10.04.2009
Pittsburgh encore
This is a republication of a post that was first published on 9.24.2009. The text had been corrupted, though.
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As my trip to "dahntahn" Pittsburgh yesterday (9.23) made plain, the G-20 Summit has already worked a kind of bad magic on the everyday political and social life of the city of Pittsburgh.
I say this because it was not at all hard to find evidence supporting my belief that a kind of frenzy drives the local political culture more than a reasoned appreciation for the political, social and cultural predicaments of the moment. Fear — and thus hatred — pervades the city. This is unsurprising since a paranoid ranting has dominated talk radio for weeks along with the local news more recently. The streets were not empty, of course. They were only "not themselves," different in a way that pointed to the G-20 Summit and the political situation surrounding it.
The immediate cause:
"The Anarchists are coming, the Anarchists are coming…."
The anarchists are fearful because they are willing to contend in a direct and forceful way with the militarized and well-armed security forces in the city. Their tactic: Civil disobedience.
In other words, the federal government and its local adjuncts are seeking to suppress much of the politics that will originate from below when that politics fails to affirm in a decisive and direct way the despotic powers of the state and, to be sure, the anti-democratic features specific to the American form of governance. The suppression combines the law (rule by law) with force and violence (rule by law realized by a militarized police). The upshot: Something akin to a local state of siege had appeared as the Summit neared. Pittsburgh epitomizes police state American. Thus:
"The streets of Pittsburgh are secure and will remain so during the Summit. The dignitaries visiting the city for the event will not be molested in any way by the black flag folk especially or by any other movement that chooses to protest the event, the participants and their doings. Nor, for that matter, will they endure a confrontation with the indigent living under the city's many bridges or the famished scrounging for food, for they have been cleansed. Humanity will be disciplined so that unaccountable power might thrive."
As it turned out, the forces of 'order' and fear achieved their goal: Pittsburgh looked as though it were preparing to weather a Category Four political hurricane. Businesses were securing their windows. The police patrolled the streets on foot, singly and in large groups, on motorcycles, bikes and riding in other vehicles. Some of the sidewalks near the Convention Center were enclosed in long but narrow steel cages, creating pedestrian bottlenecks intended, one would guess, to pacify the crowds moving toward the Convention Center and its precious occupants. In short, Pittsburgh looked to be a social and political wasteland in the making, and has remained so today as I write this article.
This debacle — and it was a debacle — received a mixed reception from the locals. I often overhead some of them — "Yinzers" — complaining about the protesters who allegedly were "ruining the Summit for the City," were in need of "a full-time job," a bath, more variety in their diet, better manners, good clothes, etc. It seems the protesters needed, if one were to believe their critics, a whole new identity and way of life, an identity and life that conforms to the expectations the critics have for themselves, their kind and for all 'real' Americans. The protesters ought to become "one of us," so to speak. Apparently, Pittsburgh's anti-protester protesters believed the normalization of the event necessarily meant the complete pacification and integration of the city and, by extension, the people who will host and participate in it. Pacification in this case means the elimination of an opposition politics.
What the protest critics neglected to mention was the purpose animating these protests: To secure a higher quality of life in the present and the future for those who need it the most. Nor did they consider the issues the G-20 countries would discuss while convening in Pittsburgh or, for that matter, the situation that they and everyone else confronts today. They treated these as irrelevant. They were beside the point, it seems, because their presence could only undermine the spectacle of the event and the security of the city.
In short, the critics of the protesters had erased the political essence of the event which would have scared the Hell out of them had they taken seriously this essence along with the issues history has made relevant today.
But, they could instead obsess about the spectacle at hand: A spectacle composed of despotic and unaccountable power doing as it pleases, of armed forces crossing the streets of their hometown, of political liberties breached and undermined, of a garrison state as it appears to those subject to it.
9.22.2009
Pittsburgh
A stop on the road to dictatorship in America
While addressing the G-20 Summit along with the protests meant to challenge the Summit and what it represents, Chris Hedges recently characterized the repression implemented by the federal government and the local governments in the Pittsburgh region as follows:
The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the established centers of power.
A quibble: I would say that the threat is real and that the elite rightly believe their position to be insecure. But the actual threat posed by the G-20 demonstrators gathering now in Pittsburgh will not be in any way related to whatever violent acts they might commit during their demonstrations. The actual threat which motivates this kind of fear among the elite is political in nature. It takes the form of a politics meant to represent the interests, identities and lives of those largely excluded or ignored by America's compromised political institutions. This political exclusion supports and reflects the economic dispossession that is now operative in an economy teetering on the brink.
Additionally, the repression is future-directed, as Hedges recognizes:
The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.
How, indeed, will the dispossessed respond to their knowing that their lives were sacrificed so that the finance capital might thrive in the difficult future now coming into being? To whom will they attribute their suffering? Will they have the cultural and social resources they will need if they are to survive the global system coming into being? How will they survive the slums they will inhabit when they know so little of solidarity and political communication?
The American political system, tenuously democratic and corrupted as it has been by the militarism and market fundamentalism of the last decades, can produce only one response to this threat, which is, to be sure, a threat generated by its growing illegitimacy and the inadequacy of contemporary capitalism:
The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world's wealthiest nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city's police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.
In other words, "Force is all the elite have left," as Hedges succinctly states. The elite have no other response to these protests because they lack a reform politics that points to a possible world that exists beyond the crises of the present and which resolves these crises in a manner that can be judged legitimate. Force — the 'reasoning' and 'communicative' technique used by the stupid to address problems they do not understand and cannot resolve.
6.23.2009
The DoD: Freedom’s ally
The American Civil Liberties Union has already protested the DoD's infringement on an American citizen's basic rights. The ACLU's response can be read here.
6.15.2009
Sara’s epistle
Sarah Robinson asks:
Dear Conservatives:
Your fellow Americans demand an answer — and we want it now. Just one simple question:
Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war?
Just answer the question. Yes or no. Don't insult us with elisions, evasions, dithering, qualifications, or conditional answers. We need to know what your intentions are — and we need to know NOW. People are being shot dead in the streets of America at the rate of several per month now. You may not want responsibility for this — but the whackadoodles pulling the triggers make no bones about who put them up to this.
You did.
My wild guess: Yes, it is clear that far too many of America's right-wingers want to start a civil war. I would even suspect some of them of wishing to rectify the lost cause of the 1860s and to take the revenge for having endured the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras. I would imagine their present-day Yankee equivalents would prefer to move to an authoritarian liberal regime, that is, a system which is socially and politically authoritarian but economically liberal.
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