So I turn on the radio this morning and hear Tom Gjelten of NPR regale me with a sensational story of how the US government had busted a plot by the Iranian government to collude with a hit man associated with the Mexican drug cartels to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador in a restaurant in the US, along with hundreds of bystanders. As always, faithful government stenographer that he is, Gjelten (in his case NPR stands for National Pentagon Radio) excitedly passes on uncritically what he hears from the US government. < [Read more…]

Chris Hedges has been doing some powerful writing on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Here is an excerpt from his latest essay with the above title.

Even now, three weeks later, elites, and their mouthpieces in the press, continue to puzzle over what people like Ketchup want. Where is the list of demands? Why don’t they present us with specific goals? Why can’t they articulate an agenda?

The goal to people like Ketchup is very, very clear. It can be articulated in one word—REBELLION. These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back.

This is a goal the power elite cannot comprehend. They cannot envision a day when they will not be in charge of our lives. The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism are natural law, some kind of permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered. What the elites fail to realize is that rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don’t understand what is happening. They are deaf, dumb and blind.

Critics of the Occupy Wall Street movement have asserted that their goals are not clear and they don’t have solutions, although it is pretty obvious (as this Tom Tomorrow cartoon says) that economic injustice is their main grievance. But Paul Krugman points out that the hysterical response to the Occupy Wall Street movement is a telling indicator of the fact that the protestors have achieved one major goal: they have put the role of the financial oligarchy in causing the nation’s problems in the spotlight and they are squirming and want to shut down the discussion. They much prefer to do their work in the shadows.

The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny.

Political cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall is one of the people indefinitely occupying Freedom Square in Washington DC as part of the October 2011 movement. He talks about what they are hoping to achieve, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the state of US politics. Well worth listening to.

Unlike the ones that exists only in the fevered imagination of opponents of health care reform who labor under the delusion that these panels exist to decide who should get medical treatment and who should be left to die, these death panels are real and consist of people who decide in secret which Americans deserve to be killed by the president, using the entire military apparatus at his disposal.

This report confirms what was reported as far back as in February 2010 when Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, said in a Congressional hearing that the intelligence community had the right to kill Americans abroad who have been deemed to be a threat.

So our government thinks it has the right to send roving gangs of assassins anywhere in the world to murder anyone whom the president has decided must die. It is astonishing to me that people are not outraged.

Glenn Greenwald has more. As usual, political cartoonist Ted Rall nails it.

It looks like the trouble with the police that I feared has already begun.

Occupy Wall Street Arrests; Fox 5 Crew and Protesters Hit by Mace, Batons: MyFoxNY.com

The Guardian covered the march and also the clash with police, with more video.

As long as the Occupy Wall Street movement remains fairly small and contained, the oligarchy can treat it with condescension, in the expectation that it will dissipate with time. The reaction of the political leadership has been cautious with few venturing comments. Mitt Romney, as unoriginal as ever, has called it (sigh) ‘class warfare’ and that it was ‘dangerous’ but dangerous for whom he did not specify. Herman Cain reached new levels of the smugness that afflicts so many rich people, saying, “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!” Some people at the Chicago Board of Trade seem to think that mocking the movement is a good idea and, like the champagne swillers in New York, display a sense of ignorance to the legend of Marie Antoinette. These people have no idea of the rising level of anger in the country.

The movement has latched on to succinct slogans that capture the essence of the problem, like “We are the 99%” and the chant “Q: How do we end this deficit? A: End the wars, tax the rich.” These are dangerous messages for the oligarchy because they are simple and right on target. As a result, the movement is gaining public support nationwide and growing, and even linking to global protest movements. Nearly a 1000 people turned up in Philadelphia on Tuesday night merely to organize the occupation in that city on October 6th.

The movement is also gaining mainstream acceptability. Even chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke (Ben Bernanke!) said in Congressional testimony that there was “some justification” for the protests and that “At some level I can’t blame them. Nine percent unemployment and slow growth is not a good situation.” Editorial cartoonists are also spreading the message about the revolt against the 1% epitomized by Wall Street.

Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! interviewed Kevin Zeese and Dr. Margaret Flowers, two key organizers of the October 2011 movement that was planned six months ago for an indefinite occupation of Washington DC starting today, and that has coincided in a symbiotic way with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

As the movement grows and expands, I fully expect at some point in the near future that the repressive apparatus of the state will be brought in to quash it. I am certain that right now there are high-level discussions amongst members of the oligarchy on how to derail the protests. It will be difficult to forcibly disperse the peaceful occupiers since the initial protestors were mostly educated, white, middle-class, young people (though yesterday’s march was much more diverse in terms of age and color) and baton-charging, tear-gassing, and arresting them in large numbers would not look good on TV. The usual method of dealing with such situations is to dispatch some provocateurs to mix in with the protestors and then create divisions and destruction and confrontations. The purpose will be two-fold: to lower public sympathy for the movement by associating it with violence and to provide an excuse for harsh measures to ‘restore law and order’. I hope the organizers are prepared to combat this tactic

The rising tensions surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement reminds me of the mood in the classic 1967 song For What It’s Worth written by Buffalo Springfield band member Stephen Stills in the wake of an assault by the Los Angeles Police department on young people during that turbulent period.

Movements in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement are springing up in 184 cities and growing rapidly.

Locally, tomorrow (Thursday, October 6th) Occupy Cleveland begins its action at noon at the Free Stamp sculpture site at Willard Park at East 9th and Lakeside. On Saturday the 8th there will be an Occupy Cleveland General Assembly in Public Square from 3:00-6:00 pm. More details are here. As one might expect with a fast-moving, all-volunteer spontaneous movement, things are somewhat chaotic.

Graphic artists have donated downloadable posters for people to use.

Today is National Student Walk-out Day, where college students around the nation are encouraged to walk out of their classes at noon to protest rising tuition and debt.

Meanwhile, read the moving testimonies of people from all walks of life who explain why they are the 99%.

The idea that increased unemployment and a vast and growing gap between a rampaging oligarchy and the rest of the population could lead to riots and other forms of trouble in the US is something that some of us have been warning about for some time. But it was still startling to hear someone in the oligarchy like the mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg say the same thing. He suggested that the popular uprisings that happened in Egypt and Spain could happen here too. Of course, he thinks that this would be a bad thing, but the fact that a member of the oligarchy saw the potential of such a thing happening here is significant.

He said this just before the Occupy Wall Street movement began on September 17 to create a permanent protest site to block off Wall Street. Initially they were stopped by the police but they managed to overcome that obstacle and have now set up permanent camp. Glenn Greenwald says there are signs that the oligarchy is getting nervous and they are, as usual, using their lackeys in the establishment media to try and belittle and undermine the protests.
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In yesterday’s post I wrote about an anonymous government official who said that the justice department had prepared a secret memo saying that Obama’s order to murder Anwar al-Awlaki was legal but they refused to release it or reveal the reasoning.

David Shipler and Conor Friedersdorf pose the obvious question: Why is this document secret?

The usual arguments for secrecy, that it will put some people in harm’s way or impinge on their privacy rights or reveal some critical government information that would be harmful to the country’s national interests clearly do not apply in this case. This is presumably a legal document that would be of interest mainly to scholars. So why not tell us how the government arrived at the important conclusion that Obama can order the death of any US citizen without any oversight by any body?

The only answer that I can think of is that the government is afraid that legal scholars will rip their argument to shreds and that it will be seen to have no merit. Much better for them to keep it secret, using the “If we reveal this information, the terrorists will have won” mantra that seems to inexplicably satisfy so many people.

During his 2008 presidential campaign Obama promised that his administration would “run the most transparent White House in history” and some commentators even wondered if such excessive transparency might be a bad thing. It is clear that that worry is unfounded because that promise has turned out to be a joke. Obama is making even the Bush White House seem like a glass house.

UPDATE: Scott Horton rips apart the Obama hypocrisy on this issue. The exchange between Jake Tapper and White House press secretary is quite incredible.