To follow up Nightmares of Capitalism, Pipe Dreams of Democracy, we present The Empire Has No Clothes, an overview of the factors we expect to shape the context of struggle in 2012. These include intensifying repression, the struggle for the internet, the crisis of legitimacy facing representative democracy, and the fault lines within our resistance movements themselves. We anticipate a new round of confrontations, more pitched than the last, and the stakes are only getting higher.

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The new year breaks on a turbulent world. Increasingly superfluous, we pour into the service industry—greasing the wheels for consumption rather than producing anything of lasting value—or scavenge at the margins. Forced to be ever more flexible and mobile, competing against ever-broadening swaths of the population for ever more precarious jobs, we aren’t just atomized, we’ve become plasma—a shapeless, reactive mass in which even the most elementary bonds have been broken.

This doesn’t signify the triumph of capitalism, but a new phase of uncertainty for the system as well as its subjects. Today, even liberals acknowledge that 99% of the population has little stake in perpetuating the status quo. Yet only the most doctrinaire Marxists still believe history will deliver us to utopia: maquiladoras on the moon seem equally likely. The current turmoil simply affords us a window of opportunity, a window with no guarantees. If we fail to seize it, the system will stabilize once more, as it has in every previous crisis: and this time we can be sure the stabilizing mechanism will not be the carrot, but the stick.

To summarize an earlier analysis: when it’s easier to overthrow governments than to reform them, we shouldn’t base our strategies on incremental victories, but popularize ways of fighting that create new social bodies. As people lose their previous positions in society, traditional struggles will collapse, but the disenfranchised will pour into every struggle that creates new commons. Yet these commons can only survive as long as they spread: we can only defend ourselves offensively.

These hypotheses were borne out throughout 2011, from the so-called Arab Spring to the fall of the occupations. Here are some of the factors we expect to shape the context of struggle in 2012.

Not the Carrot, but the Stick

In the economic crisis, policing and private security are one of the only remaining growth industries. The fierce and apparently coordinated police repression of occupations should come as no surprise in a nation where nearly two and a half million are incarcerated and police kill hundreds every year. That violence is only going to intensify. There’s no other way to keep the superfluous population under control, especially as we get unruly.

We should brace ourselves for increasing levels of force—perhaps beyond anything we can imagine—and countering these in the streets will be essential to the next phase of resistance. But the strategy of the stick means more than tear gas and SWAT team raids. The authorities can’t utilize force without provoking greater unrest unless they delegitimize the targets and break up all social configurations that could fight back. Demonizing insurgents in the media, driving wedges between and within social bodies, and buying off potential allies are all essential steps in this strategy. In this context, implicit offers of immunity to cooperative elements in popular movements are functionally identical to police violence, as they prepare the ground for it. Protesters who seek to distinguish themselves from the irrational and unruly are accepting complicity in everything that is done to the latter.[1]

We can already see how this has played out in various parts of the world over the past year. In Egypt, a widespread popular revolt obtained its original object, but fragmented afterwards as some continued fighting for liberation while others abandoned them to the bullets of the military. In the UK, the disconnection between protest movements and the suffering underclass meant that the inevitable revolt of the latter took an antisocial form, limiting its scope. On the other hand, Occupy Oakland has been able to continue escalating precisely because anarchists and other angry poor people were never successfully marginalized. 

The Cycle of False Hope

Four years ago, savvy young people eager to change the world lined up behind a politician’s promise of “Hope.” In 2011, many of the same people took to the street; the Occupy Movement was a logical next step for the Obama Generation once electoral politics failed them. We can expect this cycle of hope and disillusionment to continue now that the occupiers’ attempt at autonomous direct democracy has been crushed by force. Faith in leaders was the first to go; faith in nonviolence might be next.

In a time of widespread anxiety and discontent, it’s tempting to throw one’s weight behind anyone who offers to fix the economy and the social ills that supposedly caused its decline. When one promise inevitably fails, the next round of proposals tends to be more extreme. In the coming years, there will be more militancy across the political spectrum and more willingness to act outside the established institutions.

Unfortunately, direct action does not always serve liberating ends. The crucial battle right now is not between illegalism and law and order, but between competing visions of upheaval—and our most dangerous enemies may not be bureaucrats or executives. One of our tasks as anarchists is to unmask would-be leaders and their false promises—the pied pipers of pipe dreams. This is not for the faint of heart: anarchists who lacked the mettle to take an unpopular stand when Obama was elected will be hard-pressed to take on apparently horizontal social movements that ultimately function to stabilize capitalism.

Anarchist principles are catching on throughout society, well beyond the plaza occupations. From the right we hear that “every tea partier is a tea party leader,” and at least some people take this rhetoric seriously. For now, this trend seems simply to be fostering an extra-parliamentary version of two-party politics, with little serious opposition to capitalism on either side. But every moment of disillusionment can also be a moment of transformation. We may find strange bedfellows in 2012.

Higher levels of conflict are going to become increasingly routine . . .

The Taming of the Technological Frontier?

“Not the carrot, but the stick”: we picture security guards with actual nightsticks, but this clampdown will also occur on the newest terrain of struggle, digital communication. The same technology that helped capitalists outflank the resistance of the 1960s has produced new forms of revolt, from file-sharing to viral riots. Without the advance endorsement of Anonymous, for example, Occupy Wall Street might never have gotten off the ground. We can expect to see a worldwide authoritarian backlash against the internet-spread and twitter-savvy revolts of 2011.

Much of this clampdown will take the form of direct surveillance and censorship. We take for granted that those are chiefly employed in places like Syria and Tunisia; in fact, most of the censorship technology those governments use comes from Silicon Valley—and was first applied right here in the US.[2] Since even the slightest internet censorship presupposes effective and exhaustive surveillance, it is a small step from regulation to lockdown.

Yet not all digital repression is as heavy-handed as the firewall around China. Think instead of the digital forensics utilized by police in the UK to follow up on last summer’s riots. Alongside this kind of surgical targeting, we can expect yet subtler efforts to delegitimize resistance and guide discourse away from anything that could prove disruptive. The attention economy of Facebook and Youtube is ideal for both approaches.

The current struggles over digital privacy and “free speech” are not just a matter of civil liberties; they will have significant consequences for the next phase of struggle in the streets. The more difficult it becomes to speak freely and safely online, the more specialized the role of circulating information will be, and the more difficult it will become to coordinate revolt spontaneously. The resulting power imbalances may figure strongly in the cooption and neutralization of struggles: in some plaza occupations, the disproportionate power of the media working group has already been a recurring problem. If the clampdown succeeds, this will only get worse.

Keeping up the Fight

Of course, our best defense against the authorities utilizing all the intelligence they gather is not proper computer security, but thriving social movements. When people are used to acting together and discontent is simmering, the powerful are afraid to provoke a storm they can’t control. Again, the best defense is a good offense.

As different groups compete for ownership of the struggle, we should be especially suspicious of every attempt to manage the forms revolt takes. The do-it-yourself ethic that seemed revolutionary in the 1990s ultimately helped solve the crisis of the previous form of capitalism, preparing atomized individuals to self-manage our integration into the economy; self-managing the taming of our own rebellions may well be the next phase of this program. The non-profit post-industrial complex is a familiar example of this: it is essentially a return to feudalism, in which the powerful dole out just enough resources to the well-meaning to keep the population quiet. We expect to see some new examples as social conflict continues. Some of the best managers might be impressively militant.

Today the question isn’t whether there will be resistance—we no longer need to buy plane tickets overseas to get a taste of it—but what social forms will characterize it, what precedents it will set. We’ll probably see heterogeneous zones like Occupy Wall Street open up repeatedly over the coming years, each time drawing in new sectors of the population with diverse perspectives and agendas. These spaces will inevitably rupture as the elements that constituted them form new configurations and new fault lines emerge. Our goal should not be to preserve these for their own sake, then, but rather to make sure the right ruptures occur.

Alongside attempting to intensify explicitly political movements such as the plaza occupations, we should also figure out what role to play in the violent clashes we can expect to see more frequently. Even after a remarkable wave of anti-austerity protests, anarchists in London seemed unprepared for last August’s Tottenham riots. We need to be able to act swiftly and decisively in such moments. We probably won’t succeed in imposing our own political agenda on them; even if we could, it might put us in the ranks of the managers and protest marshals. What we can do is demonstrate in practice how different forms of revolt are relevant to each other, and help to link them together. Looters need hackers, and hackers need looters too.

A Crisis of Legitimacy

Whatever their results, presidential elections are a ritual for reinforcing the legitimacy of the government and its political process. In 2012, this legitimacy is in question to an unusual extent. The popular rhetoric of autonomy and participation is the flipside of a growing skepticism towards our rulers.

Right now this skepticism is mostly expressed in the language of corruption and mismanagement; people doubt the legitimacy of this government, but perhaps not of government itself. For the ruling class, holding that line will be the top priority this year. Our priority will be the opposite.

At the same time, we’ll be facing our own crises. Would-be leaders have always used discourses of legitimacy to isolate their foes—violence versus nonviolence, locals versus outside agitators, goal-oriented discipline versus unproductive chaos. As the false promises become more extreme, so will the recriminations. Pandering to their discourse reinforces their advantage, but declaring ourselves on the side of the illegitimate is not enough to undermine the force of legitimacy itself. How we navigate this complex problem will determine our ability to link different social bodies in revolt.

No matter what, we cannot sit back and let the cycle of hope and disillusionment run its course, however costly those who profit off of false hope make it to intervene. Nothing we say is credible if we fail to provide examples of action to those who are ready to act. An escalating cycle of conflict produces a growing apparatus of control. If we wait until every solution except anarchy has been tried, it will be too late.

.

 . . and the stakes keep going up.

 Notes

The crisis continues. This isn’t just a hiccup in the market, but a structural breakdown. A system driven by competition for ever-increasing profit can’t run indefinitely; sooner or later everything that can be commodified has been drawn into the market, all the capital accumulates in a few hands, and the profits dry up.

Today the factories of every industry produce commodities more and more efficiently via automation that renders workers increasingly redundant. The only way to profit on these commodities is to cut costs: to eliminate workers or pay them next to nothing. But without work or wages, people can’t play their part as consumers. The only job openings are with the police, who wage a never-ending war on the population to control the poor and unemployed. This is why our world is overflowing with cheap shit, with human life cheapest of all.

