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(This article, the first in a three-part series, was written on assignment for WhoWhatWhy News)
 

Miami Beach -– Len Berry was relaxing with colleagues on a hotel patio here one evening last October when one of them shouted, “Look! It’s happening!”  Peering over the railing, the group could see water pushing up onto the street below from storm sewer drains – something that thanks to sea level rise has been happening with increasing frequency in this low-lying resort city. Berry, director of Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Environmental Studies, says he and the others were in town to attend a conference on climate change when they got this first-hand view of the crisis.

Far north of Florida, skeptics of the chaos caused by climate change are rare. The denizens of Alaska, Siberia, Scandinavia, Greenland and northern Canada have been witnessing firsthand the frightening effects of a rapidly heating Earth: Lakes and shallow seas bubbling with methane, the Arctic Ocean’s icecap shrinking, soon to vanish altogether in summer, “drunken forests” whose tree roots once sat firmly atop permafrost, now wobbling helplessly on mud. They know what’s happening.

But in America’s Lower 48, there are still plenty of climate-change naysayers. In Florida, you will find fewer and fewer of them, though, especially along the state’s long, low-lying coastline. The evidence of climate change is getting harder to ignore down here, too.

The playground city of Miami Beach may seem an unlikely place to spot such radical changes. But at its greatest elevation this heavily developed island sits just four feet above mean sea level. Much of the land is even lower and these days it gets inundated when the tide is high.

Miami Beach’s Holocaust Memorial sculpture by Kenneth Treister, rising 40 feet above the island, could end up being the last visible sign of Miami Beach, and an unintended symbol of a drowning city’s climate change fate

This past week, the Federal government threw a one-two punch that will effectively destroy the Internet as we know it. Demonstrating, once again, his talent for obfuscation and misdirection, President Obama made a speech about reforming the NSA and controlling surveillance that actually officially recognized, sanctioned and even expanded the NSA’s domestic spying and cyber-warfare.

While pundits and activists quickly pointed to the President’s “weakness” in not implementing real changes in the spying policies, there was nothing weak about Barack Obama’s speech. True enough, this wasn’t the conciliatory speech some people wanted or even expected; he didn’t apologize for the atrocious mangling of our civil rights he’s overseen. But he wasn’t hiding from the outrage. Rather, he told us in no uncertain terms that he sees a need to spy on us, has what he claims are the laws in place to let him do it and has the will to continue and expand upon it. It was a chilling moment: a bully telling us “how it’s gonna be”.

Obama from the bully pulpit: nothing will change

At the same time, the federal courts last handed down a decision which also, if upheld on appeal, obliterates the Internet as we know it: throwing out net neutrality rules and actually declaring the Federal Communications Commission legally incapable of regulating the Internet’s vitally important high speed broadband service.

The President’s speech is the more infuriating, the court decision the more dangerous but, taken together, they present a horrifying vision of a government whose homicidal activities are accompanied by its destruction of democratic protection. The same government that is fighting some kind of war in every part of the world is fighting an unrestrained war on our freedom and liberty here at home. I’ll have something to say about net neutrality later this week but first…our President and his war on our rights.

This poem is based on two assumptions:

1) A party is good for the American People.

2) There actually are “American People”.

So, let’s have a party and invite the American People!
Let’s have a theme.
We’ll get everything we need from the party store!
There will be a DJ, and a huge cake.
And zombies serving finger food.

(The American People get zombies.)

There will be lots of young beautiful educated people
From other countries
Walking around nodding and smiling.

(The American People get foreigners.)

There will be a dog there so the American People
Can have something to distract them
From trying to be too clever.

US military history from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan is too often a combination of destructive stumbling around followed by an effort to sustain and project forward the notion of US power and exceptionalism. To forge another narrative is very difficult.

There’s the blind rush to war to put in its place some faction halfway around the world that has not played ball with US leaders. Next, there’s the moment military leaders realize they must fend off a local opposition they had not anticipated. Finally, there’s the inevitable condition of weariness over the killing, dying and destruction, leading to a withdrawal once that can be managed in a face-saving manner that sustains the delusion that the whole enterprise was honorable.

