Liberty and Justice for All

I pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands every day in school when I was a child as I know you did.  I firmly believed in that pledge, because I was taught that in the American Dream everyone had an equal opportunity to be anyone and do anything in the freest fairest country in the world.  I believed our politicians served the public and our government guaranteed our rights. 

Today I have a different view of my country.  I still believe in America, but I believe in it the way I would believe in a relative who had a drinking problem.  I love this country with all my heart, I want it to overcome its problems more than anything, but I know the battle is uphill and time is running out. 

In 2008, Wall Street, the White House and the Federal Reserve conspired to reorganize the economy around financial monopoly.  After 30 years of eroding the New Deal protections against dangerous speculation, failed banks nearly brought the economy to its knees.  We The People bailed out Wall Street to prevent a second Great Depression.  We were forced to write a blank check worth a generation of growth with no strings attached.  There was no major reform to re-erect the wall between investment and commercial banking.  There have been no investigations, no charges, no trials to root out the corruption.  The plutocracy picked the poor’s pockets and mugged the middle class.  They smashed America’s piggy banks full of mortgage payments, college funds and retirement savings.  They took our money to tally historic profits and CEO bonuses while laying off their employees.  

We don’t argue against the merits of using trade to engender productivity, commerce and invention.  We know Capitalism is the fire that fuels growth.  But fire needs to be contained to be useful.  We need to regulate finance to harness its creative power for the good of society, while preventing it from unleashing its destructive potential.  A fire can keep your house warm and put hot meals on your table if you contain it in your fire place.  That same fire will burn your house down if you let it spread to the walls.  Those who argue that we should not regulate Wall Street are arguing that we should light our walls on fire to keep our house warm. 

Under our unregulated radical capitalism, the plutocracy orchestrated inverse Marxism for themselves: a welfare state in which the top 2% own more than the bottom 90%; a control economy in which the richest hog all the profits while the laborers shoulder all the penalties. 

From the Atlantic coast to the shores of Hawaii, an Iron Ceiling has descended across the country.  Beneath that Ceiling lies the disappearing middle class and its endeavors to produce American culture.  Above the Iron Ceiling a few hundred billionaires and a few dozen conglomerations dictate the direction of our society from the shadows.  Above the Iron Ceiling, Wall Street makes our elected officials dance on strings of gold. 

This degree of divide between the rich and the rest has not been seen since the Great Depression.  One in five children face poverty, hunger and homelessness.  Half of young adults are unemployed or underemployed while enslaved to Sallie Mae debts of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education that hasn’t opened any doors.  In numbers not seen since the 1940s, the young are putting off leaving home, getting married and starting families.  Middle aged folks are struggling to support their families.  They are working longer and longer hours to pay the mortgage, feed the family and put the kids through school.  Older Americans are delaying retirement.  They are stuck in the race after crossing the finish line, taking menial jobs to stave off poverty in their golden years.  Some have faced horrible decisions about whether to bankrupt their families to cover medical costs or accept an early grave. 

Amid all this, the ratio of average rent to average income has tripled since the 1970s.  The middle class has not had a raise in a quarter century.  Homelessness has increased by a third since 2007.  Meanwhile, millions of foreclosed homes gather dust while people shiver on the sidewalk. 

Yet, our economy is still growing.  Our Gross Domestic Product is as strong as ever.  Since the 1980s, the top 1% have lit cigars to celebrate their income doubling, tripling, quadrupling, while the middle class has flat-lined.  Since the Great Recession, the middle class is getting poorer while the rich, who caused the crash, are becoming stupendously wealthy. 

This situation was entirely avoidable.  The New Deal tamed the boom and bust cycle and enforced economic justice.  In the last thirty years, the very rich have bought both parties and all three branches of government and used them to dismantle the New Deal.  Their massive media companies saturate our discourse with pro-corporate propaganda.  Many pundits are merely corporate marionettes who sling names and innuendo at anyone who questions the billionaires’ agenda.    

There are over 25 lobbyists for every one member of Congress.  By a rate of 10 to 1, those lobbyists represent large corporations over any other interest.  They create a pervasive culture of bribery, favors and gifts.  Corruption is the norm in this town.  Lobbyists write their own legislation for their corporate clients and bribe our representatives to vote for it.  Wall Street used K Street to sideline Main Street and take our democracy away from us. 

Their control over our Congress is rapidly snowballing.  The Citizens United ruling allows Super PACs to flood our campaigns with millions and millions of secret dollars.  With campaigns so expensive, an honest politician who refused to be corrupted would drown under a tsunami of negative advertising from shadowy sources. 

The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law prohibiting free speech.  Free speech.  Not expensive speech.  Free speech is the dam that holds back the flood of tyranny.  As long as We The People have an absolute right to express ourselves, we will always be a free people.  But the corporate puppet masters seek to make speech too expensive for us, so that only they will have the right to speak.  Corporate Big Brother tells us words are not speech but dollars are.  If money is free speech, then logically, buying crack, paying a prostitute and hiring a hitman are all forms of protected speech.  As a society, we have decided that paying for those things should be illegal.  So obviously, it must be illegal to buy a politician or an election.   

Since September, we have been sounding the alarm.  We occupied Wall Street.  And the corporations flexed their muscles.  They have privatized municipal police departments around the country with huge corporate gifts and they sent the cops after us.  We have seen the images of a veteran who served his country in Iraq terribly wounded while serving his country by protesting corruption.  We have seen students pepper sprayed for the audacity of sitting together in a park.  Nearly 6,000 people have been arrested for speaking in public.  Nearly 300 have needed medical treatment after being beaten or gassed for the sin of peaceably assembling.  Still, zero bankers have been arrested, charged or jailed for the illegal trading that blew up our economy. 

