Obama's 'terror' state under challenge

Journalist Chris Hedges is a passionate and principled man, and these attributes have brought him into a direct conflict with the Obama administration and the US state over the dubious “legality” of anti-terror laws. 

Hedges’ 15-year career as foreign correspondent for the New York Times ended in 2003 when he was reprimanded for opposing the unlawful invasion of Iraq.  In 2011 he took part in Occupy Wall Street, and was among those arrested.

In September last year, with others, he defeated the Obama government in court, challenging the administration’s new anti-terrorism legislation. Hedges argues that it restricts news reporting, protest and political organising in defence of controversial causes and could be used to indefinitely imprison journalists, activists and human rights workers. 

The appeal, which opens in court today coincides,  with the publication of a hitherto 16-page secret memo prepared by Obama’s Department of Justice that sets out to justify the president’s power to target even Americans for assassination by drone without due process.

Glenn Greenwald, noted writer on civil liberties and constitutional issues, commented: “The core distortion of the War on Terror under both Bush and Obama is the Orwellian practice of equating government accusations of terrorism with proof of guilt. One constantly hears US government defenders referring to ‘terrorists’ when what they actually mean is: those accused by the government of terrorism. This entire memo is grounded in this deceit.”

Hedges’ co-plaintiffs in the case include Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, linguistic philosopher and campaigner Noam Chomsky, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Jennifer Bolen, founder of the activist media group RevolutionTruth and Occupy London activist Kai Wargalla.

Hedges took his campaign to the People’s Recovery Summit in Brooklyn, on Saturday. The opening words of his extraordinarily stirring speech are about as direct and uncompromising as you can get: 

The corporate state has made it clear there will be no more Occupy encampments. The corporate state is seeking through the persistent harassment of activists and the passage of draconian laws such as Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defence Authorization Act…to shut down all legitimate dissent. The corporate state is counting, most importantly, on its system of debt peonage to keep citizens — especially the 30 million people who make up the working poor —from joining our revolt. 

Hedges has teamed up with political activist and former consumer champion Ralph Nader, launching a campaign to raise the minimum hourly wage in the US from its current $7.25 – the lowest amongst the rich Western countries. Nader is pushing for $10.50 – to bring the value back up to what it would buy in 1968.  Hedges is going further. He wants it to be $11.

He argues that the dominance of the economy by credit and debt has changed the character of class warfare. He believes that a mass movement to raise the minimum wage by 50% will be a challenge to the corporate state, discrediting it, even paralysing it. He says: 

This debt peonage must be broken if we are going to build a mass movement to paralyze systems of corporate power. And the most effective weapon we have to liberate ourselves as well as the 30 million Americans who make up the working poor is a sustained movement to raise the minimum wage nationally to at least $11 an hour. 

Hedges believes that the moment workers rise up and demand justice is the “moment the staggering inequality of wealth begins to be reversed”. Hedges is clear that the campaign for a minimum, let alone a living wage is inseparable from the conflict with the state.

But the bankrupt capitalist economy cannot and will not concede to even such minimal demands. Inequality is not going to be “reversed” by mass pressure, athough the Hedges-Nader campaign deserves everyone's support. Inequality is actually built into global capitalism in whichever country it operates. And if the state decides to use anti-terror laws to suppress dissent and protest it won’t hesitate to do so because it exists to defend the status quo. Never forget that.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Hands off Gaza - one state the only solution

The latest Israeli assault on Gaza is the act of a state with nothing to offer but the politics and economics of war and terror. With an election coming up in January, Netanyahu’s Likud government is killing Palestinians with the aim of creating fear at home to help them hold on to power.

Netanyahu’s regime has turned once more to state terrorism to find a distraction for an Israeli population burdened by debt and devastated by spending cuts. In July, mass protests once more erupted on the streets of Tel Aviv and two men died after setting themselves on fire in protest at social conditions.

Inequality in Israel is amongst the highest in the world, according to the OECD. One in five Israelis live in poverty, one in three children. But between 2008 and 2009, the number of millionaires increased by 43%, largely from hi-tech start-ups in the weapons, security and communications sector.  

As usual, the world’s media slavishly follows the Israeli line that increased rocket attacks from Gaza led to the current assault, but an open letter from ten leading academics, including Noam Chomsky, is eye witness to a different chronology.

On November 5, a 20-year old Gazan man with a learning disability was shot when he wandered too close to the border. It was six hours before Israeli troops would let medics reach him, so he died. On November 8, a 13-year old boy playing football in front of his house was killed when the Israeli Defence Force made an incursion into Gaza.

By November 11, five Palestinian civilians including three children had been killed in 72 hours. Four deaths occurred when shells were fired at a football match. Some 52 civilians had been wounded, including six women and 12 children.

A Canadian doctor working in Gaza reports wounded arriving at Shefa hospital with shrapnel wounds – brain, neck, throat, intestinal and bone injuries leading to “traumatic amputations”, carried out with “very little morphine for analgesia.”

