Author: John Grant

 
Christmas has come a long way from the three wise men on camels visiting the Baby Jesus in a manger in a Middle Eastern desert or from the anti-capitalist-greed morality tale of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Now we have a holiday cartoon blockbuster called Arthur Christmas that looks like The Invasion of Normandy starring The Muppets as told by Tom Clancy and delivered by Fed Ex.

In this version, the ranking Santa Claus sports a red military uniform with golden epaulets and medals on his chest (presumably for past Christmas campaigns) while his vast army of elves dressed in camouflage military uniforms march around the North Pole in formation harassing endangered polar bears.

The premise of the movie is that the Claus family has a super-secret base in The North Pole and operates its modern delivery juggernaut from a massive “mission control” not unlike the war room in Doctor Strangelove, except this vast room featuring thousands of computer terminals and giant video screens is not constructed out of harsh, film-noir light and shadow but of cotton-candy and ginger bread.

Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Santa Claus

Here’s the movie’s synopsis according to its publicity blitzkrieg:

“This Christmas movie highlights the technological advances of operations at the North Pole, revealing how Santa and his vast army of highly trained elves produce gifts and distribute them around the world in one night. However, every operation has a margin of error. When one of 600 million children to receive a gift from Santa on Christmas Eve is missed, it is deemed ‘acceptable’ to all but one, Arthur. Arthur Claus is Santa’s misfit son who executes an unauthorized rookie mission to get the last present half way around the globe before dawn on Christmas morning.”

With a $55 million construction contract “imminent” for Dilworth Plaza — home since early October for Occupy Philadelphia – the city trade unions and those in Occupy Philly determined to hold-out in the Plaza have arrived at a showdown.

Everything in life is a dialogue with something, and that goes for the bottom-up/top-down dialogue known as the Occupy Movement. The Philadelphia Police are the well-armed arbiter in the middle of this dialogue with the city. The dialogue, however, just got more complicated with the entrance of the job-hungry trades union.

“We have a dilemma,” Pat Gillespie, head of the city Building and Construction Trades Council, told The Philadelphia Inquirer. While in “full sympathy” with Occupy Philadelphia on the larger economic fairness and justice issues, Gillespie said he and his union were determined to get to work on the 800 plus jobs in the Dilworth construction contract. Gillespie offered union workers to help Occupy Philly members move their belongings across the street to Thomas Paine Plaza – or wherever they might decide to move. The matter was to be taken up at the next Occupy Philly general assembly.

Occupy Philly candlelight vigil on Dilworth Plaza

On Wednesday, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter posted an eviction order for Dilworth Plaza, citing the planned re-design project that the notice says is to start “imminently.” He ordered occupiers to leave the plaza “immediately.” The construction work is to be done by the Daniel J. Keating Company.

The $55 million project uses federal, state and other funds and is billed as a job stimulus project to last 27 months. The project has reportedly been planned for two years. It will feature a café, a market and skating rink in winter. The city’s promotional material claims 185,000 people live or work within a ten-minute walk of City Hall and will use the renovated public space. Critics say the $55 million should have been prioritized for low-income housing or other more needed projects.

A friend familiar with union issues in Philly said things could get dicey if the hold-out members of Occupy Philly don’t agree to move and allow the jobs-program to begin. Half-joking, he said trade unionists might turn on the occupiers and do their own “eviction.”

 
We’re living through an interesting juncture in history. On one hand, there’s the amazing bottom-up Occupy Movement, and no one knows quite where and how far it will go. Then, there’s the field of Republican neo-Know-Nothing, nativist candidates with each one tripping over the other to be more divorced from facts, history and reality. The strutting, cock-of-the-walk Herman Cain is currently the most interesting of this pack.

For a week now, Cain has been denying the obvious, that as leader of the National Restaurant Association he “sexually harassed” — ie, hit on — three women who worked under him who were offended by the attention and wanted nothing to do with him. Now, a fourth woman has gone public with a story of Cain’s intimate groping in a car. Despite all his vague and contradictory dismissals, his prurient assertiveness was persistent and obnoxious enough that the Restaurant Association felt it had to pay a total of $80,000 to two women — who are now legally silenced from telling their side of the story.