As commodities get cheaper and consumers get poorer, how can capitalists continue making a profit? Credit was invented as a way for consumers to go on shopping even when they weren’t paid living wages. When the sale of real goods can no longer produce profit, profits must be made on expected future returns—in other words, on speculation.

But like any house of cards, debt can’t be built up forever—eventually someone calls it in. The house of cards collapsed under its own weight in 2008 when it became clear that the expected future returns could never materialize. Rather than reconsidering their faith in capitalism, the authorities are now gutting the last vestiges of the support structures established to pacify the old labor movement, feeding every last stick into the fire.

The financial crisis signals a deeper metaphysical crisis: this system, which perpetuated itself by creating unfulfillable emotional needs, cannot provide for the global population’s material needs either. The high rates of unemployment from Egypt to the US are not simply caused by the corruption of despots like Mubarak, nor the greed of specific capitalists; they are evidence that a system that never worked for us is on the verge of ceasing to work at all.

In response, some hope to resurrect social democracy. But wasn’t it social democracy that neutralized the resistance movements of the 20th century, while building up a state powerful enough to impose the current inequalities? Democracy has always been the guardian of capitalism, giving the greatest possible number of people reason to invest themselves in hierarchies and coercive institutions, equating freedom with property rights. If capitalism is doomed, we need something altogether different—the truth is, we always did.

Capitalism won’t crumble overnight. Its rituals and values are so deeply ingrained in us that its demise could take generations, and it might give way to something even worse. If we want to have any influence over what comes next, we have to pose the right questions with the ways we fight and the narratives we propagate. Here we’ll trace the trajectory of popular struggles against austerity and capitalism around the world across 2010 and 2011, identifying their limitations so as to push further next time.

Pitfalls and Paradoxes: The Student Protests of March 4, 2010

The economic crisis that entered the public consciousness in 2008 prompted governments to inflict massive cutbacks on public education. The student movement that began in December 2008 with the occupation of the New School in New York City—itself a private school—intensified with a series of protests and occupations throughout fall 2009, principally in California.[1] These culminated in nationwide demonstrations on March 4, 2010. The Bay Area was the epicenter of this day of action, with tens of thousands in the streets; but at this epicenter, the contradictions within the movement came into stark relief.

While anarchists had been at the forefront of the occupations, reformists took the lead in organizing for March 4, planning a standard march and rally. They also attempted to seize control of the narrative. A week before the day of action, a dance party at UC Berkeley turned into a small-scale riot as students took the streets, mingling with non-students and defending themselves against police attacks. There were only two arrests, but afterwards liberals and leftists alleged that outside agitators were attempting to hijack the movement—a story some had been repeating for months, which has become all the more familiar since.

As in the anti-war movement seven years earlier, anarchists had largely limited themselves to escalating the tactics of the student movement. Most militant actions were organized informally, and there was neither an autonomous body for coordinating these nor a voice for them in the organizational structures of the larger movement. This opacity offered the element of surprise, but it ultimately enabled reformists to outflank radicals by dominating the public discourse and planning actions that were unfavorable for confrontation. Likewise, because anarchists weren’t able to popularize a narrative identifying the student movement with the larger struggles of the disenfranchised, most people took it for granted that the point of the struggle was simply to get more funding for public education. Consequently, it was difficult to legitimize the participation of non-students except as passive “allies,” let alone make a case for a struggle against government.

On March 4, a march of several thousands departed from Berkeley towards Oakland. Student organizing groups jockeyed with black-clad militants for the lead. The march joined younger students and teachers in downtown Oakland for a rally at which the usual speakers took turns at the podium. A breakaway march had been planned to depart from the rally, but one speaker took the stage to discourage anyone from participating, emphasizing that it would be illegal and dangerous. The word on the street was that radicals had established some sort of back-room deal with public organizers that the latter reneged on. Most people left after the rally, but a couple hundred eventually regrouped around a sound system and set out, managing to block the freeway before being mass-arrested. A fifteen-year-old student fell from the freeway when the police closed in, suffering serious head injuries and tragically confirming the speaker’s warning.

Afterwards, there were declarations of victory and hysterical recriminations, but the student movement had passed its peak. Without the initiative of the militant participants driving the movement, the reformist wing drifted into hopeless attempts to influence politicians; momentum collapsed. The same pattern played out elsewhere in the country.

Anarchists have to find a starting place from which to act in a society in which few even understand our goals. This creates paradoxes such as joining a struggle for education in a country in which education has always been tied to the state. Participating in the student movement, anarchists risked legitimizing social structures, roles, and privileges they would otherwise set out to undermine. The student movement of 2009-2010 might have gone further if it had been reframed as a part of a larger struggle involving all who were losing or had already lost their positions in the economy—not to mention those who never had any in the first place. In any case, it set the stage for Occupy Oakland to do this.

Anarchists were “occupying everything” long before Occupy Wall Street
was a gleam in Kalle Lasn’s eye.

Reaching Limits: May Day, 2010

On May Day 2010, small but fierce anarchist demonstrations and attacks on property took place in many cities around the United States, notably including Santa Cruz, California and Asheville, North Carolina. Eleven people were arrested in Asheville, charged with conspiracy and other felonies and held on $65,000 bail.

The arrests sent shockwaves of controversy throughout anarchist circles. One editorial entitled “What I would do with $55,000” [sic] argued that it would be more strategic to leave the arrestees in prison and use the money to buy screen-printing equipment and pay the rent of social centers in Chicago. This is noxious indeed, but it showed how polarized the debate had become between partisans of infrastructure and confrontation, and how unfavorably insurrectionists had positioned themselves on the field of public discourse in advance of repression.

That question, raised in bad faith, still speaks to an important issue. What could anarchists do offensively with such an enormous sum of money? What would it mean to take the initiative, raising $65,000 to advance a confrontational program intentionally rather than reactively? Divorced from a strategy that incorporates repression as a necessary phase, following a blind mantra of attack is like taking the first vulnerable piece you see in a chess game: it can set you up for crushing defeats. This leaves anarchists always on the back foot.

Four days later, well over 100,000 people gathered in Athens, Greece to protest government cutbacks and tax increases mandated by the European Union and International Monetary Fund. Wave after wave attempted to storm the parliament in Syntagma square; this was arguably the closest Greece had come to insurrection since the riots of December 2008. It came to an end when three people were killed in a fire irresponsibly started by rioters in a bank still staffed by employees.

Many believe that this tragedy prevented a potentially revolutionary situation from unfolding. It also inverted the narrative that had framed resistance in Greece since December 2008, associating murder with protesters rather than police. It takes ten thousand people ten years to legitimize militant struggle, and a single fool an hour to discredit it.

The mood was bleak afterwards on both sides of the Atlantic. While anarchists in the US bickered about the Asheville 11, in Greece they debated about how anti-social tendencies had taken root and set the stage for the bank fire. Some still declared the worldwide actions at the beginning of May to be a success, but it’s worth noting that few towns in the US hosted repeat events on May Day 2011.

When a strategy begins to produce diminishing or counterproductive returns, this is an opportunity to reevaluate and experiment. While the existing anarchist movement struggled to come to terms with the limits it had reached, new protagonists took the stage.

Anarchy in the UK:
The Student Movement, November-December 2010

On November 10, 2010, the National Union of Students drew 52,000 people to London to protest an austerity bill that would raise the tuition cap from £3290 to £9000. As the main demonstration moved by Millbank Tower, a splinter group of hundreds, headed by no more than 30 black bloc anarchists, broke into the Tory Headquarters there. As they smashed windows, painted graffiti, and clashed with police, thousands of supporters gathered in the square outside, building a fire from their signs and placards. It took the police hours to regain control. Helicopter footage showed the occupiers lining the railing on the roof of Millbank, papers blowing out over the crowd far below while smoke rose from the fire.

While individual anarchists were among the first into the building, none of the organized anarchist groups in the UK turned out in great numbers. The photos of suspects circulated by the police and media didn’t show the faces of longtime militants but those of the nation’s youth. The participants referenced the unrest sweeping the globe—“France, Greece, now here too”—but this marked the entry of a new generation into confrontation with the state.

The UK had been comparatively quiet for years. Previous protest campaigns had largely been organized by full-time activists; consequently, an activist subculture had emerged. This subculture helped to foster radical activity and infrastructure, but it was disconnected from the experiences and concerns of most of those suffering from capitalism.

The attack on Millbank ignited a wave of protests, walkouts, and other actions involving more than 100,000 people over the next two months.[2] Occupations occurred at schools throughout the country, serving as nerve centers to broaden and coordinate the movement. Several thousand young people converged in London again November 24 and 30; the police responded by surrounding and “kettling” demonstrators for hours. The movement peaked on December 9, with thousands participating in clashes in London while the British parliament passed the austerity package. Police kettled and viciously attacked protesters, sending one boy to the hospital in need of brain surgery; protesters defended themselves, smashed the windows of the Treasury and other buildings, and attacked a car bearing Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall.

In contrast to the US student movement, the disenfranchised took a primary role in these protests, often to the chagrin of “proper” student organizers. In one video clip from December 9, masked hooligans asserted, “We’re from the slums of London—how do they expect us to pay £9000 for uni fees?” Politicians and corporate media endeavored to drive a wedge between the different demographics that comprised the movement, but this diversity was its primary strength.

Activity tapered off after the bill passed. As in Greece in December 2008, the end of the year served as the closing of parentheses around a period of increased momentum.

The movement in the UK came on the heels of strikes and labor unrest throughout Spain and France; it coincided with a comparable student movement in Italy, culminating similarly on December 14 with fires and rioting outside the Italian Parliament during a controversial vote. Things were heating up.

New Fronts in Information Warfare:
Wikileaks, Anonymous, Lulzsec

While austerity protests drew in wider and wider swaths of the population, the same thing was taking place online. After Wikileaks released classified documents from the Afghanistan and Iraq occupations and US diplomatic cables, several corporations broke off relations with the group, cutting off its access to funds. In response, Anonymous—an internet meme serving as an umbrella for collective action—orchestrated distributed denial of service attacks on many of these companies, shutting down their websites and attracting international attention.

In the 20th century, the first wave of hackers had been motivated by curiosity and mischievousness; their successors pursued personal gain, working for criminal enterprises or security organizations—often in that order. Now, finally, it seemed that politicized hacking was coming into its own. Some of this attention may have been convenient for the US government, which was seeking to position itself for online crackdowns; but it also reflected the determination of online communities that existed by virtue of anonymity and free circulation of information to protect the necessary conditions of their existence.