I made two trips to Iraq, one in December 2003, and another the following month, January 2004. Both entailed hair-raising 12-hour back-and-forth dashes across the Anbar desert in a large SUV sometimes doing 110 MPH from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad. This was at the moment US military commanders realized, shock and awe aside, its invasion/occupation had flushed out a formidable resistance movement.

Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Marines in the second and bloodiest attack on Falluja
 

In December 2003, I visited Falluja with two Iraqis and another American in a blue Opal with a cracked windshield. We were going to link up my American colleague with his son at a forward base in Falluja. It was quite an adventure finding the base. In the process I learned that Falluja — contrary to the identity it now has in the US as a famous battle — was a lake resort known for its delicious kabob restaurants. Our Iraqi guide was a bit of a comedian and insisted that we would end the day with a visit to a famous kabob restaurant in downtown Falluja.

“Uhh, is that wise?” I asked. The guide who was a professor of cinema at a Baghdad university winked at me but kept up the joke for the more anxious American father in the front seat.

“No problem! They are delicious. You will love the kabobs of Falluja.”

My second visit to Baghdad was with David Goodman, a documentary filmmaker. We went to meet with this same cinema professor to ponder cultural exchange. Goodman and I were hoping to return to Baghdad to teach a class. Then, all our plans went up in smoke when several American military contractors were ambushed in Falluja and their charred bodies hung ignominiously from a bridge. This provoked the first, Army assault on Falluja. There was to be no cinema class featuring an American Academy Award winning director and his Sancho Panza sidekick. The resistance had grown and the price on American heads was too much.

On this website, we’ve speculated that one outcome of the flood of NSA-centered revelations has been to desensitize U.S. citizens and diminish outrage at what is actually revealed. We are becoming conditioned to the horror story that is the National Security Administration.

Right before Christmas, we got another dose of breath-taking outrageousness through the reporting of a group of journalists courtesy of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel. The report profiles the work of a powerful unit of technological thugs called the Tailored Access Operations unit or TAO — either an unfortunate coincidence in naming or a reflection of disdain for another culture.

TAO's Parent and Home: NSA Headquarters
 

By the NSA’s own admission, this is among its most important programs and one of its fastest growing. Its existence has already been reported on by the Washington Post based on Edward Snowden information. These Spiegel articles add disturbing details to the picture.

The unit, founded in 1997 and now comprised of an estimated 1,000 technologists and support staff in a half dozen offices nationwide, attacks highly selective and well-protected targets. It steals data, conducts on-line denial of service and other attacks against computers and servers in other countries (including government servers and websites), sneaks into offices and other locations to break open and tamper with computers, and intercepts shipments of equipment to break into those and insert modifications that will allow NSA data capture.

Yet, as frightening as this activity is, perhaps TAO’s greatest attack is on the Internet itself. It has turned a technology that was designed to enable communication among the world’s people into an implement of war and sabotage. In fact, one TAO paper explains the need to “support Computer Network Attacks as an integrated part of military operations.”

The US Department of “Justice” has a distinctly nuanced concept of that term, taking a tough, no-holds-barred stance when it comes to individuals — especially little people without much power or influence — and trying at all costs to avoid prosecution when it comes to the powerful, and to big corporations — especially big financial corporations. That schizoid approach to prosecution is personified in the recent actions–and inaction–of the DOJ’s man in Manhattan, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara.

You remember Preet. He’s the guy who came down so hard on a deputy consul general of the Indian Consulate in New York who was accused by his office of “human trafficking.” Setting aside the deliberately incindiary “slave trade” language, what the 39-year-old Devyani Khobragade stands accused of is lying to US visa officials in New Delhi when she applied for a visa to bring an Indian maid to the US to work in her home, allegedly claiming to them that she would be paying the woman some $4500 a month, when the maid, who left the job, claimed she was paid just $573 monthly. The US prosecutor (himself a naturalized citizen and native of India who grew up in the US) had Khobragade arrested as she dropped her two children off at school, brought her to the federal lock-up in Manhattan, where she claims she was strip searched and cavity searched several times, and finally released her on $250,000 bond, to face felony charges that could potentially result in 10 years’ jail time. (Khobragade has denied the charges and claims that the maid in question was extorting her family.)

