Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

After peace, Ferguson cops again incite disorder

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After two nights of peaceful demonstrations under the supervision of the Missouri Highway Patrol on Thursday and Friday nights, things in Ferguson took a turn for the worse after midnight last night, when heavily armored local police unexpectedly returned to the scene (on the orders of the St. Louis County Prosecutor, which seems bizarre).

Prior to this surprise development, there was no looting happening or any kind of violence, despite the local authorities spending all of Friday disseminating objectively false information (as well as highly dubious claims) about the original shooting of Michael Brown. Most people and reporters were actually going home or leaving for the night by the time the riot police appeared unexpectedly and started antagonizing people, pointing guns at them, and firing “less-lethal” devices at them, including smoke grenades. The police also explicitly tried to order media members to disperse in particular.

This turn of events prompted a small minority of the people assembled (predominantly young people, by most accounts) to start breaking into stores to steal and destroy stuff. A much larger proportion of community members began frantically trying to block access to halt the looting, with mixed success. Meanwhile, the police just sat in their vehicles for at least an hour and didn’t do anything, as the chaos began unfolding and the property damage figures started mounting quickly. This is a very obvious provocation, and in no way was the police presence a response to the looting (since they arrived well before it).

Of course, the national media immediately tried to revise the timeline of event to imply that the renewed presence of armored police was a response to (rather than the catalyst for) looting. Here’s a sample headline from the middle of the night / early Saturday:

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Saturday afternoon’s development is that Governor Jay Nixon has declared a State of Emergency and proclaimed a curfew in Ferguson tonight from 12-5 AM. This is completely the opposite of a logical reaction, given that the community clearly wasn’t the problem and there had been two evenings of peaceful demonstrations under his original solution of bringing in uniformed highway patrolmen from outside in place of armored SWAT divisions. Thursday night was a pretty solid confirmation that people will calm way down if you stop deploying armored police to attack them and instead send regular uniformed officers from outside to help them march safely. Friday night proved that taking away the supportive force and bringing back the militarized units will rile people back up again.

Meanwhile, there has been very little progress toward a credible investigation up to now, which is all that the protesters have been demanding this entire time, yet they are the ones being punished. It seems fairly likely there will be mass civil disobedience against the curfew order tonight.

Ferguson police occupation, community resistance continues

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A summary of major developments in Ferguson, Missouri from Tuesday through Thursday afternoon (August 12-13, 2014), as the community continues to peacefully resist occupation by militarized police presence.

Tuesday

New York Times home page prominently featured an examination of the U.S. media trend of automatically showing unflattering images of Black Americans when killed by the police. Black social media users were speculating whether their “respectable” photos would be used if they were gunned down or more casual photos from parties and the like, which could be misconstrued. (Everyone has a dichotomy of available photos like that, of course, but the media tends not to use the unflattering photos of White victims, or often even assailants.)

Screenshot from U.S. Edition of NYTimes.com home page at 1:15 PM ET on August 12, 2014

Screenshot from U.S. Edition of NYTimes.com home page at 1:15 PM ET on August 12, 2014

Beyond the racialization of it, I think it’s super creepy in general that the U.S. news media feels comfortable taking and using people’s Facebook profile pictures without permission for use in news reports.

We also saw British news media start to emerge as an important source of accurate reporting on the ground in Ferguson, particularly on the subject of what weapons were being used on unarmed civilians. The Guardian reported on Monday’s police crackdown with evidence photos in an article headlined: “Missouri police fired wooden bullets at crowd during protest over teen’s death”

Local news reporters and news bloggers from St. Louis and Ferguson, of course, also remained critical sources of news. A blogger for the Riverfront Times reported on a development from Monday night: Police in Ferguson Fire Tear Gas on Protesters Standing in Their Own Backyard

Photojournalists continued to capture countless examples of militarized police overreach in downtown Ferguson, which have rapidly gone viral. TIME posted this AP photo (which I’m using here due to its newsworthiness, despite the copyright).

Riot police walk toward a man with his hands raised in Ferguson, Mo. (Jeff Roberson—AP)

Riot police walk toward a man with his hands raised in Ferguson, Mo. (Jeff Roberson—AP)

On Tuesday night a second person was shot and critically injured by police in Ferguson. Police claimed he had been brandishing a handgun threateningly, but they also began making extremely fanciful claims about the circumstances surrounding the original shooting of Michael Brown (which was seen by multiple eyewitnesses), so it was not an easy claim to buy on face-value.

Wednesday and overnight to early Thursday morning

The Atlantic’s CityLab blog reported that the militarized and violent police presence was not only going against the FBI manual for defusing such situations but was also a very one-sided “clash” that could obviously not be deemed a “riot.”

Media outlets have used the word “riot” dozens of times, even hundreds of times, to describe the crisis in Ferguson. Yet despite last night’s violence, three days after the death of the unarmed 18-year-old resident, Ferguson does not yet resemble the notable riots from the 1960s to the present day. Rather, it is starting to look like an occupation.

 
On Wednesday night, the police response escalated yet again. It was already clear that they weren’t thinking logically or strategically, but then they arrested and assaulted a Washington Post reporter and the Huffington Post’s reporter for The Department of Justice beat, this is some next-level self-immolation. The two detained reporters were only released when a Los Angeles Times reporter called the local police chief to ask why they had been arrested, and he was surprised to learn of the information. The immortal quotation was “Oh God.”
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Russia’s grip on the Tories (and London) remains strong

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Former Labour MP and UK Minister for Europe Denis MacShane has a new article in The Globalist blasting the Conservative Party’s tightening relationship with top Russians, even as the United Kingdom (officially, at least) grows more cold toward Moscow.

In the latest controversy, the Conservative Party is refusing to give back £160k in campaign funds donated by Russian oligarchs and former Putin insiders, just ahead of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in Ukraine (which killed UK citizens), but well after the annexation of Crimea. Last year, the Conservative Party accepted almost £900k in campaign cash from Russian high-rollers.

Adapted from Colin's photo on Wikimedia

“Russian Gherkin, City of London” by Arsenal for Democracy. Adapted from Colin’s photo on Wikimedia

Meanwhile London and the City (the country’s financial zone) continue to attract sketchy Russian investors and residents.

Even Vladimir Putin mocks London as the place where “the oligarchs have bought Chelsea,” a reference to Roman Abamovich, the owner of the top soccer club. Another oligarch, Evgeny Lebvedev, is the owner of two key newspapers, the Independent, and the respected London Evening Standard, as well as a London TV station.

One in ten of all London homes with a price exceeding $1.5 million was bought by a Russian last year. [Conservative Party donor] Mrs. Chernukin and her husband, Vladimir, a former director of Aeroflot, live in a $12 million dollar apartment.

Another Russian donor to the Conservative Party, Andrei Borodin, has fled to London after accusations of a $370 million fraud in Russia. He lives on a $235 million estate near London and paid $67,000 for a portrait of Margaret Thatcher at a Tory fundraiser last year.

The UK Electoral Commission reports $1.5 million in donations from rich Russians to Conservative funds last year. The UK has given visas to 433 Russians since 2008 who invested more than $1.5 million in Britain.
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London courts are also where Russian oligarchs fight out their legal battles. London lawyers earned an estimated $150 million from just one court fight between Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky. Lawyers say that 60% of all the cases now heard by London senior commercial courts are linked to disputes over spoils from the ex-Soviet Union.

Another attractive legal market is divorce fights. Londoners have gaped at the fierce legal fallout as elderly Russian oligarchs trade in their wives for slimmer, younger beauties.

 
MacShane also noted the hypocritical and increasingly fact-challenged assertions by Prime Minister David Cameron regarding UK arms trade with Russia, a topic I’ve covered at some length previously.

I was going to note how odd it is that these foreign citizens can make political contributions directly to the parties in the United Kingdom, since that’s prohibited in the United States, but I suppose our equivalent is the heavy presence of “consulting” operations in Washington DC, advising — but not officially representing — a multitude of unsavory foreign clients on their relationships with various malleable forces in the U.S. capital.

Pro-Gay, Pro-Erdogan: The LGBT reformers inside Turkey’s AKP

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The big political story this week from Turkey is that controversial PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan has somehow managed to get himself elected president, after years of finagling, despite being at the center of a major corruption scandal and despite a fairly nasty crackdown on protesters across the country in 2013. The massive engine of Erdogan’s center-right AK Party keeps chugging along and apparently that’s sufficient to keep him, an increasingly unpleasant man with a worsening record, on an easy cruise into an enhanced and strengthened presidency, even after more than eleven years as prime minister.

There are some other interesting stories getting less attention from this year’s politicking in Turkey. One in particular that I read about from Al-Monitor was about the increasingly visible presence of LGBTQIetc supporters in the ruling party — an important development since the party clearly seems to be quite entrenched across most of the country at this point.

