Conservative governments were in power in Britain, France, and Germany. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron pushed through a tough package of austerity measures that matched his conservative party’s ideology that the less government interference in the economy, the better. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy did the same, followed by Angela Merkel in Germany. Although none of these countries had the deep public debts of Greece, Ireland, or Iceland, the problems in those “southern” European countries gave the conservative politicians in the larger European nations an excuse to impose cuts in social welfare programs and pass anti-union legislation.

Last week brought a major pushback from the voters in those countries. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy lost the presidency to Socialist Francoise Hollande who remarked, “Austerity need not be Europe’s fate.” Hollande promised to renegotiate the budget discipline treaty signed by 25 European leaders in March, a treaty that was meant to enshrine the policies that have plunged Europe even deeper into economic recession.

In Britain, local elections on May 3rd brought tremendous gains for the Labour Party, which had it’s best showing since 1997. Labour won 800 seats, while David Cameron’s Conservative Party lost 400 seats, sending his constituency into a uproar. British voters deserted the two main parties (Conservative and Liberal Democrat) and voted overwhelmingly for Labour and a host of third parties.

The same was true of the May 13th local elections in Germany’s most populous state, Northern Rhine-Westphalia, where Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats took only 26% of the vote, the party’s worst showing since World War II. The center-left Social Democrats took nearly 39% of the vote and will form an alliance with the Green Party, which took a little more than 12%. Other recent local elections in Germany have brought similar results, an ominous sign for Angela Merkel, who’ll be up for re-election in 18 months.

It’s impossible to view these elections as anything other than a public referendum on austerity measures. It erases the excuses the conservatives have been using for the past four years that economic stimulus programs are politically unpopular. The voters have voted according to their pocketbooks, and the conservatives have lost.

History has given us many examples of how politically unpopular austerity measures are. Leaving aside the historical fact that austerity measures imposed during an economic downturn only lead to a worse downturn, as the United States discovered during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, we need only look at the failure of neo-liberal economic policies on developing nations.

The 1960’s and 1970’s were a boom time for banks lending money to developing nations, many of which had just broken free from colonial governments. New, independent governments—some of them democratic, some of them not—were able to tap a flood of development money. It was the Cold War, and the U.S. and Western Europe wanted to buy allies wherever they could, and banks saw an opportunity to make a profit issuing sovereign debt at high interest rates. But the money also came with political and economic strings attached.

Developing nations had to agree to “liberalize” their economies. They had to remove trade barriers and labor protections, do away with limits on foreign investments in their countries, and use the money to build infrastructure that benefited multi-national corporations, like roads, port facilities, railroads, pipelines, and even factory shells. But all of this investment didn’t bring the economic gains these nations hoped for. Profits were taken home by U.S. and European corporations, and the wages paid to local workers remained too low.

Eventually, the loans came due. In the 1980’s and 1990’s a wave of developing countries were forced to restructure their debts. The International Monetary Fund imposed round after round of austerity measures on many countries, only to see those nations sink deeper into economic recessions. A wave of nations began to default on their debts, including Egypt, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. In fact, the Latin American Debt Crisis of those years led to what is commonly called the lost decade: a time when real wages across the region dropped 20-40% and Latin American economies showed negative growth of 9%.

So the results of last week’s elections in Greece came as no surprise. The two main parties that had negotiated Greece’s debt restructuring and austerity measures failed to take enough votes to form a coalition government. Greek voters deserted in droves to third parties, especially the far-left party Syriza, which campaigned on the platform of revoking the austerity measures and imposing a moratorium on Greece’s debt payments for three years—a technical default on their sovereign debt.

None of Greece’s parties won a majority, and no two parties won enough votes to form a coalition government, so unless a miracle occurs, new national elections will be called in June. When Greece finally forms a new government, the pressure to default on its loans and withdraw from the European Union will be impossible to resist.

