go ahead and send it out. Its already on our website and being spread around. GA has been allowing us to just report actions during our committee reportbacks so that is what I hope will happen soon. How we are supposed to actually be getting things approved by GA is no longer really clear. If someone else wants to step up to help me figure this out, awesome, but I say we just go forward with this action.

I actually agreed with the action in question. But the problems with allowing the committee to instruct people to "just go ahead" and claim events are in Occupy DC's name without even announcing them should be obvious, particularly when said committee is stacked with numerous people paid to pursue an explicitly Democratic agenda.

Instead of banning me over a rule that was never stated, I replied to Mr. Ultimatum that maybe we ought to be considering, not just informing new members of the alleged rules of the list the moment they sign up, but a new rule requiring people to state up front whether they work to elect Democrats (or Republicans) so as to avoid conflicts of interests and the appearance of impropriety. And why not specifically ask people to state whether they're participating in the movement as part of their jobs?

This is the response I received.

Unhappy with the direction of the Occupy DC action committee? Attend one of their meetings, held every Saturday at 4pm and every Tuesday and Thursday at 8pm.

Baby, I'm an anarchist

More of this, please

The Franklin School in downtown Washington, DC, has been sitting dormant for years now. A historic building situated right next to a park filled every night with homeless people that have nowhere else to go, the city-owned property could be put to a number of important uses that would benefit the community around it. But, alas, it sits empty.

Until this past weekend. In a break from the sort of timid, SEIU-backed protests that the folks at Occupy DC have had an irksome habit of embracing as of late, a group of 11 activists without -- oh no! -- the endorsement of the McPherson Square general assembly decided to occupy the building and declare it under "community control." Though they certainly couldn't have had much expectation of being allowed to stay -- they were removed within a matter of hours -- as a symbolic gesture it was poignant.

Local anarchist blogger BroadSnark, who snapped the photo above and who I finally met at Occupy DC after years of cyber-stalking, has more details:

The building was being used as a homeless shelter until 2008, when the city closed it down just before winter. The plan was to sell it to a developer who would turn it into a boutique hotel. Homeless advocates, including Eric Sheptock, fought like hell to stop the closure. You can read his story here.

It took about three hours for the police to pull the occupiers out of the building and haul them off. Until then, supporters did what they could to rally the crowd, document what was going down, and block the exits to make it a little more difficult for the police to get them out – at least not without witnesses.

A passerby, who asked us to explain what was going on, agreed. He was “one of the lucky ones” who was able to get a home voucher before they cut the local rent supplement program. He commented that, in other cities, people said occupiers were violent, inferring that was not the case tonight.

The move wasn't without controversy. One middle-aged man walking a dachshund hysterically yelled at those of standing outside the building in solidarity with the occupiers that we had "just fucked" the Occupy movement by embracing "vigilantism." At back at McPherson Square, dozens of people chose to hang out over joining their comrades two blocks away.

Judging by the media coverage, however, the occupiers succeeded in drawing attention to the controvery surrounding the closing of Franklin School and the broader issue of governments privatizing community space for corporate gain -- certainly more attention than any number of confined-to-the-sidewalk exercises in protesting self-gratification could have ever hoped to achieve.

Obama loves war and Wall Street

For days I bitched about Occupy DC's participation in a rally for infrastructure spending with the SEIU, a bitching that hit a fever pitch after the latter endorsed Barack Obama as the candidate of the 99 percent. But I'll tell you what: I can't give up a good opportunity to protest and a chance to open a few minds -- or at least piss a few off.

So, with pushing back against co-option on my mind, I decided I'd head down to Georgetown and the Key Bridge after all, but armed with a sign speaking for the 90 percent of the 99 percent who don't believe the president represents their interests. I tend to prefer signs calling out the institutional problems with the system, not the personnel, but the SEIU kind of forced my hand.

The response was interesting.

From actual occupiers, the people I recognized from camping out at McPherson Square this past week, the reactions were universally positive, which should assuage some fears that the Occupy movement will turn into a Democratic get-out-the-vote machine. I also got a few honks, in addition to some angry shouts, including the ever-so clever "get a job."

At one point as I held the sign out to traffic crossing the bridge, a Circulator bus full of commuters stopped, the driver opening his door to tell me "that's not true, he doesn't love war," as he shook his head. I then explained that he had in fact doubled the troops in Afghanistan, killing thousands of civilians and -- knowing my audience, this being America and all -- more U.S. soldiers than in the eight years George W. Bush oversaw the occupation. I also mentioned the drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

A funny thing then happened. "Is that true?" the driver asked. A fellow occupier interjected: "Yeah, it is." With a look of having genuinely learned something, the driver nodded his head.

Wait, I thought, did I just have a successful political conversation with someone who started by hollering at me from his vehicle? Weird.

The conversation I had earlier with a suit-wearing, self-described private contractor for the State Department was a bit more . . . tense. Demanding to know what my sign "meant," which I thought was pretty clear, said contractor proceeded to reaffirm every caricature of a mindless, subservient supporter of state I ever held. What follows are, I swear to the gods, verbatim excerpts from of our conversation:

Me: Obama's foreign policy is the same as Bush's. He has just expanded the war on terror.

Dude: That's not true.

He doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan.

No, he surged the troops in Afghanistan. Just like Bush.

*****

He has authorized more drone strikes in Pakistan than Bush did in eight years, killing thousands of innocent civilians.

You're wrong. He killed Osama bin Laden.

 *****

He's also killed U.S. citizens with drone strikes.

They were traitors.

Well, under the Constitution even traitors are supposed to have trials to determine they are traitors. Should we really trust one man to decide who lives or dies?

I trust my government.

*****

So what would you have us do?

I would have us pull all our troops out of every country and bring them home. Something like 95 percent of suicide attacks are the result of foreign occupations. You don't see terrorists going after Switzerland.

Well, that's because they don't have a military.

As Upton Sinclair said, it's difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on their not understanding it.

Declaring what Occupy DC stands for

I was prepared to be disappointed. I was prepared to escalate from a simple downward twinkle fingers to an outright block, you “progressive” Democrat, willing-being-co-opted mother fuckers. But, gosh darn it, I was pleasantly surprised.

After being disappointed in some of Occupy DC's choice of actions, including a rally for more infrastructure spending sponsored by the same SEIU that just endorsed Barack Obama as the candidate of the 99 percent, I was expecting the worst when the time came at Wednesday's general assembly to read the McPherson Square chapter of the occupy movement's long-awaited draft declaration of grievances. Perhaps a line about the Koch brothers “corrupting” our long corrupt democracy. Maybe something about a certain someone failing to deliver the change he purportedly promised.

To my chagrin, even my black anarchist heart was rather impressed.

Occupy everywhere, but maybe not the Key Bridge

Shaking from the cold at 3 in the morning on a park bench a few blocks from the White House, warmed only by a paper-thin prison blanket an empathetic passer-by had gifted me, I couldn't help but think: man, am I a bad ass or what?

Well, not really. Mostly I thought about being cold and whether my overwhelmingly witty sign – American Dream = Park Place, American Reality = Park Bench – made it all worth it. And then I thought about how this is what homeless people in the imperial capital go through every night. And how no one cares. And then I was kind of sad.