While the culture of early Anonymous had been steeped in the adolescent humor and hostility of the message boards where it originated, by 2011 participants in this and similar projects frequently endorsed an anarchist agenda. For example, after targeting the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Lulzsec proclaimed, “We’re doing this not only because we are opposed to SB1070 and the racist Arizona police state, but because we want a world free from police, prisons and politicians altogether.”

Information heists can reveal the shady underside of the authorities, discrediting them while dispelling the myth of their invulnerability. The cables released by Wikileaks describing President Ben Ali’s pet tiger enjoying a luxurious diet while Tunisians starved stoked the flames of revolt in that country. But these attacks further a longer-term strategy, as well. Both 21st-century capitalism and the repressive apparatus that protects it depend on the circulation of information. Forcing corporations and governments to be cautious about how they share data cripples them.

 CNN: What’s the end goal for you? What do you want to see happen as a result of Operation Payback?

Anon: Personally? A utopian society.
This is just a new way to fight . . .

The Insurrection Comes:
“Arab Spring,” December 2010-March 2011

No one was prepared for governments to begin toppling. The first to go was Tunisia. Demonstrations commenced after an impoverished street vendor set himself on fire in protest of his treatment by police; at first, these protests were marginal, but every attempt at repression fanned the flames until unions and even lawyers joined in. Turnouts only increased after Ben Ali fled the country on January 18.

The first massive demonstrations took place in Egypt a week later, organized by a coalition of predominantly youth groups. One of the most influential forums supporting these was a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Saeed,” named for a man murdered by police. The protests were violently repressed, and the government shut down internet and cell phone access throughout much of the country; but once again, this only spread and intensified the resistance. After clashes with the police left many police stations burnt to the ground along with the headquarters of the ruling party, demonstrators shifted towards strategic nonviolence rather than taking on the military directly. By early February, a great part of the country was participating in the revolt, despite hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries.

President Mubarak repeatedly offered to grant protesters’ demands, but always a step too late; as momentum increased, people gained the confidence to demand more and more, until they would only be satisfied with his departure. He finally resigned on February 11. The following weeks saw similar uprisings in Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere around the Middle East, and an all-out civil war that ultimately drove Gaddafi from Libya.

Although North Africa might seem far away, in a globalized world we shouldn’t be surprised by how familiar everything in this story is: unemployment and bitterness, actions organized by groups protesting police brutality, even college graduates working at coffee shops. There are no exotic overseas revolutions in the 21st century. Though these events dwarfed the preceding riots in Greece and the student movement in England, they sprang from the same source and assumed similar forms. The waves of unrest that had washed Europe in the preceding years helped set a precedent for what it looked like to revolt, which North Africans pushed further than Europeans had imagined possible.

We can learn a lot about revolt in the 21st century from studying these events. The upheaval began at the margins—Tunisia is a relatively minor nation, while Egypt is the most populated in the Middle East—and at the social periphery, among the unemployed, the young, and the poor. It spread to all social classes and metropolitan centers, going on to exert influence worldwide. In a fully networked world, instability at the fringe can threaten power at the center.

These uprisings continued the experimentation with new technologies and decentralized organization that characterized the anti-globalization movement, showing that anonymous networking could initiate full-scale leaderless rebellions. As information has become the lifeblood of capitalism,[3] rendering the internet the new global factory floor, these were its first workers’ councils—a new kind of collective intelligence enabling people to organize themselves directly without representation.

At the same time, if communications technology was essential to the uprising, it was because it subverted its conventional role in the West, bringing people together rather than enabling them to remain at a distance from one another. This is proven by the fact that the demonstrations only intensified when Mubarak shut down cell phone and internet service. The material infrastructure of the internet is still quite centralized; while it can be useful, it is a mistake to depend on it as long as it remains in capitalist hands.

Mubarak faced a no-win situation: if he left communications technologies running, they would be used against him, but taking them down provoked outrage and international solidarity. In the future, we can expect the authorities to suppress unrest by structuring and directing the flows of information rather than interrupting them. They already seem more adept at this in the US, where Facebook is not usually used to coordinate insurrections but as a space for atomized individuals to compete for social capital.

Although the North African upheavals involved labor unrest, they started outside the workplace and remained focused on public spaces like Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The old labor movement was predicated on the way the production process gave workers common experiences, just as the subcultural strategies that followed it were based on the common references consumers shared. In the era of precarity, in which the common condition that unites us is that we are all at the mercy of an economy that offers us no permanent role, it makes sense for the factory occupations of 1968 to be replaced with the seizure of public space. Likewise, police are to the unemployed what bosses are to workers; in countries where young people suffer astronomical unemployment, it’s not surprising that revolts begin with attacks on the police.

The drawback of starting from outside the workplace is that it can frame the object of the revolt in political rather than economic terms. While the revolts in North Africa were produced by economic conditions, they opposed themselves chiefly to the forms of government rather than the economic structures that produced these; in the end, they may have been limited by the absence of an alternate vision for human relations. Without this, people fell back on the traditional narratives of nationalism—as exemplified by Egyptian flags and the chant “Muslim! Christian! We are all Egyptian!”—and democracy. As often happens, the forms the rebellion assumed were far more radical than the demands it presented. As the Middle East continues to ferment and new traditions of resistance take root, we can hope that the vision implied by these forms will come into its own as an end as well as a means.

The peak of the so-called “Arab Spring” was followed by a period of chaos that continues up to today. The state desperately needs people to distrust and fear each other; without this, it lacks its chief justification for existence. Just as Mubarak’s undercover police had posed as looters in order to justify a crackdown, outbreaks of ethnic violence have been convenient for those who wish to relegitimize state power. Yet Tahrir Square has been re-occupied by demonstrators again and again; the ousting of Mubarak and Ben Ali was clearly only the beginning of a long struggle.

Egypt received the second most military aid from the US in the world, after Israel—$1.3 billion a year. The tear gas canisters fired at demonstrators were inscribed “Made in the USA.” The oustings of Mubarak and later Gaddafi show that once things go far enough, military force is no longer a trump card; the military can hardly bomb its own cities. At the same time, to achieve more than a change of rulers, an insurrection has to spread into the ranks of the military and beyond national borders. It’s unclear when we will cross this threshold, but nobody saw the Tunisian uprising coming, either.

EGYPT WAS A RIOT
Obama (recent supporter of Mubarak, February 11): “Egyptians have inspired us, and they’ve done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained by violence… For Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence that bent the arc of history toward justice once more . . . I’m also confident that the same ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit that the young people of Egypt have shown in recent days can be harnessed to create new opportunity: jobs, businesses.”

Occupying the Capitol, Not Attacking Capital:
Wisconsin, February-March 2011

On the heels of the Egyptian example, anti-austerity protests gathered steam even in the US. Four days after Mubarak stepped down, a line of people mobilized by the Teaching Assistants Association waited to address the Wisconsin state legislature about proposed budget cuts and anti-union legislation. When the hearing was closed for the night, the queue became an impromptu occupation, as those who hadn’t gotten to speak were reluctant to lose their places.

The Capitol building was occupied until March 3, becoming a rallying point for unprecedented demonstrations. Teachers called in sick to work en masse, shutting down schools; anarchists and fellow travelers occupied a university building in Milwaukee in an attempt to spread the unrest; rumors circulated about a general strike.

On March 9, while Senate Democrats were absent in protest, Wisconsin’s Republican Senators passed a part of the proposed austerity package—a bill stripping public-sector unions of collective bargaining rights. In response, thousands returned to the capitol building, pushing past state patrolmen to reoccupy it in defiance of the court order that had concluded the previous occupation.

The centrality of the capitol building throughout the protests drove home prior to the Occupy movement how important it is for a movement to establish a relationship to physical place. Just as university occupations served as nerve centers during the December 2008 uprising in Greece, the capitol building offered a focal point for demonstrators to build momentum over a period of weeks and a site to converge in response to new developments. In a time of universal estrangement, when we can only congregate in spaces designed to make us shop or cheer for sports teams, common space itself has become radical and radicalizing.

This level of disruption was unusual for a quiet Midwestern state like Wisconsin. But once again, though the occupation assumed comparatively radical forms, it still limited itself to law-abiding democratic discourse. This created strange bedfellows for the protesters; for example, individual police officers expressed support for the occupation early on, though they later helped put a stop to it. This also paved the way for the Democratic Party to squander whatever momentum remained afterwards by channeling it into a doomed campaign to recall the governor.

However devious the Republicans’ machinations, they passed the bill by democratic process, the same way countless other bills are passed. Although the protesters saw themselves as partisans of democracy, in forcing their way back into the capitol on March 9 they were essentially asserting that their illegal occupation of the building was more legitimate than Senators doing what they were elected to do in it. Unfortunately, this was never articulated; people were prepared to break the law, but not to cease believing in it. It speaks volumes about the function of the Left that liberal organizers entered the capitol illegally on March 9 just to persuade everyone else to leave with them.

Between February 15 and March 3, the original occupation of the capitol had been undermined one compromise at a time. First the police politely asked people not to be in one room; they were being so nice about everything, and weren’t they on the same side? Then they gently asked people to vacate another room, and longtime organizers supported this, and so on—until the former occupiers found themselves out on the pavement, dumbfounded. This same process took only one night to play out again on March 9.

This underlines an important lesson: the first compromise might as well be the last. Whenever we concede anything, we set a precedent that will be repeated again and again, emboldening those for whom it is more convenient if we don’t stand up for ourselves. If police didn’t arrest demonstrators in the capitol, it was not because they supported the occupation, nor because demonstrators had the right to be in the building, but because the demonstrators had mobilized enough social power to force the authorities to back down. Politeness and obedience could only detract from this leverage.

In popular struggles, one role anarchists can play is to be the ones who refuse to yield. We can also pass on our hard-won analyses to less experienced protesters—for example, emphasizing that however personable individual police officers might seem, they cannot be trusted insofar as they are police.

