These obstacles and problems on the road to true democracy should come as no surprise to any objective observer of events. Those with vested interests in the old despotic regimes are not going to relinquish their power and wealth so easily. Driving the revolution into the destructive blind alley of sectarianism and ethnicity is their way of countering the glorious revolution of the young. Azmi Bishara, head of the Centre, opined that these sectarian tensions should have been expected and “it is wrong and naïve to sweep them under the carpet of unity.” Wajeeh Kanso, academic at the University of Lebanon, believes that “sectarianism is an ever present danger” because knowledge of the true democratic ideals is superficial among the populace, citing and regretting the lack of representation of the young revolutionaries in the new parliaments.

I agree that there are these dangers. The question, however is this: are these divisions really deep in society or are they being played up and heightened by counter revolutionary forces and corrupt politicians to shore up their power base? I believe it is the latter, even in Iraq where the fabric of Iraqi society was ruptured by an illegal invasion and subsequent war.

Egypt, a pivotal country in the Arab world, is still a revolution in progress. The Egyptian people are now struggling with the military junta that still more or less represents the old regime. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo to commemorate the first anniversary of the revolution on 25 January, and to remind the Supreme Council of the Armed forces that currently rules Egypt that they have not gone away and will continue their protests until full democracy is established. What happens in Egypt matters and will have profound influence on the rest of the Arab World.

I am not as pessimistic as many commentators are; the reason being that this revolution is grass roots based; it is not led by army officers spouting nationalism and empty slogans, only to become worse than the kings and despots they replace. The revolutions are led collectively by young people who have, particularly in the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, given the world a lesson in the power of mass peaceful action. They have shown that their idealism, passion, resilience and their courage are stronger and more powerful than the instruments of repression and violence wielded by the regimes of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak. Their tenacity in using peaceful means to fight the forces of darkness is nothing short of miraculous.

The revolutionary young of Egypt are fully aware that more needs to be done. Al-akhbar Arabic Newspaper (27 January) quotes some of the people in Tahrir Square and gives a flavour of the slogans on banners, such as “Down with military rule” and “Where is our revolution, Field Marshal, we do not feel any change?” in reference to Field Marshal Tantawi, Head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). One demonstrator was quoted as saying:

“What we achieved needs to be safeguarded… and most important to remember is that some of the actions of the military junta are more brutal than those of the dictator Hosni Mubarak. The revolution must continue until full powers are transferred to an elected government.”

The chains of fear imprisoning the Arab people have been broken by the revolutionary young; the genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back. The tide of pent up yearning to be treated with dignity, respect and to be free is triumphant. Sectarianism is but one of a number of setbacks and difficulties on that road on which the Arab masses have embarked. But make no mistake, these will be overcome and the Arabs will be free.

Dr Adnan Al-Daini is a retired University lecturer. He is a British citizen born in Iraq, which he left in 1962, age 17, on a scholarship to study in Britain. He writes regularly on issues of social justice and the Middle East. Adnan is a contributing writer for the Huffington Post

A day or so later, the Adbusters group that put out the original call to Occupy Wall Street published a provocative “Tactical Briefing” calling for a “Showdown in Chicago” at the G8/NATO summit in May. Arguing “we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 1968,” the call to action urged “jammers” to “prepare for a big bang in Chicago this Spring.”
Chicago Protest 1968
And then, turmoil in Oakland over the weekend: a violent police action clearing public space, mass arrests, protesters’ violence, a flag-burning, etc. For people of a certain age, these events convey a sense of déjà vu.

With good reason. Chicago ’68 is, of course, a galvanizing flash point for the 60s era as a whole, whichever side one came down on. It was also a hugely important turning point the world politics, but more on that later.

Mass media coverage of the Occupy movement has generally followed the exact same pattern it followed during the 60s era, with significant implications for how that era turned out. Mainstream discourse has failed to give due credence to the most widely shared argument of Occupiers: our democracy is broken, corporations own our politics.

On the other hand, the mass media are all over any violence that may occur, and their response to Oakland is telling. Mass media cameras zeroed in on police defending public buildings from vandalizing protesters; one protester who burned an American flag got front page coverage in the on-line LA Times; overall, stories on the violence concentrated on violence by protesters.