Herman Cain never looking back and dealing with the future

Instead of adhering to what seems his usual instinct of waving off questions as politically-correct, liberal nonsense, in this case Cain has followed the more traditional route of denial and cover-up, which as we’ve all learned only makes the press hungrier.

At this point, Cain and his Campaign Manager Mark Block — he of the bizarre You Tube smoke-break commercial — have decided to drop the cover-up and, instead, have declared it’s time to move on “to the real issues impacting this country.” That is, issues like Cain’s famous “9-9-9 plan,” which has been shown to be corporate-friendly and to increase taxes for the poor, and his lethally-electrified fence along the Mexican border, a program that was serious, then a joke, then serious again.

As far as any pain and suffering he may have caused his three silenced women accusers, at least one of whom is married, his new tack is: Never look back. The past is what it is, and it’s more important for the nation that he look to the future.

 
The people, unfortunately, are still very ignorant, and are kept in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments, who consider this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the essential conditions of their own power.
 
-Mikhail Bakunin

 
It was 10:30 pm on Dilworth Plaza, the concrete apron around Philadelphia City Hall that’s home for over 300 tents in the Occupy Philadelphia movement. The air was clear and the temperature was pleasant.

Occupiers collected in clusters, talking, some smoking and drinking out of cups. A tall, good-natured African American man performed a spoken-word dance routine before an audience of 15 people. People were still tabling the Information Tent and some were inside the Media Tent doing official Occupation work. There was not a cop in sight.

“We need to march in solidarity with the people of Oakland!” a young woman announced using a microphone. She referred to the war-zone-style police assault on the Occupy Oakland encampment the night before, where an Iraq veteran member of Veterans For Peace had been shot in the head by a police projectile; he was still unconscious and in critical condition in an Oakland hospital.

A crowd began to congregate around the young woman with the mike, some taking the mike to express their outrage over the police assault in Oakland. Someone mentioned Atlanta, where the same night police had cleared occupiers from a city park, arresting 53 people. The plan was to march around City Hall.

The street was empty as they took off and began to holler, “Whose street? Our Street!” Someone had made a crude sign mentioning Oakland. On the south side of City Hall, I noticed a uniformed policeman heading the other way at a brisk walk, as if he didn’t want to deal with these people. Hey, let ‘em have the damn street! A lone taxi drove by, and its immigrant driver honked enthusiastically. The marchers waved back.

Occupiers discuss their occupation under the statue of Frank Rizzo across from Philadelphia City Hall (John Grant)

When they got to the north side of City Hall, the group marched across the street onto the plaza in front of the Municipal Services Building, ending up at the statue of former Mayor Frank Rizzo, an Italian beat cop who became police commissioner and then mayor. He was famous for going to his mayoral inauguration with a nightstick in the cummerbund of his tuxedo. Rizzo enjoyed telling people how much he admired an Italian police tactic known as spacco il capo — break their heads. He was notorious during the insurgent sixties and seventies for saying he was going to clear out the city in such a way to “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” Leading some police operation in one of the neighborhoods in the 1970s, he told an acquaintance of mine who expressed some concern about the brutal action to shut up and get off his porch, “Or I’ll come up there and break your back.”

The marchers clustered at the base of the statue of Rizzo extending his right arm. Depending on one’s point of view, Rizzo is either making a warm, paternal gesture or he’s giving a limp parody of the Nazi salute.

 
As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator — and I wasn’t giving up before I had my story.

Patrick Howley
Editorial Assistant, The American Spectator
 

Here’s a story from the annals of fools posing as journalists.

After a pepper spray melee October 8th at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC in which several people I know were painfully sprayed, it was revealed that one of at least two provocateurs whipping up the guards and cops was a writer from a right-wing magazine, The American Spectator.

Op-ed News photographer Cheryl Biren was at the museum and noticed a beefy man in a black t-shirt whose aggressive actions seemed to her the actions of a “provocateur.” She sent out a query with 27 shots of the man to see if anyone knew who he was. He’s seen charging a guard in Biren’s photo below; the man directly behind him in a tan jacket is American Spectator Editorial Assistant Patrick Howley.