To accomplish this, however, anarchists have to be vocal and in the thick of things, not looking on from the margins as they were in Wisconsin. Anarchists of a more insurrectionist bent gravitated to the occupation in Milwaukee, which failed to pick up steam, while anarchists in Madison largely focused on providing infrastructure.[4] Offering resources can be a good way to connect with strangers; yet our task is not just to facilitate protests of any kind, but to ensure that they threaten the power structure. To this end, we have to seize the initiative to organize actions as well as infrastructure—engaging the general public in the process, not just other anarchists. Clashes with the state are bound to be more controversial than free meals and childcare, but this controversy has to play out if we are ever to get anywhere.

The occupied theater building in Milwaukee

A common complaint from the more combative participants in the Madison occupation was that leftist organizations had already determined the character of the protest. Anarchists were afraid to act, fearing that they would simply be marginalized if they challenged the dominant narrative. In fact, there’s nothing to lose in such circumstances, when for all intents and purposes anarchists are already marginalized. The solutions promoted by the Left don’t point beyond the horizon of capitalism; even when they aren’t utterly naïve, they serve to distract and neutralize those who desire real change. Where the field is split between left and right, we may as well disrupt this dichotomy by acting outside of it. Even if we fail, at least we broaden the terrain.

This brings up the larger question—what should be the goal of anti-austerity protests? In Wisconsin, most participants took it for granted that their goal was to stop the bill: in other words, to keep things the way they had been. This treats the financial crisis as if it were just an excuse dreamed up by greedy capitalists.

But from the capitalist perspective, austerity measures really are unavoidable; there’s no other way to keep the system running. Elsewhere in the US, earnestly heartbroken Democrats were proposing similar measures for their own states—largely without opposition, thanks to the stupefying effect of the two-party system.

Capitalism is not a static condition but a dynamic process transforming the world. A protest can’t freeze history. Even if one wave of cutbacks can be stopped, a thousand more assaults will follow. The state literally can’t back down—the politicians have nowhere to go. This means that apparently realistic goals, such as blocking a particular budget or bill, are actually less realistic than attempting to change the entire system.

This was lost on many North American workers. Wisconsin teacher Peggy Kruse was quoted as saying, “Most teachers are more than happy to take the 18% pay cut, to do anything that will help get the state back and running. We’re most concerned about the loss of collective bargaining rights.” In other words, we’ll concede anything—just don’t take away our right to concede! Let Bill Gates keep his $56 billion while we get pay cuts or pink slips, but don’t touch the illusion that we choose this state of affairs.

Accepting defeat in advance correlates with a blind commitment to peaceful protest. Signs in Wisconsin read “FIGHT LIKE AN EGYPTIAN,” but Egyptian protesters burned down police stations. No amount of Obama doublespeak can render that peaceful.

If we shouldn’t evaluate anti-austerity protests according to whether they thwart new legislation or how many people they draw to rallies, their content becomes the important question. Do they create new relationships between people, new ways of relating to material goods? Do they demonstrate values that point beyond capitalism? Do they produce new momentum, new ways of fighting, new unruliness?

The capitol building symbolized democracy, which is to say collective participation in top-down control. Occupying it implied that the people could be better stewards of democracy than their elected representatives. Insofar as workers behaved themselves even as their right to organize autonomously was stripped away, they proved this to be the case.

Like the student movement, the movement in Wisconsin stalled because it limited itself to opposing specific legislation affecting one demographic. Framed as a last-ditch effort to protect the privileges of state employees, it could only go so far; people of many walks of life got involved, but the narrative prevented them from taking the lead. Yet millions of workers without union jobs or state salaries were already suffering the same conditions the Republicans wanted to force on state employees. A movement involving all these different sectors of society as equal participants could have snowballed; it would also have been much more difficult to control. Spontaneous high school walkouts in February had hinted at this possibility, connecting the proposed cutbacks to the alienation of young people who had yet to be thrown at the mercy of the job market. Instead, the predominantly white union workers framed the protest as a matter of defending their own privileges, sidelining other demographics such as unemployed African-Americans in Milwaukee and thus dooming themselves to defeat.

Get over it

It Spreads: The Plaza Occupation Movements, May-June 2011

The time for indignation is over. Those who get indignant are already starting to bore us. Increasingly, they seem to us like the last guardians of a rotten system, a system without dignity, sustainability or credibility. We don’t have to get indignant anymore, we have to revolt. The next time 300,000 of us take to the streets, let’s not go back home at the end of the day. Let’s go with our sleeping bags, knowing that on that night we won’t sleep in our beds.” -Franco Berardi Bifo

The spell of occupation extended beyond Wisconsin—along with the spell of democracy. Real Democracy Now (appropriately abbreviated DRY in Spanish), a new group professing to be outside all existing political parties and ideologies, organized protests against austerity measures and political corruption around Spain on May 15; afterwards, the idea spread by Twitter to camp out in plazas in imitation of the Tahrir Square encampment. Organized around assemblies based on “direct democracy,” these occupations swiftly drew thousands of participants in many cities around Spain. Communists, anarchists, and partisans of various national liberation movements mingled with people of other walks of life, many of whom had not previously been involved in protests or considered themselves politically active.

By the countrywide elections the following weekend, hundreds of thousands of people had visited or participated in the occupations. Nearly half of the population abstained from voting, with blank ballots doubling to 5%.

On May 27, police arrived at the occupation in Barcelona to “clean up” the plaza. Tens of thousands converged to oppose them. Organizers attempted to impose a code of nonviolence, as they had in every proposal in the assemblies, but as the police attacked clashes broke out all the same. After a long battle, the occupiers forced the police to withdraw; over one hundred people were injured, many with broken bones.

In some cities, the occupations had signed on the to DRY manifesto from the outset, becoming ideologically homogenous; these occupations did not expand as much or last as long. The occupations that remained sites of contention for a range of ideas and approaches were much more vibrant and enduring. Nonetheless, by mid-June the plazas had emptied throughout the country, though in some cities neighborhood assemblies took their place. Because they did not mount an offensive on the state and private ownership of capital, there was no endgame for the occupations: they were exciting experiments in convergence and self-organization, but offered no obvious road forward.

Like the UK student movement, the plaza occupation movement marked the entry of new demographics into conflict with the state—including many from the disenfranchised middle class. These newcomers accepted some of the premises of longtime radicals, such as autonomy from political parties; in this regard, they went much further than protesters in Wisconsin had. At the same time, they brought many of their dogmas with them, including pacifism. Likewise, the myth of a better, purer democracy remained alive and well in the plazas. The central assemblies addressed demands to the government and monopolized legitimacy, if not power, in the occupations.

In Greece, plaza occupations inspired by the ones in Spain began on May 25. These lasted longer than the Spanish occupations, drawing hundreds of thousands at the high points. They built up to a 48-hour general strike on June 28-29 coinciding with the Greek parliament narrowly voting to accept the new austerity measures decreed by the European Union. In Greece as in Spain, the new refugees from the middle class brought pacifism with them alongside various brands of nationalism. The pacifism threatened to divide the movement: as had occurred in the wake of the Toronto G20 protests and elsewhere, baseless conspiracy theories circulated that the “hooded ones” at the front of clashes with the police were actually somehow in league with the authorities. The nationalism was also ominous; although only a small minority in the occupations were out-and-out fascists, as the economic crisis worsens even mild nationalism may turn into xenophobia.

Despite these internal challenges, the general strike was marked by massive violent clashes with the police. For the first time since May 5, 2010, the insurgents who had risen up in December 2008—anarchists, anti-authoritarians, students, the underclass—were joined in the streets by the general public.

Anarchy in the UK, Take Two: Riots and Reaction, August 2011

A month later, Chile erupted in its wildest riots in years, with 874 people arrested in student protests against the privatized education system—the same day that Standard & Poor’s downgraded the United States credit rating. Immediately afterwards, riots broke out in the UK in response to the police murder of Mark Duggan. Far from subsiding, the unrest generated by the crisis was ricocheting back and forth across the globe.

The riots began on August 6 in London following protests in Duggan’s native Tottenham and spread swiftly around the country, intensifying in other cities after police clamped down in the capitol. These were the opposite of the plaza occupations: a single subset of society escalating its private war on police and private property, without narrative, demands, or illusions, and thus coming directly into conflict with the rest of society as a whole. Participation occurred chiefly along class rather than racial lines, with many groups being effectively multi-ethnic.

Redistribution of power

Redistribution of wealth

Altogether the riots inflicted around £200 million of damage, including widespread looting and arson. Once again, Twitter and Facebook were used to coordinate action on the ground, although the authorities took extensive advantage of this to arrest and prosecute participants—foreshadowing future clampdowns. Five more people lost their lives in the disorder.

The UK riots followed close on the heels of the unsuccessful anti-austerity protests, showing the consequences of denying a generation any prospects within capitalism. The subsequent push to cut off rioters’ families from social services underscores how the riots formalized the emergence of an excluded class that will only be controlled through unbridled violence. The appearance of vigilantes during the riots, including fascist groups like the English Defense League, indicates the breadth of forms that violence will take.

In this context, it’s chilling how many people identified with the corporate media narrative demonizing the rioters, even turning out with brooms in a media stunt calculated to show that ordinary British people supported the continuation of law and order. If the British working class has any hope of defending itself against the next round of austerity measures and diminishing employment opportunities, this can only come from common cause between rioters and other elements of the exploited. The availability of the underclass as competition for employment is precisely what enables capitalists to keep wages and benefits down; in attempting to assert and defend their own privileges, obedient workers doom themselves to be the next on the chopping block. Of course, globally speaking, British workers have only recently begun to lose their comparative privileges, so perhaps it is not surprising that it is taking them some time to come to terms with their current condition.

Do-it-yourself class treachery

The absence of effective anarchist initiatives immediately following the riots was not promising; history appeared to be racing ahead of anarchists just when it was most important for them to intervene in it. Treating class as a kind of identity politics had not equipped the conservative majority of British anarchists for a world in which the most determinant struggles occur outside the workplace.

The Shape of Occupations to Come

In September 2011, protesters in North America finally hit upon a format that could spread, based on the models already tested elsewhere around the world. We’ll discuss the lessons of the Occupy movement to date in a forthcoming analysis. Here, let it suffice to say that Occupy Wall Street caught on around the continent because it fulfilled conditions that could easily be deduced from earlier successes and failures worldwide. This suggests that studying the shortcomings of these precedents can also teach us how to improve on this success.

One obvious lesson is the importance of decision-making structures conducive to anarchist action. At no point during the buildup to the protests of March 4, 2010 or the occupations in Wisconsin did anarchists establish an autonomous public organizing body to play a role such as the RNC Welcoming Committee played at the 2008 Republican National Convention or the PGRP played at the 2009 G20 in Pittsburgh. This was a strategic error that enabled liberal and authoritarian organizers to monopolize the public discourse around the protests and determine their character and conditions in advance. Without the leverage afforded by public organizing of our own, we can always expect to be hoodwinked and betrayed by those who don’t share our opposition to hierarchical power.

The actions that go well for anarchists are likely to be the ones initiated by anarchists, or else in conjunction with others who respect anarchists’ goals and autonomy. In such cases, anarchists are more likely to succeed in determining the character of events, choosing a terrain conducive to confrontation. This may explain why occupations and apparently “spontaneous” actions have given more space and opportunity to decentralized forms of resistance than large-scale events such as the permitted marches of March 4, 2010. Authoritarian and lowest-common-denominator organizations can more easily dominate the latter, both by literally laying the groundwork of what is to happen and by monopolizing legitimacy in the public eye by presenting themselves as representing the movement. So long as anarchists remain on the margins of liberal and authoritarian organizing, organizing breakaway marches and the like, the lack of initiative and “legitimacy” in the public eye will always impose structural limits on our efforts.

We need public, participatory calls and organizing structures, both to offer points of entry to everyone who might want to fight alongside us and to make it impossible for authoritarians to stifle revolt by arranging the battlefield to be unfavorable for it. Public organizing can complement other less public approaches, but often it’s necessary to render them possible in the first place. Not surprisingly, the cities in which anarchists succeeded in carrying out inspiring actions as part of the Occupy movement—Oakland, Seattle, Saint Louis—were the ones in which they either had considerable leverage within the general assemblies or maintained their own open anti-authoritarian caucuses.

As capitalism renders more and more people precarious or redundant, it will be harder and harder to fight from recognized positions of legitimacy within the system such as “workers” or “students.” Last year’s students fighting tuition hikes are this year’s dropouts; last year’s workers fighting job cuts are this year’s unemployed. We have to legitimize fighting from outside, establishing a new narrative of struggle.

If we can accomplish this, we will neutralize the allegations of being “outside agitators” that are always raised against those who revolt. Better, we will transform every austerity conflict into an opportunity to connect with everyone else who has been thrown away by capitalism. Our goal should not be to protect the privileges of those who retain their jobs and enrollment, but to channel outrage about everything that capitalism has taken from all of us.

In addition to exacerbating the contradictions inherent in the financial crisis, we should undertake to make life in upheavals more pleasurable and robust than workaday life. Those who participate in wildcat strikes, blockades, and occupations should experience these as more exciting and fulfilling than their usual routines, to such an extent that it becomes possible to imagine life after capitalism. As many anarchists live in a permanent state of exclusion, making the best of it despite everything, we should be especially well-equipped to assist here.

Finally, we have to be tireless in our critique of democracy, as the alternative people in this society intuitively fall back on against the excesses of capitalism. The more unpopular this is, the more important it is that we do it. Private property and government are the two great sacred cows of our age—the ones for which our lives and the earth itself are being sacrificed—and challenging the ways they monopolize legitimacy is one project, not two. They are two heads of the same beast; they cannot be beaten separately.

 “It was a symbolic battle—or more precisely, a frighteningly real and bloody fight over a symbolic location; the fight itself was the message.” participant in the battle for the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior

Notes

[1] See Rolling Thunder #9.

Source: Huffington Post

More than 1,100 dogs in China are waiting for new homes after being rescued from the slaughterhouse last week with the help of a blogger, who helped authorities intercept the animals while they were being transported in deplorable conditions for the purpose of human consumption, China Daily reports.

The dogs were being shipped from Southwest China’s Chonguing province to a slaughterhouse in Guandong province, a journey which would have left the dogs crammed into cages without food and water for 22 hours, according to the Daily Mail.

Luckily, a 40-year-old blogger and volunteer for the Chongqing Small Animal Protection Association who goes by name Peng spotted the dogs being shipped in stacked cages on a flatbed truck and posted a plea online to save them, China Daily reports.

Peng’s blog post tipped off animal activists and local law enforcement officials who were able to intercept the dogs, which were then taken to a pig farm in Southwest China for emergency care, according to China Daily.

A donor has since offered a 1,000 square meter warehouse to house the animals while they are nursed back to health. Local animal lovers have also donated enough food to feed the dogs for the next 20 to 30 days.

Now, volunteer activists for the Chongqing Small Animal Protection Association are searching for new homes for the animals, but say finding suitable homes for more than 1,000 dogs seems to be an impossible task.

Chen Mingcai, head of the Chongqing Small Animal Protection Association, estimated that 20 percent of the animals will be adopted locally. But the remaining dogs 800 will still need more space to live comfortably until a permanent situation can be found.

“Now I am thinking about calling for more social donations to build dog houses,” Chen told China Daily.

While consumption of dog meat is banned in most countries, some people in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea, Mexico, Taiwan and the Philippines still consider the meat a delicacy. In these countries, dog meat can be found on many restaurant menus, according to Action for Our Planet.

But in China, where the consumption of dog meat has occurred in some areas for thousands of years, a growing animals rights movement has led to more activists to push authorities to crack down on the practice, the Associated Press reports.

Last April, around 200 people blockaded a truck carrying dogs to the slaughterhouse for 15 hours until they were able to negotiate the animals’ release for $17,000, according to the Associated Press.

In September, for the first time in 600 years, residents of Qianxi, China, were banned from holding an ancient dog-eating festival after public outrage erupted on the Internet, according to The New York Times.

“I believe China is going through a Chinese animal liberation movement, a bottom-up movement, gaining huge momentum in the past year, very much with the help of the Internet and [Chinese social networking site] Weibo, together with the younger generation growing up with cats and dogs as family pets,” Deborah Cao, a professor at Griffith University in Australia who studies animal rights law, told The New York Times last year.

by Radley Balko (Huffington Post)

In February of last year, video surfaced of a marijuana raid in Columbia, Mo. During the raid on Jonathan Whitworth and his family, police took down the door with a battering ram, then within seconds shot and killed one of Whitworth’s dogs and wounded the other. They didn’t find enough pot in the house to charge Whitworth with even a misdemeanor. (He was, however, charged with misdemeanor possession of drug paraphernalia when police found a pipe.) The disturbing video went viral in May 2010, triggering outrage around the world. On Fox News, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer and Bill O’Reilly cautioned not to judge the entire drug war by the video, which they characterized as an isolated incident.

In fact, very little about the raid that was isolated or unusual. For the most part, it was carried out the same way drug warrants are served some 150 times per day in the United States. The battering ram, the execution of Whitworth’s dog, the fact that police weren’t aware Whitworth’s 7-year-old child was in the home before they riddled the place with bullets, the fact that they found only a small amount of pot, likely for personal use — all are common in drug raids. The only thing unusual was that the raid was recorded by police, then released to the public after an open records request by the Columbia Daily Tribune. It was as if much of the country was seeing for the first time the violence with which the drug war is actually fought. And they didn’t like what they saw.

That video came to mind with the outrage and public debate over the now-infamous pepper-spraying of Occupy protesters at the University of California-Davis protest earlier this month. The incident was just one of a number of high-profile uses of force amid crackdowns on Occupy protesters across the country, including one in Oakland in which the skull of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen was fractured by a tear gas canister, and in New York, where NYPD Officer Anthony Bologna pepper-sprayed protesters who had been penned in by police fencing.

But America’s police departments have been moving toward more aggressive, force-first, militaristic tactics and their accompanying mindset for 30 years. It’s just that, with the exception of protests at the occasional free trade or World Bank summit, the tactics haven’t generally been used on mostly white, mostly college-educated kids armed with cellphone cameras and a media platform.

Police militarization is now an ingrained part of American culture. SWAT teams are featured in countless cop reality shows, and wrong-door raids are the subject of “The Simpsons” bits and search engine commercials. Tough-on-crime sheriffs now sport tanks and hardware more equipped for battle in a war zone than policing city streets. Seemingly benign agencies such as state alcohol control boards and the federal Department of Education can now enforce laws and regulations not with fines and clipboards, but with volatile raids by paramilitary police teams.

Outraged by the Occupy crackdowns, some pundits and political commentators who paid little heed to these issues in the past are now calling for a national discussion on the use of force. That’s a welcome development, but it’s helpful to review how we got here in order to have an honest discussion.

Part of the trend can be attributed to the broader tough-on-crime and drug war policies pushed by politicians of both parties since at least the early 1980s, but part of the problem also lies with America’s political culture. Public officials’ decisions today to use force and the amount of force are as governed by political factors as by an honest assessment of the threat a suspect or group may pose. Over the years, both liberals and conservatives have periodically raised alarms over the government’s increasing willingness to use disproportionately aggressive force. And over the years, both sides have tended to hush up when the force is applied by political allies, directed at political opponents, or is used to enforce the sorts of laws they favor.

How We Got Here

According to Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Peter Kraska, the number of SWAT raids carried out each year in America has jumped dramatically over the last generation or so, from just a few thousand in the 1980s to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s, when Kraska stopped his survey. He found that the vast majority of the increase is attributable to the drug war — namely warrant service on low-to-mid-level drug offenders. A number of federal policies have driven the trend, including offering domestic police departments military training, allowing training with military organizations, using “troops-to-cops” programs and offering surplus military equipment and weaponry to domestic police police departments for free or at major discounts. There has also been a constant barrage of martial rhetoric from politicians and policymakers.

Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a “war,” and the consequences are predictable. These policies have taken a toll. Among the victims of increasingly aggressive and militaristic police tactics: Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Md., whose dogs were killed when Prince George’s County police mistakenly raided his home; 92-year-old Katherine Johnston, who was gunned down by narcotics cops in Atlanta in 2006; 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda, who was killed by Modesto, Calif., police during a drug raid in September 2000; 80-year-old Isaac Singletary, who was shot by undercover narcotics police in 2007 who were attempting to sell drugs from his yard; Jonathan Ayers, a Georgia pastor shot as he tried to flee a gang of narcotics cops who jumped him at a gas station in 2009; Clayton Helriggle, a 23-year-old college student killed during a marijuana raid in Ohio in 2002; and Alberta Spruill, who died of a heart attack after police deployed a flash grenade during a mistaken raid on her Harlem apartment in 2003. Most recently, voting rights activist Barbara Arnwine was raided by a SWAT team in Prince George’s County, Md., on Nov. 21. Police were looking for Arnwine’s nephew, a suspect in an armed robbery.*

The drug war has been the primary policy driving the trend but, since 2001, the federal government has also used the threat of terror attacks to further militarize domestic law enforcement. This includes not only finding new sources of funding for armor, weapons and gear, but also claiming new powers for the “War on Terror” that are then inevitably used in more routine law enforcement.