This is exact echo of mass media accounts during the 60s, except for a handful of cases, chiefly in the southern civil rights movement, where protest images could be seen sympathetically by wide majorities.

Contemporary activists need to understand these dynamics. This is how mass media behave, reflexively. Protests are invariably seen as “deviant” forms of politics; “normal” politics occurs when “leaders” sit down to negotiate, vote, or orate. The drive to maximize readership and audience size means the most dramatic, colorful, and especially conflictual actions or actors will be prominently featured.

Almost immediately “credible” leaders will denounce the movement, equating it with the more extreme images and personalities. And thus the backlash sets in, and mass audiences are led away from learning how they might, in fact, share the values and goals of the protest movement.

Another 60s echo is that the media images –even more widely circulated today via social media— invite individuals to act in the very ways the media notice. So while protesters often find their views are not taken seriously by the media, some behaviors, symbols or appearances will at least be seen by the public eye. As one young black male put it after the Watts riot of 1965, “We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us.”

However, despite being triggered by cases of police brutality, the urban violence of the 60s era was the first target of the backlash campaign that eventually produced the broken world we live in today.

An even more telling example: as police attacked them violently, antiwar protesters at the 1968 Chicago convention chanted “The whole world is watching,” confident that the wider public would be appalled by what the Walker Commission later called a “police riot.” Instead, a majority of the public, viewing the conflagration in Chicago through the mass media, sided with the police.

The Occupy Movement is going through a winter of transition, building plans for General Assemblies to map out the movement’s activities in the spring. There are many levels at which Occupiers need to strategize about what should be done –in Oakland, in Chicago, and elsewhere.

I would suggest a few considerations that reflect the work I have done on mass media and the 60s era. My perspective is grounded in a belief in real democracy, government by the people. In addition to sharpening its own focus, I believe Occupy needs to do three things. First, reach out to and engage a wider circle of the public in ways that help the public see why the political and economic systems are not working for them. This includes reaching the many Americans who the system is leaving behind but who have thus far bought the faux populism of the billionaires’ Tea Party rhetoric –an effective, long-running propaganda campaign that has its roots in backlash attacks on the 60s.

Second, through its example, the Occupy movement needs to inspire others to join in what would be an historic and enormously fulfilling effort –one that would truly lift people out of dead end grumbling about their daily struggles.

Third, the movement needs to strengthen connections with what is happening globally –both the uprisings around the world and the deteriorating biosphere we all share. The time to join in creating an historic transformation is now.

The G8 summit in Chicago offers a great opportunity for the movement to grow on all three of these fronts, but it also carries enormous risks.

60s era history makes clear that it would be disastrous to repeat Chicago ’68. In the lead-in up to the August convention, colorful anarchistic groups like the Yippies advertised their “plans” for love fests and putting LSD in the city’s water supply. Committed to a successful Democratic party convention, the city stonewalled the protesters’ efforts to fine venues for peaceful protests, and Chicago’s police unleashed staggering violence against the protesters, some of whom fought back.

It is very clear today that the city of Chicago, under Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s leadership, is already setting in motion the mechanisms of repression.

There’s a final 60s connection here. If the mass media’s way of “remembering” the 60s hadn’t reduced the very important and empowering struggles of that day to absurd stereotypes about youthful rebellion and colorful personalities, protesters today might be more conscious of their connection to a past that could teach much. Among other things, they might realize the folly of burning the American flag as a form of protest. Much like those who flaunted Viet Cong flags in the 60s era, they seek a way of symbolically expressing their feelings of outrage and alienation, failing to realize (or even care about) the millions of Americans who will find the symbolism offensive.

Given that mass media fail to trace the symbols, or the sporadic acts of violence, back to their origins in the conditions people protest against, it is up to the protesters themselves to find ways of communicating their meanings to the wider public in ways that public can hear.

