Obama and Occupy

Conservatives never let the facts get in the way of the party line.

The right inists that the Occupy movement is aligned with, sympathetic to or manipulated by the Obama administration. The reactionaries will not let go of this fixed idea, even though all of the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Example: Three young "anarchists" associated with the Occupy movement have been charged with plotting to bomb Barack Obama's campaign headquarters and Rahm Emanuel's home. (The accused are quite young, of course. Don't trust anyone under thirty; most of 'em are borderline retarded.)

As always, there are indications that the terror plot was engineered by the very forces that now claim credit for preserving the peace:

But outside court Saturday, Michael Deutsch, the attorney representing the men now known as the “NATO 3,” said they were railroaded — “a Chicago Police set-up, entrapment to the highest degree.”

Deutsch said three undercover cops nicknamed “Nadia,” “Mo” and “Glove” befriended his clients on May 1: May Day, an international day of labor solidarity.

Two of the nine arrested people were themselves undercover cops, Deutsch said. And those undercover officers “egged on” the accused men, he said.

“From our information, the so-called incendiary devices and the plans to attack police stations — that’s all coming from the minds of the police informants and not coming from our clients, who are non-violent protesters,” he said.

Firedoglake has more on the entrapment issue.

The details I have been able to gather from speaking to arrestees personally make it seem like the police have, in the past 48 hours, fabricated all of these details about having some investigation in progress.

There is much more to say on the topic of entrapment, but at this time I want to focus on the right's narrative that the Occupiers are Obots. That claim is nonsense. It seems quite clear that, even if the charges against those young anarchist dolts prove to be false, said dolts are not fans of the president.

And Obama is no fan of the protesters.  Dave Lindorff has been going over some newly-released documents which demonstrate that Obama's Department of Homeland Security directed a nationwide crackdown of the movement, despite official denials.

The latest documents, reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC).

On December 12, when Occupy planned anti-war protests at various US ports, Verheyden-Hilliard says the new documents show that the NOC “went into high gear” seeking information from local field offices of the Department of Homeland Security about what actions police in Houston, Portland, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles planned to deal with Occupy movement actions.

Another document shows that earlier, in advance of a planned Occupy action at the Oakland, CA port facility on Nov. 2, DHS “went so far as to keep the Pentagon’s Northcom (Northern Command) in the intelligence loop.”

Would Bush have reacted in a different fashion? I doubt it.

Since the police response has obviously been coordinated the DHS, Obama arguably bears indirect responsibility for street-level misbehavior by the cops. In that light, let's take another look at Firedoglake's coverage of the three arrested anarchists. Sarah Gelsomino, acting as legal counsel for the three, makes some rather chilling accusations:

They were driving in a car and were pulled over without any kind of justification or reason by the Chicago police department. They were surrounded by police and they were questioned for a very long period of time about what they were doing in Chicago, why they were here to protest, what their political affiliations were, how they identified politically—All kinds of absolutely outrageous questions that certainly do not indicate any kind of illegal behavior because it is not constitutional simply to accuse them of a crime because of a political belief.

If Obama were locatable anywhere on the left, why does his Justice Department continually target progressives?

The Obama administration has done nothing to impede the outrageous cop practice of confiscating cameras from bystanders recording the anti-Occupy police actions.

Just ask Carlos Miller. The photojournalist has been arrested three times. His “crime?” Attempting to photograph police actions in the U.S. Most recently, in January, Miller was filming the eviction of Occupy Wall Street activists from a park in downtown Miami.

In twist that’s become too familiar to many, the journalist became the story as police focused their crackdown on the scrum of reporters there to cover the eviction. Miller came face to face with Officer Nancy Perez, who confiscated his camera and placed him under arrest.

And Miller is not alone. Since Occupy Wall Street began last September, more than 75 journalists have been arrested.  My colleague Josh Stearns has chronicled these arrests since the movement’s earliest days. Stearns expects to see an uptick in arrests as thousands of protesters and reporters converge on Chicago.

The courts have upheld the public's right to videotape, but that right means nothing if the cops won't observe it. Why hasn't the Justice Department cracked down on police abuse?

I strongly urge you to read Rick Pearlstein's expose in Rolling Stone. When this administration goes looking for (non-Islamic) terrorists, it adheres to the old policy of "Left eye open, right eye blind." As Pearlstein documents, right-wing terrorists pose a far more serious threat -- yet their groups are seldom infiltrated, and their members need never worry about entrapment.

The contrasts are extraordinarily instructive. When federal law enforcement agencies take an affirmative role in staging the crimes, the U.S. Justice Department then prosecutes, leaving more clear-and-present dangers relatively unbothered, the State is singling out ideological enemies. Violent white supremacists are not one of these enemies, apparently – because, as David Neiwert, probably the nation’s top journalist on the subject, told me, the federal government has much less often sought to entrap them, even though they are actually the biggest home-grown terrorism threat.  That is unconstitutional, because law enforcement’s criterion for attention has been revealed as the ideas the alleged plotters hold – not their observed violent potential.

But don't worry your pretty little heads over the epidemic of far-right insurrectionism that followed the election of Barack Obama: all told, according to a forthcoming data analysis by Neiwert, there have been 55 cases of right-wing extremists being arrested for plotting or committing alleged terrorists acts compared to 26 by Islamic militants during the same period. The right-wing plots include the bombing of a 2011 Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane and the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009. Neither of their perpetrators, it goes without saying, had been arrested before they attempted their vile acts; neither required law enforcement entrapment to conceive and carry them out. It's just too bad for their victims they did not fit the story federal law enforcement seeks to tell.

The irony is overwhelming. Right-wing terrorists hate Obama and would probably murder him if they could. Nevertheless, Obama's Department of Homeland Security ignores the right and focuses with laser-like intensity on anyone who might be left of center. Our first black president coddles racist thugs, preferring to target naive young "anarchist" cranks. Meanwhile, the anarchists themselves -- whose political philosophy strikes me as a muddled and incoherent stew -- seem to dislike Obama rather intensely.

Yet folks who get their facts from Fox News will tell you that Obama is Lenin and the Occupiers are his Red Army.

We can't have a useful national dialogue if half the country insists on a narrative located at a 180 degree remove from reality.  

Update: Mahablog was kind enough to cite this post in an article entitled "Obama Behind Plot to Blow Up His Own Headquarters!" That post includes some hilarious examples of the "Obama controls Occupy" narrative to be found on right-wing blogs. The rightists are too stupid to notice that the arrests contradict their preconceptions.

Calling Alex Jones! We need a right-wing conspiracy theory to bring everything together. The theory should explain why Obama would direct a plot to blow up his own headquarters and why Obama would entrap the anarchists. The theory should explain why Obama would engineer the Occupy movement and why Obama would sic police thugs on the Occupiers.

Coming up with a single theory for all of this contradictory activity will take enormous creativity. But I have faith in our nation's paranoid class.