Federal agencies spy for corporate America

The United States is always awash with conspiracy theories, some more outlandish than others. But their source does not lie simply within the imagination of those who develop them. In fact, real, actual conspiracies by the American state constantly fuel people’s deep suspicions about their government. 

For the latest example, you have to look no further than the FBI’s secret war on the Occupy movement, whose activists were classed as “terrorists” and a threat to “homeland security”. Documents obtained by Partnership for Civil Justice Fund reveal the FBI collaborating with the Department for Homeland Security and using local branches of the Federal Reserve Bank in their illegal surveillance.

As to the fanciful notion that the FBI is there to protect its citizens against violent death, forget it. The FBI allowed a plot to murder Occupy activists in Texas with sniper rifles remain a secret until the heavily-redacted files were made public through a Freedom of Information request.

Even the right-wing John Birch Society is alarmed by the Obama administration-sponsored war on its own citizens. An article in its magazine notes: “According to analysts, in addition to exposing numerous violations of the Constitution, the newly released documents also offer a great deal of insight into the emerging ‘police state’ apparatus.”

Pullitizer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges is of a similar mind, although quite rightly he links the FBI-Homeland Security activities to a plot to silence critics of big business, which Occupy placed at the top of its agenda. Hedges says the FBI documents show how widespread surveillance is and amount to an “explicit warning by the security services to all who consider dissent”, adding: “Anyone who defies corporate power, even if he or she is nonviolent and acting within constitutional rights, is a suspect.”  

Government security services began monitoring Occupy activists before the high-profile camp in Zuccotti Park, New York. Documents obtained by the PCJF show, for example, that they were in attendance when activists met in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The 9.11 attacks spurred the Bush administration into creating a threatening security framework which the Obama White House has not only embraced but developed in new ways. The imminent appointment of John Brennan as head of the Central Intelligence Agency is a case in point.

Brennan, Obama’s principal counter-terrorism and security advisor, has made the use of targeted assassinations by drone attacks virtually an everyday event. They are considered illegal in international law. Brennan is a supporter of forms of torture and “extraordinary rendition”, by which suspects are kidnapped by US agents and flown to secret camps. No doubt Brennan will bring the CIA into closer focus with the FBI in the hunt for domestic opponents of the government.

At the heart of the Obama authoritarian state is a network of 77 “fusion centres” set up over the past decade. They were supposed to co-ordinate the “war on terror”. Instead, according to a recent according to a recent Senate report,  the centres pose a threat to civil liberties as well as producing a series of half-baked reports which were worse than useless.

So as Obama starts his second term, the illusions many held in his administration four years ago have all but disappeared. The state is there to protect capitalist corporations and big finance. And Obama is there to co-ordinate the work of the state, putting together an apparatus that resembles those of a police state.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, said in a statement: “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

As the struggles against massive inequality, unemployment and low wages gather pace, America’s capitalist state is tooling up for mass confrontation. The rights enshrined in the US constitution will have to be renewed through the creation of a more developed, revolutionary democracy. That much is clear.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Militarized policing comes to America

The crackdown on the Wall Street occupation and similar actions around the country have prompted two authors to warn about an increasing militarization of America’s policing.

Tom Engelhardt, whose latest book, The United States of Fear is out this month, has dubbed the space in New York that police brutally cleared of occupiers as “Zuccotti Prison”. He says that there are no tents, no kitchen, no library left in the park.

Just 30 protesters and 100 police plus private security guards. Parts of the park are cordoned off with yellow police tape that would normally surround a crime scene. When he went there last week, a young protestor was being arrested, evidently for the “crime” of lying down on a bench.

Engelhardt writes gloomily about a “distinctly up-armoured, post-9/11 American world”, citing the example of the “police” who so notoriously pepper-sprayed non-violent, seated students at University of California Davis. They were, in fact, campus cops who in his days wore civilians clothes and had no real powers.

“Now, around the country, they are armed with chemical weapons,Tasers, tear gas, side arms, you name it. Meanwhile, some police departments, militarizing at a rapid rate, have tank-like vehicles, and the first police surveillance drones are taking to the air in field tests and capable of being weaponized.”

He warns: “In the United States, increasingly, those in power no longer observe the law. Instead, they make it up to suit their needs. In the process, the streets where you demonstrate, as (New York’s mayor keeps telling us) is our ‘right’, are regularly transformed into yet more fenced-in, heavily surveilled Zuccotti Prisons. This may not be a traditional police state (yet), but it is an increasingly militarized policed state in which the blue coats [police], armed to the teeth, act with remarkable impunity.”