Explaining his tough approach to the case, Bharara has stated that Khobragade’s treatment under arrest was not harsh, and that she was simply subjected to “routine procedures of the US Marshal’s Service” for persons being placed in detention following arrest. In fact, he claimed she had been extended “special courtesies” such as being allowed to make multiple phone calls to assure that her children would be cared for in her absence, and being offered coffee by her arresting officers. Bharara also defended his department’s tough approach in this case saying that human trafficking is a serious crime and that “Foreign nationals brought to the United States to serve as domestic workers are entitled to the same protections against exploitation as those afforded to United States citizens.” He went on to declare that the alleged lying to visa officials and the alleged “exploitation of an individual” were something that “will not be tolerated.”

Some might immediately point out that exploitation of low-paid American workers is rampant — including in Bharara’s jurisdiction of New York–and that the Justice Department largely ignores it. (US workers routinely are defrauded out of overtime, get paid below minimum wage, are denied unemployment benefits they are owed, are forced to work in dangerous conditions, and are abused on the job and the “Justice” Department does nothing.) But even putting that huge hypocrisy aside, there’s the matter of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase.

US Prosecutor Preet Bharara (center): On the one hand, $65-billion fraud-abetting bankster Jamie Dimon gets no prosecution or arrest, on the other, Indian consular worker Devyai Khobragade gets arrested, strip-and-cavity-searched and hit with a felony charge for lying on a visa application

There is no question but that New York’s new mayor, Bill De Blasio, owes his landslide victory in the November election to the Occupy Movement.

It was Occupy Wall Street’s minions, hemmed in by thug-like NYPD officers armed with sidearms, clubs and pepper spray cans, who in 2011 abruptly changed the national conversation about capitalism, introducing the concept of “We are the 99%,” and focusing attention on the enormous enrichment of the top 1% of Americans at the expense of the other 99% over the past several decades, as a direct result of public policies on taxation and bank deregulation.

And it was that new focus on the country’s yawning wealth and income gap that provided De Blasio with his winning campaign theme.

It’s a sad commentary on the diminished influence and power of the left in America that De Blasio and Kshama Sawant, who won a little city council seat in the second-tier small city of Seattle (pop. 635,000) as an openly socialist candidate, are being hailed as the heroes of a resurgent progressive movement. (I don’t mean to diminish the victory that Sawant has achieved, merely to point out the fact that the left in the US has to be pretty weak for us to see one city council seat going to a socialist as a big deal nationally.)

The truth is, it’s hard to know how progressive and “left” De Blasio really is. Certainly his background as a backer of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua beats Barack Obama’s short stint as a “community organizer,” and there are other reasons, not least the evident lack of greed in his personal life, that suggest De Blasio may be the real deal and at least a worthy heir of New York’s last truly progressive mayor, Fiorello La Guardia. But there are also troubling signs that he may not be all that he presents himself as. The most troubling of these is his chumminess with former president Bill Clinton — the man whose presidency brought us war in Bosnia, the unravelling of habeas corpus, the beginnings of the war on terror (see Effective Death Penalty Act), the “end to welfare as we know it,” and of course, the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act that converted banks into casinos.

Inviting Clinton to administer his oath of office was a bad sign. There were so many New Yorkers who would have been better suited for that symbolically important job — for example Ruth Messinger, former New York City Councillor and Manhattan Borough President and a life-long fighter for progressive causes in the city, or Heidi Beghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, whose minions struggled mightily over 12 years to defend civil liberties under the onslaught of Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his riot-clad centurions. Instead of someone like them, De Blasio handed the job to a man who, like the current president, spent most of his time in office betraying whatever progressive principles the Democratic Party may have had since the time of FDR.

Bill De Blasio as a Sandinista supporter in 1988, and with his family, being sworn in as New York's new mayor in 2014

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The issue of economic equity is appearing on the national agenda. We’re suddenly hearing lots of talk about raising the minimum wage and other reforms to break the cycle of social Darwinism and provide working people at least a livable wage for their labor.

As a political activist, I’m impressed with how issues like these play out in the cultural realm where narrative and storytelling play a powerful role in forming the political consensus for reform in a globalized world.