By taking our message to the streets, the Occupiers have captured America’s imagination and seized the moment.  They have flushed out the corporate puppets that seek to ridicule, undermine and intimidate anti-corruption protesters into silence.  We are recreating our public sphere while the corporations seek to shut it down.  A vibrant public sphere is essential to democracy.  The Founders saw that the marketplace of ideas was the key to their early organization and ultimate success against the British crown.  In the years before the Declaration of Independence, the 13 colonies were abuzz with underground newspapers debating political ideas, publishing houses cranking out pamphlets, protests on public squares which evolved into boycotts, coffeehouses serving up hours of caffeinated discussion.  These sparks of public debate lit the fire of Revolution on which our nation was founded.  Today, we are keeping our Founders’ vision alive by carrying on the ancient discussion of what makes a free and fair society. 

The beauty of open discourse assessed under the bright light of reason is that good ideas gain steam and bad ideas fall to the wayside.  In a healthy democracy, bad ideas are not dangerous because they inevitably self-destruct.  If Occupy had bad ideas, everyone could safely ignore us.  Regressive mayors, funded by corporations, wielding privatized and militarized police departments, have ordered a crackdown on the Occupation BECAUSE our ideas have merit.  Our ideas that America’s economy should be democratic and work for our whole society are dangerous ideas BECAUSE they are good ideas. 

Our ideas are a profound threat to the power structure that enriches the wealthy elite.  The police raids against the Occupation announce that the billionaires running our country will use all their formidable influence to crush any notion of economic justice or government accountability.  But they are terrified.  They know that their position is morally untenable.  They know that if the people awaken to the reality of the power dynamics in our institutions, they will fall.  We can no longer tiptoe around the issue of class war.  The 1% have openly declared total war on the middle class who are becoming poor and the poor who are becoming desperate. 

We have come here today to draw a line in the sand.  Big money has pushed our democracy to the edge of a cliff.  Below lies an abyss of ceaseless corruption which can only lead to poverty, decline and tyranny.  We will not let you push us any further.  You picked this fight, but we will make you wage it on our terms and on our turf.  We will use the power of nonviolence, as demonstrated by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, to monopolize the moral high ground the same way you have monopolized our economy.  We will adapt and evolve.  Kick us out of parks and we will Occupy foreclosed homes.  We will be Bugs Bunny to Wall Street’s Elmer Fudd, Roadrunner to the corporate Wile E. Coyote.  

We have come here today to stage an intervention in Congress’ addiction to Wall Street’s cash.  To tell Congress: say no to corruption.  Represent the needs and wants of your constituents.  We need a new New Deal for a new era of economic suffering and we want jobs.  We are here to tell Congress: restore the Glass-Steagall Act that prevented banks from gambling with people’s homes; Amend the Constitution to outlaw Citizens United and any law that gives corporations a free pass to expensive speech.  Cap the outrageous costs of our for-profit healthcare and higher education industries.  Congress: restore the level playing field for the middle class.  Congress: tear down the Iron Ceiling that the 1% paved over the 99%.  Congress: relight the torch of the American Dream. 

Today, I pledge allegiance to the people of the United States of America and to the Republic which we built with our labor.  I pledge to resist unjust laws.  To boycott corrupting banks and corporations.  To vote corrupt politicians out of office.  I pledge to educate myself, my friends and my family about the role of creeping greed in America.  To inform the public and expose corporate propaganda.  I pledge to support the Occupation.  I pledge that we will occupy Wall Street, occupy K Street, occupy Main Street and take control of the economy and the government back to the American people so together we can restore America to one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. 

Occupy the Open Mic

So there I was standing in a sea of about 2,000 Occupiers from around the country literally in the shadow of Congress.  I was all pumped up to give the speech I had spent a weekend preparing to lambaste Congress loudly and closely enough that they might actually hear it.  I found the open-mic coordinator and told her I was here for my time slot.  Our conversation went like this:

Me: I’m here for the 6:30 time slot.

Her: What’s your name?
Me: Marc Belisle.

Her: You’re not on the list.

Me: I signed up a week ago.  I double checked the wiki today and I was still on it.  
Her: Okay, no problem.  We have a free time slot coming up anyway. 

Me: Okay, good. 

Her: So do you have an instrument or something?
Me: No, I’m giving a speech.

Her: Oh, that’s why you’re not on the list.  We had to move speeches off the mic. 

Me: What?
Her: Yeah, when we opened up the mic, we had politicians signing up to speak.  The organizers didn’t want that and we decided it wouldn’t be fair if we had to pick who could speak and who couldn’t, so we just decided to cancel speeches in general.  We sent out an email about that to everyone.  Didn’t you get the email?

Me: No.  No, I didn’t.  I did not get that email. 

Her: Oh, sorry. 

And that is the story of how I didn’t give a speech at Occupy Congress. 

I’m convinced that closing the mic to speeches is a major tactical error and a missed opportunity.  Honestly, I’m not saying this to gripe.  Obviously I’m disappointed but I’m not mad at anyone.  I’m saying it because I really want the Occupation to succeed.  I also don’t believe that my speech is so important or anyone else’s would have been.  But I do believe that speech itself is important.  It would have been a very powerful symbol to open a platform for open political discourse virtually on the steps of Congress. 

Instead, you had people playing music and reading slam poetry.  Granted, I was only there for an hour, and your event went on all day, so I can’t comment in general.  But from what I saw, it seemed that most presenters had either taken the sound-byte chants of Occupy marches and set them to folk guitar or rehashed them into snappy little couplets.  Or both.  That’s all cool, but you’re not inviting anyone into the movement when you’re just using the mic to reiterate the lingo that you use with each other. 

I’m trying to understand what exactly it was the organizers were afraid of.  I know that Occupy has been sensitive about being co-opted by professional liberals.  But allowing someone to speak is not the same as endorsing their speech.  Besides, let’s say someone like Marion Barry came to Occupy Congress and sneakily used your lingo to his own ends.  So what?  That’s not co-opting the movement.  As long as he’s not giving you money, he doesn’t have any say in how the movement is run.  Or let’s imagine the opposite.  Say Eric Cantor walked out of the Capitol, down the steps, hopped up onto your stage, grabbed the mic and called you all a bunch of filthy communists and intoned about the wonders of capitalism for fifteen minutes.  First of all, you wouldn’t even be able to hear him over all the booing.  But again, so what?  Would it not have been an opportunity to allow one of your detractors enough rope to hang himself?  Or to find some common ground with someone of a different philosophy, and thereby—to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln—destroy an enemy by turning him into a friend? 

I think it’s important to always keep in mind who the real enemies are.  The real enemies are the purveyors of very big money who use that money to corrupt our political system for their own ends.  Everyone else is a potential friend.  And in the battle of winning hearts and minds, apart from nonviolent demonstration, well-crafted open discourse is the most potent weapon we have.  I realize that there is this all-consuming ethos of ‘the movement is the message.’  But in the fight to stay in the parks, you’re losing to municipal authorities and the weather.  Camping out needed to be phase one.  If nothing else, you should have at least opened the mic for a dialogue along the lines of: what should phase two be?  You obviously can’t beat Wall Street on ability to fund and organize.  So you have to argue more convincingly than they do.  Occupy needs to be about ideas, not about clinging to a few square acres of real estate.  The decision to close off discourse is a self-inflicted wound. 

Walking around the West lawn of the Capitol, every single person I saw seemed to be a hardened veteran of Occupations.  I didn’t notice any DC residents poking around the event out of curiosity.  The first weekend that Stop the Machine set up shop here in DC, at any given time there were about 2 locals to every 1 Occupier, because they had prepared interactive demonstrations, and they even had an outreach tent.  They seemed to be getting people to think and to feel strong outrage, what with the boots and dogtags of fallen soldiers. 

I’m not saying you had to go to that extent.  What I’m saying is that there seemed to be this bright red line between them and us.  And ‘them’ seemed to be anyone who hadn’t been camping in a park for the last few months.  I wore a tie for my speech, and as I was walking around, I received several snide or suspicious comments about my dress.  I am not The Man.  I was not judging you.  I did feel a little judged myself though.  I wore the tie to create the symbolism that an average American supports you.  Maybe you don’t want average Americans to support you?  If so, I believe that’s a potentially fatal mistake.  Occupy risks irrelevancy if you allow a herd mentality to begin defining the movement. 

For what it’s worth, this is the speech I had prepared.

You Are Invited!

You are cordially invited to attend a speech that I will deliver on the steps of Congress.  The speech is entitled "Liberty and Justice For All" and will incorporate themes that I've written about in this blog.  It is part of Occupy Congress' open mic.  I will speak for 15 minutes at 6:30 PM on Tuesday, January 17th on the West lawn of the Capitol building. 

Come support and watch me help the Occupiers deliver our message to Congress, the message of our Founders: that government derives its power from the consent of the governed.

Links for the event:

http://www.occupyyourcongress.info/

http://wiki.occupyyourcongress.info/index.php?title=Sign_Up_Page_for_Open_Mic

The Hunt

I know our first ancestor
echoing across the grand
canyon of an age ducked in

to the cave after an unlucky hunt
to face his moaning children’s sunken
eyes.  He wrapped their shoulders

in bear skin, showed them

to pluck a smoking stick

from the fire, sketch a bison

with the charcoal tip upon

the cool shale.  For a time

soot spears pierced wool hide

twig people ripped open the animal

grilled its flesh, filled their bellies

and danced under the stars

on the wall of rock.  He who

passed his bones down showed

us the imagination is a hawk. 

Let's illiterate.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.’

—George Orwell, 1984

As an ESL teacher, an important part of my job is keeping a straight face when a student becomes unfortunately confused about the finer points of our language.  Over the years, I’ve encountered classic examples of this, such as when I taught a class the expression to beat someone up.  An innocent student then went to the administration and jokingly chirped about how she was going to beat them off.  I had to delicately explain to her the difference between beating someone up and beating someone off.  

So I recently girded myself for silent chuckling at what seemed to be a misunderstanding only to be horrified by corporate Newspeak.  I was brainstorming a list of holiday-related expressions with my students.  Our list had only gone as far as “Happy Holidays!” and “Merry Christmas!” when a caffeine-addicted student shouted out, “Let’s merry!”  Ahh, the pitfalls of the English language, I thought to myself.  I diagnosed it as merely a verb/adjective mix-up.  It would be simple enough to correct. 

“No,” I began, “‘merry’ is only an adjective.  We have to use a verb after ‘Let’s.’  ‘Let’s be merry’ would be fine, though not really something we would say.” 

“No!” my class cried out in unison.  “‘Let’s merry’ is a common English expression!”

Then my students showed me this:

and I involuntarily taught them a slew of rare English expressions until I was hoarse.  The class dutifully wrote down each one. 

As a writer, reader, teacher, native English speaker—and frankly as a human being with a cerebral cortex—this nonchalant raping of grammar for no apparent reason boils the very marrow in my bones. 

I would like to sit down for a cup of coffee with the advertising executive at Starbucks who came up with this.  After dumping the coffee on his head, I’d just want to ask him: Why?  Why did you omit the verb?  It’s not a play on words.  It’s not a pun.  It’s not funny, witty, catchy or clever.  It doesn’t evoke nostalgic holiday cheer or vogue slang.  Even the obnoxious Microsoft Word paperclip is begging me not to write it. 

Let’s merry.  Is just.  Bad grammar.  For no reason.  Whatsoever. 