The members of the AKP LGBT group have a great affection for Erdogan. They argue that pious people, Kurds and non-Muslims have all acquired greater freedoms under Erdogan, and believe he is the only leader who can make LGBT individuals freer, too. They are fully confident that Erdogan will undertake LGBT reforms when the time comes. Yet, they are strongly critical of the AKP’s current LGBT policies. Their objective is to transform the AKP.

 
Even though Erdogan’s cabinet has sometimes said cruel things about gay people and the party still remains generally unsupportive, Al-Monitor reported that “a gay pride march would have been unthinkable before Erdogan, whereas today homosexuals hold marches to freely express their identities.” Which is to say, even after more than a decade of governance by a socially conservative party with extensive rural support, Turkey is more liberal than before.

And they’re making their presence inside the party known, whether the leadership is ready for it or not:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Aug. 3 rally in Istanbul marked a first for the country: LGBT supporters of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) waved the rainbow flag at the rally in a show of support for Erdogan’s presidential bid.

The group, using the Twitter handle Aklgbti, shared pictures from the rally with the following message: “The homosexuals stand with Tayyip Erdogan. We are at the rallies, we are everywhere — get used to it.” A member of the group tweeted, “I waved the rainbow flag in the front rows. Our prime minister must have seen it.”

It was a truly intriguing scene, which Western analysts of Turkey may find difficult to comprehend.

The rainbow flag was first seen fluttering next to AKP members at the inauguration ceremony of the Ankara-Istanbul high-speed train on July 25, which Erdogan attended.

 
One activist said, of the election rally, “We waved our flag right before Erdogan’s eyes. He saw the flag, but said nothing and only smiled. We take it as a positive sign that he said nothing. Thus, we will now keep up the struggle.”

That might not seem like much, but he’s not exactly known for verbal restraint on the campaign trail.

One could suggest that LGBT supporters of the Islamist-oriented AK Party in Turkey are showing a lot more guts and grit than their generally staid and quiet counterparts inside the Christian-oriented Republican Party in the United States. They’re also laying important groundwork, it seems from the article, for making the loud and proud case that they can be dedicated Muslims and be gay at the same time, which will probably benefit many other gay Muslims the world over in years to come.

President-elect Erdogan and his senior officials might have many troubling authoritarian, anti-European, and racist tendencies, but it seems clear that the AK Party as a whole is still a relatively moderate political entity with broadly socially conservative leanings and a diversity of opinions on how flexible those should be. And for the moment, even when the popular AK Party’s leaders go overboard with absurd viewpoints, Turkey still has enough democratic freedom for the people to call it out.

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U.S. begins direct weapons shipments to Iraqi Kurds

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Last week, Kurdish fighters had faulted severe ammunition shortages and lack of help from Baghdad for the loss of a number of key northern cities and the abandonment of some strategic targets and vulnerable civilian populations. I predicted that, despite years of fearful resistance by the central government politicians to the idea of the United States re-arming the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government without going through Baghdad, the United States would be forced to exactly that and fast. The New York Times reports that U.S. direct weapons supplies have begun:

The Central Intelligence Agency has begun directly supplying weapons to pesh merga fighters, administration officials said, after weeks of pleas and demands from leaders in the country’s semiautonomous Kurdish region for help in fighting ISIS. But it remains unclear just how much weaponry the United States has funneled through to the Kurds so far; Defense officials said they would probably begin sending small-arms munitions soon, too.

 
The move is sure to further infuriate the Sadrist Movement — Shia hardliners — and probably some of the Islamic Dawa Party members aligned with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (who appears to be strenuously resisting attempts to replace him), who have opposed anything that might decentralize power in Iraq.

An unnamed U.S. official also commented on the apparent disjunction between the hard-earned fierce and competent reputation of the Kurdish peshmerga troops and their repeated retreats in recent weeks (which continued today):

“The pesh merga are composed of capable, disciplined forces who deserve their reputation as fierce mountain-war fighters,” a United States official said. “However, it’s been almost a decade since their mostly light infantry brigades have been tested in battle, so it’s not surprising that they’ve taken some knocks from ISIL.”

 
That was what I was starting to hypothesize myself, in recent days: They were such effective guerrilla resistance forces that everyone eventually just left them alone, which then meant that after a while they were no longer “battle-tested.” In contrast, ISIS had battled its way across Syria and Western Iraq for more than a year, fighting against two central governments and competing insurgent forces. But with proper supplies, the Iraqi Kurds have a better shot than anyone else in the region for turning back ISIS.
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Resistance against the police in Ferguson MO

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Over the weekend, a cop in Ferguson, Missouri (in St. Louis County) shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager in the back. The local Black community, which has borne the brunt of law enforcement activities in recent years (especially as the city has rapidly gone from almost 50-50 Black and White to being two-thirds Black), was quite understandably very angry about the situation and began protesting. Despite the FBI being brought in to take over the investigation of the case, the situation has continued to escalate as Ferguson’s police department mobilized very aggressively against the protesters.