I’m particularly interested in the genre of noir crime fiction. In our hi-tech, distraction-based culture, it’s arguably the rule that to get ahead one must break rules. Foolish losers follow the rules. Writing on Brazilian culture in Brazil On the Rise, Larry Rohter talks about a tradition there where laws are seen as not applying to the powerful; laws are, instead, used by the powerful against their enemies. A similar, more Anglo Saxon climate of corruption plays out in our North American capitalist world. The rich get richer and the poor, poorer. Money drives elections and justice itself.

There’s no better overarching narrative structure to address this than the genre of crime fiction, especially what is known as noir, a genre the crime fiction maven Otto Penzler, publisher and owner of the Mysterious Bookstore in New York, says is classically about desperate “losers” struggling to get somewhere in a harsh world.

There’s a movement in Philadelphia to resurrect the pulp fiction novels of David Goodis from the 1950s that emphasize ordinary working class protagonists in an essentially lawless, rough underworld in Philly. Utilizing art and entertainment, stories like this ennoble the struggle of ordinary working people.

The 1953 pulp novel's cover and a scene from Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1983 film of The Moon in the Gutter
 

The Moon in the Gutter, Goodis’ 1953 classic is a wonderful pulpy noir about the realities of class in a working class river ward of Philadelphia. The plot revolves around stevedore Bill Kerrigan, a beefy, working man struggling with life at the bottom and the effort to retain some dignity. While not all “Marxist,” the novel is about the collision of class, specifically involving “slummers,” well-off, uptown people who like to drown their sorrows or walk on the wild side in a poor working class neighborhood along the Delaware River. Much of the drama takes place in a bar called Dugan’s Den, “the kind of room where every time piece seemed to run slower,” where a double shot of rotgut rye cost twenty cents. “At Dugan’s there was little interest in time. They came here to forget about time.”

Let’s start here by conceding that today’s New York Times editorial saying that President Obama should “find a way to end (Edward) Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home” was pretty remarkable.

It shouldn’t be, though.

Former National Security Agency employee and contractor Edward Snowden, currently living in exile in Russia under a temporary grant of amnesty, but facing charges of espionage and theft of government property here at home for his copying of thousands of pages of NSA files and for releasing them to US and foreign journalists, is a hero of democratic freedom. He has raised the bar for whistleblowers everywhere, putting his own life at risk to let Americans and citizens of the world know just how pervasively the NSA is spying on us all. The Times, as well as the rest of the news media in the US, should have joined in a campaign to have him nominated for a Nobel Prize. Instead the nation’s leading newspaper, long an ardent supporter of the national security state, simply says he should be offered some kind of a “plea bargain” or presidential clemency, so that he doesn’t have to face the prospect of “spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder,” or of facing a life sentence in prison.

I’m glad the Times is finally calling for at least some kind of justice or leniency for Snowden. Back on June 11, the paper’s same editorial board was pontificating that Snowden should accept the price of civil disobedience, which the board wrote means “accepting the consequences of one’s actions to make a larger point.” The same editorial writers (none of whom has ever shown that kind of courage), stated that Snowden had “broken the agreement he made” to keep NSA documents secret,” and that he would likely be charged with violating the Espionage Act, a hoary 1917 law that the Obama administration has already dusted off and started using to keep its activities secret, and they said he could face 10 year sentences for each count of document theft — enough to keep him in jail for life.

That earlier editorial view wasn’t quite as bad as some political hacks like House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein, who have been ignorantly calling Snowden a traitor (a crime that carries the death penalty), or journalistic hacks like CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who called Snowden a “grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.”

The Times is now admitting Snowden did the whole country and the world a favor by exposing the “crimes” of the NSA, but in its latest cautious editorial, the editors are still saying that Snowden “may have committed a crime” in copying and disclosing NSA files, and they are still okay with the idea that he might end up having to face some “substantially reduced punishment.”

If I were advising Snowden, I would say don’t trust your life to the thugs now running the US government. They might cut you a deal offering you some reduced charge and a short prison term, but first of all, you’d still be a convicted felon at the end of your shortened stay. And that’s if you survived it. Prison in the US is a violent place, and the prison authorities have ways of turning a short stay into a death sentence if their bosses have it in for somebody on the inside.

Who's the real criminal in the NSA scandal, Edward Snowden or President Obama?