How stupid do you think we are, Starbucks?  Are your customers drooling Neanderthals dragging a woman by her hair into a coffee shop?  Do we line up at your dollar-green counters and grunt “Me want coffee!”?  The whole shtick of Starbucks is supposed to be that we’re all a bunch of hip urbanites: the type of people padding down an ironic spiral staircase in a postmodern brick penthouse.  We hop in a cab for a mile ride downtown while tweeting our angst for the environment.  Then we sashay into Starbucks to tap on our iPad while cooing shipping orders into a blue-tooth.  A floppy notepad displays our sketches we wield while wooing a client.  We are the uncommoners sipping our venti lattes, designing and selling half a million units of cool in sleek little packages to the commoners. 

So why, Starbucks, did you pick this holiday season to start peddling idiocy to us?  Illiteracy is a serious problem affecting the lives of millions of poor, undereducated people in this country, and the economy itself.  There’s nothing noble about contributing to that problem. 

While I’m at it, train your cashiers to say something other than “Can I help who’s next?”  This is terrible grammar and doesn’t make any sense.  “Can I help?  Who’s next?” would be a huge improvement.  But really, what’s wrong with a pleasant “Next, please!”  The sizes, “tall,” “grande” and “venti” aren’t doing anything to inspire the zeitgeist either.  The English word “tall,” the Spanish word for “large” and the Italian word for “twenty” don’t mean anything together.  English has three perfectly good words: “small,” “medium” and “large.” 

In 1984, George Orwell described how the party of Big Brother would slowly whittle away at the language until nuance became impossible.  This would leave the populace literally incapable of saying or even thinking anything critical of the ruling regime.  Across society, words and their meanings are disappearing into a memory hole of vapid convenience.  Facebook’s baby-faced billionaire is rubbing the verb “befriend” from the dictionary, as well as what it means to be someone’s friend, as he encourages us to “friend” everyone we’ve ever met.  He then sells our every impulse to advertisers in lab coats training us, like mice, to press the lever again and again and again for consumer food pellets.  Our politics are disappearing into soundbytes shorter than a handful of syllables.  Popular discourse is flitting away into 140-character tweets texted from twits. 

And Starbucks takes a phrasal noun, an adjective, a period, and calls it a day.  This is reason enough to walk past Starbucks and say “Next please!” when searching for a coffee.   

 

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night. 

Pyongyang Porcelain

Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.

—Confucius

The Dear Leader’s train pulled into his terminal station ahead of schedule.  Though dictators have been dropping like home values this year, the Koreans won’t be celebrating.  The peninsula and the region’s power brokers are entering a period of extraordinary uncertainty. 

In the 1590s, Japanese Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi struck out to conquer Korea.  The allied forces of China and Korea eventually repulsed the invasion after devastating years of war, but not before the Samurai made off with fortunes in loot.  One of the most valuable items they pilfered wholesale was Pyongyang porcelain.  They stole not only shiploads of pottery and kilns but also kidnapped tens of thousands of the artisans who made the pottery. Upon disembarking in chains, the potters faced a lifetime of forced labor, crafting their luxury for Japanese lords.  In doing so, they fundamentally altered the Japanese aesthetic.  Many of the most priceless Asian ceramics were spun by Korean artists of the period.  This is an origin of our sense of the beauty of the Far East: art, and the life it imitates, is mysterious, ferocious and fragile.  These same descriptions apply to the situation in Pyongyang. 

Like the elegant whorls on a ceramic jar, North Korea is mysterious.  To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld’s metaphysical poem about Iraq, there are “known knowns,” “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.”  We know that North Korea is the most isolated and opaque country on earth.  The military runs the country and staffs all the most important positions at every level of government.  The top generals form a sort of elderly House of Lords believed to be a political scorpion pit in which one misstep can spell ruin.  We know that an untested twenty-something-year-old Kim Jong-un is about to be dipped into this pit as de facto head of the country.  He hails from the dynasty established by Maoist-guerrilla-turned-Stalinist-dictator Kim Il-sung.  Jong-un’s grandfather and father derived power from the most thorough cult of personality possibly since the pharaohs built the pyramids. 

Aside from this basic information, there is little beyond questions.  The regime, realizing Kim Jong-il’s days were numbered, was in the middle of a rushed transition.  It is not known how much training Jong-un had, how much real political influence he has with the ruling elite, whether the elite will accept him and whether he is capable of taking the reins.  Given Jong-un’s tender age, he may serve as a sort of dauphin while regents actually rule the country behind the scenes.  Likely candidates for this role include his aunt and uncle.  Both of them are recent rising stars in the late dictator’s ruling clique.  They may be in the best position to instill stability.  It is not known, though, whether they were chosen in a grand succession bargain or whether they would step in by default.  Assuming that there is a plan for interim regency, there is no way to know whether Jong-un or the country’s ruling generals will go along with it once Jong-il is cold.    

The North Korean people could also become a wild card if the transition gets messy.  North Korea observers have always wondered whether the people are genuinely brainwashed or whether they role-play starry-eyed revolutionaries for fear of the consequences.  Many North Korean defectors have suggested that it’s more the latter.  But it’s possible that there is a bit of both.  If so, regional and socioeconomic animosities could become important if the regime fails to consolidate authority.  As in any country, and especially one as impoverished and hierarchical as North Korea, there are likely to be social divisions that could become inflamed during a turbulent transition.  Candidates for this type of schism include: the farmers vs. the military, a secondary city vs. the capital, one branch of the military vs. another. 

A test of Kim Jong-un’s ability to lead, or at least control, his people will come quickly.  Early next year, the DPRK will launch a series of festivals to mark the centennial of Kim Il-sung’s birth and to celebrate North Korea’s status as a “strong and prosperous nation.”  North Koreans are several inches shorter than their Southern cousins due to malnutrition.  So, this celebration of ‘prosperity’ will stress how much the people will tolerate a new regime’s barrage of baloney and how much the regime in its infancy can cram obvious propaganda down their throats.  The degree of the plebs’ cognitive dissonance may illuminate how closely a new big brother can watch them.     