These were deliberate provocations against a relatively defenceless people armed with a few home-made rockets who live in what has been dubbed the world’s biggest prison camp. Cut off from their fellow Palestinians on the West Bank, most Gazans are registered refugees dependent on help from United Nations agencies and conditions are deteriorating.

Not one Israeli civilian died before the IDF attack began – today three are dead as Hamas stepped up rocket attacks. Netanyahu has to answer for them, too.

Increasingly desperate violence is the Zionist state’s only response to the massive changes in the region. Iran has announced new advanced drones, more sophisticated than those they gave Hezbollah in Lebanon which were sending satellite pictures of Israel’s military and nuclear bases.

The Egyptian government, formerly a supine supporter of US policy in Israel, has recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv. Its border with Gaza is open and Egyptian hospitals are preparing to accept casualties. Israel has been exchanging fire with Syrian artillery batteries on the Golan Heights, where anti-Assad rebels are located.

Later this month the United Nations will discuss a request from the Palestine National Authority for observer country status, a de facto recognition of statehood. The Israeli government has warned that if this happens, they will invade the Palestinian area and topple the government of Mahmoud Abbas.

The Zionist state is in a profound, existential crisis. It has nothing to offer the Israeli people, but the same could be said of the Hamas and Fatah leaderships – and the Iranian government with its military adventurism.

The only people offering a way forward are those from both sides of the Arab/Israeli divide who propose a one-state solution in place of the doomed two-state approach which becomes more impractical each day that Israeli settlement building continues.

Surely the aim has to be remove all the walls and checkpoints and to create a single democratic, secular state with equal rights for all its citizens, whatever their religious or ethnic background. That is the only way to rally Israelis and Palestinians against their common enemy.

Penny Cole

Democracy is more than a governance issue

The fanfare launch of a Manifesto for Global Democracy backed by significant thinkers ought to be a cause for celebration. Unfortunately, its content is so weak that at best it’s a missed opportunity and at worst a step backwards. 

Among the signatories are democracy expert and professor Daniele Archibugi, Noam Chomsky, the writer and journalist George Monbiot, globalisation expert Saskia Sassen and scientist and activist Vandana Shiva. They and others wrote and signed the manifesto.  

Much of the document states the obvious, though it’s none the worse for doing so. You can only nod in agreement when the manifesto says: “In spite of their many peculiarities, differences and limitations, the protests that are growing all over the world show an increasing discontent with the decision-making system, the existing forms of political representation and their lack of capacity for defending common goods. They express a demand for more and better democracy.”

It portrays the “emergence of regressive and destructive processes resulting from the economic and financial crisis, increased social inequalities, climate change and nuclear proliferation” and concludes: “Global crises require global solutions.”  

However, the assertion that the failure of national and international leaders to deal with global events shows merely that “existing forms of global governance are insufficient” is superficial and wrong. That’s because the 872-word document avoids, omits, ignores, rejects or sidesteps the nature of our current social system, aka capitalism.

You will find that term mentioned frequently in the Financial Times, even in parliament by leading politicians. But not in this manifesto. So we’re left clutching the air with talk of “governance” which, while certainly an issue, cannot be tackled separately from the main cause of a series of global crises.

As a result the call for “global solutions” is reduced and restricted to an appeal for a series of reforms to international agencies. These are intended to be carried out by the same discredited political elites who have played a crucial role in facilitating an uncontrolled, corporate-driven globalisation process that has led to a tipping point.

So the manifesto insists that “the existing national-state organisations (my emphasis) have to be part of a wider and much better coordinated structure” alongside democratic regional institutions and moves towards a future World Parliament. Yet increasing numbers of people view these existing structures as part of the problem and not the solution.

World leaders have not, as the manifesto claims, been “running behind global events” because of governance issues. They cannot tackle fundamental issues because the state systems they administer are tied inextricably to conserving and advancing the status quo of transnational capital. Of course, capitalism itself more and more resembles a nuclear power station in melt down mode.

Capitalist democracy, which was a step forward for the masses previously denied an electoral voice, is in crisis precisely because it has disenfranchised the majority. Increasingly, political institutions and parties are in practice part of a single giant corporation – UK PLC, for example. This is not democracy. It’s a corporatocracy.

As a result, the manifesto’s call for “a socio-political process open to all human beings, with the goal of a creating a participative global democracy” must inevitably fall on deaf ears. So will the demand for a “new paradigm of development which has to be sustainable on a global basis and which benefits the poorest of humanity”.

Achieving these worthwhile and essential goals will require much more than an appeal to existing political classes to join with ordinary people to succeed. Yes, we need a more advanced democracy, as the manifesto says.

But that cannot be separated from the extension of democracy in deeper ways through, for example, the transfer of ownership of corporations and banks into the hands of working people, consumers and local communities. Production for profit has to be replaced with co-operation and meeting need.

That will involve a transition from failed political-state structures that uphold the status quo through building initiatives like people’s assemblies. Our rulers have had their chance and blown it. It’s time to move history on, politically, socially and economically.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor