T’was the night before New Year’s, 2012…. and we were reminded of this story told long ago, in the pages of the LA Free Press in 1968. Hopefully, re-running it now is helpful.

How to Escape from a Concentration Camp, LA Free Press Archives, 1968 (1 of 4)

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How to Escape from a Concentration Camp, LA Free Press Archives, 1968 (2 of 4)

How to Escape from a Concentration Camp, LA Free Press Archives, 1968 (3 of 4)

How to Escape from a Concentration Camp, LA Free Press Archives, 1968 (4 of 4)

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Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture.
Today, it’s… all about us.

Est. 1964 Re-Incarnated by Popular Demand

This is the original, 60’s, counter culture, LA Free Press. Today’s Best Alternative View & Our Old Hippie Headlines, Too! A Head Trip for Smart Minds.

Been There. Done That.

Now, A Chance to Get it Right.

December 30, 2011 – January 5, 2012

To be Published throughout the Week

With the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act, the OWS Movement may only be a stepping stone to ‘America’s Salvation’.  While supporting its intent, we will now go further, bringing news and views that will not only encourage the changes the Occupy Movement seeks but those actions that will protect our Rights to make those changes.

On December 20, 1968 the LA Free Press Front Page pointed toward the inside article  – How to Escape a Concentration Camp.  A reprint of the article will appear here on January 3.

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture.
Today, it’s… all about us.

Est. 1964 Re-Incarnated by Popular Demand

This is the original, 60’s, counter culture, LA Free Press. Today’s Best Alternative View & Our Old Hippie Headlines, Too! A Head Trip for Smart Minds.

Been There. Done That.

Now, A Chance to Get it Right.

December 24 – December 31, 2011

Published throughout the Week

The OWS Movement is not the ‘Arab Spring’, but it may be ‘America’s Salvation’.

The LA Free Press brings a unique perspective to a Movement that may change your life forever…

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) should be on your mind.  If it is not, as it is on the minds of millions of other Americans, then clearly you do not know of it or you do not, as they do, understand the danger it presents.

In brief, you and I might be easily labeled as a ‘terrorist’ or, with just as little proof, as one who – though maybe unknowingly – had given ’support’ to a terrorist organization, perhaps one that seemed to us a charitable cause.  No matter.  And no chance to have your day in a civil court where a presumption of innocence trumps one of guilt, where a jury is comprised of your peers, and – this is important – the trial is to begin in a ’speedy’ fashion.  Instead, the U.S. Military will try you, and at their leisure.  In other words, you could wait for years with little assurance that a judgment by our Constitution will ever come about.

(A link to how you may find yourself hauled away, and the chance of again seeing the light of day is provided below.  You should be dismayed, or better yet, scared, as to how your Rights as an American Citizen are decimated by the NDAA.)

For the millions of those who do know what the NDAA portends, there is yet one item of which most seem uncertain:  Has it, in fact, become ‘law’… did Obama sign it, or did he veto it?

In response to the many calls we have received on these questions – the answer is ‘No.’; President Obama has NOT signed the NDAA (SB #1867) into law, nor has he vetoed it.  Another fact is that he has longer than the 10 days widely touted as his deadline.  While he was presented with the bill on Friday, December 16th, and many were led to believe that today, the 26th, was its do or die date, Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution states:

If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a Law, in like manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its return, in which case it shall not be a Law.

Therefore, the Sunday that immediately followed Friday, December 16th, AND the following Sunday, the 25th, would be eliminated from the 10 day count.  But, more important, is the third fact:  Congress has put itself (officially) into a coma, declaring that the lights are on, even though no one is really there.

It is nothing more than an attempt to stick to the words of Robert’s Rules of Order while side-stepping his intent.  Not new, but why now?  So that an ‘official’ adjournment does not present President Obama with the opportunity to neither sign the NDAA nor affix a veto to it so that, per the Constitution, the bill ‘shall not be a Law.’

They understand the opportunity, it is not unique, it has been done several times before.  Many of us know it as a ‘pocket veto’.

What many may not know – and find hard to believe – is that its exact precedent was set by (Republican) President George W. Bush in December 2007 when he pocket vetoed H.R. 1585, the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008″.

At that time, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was still the House Speaker.  Emphatically and adamantly, she declared:  “Congress vigorously rejects any claim that the president has the authority to pocket-veto this legislation, and will treat any bill returned to the Congress as open to an override vote.”