Default was obviously the only choice for Greece from the beginning, but conservative politicians chose to ignore historical fact and impose the pain of austerity measures instead. And now they’re earning their just desserts at the polls.

This year, still more mothers, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, the USA, and a dozen other places where we have a hand in the local violence mourn fallen sons and daughters, lost to the insanity of organized violence. Julia Ward Howe’s call for women to not allow men to constantly play at war is due for a revival. The radical origins of Mother’s Day, as a powerful feminist call against war, penned in the wake of the US Civil War in 1870, are fully compatible with the universal notion of honoring mothers.

Women, even more so now, are the primary sufferers of warfare. Through World War I, 90 percent of war casualties were uniformed soldiers, and only 10 percent were civilians. Those figured have exactly reversed in the last century: civilian populations bore 90 percent of war’s casualties around the world in that time. Mass and indiscriminate attacks, popularized in WWII by the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Allied firebombings in Japan and Germany, and the rape of Nanjing, are only the most spectacular examples of a phenomenon in which it is mostly women who become the rape and famine victims, the refugees, the forgotten statistics in what are invariably the wars of men. The transformation is so complete that the announcement in the last month that the US military was now authorized to launch drone attacks on civilians without even knowing who they are met nary a ripple of protest from the American political mainstream. The Commander-in-Chief of these war crimes even has a Nobel Peace Prize to show for his efforts.

As with so many other aspects of American history–see this recent article on May Day for another example–a legacy that is now celebrated around the world is farthest from its original intent in the land of its birth. The (male) generals have written our historical memory: in the Civil War, and in most popular narratives of the bloody trail of modernizing “Western Civilization.”

It’s worth remembering that the Civil War, a political division that lasted
longer and was considered more intractable than today’s Palestine/Israel
conflict or indefinite “War on Terror,” and that killed well over a hundred
times more people on American soil than the attacks of September 11, was not
unanimously lauded at the time. And that women thought they could do
something to prevent such bloodshed in the future.

Here is the original, pre-Hallmark, Mother’s Day Proclamation,
penned in Boston by Julia Ward Howe in 1870:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and
patience.
We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons
of war.
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the
dead.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the
means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of
Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions.
The great and general interests of peace.

Maybe next year.

It has no immediate practical impact, but it will mean a lot to a lot of people, especially after yesterday’s discouraging North Carolina vote. Years from now, people won’t remember that vote, but they’ll look back at Obama’s “coming out” as a major turning point.

I lived through eight years of Reagan never once mentioning the AIDS pandemic as it unfolded. For anyone queer who survived that era, the import of this is unmistakeable.

Jane Perlez and Michael Wines reported from Beijing on the deal that would get Chen and his family visas to the US, for him to take up a fellowship at NYU.

Andrew Jacobs weighed in with the news that “Once exiled, nettlesome prisoners of conscience, like Chen Guangcheng, almost invariably lose their ability to grab headlines in the West and to command widespread sympathy both in China and abroad.” The op-ed page carried Wang Dan reflecting that “It’s the right decision for Chen Guangcheng to study in the United States. Democracy and human rights are of great importance, but so are a family’s love and affection.”

A mop-up NYT editorial declared that “What seems to have been forgotten in all the political roiling here is that this episode is first and foremost an embarrassment for China and a glaring reminder of its abysmal mistreatment of its own citizens.”

Let’s suppose that Chen remains spunky once he’s settled in at NYU, and decides some time during the summer to join an Occupy demonstration, along with his wife.

Here’s what they might reasonably expect by way of treatment from the NYPD, if we are to believe – which I do – a report on new police strategies against protestors by David Graeber, anthropologist and creative force in the Occupy movement, on the Naked Capitalism site for May 3.

Graeber begins with a conversation with an old friend:

A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast. “What happened to you?” I asked. “Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.” “Again?” someone said. We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.

“Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.“ Actually, she quickly clarified, only one wrist was literally broken….Police dragged her, partly by the hair, behind their lines and threw her to the ground, periodically shouting “stop resisting!” as she shouted back “I’m not resisting!” At one point though, she said, she did tell them her glasses had fallen to the sidewalk next to her, and announced she was going to reach over to retrieve them. That apparently gave them all the excuse they needed. One seized her right arm and bent her wrist backwards in what she said appeared to be some kind of martial arts move, leaving it not broken, but seriously damaged. “I don’t know exactly what they did to my left wrist – at that point I was too busy screaming at the top of my lungs in pain. But they broke it.”

This happened on March 17, when several hundred members of Occupy Wall Street celebrated the six month anniversary of their first camp at Zuccotti Park by a peaceful reoccupation of the park – a reoccupation broken up within hours by police with 32 arrests. … Many of these arrests are carried out in such a way to guarantee physical injury… Graeber’s friend Eileen’s wrists were broken; others suffered broken fingers, concussions, and broken ribs.

Graeber says “the apparently systematic use of sexual assault against women protestors is new.” On March 17 there were numerous reported cases, and in later nightly evictions from Union Square, the practice became so systematic that at least one woman told Graeber her breasts were grabbed by five different police officers on a single night (in one case, while another one was blowing kisses.) The tactic appeared so abruptly, is so obviously a violation of any sort of police protocol or standard of legality, that it is hard to imagine it is anything but an intentional policy.

“Why is all this not a national story?” Graeber asks.

Back in September, when the infamous Tony Bologna arbitrarily maced several young women engaged in peaceful protest, the event became a national news story. Now there’s nothing. Graeber:

I suspect one reason so many shy away from confronting the obvious is because it raises extremely troubling questions about the role of police in American society…. The commander of the First Precinct, successor to the disgraced Tony Bologna, is Captain Edward J. Winski, whose officers patrol the Financial District (that is, when those very same officers are not being paid directly by Wall Street firms to provide security, which they regularly do, replete with badges, uniforms, and weapons). Winski often personally directs groups of police attacking protestors: Winsky’s superior is Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, former director of global security of the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns:

And Kelly’s superior, in turn, is Mayor Michael Bloomberg – the well-known former investment banker and Wall Street magnate. The 11th richest man in America, he has referred to the New York City Police Department as his own personal army.

Graeber added an update to his story: “In comments, a reader asked why I did not go to the media. My response: “To be honest my first impulse was to call a sympathetic Times reporter. He said he was going to see if he could spin a story out of it. Apparently his editors told him it wasn’t news.”

It won’t be long before the NYPD kills a demonstrator. It will take that to force the issue of methodical police violence back onto the news pages.

Big city police chiefs are transferring their skills to the international theater. Leonard Leavitt reports on his NYPD Confidential site that if Kelly embarks on a bid to be Bloomberg’s successor in City Hall, Bloomberg could ask him to quit as police chief and then appoint as Kelly’s successor someone with national experience such as Bratton, or someone with both national and international experience such as Bratton’s First Deputy John Timoney. Timoney, who subsequently ran police departments in Philadelphia and Miami, is now advising Bahrain’s Ministry of Interior in that country’s “internal religious war.”

“Internal religious war” is a tactful way of describing the Khalifa dynasty’s methodical, lethal savagery against the Shi’a’s demand for elementary political rights.

Goodbye to the Great Charles Higham

Charles Higham died last week at the age of 81. He wrote many books, among them a spectacular expose of Erroll Flynn as a Nazi agent and the brilliant Trading With The Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949. Both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times ran snooty obits. (Higham worked as a stringer for the NYT for many years.) Both obituarists energetically attacked his work on Erroll Flynn, but kept quiet about Trading with the Enemy, a devastating investigation of how many of the top US corporations and American super-rich collaborated with the Third Reich before and during the Second World War.