Those of us who have worked for decades as non-violent antiwar peace activists talk about these sorts of individuals in cretinous terms. They are the bane of our existence. Why? Because they intentionally whip things up to a frenzy to distract from a protest’s intended message. They do this by provoking the police into what might be termed cop-riot-mode where they feel the need to indiscriminately whack people with batons and/or spray them with pepper spray.

This is exactly what happened October 8th at the Air and Space Museum, where these men and possibly others shoved their way into the museum lobby and went a long way toward creating a melee out of what was to be a moral protest of the US drone program.

Patrick Howley is behind the beefy man, here, shoving his way into the museum lobby. Photo: Cheryl Biren/opednews.com

The Economist, a respected international news magazine, wrote about Howley’s operation in the Air and Space Museum and called him a “conservative jackass.” The online Economist writer M.S. was making both a reference to the TV show “Jackass,” where people do stupid, dangerous things on camera, and, presumably, reflecting on Howley’s thinking as he was rushing around in the Air and Space Museum like John Wayne hitting the beach at Iwo Jima.

At the end of this chaotic YouTube video, made at the end of a victory rally by the activists occupying Wall Street and thousands of their supporters, one of the demonstrators is heard hollering: “He ran over his fuckin’ leg!”

Well, I’ve looked at the video three times and that seems a pretty accurate description of what this scooter cop did.

At first, the young man’s leg seems ahead of the scooter’s front wheel, as if maybe the cop ran into him with the scooter. The man on the ground is clearly a legal observer with an official National Lawyers Guild yellow observer hat, seen on the roadway in the photo above. He seems to be in serious agony at this point. So it seems likely he has already suffered some injury.

Then, for some reason (confusion? sadism?) the scooter cop runs the scooter forward over the man’s leg — again.

Now it gets really twisted and disturbing.

 
“The First Amendment right to gather news is, as the Court has often noted, not one that inures solely to the benefit of the news media; rather, the public’s right of access to information is coextensive with that of the press.”
– United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit, August 26, 2011
 

I spent a day in Freedom Plaza, a triangle of concrete adjacent to several high-end hotels with shiny black Mercedes limos out front three blocks from the White House. It’s Washington DC’s entry in the Occupy America phenomenon.

I came wearing two hats. One, I’m a Vietnam veteran member of Veterans For Peace who has actively worked for over a decade against our bankrupting wars. And, two, I’m an experienced journalist with a master’s degree who works in both images and words. I won’t take a back seat to anyone in what is known as the Main Stream Media.

The crowd of maybe 700 people occupying Freedom Plaza was fired up. The focus of the occupation was on the wars and the “one percenters” at the top of the economic heap in America who control our lives more and more as they pursue more and more “free market” profiteering.

This monster of greed has always existed in history, but this latest binge was unleashed by a hack Hollywood actor who became President of the United States 30 years ago. Everything has been deregulated and the ruthless financial reapings by this class led to a progression of bursting bubbles, an economic meltdown and a subsequent tax-payer bubble in the form of massive bailouts.

Andrea Egizi, one of millions of victims of the bailed out bankers and financiers. (All photos: John Grant)

We all know the story by now. We know who got bailed out and who ended up holding the bag and losing their homes, people like Andrea Agizi, a single mother from Atlantic City I ran into in Freedom Plaza. Up until the recent wave of “occupations” across America, those who ended up paying for this free-market extravaganza were silenced and marginalized.

The slick financial wizards who sliced and diced Andrea’s mortgage for profit all worship the “free market.” They tend to be very liberal with those profits when it comes to financing political candidates who, once in office, lower their taxes even further. But a funny thing happened when these free marketeers saw the baroque money-making machine they’d created swirling in circles down the toilet — they suddenly turned into flaming socialists with all our tax dollars. After all, the machine had been fully endorsed, and shilled for, by the Federal Reserve’s Oracle at Delphi Alan Greenspan, and the nation didn’t want high-finance pirates jumping out of windows.

 
Honorable people like to debate whether the United States of America is a “police state,” but when it comes to shutting down the expression of ideas on the political left, there’s little room for argument.

We are inundated in this country with propaganda boilerplate about being the greatest democracy in the world. No, we’re not a police state like our friends in Saudi Arabia or our former friends, and current enemies, in Iran. Our police agencies have figured out how to accomplish police state repression in a “softer,” more sophisticated manner.