Her declaration was, very likely, more of frustration than of fact; certainly she was aware of the precise advantage that a ‘pocket’ veto gave the President.  Simply put, if President Bush had chosen to veto the bill via the standard process, it could have been overridden in each house by a two-thirds majority vote – the bill would have become law.

HOWEVER, a pocket vetoed cannot be overridden. Instead, the bill must be reintroduced in each house of Congress, and then passed by both.

With a public outcry, as there surely has been in this case, from efforts to halt its passage via online petitions to have the President veto it to the outright retribution of recalling those who voted for it, few are likely to want to put their name on a similar but new bill.  And with the warning of what can happen to those who voted for the last set of bills freshly evident, those sponsors should find vote gathering, tough going.

In the instance of President Bush’s pocket veto, H.R. 1585 was sent to him on December 19th, the same day the Congress adjourned. In its essence, the bill was re-introduced as H.R. 4986 on the very next after day Congress reconvened on January 15th, 2008.  Incredibly, a Committee the very same day (January 16th) was able to modify the several phrases the President objected to and get it to the full house for a vote.  AND it passed that very same day, too! Just as amazingly, the modified bill passed the Senate – less than a week later.  Only six days after that, President Bush signed it into law.  All told, it was a mere 5 weeks from rejection to (in his form) resurrection.

I’m willing to say, with the cross-purposes that abound in the present Congress, as small an interim of rejection to resurrection would be more than miraculous even if it were all powered up by the angry discovery that they were, in fact, adjourned, and the ‘veto’ was the natural consequence.

And wouldn’t all be for the better?  A ‘signing statement’ has been mentioned – perhaps it will be Obama’s promise to us all that he will not enforce the terrible power the bill provides.  But we will still know it is there.  And won’t all of those legislators bear a cross for providing it in the first place, or have egg on their face as it is rejected?

The irony of it all – all year long they have come in, when they should have been gone.  And now, they should have been gone and, instead, they come in!  Either way, and tragically, we’re the ones hit by the swinging door.  A door in a façade, that’s nothing more than a house of cards, where the deck seems to be, perpetually, stacked against us.

Maggies view on the snares of the NDAA: http://www.maggiesnotebook.com/2011/12/national-defense-authorization-act-rendition-detaining-americans-the-reality/

A video on the snares of the NDAA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAL6ATLv77c

A petition to the President: https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=3897&s_subsrc=SEM_Google_search-indefinite-detention_NDAA_ndaa_p_9302625622

For recall information: http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Laws_governing_recall#State.2C_local.2C_and_federal

Per this site, only eleven states provide rights of recall of their elected federal officials.

Montana, for instance, permits recalls on the grounds of physical or mental lack of fitness, incompetence, violation of oath of office, official misconduct, or conviction of certain felony offenses.  Recall campaigns against Senators Max Baucus and Jonathan Tester, who voted for the NDAA, have been announced.

Federal courts have not ruled on the validity of such recalls.

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture.
Today, it’s… all about us.

Est. 1964 Re-Incarnated by Popular Demand

This is the original, 60’s, counter culture, LA Free Press. Today’s Best Alternative View & Our Old Hippie Headlines, Too! A Head Trip for Smart Minds.

Been There. Done That.

Now, A Chance to Get it Right.

December 17 – December 23, 2011

Published throughout the Week

The OWS Movement is not the ‘Arab Spring’, but it may be ‘America’s Salvation’.

The LA Free Press brings a unique perspective to a Movement that may change your life forever…

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture.
Today, it’s… all about us.

Est. 1964 Re-Incarnated by Popular Demand

This is the original, 60’s, counter culture, LA Free Press. Today’s Best Alternative View & Our Old Hippie Headlines, Too! A Head Trip for Smart Minds.

Been There. Done That.

Now, A Chance to Get it Right.

November 19 – November 25, 2011

Published throughout the Week

The OWS Movement is not the ‘Arab Spring’, but it may be ‘America’s Salvation’.

