But this is no flash in the pan.

The Occupy movement is here to stay, come hell or high water, because the status quo is unacceptable. Not since the 1960s and 1930s have tens of thousands of people been this defiant and determined to win economic and social justice. What is unfolding is in many ways a synthesis of the movements of those eras.

Our emphasis on mass, nonviolent resistance in the face of repression is a product of the civil rights movement. When four black students used the occupy tactic at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960, they had no idea they would trigger a wave of occupations at lunch counters throughout the South and solidarity pickets at segregationist stores in the North.

Similarly, the Occupy movement spread to 250 cities and towns in every region of the country in less than a month. Occupy has even spread to South Korea, Pakistan, and Australia.

After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Dr. King launched a Poor People’s Campaign which he saw as “the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty.” King was aiding a black sanitation workers’ strike when he was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968.

Today, the occupiers in Liberty Plaza sport buttons from the 1963 march for jobs and freedom where Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, a sign that Dr. King’s struggle against poverty and racism did not die with him.

While it took a decade before the civil rights movement spread north into inner city black and Hispanic communities, it took weeks for Occupy the Hood to appear. The support of unions from the get-go allowed us to avoid the hardhat-activist divide that plagued the 1960s movements.

The occupy tactic was pioneered in the 1930s by the unemployed, veterans, and labor movements. The Bloombergville occupations that came just before Occupy Wall Street sought to highlight the plight of people affected by Mayor Bloomberg’s budget cuts by creating modern day Hoovervilles, the Great Depression’s shantytowns that thousands lived in after they lost their homes, jobs, and savings as the Hoover administration did nothing.

In the early 1930s, thousands of unemployed people occupied parks near city halls demanding jobs, unemployment benefits, and government relief. Many of these occupations were dispersed by the police, but they succeeded with the creation of relief programs and public works projects.

In 1932 tens of thousands of unemployed World War One veterans occupied Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. seeking the bonus Congress promised them for wages lost while they served in European trenches. They were brutally dispersed by the U.S. military, but ultimately won when Congress passed the G.I. bill in 1944 giving veterans money for college and low-interest loans to buy homes and start business.

Workers in Flint, Michigan occupied their factories in 1936, sparking copycat actions in workplaces all over America that eventually gave birth to the AFL-CIO.

History came full circle when the AFL-CIO, created by the occupy tactic, mobilized its members early Friday morning to block Mayor Bloomberg from evicting us. The Occupy movement and the unions are catalysts for one another. We march with union workers locked out by Sotheby’s, with Verizon’s union members, and alongside postal workers who are fighting mass layoffs. Because of the Occupy movement, the AFL-CIO recently signed up 25,000 new, unorganized workers in one week.

Some of us may not realize it, but we stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us.

This is remarkable. It is against military regulations for active-duty troops to attend demonstrations in uniform, although standing in a park surrounded by dozens of tarps and tents in the middle of a cold rainy afternoon without a sign or banner in sight probably does not count. During protests against the Afghan and/or Iraq wars, active-duty personnel who attended them made it a point not to appear in uniform because of these rules.

“I support this movement 100%,” he told me. He would have come down before today if he hadn’t been busy with National Guard training. He was bothered by what he described as the government’s “imbalanced” approach to fiscal issues; namely, massive tax cuts for the 1% while social services for the 99% saw their funding slashed to the bone. Shelters for homeless teenagers faced cuts, and he feared what kind of trouble these kids would get into with nowhere to go and no one to turn to. As we spoke, a young Hispanic guy asked him if the military would help him get his G.E.D. (the equivalent of a high school diploma) and how the training was.

I asked the Guardsman why he joined the military. He said he chose the National Guard so that he could go to school part time (he committed to six years of part-time duty so that he could attend school at the same time). When I asked him about the military’s health care benefits he chuckled and told me that he had to pay into the system known as Tricare. He noted the irony of being forced to pay into the military’s health care system when it was his life and limb that would be at risk in a future military deployment.  Meanwhile Congress had no problem voting to give themselves raises every year.

British activist Richard Seymour reacted to the crackdown in Oakland by asking, “How can you uphold your right to protest when that right is gainsayed by tear gas, rubber bullets, and bean bag rounds?”

U.S. Marine sergeant Shamar Thomas showed us how a few weeks ago when he single-handedly shamed and stopped 30 cops with flex cuffs on their belts from arresting peaceful Occupy protesters at a massive Times Square demonstration.

A thinking soldier, a soldier with a conscience, is the 1%’s worst nightmare. If the rank and file of the U.S. military become aware of the fact that they too are the 99%, they won’t have enough cops in the country to stop us

The growth problem was solved by the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) crackdown and the determination of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activists to continue on despite repression. Their actions electrified the country and won the movement mass support.

A union-sponsored march to join OWS called a few days after the NYPD lured 700 activists onto the Brooklyn Bridge for mass arrests drew 20,000-30,000. Usually union marches are publicized months in advance and most of the people on them are union members. They come, listen to speeches, wave union-printed placards, go home after a few hours, and the status quo continues undisturbed the day after.

Not this time.

Most of the marchers did not appear to be union members, judging by their homemade signs and lack of union shirts. They had a spirit of defiance about them. They were energized by the militancy of OWS activists, outraged by the NYPD’s tactics, and felt safe to march because the unions secured permits.

As the masses poured into the Financial District that evening, 1,000-2,000 protesters held a mass meeting and decided via consensus to push through the police barricades at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway in front of TD Bank in an attempt to march on the New York Stock Exchange one block away. They were repelled twice by the NYPD’s night sticks and pepper spray, and scattered skirmishes occurred thereafter. At one point cops on motorcycles rammed protesters. Over two dozen were arrested.

OWS’s heroism in the face of repression has ignited a mass movement. Occupations and marches have taken place in 250 cities and towns across America: thousands in Los Angeles, California, 500 in New Orleans, Louisiana, 5,000 in Portland, Oregon, 1,000 in Tampa, Florida, dozens in Des Moines, Iowa, 150 in Nashville, Tennessee, 50 in Mobile, Alabama. All of them are led by determined, mostly young people who are willing to brave arrest and police brutality. All of them see reclaiming public space and the right to protest as being just as important as the underlying economic and political problems that drove them to the streets in the first place.

The sweep of the Occupy movement is as wide as it is deep. Everyone in America is mad as hell at Wall Street for nearly destroying the world economy, handing taxpayers the bill, and awarding themselves even bigger bonuses than before even though the economy is on life support. Wall Street and Corporate America did everything in their power to turn the 99% against them and the Occupy movement has succeeded beyond even the wildest dreams of OWS’s initiators.

This is a mass, grassroots movement, one that does not have leaders or leadership in the conventional sense. The people leading this movement are the people participating in it. It is direct democracy, unmediated by unions, non-governmental organizations, non-profits, political parties or organizations.

At Liberty Plaza, OWS can only be described as a self-organized mass of humanity, a combination Woodstock, Berkeley Free Speech movement, Bonus Army, and anarchist commune all rolled into one.

During week one, there were about 100 overnight occupiers in Liberty Plaza; during week two, it grew to over 200; now, there are over 600. After work hours, the number of people at the encampment grows into the low thousands. When you approach the area, you hear the low hum of thousands of unending conversations, some political, some not, with various drummer groups pounding away, their rhythms echoing off of office buildings containing the 1%. The scene gives new meaning to the term “concrete jungle,” and it sits just hundreds of feet away from the nerve center of world capitalism, the New York and Nasdaq stock exchanges.

OWS’s working groups deal with food, sanitation, medical, security, media, outreach to other activist groups, transparency, facilitating meetings, and meeting a variety of other needs of the hundreds-strong collective (last week they had a makeshift barbershop and gave people free haircuts). Many of the working groups are divided into subgroups due to the complex nature of the tasks they are responsible for. All working groups report to the General Assembly (G.A), an open mass meeting that operates using modified consensus, meaning almost everyone must agree for decisions to be made.

Although the Occupy movement is going from strength to strength, there are problems brewing beneath the surface of OWS’s success.

There is an intense level of frustration among occupiers with the G.A. process and the dysfunctional nature of some working groups. This has given rise to talk of creating a spokescouncil, a body composed of the working groups that would more efficiently deal with mundane, practical matters, allowing the G.A. to be more focused and productive. Some people in working groups skip the G.A. altogether because they feel it is a waste of time. One woman in the sanitation working group spends 20 hours a day cleaning the plaza and has no time or energy left to participate in the political process.

Bobby, a self-described anarchist who is part of three different working groups, complained at a discussion about the proposed spokescouncil that the G.A. was often held hostage by the “tyranny of the minority.” (A minority can block decisions from being passed in a system based on consensus; conversely, the pressure to agree unanimously to get something done led to ugly racial tensions after people of color repeatedly blocked the G.A. from incorporating the absurd claim that racial divisions no longer existed in the text of OWS’s first official declaration.)

Bobby also complained that decisions passed by the G.A. were often impractical, such as the G.A.’s approval of the sanitation working group’s request to buy trash bins to help clean Liberty Plaza. The G.A.’s approval came with conditions: they had to be “fair trade” trash bins and the sanitation group had to look on Craigslist first for the best price. This hampered execution of the decision and made meeting a vital need of the occupiers very difficult.

The simple, horizontal structure originally created around a G.A. using modified consensus has become a barrier to practical and political work getting done now that over 600 occupiers and an even greater number of people (workers, students) are involved through working groups. What was once an asset has now become an impediment.

There is even more tension surrounding the issue of money. At least $40,000 has been donated to OWS mostly via the internet, and OWS has yet to figure how to account for and control spending. The G.A. process is too inefficient and arbitrary to be responsible for deciding this question on its own. For example, the G.A. voted to give $200 to one of the protest organizers after he said he lost his phone and needed to buy a new one. He was not forced to buy a “free trade” phone or look for the best price on Craigslist.

The biggest challenge facing OWS is not the lack of formal demands. As someone in the OWS media group put it, “we’ll settle on those once the movement stops growing.” Not having demands allows the movement’s message to be shaped by rank-and-file participants; this all-inclusive openness, combined with the heroic determination to march on Wall Street no matter what, is the key to the Occupy uprising’s fast and furious growth.

Demands are not decisive. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott was declared before a formal list of demands was adopted at a mass meeting. The boycott led to the complete end of segregation on the bus lines, a far more radical outcome than the boycott’s modest demand that seated blacks not be forced to give up their seats for standing whites on segregated buses.

Historical experience shows that the fate of movements and the course of history are not determined by lists of demands but by mass action.

The biggest challenge facing OWS is sustaining the movement for the long haul because the dramatic regulatory, economic, and political changes we want are not on the cards in the near future. It is going to take even more protest than we have seen thus far to win things like a tax on all financial transactions or the separation of commercial and investment banking, which would mean splitting up “too big to fail” institutions in an operation dwarfing the division of “Ma Bell” into four smaller telecom companies in the 1980s.

However, there are many things on the local and state level that are within reach: reversing the Bush-style tax cut for millionaires championed by New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, raising New York City’s local income tax rate for the 1%, getting banks or states Attorneys General to halt foreclosures and fraudclosures are a few examples.

Anything that alleviates the suffering of the 99% is worth fighting for.

Creating a sustainable movement also means building or modifying our infrastructure of protest and organization to be more responsive to our needs, more democratic, and more open to mass participation beyond the core of people who can “all day, all week, occupy Wall Street.” Properly staffed and well-run working groups would take the burden off of the very committed occupiers who are members of multiple groups and are working so hard they do not or cannot participate in the time-consuming decision-making process.

OWS is the vanguard of the Occupy movement, and what happens at Liberty Plaza will play a disproportionate role in shaping the future of the biggest rebellion to rock this country since the 1960s. OWS has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations thus far, and we need to be clear and honest about what can be done better if we hope to build on this success and reign in the most greedy, powerful, and ruthless 1% the world has ever known.

The mood of the crowd is defiant and determined. Quite a few people were still unsure of how exactly they had been trapped by the NYPD, but that did not matter.

What mattered was that OWS made front page news in papers around the world along with its official list of grievances, undercutting naysayers who pretended it was a bunch of ignorant jobless kids without a clue as to what they want.

What mattered was that Transit Workers Union Local 100 backed up Friday’s solidarity speeches with action by filing an injunction against the city for ordering their drivers to bus arrested protesters to jail. The drivers cooperated with the orders, but only because armed high-ranking NYPD officers told them to do so. Who can blame the drivers? You never know which one of them might be the next Anthony Bologna.

On Tuesday, a brave soul named Steve from the 1% came to talk to the people in the park. He claimed to work for a nearby investment firm, and he certainly dressed, spoke, and acted the part. Many of the activists questioned him and tried to debate him, but he gave them mostly suave evasions, which generated a lot of frustration among the crowd of 5-10 that gathered around him.

A white Viet Nam veteran and hospice nurse (I never saw an old woman with a purple heart until today) asked Steve why should Medicare or Social Security be privatized using a voucher system? Why should the elderly and sick be forced to do with less during these hard times? Steve replied that he does not support these moves and believed in a “strong social safety net” (a direct quote). Next, a middle-aged black guy named Keith Thomas (who later turned out to be a transit worker injured on the job) asked Steve whether or not Wall Street firms had any type of moral obligation to their employees. (Thomas was laid off from a Wall Street firm prior to his job in the transit system.) Steve agreed they have a moral obligation, but added that no entity, whether it was a corporation or government, had obligations that were set in stone.

When I heard this, I could not keep my mouth shut anymore and interjected, “so what about Medicare and Social Security? Those are obligations, right? And you said you supported them.” I pointed out that “too big to fail” banks enjoy a government guarantee that they would get bailed out again as in 2008. Not surprisingly, Steve did not take well to my line of questioning and left shortly thereafter. The crowd thanked him for having the dialogue, as did I, and we asked him to come again.

I doubt he will.

In the course of the exchange, a number of things became clear.

First, Wall Street and Corporate America will try to deflect responsibility for what OWS is upset about in the hopes that it falls for the Tea Party mantra that “government is the problem.” When Steve said we should be protesting in Washington, D.C., demonstrators said Wall Street owns the government; some even went so far to say that Wall Street is the government.

Second, OWS has become what can only be described as a people’s movement. When you go into the park, it really is the 99% that you find there. Thomas later told me he felt like this was “just like 1968.” He said it evoked feelings in him he had not felt for a long time.

There is a feeling of empowerment, like justice is on our side, of good will, and of seriousness of purpose in the air there that is very difficult to capture with mere words. Even pictures and video footage, worth many millions of words, cannot convey it.

You have to come to Liberty Park to experience it. And once you experience it, you cannot stop the inner urge you feel to fight and win, against all odds. It is this feeling that is propelling the movement into the most unlikely of places, like Mobile, Alabama.

I am not old enough to remember 1968, but I imagine this is what it was like.

The occupation in the last few days has become much more multiracial than in the first and second weeks. I saw aging Viet Nam veterans (some of them homeless), union workers, high schoolers, journalists from the corporate media, Laura Flanders, Michael Moore, Hispanic and African immigrants, low-wage workers who work nearby, retirees, disabled people, and college students.

The class and racial breakdown of the occupants looks much more like that of a rush hour subway car in midtown Manhattan than an alternative music concert as it did previously.

If you hear otherwise, you are hearing lies.

The only people missing are the the Steves of the city, the 1%. They are asking their friends in the corporate media, “is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal? … Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”

Wall Street is worried about what this means.

And they are right to be. We are onto them.

The occupy movement is growing roots into all communities among all age groups and races. Everyone is bringing their issue to the table and receiving nothing but 100% support. There is not a progressive cause OWS will not get behind, nor an injustice that it will not try to address in some way.

Union members from New York City’s largest municipal workers union, DC37, held a rally at OWS on Monday, as did the Teamsters who have been locked out by 1% auction dealer Sotheby’s for months. There were quite a few members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) there as well (their headquarters is two blocks away).

All of the middle-aged union members I saw were grinning from ear to ear, cheered by the defiant and militant spirit that was once the calling card of the American labor movement. Speaking of which, I ran into a young man at the Monday occupation who said he was a descendant of the Molly Maguires. I never expected to hear that name at a protest in this day and age (they were framed and executed in the 1870s using the same methods the state of Georgia used to kill Troy Davis because they sought to organize Irish immigrant workers in Pennsylvania’s coal fields).

This young man, Mark Purcell, traveled from central Pennsylvania to OWS and said he planned to get involved in whatever occupation happens in Philadelphia. Mark told me he realized the system was totally corrupt when he worked at an Allentown warehouse as a temporary worker. He said the companies took advantage of undocumented immigrants since they have no legal rights or protections. The minute he complained about working conditions, the company he worked for told him to talk to the temp agency that was technically his employer, and the temp agency fired him. He was pissed that companies outsource labor to these agencies and use that to dodge responsibility for working conditions. “It’s bullshit,” he said.

Amen.

The spirit of the Molly Maguires lives on at OWS. On October 5, National Nurses United, 1199SEIU, SEIU Local 32BJ, the New York AFL-CIO, UFT, Communications Workers, Professional Staff Congress-CUNY, the NY Central Labor Council are all mobilizing to rally and march to join OWS. And they have permits.

In addition to the alphabet soup of unions mobilizing, student activists are organizing walkouts from Hunter College, the New School (where professors issued a statement supporting their students’ walkout), and even New York University. Even the children of the 1% support OWS.

The last time the unions mobilized was back in May, when the UFT brought out over 10,000 during its contract negotiations with Mayor Bloomberg. The proceedings were tightly controlled and the messages carefully managed from above by union leaders.

This time, things will be different. The turnout will surprise everyone, and the message will not be handed down to the city’s workers and students from on high. “Students and labor can shut the city down,” we shouted at Friday’s rallies against police brutality.

Perhaps we were prescient.

“Come into my parlor,” said the spider to the fly.

The NYPD claims they warned marchers of the consequences of blocking traffic on the bridge and released footage on YouTube to prove it. The video shows that an officer ordered people to leave the roadway if they did not wish to be arrested. The problem is that it is unlikely that even seven protesters heard him, much less the 700 they arrested. This was by design. The NYPD has access to huge loudspeakers, helicopters, and a variety of sound gear, so there is no excuse, especially considering the fact that protesters are not allowed to have such equipment and must rely on their voices alone to communicate.

This was entrapment, plain and simple. In legal terms, entrapment is when a law enforcement officer lures someone to commit a crime they were not previously willing to commit. Given that footage subsequent to the nearly inaudible NYPD warning shows officers practically leading the march onto the bridge’s roadway, it is no wonder so many decided to exercise their First Amendment right on a busy roadway.

OWS just learned an important lesson: never trust the cops.

If the NYPD was truly concerned about keeping the road open for vehicles, they would have formed a phalanx at the foot of the bridge. Instead, they waited until the march took over both lanes of traffic and made it to the middle of the bridge before they confronted the activists with a formation blocking their path.

The NYPD also released a video in which the same officer who made the nearly inaudible warning at the foot of the bridge proclaimed in the middle of the bridge that everyone who “refused” to leave the bridge’s roadway would be arrested. An NYPD spokesman later claimed, “this was not a trap.”

This is a lie, and a stupid one at that.

Footage taken from the middle of the bridge shows that vans and officers followed behind the protesters, trapping them between two walls of blue and white shirts. If it was not a trap, why did middle- and retirement-aged people begin frantically climbing up the metal beams towards the pedestrian walkway 5-10 feet above when they realized they were surrounded? People in that age bracket with families and jobs do not take up new hobbies like climbing without safety gear in the middle of a peaceful protest, even in the most severe and unexpected cases of mid-life crises. Someone could have fallen and gotten seriously injured, or worse.

If anyone is guilty of disorderly conduct, it is the NYPD.

Predictably, the New York Times (NYT) believed and spread the NYPD’s stupid lies about the incident when they replaced their initial story that said the police allowed the marchers onto the bridge before arresting them with a second story that let the cops off the hook and placed the blame on the protesters within an hour. Is it any wonder that the intellectually savvy and inscrutably honest President George W. Bush was able to get the NYT to scream about Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction for almost two years starting in fall of 2002? Maybe they should learn the “fool me once” saying Bush famously mangled.

That the NYPD would resort to entrapment is undoubtedly a shock for millions in this city and around the world. For the city’s Muslim community, it is old news. Their constitutional rights have been systematically violated by city, state, and federal law enforcement authorities since September 11, 2001.

Those rights are still in their crosshairs, but this time the group they are going after is the 99%.

The only thing more disturbing than the NYPD’s cunning and outrageous tactics is the fact that JPMorgan Chase gave the NYPD’s nonprofit a $4.6 million donation a few days before the latest arrests. That’s way more than the $800,000 JPMorgan Chase employees gave to Barack Obama in the 2008 election cycle. This donation was also tax deductible. Was the $1.4 billion tax refund JPMorgan Chase was eligible for in 2010 just not enough?

Another difference: this was an institutional donation, not a series of donations by individual JPMorgan Chase employees. This is CEO Jamie Dimon’s way of saying thanks to the NYPD for services rendered. It seems the NYPD has sworn to serve and protect everyone but the 99%, even though Mayor Bloomberg tried to cut their pensions and pit them against the local teachers union during negotiations over their last contract.

The good news? The OWS spark is kindling flames all over: 3,000 people marched on Bank of America in Boston over the weekend, an OWS-style march is being planned in Toronto, Canada, and there is even an Occupy Nashville, Tennessee action being organized. When Nashville rises up against Wall Street, we have gotten way beyond the point where pepper spray and entrapment will work to crush dissent.

The character of the two protests could not be more different.

Liberty Plaza was stuffed with people like a rush hour subway car. I did a couple counts from different vantage points and came up with about 2,000 people both times, well above the normal the 200-300 who march near the stock exchange for the opening and closing bells every day or the 100-200 occupants who have made it their business to stay in the park until something in this country change. People were packed tightly on all four edges of the park, and quite a few protestors were on the sidewalks adjacent to the park, unsure of whether the NYPD would keep us bottled up there or begin arresting us.

Before the Granny Peace Brigade stepped up Broadway toward 1 Police Plaza, the crowd at OWS commemorated past victims of police brutality – Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, and many, many others. Soon after, they heard from New York City’s most powerful union, Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, who represent the workers who operate the city’s massive public transit system.

TWU speakers made militant speeches in solidarity with OWS, denounced police brutality, and loudly asserted that people have the right to protest without fear of being attacked. Most of their speakers were black and seemed pleasantly surprised when the mostly white crowd repeated their every word using the “human microphone” tactic that was invented to get around the NYPD’s ban on megaphones. Local 100’s support came after OWS disrupted a Sotheby’s art auction in solidarity with their locked out union workers and marched to a postal workers’ rally against the fake crisis aimed at smashing the postal unions.

It seems solidarity is contagious, and it’s spreading all over the country.

As the march made its way up Broadway, the NYPD lined the street, separating protestors on the sidewalk from passing traffic. They were almost downright polite when they asked marchers to stay on the sidewalk in stark contrast to the heavy-handed tactics they used less than a week ago.

It’s obvious that there is no consistent tactical police policy coming from NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg. They are playing it by ear day by day, just as the activists are. Like in Egypt, every time they back down and let marches happen it bolsters the confidence of OWS; every time they clamp down, it infuriates people who are barely paying attention and support for OWS grows.

A few elderly women (not the peace grannies) tried to tell people in the crowd to hush up, that this was a “silent march,” but the much younger crowd would have none of it. The most popular chant I heard in my section was “banks got bailed out, we got sold out!”

As the march passed Vesey Street, I realized they intended to march up Broadway and take a right on Chambers Street in order to pass City Hall before reaching 1 Police Plaza. The solid police line next to the march became ever thinner and eventually ceased to exist as they struggled to contain the front of the procession, allowing myself, photographers, and fellow protestors freedom to maneuver. I opted to head directly to the plaza to see what the rally looked like before the two groups merged.

As I approached the Manhattan Municipal Building that stands between City Hall and 1 Police Plaza, I was struck by the NYPD’s absence. Not a cop in sight. The last time I was at a march here was after the murder of Sean Bell in 2006. Back then, the place was locked down with cops standing in tight formation blocking our procession to their headquarters.

I made my way under the building’s arch and came upon a crowd of 50-100 or so of long-time leftists, most of them middle-aged or older, many of them with their children. A couple dozen of them walked in a slow circle chanting in unison somewhat dejectedly against police brutality. I saw veteran socialists Louis Proyect, Sam Farber, Sandy Boyer, and long-time activists in the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union of faculty and staff of the city’s public higher education system. It was PSC members who called the rally.

PSC member Penny Lewis gave a great speech while tending to her young daughter. She pointed out the fact that Mayor Bloomberg and right-wing extremist David Koch were the two richest men in the city and that Bloomberg, like his predecessor Rudy Giuliani, consistently used the NYPD to harass, intimidate, hamper, and pen-up any and all protests. The spirit of militant defiance of OWS in the face of the NYPD’s typical tactics was a breath of fresh air for this crowd. I also detected a mood of apprehension since they had no idea how big the OWS feeder march would be.

The merger of the two groups was triumphant. The NYPD may have tried to keep the two groups separate by blocking the grannies at the entrance of the Manhattan Municipal Building’s arch, but apparently the NYPD relented. Perhaps Bologna ran out of pepper spray. A huge mass of people chanting, “we, are, the 99%!” made their way into the plaza area and occupied it. The chant dominating the end of the feeder march was new and a bit shocking: “students, and labor, can shut this city down!”

Let’s hope so.

On Saturday, the police allowed hundreds from OWS to march onto the Brooklyn Bridge only to trap them once they reached the middle of the bridge. They arrested many people, possibly hundreds, including a New York Times reporter. Marchers locked arms, forming a human chain in an attempt to make it harder for the cops to divide protestors so they could snatch and grab people as they did last Saturday. It’s amazing how fast people are learning to adapt their tactics.

Of course, the cops will claim the activists were “blocking traffic,” but why let them march onto the bridge to begin with if that was really the concern? Most likely, this is a test to see how OWS reacts and how the public reacts.

OWS struck back by releasing its first official statement outlining the grievances of the 99%. Releasing this concise document with grievances that literally hundreds of millions of Americans share at the height of media attention that the latest round of arrests will attract is nothing short of a brilliant public relations move.

Meanwhile, the OWS movement is coming to a town near you. If not, start an event on your own in your area. The pickets of Woolworth’s department store in solidarity with black and white students who defied segregation at Woolworth’s lunch counters throughout the Jim Crow South in the 50s did not just happen. They were organized. People stopped complaining and started doing something, first in handfuls, then in dozens, then hundreds, and then thousands.

As one OWS speaker put it at Liberty Park, “we’ve been waiting our whole lives for this.”

Now is the time. Now is our time.

After the daily 1 p.m. General Assembly meeting ended, OWS divided into its working groups, including media, labor, outreach, and a number of others. I walked over and sat down next to the point person (or “ leader”) of the working group, a young white guy in his twenties who looked like a 60s throwback with his long, straight hippy-style hair, rainbow tights, fatigue shirt, and Ziploc bag of rolling papers. Of course, you can never judge a book by its cover — he is also a student of behavioral economics and mentioned that academic studies have shown that the OWS’s decentralized, highly participatory, and lengthy process of dialogue is the best way to organize.

The open source meeting swelled very quickly to 20 or 30 people, an indication that a lot of people want to figure out what OWS’s demands should be. The group moderator remarked that the group was so big it was practically a “second General Assembly.” His brief introduction to the process whereby OWS would define its vision (he repeatedly used the phrase “visioning”) was interrupted as many hands went up, asking to be called on; at least 10 people wanted to speak and each was allowed a minute and a half.

What emerged from the discussion was that there is no consensus that demands are even necessary. Quite a few protesters argued along the lines that this is movement or process of dialogue is the demand/goal and that therefore demands are not necessary; one said our demand to the world should that they “join us.” Two older people, one in his sixties, the other in his thirties, spoke out for having clear, specific demands as being a very necessary step to creating a sustainable protest, much less a movement.

I argued that a few concrete, achievable demands were important, citing the “Day of Wrath” protest on January 25, 2011 that began the revolution in Egypt that demanded raising the minimum wage, an end to the dictatorship’s “emergency laws,” the firing of the interior minister, and a two term presidency. I explained that Mubarak’s ouster was not one of their original demands, but it became a demand once millions of people became involved in the movement, and therefore demands can and should change depending on circumstances. My suggested demand was to raise taxes on the 1%, something the New York state legislature and the city council could vote to do immediately.

One woman argued against having demands on the grounds that the media wanted us to do exactly that, that it would be a way for them to put us in a nice neat little confining box the better to ignore us; instead, she proposed we copy the model used to write grant proposals and draw up a mission statement, goals, and objectives. The moderator took to this and we dispersed into six groups of five or so to discuss what motivated us to protest and what our “visions” (or goals, long and short term) were; after the break out, we would reconvene to sum up and share what each of our groups had come up with in the hopes of finding some type of consensus that would inform some sort of statement to the world.

The OWS political process is very participatory, cumbersome, and time-consuming. One strength of their process is that it avoids the top-down control that Wisconsin’s union leaders exercised to scuttle the protests and developing strike wave that shook the state in favor of harmless (and ultimately fruitless) recall efforts.

To participate and help shape OWS politically requires dedicating many, many waking hours every day to ongoing, continuous debates and discussions. This is not necessarily a bad thing but in practice ends up favoring the participation of those who can afford to skip work and/or school for a week or more. With unemployment over 9% (a figure even higher for the 18-25 age group), it should be no surprise that these are the people taking the fight to the enemy’s lair.

It may be that OWS never develops a clear set of demands. OWS seems to be headed toward issuing a general statement akin to the Port Huron Statement by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962, although it will probably be less wordy and much darker. Port Huron spoke moralistically of the highly privileged lives led by America’s post-World War Two college students that stood in start contrast to the conditions facing black and brown people in the Jim Crow south, America’s urban ghettos, and the Third World. Today, students face the prospect of lifelong debt, serial dead-end jobs, and holding two or even three part-time jobs just to keep up with the bills and rent, just like the non-college educated working class.

Whatever OWS decides with regards to demands, they deserve credit for putting their finger on the real enemy and being brave enough to defy the police and break the law to make the voices of their generation heard.

Everyone who can should go and help occupy Wall Street.

Sounds good right?

Sure, until those troops get home. Paul voted against providing housing assistance to very low-income veterans, against expanding education benefits for returning troops, and against improving how the Department of Veterans Affairs is funded.

No wonder the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gave Paul a big fat F on their congressional scorecard.

Paul’s anti-veteran votes are the logical conclusion of his libertarian politics. Libertarians hate “Big Government,” by which they mean just about every federal law and program under the sun. That’s why Paul is against the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the food stamp program, mandatory immunization, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act that ended Jim Crow segregation.

Yet Paul’s principled opposition to “Big Government” ends when it comes to the issue of immigration. He supports denying undocumented immigrants any form of legal status, repealing the Constitution’s fourteenth amendment guaranteeing citizenship by birthright, militarizing the border, and forcing hospitals to report suspected undocumented immigrants. A consistent libertarian would oppose all immigration controls because they restrict an individual’s freedom to live where they please and interfere with the laws of supply and demand governing international labor markets.

As if Paul’s opposition to the law ending Jim Crow and his support for Big Brother’s anti-immigrant measures weren’t bad enough, there’s also the thorny issue of the racist newsletters that appeared under his name in the 1980s.

How Paul has addressed this issue has evolved (although he doesn’t believe in evolution). In 1996, he said the racist newsletters merely expressed a “clear philosophical difference” between himself and the Democrat he was running against. It wasn’t until 2001 that he totally disavowed them and in 2008 he claimed he still had “no idea” who wrote them on his behalf.

Why hasn’t he bothered to find out who wrote them? Maybe he needs more time – another 20 years, perhaps?

In the end, Paul claimed that he didn’t write the newsletters, that they were the work of a ghostwriter, and took “moral responsibility” for the racist content. I believe him and he deserves credit for taking responsibility.

However, that doesn’t get Paul off the hook. Eric Dondero, a former volunteer and personal aide for Paul, said “the wilder [the newsletters] got, the more bombastic they got with it, the more the checks came in. You think the newsletters were bad? The fundraising letters were just insane from that period.”

In other words, Paul’s campaign used racist rhetoric in its newsletters to generate cold hard cash. At that time the racist newsletters were published, his campaign was getting $1 million a year! That was an unheard-of amount of campaign cash for a relative nobody in a small Texas congressional district in the 1980s (it wasn’t until 2008 that a House race cost $1 million).

So what’s more disgusting: being a racist, or pretending to be one to fill your campaign coffers?

That wasn’t the last time Paul fanned the flames of racism for political gain either. During the 2008 campaign, he released an ad touting his vote to block student visas for those coming from “terrorist nations.” Since most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, would that make Saudi Arabia a “terrorist nation“? Does that mean that all nations with Arab and/or Muslim majorities are also “terrorist nations”? People who wish to study in the U.S. shouldn’t be given visas because of their nationality or race?

Although Ron Paul is probably not a racist, he has no problem promoting and exploiting racism for his own political and financial gain. That much is certain.

Keep all of this in mind the next time you hear a progressive toying with the idea of backing Paul’s 2012 campaign. Just because we agree wholeheartedly with Paul on one, two, or three issues doesn’t mean we should back his presidential campaign, which means (critically) supporting a candidate’s overall platform and political agenda. Inviting him to speak at an anti-war rally is one thing; turning a blind eye his hostility to the interests of workers, veterans, the undocumented, the elderly, the poor, African Americans, Arabs, and Muslims is something else entirely, especially when all of these groups are under sustained attack.

Ron Paul makes Paul Ryan look like FDR and voted against Ryan’s Medicare-killing budget because it “didn’t do enough” to reduce the deficit. No wonder he’s known as the “Godfather of the Tea Party.” Given all this, it’s fitting that Paul announced his candidacy on Friday the thirteenth. His politics are horrific.

Achcar’s support for the no-fly zone rests on two key arguments: 1) Gaddafi’s forces were at the gates of Benghazi and would slaughter thousands if they entered the city and 2) the rebellion’s leaders demanded the imposition of a no-fly zone to neutralize Gaddafi’s air superiority.

Achcar’s first point is indisputable. Nothing is more humiliating to a ruling class than a successful rebellion; such rebellions have historically been drowned in the blood of tens of thousands of people. Benghazi would not have been treated any differently than the Paris Commune in 1871, Hama, Syria in 1982, or Fallujah, Iraq in 2004.

Does that mean opponents of imperialism should support the latter’s imposition of a no-fly zone because there was no alternative means to stop Gaddafi’s forces? Achcar argues yes. He goes on to say that he would’ve supported imperialist intervention in Rwanda and implies that he would’ve supported the U.S. in the Second World War. For him, the dead civilians in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden were just so much “collateral damage” on the road to defeating German and Japanese imperialism.

Achcar’s opposition to imperialist intervention is based on the following: “What is decisive is the comparison between the human cost of this intervention and the cost that would have been incurred had it not happened.”

So what is decisive for Achcar is the body count.

Every imperialist intervention in world history has been waged under the pretext of saving lives, whether said lives were in real danger or not. How many lives will be “saved” by a given intervention is impossible to calculate beforehand, unless Achcar has a crystal ball. Imperialist interventions unleash a chain of events that cannot be foreseen with any meaningful accuracy; there is no way of knowing for sure how many lives will be lost due to intervention as opposed to allowing events to run their course without imperialist interference.

George Bush Sr. ordered 30,000 marines into Somalia ostensibly to stop mass starvation caused by local warlords who were pilfering food convoys from relief organizations. No one could’ve predicted that 18 Americans and 1,000 Somalis would be killed in a single firefight immortalized by Hollywood in the film Black Hawk Down. Achcar asks about Rwanda rhetorically: “[C]an anyone in their right mind believe that Western powers would have massacred between half a million and a million human beings in 100 days?” By the same token, who in their right mind would demand that U.S. marines land in Rwanda given the fact that 1,000 Somalis were killed in a single firefight during a “humanitarian” mission?

The body count must be rejected as a means to determine whether or not to support an imperialist intervention. This is especially important because imperialist wars that start small and limited tend to end up being large and bloody.

Achcar’s second argument is much stronger. The rebels in Libya did call for a U.N.-sponsored no-fly zone because Gaddafi was using his air superiority to pound the poorly armed disorganized rebels into retreat after retreat. No amount of obfuscation can cover up this fact.

So how do anti-imperialists in the West respond?

The first thing to understand is why the rebel leadership, organized around the Libyan National Council (LNC), called for a no-fly zone. It was not because they were comparing “the human cost of this intervention and the cost that would have been incurred had it not happened.” For them, it was a question of the revolution’s victory or defeat; desperate times called for desperate measures.

No anti-imperialist in the West should begrudge them for this act of desperation. Our job isn’t to dictate tactics to Libya’s revolutionaries. We should support revolutions against tyranny and oppression no matter where they break out, who they are (mis)led by, or what their political program is.

That said, we shouldn’t close our eyes to weaknesses within the revolutionary wave stretching from Algeria to Iran. Unlike in Egypt, Libya’s revolutionaries have not appealed to the rank-and-file of the military to switch sides, nor have they sought to mobilize the country’s workers to strike against the regime. This took social revolution off the table and confined the struggle between Gaddafi and the rebels to a purely military dimension, guaranteeing him the upper hand and setting the stage for the LNC’s desperate plea for help from the region’s most anti-revolutionary force: the U.S. government. This failure was no accident; many members of the LNC are top figures from Gaddafi’s decrepit and brutal regime. Instead of mobilizing workers, they’ve issued proclamations honoring all contracts with foreign oil companies.

By inviting imperialist intervention in the form of a no-fly zone, the LNC risks becoming dependent on the good graces of Washington which will use its newfound leverage to contain the revolution even further. Limiting and weakening the revolution will strengthen Gaddafi.

Achcar began his article with a quote from the Russian revolutionary Lenin about the childishness of rejecting all compromises in the name of being principled. This is ironic, given that Achcar has seemingly forgotten Lenin’s articles dealing with World War One. In those writings, Lenin did not dwell on the respective body counts of French, British, Russian, German, or American imperialism. Instead, he argued that “war is politics by other means.”

Here are the politics of the war in Libya: Gaddafi is trying to crush a democratic revolution; the revolution’s leadership prefers to call for imperialist intervention under a U.N. fig leaf instead of mobilizing the masses to bring down the regime; the U.S. is scrambling to check the most widespread and powerful revolutionary upheaval since 1848 from sweeping its strongmen into the dustbin of history. The no-fly zone is damage control, an attempt to co-opt the Libyan revolution. Washington is setting the stage for a new client state in eastern Libya to emerge under its air cover and “regime change” in Tripoli would be the icing on the cake (hence why Gaddafi’s compound was attacked early on in the establishment of the no-fly zone).

All anti-imperialists should oppose the no-fly zone. Revolution? Yes! Intervention? No!

That’s the only word that can describe President Obama’s meeting with “fat cat bankers on Wall Street” at the White House today where he called on them to open their wallets and start lending to small businesses to jump start the economy. He also urged them to stop lobbying against regulatory reform.

So let me get this straight: The government comes to the rescue of Wall Street at the cost of trillions of dollars in free taxpayer money to save the finance industry from the Apocalypse they themselves created. The bankers take the money and run back to the casino, jack up interest rates for consumers, and reward themselves with fat bonuses for the amazing job they’ve done wrecking the economy and robbing taxpayers in the middle of the worst recession since the 1930s.

And all the president can do is beg, plead, and grovel before these guys.

If this kind of moral suasion is so effective, why not use it on the Taliban? Why not call Mullah Omar to the White House, call on him to lay down his arms, and urge him to please stop blowing up our troops?

Of course this is absurd, but it is also illustrative.

If the president was serious about taking on the fat cats on Wall Street, he wouldn’t be asking them to be on their best behavior and play nice with the rest of kids in the Capitol Hill sandbox. If he was serious about taking them on, he’d fire his Wall Street cronies, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Ben Bernake and replace them with Paul Volcker, Elizabeth Warren, and Ralph Nader. If he was serious about anything he claims to stand for, he’d go to Capitol Hill himself and lobby Congress to pass a reform bill with teeth just as he has with his industry-friendly health care bill. If his actions were in line with his words, the Dow Jones would suffer and Wall Street would start plotting regime change at home just as they did FDR.

That would be real change we can believe in.

But that’s not what Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street crowd paid for when they bankrolled Obama’s presidential campaign. They invested in a slick-talking lawyer from Illinois with a thin resume who seemed to be everything to everyone and they are certainly getting their money’s worth. Think of it: trillions in bailouts and being branded “too big to fail” by the government in exchange for hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions. That’s the deal of a lifetime.

When you look at it this way, no wonder Obama is so nice to these fat cats. They own him.

Maybe someone should tell Mullah Omar to get out his checkbook.

Instead of adopting adopting a single-payer plan, which would both cover everyone and be the most cost-effective solution, they’re going to pass an outrageous insurance-and-drug-industry-friendly bill. Then, they’ll brag about how they passed “landmark legislation.”

At least until the bills come due and the government goes bankrupt.

Despite the armed racist mobs turning their brains off and running their mouths at town halls (Trotsky called them “human dust” in his day), Congress will pass and President Obama will sign into law something mislabelled health care reform. The devil, as always, is in the details.

First and foremost, a robust public option is pretty much off the table, and with it, anything meaningful, substantive, or worthy of the name “reform.” A public option would be a government-run single-payer health insurance program similar to Medicare. You know, that big scary socialist-fascist-communist-anti-American-beginning-of-the-Gulag government program that has sent tens of thousands of patriots to their graves thanks to Soviet death panels? Yeah, that Medicare.

Despite their trash talk, Republicans in Congress refused to kill Medicare in a recent vote. Not a single Republican would vote against this diabolical Marxist scheme. We ought to deport these single-payer-loving commies back to Cuba where they belong, but only after some “enhanced interrogation” at Gitmo, of course. We can start with Michelle Bachmann. At least then she’ll have something real to fear for a change.

President Obama said “those who profit from the status quo” are behind the efforts to sabotage the legislation. The funny thing is, he gave them a seat at the health care reform table in an effort to buy their acquiescence. Instead of going to war with the institutions that have a vested interest in sabotaging his agenda, the president allowed them to shape the legislation. This is Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force all over again, except its out in the open. When people voted for change, they weren’t voting for lobbyists to use the front door of the White House instead of the back door.

At a “historic” summit, Obama announced that hospitals, drug and insurance industries, and doctors’ associations agreed to $2 trillion savings over the next 10 years. But as the New York Times noted, “None of the proposals are enforceable, and none of the savings are guaranteed. … At this point, cost control is little more than a shared aspiration.”

Obama surrendered any hope of meaningful health care reform in exchange for – nothing. Absolutely nothing. The drug companies, for example, agreed to voluntarily cut costs by $80 billion over the next 10 years. In exchange, the legislation won’t legalize the re-importation of cheaper drugs from abroad, and there won’t be government negotiation of drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries. (For anyone who’s counting, that’s another campaign promise Obama reneged on and another Bush policy he’s adopted.)

Never mind the fact that these agreements don’t have the force of law behind them. Never mind that they are so vague as to be totally meaningless. Never mind the lack of an enforcement mechanism in case these industries don’t live up to their obligations. While we’re at it, never mind health care reform.

The reason the Right is screaming against a single-payer or public option is very simple: it works. Cheap, universal, quality health care coverage is what the drug companies, insurance crooks, doctors’ organizations, and the rest of the health care industrial complex are so deathly afraid of. They stand to lose hundreds of billions of dollars and could be driven out of business if the profit motive is removed from the health care equation.

We get the least bang for the buck because our system is set up to get the private sector the most buck for the bang. In McAllen, Texas, where medical costs are among the highest in the nation, an investigative journalist found that doctors did all kinds of medically unnecessary procedures to increase their income. One doctor claimed that ordering superfluous tests was a necessary evil to avoid lawsuits, to which a general surgeon replied, “We all know these arguments are bullshit. There is overutilization here, pure and simple. … [T]he way to practice medicine has changed completely. Before, it was about how to do a good job. Now it is about ‘How much will you benefit?’”

The fee-for-service system, where doctors get paid every time they run a test, see a patient, do a procedure, etc., is one of the reasons health care is so costly. The Mayo Clinic, which Obama touts as a model for the nation, keeps costs low and has excellent outcomes because their doctors are essentially proles. They work under one year contracts for a salary instead of deriving their incomes from individual services performed.

None of the legislation in Congress would touch the fee-for-service system.

David Roderick, the chairmen of U.S. Steel, once commented: “US Steel is not in the business of making steel. It is in the business of making money.” Ditto for doctors’ associations, insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmaceutical giants. They’re not in the business of helping sick people, they’re in the business of making money. The health care system can either prioritize making money, or it can prioritize delivering the best possible health care for the population. It can’t do both.

Private sector profits are at the heart of why the U.S. health care system is number one in the world when it comes to costs but is 72nd in terms of the health of its population.

Plans that fail to address this issue are doomed. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that none of the plans under consideration by Congress would halt or reverse health care inflation. (By contrast, the CBO says single-payer would save $1 trillion(!) over the course of a decade, yet no fiscal conservatives are screaming for single-payer at the town halls.)

Obama’s version of the public option is not even worthy of the name. He says, “it shouldn’t be something that’s simply a taxpayer-subsidized system that [isn't] accountable, but rather [has] to be self-sustaining through premiums and that [has] to compete with private insurers.” For those who don’t spend their lives inside the Beltway, here’s the translation: I don’t want to drive the insurance industry out of business with an effective public option that would provide cheap quality health care for everyone. So, I want the government plan to emulate what the private sector does, even though those practices are what’s creating the rapid inflation and terrible outcomes for patients in the first place.

Setting up a public option this way guarantees it’ll be a miserable failure. Not only would it lead to political blowback that could dislodge the Democrats from power (not that I care), it would discredit the very idea of a public option (which I do care about). On top of that, it’d make the health care system even more dysfunctional, chaotic, and costly than it already is. It’d do for the Democratic Party what the Bush’s Iraq war did for the Republicans.

Sadly, it looks like we won’t even get the half-assed version of the public option described above, mainly because the insurance industry spent $11 million since 2007 getting Democrats elected to Congress. The Democrats are prepared to bear the political consequences of a deeply flawed version of the public option without even delivering it. In all likelihood, cooperatives will take the place of a public option, thanks to Senate Finance Committee, which the White House directed industry lobbyists to work with.

That’s right: President Obama directed industry lobbyists to focus their efforts on the Senate Finance Committee. Your president has betrayed you.

After the legislation passes, health care decisions will continue to be made exclusively by penny-pinching insurance company bureaucrats. Medical bills will continue to be the number one reason people declare bankruptcy. Denying people coverage because of preexisting conditions will be outlawed, which is well and good. But lawyers and accountants for the insurance companies have probably figured out a way around the ban: charge people with preexisting conditions ten, a hundred, or a thousand times more than the average policyholder. Those who are too poor or sick to buy private insurance will be forced into the co-op system, which will be quickly overloaded and become insolvent. The government will then be forced to either subsidize co-ops with taxpayer dollars, kick people off the rolls, charge them higher rates, or some combination of all three.

The bottom line is that whatever passes promises to be a costly, ineffective failure.

The health care industrial complex is in a win-win situation. If reform fails to pass because right-wing Democrats join the miserable Republican rump, they win. If reform without a real public option, they win. An aide to the Senate Finance Committee admitted, “The bottom line is that health reform would lead to increased revenues and profits.” The law that passes will make buying health insurance coverage mandatory for all Americans. That will boost the industry’s profits as almost 50 million Americas are forced into the insurance marketplace, aided by small tax credits.

Obama said, “I would rather do the right thing and have one term than be mediocre and have two.” At this rate, he won’t be forced to choose. American history has plenty of one-term mediocrities who broke campaign promises at the behest of Corporate America.

For the American working class movement and the organized left, the Democratic Party has been a key stumbling block since the Populist Movement shook the country back in the 1890s. The Democratic Party has managed, contained, controlled, co-opted, rolled back and eventually destroyed every social movement that has arisen since then.

Selfa begins the book by looking at the Obama’s ascension to the throne of the American Empire in the wake of 9/11, eight years of Bush, and the collapse of the Republican Party after three decades of political dominance. In the second chapter, he analyzes the class nature of the Democratic Party, and points out that the Democrats are unlike most other parties in the world in that individual candidates, rather than the party platform, dictate their policies. He argues convincingly that the Democratic Party is a capitalist party and cites as evidence where their politicians get money from, which think-tanks they take advice from, who they staff their campaigns with, their record on legislation, and their record on foreign policy. He devotes an entire chapter to explaining how and why the Democrats are just as imperialist as their counterparts across the aisle, and points out that all the major wars of the 20th century were launched by Democratic politicians who claimed to want peace while they prepared for war. The fact that the party that jumped into two world wars, used nuclear weapons, designed the Cold War, and started “small” wars in Korea and Vietnam is seen as being less pro-war than the Republicans is a feat that would impress Karl Rove.

Unlike the Republican party, the Democrats incorporate representatives of the oppressed and exploited (women, blacks, gays, unions) within the party as a subordinate component, to give them a meaningless “seat at the table.” Doing so helps the Democrats maintain the fiction that they are the “party of the people,” or that they’re “friends of labor,” as opposed to the bad big business-backed Republicans. The third chapter is dedicated to looking at the rise of the “New Democrats,” i.e. Bill Clinton and the unapologetically pro-business GOP-lite Democratic Leadership Council that has controlled the party since the 1990s.

In the remaining chapters of the book, Selfa turns his attention from the nature of the party and its current trajectory to focusing on the Democratic Party’s (abusive) relationship with social movements, unions, and the organized left. He starts with the Populist movement that united black and white sharecroppers in the rural West and South(!) against the growing power of the robber barons but which made the fatal mistake of entering into an alliance with the Democrats. Next, he shows how the tremendous working-class rebellion in the 1930s that won Social Security and made the American Dream possible was blocked from creating a European-style Labor Party, the parties that created the universal health care systems that Michael Moore envied in Sicko. Lastly, he looks at the rise and fall of the civil rights, anti-war, women’s rights, and gay liberation movements of the 60s and 70s.

In each case, the Democrats resisted these movements but eventually granted meaningful reforms because these movements became too powerful to crush. These movements ignored pleas by Democratic politicians to moderate their demands, to shut up and wait, and to stop organizing (Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the darling of liberals to this day, told civil rights organizers: “If you stop all this sitting-ins — and concentrate on voter registration, I’ll get you a tax-exemption.”) At the same time, the Democrats worked hard to incorporate and co-opt movement leaders into the machinery of government, to transform organizers into party/government bureaucrats sitting behind desks by offering them jobs.

Sadly, in many cases, the strategy worked. Jesse Jackson, for example, agreed to endorse conservative Democratic loser Michael Dukakis and give him the Rainbow Coalition’s delegates in exchange for putting several Jackson staffers (including Jackson’s son) on the Democratic National Committee. While big business-friendly candidates kept its hands firmly on the wheel of the Democratic Party, progressives and their issues took their seats at the back of the bus. The book is rife with examples of movement leaders that decide a seat at the Democratic table is more important than changing the menu, the portions, or who gets what in this country.

The last few chapters of the book are devoted to whether or not the left can take over or use the party as a vehicle for social change. He uses Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s and today’s Progressive Democrats of America as examples of how activists who set out to change and takeover the Democratic party end up changing, getting co-opted and neutered by the very forces they sought to challenge.

The book closes by examining the missed opportunities to create broad-based third parties free of corporate domination, opportunities which the Democratic party sabotaged, more often than not with help from forces within social movements. The most ugly example is the American Communist Party during the 1930s and 40s. No matter how many strikes the Democrats broke, or how many working-class radicals were victimized by McCarthyism, the CP toed a pro-FDR line even though there was a groundswell of support for a Labor Party independent caused by repeated Democratic betrayals of the working class. To read more about that, check out Sharon Smith’s excellent book on U.S. labor history Subterranean Fire.

Two themes run throughout the book and form Selfa’s conclusion: 1) the Democratic Party is part of the problem, not part of the solution if you want real, meaningful change in this country and 2) change comes from grassroots movements independent of (and in opposition to) the Republican and Democratic parties. The lesser-evil strategy has been and will always be a complete disaster, allowing both parties the freedom to become more and more “evil” as time goes on so long as they don’t become equally “evil.”

The only shortcoming of this book is that Selfa neglects to mention the fact that the Democratic Party is itself a misnomer. Forty percent of the votes that a nominee needs to win at the Democratic Convention are controlled by “super-delegates,” current and former elected officials, who can vote however they want, regardless of how people in their districts or state vote. This system was instituted after George McGovern lost in 1972 to Nixon for the explicit purpose of blocking candidates that were deemed by party bosses as “too left-wing.” This voting bloc exists to put a check on democracy within the party. Furthermore, there’s the fact that the road to the nomination begins in rural conservative states (Iowa, New Hampshire) and continues through a gauntlet of the other 49 states, each of which have different and complicated formulas for awarding delegates, a system whose lunacy was on full display in the Clinton-Obama death march to the nomination that lasted twice as long as the general election. The system is rigged to ensure that only conservative candidates with millions of dollars to burn can win the nomination.

This book is essential reading for any activist who wants to understand how to win change in this country and anyone who thinks we need an alternative to the two party state we live in now.

Sadly, Paul won a large amount of support from young people, progressives, and anti-war activists who were fed up with the two parties that are both pro-war, pro-corporate, and anti-civil liberties.

The fact that someone who opposes the minimum wage, has made racist remarks past and present, hates unions, opposes immigrant rights, and doesn’t believe in evolution could gain the support of many progressives says a lot about how politically weak and organizationally almost non-existent the American left is these days.

I don’t know Kokesh personally, but I see his endorsement as another example of someone who was pulled to Paul’s campaign for lack of anything else. Paul, for the record, voted against expanding education benefits for returning GIs and against providing housing assistance to very low-income veterans. As a result, Paul has earned himself a dismal 41% rating from the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. When your candidate’s rating on vets issues matches Bush’s IQ, you have a problem.

Not only has he voted against veterans, he’s also an opportunist. In his announcement that he would not endorse McCain, he said that “the strongest message can be sent by rejecting the two party system. This can be accomplished by voting for one of the non-establishment, principled candidates.” Funny that he calls on voters to reject the two party system, because is part of it — he’s a Republican.

Then there’s the fact that his congressional district gets its fair share of federal dough. There’s a word for this. It’s called hypocrisy.

Some have argued that Batman is an allegory for neoconservatives, the folks who wanted to invade and occupy Iraq come hell or highwater under the pretense of fighting terrorism by spreading democracy in the Middle East. You could even go so far as to see Batman as Bush, a crusader willing to break the law because the institutions charged with enforcing them are too corrupt to do so themselves.

However, I think The Dark Knight’s politics are much more complicated than that. The Joker’s goal is to break Gotham’s heroes in order to rob the city of all hope. He is the criminal world’s answer to Batman, the anti-Batman if you will, dedicated to ensuring that vice, crime, sin and fear rule Gotham’s streets again. Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler, labels him a “terrorist” and says, “some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

In a conversation over dinner, District Attorney Harvey Dent tells Bruce Wayne “either you die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.” That sums up both the Joker’s goal and the theme of the movie.

Joker succeeds in corrupting Dent by getting corrupt cops to kill Dent’s girlfriend, Rachel (whom Bruce Wayne also loves). Thanks to Batman, Dent survives an explosion set up by the Joker but the left side of his face is horribly disfigured, and he takes on the name Two-Face. Two-Face goes on a rampage against all those he deems responsible for Rachel’s premature death – the corrupt cops, the mob boss, and eventually, Batman and Lt. Gordon. Instead of dying a hero, Dent becomes corrupt by violating his own principles and taking the law into his own hands in his desperation to stop the Joker. Even before his transformation into Two-Face, Dent threatened to shoot one of Joker’s goons unless he gave him information on the Joker’s whereabouts.

Joker’s attempt to corrupt Batman proves far more difficult. He tells the people of Gotham that he will continue murdering people until Batman takes his mask off and reveals his true identity. After he kills the police commissioner, a judge, Dent’s parents, and comes close to killing Dent and the mayor in broad daylight at the commissioner’s funeral, Bruce Wayne decides he can’t take it anymore and will reveal his identity. Doing so would destroy Batman’s mystique as a hero and make it impossible be a billionaire playboy by day, crime-fighter by night.

Dent beats Wayne to the punch and claims that he’s Batman, setting a trap for the Joker, who willingly walks into it. After Batman saves Dent and Joker is arrested, Rachel and Dent are whisked away by corrupt cops to warehouses on the opposite sides of town, bound and gagged, and explosives are set up next to them.

To save Rachel and Dent, Batman attempts to get their locations by brutalizing the Joker in an interrogation room after he blocks the door to prevent the cops from getting in to stop him. Later on, Batman taps the cell phones of every single person in Gotham (millions of people) and turns them into sonar devices so he can find the Joker’s location. This is where it seems like Batman is aping the Bush administration in the “war on terror.”

However, this is also where the analogy falls apart. Batman manages to stay true to his one rule, don’t kill anyone, and the cell phone spying system is immediately destroyed after the Joker is apprehended after Lucius Fox, Batman’s gadget-maker, threatened to resign. This stands in stark contrast to the open-ended nature of the so-called “war on terror” and the destruction of the very freedoms that Bush claimed to be protecting after 9/11. In The Dark Knight, there is no parallel to the administration’s exploitation of 9/11 to achieve its long held goals to invade Iraq and expand executive power at home.

Furthermore, the Joker is not simply a maniacal mass murderer hellbent on creating chaos for his own sake. He’s also something of an intellectual and a social critic. For example, he tells Harvey Dent:

Nobody panics when they expect people to get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It’s fair.

Throughout the movie, the Joker is constantly exposing society’s hypocrisy and forcing his victims to make horrendous choices to expose their “true nature.” He threatens to destroy a hospital if an individual isn’t killed within the hour, and sure enough, a mob forms outside the building to kill the man. Even a police officer assigned to escort the individual tries to shoot him because the officer is worried about his own wife who is in a hospital.

When Joker gives Batman the location of Harvey and Rachel, he lies about who was where, tricking Batman into thinking he was saving Rachel when in fact he was saving Dent. When people evacuate the city on ferries, Joker rigs them both with explosives, and tells each ferry that they have the detonators for the other ferry and that by midnight, if one group has not blown the other up, he will blow up both groups. (This is a modified version of prisoner’s dilemma.) He dresses hostages up as clowns and tapes machine guns to their hands in the hopes that police snipers will shoot them instead of his goons who are dressed as hostages, making the snipers guilty of judging books by their covers.

One of the most emotionally powerful and politically significant moments in the movie is the resolution of the scene with the people stranded on the ferries rigged with explosives. Heated arguments on each ferry amongst the passengers (one ferry is loaded with civilians, the other is loaded with convicts) climax with a vote on the passengers’ boat. The majority vote to blow up the prisoners but the most vocal proponent of blowing up the other ferry backs down at the last minute. On the prisoners’ ferry, a big, muscular black convict tells the captain of his boat to give him the remote detonator so that he can do what should’ve been done 10 minutes ago. Just when you think the prisoner is going to hit the button and save his boat, he throws the detonator out the window, goes back to his seat, and sits quietly.

When neither boat blows the other up, Joker is furious that he was wrong in his assessment of society’s “true nature” that people are at a basic level willing to cut each other’s throats if that’s what it takes to survive. The people on the ferries proved that they are just as capable of solidarity as they are capable of being greedy, even in life-and-death situations where the rational choice is to blow someone else up to save yourself.

Joker tells Batman, “you complete me,” and he isn’t lying. While Joker is funny, spontaneous, bloodthirsty, and not bound by any rules, Batman is humorless, predictable, and torn by acting outside the law in order to enforce it while at the same time adhering to a strict moral code. What they have in common is that they both don costumes, and they are both very driven, methodical loners, excellent at reading people’s strengths and weaknesses.

Given all this, it’s safe to say that the Joker is no bin Laden, Batman is no George W. Bush, and The Dark Knight is not the “War on Terror.”

The irony is that at the end of the movie, Joker does win, although not in the way he imagined. While Batman sticks to his moral code and refuses to kill the Joker, Batman tells Gordon to blame him for the murders Dent committed so that Gotham City can have an untarnished White Knight, a legitimate hero who played by the rules and put the bad guys in jail. Dent died a hero to Gotham while Batman lives to become the villain despite not breaking his moral code. He is the Dark Knight.

That’s the proverb that comes to mind when looking at Barack Obama’s recent and not-as-recent flip-flops on everything from publicly financed elections to the recent FISA bill legalizing warrantless wiretapping and email snooping by the government. The bill also gives companies like Verizon, which cooperated with the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping after 9/11, immunity from lawsuits.

In Obama’s announcement that he would opt out of the system of public financing, he claimed that the system “is broken” because of loopholes that Senator John McCain has exploited to raise money from lobbyists and special interest groups. With public financing, Obama would have received $84 million in taxpayer money, gained from the $3 check-off on federal tax returns, which he could spend starting at the close of the Democratic Party’s convention until Election Day.

To deflect criticism of Obama’s flip-flop on the issue, apologists for Obama and the candidate himself have made much of the fact that 45 percent of his money comes from small donors (defined as those who donate $200 or less). He claims that these small donors “will have as much access and influence over the course and direction of our campaign that has traditionally been reserved for the wealthy and the powerful.”

In reality, big contributors have far more influence in and access to the campaign than the voter who shells out $200 because he or she really believes in Obama’s message of change. These small donors did not get advance copies of Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech addressing the Reverend Wright controversy. They do not participate in weekly and quarterly conference calls with the head honchos of the campaign and with Obama himself.

To sit on the “national finance committee” that gets advance copies of speeches and access to the campaign’s decision-makers, donors must bundle contributions of $200,000 or more from friends, associates, co-workers, and employees. The top 79 bundlers for Obama’s campaign, five of whom are billionaires, are responsible for 27,000 checks from individuals for the legal maximum of $2,300. Of those bundlers, 18 work at top law firms and 21 are Wall Street executives and power brokers from Fortune 500 companies. Others include hedge fund executives, Silicon Valley capitalists, Chicago-based developers, and black millionaires.

Of course, that’s not counting the money Obama has raised by exploiting the very same loophole in campaign finance laws that he blasted McCain for. He got $28,500 donations recently by dining with rich couples in Hollywood for a grand total of $5 million in one event. (That money goes to the party, circumventing the $2,300 legal limit on individual donations to candidates, which is a joke since Obama now controls the Democratic Party).

Forget “change we can believe in.” I’ve got a better slogan for the Obama campaign: “hypocrisy made flesh.”

Here’s the picture when individual donors are broken down by industry: Lawyers have donated about $18 million to Obama, the telecom industry has given about $10 million (thereby purchasing his flip-flop on FISA legislation), employees of securities and investment firms have given about $8 million, university administrators and employees have given roughly $7 million, real estate professionals have contributed $5 million, medical professionals have donated $7 million, bankers have given $1.6 million, and hedge fund and private equity managers have given about $1.6 million.

Broken down by individual companies, we find that Goldman Sachs employees gave more to Obama than any other group, followed by the University of California, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, National Amusements, Lehman Brothers, Harvard, and Google. These institutions would have to be stupid to give millions to a candidate that would deliver real, substantive change at their expense for the benefit of America’s working-class majority. If they’re that stupid, they can write some checks for a guy I know in Venezuela named Hugo Chávez.

Now that the primaries are over, we can see what Obama really stands for: more of the same. More of the same policies that have produced a gigantic disparities in income, growing pockets of poverty, more people without health insurance, the highest per-capita prison population in the world, crumbling infrastructure, a failing education system, inner city decay, and an increasingly aggressive foreign policy.

If you think Obama’s light-speed blitz to the right is bad now, wait until the election is over. Then he won’t have to pretend to give a damn what the voters think and he can repay his top donors for the investment they made in him. Already the Wall Street Journal is salivating over the prospect of Obama presiding over Bush’s third term.

Remember folks, he’s Barack Obama, and Wall Street approved his message.

“Yes we can!”

“Change the world.”

For hundreds of millions of people, the slogans of the Obama campaign are not the focus-group tested products of marketing gurus and professional campaign strategists. They’re not empty words printed on cheap plastic yard signs, on banners, or on the podium from which Obama speaks.

To them, these slogans and Obama’s candidacy are what the 2008 elections are all about. Somewhere around 85 percent of the country thinks things are going in the wrong direction. It’s gotten so bad that even Black Republicans are thinking of voting for Obama.

The question is: will Obama deliver?

Of course, electing a black man to the throne of the American empire would make history, given that America is the land of the free and the home of the slave. But the millions, especially in the black community, who look to Obama for change don’t simply want a black man in the White House. They want real, substantial change. Health care coverage for all. Reform of the criminal justice system and out-of-control police brutality both of which have devastated black and Hispanic communities. Debt relief for homeowners. Halting the three-decade decline in working-class living standards and the skyrocketing price of food and energy. Fixing the dysfunctional two-party system. Steps to finally overcome centuries of racism. An end to the war in Iraq.

That’s a tall order for one man to live up to. Unfortunately, I don’t think Obama has any intention of delivering on these lofty goals.

For example, take his position on Iraq. According to conventional wisdom he is the candidate who will get U.S. troops out of there, as opposed to old man McCain who is more than happy to keep them there for 100 years. But Samantha Power, one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers (who resigned after she called Hillary Clinton a “monster”), made it clear that Obama has no intention of being bound by anything he says on the campaign trail.

Obama’s criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a similar case of mendacity. Behind the scenes one of his advisers told Canadian officials “not to be worried about what Obama says about NAFTA.” Translation: don’t worry, Obama is just telling voters what they want to hear. Given the free-market ideologues he has surrounded himself with, lying about NAFTA shouldn’t be a surprise.

However, I don’t think Obama is a bad person, that his lying is some kind of personal flaw, or that it’s a compulsion that he has no control over (as it seems to be for President Bush).

Rather, it’s because Obama has made a series of political choices, the cumulative effect of which is real change we can believe in because we can see it before our very eyes. He might have set out to change the system, to change the way politics is done in this country, but it is the political system that has changed him.

The first and foremost example of this has been the way he threw his pastor of two decades under his campaign bus. The thought police . . . err, I mean the corporate media . . . focused with laser-like intensity on Reverend Wright’s suggestion that AIDS was the product of a government conspiracy to rid the country of blacks (as if AIDS only infected them). They exploited this remark to vilify Wright and distract people from the content of what he said about U.S. foreign policy. When he spoke up in his own defense, Obama severed all ties to him, proving without a doubt that Obama is indeed a conventional politician. As Wright himself put it, “politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.”

The corporate media forced Obama to choose between his pastor and a shot at the presidency, between principles and power. After some hesitation, Obama chose the latter.

Obama faced the same choice on the issue of Israel and Palestine. He could either continue saying “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people,” or he could stop worrying about them and learn to love Israel for ensuring American dominance of the Middle East. (One Major General said Israel is worth “5 CIAs” and that it would cost $125 billion a year to maintain an American force in the region the size of Israel’s, making the $5 billion a year the U.S. gives to Israel every year an amazing bargain).

The day after clinching the Democratic Party nomination, Obama told the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel, i.e. that the Palestinians had no claim whatsoever over the Holy City. That put him to the right of Bush and the Israeli government, both of whom pay lip service to Palestinian aspirations and say that the city’s final status is subject to “future negotiations.” He said he would do “everything” in his power to defend Israel. Over time Obama chose the Israeli Goliath over the Palestinian David.

Apparently he didn’t see the irony of the first black President-to-be calling for Jerusalem to be a Jews only city and pledging to preserve Israeli apartheid by any means necessary. Malcolm X had a term for politicians like Obama. Hint: it wasn’t field negro.

People may not want to hear it, but “change we can believe in” is a lie almost as big as Iraq’s WMD or Saddam Hussein’s connection to Al-Qaeda.

If Obama represents some kind of watershed or fundamental break with the past, why is his panel of foreign policy advisers dominated by officials from the Clinton administration? If Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright, the woman who said killing half a million Iraqi kids through sanctions was “worth it,” is giving Obama foreign policy advice, how many Iraqi and American lives will be “worth it” because he refuses to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq? If he represents such a dramatic break with Bush’s policies, why is he open to keeping Bush’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Pentagon? Is it because Gates is secretly a big fan of Cindy Sheehan, or is it because Obama and Gates want to mend, not end, the occupation of Iraq and American domination of the oil-rich Middle East?

Even Obama’s call for ethanol to replace gasoline as a fuel source is disingenuous. He opposes importing Brazilian ethanol derived from sugar which is cheaper, cleaner, and produces more energy than the domestically produced ethanol derived from corn. Why? Could it be because Archer Daniels Midland and other American agribusiness corporations that produce corn ethanol have close financial and personal ties to his campaign and his advisers?

Like McCain, Hillary Clinton, and every politician on both side of the aisle, his positions on every issue are heavily conditioned by what big business is willing to tolerate. That doesn’t mean he won’t talk a good game on the campaign trail and ride the intense desire for change that’s gripped the country all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

However, it does mean that progressives (or The Left, if you prefer) need to wake up and take advantage of the rising expectations generated by Obama’s campaign. Both the hunger for real change and the elite’s determination to block it has never been greater.

The Washington Post has a story with a big headline that says: “All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Discord, Study Shows.” The second paragraph starts with the following sentence: “That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results.”

Say what? It’s good news that Iraqis of all sects agree on one thing: that the U.S. military’s invasion and occupation is the number one cause of sectarian warfare in Iraq? It’s good news that despite the sectarian hatred that has ripped Iraq apart, they all agree that America is to blame?

These idiots are so desperate for good news they’re spinning anti-occupation sentiment among Kurds, Shias, and Sunnis as proof that the surge is working.

The article mentions that other polls conducted by the State Department and private companies have all been consistent on one issue: a majority of Iraqis think a U.S. withdrawal would make their lives better. Duh. Not having the 130,000+ soldiers from the world’s most lethal military and tens of thousands of armed, lawless contractors roaming your country killing at will would be an improvement.

Over a million Iraqis have died as a result of the occupation and the U.S. opted for a divide-and-rule strategy when a unite Shia-Sunni resistance became a threat in spring of 2004. Fracturing the resistance along sectarian lines helped maintain an otherwise unsustainable occupation but had the unintended consequence of igniting a full-scale civil war that has torn Iraqi society apart. Fear and sectarian militias now rule the streets.

Many Americans who oppose the war also oppose immediate withdrawal based on this reality. Their argument, echoed by mainstream politicians who want to stay in Iraq to protect its oil not its people, is that there will be genocide, chaos, and unthinkable bloodshed if the U.S. leaves. If anything, the opposite is true: there will be genocide, chaos, and unthinkable bloodshed if the U.S. stays against the will of the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, especially given that the main sponsors of the sectarian death squads, the Shia parties Dawa and SIIC, are in the government, control the armed forces, and have American protection. The fact that every year of occupation was worse than the last should be enough proof that what Iraq needs is not more of the same.

Withdrawing the largest, deadliest militia — the U.S. military and its Blackwater counterparts — would reduce the amount of Iraqi bloodshed exponentially. The polls of Iraqis show that 1) they want a total U.S. withdrawal ASAP and 2) they realize that the occupation is the main reason Iraq has become divided against itself. Removing the occupation from the equation will produce a much more democratic and representative government than what exists now in the Green Zone. Without American protection and sponsorship, the Dawa and SIIC parties, will not be able to stay in power. Indeed they’ve been blocking elections in southern Iraq because they fear they will lose, and lose badly, to the Sadrists.

Obviously, Iraq will not become some kind of mythical paradise or utopia once U.S. forces get out. (Another duh.) The country has already been pushed back almost to an almost feudal era, without a national government, where warlords and their militias rule by fear and terror, where women are forced to wear veils in public, with little or no basic services like clean water, an education system, or health care, thanks to a decade of murderous sanctions imposed by Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton and a war launched by Bush Jr. That the U.S. government and companies like Halliburton who profited from Iraq’s destruction owe Iraq tens of billions in reparations is the understatement of the century.

Make no mistake: there will be a civil war to determine who will come out on top of the post-U.S. political order, but it won’t be nearly as bloody as having a civil war and an occupation at the same time, which has been the situation for the past five years.

Neither the Mahdi Army, the Badr Brigade, the various Sunni resistance groups, Al-Qaeda, nor the Kurdish Pershmerga have anything remotely approaching the firepower or destructive capability of the U.S. military. They have AK-47s, mortars, rockets, and roadside bombs, all of which limit how many Iraqis they can kill, even assuming they want to conduct a full-scale genocide.

Furthermore, a post-occupation civil war wouldn’t necessarily be a straight Sunni vs Shia vs Kurd battle. The sectarian parties that control the Shia south (SIIC, Dawa) and the Kurdish north (KDP, KUP) both have an interest in creating strong regional governments and a weak central government, which reflects their geographic and political sway. They want to monoplize control of the oil revenues, and the country’s oil deposits are conveniently located in southern and northern Iraq.