Look at the video in the September 26 report by Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC on what he describes as a “violent burst of chaos” caused by armed “troublemakers” from the New York Police Department.

It was a peaceful demonstration against Wall Street greed. At least it started out that way. All evidence suggests it was, then, sent careening into chaos by the police strong-arming of young protesters who had done nothing but express their views in public.

Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, left, on a pepper spraying spree, the woman he sprayed in the face and a brave recorder of the melee

In one incident, young women on the sidewalk observing the arrest of a young man in the street are corralled by cops using orange plastic nets. White-shirted Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, then, walks up, un-holsters his pepper spray gun and sprays the women full in the face. He re-holsters his weapon and walks away. Another video shows him doing the same thing indiscriminately to others in an apparent violation of NYPD rules that say the spray is only authorized to disable someone resisting arrest. Over 80 people were arrested in the melee.

At what point does Israel and its complicated settlement situation become a liability for the United States as Americans cope with the growing pain of recession and decline?

The United States has been an enthusiastic partner of Israel’s worst Iron Wall policies since the beginning of the state in 1948 and, most intimately, in the years following the 1967 war. The decision to see the West Bank, Gaza and all of Jerusalem as conquered, militarily occupied territory and the acceptance or encouragement of a settlers’ movement has led to a world-class impasse and growing international anger at Israel.

The madness has gotten to the point that, even if leaders of the United States and Israel suddenly woke up one morning and accepted a Palestinian state, the state of Israel would be at odds with its own settlers it sent out to colonize the conquered areas. Accepting a Palestinian state would require Israel to take on some of its most volatile citizens with military force to dislodge them.

Israeli settlers and two settlements

The more Israel insists on its role as conqueror of Palestinian territory, the more dicey Israel’s hold on international respect becomes. And it all seems to be coming to some kind of a head this month as the hurricane known as The Arab Spring heads into totally uncharted waters.

“We’re watching a potential train wreck,” a senior western diplomat (speaking anonymously due to the gravity of the situation) told The New York Times.

It’s a sad reality of our day that denial and bullshit seem the most useful talents to getting elected and to govern in America.

Bullshit is meant in the sense used by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his popular book titled On Bullshit. He defines bullshit as language with no basis in truth or fact focused on obtaining power. A liar knows the truth and tries to sell falsehoods; bullshitters simply don’t care what the truth is.

Some of the most popular candidates for the Republican Party (think Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman) are classic bullshitters who completely disdain rational analysis. For them it’s OK to say anything, like Perry and others’ denial of evolution and global warming. Reason and responsible history are for the weak.

Even “liberals” like Barack Obama are masters of bullshit. You can’t be elected President of the United States as a “peace” candidate and then run three wars, expand the use of lethal drones and special ops assassination teams and attempt to jail NSA whistleblowers, without being an excellent bullshitter. Obama’s bullshit is less the counter-Enlightenment stuff of Perry and Bachman; his bullshit is the art of seeming to fight for change as he really nestles into the status-quo.

In such a climate of bullshit is it any wonder Americans are living through such unprecedented stress and difficulty? And all indications suggest it will only get worse before it gets better.

Harry Frankfurt, left, Rick Perry and President Barack Obama

The problem is the current raft of bullshitters insist on propagating a master narrative from the 19th and 20th centuries that no longer works for the reality of the nation as it moves into the 21st Century. Master narratives are based on national myths and are found in the nostalgic assumptions of identity that people believe and want to keep alive in the future. The key myth in this context is the Myth of American Exceptionalism that says we Americans are the best of history and humanity — a super-nation at the pinnacle of global political evolution destined by our affluence and narcissistic assumptions of greatness to be the world’s role model and policeman.

Dig a little deeper and read some responsible history and it becomes clear we’re a complex nation — like all humanity, a struggle of opposites like good and evil — founded and sustained by ambition, violence and conquest. Now, in the unfolding 21st century, the whole project is running low on gas. The sense of exceptionalism is becoming more nostalgic, making sustaining the myth more costly and more detrimental to a good future. This means greater and greater amounts of bullshit.