Burning the flag ... Whose flag is it?

In Oakland, California this Saturday there was what is known as an "action" conducted by Occupy Oakland.  This action began as an effort to claim and inhabit an abandoned convention center in Oakland for gathering and for continuing the services that were terminated when Occupy Oakland's common space at Oscar Grant Plaza was lost.  Last year Oscar Grant Square, the site of the Occupy Oakland commune was evicted by police.  The functioning commune was a center for developing consciousness, for feeding homeless citizens, providing medical care and education.  These are services that the established community in Oakland is unable or unwilling to provide.  More to the point, however, the Occupy Oakland commune, in solidarity with occupies world wide, serves as an example of a demonetized alternative to capitalism.  Thus it is seen as a mortal threat by the ruling elites, the capitalist class.

The effort to occupy the abandoned convention center was repulsed with repressive force by the Oakland Police who employed tear gas and other forms of "crowd control devices."  Thus, Occupy Oakland was, in essence, told to just disappear.  The irony of the moment could not have escaped the marchers that evening.  Here were police protecting abandoned buildings while homeless citizens were being abandoned around the nation: Property trumps social justice.  The marchers, many of whom were kettled by police and then told to disperse, were not able to leave.  More than 400 marchers were arrested.  Meanwhile, a branch of the march managed to escape the police kettling and moved toward Oakland City Hall.  They reported that the door was open.  Some marchers entered City Hall and left graphite as well as performing minor vandalism.  The part of all this that the mainstream media focused upon was the attempted burning of a US flag.  Why was the US flag the target of burning rage?  And, more importantly, why has the corporate media ignored the primary goal of the march: the attempt to occupy an unoccupied building in order to restore to the Oakland Occupy commune a common space.

I think it depends upon what the American Flag means to you personally as mediated by your experience as a citizen of the US.  When I was a young boy, I remember getting goose bumps when I recited with the entire student body of my grammar school the Pledge of Allegiance.  The Pledge itself was written in 1892 by Edward Bellamy, a socialist.  That is why "justice for all" appears in the recitation.  Now I have come to understand that the flag that represents my government, my democracy has been captured by the ruling elites.  Money is power in our nation.  The wealthiest portion of our  citizens, the 1%, the capitalist class  owns our economic and political system.   They have fashioned a one-party system to serve their interests first.  It is the capitalist party.  It has two right wings.  So when I look at the American Flag I have to ask myself, "Is it my flag or has it been hijacked?"   Is it now being used only as a symbol to rally Americans into wars that they do not want, or to vote against their own self-interests?  I think you need to ask yourself the same burning question. 

Anti-Camping Ordinace facing Occupy DC

The capitalist class, represented by Darrell Issa, is very much opposed to the concept of "the commons."  Rather, the only alternative for the ruling elites is " the privatized."  The occupy movement challenges this major operating premise of capitalism, e.g., the propertied have rights, the property less are given rights controlled selectively by the capitalist class.  Class consciousness is the crux of the entire issue.  The longer the occupy movement highlights the issue of class consciousness, the more the capitalist class will endeavor, by whatever means, to silence the 99%.

The problem with McPherson Square The story reported in Huffington Post today, is said to be "rats."  When I was there in November, I found people working together to promote the central message of Occupy, the gap between the capitalist class and the people who must sell their labor to them.  There may very well be rats in Washington, DC.   I recommend looking elsewhere than Occupy DC.

Politicians Divide the 99% ... a Tool of the Elites

The GOP primary in South Carolina is history.  The results show us a few important things about how the ruling elites manage to persuade the 99% to surrender their power.  Romney, the undisguised patrician, seeks through his rhetoric to have the laboring classes identify with with the capitalist class.  This is done by promoting the gutting of the social safety net.  The message delivered, none to subtly, is this:  The reason your taxes are so high is that the people who do not want to pull their weight are living off of you.  "Let's get them."  Tax cuts that primarily benefit the ruling elites are great: The ruling elites are, after all the "job creators."  You need job creators so that you can have someone to sell your labor to.  The capitalist class has your interests at heart.  This message did not play well in South Carolina due to a resurgent class consciousness.  When Romney described, for example, his earnings from speaking tours totaling over $300,000 as "not very much," this laid bare his class isolation.  He has a "gated mentality."