We, the American and South Korean people, don’t know how much our governments know.  South Korean pundits are squawking that their government only learned about Jong-il’s death when North Korea announced it.  They are imploring their intelligence services to gain a fuller view of the situation in the North.  There are two possible explanations for this.  One is that they truly did not know.  The other is that they did know, but feigned ignorance to protect their spies.  Furthermore, if Seoul had announced the dictator’s demise before Pyongyang did, that could have triggered a high-level purge at precisely the wrong moment. 

We don’t know how much Uncle Sam knows.  All the space age electronic intelligence in the world won’t crack open a country just this side of feudal.  It is likely that the US only knows what South Korea decides to share with them.  Any spies would have to be DPRK defectors contacted by ROK handlers.  Infiltrating the hierarchy and gaining access to sensitive information could then take years.  It seems unlikely that the South could turn anyone already very high level.  Hollywood encourages us to believe that our government sees everything.  Yet, consider the fact that Hezbollah, a politically organized militia in a relatively open society, recently unraveled a CIA spy ring.  If such a second-rate rival can break up our intelligence, imagine the intensity of a cat and mouse game in a state founded upon paranoia.  It is entirely possible that we are blind in North Korea.  If so, there are probably key actors and dynamics at play that we are completely unaware of. 

Like a ceramic dragon rearing to strike, North Korea is ferocious.  There was a time when the North’s economy kept pace with and even threatened to surpass the South’s.  But the tides of the Cold War, terrible policy stemming from fanatical devotion to Maoism, American sanctions and snowballing isolation have utterly and irreversibly crushed the DPRK’s economy.   As a result, for the last twenty years, Jong-il has pursued a foreign policy of acting like a cornered snake, hissing and snapping.  The North is so devoid of resources and productivity that it begs and blackmails to get the food and fuel it needs to sustain the military (not the people).  When that doesn’t work, the world’s fifth largest (though significantly outdated) military lashes out, usually at the South, in the hopes that its neighbors and the US will pay it to be reasonable for a while.  The most recent examples of this are the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong island in disputed waters.  

These attacks seem to coincide with suspected domestic strife, when the regime is desperate for aid or is seeking the attention of Washington or Seoul.  Provocations like these would lead to conflict in most places, but are treated like bad weather in the South.  The danger is always present, though, that a tit-for-tat exchange could spiral catastrophically out of control.  If the new regime faces difficulty consolidating its authority, we can expect more attacks.  This is especially true if Jong-un senses the need to hold the generals at his side in the capital while sending their troops out into the field.  Keeping the military busy would be tempting for a beleaguered young dictator seeking to keep his friends close and his enemies closer.  Indeed, his first order as ruler was for all military personnel to return to their bases.  Apart from demonstrating control, this is also likely an effort to flush out any officers who don’t click their heels quickly enough. 

Though relations between the Koreas have never been great, they were less chilly in the 90s.  The reason for this was the Sunshine Policy, in which the South kept aid flowing to the North.  In return, the North was less bonkers.  Relative calm mostly prevailed on the peninsula.  South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, architect of the policy, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his brainchild.  Roh Moo-hyun continued this policy in the following administration.  Then came Lee Myung-bak.  President Lee was nicknamed “the steamroller” for the trail of bodies he left in his wake as he relentlessly leapt from office to higher office in business and government.  He is the South Korean equivalent of a neocon.  He scrapped Sunshine in favor of building up the military and confronting and containing the North.  The DPRK had grown to rely on ROK aid, so when Lee turned off the faucet and began confronting Pyongyang, this exacerbated the North’s poverty, which increased pressure on the regime, which caused it to lash out, which resulted in Lee confronting the North, and so on. 

American leadership has played an important role in this story as well.  During the 90s, the Clinton Administration acted in tandem with Sunshine, while playing the role of bad cop when necessary.  In 2002, Bush fired a shot across Kim’s bow in his ‘Axis of Evil’ speech.  Saddam’s fate was an object lesson to Jong-il (and Ayatollah Khameini) to seek weapons of mass destruction before Bush bombed him (further) into the Stone Age.  In Bush’s first term, his administration refused to speak to North Korea, which didn’t go over well in Pyongyang.  Bush officials justified this by crowing about not rewarding the North’s bad behavior.  There is some truth to this, but only up to a point.  The analogy to raising a child breaks down when you consider that children eventually grow up and become independent.  North Korea isn’t going anywhere, and it’s always going to depend on outside food aid no matter how high you build the fence around them.  It may be unpalatable but it is reality.  Tons of free wheat is a small price to pay if it keeps them from blowing things up. 

Early on, Obama seemed to have essentially ceded control of the agenda to Lee.  The military buildup and the ‘no rewards’ ethos has continued unabated.  Lately, though, he may be seeking to capitalize on the impending shift in the North and to demonstrate progress during his reelection campaign.  His administration has been laying the groundwork for aid and a return to six-party talks.  Jong-il’s abrupt death cast a media spotlight on a phone call regarding food aid that was probably supposed to be a secret. 

The most unsettling element of these dynamics is North Korea’s nuclear program.  If the transition fails for any reason, weapons of mass destruction could go missing.  This is the nightmare scenario for strategic planners throughout the world.  If the North began coming apart at the seams and the weapons were in jeopardy, the region’s power brokers, the US, Russia, China, South Korea and Japan, would have to make some extremely difficult decisions with precious little time to deliberate. 