The LA Free Press brings a unique perspective to a Movement that may change your life forever…

How the 99% Won in the Fight for Worker Rights

by Andy Kroll (via TomDispatch)

Twelve hours after Mayor Bloomberg’s cops evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment from Zuccotti Park, the space had been scrubbed down and repopulated with police and private-security types, up to 150 of them. In essence, since September there had been two occupations in the Wall Street area and the second of them, the massive one the police were running, had now quite literally replaced the first. Odder yet, by mid-afternoon the police, barricaded in the park, were ringed by the returning protesters, awaiting a judge’s decision on whether they could again set up camp. It was as if in a single night the situation had somehow been turned inside out.

As Occupy Wall Street’s website wryly put it: “NYPD Occupying Liberty Square; Demands Unclear.” That caught the strangely high-spirited post-eviction moment. But something else caught my eye that afternoon. The “park” itself, demonstrator-less, filled with bored cops, had morphed into a bare and pitiful space. It wasn’t a park at all, but a thumbnail slab of concrete with lights embedded in it, trees with yellowed leaves, and scattered, plinth-like stone benches, cold as death.

What more reminder did anyone need that the zeitgeist-inspired Occupy Wall Street protesters had brought a mythic quality to a postage-stamp-sized bit of privatized public property? They had made it, tents and all, larger than life, bigger than anything specific that happened there. They had somehow put it on a world stage. If they head elsewhere, that mythic quality goes with them. The police have now, as is their wont, turned the park into something like an open-air prison. It’s the only thing they evidently know how to do, just as they tried to imprison in metal barricades the giant march from Manhattan’s Foley Square across the Brooklyn Bridge on Thursday night — with far less success than expected thanks to the effervescent, surging power of the crowd.

As a crew, the OWS protesters are no slouches. By the afternoon of their park eviction, some were already carrying around signs that said: “You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.” It’s a rousing instant slogan, and who can deny that there are ideas aplenty swirling around in the OWS ether? As for myself, though, I don’t think Occupy Wall Street is an idea. To me, it seems more like an embodied feeling, as hard to pin down, yet powerful and all embracing, as that 99% label.

Along with its hope and high-spiritedness, OWS has, I suspect, caught and crystalized an American feeling of loss, of a world going down (which always has the possibility of the new somewhere inside it). The outrage that it has transformed into activity is over those who are still living high and profiting off that world’s demise — the privateers, looters, subprime hucksters, corporate grifters, Wall Street gamblers, and all those willing to take a buck to shill for them, to make sure in every way that they thrive as other Americans crash and burn.

All of this, by the way, was available for anyone to see in clear, even cartoonish, form in the crony-capitalist version of the occupation of Iraq with its urge to privatize everything, make money off Iraqi suffering while the going was good, and stick the Iraqis with a subprime “reconstruction” program so shoddy that nothing would work and no services would ever be delivered, while the companies hired to reconstruct took home the cash.

As it happened, while few Americans cared what befell the Iraqis, a subprime crook’s version of the occupation of Iraq was heading home. So here’s the truth of it: before anyone decided to “occupy” any park, we wuz occupied! And the truth of now is perhaps this: a feeling embodied is even harder to suppress than an idea, no matter how often you play whack-a-mole with its encampments. A feeling embodied, as TomDispatch associate editor and Mother Jones reporter Andy Kroll makes clear, can have genuine on-the-ground political power. It can deliver the goods. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Kroll discusses Occupy Wall Street’s unlikely first political victory click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

How the 99% Won in the Fight for Worker Rights
The Unsung Victors in the Hottest Election of 2011

By Andy Kroll – Posted  at 5:50pm, November 20, 2011.

No headlines announced it. No TV pundits called it. But on the evening of November 8th, Occupy Wall Street, the populist uprising built on economic justice and corruption-free politics that’s spread like a lit match hitting a trail of gasoline, notched its first major political victory, and in the unlikeliest of places: Ohio.

You might have missed OWS’s win amid the recent wave of Occupy crackdowns. Police raided Occupy Denver, Occupy Salt Lake City, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Portland, and Occupy Seattle in a five-day span. Hundreds were arrested. And then, in the early morning hours on Tuesday, New York City police descended on Occupy Wall Street itself, fists flying and riot shields at the ready, with orders from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to evict the protesters. Later that day, a judge ruled that they couldn’t rebuild their young community, dealing a blow to the Occupy protest that inspired them all.