But paramilitary creep has also spread well beyond the drug war. In recent years, SWAT teams have been used to break up neighborhood poker games, including one at an American Legion Hall in Dallas. In 2006, Virginia optometrist Sal Culosi was killed when the Fairfax County Police Department sent a SWAT team to arrest him for gambling on football games. SWAT teams are also now used to arrest people suspected of downloading child pornography. Last year, an Austin, Texas, SWAT team broke down a man’s door because he was suspected of stealing koi fish from a botanical garden.

“That he which hath no stomach to this fight, … Instead, make this known throughout the army: whoever has no spirit for this fight, let him depart” -William Shakespeare

In response to a Facebook acquaintance’s question as to how to make the vegan and animal advocacy far more dynamic and effective movements, I gave this general sketch of a reply that summarizes some of my thoughts, concerns, and frustrations.

I think it is important to underscore the difference between pacifism and passivism. I’m no pacifist, but deeply respect the action and confrontation based approach of Gandhi, King, and others. There are thousands or millions mouthing their words without following their actions, which apparently even animal “activists” think are too “alienating” to the God of public opinion or are afraid of an arrest charge just slightly more serious than a parking ticket. Just when was even mass civil disobedience taken off the table as a needed tactic, and renounced as violent or counter-productive? This movement has not even tried this tactic and the much-vaunted “peaceful” means of change have barely even been explored for the opportunities available even within that particular paradigm.

We need to put the social and political and resistance movement back into the meaning of vegan and animal rights/liberation (or reinvent these concepts as such). For all the power and advantages of new social media, I think Facebook and other such technologies have played a huge role in the pacification and domestication (literally) of this movement. Some people use these tools very effectively by mediating them with actions and campaigns, others remain locked into the virtual straightjacket and spectacle of these media, confusing politics with hitting “like” and sign e-petitions.

We need to raise the bar; we are content with crumbs and too little, we have lost the capacity to imagine and the boldness to demand. We pander far too much to public opinion rather than to execute effective strikes and actions against oppressors. We have internalized the state superego, to the point of demanding we respect animal oppressors and treat them with respect and as people who have strayed from their “humanity.” We have fallen prey to this Kumbaya nonsense that we are one human family, when we shall forever be divided and there will always be enemies who want to murder, rape, and destroy, and they are not our friends or part of our community. We have denied ourselves use of the words “war” and “enemy” as being nothing but vocabulary taken from the dominator culture rather than apt analytic terms and important concepts to avoid being seduced into false alliances and collaborationism that betrays the animals and the earth.

We need to put the fight back in this movement, we need to revive what the 19th century abolitionist movement in the US was and meant compared to the pathetic caricature of what some call “vegan abolitionism” today and attempt to patent as the only form of abolitionism possible, and which amounts to nothing more than following a cult leader in chanting ”Go Vegan!” and “Adopt a dog from a shelter!” (how the hell is that abolitionist?!) mantras. They have completely corrupted, perverted, and irrevocably drained the term “abolitionism” of any meaning, and so I use the discourse of “liberationism” for various reasons.

We need to take risks, put our bodies on the line and in the way between hunters and hunted, killers and killed. We need a social resistance movement,, a new anarchist, not yet another vegan, cookbook. I’m not holding my breath, but I have done my share of CD and I would do it anytime, I just wish it could be part of a large movement of the kind Gandhi and King once mobilized, rather than myself and maybe one friend. Non-cooperation, total interference, absolute disruption, shut it down system by system, plank by plank, and escalate the struggle from occupation to appropriation to transformation.

Over the course of years, I sometimes feel like I am pissing in the wind or addressing an imaginary audience wholly unaroused by the level of outrage, urgency, and passion that I feel every day.  How refreshing it would be to hear from at least two dozen people who are thinking along the same lines, and then I might regain hope this movement has a chance to make a real impact in the short time remaining to us before global social and ecological catastrophes bury us all like the wretched victims of Pompeii, whose bodies still lie in frozen agony.

With the planet in the throes of dramatic climate change, destabilization and death of all ecological systems, the sixth great extinction crisis the history of the earth (this one being caused by human activity not natural events), and with the number of animals murdered for human purposes growing each year (60 billion land animals killed each year for food consumption alone, add dozens of billion more perhaps for sea animals), “reasonableness” and “moderation” seem to be entirely unreasonable and immoderate, as “extreme” and “radical” actions appear simply as necessary and appropriate.

So yes, I am an extremist: to be anything else in these conditions, in this distinct context and moment in time, is treacherous, cowardly, unethical, and insane.

The question “what would the animals want us to do?” is no different in essence from “what would future generations want us to do?” The answer is: a hell of a lot more than what we are doing now.

Harriet Tubman, "Conductor" of the Underground Railroad

The 21st century is a time of reckoning. With the rainforests falling, species vanishing, sea levels rising, and temperatures climbing, this is undeniably a pivotal time in history, a crossroads for the future of life. It’s now or never, do or die. Windows of opportunity are closing. The actions that humanity now collectively takes — or fails to take — will determine whether our future, and that of biodiversity itself, is hopeful or bleak, merely terrible or absolutely unbearable.

And this outcome will determined by whether or not we can wake up, free our minds, galvanize our will, (re)discover our courage, abandon the state superego, and adopt whatever tactics we need to end the total war on life and earth.

There is no guarantee we can perform this Herculean feat at the 11th hour, but it is certain that if we cannot create anything short of systemic psychological, moral, and institutional revolution on a global scale, then our fate is sealed. Consequently, we shall follow all other prior Homo species into the same black hole of extinction, taking perhaps half of all existing species with us. And that is only if we perish in the next century or so, otherwise the toll on other species could be even more obscene.

We need the largest, broadest, boldest, most systemic and inclusive visions and strategies possible, ones that fear no consequence of logic and are attuned to historical precedents and possibilities. We need the most uncompromising, militant form of politics we can muster.

To stop the ongoing war, Holocaust, and genocide against animals — we must employ every means at our disposal, from nonviolent resistance to civil disobedience; from sabotage to liberation; and from violence and guerilla warfare, and armed struggle (all better understood as self-defense and protection of innocents and the earth under massive assault). We need everything we got, and to use any and all of it –when necessary, when intelligent, and when most effective.

We must not take anything off the table, for the stakes are the future of evolutionary biodiversity as we know it, and the losses are potentially total.

Otherwise, should we wring our hands; allow ourselves to be seduced into the endless delaying and diversion tactics of the legal system; or to cling to outmoded, naive, and suicidal moral principles — while earth enemies in the corporate-state-military industrial complex have longed ago removed all moral constraints on what is pure aggression and the implacable exercise of pathological  power – we allow a greater violence to grow exponentially.

And once the rainforests are but smouldering ruins, the oceans acidic cesspools, the animals have vanished from the face of the earth, and the winds of climate change beat down upon us in all their fury, wiping away and evolutionary mistake, then we just might see, finally, the blood-stains on the hands of pacifists. Then we will understand the full consequences of believing in their false views of human nature and their naive faith in the state to deliver justice under pressure. Then we will grasp out own massive lapse in judgment in adhering to their foolish counsel to tolerate the intolerable, when all the while we should have taken necessary measure to shut down this nihilistic, barbaric, and omnicidal dominator culture and world system when we still had a chance.

It’s still not too late. It’s now or never, do or die.

.

by Adam Gopnik 

Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags. Photograph by Steve Liss.

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Now that we’ve touched on how much protein we need, let’s talk about how the production process behind high protein foods impacts the environment.

First, the big picture: While meat consumption has gone down slightly here in the U.S. in recent years, the rest of the world appears to be on the opposite track. Nearly half the protein eaten in the developed world comes from animals (compared to 28 percent of protein, worldwide) and, as incomes in larger developing nations like Brazil, India and China have picked up, so has the taste for meat.

World meat consumption more than doubled between 1950 and 2009 (bringing annual intake per person to over 90 pounds or around a quarter pound a day), and the uptick in consumption of eggs and milk has been similarly staggering. If we continue at this rate, by 2050 we’ll be eating two-thirds more animal protein globally than we are today.

Add to all this the fact that animal protein is more resource intensive to produce than fruits, vegetables, and grains, and you begin to understand why it’s especially important that the world gets its protein plan in order.

The story (or life cycle) of most animal-protein starts with acres of monocropped soybeans, corn, and wheat (grown with pesticides and nitrogen-heavy fertilizers that endanger the nation’s water tables, travel down the Mississippi river, and end up in the Gulf, where they lead to dead zones). Roughly 35 percent of the world grain harvest is used to produce animal protein. Then there are the energy-heavy factories where the grains and legumes are processed (often broken down chemically, to create soy isolates and other wonders of modern science) before they’re trucked around the country and fed to livestock kept in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) – or in around 1 percent of the time — on pasture or in smaller feeding operations.

Most of the recent research into food and environmental impact has focused on the carbon emissions implicit in this process, and – while that’s not the only rubric that matters – it has also shown that not all animal protein sources are the same. In fact, they require different resources or “inputs,” resulting in radically different carbon footprints.

A report submitted to the United Nations by the Farming and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2006, states that cattle farming contributes to 18% of green house gases. To give you insight into this figure, 18% is greater than the contribution of transportation to green house gases.Livestock farming is also a major source of land and water degradation.

The vegetarian footprint

We all know that meat has a higher environmental cost than plant-based protein sources, but what about other animal protein, like dairy and eggs? If you’re a vegetarian, aka a lacto-ovo vegetarian (as opposed to a vegan, who eats no animal products at all), are your protein sources significantly more eco-friendly than meat?

Maybe not — especially if you eat a lot of cheese. A 2011 report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found that a 4-ounce serving of cheese produces the same amount of greenhouse gas as driving 3.5 miles in a car, which means cheese has a larger carbon footprint than any other common protein source except beef and lamb. The report determined the footprints of 20 food items using life-cycle analysis, calculating emissions generated by growing the given crop or animal feed, raising the animals, processing their products, transportation, cooking, and disposal of unused food.