A refugee crisis is the other threat that the North poses to the region.  China takes this potentiality very seriously.  Many observers believe this possibility drives China’s policy of sustaining the North.  If the DPRK were to collapse abruptly, upwards of ten million starving North Koreans would shamble into China and swim or boat around the DMZ into South Korea.  This would cause an immediate food shortage in Northeast Asia, one of the most crowded places on earth.  A rippling economic crisis would follow.  The whole world would have to pitch in.  For efforts to manage the situation to succeed, the US and China would have to be quarterbacking from the same playbook.  Even then, they’d be throwing a Hail Mary pass with the clock running out if they hoped to contain, direct and provide for a flow of millions of refugees.  Nonetheless, it’s not clear that there’s ever been any high-level huddle on this possibility. 

Like priceless pottery, North Korea is fragile.  Kim Jong-il shadowed his father as apprentice and sidekick for 15 to 20 years before taking the reins of power.  Even so, a 3-year transitional period followed which is believed to have been rocky.  After a severe stroke in 2008, Jong-il seems to have launched a sweeping purge of mid-level officials which included a spate of public executions.  He may have been paranoid about efforts to undermine his authority while he was debilitated.  Or he may have had valid reasons to be worried. 

In contrast, no one had ever heard of Jong-un two years ago.  He seems to have been elevated to the role of heir-apparent much more swiftly than he could have naturally filled those shoes.  The images of him at his father’s funeral surrounded by officials twice and thrice his age are striking.  He is in over his head and you can bet many of the people in that room are thinking, ‘that should be me.’  In this atmosphere, there are almost certain to be opportunists sitting on a personal power base, lurking in the shadows, waiting for any sign of weakness, preparing for a moment to strike. 

As we saw in Iraq, an authoritarian government can maintain order and stability for a long time even in a society that has completely collapsed.  A strong dictator’s regime forms a sort of lid on a squirming can of worms.  But when you remove the dictator and the regime, you rip the lid off, and you open the can of worms.  North Korea takes both socioeconomic collapse and authoritarian government to chilling extremes.  If the regime were to collapse, all kinds of unimaginable social, economic, political and military problems would wriggle out into the region.  Such a collapse would be the biggest since East Germans started whacking the Berlin Wall with sledge hammers.  But unlike the collapse of the Soviet Union, in North Korea there are no top level reformers ready to face the music and there is no underground political culture of democracy and liberalization (that we know of).  If young Jong-un were to fail to complete his ascent to the throne, if the regime were to wobble, North Korea’s problems would become the world’s problems. 

If the world were to suddenly inherit North Korea’s unfathomable frozen crises, it would come at a generational nadir of global malaise.  The United States is facing an ongoing economic crisis.  If history is any indication, after a decade of war, the US will have no stomach for open-ended foreign engagement for the next 20 years.  Japan’s trilogy of disasters this year topped almost a decade and a half of stagnation.  Given their checkered history, any Japanese intervention would be viewed with extreme suspicion on the Korean peninsula.  Russia is facing domestic strife, striving mightily to maintain momentum in European oil and gas markets and has not been a serious player in the Far East since the end of the Cold War.  China is in the strongest position to influence the DPRK, and Beijing is the only capital that barely tolerates Pyonyang’s shenanigans.  Some hard-line mandarins from the old guard have a sort of admiration for the DPRK’s single-minded devotion to Maoism.  But they are becoming fossils even in Beijing.  Any unilateral attempt by China to take charge of a precipitous situation in Korea would draw vehement American protest.  South Korea would be the most logical country to assume the North’s problems.  Fifty years ago, this was viewed as the South’s destiny.  Today, though, the few people left who remember the times before the Korean War are in their twilight years.  The population is steadily becoming anti-unification due to the costs.  The reunification of Korea may cost South Korea five times what the reunification of Germany cost West Germany.  South Korean intervention in the North would draw Beijing’s suspicions about Washington’s role in a unified Korea on its border.

The Korean people have taken the division of their peninsula in stride for nearly a lifetime.  But this moment of uncertainty is particularly acute.  Anyone who has scrambled up a Chungcheong ridge in the dark to watch the rising sun toast the mist off the valley rice paddies as it has for millennia understands why Korea is fondly referred to as the Land of the Morning Calm.  Let’s hope it stays that way. 

The Right to Remain Silent

“Democracy is the most difficult government to maintain, … everyone must have similar amounts of wealth, because economic inequality creates power differences that cannot exist in a democracy.”

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

           

By overreacting to the Occupation, Wall Street has revealed its hand.  It maintains its power over the will of the people through an expensive strategy of: Ridicule, Undermine and Intimidate.  The billionaires who bought our government are using the American people’s money to attack the American people.  They hoard their power while perpetuating the illusion of justice and equality by cultivating a legion of liars, manipulators and attackers to do their bidding.  This class of economic Uncle Toms consists of people who are tossed larger than average crumbs from the masters’ table.  In return, they aggressively defend the interests of the rich by insisting on a fervent devotion to the status quo and by feigning horror at anything resembling a new idea.        

In a scene in Lewis Carroll’s fable of disjointed reality, Alice in Wonderland, Alice flees with the Duchess from the Red Queen awfully fond of beheadings.  As they get away, the Duchess scolds Alice for thinking.  Alice protests, “I’ve a right to think,” to which the Duchess replies, “Just about as much right as pigs have to fly.”  The same absurdity pervades current American discourse.  The mega-rich have an absolute right to flood the public with their speech to behead any policy or the candidacy of any politician opposed to them.  Now, people seeking to publicly discuss our society’s economic direction are told the only right they have is to remain silent. 