The Sadrist movement, on the other hand, has strongly opposed any move in that direction because a weak central government would mean less oil money invested into the movement’s Sadr City stronghold in Baghdad. This opposition puts the Sadrists in the same camp as the Sunni resistance, who contorl the central and western areas of the country, which would also receive little to no oil money if the central government is weak.

The problem is that these Sunni resistance groups see Al-Qaeda being closer to them than the Sadrist movement because of the sectarian murders committed by many members of the Mahdi Army. Sadr has declared a ceasefire against the U.S. to buy himself the peace he needs to purge his militia of the disloyal sectarians who, by murdering their Sunni brethren, have made it all but impossible to unite with the Sunni resistance against the occupation. At the same time, Sadr is also cramming to become an Ayatollah, to counter the influence of SIIC which has the backing of the top Shia religious authority in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

So I guess I agree with the U.S. military analysts. It is good that Iraqis blame the occupation for the sectarian strife. Hopefully that will be enough of a basis for them to unite and pry the eagle’s claws off their country.

Dumbsfeld went before Congress to testify about the apparent fratricide of Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. At the time, the Bush administration seized Tillman’s death as an opportunity to sell the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They pointed to him and said that he had given up a million dollar career as a star in the NFL to serve his country. The Pentagon said he was killed by enemy fire and he was awarded the Silver Star posthumously.

Five weeks later the truth leaked out. Tillman was killed by red-blooded patriotic Americans, not crazy Jihadi evil-doers wearing turbans. He died from three bullet wounds to the head from an M-16 at a range of only 10 yards, making it look suspiciously like murder. A sergeant in his unit burned Tillman’s journal and personal belongings on the orders of a higher-up.

That the Army did this shouldn’t be a surprise. Tillman was no closet critic of the war. He told his comrades-in-arms while serving in Iraq that the war was “so f—– illegal,” crushing the hopes of couch potato hawks such as Ann Coulter who sought to pimp his death for the war machine. His commanders have consistently said he was well-liked within the unit, but that doesn’t square with the fact that he yelled at a fellow Ranger moments before his death: “Would you shut your (expletive) mouth? God’s not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling …” We can only imagine what he wrote in his journal about incompetent commanders, restless natives, and unwinnable, unjustifiable, illegal wars. Rest assured, whatever was in there wouldn’t fit in a strength-through-illiteracy “Army Strong” recruiting commercial.

Anyway, back to Dumbsfeld.

I doubt he had any idea of what really happened that day in Afghanistan to Tillman. He was busy lying his ass off about Iraq’s WMD in 2004, claiming that they just hadn’t been found yet because the U.S. wasn’t looking in the right places. (In 2006, he denied ever saying that he knew where Iraq’s WMD were.) He was also busy lying his ass off about prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib in April 2004, saying that he had no idea what was going on when in fact, he knew damn well what happened. He personally authorized specific torture techniques in an order to Gen. Karpinski who was in charge of the prison that had a handwritten note next to his signature that read: “make sure this is accomplished.”

But in the case of the Tillman, this might be the one time anyone should believe that Don Rumsfeld wasn’t really involved in the cover-up. But when he says “I would not engage in a cover-up,” try not to laugh too hard.

NY Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer says there is “such urgency to bring an end to the war” that they are “stepping up the pressure.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t think any Republicans will be upset about a Senate slumber party except those who have to skip their D.C. Madam visit that night.

Reid is whining because Republicans are threatening to use a filibuster, which can only be overridden with 60 votes, to block an amendment to a military spending bill that would embarass Bush. I’ve lost count of the ridiculous number of toothless nonbinding hand-wringing votes that have occurred since the Democrats took office last year. No wonder Congress’ approval rating is lower than Bush’s. People want them to shut up and start doing something about Iraq instead of just droning on and on about Bush. That’s why the comparisons between the U.S. and the Roman Empire are totally false — back then, when the Emperor angered the Senate, Senators stabbed him to death.

Senate Republicans aren’t afraid to use a filibuster to stop an embarassing vote for Bush but the Democrats won’t do it to stop the killing in Iraq. It takes 60 votes, a super-majority, to end a filibuster undertaken by one Senator and the Republicans have only 49 seats. None of the Senators running for President — Obama, Clinton, Biden, or Dodd — filibustered the war-spending bill in the spring and none of them are filibustering the jaw-dropping $648 billion Defense Authorization Bill which will fund the U.S. military through 2008 for everything including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reid has said “the war is lost” yet continues to fund this lost war to the tune of billions of dollars a year. (Mr. Reid, I have some Enron stock you may be interested in buying.)

The impending vote on this monstrous bill is giving Senate Democrats the opportunity to do photo-ops, get sound-bytes on the air, and have a slumber party over an amendment that will inevitably be voted down or blocked by intransigent Republicans. The irony is that the amendment would not end the war, close the permanent bases the Pentagon is building in Iraq, or get any troops out of harm’s way.

I’ve read the text of the doomed amendment. It would require some unstated number of troops to be withdrawn, starting within four months of the bill’s passage and ending by April 30, 2008. So Bush could withdraw a division of tens of thousands of troops or a single squad of ten soldiers on April 29, 2008 and satisfy the amendment’s requirements. After the deadline, U.S. forces in Iraq could only be used for the following purposes: protecting U.S. bases and personnel, training, equipping, and providing logistical support for the Iraqi military/police, and fighting Al-Qaeda and other freedom-hating terrorists.

Sound familiar? It should. These limits are identical to the pre-surge Rumsfeld-Casey strategy of “as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down,” which was a smashing success. These limits are also identitical to the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, the grumpy old white men and foreign policy nerds who offered Dubya some political cover to change his war policy after the GOP thumpin’ at the polls last November.

Reverting back to the old strategy will require the same number of troops as it did before (duh!) — about 100,000 or so. Like Slick Willie on affirmative action, the Democrats’ position on the Iraq occupation can be summed up as: “mend it, don’t end it.”

No wonder our troops are so fed up that they’re saying stuff like this: “we have people up there in Congress with the brain of a two-year-old who don’t know what they are doing – they don’t experience it. I challenge the president or anyone who has us for 15 months to ride alongside me. I [would] do another 15 months if he comes out here and rides along with me every day for 15 months. I’ll do 15 more months. They don’t even have to pay me extra.”

Of course, if I were a two-year-old, I would be deeply offended at the suggestion that my intelligence was equivalent to Harry Reid’s, but I would understand the anger. The anger about being lied to about Hussein’s WMD and connections with Al-Qaeda, that “we will be greeted as liberators,” about Iraq’s never-ending progress, about “turning points” that come and go with no change in the situation, and about the historically unprecedented multiple yearlong deployments of continuous combat that have been extended to 15 months that troops have to endure.

That anger has fueled the explosive growth of Iraq Veterans Against the War from a handful of members in 2004 to over 500 today. IVAW’s growth is a hopeful sign admist the divided, partially co-opted, and largely dormant American anti-war movement. A strong anti-war movement can do what Senate slumber parties, meaningless nonbinding resolutions, and Democratic Party politicians won’t: end the war by forcing the U.S. to close those permanent bases and bring all the troops home now.

On Wednesday, the Senate voted 97-0 for an amendment written by Joe Bomb Iran Lieberman, whose position on Iran is identical to Dick Cheney’s.

The amendment repeats the flimsy charges made by the Cheney administration earlier this year that the Iranian government is arming Iraq’s Shia militias with explosively-formed projectile explosives that have killed almost 200 American troops and that Shia Iran is giving a safe haven to Sunni extremist Al-Qaeda (even though AQ is blowing up Iraqi Shias left and right). These are the same charges that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Statt, Peter Pace, distanced himself from, claiming that the evidence did not support the contention that Iran’s government either supplied or was complicit in the supply of these weapons to militias in Iraq. (Pace’s will not be renominated for the position, by the way.)

The amendment states that “the murder of members of the United States Armed Forces by a foreign government or its agents is an intolerable act against the United States,” and demands the government of Iran “take immediate action” to end all forms of support it is providing to Iraqi militias. It also mandates a regular report on Iran’s anti-US activity in Iraq .

Senior Democrat Carl Levin successfully inserted a small change to Lieberman’s text stating that, “Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize or otherwise speak to the use of Armed Forces against Iran.” If you’re thinking, “phew! That’ll stop a war on Iran!” think again. The Iraq Liberation Act passed by Congress in 1998 and signed by Bill Clinton had the same text. And we all know the story of how that text stopped the invasion of Iraq .

Charging Iran with killing US troops has nothing to do with the facts. It’s about beating the war drums and trying to convince Americans that in order to “protect our troops” the US must bomb Iran.

The unanimity of the vote is alarming. Hillary and Obama voted for it. Only three sat out on the vote, including Senator Vitt who can’t be bothered to Iran-bash in the middle of his Religious Right-family-values-meets-hookers-and-diapers political meltdown.

During the Vietnam war, it was obvious that the Vietnamese were killing American soldiers with bullets and bombs with “from Russia with love” or “made in China” written all over them. These weapons were delivered by the boatload by Chinese and Russian ships sent their by their respective governments. Yet no one in Congress declared that this was “murder” by “foreign governments and their agents” and even Nixon, rabid anti-Communist that he was, never threatened Russia or China if they failed to “take immediate action” to halt these shipments.

Then again, those governments had armies and nukes powerful enough to do real damage if the US was stupid enough to attack them. These days, the US picks fights with tin pot dictators of impoverished Third World nations (Noriega, Hussein, Milosevic, the Taliban, Kim Jong-Il, Ahmadinejad) while screaming they are “the next Hitler.”

If the war on Iraq was a cakewalk, an attack on Iran would be. It’s got a bigger population, a bigger economy, a fairly strong military, and they’ve probably studied how Hezbollah fought the Israelis to a stalemate last year. The US Navy is so cramped for room to manuever its 130 or so ships in the Persian Gulf that they regularly radio the Iranian navy to notify them about impending ship movements, imagine how it will be once that third aircraft carrier arrives and if Iran fires thousands of missiles at these ships to overwhelm their hi-tech defenses. Plus, Iraq’s Shia won’t take kindly to the mass slaughter of their brethren next door by the same nation that refuses to leave Iraq and funds Israel’s slow motion genocide of the Palestinians.

Make no mistake. The US is on a collision course with Iran. Both Democrats and Republicans are hell-bent on rolling back Iran’s growing power and influence on the region, even if it means a war that will cost thousands or tens of thousands of lives. The vote on Wednesday is just more proof of that.