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The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy | Naomi Wolf
[Quote]:
The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.
To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.
I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors’, city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.
[..]
I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.
That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.
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I’m quite concerned about DHS involvement and coordination here, but most of what Wolf claims here amounts to speculative claims at best, and in places is actually wrong. Most notably a study showed that the average congressperson actually does no better as an investor than the market overall, so this claim about Delaware coorporations (oooh, Delaware, scaryyyyyy, sneakyyyyy, yaaaaaawn!) has lmited mileage.
It seems more plausible to me that a few mayors initiated is meeting and reached out to DHS for advice. Much simpler, requires far less conspiracy.
Note: I support the things Wolf says the Occupiers want, have a lot of sympathy for the protesters, and am quite upset about the police violence. I just don’t buy these conspiracy theories.
@Desiato Can you give the citation please for: “Most notably a study showed that the average congressperson actually does no better as an investor than the market overall”
Desiato, wait, what – you’re trying to say “they didn’t abuse this gap in the law all that much so it’s okay to keep the gap”?
Ms. Wolf isn’t actually shocked. This is what she’s been writing and talking about for a long time. What is actually surprising is that it took the powers that be so long to actually realize they had/have a problem on their hands and to do anything about it. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” sort of exists, but it’s more of a reaction given a certain ideological stance and a certain problem and far looser than normally understood.
It seems likely that the authorities did coordinate their reactions in Canada, all the evictions happened at around the same time.
@Mykolas: ““Congressmen don’t beat the market” Now, this covers a different period than the previous paper that got everyone so upset (“Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives”). If you’ve played with stock charts that allow you to compare stocks over time, you’ll know that by changing the period over which you compare them, you can get very different pictures. For example, over the past 6 months, Google (+8.7%) outperforms Amazon (-6.5%) but over the past year it’s the reverse (Google -4.6%, Amzn +2.9%).
Any any case, I think we should be careful to distinguish between the possibility that *some* members of Congress are acting unethically, which is entirely possible, and the assumption implicit in Wolf’s article that they must all be greedy criminals.
@John: I didn’t say anything like what you suggest. I’m completely in favor of stronger rules to reduce conflicts of interest, starting with campaign finance reform, but quite possibly including limitations on investments and stock trades.
I don’t know if you can get rid of the conflict of interest entirely, though. People running for Congress are going to be well enough along in their lives that they’re going to have savings which are mostly likely going to be invested in the stock market. Even if they hold only index funds, it’ll be in their interest to boost stock returns through policy, rather than, say, average wages or employment.
The biggest other problem with the article (among many, IMO) is the suggestion that DHS acted on the orders of a Member of Congress. Without further substantiation, this is just not credible. Congress has oversight over cabinet departments, but not executive control. When DHS wants to know what to do, they don’t go to Congress, they go up the chain internally. What, were Secretary Napolitano and Vice President Biden in Australia, too?
And this is assuming, as I noted before, that DHS initiated the coordination rather than the more plausible scenario that the mayors reached out to DHS. And do you think that DHS never communicates with local law enforcement? Think about policing that goes on along the border and in the War on Drugs. Of course DHS regularly works with local police in multiple states, probably even in a coordinating fashion. Yet here is Wolf saying that one possible instance of such coordination is a shocking move prohibited by the Constitution. Oh, really?
I don’t mean to claim that Congress never reaches out to departments and tries to influence what the departments are trying to do. Sure they try. But the claim in the article is of the quality of “well, all the Congresscritters are trying to get rich, so they’re in bed with the banks, so of course they would want to tear down the protests, so they made DHS do it”. It’s just not credible at any step of the “argument”.