Weapon of Mass Destruction

Milk, interestingly, has the third-lowest footprint of the 20 foods that EWG analyzed. Kari Hamerschlag, lead researcher and author of the report, explains that the carbon footprint of cheese is so much larger than that of milk because “it takes about 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese.” Less-dense varieties, like cottage cheese, have a smaller footprint, because it takes less milk to produce them. Hamerschlag also clarifies that a normal serving size of cheese is 1-2 ounces instead of 4; the report uses 4 ounces because that is a typical serving for meat, and thus a good point of comparison with other foods. However, in terms of emissions per unit of protein (instead of per 4 ounces), cheese is still the third highest, behind beef and lamb. (Pound for pound, lamb has the highest carbon footprint of all meats—50 percent higher than beef—because lambs require similar quantities of feed as cows but produce less edible meat per animal. Not that they don’t have other benefits — but more on that later.)

What about eggs? According to the EWG report, the carbon footprint of a 4-ounce serving of eggs is equivalent to driving just a little over 1 mile—a lower footprint than any of the meat or fish products analyzed, so not too bad. But unless you’re Cool Hand Luke, the number of eggs you can eat in a day is fairly low; the 2010 Dietary Guidelines recommend no more than one egg per day, or seven per week. Egg production is also fairly water-intensive. One international study determined that it takes 2.29 liters of water to produce 1 calorie from eggs—more water per calorie than pork.

But don’t rush out and become vegan just yet. Danielle Nierenberg, director of Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet project, says that while she is vegan, “I don’t agree that it’s always better for the environment — I don’t think the way a lot of vegans eat is very sustainable.” She says this is because many vegans eat a lot of heavily processed foods, like “imported soy products, vegan cold cuts — it takes the agriculture out of the food.” In other words, processed vegan products are a far cry from the nuts and soybeans they’re made from

The pasture factor

While a vegan diet may generally have a lower environmental impact than eating beef, there may be other benefits to supporting the production of sustainable livestock, like grass-fed meat. Few existing studies compare emissions from pasture-raised versus grain-fed, industrially produced meat, but there is some promising evidence. As the EWG report notes, grass-fed cattle may initially appear to contribute to higher emissions because they take longer to reach slaughter weight and thus emit more methane along the way. However, these increased emissions may be offset by the fact that pasture managed in conjunction with actively grazing cattle can help with soil carbon sequestration [PDF]. Then there’s also the fact that pasture-based feed doesn’t require energy-intensive inputs (such as fertilizer and pesticides), when compared to grains.

As Hamerschlag explains, “From an environmental perspective, you’re always going to be better off consuming plant protein. But given that people aren’t going to stop eating meat altogether, we need to support grass-fed approaches and integrated farming systems.” In such systems, animals are raised on farms that also grow grains and vegetables, and the manure these animals produce is used to fertilize the fields, help to minimize energy input on the farm. “If we want to grow our food, we need fertilizer, and it’s far better to generate that fertilizer from animals that we’re going to eat than from petroleum-based products and all the accompanying environmental impacts that come from producing chemical fertilizers,” Hamerschlag says.

In the developing world, Nieremberg says, integrated systems are the norm. “Farmers aren’t raising livestock on the scale that we are in the United States — they’re using kitchen waste, letting chickens forage between crops. It’s a natural, walking form of pesticide.”

Brazilian Rainforest Destruction

by Marc Bekoff (Psychology Today)

Human’s long-time and rampant obsession with making war is well-known, as is some people’s claims that because we are animals it’s natural to behave in these violently destructive ways. John Horgan’s recent book, The End of War, is a worthy read, in which it’s made clear that war is a choice that some people make and is not part of who we (or other animals) are – it is not innate. Horgan argues, “I believe war will end for scientific reasons; I believe war will must end for moral reasons” (p. 19). Others agree with his general message (see also and).

Regardless of mounting scientific evidence that non-humans are predominantly cooperative, peaceful, and fair and on occasion display social justice (see also and), media hype portrays other animals as being far more violent and war-like than they really are. This includes a recent movie called “The Grey.” Why is it that blood, rather than peace, sells?

I concluded an earlier essay as follows: “People who claim nonhuman animals are inherently aggressive and warlike are wrong. So, when they use information from animal studies to justify our own cruel, evil, and warlike behavior, they’re not paying attention to what we really know about the social life of animals. Do animals fight with one another? Yes. Do they routinely engage in cruel, warlike behavior? Not at all. Numerous species display wild justice and carefully negotiate their social relationships so that fairness, cooperation, compassion, and empathy are quite common.

In another essay called “Quitting the hominid fight club Horgan concluded, “All told, since Jane Goodall began observing chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park in 1960, researchers have directly observed 31 intergroup killings, of which 17 were infants…. researchers at a typical site directly observe one killing every seven years … my criticism – and that of other critics I’ve cited – stems from science, not ideology.” (the italics are mine)

Warlike animals are the rare exception, not the rule, and this must be factored into our own rationalizations and justifications for our seeming obsession with making war. War is a choice and non-human animals should not be blamed for our destructive inclinations.

When we say to someone, “Oh, you’re behaving like an animal” it’s actually a complement rather than an insult. We need to work for a science of peace and build a culture of empathy, and emphasize the postiive, prosocial (voluntary behavior to benefit another), side of the character of other animals and ourselves. It’s truly who we and other animals are.

The quotation in the title of this essay, taken from Horgan’s book (p. 182), should give us all hope for the future. Imagine the day when a child asks “What were wars?” This thought makes me sit back and smile, and it is indeed a possibility.

Message from the Invisible (UK Uncut)

On Saturday 28th January in central London, a group of disabled, sick and elderly people are going to engage in a daring and disruptive act of civil disobedience, and they’ve asked for our support. Meet at 11.30am at Holborn tube station with a charged Oyster card, ready to travel to a secret location.

Britain isn’t perfect. But our welfare state offers something that everyone can be proud of. It’s a comforting thought that if tomorrow you lost your job, your home or even a limb, society would be there to help you through it.

At least until now. The government’s Welfare Reform Bill is just weeks away from becoming law and is the biggest threat the welfare state has faced in its history.

The Bill will take vital lifelines from the most vulnerable people in society. Right now, 500,000 families stand to lose their homes. Others will become imprisoned in them. Half a million will lose their disability allowance, including disabled children. People with terminal illnesses will be forced into work, and 3.2 million will be put through cruel tests that are pushing some to take their own lives. Millions of people – pensioners, low waged workers, the disabled, sick and unemployed – will fall deeper into poverty.

The government’s excuse for all this? The deficit, of course. Yet it continues to turn a blind eye to the £25 billion in tax dodged by corporations and rich individuals every year, a sum greater than the projected savings of the entire Welfare Reform Bill. Vodafone’s brand new £2bn tax dodge alone could pay for all of the cuts to Disability Living Allowance, which affects 500,000 people.

Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Co. are choosing to inflict suffering on sick and disabled people rather than tackle rich tax dodgers, because they think the poor and vulnerable are invisible – that they won’t or can’t make a fuss – and the rest of us don’t care.

On Saturday 28th January, let’s show them that they’re wrong. A group of disabled, sick and elderly people are going to engage in a hugely daring and disruptive act of civil disobedience, and they’ve asked for our support.

Meet at 11.30am at Holborn tube station with a charged Oyster card, ready to travel to a secret location. The government are going to discover that the vulnerable can be very visible indeed, and that the rest of us do care.

The Lords have already shot down some of the government’s most damaging proposals. Our aim now is to shame the government into withdrawing the bill completely and instead create a welfare system that protects us all. Let’s make sure everyone knows that Cameron would rather make millions of sick and disabled people’s lives a misery than collect the tax from his millionaire mates.

See you at Holborn.

blackwater mercenaries

by Jeremy Scahill (The Nation, Oct. 4, 2010)

Over the past several years, entities closely linked to the private security firm Blackwater have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations, including Monsanto, Chevron, the Walt Disney Company, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and banking giants Deutsche Bank and Barclays, according to documents obtained by The Nation. Blackwater’s work for corporations and government agencies was contracted using two companies owned by Blackwater’s owner and founder, Erik Prince: Total Intelligence Solutions and the Terrorism Research Center (TRC). Prince is listed as the chairman of both companies in internal company documents, which show how the web of companies functions as a highly coordinated operation. Officials from Total Intelligence, TRC and Blackwater (which now calls itself Xe Services) did not respond to numerous requests for comment for this article.

One of the most incendiary details in the documents is that Blackwater, through Total Intelligence, sought to become the “intel arm” of Monsanto, offering to provide operatives to infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech firm.

Governmental recipients of intelligence services and counterterrorism training from Prince’s companies include the Kingdom of Jordan, the Canadian military and the Netherlands police, as well as several US military bases, including Fort Bragg, home of the elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and Fort Huachuca, where military interrogators are trained, according to the documents. In addition, Blackwater worked through the companies for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the US European Command.

On September 3 the New York Times reported that Blackwater had “created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq.” The documents obtained by The Nation reveal previously unreported details of several such companies and open a rare window into the sensitive intelligence and security operations Blackwater performs for a range of powerful corporations and government agencies. The new evidence also sheds light on the key roles of several former top CIA officials who went on to work for Blackwater.

The coordinator of Blackwater’s covert CIA business, former CIA paramilitary officer Enrique “Ric” Prado, set up a global network of foreign operatives, offering their “deniability” as a “big plus” for potential Blackwater customers, according to company documents. The CIA has long used proxy forces to carry out extralegal actions or to shield US government involvement in unsavory operations from scrutiny. In some cases, these “deniable” foreign forces don’t even know who they are working for. Prado and Prince built up a network of such foreigners while Blackwater was at the center of the CIA’s assassination program, beginning in 2004. They trained special missions units at one of Prince’s properties in Virginia with the intent of hunting terrorism suspects globally, often working with foreign operatives. A former senior CIA official said the benefit of using Blackwater’s foreign operatives in CIA operations was that “you wouldn’t want to have American fingerprints on it.”