William Hogeland, the author of the narrative histories Declaration and a collection of essays, Inventing American History writes how the crackdowns around America “have brought a military level of combativeness” to the scene.

It's not as if officers have been resorting to battle gear under otherwise unmanageable pressure or initiating violence only as a last resort. They've been arriving in battle gear. They've been construing noncompliance as potential attack. They've moved pre-emptively to disable attack where none existed, not just trying to evict but seemingly hoping to inspire fear, to punish and defeat. The mood these operations convey is that failure to achieve police objectives must result in something awful for the body politic. In reality, leaving citizens sitting around a park or campus a few more days, even possibly illegally, might be frustrating for police and others; it's hardly the end of the world. Sometimes taking a few deep breaths is the only thing to do. But military training, tactics, and weaponry seem to inspire the idea in civic strategists that failure to achieve an objective is tantamount to fatal defeat by a hostile enemy. Intolerable. Not an option.

He shows how creating a clear distinction between the police and military is fundamental to American constitutional law, history and ideology. Hogeland's article reviews tendencies both toward and against police militarization that go all the way back to the country's founding.

Some like Naomi Wolf see a conspiracy by the federal state to galvanise local authorities into action (see a sound demolition of her argument by Alternet’s Joshua Holland) against the occupation movement. No conspiracy is required, however. There is a nervousness within the state at all levels as the economic crisis worsens and the American dream looks more like a nightmare. The result is a lashing out by authorities whose legitimacy, not to say democratic credentials, is seeping away at federal and state level. Time for another American revolution to protect, enhance and advance democracy in new ways.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The invasion of the commons

One of the transformations in London over recent decades has been the opening out of the Thames embankments to the public. You can now meander from Vauxhall Bridge in the west to beyond Tower Bridge in the east, along the city’s historic riverside.

Stunning views of the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge and Tate Modern - are unobstructed by traffic. Unlike Rome and Venice, where architectural gems like the Spanish Steps and the Doge’s Palace are often spoiled by garish corporate logos, there are no jarring advertising hoarding. This entirely free pleasure in Europe’s largest city is one of the success stories of Ken Livingstone’s eight-year mayoral stint.

But now, the process is going into reverse. London’s bridges and its squares and open spaces are being appropriated and privatised. And increasingly, under the false flag of the 2012 Olympic Games, vast schemes are being devised which will subvert past gains.

So much so that architectural writer Rowan Moore has coined the words “publoid, publate, privlid” to describe the sinister process by which corporate owners convert areas once open to the public into “managed and controlled spaces with uniformed wardens”.

This is what happened in Broadgate, Canary Wharf, City Hall and Paternoster Square. “Ultimate control”, as Moore notes,“ is in the hands of private landowners”.

That’s why the protesters who sought to occupy the space outside the London stock exchange found all entrances to Paternoster Square sealed off by police cordons and they ended up at the foot of St Paul’s at the mercy of the church fathers. This was despite the redevelopment of the square being billed as a “public space”.

Now, a £50 million proposal by the Singaporean asset-management company Venus for a floating park to run from the Millennium Bridge to Tower Bridge is currently under scrutiny. Under the shiny corporate-speak it is the latest and insidious move of a widespread hybrid beast that has reared its head in the last decade. This is “the pseudo-public space, in which the City of London and its satellites are world leaders”, as Moore notes.

English Heritage and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment are voicing disquiet. English Heritage says the view of St Paul’s would be affected by “flashy and corporate” features of what is fundamentally “a gigantic hospitality suite with a fairly nice walkway threaded through it”.

And it is not only the high property value City part of the Thames that is being threatened. Further down river in Stratford, locals are worried about a plan for an “experiential, hospitality and entertainment” venue. Former accountant Lance Forman hopes to bring 8,000 visitors a day to a tiny island on the Thames, day and night. Olympic corporate guests will be comfy on a gigantic sofa and watch the games on a 30x 7 metre screen.

Like the Olympics themselves, this proposal is promoted as “building a lasting legacy for the area”. But those who live and work there say it is a disaster waiting to happen.

The invasion of the “commons” is not a new process and not unique to London. The turbo-charged hey-day of globalisation saw the entire planet subjected to this process. With the growing resistance to the crisis, to the banks and corporate power, the state is showing the mailed fist in favour of the owners of private property. Out go security guards, in come riot police with tasers, tear gas, pepper spray and batons.

The clearing out of occupiers in New York’s Zucotti Park and the arrest of several St Paul’s activists outside the Guildhall in the last 24 hours makes it crystal clear that not only the right to protest, but simply to live, breathe and look at the world around you in a relatively free way is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary