Browsing PBH By Articles

And Occupy Wall Street Fights For Another Day

The Article: Occupy Wall Street: Busted Up But Still Thriving by Rebecca Solnit at Mother Jones.

The Text: Last Tuesday, I awoke in lower Manhattan to the whirring of helicopters overhead, a war-zone sound that persisted all day and then started up again that Thursday morning, the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and a big day of demonstrations in New York City. It was one of the dozens of ways you could tell that the authorities take Occupy Wall Street seriously, even if they profoundly mistake what kind of danger it poses. If you ever doubted whether you were powerful or you mattered, just look at the reaction to people like you (or your children) camped out in parks from Oakland to Portland, Tucson to Manhattan.

Of course, “camped out” doesn’t quite catch the spirit of the moment, because those campsites are the way people have come together to bear witness to their hopes and fears, to begin to gather their power and discuss what is possible in our disturbingly unhinged world, to make clear how wrong our economic system is, how corrupt the powers that support it are, and to begin the search for a better way. Consider it an irony that the campsites are partly for sleeping, but symbols of the way we have awoken.

When civil society sleeps, we’re just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified. They often reveal their ugly side, their penchant for violence [5] and for hypocrisy.

Consider the liberal mayor of Oakland, who speaks with outrage of people camping without a permit but has nothing to say about the police she dispatched to tear-gas a woman in a wheelchair [6], shoot [7] a young Iraq war veteran in the head, and assault people while they slept. Consider the billionaire mayor of New York who dispatched the NYPD on a similar middle-of-the-night raid on November 15th. Recall this item included in a bald list of events that night: “tear-gassing the kitchen tent.” Ask yourself when did kitchens really need to be attacked with chemical weapons?

Does an 84-year-old woman [8] need to be tear-gassed in Seattle? Does a three-tours-of-duty veteran need to be beaten [9] until his spleen ruptures in Oakland? Does our former poet laureate need to be bashed in the ribs [10] after his poet wife is thrown to the ground at UC Berkeley? Admittedly, this is a system that regards people as disposable, but not usually so literally.

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The GOP’s Primal Affection For Waterboarding

As if the cheers that followed Rick Perry’s pro-death penalty stance weren’t alarming enough, the recent GOP debate on foreign policy provided even more reasons to believe that today’s Republican candidates may have a lot in common with the Spanish Inquisition tribunal. When asked their stance on waterboarding, it was only candidates Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman who agreed that it is in fact torture and should not be used under any circumstances. Suffice it to say that the proceeding yee-haws were very few. It wasn’t until Michele Bachmann made the rather specious claim that as President she would implement waterboarding for its “effectiveness” in gaining critical security information that the rather torpid audience burst into uproarious applause.

With Herman Cain’s recent statement that he “isn’t supposed to know about foreign policy” and Bachmann’s absurd claim that the ACLU runs the CIA, it is wholly unsurprising that the majority of GOP candidates, none of whom have much foreign policy experience (save for Jon Huntsman, the apparent candidate non grata) displayed such arrant ignorance throughout the debate.

Regardless, what Cain may not understand about Obama’s intervention in Libya or what Mitt Romney may misinterpret regarding United States relations with China pales in comparison to their unnerving endorsements of waterboarding. The fact that a “serious” presidential candidate would vocalize his or her support for waterboarding in hopes of strutting his or her bellicose conservative swagger is much more indicative of our own immorality and lawlessness than an alleged enemy’s.

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A Nation Of Left-Behinds

The Article: The Left-Behinds – How three decades of flawed economic thinking have helped to create record numbers of long-term unemployed and undermine America’s middle class by Michael Hirsh of the National Journal.

The Text: BRADDOCK, Pa.—Movie director George Romero, the master of zombie kitsch, made his first films in the pitted and rusting landscape around this fabled steel town back in the 1960s and ’70s. It was fantasy then. But today, Braddock truly is the land of the living dead.

U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Steel Works chugs on, as it has since 1875, but it’s a sprawling corrugated-metal relic of its former self. Its parking lot is almost empty at midday, and it employs several hundred workers rather than the more than 10,000 who labored here at its peak. The rest of Braddock, meanwhile, is a ragged reminder of the nearly forgotten era when western Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley rolled a century’s worth of steel for gleaming new American cities and factories.

This area used to be legendary for hard work; its progeny includes iron-tough football heroes such as Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, and Joe Montana.

Today, Braddock is a black hole of apathy where the gravitational pull of despair is often too powerful to resist. Unemployment is chronically in the double digits, not so much because of displaced steelworkers—most of those jobs disappeared in the 1980s—but because of their children and grandchildren. These are the second and third generations of a lost tribe.

“We have manufacturing companies who say to us, ‘I don’t want to look at those people. They’re not used to showing up and coming to work anymore,’ ” says Stefani Pashman, head of the Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board in Pittsburgh. Unemployment counselors talk about the difficulties of teaching “soft skills”—such as simply showing up on time for an interview and wearing something nicer than a stained T-shirt. “The perception of these people as workers,” says David Coplan, director of the Mon Valley Providers Council, “is that they’re damaged goods.”

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A Troubling Grip On Reality

The Article: When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality? by David Frum in New York Magazine.

The Text: It’s a very strange experience to have your friends think you’ve gone crazy. Some will tell you so. Others will indulgently humor you. Still others will avoid you. More than a few will demand that the authorities do something to get you off the streets. During one unpleasant moment after I was fired from the think tank where I’d worked for the previous seven years, I tried to reassure my wife with an old cliché: “The great thing about an experience like this is that you learn who your friends really are.” She answered, “I was happier when I didn’t know.”

It’s possible that my friends are right. I don’t think so—but then, crazy people never do. So let me put the case to you.

I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John ­McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support.

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The Drug Subculture Overwhelms Iran

The Article: Chasing the Dragon in Tehran by Roland Brown in Foreign Policy.

The Text: On June 26, Iranian state media reported that 20,000 former drug addicts had assembled at Tehran’s Azadi Stadium to mark the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended, and used the podium to portray narcotics as an implement of Western predation. “Today,” he said, Western countries “have begun harming nations, especially the Iranian nation, by drugs. Arrogant states masquerade themselves behind the so-called humanitarian masks and they want to stir a sense of inability in other nations. They put on masks of freedom-seeking, human rights, and protecting people but in fact they are the biggest criminals in the world.”

Tehran is one the higher capitals on the earth’s surface, and not only in terms of altitude. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports that Iran has 1.2 million “drug-dependent users,” and that 2.26 percent of the population aged 15-64 is addicted to opiates. The organization’s director, Yuri Fedotov, has praised Iran for having “the world’s highest rate of seizures of opium and heroin,” and for developing effective treatment and prevention programs. Human Rights Watch, by contrast, has criticized Fedotov for glossing over the country’s inadequate legal proceedings and executions of drug offenders. Most alarmingly, people arrested during opposition demonstrations, such as the Dutch-Iranian Sahra Bahrami, have occasionally been hanged as “drug smugglers.”

Today’s Islamic Republic offers premonitions of a narcodystopia. Take a car ride through Tehran at night, and your driver may tell you that the underage girls in chadors who offer esfand — seeds that are burned to ward off the evil eye — along the highways are really selling sex to enable addicted fathers. Ride the metro, and you will see battered children pitching trinkets and fortunes to sustain their parents’ habits. Visit a poor southern suburb like Shahr-e Rey, and you might see a cigarette vendor in the bazaar with a sideline in used needles. Walk through Khaju Kermani Park on the capital’s southeastern outskirts, and you might witness young girls smoking crystal meth in full view of park authorities, while in the background a tall, badly sunburned man with track marks on his arms staggers around in an ill-fitting, woman’s blouse.

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