Instead of simply condemning the eviction, many pundits and columnists praised it or highlighted what they considered its bright side. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote that Bloomberg had done Occupy Wall Street a favor. After all, he argued, something dangerous or deadly was bound to happen at OWS sooner or later, especially with winter soon to arrive. Zuccotti Park, Klein added, “was cleared… in a way that will temporarily reinvigorate the protesters and give Occupy Wall Street the best possible chance to become whatever it will become next.”

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman wrote that OWS “should be grateful” for Bloomberg’s eviction decree: “By acting so badly, Bloomberg has made it easy to see who won’t be truthful and can’t handle open discourse. He’s also saved OWS from what was probably its greatest problem, the prospect that it would just fade away as time went on and the days grew colder.”

Read between the lines and what Klein, Krugman, and others are really saying is: you had your occupation; now, get real. Start organizing, meaningfully connect your many Occupy protests, build a real movement. As these columnists see it, that movement — whether you call it OccupyUSA, We Are the 99%, or the New Progressive Movement — should now turn its attention to policy changes like a millionaire’s tax, a financial transaction fee, or a constitutional amendment to nullify the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that loosed a torrent of cash into American elections. It should think about supporting political candidates. It should start making a nuts-and-bolts difference in American politics.

But such assessments miss an important truth: Occupy Wall Street has already won its first victory its own way — in Ohio, when voters repealed Republican governor John Kasich’s law to slash bargaining rights for 350,000 public workers and gut what remained of organized labor’s political power.

Commandeering the Conversation

Don’t believe me? Then think back to this spring and summer, when Occupy Wall Street was just a glimmer in the imagination of a few activists, artists, and students. In Washington, the conversation, such as it was, concerned debt, deficit, and austerity. The discussion wasn’t about whether to slash spending, only about how much and how soon. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent called it the “Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop” — and boy was he right.

A National Journal analysis in May found that the number of news articles in major newspapers mentioning “deficit” was climbing, while mentions of “unemployment” had plummeted. In the last week of July, the liberal blog ThinkProgress tallied 7,583 mentions of the word “debt” on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News alone. “Unemployment”? A measly 427.

This all-deficit, all-the-time debate shaped the final debt-ceiling deal, in which House Speaker John Boehner and his “cut-and-grow”-loving GOP allies got just about everything they wanted. So lopsided was the debate in Washington that President Obama himself hailed the deal’s bone-deep cuts to health research, public education, environmental protection, childcare, and infrastructure.

These cuts, the president explained, would bring the country to “the lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president.” After studying the deal, Ethan Pollock of the Economic Policy Institute told me, “There’s no way to square this plan with the president’s ‘Winning the Future’ agenda. That agenda ends.” Yet Obama said this as if it were a good thing.

Six weeks after Obama’s speech, protesters heard the call of Adbusters, the Canadian anti-capitalist magazine, and followed the lead of a small crew of activists, writers, and students to “occupy Wall Street.” A few hundred of them set up camp in Zuccotti Park, a small patch of concrete next door to Ground Zero. No one knew how long the occupation would last, or what its impact would be.

What a game-changing few months it’s been. Occupy Wall Street has inspired 750 events around the world, and hundreds of (semi-)permanent encampments around the United States. In so doing, the protests have wrestled the national discussion on the economy away from austerity and toward gaping income inequality (the 99% versus 1% theme), outsized executive compensation, and the plain buying and selling of American politicians by lobbyists and campaign donors.

Mentions of the phrase “income inequality” in print publications, web stories, and broadcast transcripts spiked from 91 times a week in early September to nearly 500 in late October, according to the website Politico — an increase of nearly 450%. In the second week of October, according to ThinkProgress, the words most uttered on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News were “jobs” (2,738), “Wall Street” (2,387), and “Occupy” (1,278). (References to “debt” tumbled to 398.)

And here’s another sign of the way Occupy Wall Street has forced what it considers the most pressing economic issues for the country into the spotlight: conservatives have lately gone on the defensive by attacking the very existence of income inequality, even if to little effect. As AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka put it, “Give credit to the Occupy Wall Street movement (and historic inequality) for redefining the political narrative.”

Wall Street in Ohio

The way Occupy Wall Street, with next to no direct access to the mainstream media, commandeered the national political narrative represents something of a stunning triumph. It also laid the groundwork for OWS’s first political win.