Radical Ridicule

Once the 1% decided they couldn’t safely ignore the 99% movement, they primed their legion of media shills to sling any and all names they could at the people involved.  Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol fired the first shot by claiming in an ad that OWS was anti-Semitic, so to support Occupy was to support hate.  This serious charge is demonstrably false.  The New York Times observed that there have been lots of Jews openly celebrating Judaism under the tarps at Liberty Plaza.  OWS is intentionally decentralized, so it is inevitable that some fringe-minded people will show up to their protests.  But this video predating Kristol’s ad shows what happens when someone unfurls a sign reading “Zionists Control Wall Street.”  Other Occupiers surround him and chant “Nazi go home!  No Nazis here!”  Clearly the mainstream of OWS does not tolerate anti-Semitism in its ranks.  It is also important to point out that Zionism is not the same as Judaism.  Many devout Jews are opposed to Zionism.   

The Weekly Standard is allied with the Koch brothers, the same billionaires who funded WI governor Scott Walker’s campaign to destroy public unions.  Kristol’s attack serves the interests of politically active billionaires seeking to subvert American democracy and workers’ rights. 

Rush Limbaugh claimed that the Occupiers were threatening to bomb Macy’s.  This slander is disproved by OWS’ oft-repeated commitment to nonviolence and the fact that no one associated with the protests has been arrested for anything worse than trespassing.  Rush Limbaugh shills for a number of industry lobbies, and is particularly tied in with the food and beverage lobby. This lobby has become powerful enough to field its own candidate for president in the form of Herman Cain. 

In this rambling address, professional “paranoid” “delusional” Glenn Beck stands in front of an image of Barack Obama, Van Jones, George Soros, Michael Moore, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Vladimir Putin all rotating around a Nazi swastika and a communist flag while he asks a litany of zany rhetorical questions about OWS.  This image is only on screen in the background for 15 seconds, and he doesn’t comment on it, but he implies that an international Nazi/communist plot is fueling OWS.  During WWII, more people died in a shorter time in the fighting between the Nazis and the communists on the Eastern Front than in any other battle in history.  The suggestion they would be teaming up to protest Wall Street is remarkable stupidity. 

Beck insinuates that Van Jones founded the movement.  In the latest issue of The Occupied Washington Post, Occupiers wrote an article titled, “Van Jones and Democratic Party Operatives: You Do Not Represent the Occupy Movement/ Make Your Own Program; Don’t Try to Steal Ours.”  It’s possible that Glenn is right in that Van Jones wants to lead the movement.  But OWS has unequivocally rejected all attempts by institutional liberals to co-opt the movement.  Beck’s old lefty bogeyman falls flat in the face of a decentralized popular movement. 

In this video, Beck feverishly implies OWS is in cahoots with radical Islam.  He offers no facts to support this.  He says

“we have the Marxist revolutionaries yet again, along this time with the Palestinian movement and the radical Islam movement and now we have the big progressive movement and it’s all happening.  You would think somebody would see a pattern here, but apparently not.  Apparently not.” 

Apparently not, Glenn.  Clearly, a conspiracy of communists, Nazis and anarchists isn’t enough.  Why not throw ‘radical Islam’ into the mix too?  Does he think that al Qaeda has shifted tactics from suicide bombings to drum circles?  Or is he trying to prime his viewers for the argument that Americans who criticize Wall Street should be hauled off to Guantanamo? 

In 2007, Glenn Beck was the token conservative voice on CNN subsidiary Headline News.  He argued passionately for the US to launch a war with Iran while his show was funded by and hosted ads for Lockheed Martin, the largest military contractor in the United States.  When criticized about this by a guest, he called his critic “out of your mind” and attempted to silence him. 

Glenn Beck

On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly claims that OWS is a conspiracy of professional Democratic operatives.  In the very next sentence he says that they are all jobless because they don’t want to work.  As The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur aptly notes, O’Reilly’s two claims directly contradict each other.  O’Reilly says that with a college degree, unemployment is 4.5%.  This statistic is meaningless.  The national unemployment rate is around 9%, but if you include people who are underemployed and people not reporting unemployment because they’ve given up looking, the number may be 17% or higher.  The 2010 Census demonstrated how hard the recession has hit the 16-29 age group.  The most distressing fact facing job applicants, regardless of age, education or experience, is that there are 7 applicants for every 1 job opening in America.  

 In this segment on Fox and Friends entitled “From Mom to Mob,” Fox hosts blast a 38-year-old woman for “abandoning her family” to go to the OWS protests.  She left her teenage children with no one to look after them except for (the horror!) their father.  They smear her as a bad mother, imply that she’s cheating on her husband and tell her to take care of her kids.  This profoundly sexist diatribe against a private citizen is just one example of Fox’s brave trailblazing into new lows in commentary. 

In this video, Sean Hannity hosts Ann Coulter, who, while peddling her new book Demonic, says several times that the Occupiers are “demonic.”  Maybe no one told her that ‘demonizing’ your opponents is only a figure of speech?  She variously calls the protesters: “demonic loons,” “a demonic mob,” “brainless, brainwashed,” “losers,” “drug dealers,” “criminals,” “teenage runaways.”  She says they are not Ivy League, but are “coming from bush league schools,” and says “they don’t know why they’re there.”  Both Hannity and Coulter speculate that there is a strong potential for the protesters to become violent, again, in spite of their stated commitment to nonviolence.  Hannity says, “this is the face of the Democratic party.”  Like playground bullies, the two of them smugly call the protesters a litany of names and make no attempt to engage their arguments. 

In this video, Steve Doocy hosts Fox News ‘legal analyst’ Peter Johnson Jr.  Though you wouldn’t know it from watching the clip, Johnson is not just an ordinary corporate media shill, but also a Wall Street litigator.  His job is to help people who are very rich sue people who are not very rich.  Then he goes on cable TV to ridicule people who protest the very greed he helps make possible.  He is the epitome of the economic Uncle Tom class that enables Wall Street power.  Above a banner reading “Mayhem in Manhattan” Doocy says “the message is muddled.”  This consonance, or repetition of the “M” sound, is specifically designed to cognitively short-circuit a person’s normal skepticism toward new information.  Johnson says that OWS has “anarchist roots,” and “these folks are deluded in a lot of ways.”  He points out “they’re decrying the policies of president Obama with regard to job creation and foreclosures.”  Doocy then chimes in that it’s a “slap in the face of Obama.” 