While the network was originally established for use in CIA operations, documents show that Prado viewed it as potentially valuable to other government agencies. In an e-mail in October 2007 with the subject line “Possible Opportunity in DEA—Read and Delete,” Prado wrote to a Total Intelligence executive with a pitch for the Drug Enforcement Administration. That executive was an eighteen-year DEA veteran with extensive government connections who had recently joined the firm. Prado explained that Blackwater had developed “a rapidly growing, worldwide network of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations.” He added, “These are all foreign nationals (except for a few cases where US persons are the conduit but no longer ‘play’ on the street), so deniability is built in and should be a big plus.”

The executive wrote back and suggested there “may be an interest” in those services. The executive suggested that “one of the best places to start may be the Special Operations Division, (SOD) which is located in Chantilly, VA,” telling Prado the name of the special agent in charge. The SOD is a secretive joint command within the Justice Department, run by the DEA. It serves as the command-and-control center for some of the most sensitive counternarcotics and law enforcement operations conducted by federal forces. The executive also told Prado that US attachés in Mexico; Bogotá, Colombia; and Bangkok, Thailand, would potentially be interested in Prado’s network. Whether this network was activated, and for what customers, cannot be confirmed. A former Blackwater employee who worked on the company’s CIA program declined to comment on Prado’s work for the company, citing its classified status.

In November 2007 officials from Prince’s companies developed a pricing structure for security and intelligence services for private companies and wealthy individuals. One official wrote that Prado had the capacity to “develop infrastructures” and “conduct ground-truth and security activities.” According to the pricing chart, potential customers could hire Prado and other Blackwater officials to operate in the United States and globally: in Latin America, North Africa, francophone countries, the Middle East, Europe, China, Russia, Japan, and Central and Southeast Asia. A four-man team headed by Prado for countersurveillance in the United States cost $33,600 weekly, while “safehouses” could be established for $250,000, plus operational costs. Identical services were offered globally. For $5,000 a day, clients could hire Prado or former senior CIA officials Cofer Black and Robert Richer for “representation” to national “decision-makers.” Before joining Blackwater, Black, a twenty-eight-year CIA veteran, ran the agency’s counterterrorism center, while Richer was the agency’s deputy director of operations. (Neither Black nor Richer currently works for the company.)

As Blackwater became embroiled in controversy following the Nisour Square massacre, Prado set up his own company, Constellation Consulting Group (CCG), apparently taking some of Blackwater’s covert CIA work with him, though he maintained close ties to his former employer. In an e-mail to a Total Intelligence executive in February 2008, Prado wrote that he “recently had major success in developing capabilities in Mali [Africa] that are of extreme interest to our major sponsor and which will soon launch a substantial effort via my small shop.” He requested Total Intelligence’s help in analyzing the “North Mali/Niger terrorist problem.”

In October 2009 Blackwater executives faced a crisis when they could not account for their government-issued Secure Telephone Unit, which is used by the CIA, the National Security Agency and other military and intelligence services for secure communications. A flurry of e-mails were sent around as personnel from various Blackwater entities tried to locate the device. One former Blackwater official wrote that because he had left the company it was “not really my problem,” while another declared, “I have no ‘dog in this fight.’” Eventually, Prado stepped in, e-mailing the Blackwater officials to “pass my number” to the “OGA POC,” meaning the Other Government Agency (parlance for CIA) Point of Contact.

What relationship Prado’s CCG has with the CIA is not known. An early version of his company’s website boasted that “CCG professionals have already conducted operations on five continents, and have proven their ability to meet the most demanding client needs” and that the company has the “ability to manage highly-classified contracts.” CCG, the site said, “is uniquely positioned to deliver services that no other company can, and can deliver results in the most remote areas with little or no outside support.” Among the services advertised were “Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence (human and electronic), Unconventional Military Operations, Counterdrug Operations, Aviation Services, Competitive Intelligence, Denied Area Access…and Paramilitary Training.”

The Nation has previously reported on Blackwater’s work for the CIA and JSOC in Pakistan. New documents reveal a history of activity relating to Pakistan by Blackwater. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto worked with the company when she returned to Pakistan to campaign for the 2008 elections, according to the documents. In October 2007, when media reports emerged that Bhutto had hired “American security,” senior Blackwater official Robert Richer wrote to company executives, “We need to watch this carefully from a number of angles. If our name surfaces, the Pakistani press reaction will be very important. How that plays through the Muslim world will also need tracking.” Richer wrote that “we should be prepared to [sic] a communique from an affiliate of Al-Qaida if our name surfaces (BW). That will impact the security profile.” Clearly a word is missing in the e-mail or there is a typo that leaves unclear what Richer meant when he mentioned the Al Qaeda communiqué. Bhutto was assassinated two months later. Blackwater officials subsequently scheduled a meeting with her family representatives in Washington, in January 2008.

Through Total Intelligence and the Terrorism Research Center, Blackwater also did business with a range of multinational corporations. According to internal Total Intelligence communications, biotech giant Monsanto—the world’s largest supplier of genetically modified seeds—hired the firm in 2008–09. The relationship between the two companies appears to have been solidified in January 2008 when Total Intelligence chair Cofer Black traveled to Zurich to meet with Kevin Wilson, Monsanto’s security manager for global issues.

After the meeting in Zurich, Black sent an e-mail to other Blackwater executives, including to Prince and Prado at their Blackwater e-mail addresses. Black wrote that Wilson “understands that we can span collection from internet, to reach out, to boots on the ground on legit basis protecting the Monsanto [brand] name…. Ahead of the curve info and insight/heads up is what he is looking for.” Black added that Total Intelligence “would develop into acting as intel arm of Monsanto.” Black also noted that Monsanto was concerned about animal rights activists and that they discussed how Blackwater “could have our person(s) actually join [activist] group(s) legally.” Black wrote that initial payments to Total Intelligence would be paid out of Monsanto’s “generous protection budget” but would eventually become a line item in the company’s annual budget. He estimated the potential payments to Total Intelligence at between $100,000 and $500,000. According to documents, Monsanto paid Total Intelligence $127,000 in 2008 and $105,000 in 2009.

Reached by telephone and asked about the meeting with Black in Zurich, Monsanto’s Wilson initially said, “I’m not going to discuss it with you.” In a subsequent e-mail to The Nation, Wilson confirmed he met Black in Zurich and that Monsanto hired Total Intelligence in 2008 and worked with the company until early 2010. He denied that he and Black discussed infiltrating animal rights groups, stating “there was no such discussion.” He claimed that Total Intelligence only provided Monsanto “with reports about the activities of groups or individuals that could pose a risk to company personnel or operations around the world which were developed by monitoring local media reports and other publicly available information. The subject matter ranged from information regarding terrorist incidents in Asia or kidnappings in Central America to scanning the content of activist blogs and websites.” Wilson asserted that Black told him Total Intelligence was “a completely separate entity from Blackwater.”

Monsanto was hardly the only powerful corporation to enlist the services of Blackwater’s constellation of companies. The Walt Disney Company hired Total Intelligence and TRC to do a “threat assessment” for potential film shoot locations in Morocco, with former CIA officials Black and Richer reaching out to their former Moroccan intel counterparts for information. The job provided a “good chance to impress Disney,” one company executive wrote. How impressed Disney was is not clear; in 2009 the company paid Total Intelligence just $24,000.

Total Intelligence and TRC also provided intelligence assessments on China to Deutsche Bank. “The Chinese technical counterintelligence threat is one of the highest in the world,” a TRC analyst wrote, adding, “Many four and five star hotel rooms and restaurants are live-monitored with both audio and video” by Chinese intelligence. He also said that computers, PDAs and other electronic devices left unattended in hotel rooms could be cloned. Cellphones using the Chinese networks, the analyst wrote, could have their microphones remotely activated, meaning they could operate as permanent listening devices. He concluded that Deutsche Bank reps should “bring no electronic equipment into China.” Warning of the use of female Chinese agents, the analyst wrote, “If you don’t have women coming onto you all the time at home, then you should be suspicious if they start coming onto you when you arrive in China.” For these and other services, the bank paid Total Intelligence $70,000 in 2009.

TRC also did background checks on Libyan and Saudi businessmen for British banking giant Barclays. In February 2008 a TRC executive e-mailed Prado and Richer revealing that Barclays asked TRC and Total Intelligence for background research on the top executives from the Saudi Binladin Group (SBG) and their potential “associations/connections with the Royal family and connections with Osama bin Ladin.” In his report, Richer wrote that SBG’s chair, Bakr Mohammed bin Laden, “is well and favorably known to both arab and western intelligence service[s]” for cooperating in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Another SBG executive, Sheikh Saleh bin Laden, is described by Richer as “a very savvy businessman” who is “committed to operating with full transparency to Saudi’s security services” and is considered “the most vehement within the extended BL family in terms of criticizing UBL’s actions and beliefs.”

In August Blackwater and the State Department reached a $42 million settlement for hundreds of violations of US export control regulations. Among the violations cited was the unauthorized export of technical data to the Canadian military. Meanwhile, Blackwater’s dealings with Jordanian officials are the subject of a federal criminal prosecution of five former top Blackwater executives. The Jordanian government paid Total Intelligence more than $1.6 million in 2009.

Some of the training Blackwater provided to Canadian military forces was in Blackwater/TRC’s “Mirror Image” course, where trainees live as a mock Al Qaeda cell in an effort to understand the mindset and culture of insurgents. Company literature describes it as “a classroom and field training program designed to simulate terrorist recruitment, training, techniques and operational tactics.” Documents show that in March 2009 Blackwater/TRC spent $6,500 purchasing local tribal clothing in Afghanistan as well as assorted “propaganda materials—posters, Pakistan Urdu maps, etc.” for Mirror Image, and another $9,500 on similar materials this past January in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

According to internal documents, in 2009 alone the Canadian military paid Blackwater more than $1.6 million through TRC. A Canadian military official praised the program in a letter to the center, saying it provided “unique and valid cultural awareness and mission specific deployment training for our soldiers in Afghanistan,” adding that it was “a very effective and operationally current training program that is beneficial to our mission.”

This past summer Erik Prince put Blackwater up for sale and moved to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. But he doesn’t seem to be leaving the shadowy world of security and intelligence. He says he moved to Abu Dhabi because of its “great proximity to potential opportunities across the entire Middle East, and great logistics,” adding that it has “a friendly business climate, low to no taxes, free trade and no out of control trial lawyers or labor unions. It’s pro-business and opportunity.” It also has no extradition treaty with the United States.

For further information, watch “The World According to Monsanto.”