Ted (Edward P.) Morgan (epm2@lehigh.edu) is Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University and author of the recent What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (University Press of Kansas).

more Ted Morgan

And I felt angry that at the end of a day which was supposed to be about collective liberation, service through directed collectivization of material resources, and reappropriation of space to satisfy the needs of communities robbed of their most basic social, economic, and human entitlements for too long, I did not feel liberated, I felt angry.

I took from that day that anger was to be the dominant lens through which so many of us would experience the day’s events, as that blinding emotion motivated a police officer to drastically overstep his authority in a disgusting display of sociopathology and knock the teeth out of a woman’s mouth with his metal baton. I witnessed the power of that incredible motivator to extinguish all reason, or perhaps to amplify desperation, when plastic shields challenged kevlar armor and disparate bottles and stones freckled chemical clouds of noxious chemicals, their bearers picked off with rubber bullets traveling at sufficient velocity to rupture an inopportunely positioned spleen. My appreciation for their efforts at shielding the still less protected crowd was overshadowed by my sadness at our situational disempowerment and complete lack of strategic focus.

A conversation in the language of street battle is rendered instantly one-sided by a well-funded, overwhelming, militarized police force because that is the only language they speak, and it is phrased adeptly. And every time that happens, despite the popular outrage garnered, the movement for concrete changes in infrastructure, in access, in accountability grows weaker, as our anger at our collective inability to exert our will to make this world more hospitable for all its inhabitants clouds our ability to act strategically and with unstoppable power. Our power is not in combat with the tools of Capital and the State. That is a losing battle, lost over and over.

We will make gains for justice in direct proportion to our own ability to serve the most needy in our society. We will seize power over our collective resources as we challenge ourselves to redistribute power within our movements to those who act with a soberness unclouded by macho ideas of valor and honor. In cooking with our anger at ceaseless injustice, violence, and repression, kept simmering on the back burner, we will find the clarity to amplify our strength in popular appeal and creative solutions to social problems.

We each have limited energy and resources. Let us not squander what we have on fabricated warfare which will only end in defeat and further entrenchment into the hollows of oppression where the fury concerning our sad situation will only produce more fantastic scenarios for the achievement of our liberation. We, those of us marching in the streets in the USA, occupying plazas, parks, and buildings, are not at war, as anyone who has actually been at war would explain. Underpinning this romanticization of our situation is an understanding of the very real war on poor people, people of color, women, and LGBTQ identifying people in this city and throughout this world built on a foundation of genocide, slavery, and hatred which continues to undergird so many of our economic and social relationships. But the battlefields of that war are not solely demarcated by lines of riot cops.

Circumstances as we experienced on Saturday punctuate the power of the elite. If we can collectively commit to the work of mending bridges burned within our own communities, finding solidarity across political divides within our own movements, and amplifying the power of marginalized people in our actions, we will far less often experience a similarly disadvantaged confrontation with the police as we will find other creative ways to achieve our ends without sacrificing our dignity, our bodies, nor our limited resources.

Within the Occupy/Decolonize movement, many tactics employed successfully in prior instances now run ashore. Movements must adapt as those forces which seek to crush them adapt and employ new strategies. A true diversity of tactics should be employed and continually reassessed. A patriarchal value system with skewed interpretations of integrity, honor and courage is packed deeply within the baggage which we all carry on board our movements. A fundamentalist attachment to macho tactics which reinforce this destructive system of values is as damaging as the state violence imposed from above. A lack of openness to public dialog and creative negotiation even with those who hold power arbitrarily and use it unjustly is just as problematic as a fundamentalist attachment to pacifism.

There will not be an automatic co-optation of this movement through pursuit of any particular tactic. Cooptation is a complex process which the Occupy/Decolonize movement has been actively resisting since day one, and the intricate layers of relationships and truths upon which this movement rests can weed out attempts to misuse its awesome potential for revolutionary change. Opening a public dialog with those who control resources which the movement requires in order to function is an offensive action as it exists for all to see. So much of the power of the Occupy/Decolonize movement lies in its radical openness.