After some property damage occurred yesterday (though most of the protests were peaceful and undeniably reasonable), the standoff being the police and protesters became even more tense until this evening when the police began corralling and attacking the assembled community members.

Below are some firsthand videos posted by a City of St. Louis Ward Alderman, Antonio French:

And here’s a report from NBC St. Louis:

This aggression toward the community they are supposed to be protecting is yet another demonstration of the terrible results of Department of Homeland Security handing out grant money like candy to provide military-grade equipment and riot gear to local police forces all over the country.

Meanwhile, the U.S. media seems hellbent on driving the narrative that this story isn’t about the cold-blooded street execution of an unarmed child — or about the wider problem of police aggression and occupation of American black populations, or about legitimate resistance to unfair and violent practices. Rather, they’re obsessed with the idea that there might be “looting” happening or that there is a “riot.”

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Here’s the reality of the situation: Unarmed Black American kids keep getting shot to death for no reason on the false assumption they’re packing, and there’s rarely any justice. Meanwhile, unhinged adult White American men with avowedly anti-government views can walk around unchallenged in public places with assault rifles, telling you all about their “rights” and how important those are.

Is this country ever going to stop perpetrating and ignoring outrageous daily violence against and extrajudicial executions of Black Americans?

And I don’t think the media gets to decide who has the right to decide who has the right to resist (or how) when police keep targeting and fatally misjudging a population and then refuse to uphold the First Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The Israeli Military-Industrial-State Complex

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On our last radio episode, Persephone made a case that countries that sell weapons around the world as a big revenue source have a conflict of interest on fostering peace, in that it might affect their export revenues.

In many of the British examples we discussed, the sales are generally from private firms. In the United States, it’s a mix of private sales versus government discounted arms transfers and surplus equipment sales to allied armed forces, for strategic and fiscal reasons. A country’s government has an especially strong incentive to sell weapons to other countries when it devotes significant expenditures to research and development of the weapons. It’s a way to make some of it back.

Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, published an article today on the Israeli defense industry’s ramped-up production and foreign sales efforts during the recent bombardment, shielding, and ground operations against the Gaza Strip. Although there have been some major privatizations in recent years, much of the country’s defense industry is still composed of wholly-government-owned state enterprises. They have long been burdened with debt and were facing budget cuts. That means that if the companies — and by extension their government owners — were going to turn things around financially, they had a strong incentive to sell a lot of weapons to other countries. And as the article explores, through repeated examples, nothing sells a new weapons technology like real-life combat tests.

Some of the companies were even rushing brand new products off the assembly lines and into the field. And even as they were being deployed in the Gaza Strip, purchasers were flocking to Israel for explicit sales pitches, Haaretz reported:

“For the defense industries this campaign is like drinking a very strong energy drink — it simply gives them tremendous forward momentum,” says Barbara Opall-Rome, Israel bureau chief for the U.S. magazine Defense News. “Combat is like the highest seal of approval when it comes to the international markets. What has proven itself in battle is much easier to sell. Immediately after the operation, and perhaps even during, all kinds of delegations arrive here from countries that appreciate Israel’s technological capabilities and are interested in testing the new products.”

 
From new light arms ammunition to new tank shells and tank defenses, Israel’s private defense firms (which have excellent lobbyists and ties to the government) and public state defense companies (which are expected to minimize balance sheet losses and turn a profit for the government if possible), there’s a lot of really warped policy incentives in favor of pursuing a very aggressive, even hair-trigger “defense policy” in the Palestinian Territories.

Similarly, with highly experimental, very expensive, and very re-sellable technologies like a missile defense system co-designed by a state defense company, it could be suggested that goading an entity into firing daily barrages of missiles at a shield that will catch virtually all of them is an excellent way to prove to buyer countries that they should purchase the system for their own defense needs.

A country with big, financially struggling, government-owned defense firms puts itself under a lot of pressure to enable situations that will allow for combat demonstrations to foreign observers who can buy products and put money back in the government coffers (or at least reduce the need for direct budget expenditures). It’s possible to resist that pressure, but it’s there.

It’s hard to make peace when your finances are aligned in favor of making war. That’s true to some extent with the United States and many of the other countries we mentioned on our radio segment. But it’s particularly worrying with regard to Israel, where government and the defense industry are even more intertwined.
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