Just as OWS was grabbing that narrative, labor unions and Democrats headed into the final stretch of one of their biggest fights of 2011: an up-or-down referendum on the fate of Ohio governor John Kasich’s anti-union law, also known as SB 5. Passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature in March, it sought to curb the collective bargaining rights of 350,000 police, firefighters, teachers, snowplow drivers, and other public workers. It also gutted the political clout of unions by making it harder for them to collect dues and fund their political action committees. After failing to overturn similar laws in Wisconsin and Michigan, the SB 5 fight was labor’s last stand of 2011.

I spent a week in Ohio in early November interviewing dozens of people and reporting on the run-up to the SB 5 referendum. I visited heavily Democratic and Republican parts of the state, talking to liberals and conservatives, union leaders and activists. What struck me was how dramatically the debate had shifted in Ohio thanks in large part to the energy generated by Occupy Wall Street.

It was as if a great tide had lifted the pro-repeal forces in a way you only fully grasped if you were there. Organizers and volunteers had a spring in their step that hadn’t been evident in Wisconsin this summer during the recall elections of nine state senators targeted for their actions during the fight over Governor Scott Walker’s own anti-union law. Nearly everywhere I went in Ohio, people could be counted on to mention two things: the 99% — that is, the gap between the rich and poor — and the importance of protecting the rights of the cops and firefighters targeted by Kasich’s law.

And not just voters or local activists either. I heard it from union leaders as well. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, told me that her union had recruited volunteers from 15 different states for the final get-out-the-vote effort in Ohio. That, she assured me, wouldn’t have happened without the energy generated by OWS. And when Henry herself went door-to-door in Ohio to drum up support for repealing SB 5, she said that she could feel its influence in home after home. “Every conversation was in the context of the 99% and the 1%, this discussion sparked by Occupy Wall Street.”

This isn’t to take anything away from labor’s own accomplishments in Ohio. We Are Ohio, the labor-funded coalition that led the effort, collected nearly 1.3 million signatures this summer to put the repeal of SB 5 on the November ballot. (They needed just 230,000.) The group outspent its opponents $30 million to $8 million, a nearly four-to-one margin. And in the final days before the November 8th victory, We Are Ohio volunteers knocked on a million doors and made nearly a million phone calls. In the end, a stunning 2.14 million Ohioans voted to repeal SB 5 and only 1.35 million to keep it, a 61% to 39% margin. There were repeal majorities in 82 of Ohio’s 88 counties, support that cut across age, class, race, and political ideologies.

Nonetheless, it’s undeniable that a mood change had hit Ohio — and in a major way. Pro-worker organizers and volunteers benefited from something their peers in Wisconsin lacked: the wind of public opinion at their backs. Polls conducted in the run-up to Ohio’s November 8th vote showed large majorities of Ohioans agreeing that income inequality was a problem. What’s more, 60% of respondents in a Washington Post-ABC poll said the federal government should act to close that gap. Behind those changing numbers was the influence of Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy protests.

So, as the debate rages over what will happen to Occupy Wall Street after its eviction from Zuccotti Park, and some “experts” sneer at OWS and tell it to get real, just direct their attention to Ohio. Kasich’s anti-union law might still be on the books if not for the force of OWS. And if the Occupy movement survives Mayor Bloomberg’s eviction order and the winter season, if it regroups and adapts to life beyond Zuccotti Park, you can bet it will notch more political victories in 2012.

Andy Kroll is a staff reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and an associate editor at TomDispatch. He has appeared on MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, Democracy Now, and Current TV’s “Countdown” with Keith Olbermann. His email is akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Kroll discusses Occupy Wall Street’s unlikely first political victory click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2011 Andy Kroll

Ed.’s Note:  Once again we thank Tom Engelhardt for his permission to republish from his blog, our doing so a testament to his skill in choosing the best of the best in commentary, and an appreciation of the remarks that he adds to the items he selects.

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture.
Today, it’s… all about us.

Est. 1964 Re-Incarnated by Popular Demand

This is the original, 60’s, counter culture, LA Free Press. Today’s Best Alternative View & Our Old Hippie Headlines, Too! A Head Trip for Smart Minds.

Been There. Done That.

Now, A Chance to Get it Right.

November 06 – November 18, 2011

Published throughout the Week

The OWS Movement is not the ‘Arab Spring’, but it may be ‘America’s Salvation’.

The LA Free Press brings a unique perspective to a Movement that may change your life forever…