A campaign with populist support for specific strategic resource acquisition is not a foray into “representative” politics where supplicants make demands and autarchs make choices. Public demands for strategic ends have an entire gradient of tactics to back them up, to enforce those demands and to acquire positions of power within the discourse, and to provide a wedge for individuals with significant power in society to make an easier and less costly choice than deploying riot police. Very importantly, the exposure of persistent injustices inherent to lack of just action by those who control government bureaucracies and wealth streams destabilizes already tenuous societal power structures, based upon lies, during a context of already widespread mistrust and disillusionment with the status quo

Movements occur en masse. But resources, property, and land can be acquired through an array of tactics, all of which can intersect and be mutually supportive. Let’s leverage everything we have available to us to acquire what we need in order to keep building this movement and a new society based upon helping those in need to help themselves. Police lines will be meager within the deluge of human solidarity we have potential to unleash.

Good news, right?

Wrong. If you want to know what is really happening, you must turn to John Williams at shadowstats.com.

What the presstitute media did not tell us is that almost the entire gain In GDP growth was due to “involuntary inventory build-up,” that is, more goods were produced than were sold.

Net of the unsold goods, the annualized real growth rate was eight-tenths of one percent.

And even that tiny growth rate is an exaggeration, because it is deflated with a measure of inflation that understates inflation. The US government’s measure of inflation no longer measures a constant standard of living. Instead, the government’s inflation measure relies on substitution of cheaper goods for those that rise in price. In other words, the government holds the measure of inflation down by measuring a declining standard of living. This permits our rulers to divert cost-of-living-adjustments that should be paid to Social Security recipients to wars of aggression, police state, and banker bailouts.

When the methodology that measures a constant standard of living is used to deflate nominal GDP, the result is a shrinking US economy. It becomes clear that the US economy has had no recovery and has now been in deep recession for four years despite the proclamation by the National Bureau of Economic Research of a recovery based on the rigged official numbers.

A government can always produce the illusion of economic growth by underestimating the rate of inflation. There is no question that a substitution-based measure of inflation understates the inflation that people experience. More proof that there has been no economic recovery is available from those data series that are unaffected by inflation. If the economy were in fact recovering, these date series would be picking up. Instead, they are flat or declining, as John Williams demonstrates.

For example, according to the government’s own data, payroll employment in December 2011 is less than in 2001. Meanwhile, there has been a decade of population growth. The presstitute media calls the alleged economic recovery a “jobless recovery,” which is a contradiction in terms. There can be no recovery without a growth in employment and consumer income.

Real average weekly earnings (deflated by the government’s CPI-W) have never recovered their 1973 peak. Real median household income (deflated by the government’s CPI-U) has not recovered its 2001 peak and is below the 1969 level. If earnings were deflated by the original methodology instead of by the new substitution-based methodology, the picture would be bleaker.

Consumer confidence shows no recovery and is far below the level of a decade ago.

How does an economy recover without a recovery in consumer confidence?

Housing starts have remained flat since 2009 and are below their previous peak.

Retail sales are below the index level of January 2000.

Industrial production remains below the index level of January 2000.

To repeat, the only indicator of economic recovery is the GDP deflated with an understated measure of inflation.

The US economy cannot recover, because the US economy depends on consumer expenditures for more than 70% of its activity. The offshoring of middle class jobs has stopped the rise in middle class income and caused a drop in consumer spending power.

The Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan compensated for the absence of US consumer income growth with a policy of easy credit and a policy of driving up home prices with low interest rates. This policy allowed people to refinance their homes and to spend the inflated equity in their homes that Greenspan’s policy created.

In other words, an increase in consumer indebtedness and dissavings drove the economy in the place of the missing growth in consumer incomes.

Today, consumers are too indebted to borrow, and banks are too insolvent to lend. Therefore, there is no possibility of further debt expansion as a substitute for real income growth. An offshored economy is a dead and exhausted economy.

The consequences of a dead economy when the government is wasting trillions of dollars in wars of naked aggression and in bailouts of fraudulent financial institutions is a government budget that can only be financed by printing money.

The consequence of printing money when jobs have been moved offshore is an inflationary depression. This catastrophe could begin to unfold this year or in 2013. If Europe’s problems worsen, flight into dollars could delay sharp rises in US inflation until 2014.

The emperor has no clothes, and sooner or later this will be recognized.

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached through his website