Now Newt Gingrich, on the other hand uses rhetoric to foment divisions within the labor class.  Division is a tool for controlling and stirring up intraclass hatred.  President Obama is characterised, for example, as the "food stamp President."  This brings in race, class and fear of minorities taking something they are not entitled to.  Never mind that the majority of Americans using food stamps are white.  The math of demographics is too subtle to bother with in the heat of a campaign.  Gingrich also attacks public employees.  This is more division of the 99%.  One publicly employed custodian in a school, for example, could be "fired" thus leaving a wage for 30 school children.  Child labor laws should be eliminated.  They are an unnecessary barrier to capital accumulation.

My personal take on these two candidates vying for the Republican Party nomination is this:  They both employ strategies designed to divide the 99%.  You don't want the labor class to be angry with the capitalist class.  So you promote discord among the labor class itself.  Romney seeks to have the labor classes identify with the capitalist class.  The implication is that you could be wealthy if only all of the others of the labor class would just pull their weight. 

Newt, on the other hand, is just plain despicable.  He promotes divisions in the 99% having to do with ethnicity, public employees, children and gender.  In South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War and still flies the Confederate flag at the state capitol, Newt's rhetoric targeted the old divisions.  What do you call a person who can operate with the contradictions that pervade his life?  If he were a homeless person on the streets he would arrested and referred for psychiatric treatment.

The more subtle thing to acknowledge here is that the vaunted two-party system is, at bottom, nothing more that an elaborate means for dividing the labor class.  In essence we have but one party with two right wings.  It is the capitalist party.  This ruse may be coming unwound with the growing number of voters identifying as independents.  The occupy movement, which is international, has a perspective that goes beyond the outmoded instrumentality of parties.  Class consciousness is being given a voice.  "We are the 99%."  What is interesting to me is that the awareness of class is being constructed outside of the Marxist prescriptions.

The US Has A One Party System

When I was a young boy living in San Jose, I discovered  shortwave radio.  I learned that I could tune into stations all over the world  and listen to them right in my bedroom.  I became an amateur radio operator when I was fifteen.  But long before I earned my ham radio license and for years afterward, I listened by the hour to international shortwave radio stations.  Some of my favorites included Radio Canada, the BBC, London, Radio Austrailia, Radio Japan and countless others.  One international broadcaster I listened to frequently was Radio Moscow.  It was the voice of the Soviet Union.  There was a North American Service in American English.  I wrote to Radio Moscow and tried to understand as much as I could about the USSR.  I also knew that there was a vast difference between the USA and the USSR.  I could not understand how people could put up with living in a country that had a one-party system of government.  I always assumed that the United States had at least two parties that always privided a choice.

I remember too, coming home from school one afternoon to a speech on TV by President John Kennedy on June 26, 1963  It was his "Let them come to Berlin" speech.  The President painted a vivid and stark picture of the differences between a system that needed to build walls to keep its people in and the US where people were longing to get in.  I was young and impressionable.  Vietnam was ahead of us.  I came from a very conservative republican family.  I was very patriotic.  However, I was also quite afraid of the prospect of being drafted and being sent to Vietnam.  I wound up joining the Air Force and I served state-side as an electronics instructor.   All the while I followed politics and tuned in to short wave broadcasts where ever I was stationed.   I continued to listen to Radio Moscow.  I may have been open to the possibility that another way of organizing society was possible.  I harbored a inner faith that as good or as bad as life was in the United States, we always had options. We had choices between the two parties. 

While serving in the Air Force I received an education that I had not anticipated.  I read Thoreau's essay, Civil Disobedience.  I experienced an awakening of sorts that called into question my conservative political upbringing.  By the time I had served my stint in the service and returned home I was becoming radicalized.  Another world was possible although I never really thought of it in those terms until recently.  A major shaping inflence stemed from what happened  outside the major party conventions in 1968.  As a result, for me 1968 has always had a revolutionary aura surrounding it.  What is happening now with the Occupy Movement is something I have discovered I had been waiting for ever since 1968.  It has to do directly with the rebirth of class consciousness and the phenomenon of oppression.  The advent of Occupy came for me on top the US Social Forum in Detroit.  My partner and I attended the US Social Forum in Detroit during the summer of 2010.  There were 18,000 other activists there who also thought another world was possible.