So which is it, Fox, are the protesters demonic Democratic operatives, and the face of the party?  Or are they unemployed deluded losers, anarchists slapping Obama’s face?  Apparently they’re both, because “Fair and Balanced” doesn’t mean “True and Honest,” it means, ‘We slime our opponents with whatever mud we can find, even if it’s contradictory, doesn’t hold up to even a threadbare examination of the facts, and makes us sound schizophrenic.’  The segment ends with Doocy asking Johnson what it all means, and Johnson says, “I don’t know what it is.”  Albert Einstein once said, “The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”

Fox News is a subsidiary of News Corporation, the second largest media corporation in the world.  News Corp. owns over 100 media assets in numerous countries, including websites, cable channels, TV stations, production companies, magazines and newspapers.  The company is embroiled in an ongoing scandal of appalling ethics violations, including hacking the phones of celebrities and terrorism victims.  The Murdoch dynasty, which owns the multinational corporation, initially argued that they didn’t know about the hacking.  Recently published emails disprove this argument.  Clearly News Corp. is an extremely powerful opinion-forming machine which does not flinch at violating laws or normal standards of decency to generate ratings. 

News Corp. is owned and run by a fascinating crew.  Australian Rupert Murdoch is the 117^th richest person in the world.  He is a media tycoon with a long track record of using his bully pulpit to support pro-business and anti-regulatory politicians and policies in numerous countries.  His media empire has lent support to invasions, resource imperialism, brutal dictatorships and the repression of democracy and human rights.  He has threatened to sue critics and has promoted nepotism within his own family and the families of powerful political allies.  When the British government outlawed media graft to tamp down on anti-competitive political/media relations, many lawmakers referred to the law as “The Murdoch Clause.”  Murdoch has promoted offshore tax havens, dodged corporate taxes and exploited tax loopholes.  His media have reported the outcomes of close elections before they were officially tallied in an effort to influence the outcome, including the 2000 US presidential election. 

Other owners and high-level managers of News Corp. include:

·         John L. Thornton: a former President and Co-COO of Goldman Sachs.

·         Natalie Bancroft: a member of the powerful Bancroft dynasty, which owned Dow Jones & Company for decades. 

·         Jose Maria Aznar: the former prime minister of Spain.  He launched his career as a propagandist for the Fascist Franco government. 

·         Viet Dinh: originally from Vietnam, Dinh is a Republican legal adviser and was the primary author of the USA Patriot Act.  

·         Rod Eddington: an Australian who was the CEO of British Airways. 

·         Andrew Knight: a British media entrepreneur and current Chairman of J. Rothschild Capital Management Limited.

·         Thomas James Perkins: a founder of premier investment capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

·         Roger Ailes: former media consultant for Presidents Nixon, Reagan and H. W. Bush and NYC Mayor Giuliani. 

·         Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal: a Saudi prince, the 26^th richest man in the world and the richest Saudi.  He founded and owns the Kingdom Holding Company which holds investments in industries including “banking, real estate, telecommunications, broadcasting and media, entertainment, hospitality, computers and electronics, agriculture, restaurants, upscale fashion, retailing, supermarkets, tourism, travel and automotive manufacturing.”  He is deeply invested in Wall Street, and owns stock in major firms including Citigroup.  Some economists have observed that his publicly acknowledged income does not add up and have speculated his company may be a front for arms dealers. 

This prince is Fair and Balanced™

This list of James Bond villains the most influential players at Fox is only the tip of the iceberg, yet their combined wealth is greater than most countries.  They are deeply invested in so many business interests and hail from so many countries, it is impossible to know what their principal motivations are.  But their claim that their main concern is to inform the American public is an assault on logic.  It is all but certain that their media corporation is a Trojan horse for all kinds of corruption and conflicts of interest.  They are closely allied to the biggest banks and deeply invested in the illicit trading that blew up the economy in 2008.  Their tentacles wiggle powerfully in almost every government institution and political office in America.    

These billionaires own a legion of lying puppets who dance on strings of gold at the pleasure of Wall Street and large corporations.  The media marionettes are rewarded with prizes like lucrative lobbying deals.  In return they shill for powerful interests while framing, spinning and lying to the American people.  They will say anything to ridicule, slime, smear and demonize anyone who criticizes the policies that are enriching the wealthy and impoverishing the rest.  Their commentary is not journalism, it is not an effort to analyze, understand and explain the facts.  It is an effort to throw any mud they can find until something sticks.  Americans are beginning to publicly question the direction of our economy.  Wall Street is making sure they do so in a cloud of poison floating around anyone who asks the salient questions. 

We are used to seeing the two parties do this to each other, which is largely why they can’t get anything done.  But now the corporations and their puppets are turning their rhetorical guns on the American people themselves.  This amounts to a siege on democracy.  As the American people have begun to challenge the broken system impoverishing them, the broken system has responded by declaring war on the notion that we can insist on progress.  In this climate, we have as much right to think as pigs have to fly.  We only have the right to remain silent.

In the end, their attacks will fail.  The American people will reject the Wall Street sliming of Main Street Americans exercising their rights to free speech and peaceable assembly.  We held our hands to our hearts every morning as we grew up and pledged allegiance to the Republic where Liberty and Justice are guaranteed for all.  We took that pledge seriously.  We have come to demand a return on that pledge. 

As our message spreads, don’t be a sucker.  Accept nothing at face value.  Demand greater context.  Investigate the source.  Follow the money.  Our political culture is drowning in propaganda.  Build a life raft in your mind.