During the last several years and especially after the 2008 Presidential elections I have realized that essentially, those of us living in the good old USA have just one-party.  It is the party of the ruling elites.  It is the capitalist party.  It has two right wings.  That's why it keeps spinning to the right no matter how we vote.  And our media are occupied by the ruling elites who continually, twenty-four hours a day, pelt us with the predominate ideology.  Free markets are essential for our freedom we told in an uncritical manner.  Capitalism is necessary for democracy.  If you are unemployed, then that is our fault.  

The Criminalization of Homelessness

I talked with a young man who lives on the streets of the city of Sacramento.  Never mind how he got there.  He owns nothing except those things he can carry with him.  He described for me the lengths to which he has gone to avoid standing all night on a sidewalk.  I won't go into detail.  On some cold winter evenings ice forms at his feet on the sidewalk.  "I nearly froze my balls off last night," he told me.  The anti-camping law in Sacramento makes it impossible for a homeless person to sleep in a sleeping bag or tent.  You can't even put your sleeping bag or tent down for a moment in order to use facilities or find food.  It might be construed as storing camping equipment on public property.  Public property is not "the commons."  You have to occupy a  structure that is legitimately recognized by city authorities as your "property."  Otherwise, if you are still young enough to remain standing all night freezing your balls off, you continue to pursue this icy alternative.  An older person would presumably topple over after a short while and be subject to arrest for camping on city property.  Poverty is a form of institutionalized oppression.  It is an artifact of capitalism.  Poverty is a death sentence.  It is the "death panel" that has always been part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production.  And the ruling ideology supports the notion that poverty is an acceptable phenomenon.  If you are poor your life is shortened considerably.  If you are elderly and homeless on an icy Sacramento street, then your death sentence will be carried out.  It's only a matter of time.

Property rights seem to be the key to legitimacy of personhood in Sacramento.  The homeless camp along the American River was dismantled this past week partly to appease property owners who were doubtless offended  by this unsightly manifestation of capitalist oppression.  I  have witnessed the debate revolving around the exact cosmic tic at which a fetus becomes a person.  However, if you own property then you have a status conferred upon you well beyond anything similarly conferred upon a fetus.  Alternatively, if you have the means to rent space in someone else's property, then you can have property rights by proxy as it were.  However, even if you had previously passed the "fetus" check, your poverty now deprives you of even basic human rights.  You must go away.  You have no rights.

Personhood, we were recently reminded, is conferred upon corporations, thereby effectually circumventing the "fetus check." Mitt Romney chided an occupy person who had the temerity to question the influence of corporations in the U.S. "Corporations are people, my friend." Rights are conferred upon a person through the occult status of property ownership.  Politicians are speaking today to the middle class.  That is to say, those who own property.  I'm old enough to remember a time when presidential candidates used to speak of "The War on Poverty."  Now it is simply "War on the Poor."  The poor have disappeared from the rhetoric of presidential politics.  This is a total dispossession not only of the right to claim a space, but, in addition, the dispossession of personhood.

The question seldom, if ever, arises in the main stream media as to whether our economic system could be democratized so that poverty could be erased.  Any attempt to suggest an economic democracy is dismissed as "socialism." In fact, we are moving further away from this solution by the privatization of health care, education, incarceration, social security and Medicare.  The cause of poverty, we are led to believe by the ruling ideology, is personal failure.  Moreover, the primary means for eliminating poverty is through charity which is another capitalist industry.  Charity is the institutionalized instrument that functions to ease the conscience and allow for the increasing disparity of incomes to continue.  Meanwhile we can avert our eyes and believe that things are just as they should be.  Profits are up.   Wages are depressed.  God is in His heaven.

The democratic alternative will come, but not through electoral politics.  Not through the political class.  It will come in spite of the capitalist class.  The contradictions that plague capitalist accumulation are growing beyond the tectonic breaking point.  Social unrest is inevitable.  Class consciousness is taking shape.  People are reoccupying the commons ... not just here, but in Egypt, in Europe and everywhere. There will be a commons once again.  People understand that human rights trump property rights.  It must be remembered: Oppression is never an accident.