Jeffrey St Clair and I had a most entertaining lunch in Los Angeles some years ago interviewing Higham, at that time promoting a book he had just published on the murder of Lincoln. Recollections poured forth for a couple of hours. Here’s a few minutes he gave us on Orson Welles:

“One of my first detective successes is that I found Orson Welles’ last film, that he’d made in South America. Briefly, he’d been sent by Nelson Rockefeller of the InterAmerican Affairs committee to cement North and South American relations by making a film about the North and South American associations to prevent Nazi incursions. The result of it is that he broke North/South America relations because he drowned a national hero of Brazil. Not an inconsiderable feat.

“What happened was that he was recreating a raft voyage of the Chingaderras, who were the raft fisherman who sailed to Rio from Belem to bring word of their plight to President Vargas. They became the toasts of all of Brazil. They were hailed through the streets. There were 10,000 craft in the harbor to greet them. Orson Welles thought, a cinch for North/South American relations. So 10,000 people were paid a dollar a head, or whatever it was to recreate the scene. There were planes flying over with messages ‘Welcome to the Chingaderras’. Unfortunately for Orson Welles, a shark and an octopus came out of the water in a death struggle at the wrong moment. The raft turned over and the national hero of Brazil disappeared into the shark. Five days later the remains were washed up. It’s not exactly what he was looking for. Welles had to escape the hotel as a washer woman with a large wicker basket when an angry mob was waiting, but the disguise worked. He got away with it.”

And people are fighting back. Nationally, multiple efforts are underway to encourage a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and even to overturn Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the 1886 Supreme Court decision that recognized corporations as persons for purposes of the 14th Amendment, starting the precedent chain that has led to the current conservative court rulings.

Locally, in Seattle, another effort is underway – an initiative effort to “end corporate rights” that would not only challenge corporate personhood, but elevate the rights of actual human beings and, for the first time, also recognize the inherent rights of nature.

Initiative I-103 is a measure that, according to its ballot title, “concerns local rights and restrictions on corporations to achieve those rights.” It would, among many other things, codify the right to fair elections, the right to clean government, the right to self-government, the right to a citizen-managed and accountable police force, the right to equal access to a free and open Internet, constitutional rights for workers in the workplace, rights for neighborhoods to approve zoning changes, and rights for nature to enable citizens to protect our shared environmental resources.

That’s a lot to chew off for one ballot measure – but it has precedent. I-103 builds upon similar initiatives in Spokane that lost narrowly in 2011 and previously in 2009, despite being heavily outspent by opponents. And that’s the core of the issue for I-103′s backers: a political process already dominated by big money has even gotten more so in the wake of Citizens United. Nationally, the support of a single wealthy billionaire has been enough to propel some of the Republican presidential campaigns far past the point where voter disinterest should have doomed them; the presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney, is himself worth more than many African countries. Locally, the 2011 Seattle City Council elections saw all five incumbents reelected, in part due to the dominance of corporate contributions. All three statewide initiatives last year were primarily funded by single sources.

“We have the right to confront Citizens United,” says I-103 co-leader Jeff Reifman. According to Reifman – a tech industry veteran who has long campaigned against Microsoft’s dominance of our state government and its tax structure – corporations would not be able to spend money on elections (such as the $25 million or so Costco poured into last year’s liquor privatization initiative) within Seattle city limits – a restriction that would resonate beyond Seattle due to the size of its media market.

Reifman and other I-103 backers believe that the measure would survive court challenges, and might even create a template for an eventual legal challenge to Citizens United and similar corporate-friendly law. But the first and primary purpose of mounting an effort like this – whether or not it is successful – is to start a political conversation on corporate power in our democratic system, and to introduce the idea that communities and their residents have rights that are not being respected under our current, corporate-dominated political system. If I-103 is successful, backers want the idea to spread.

“We want to inspire other communities to do this,” says Reifman, who calls I-103 part of “grass roots effort to take the country back.” But before that can happen, I-103 has to actually get on the ballot. Supporters have until August 31 to get qualifying signatures (petitions are downloadable from the measure’s web site at http://envisionseattle.org).

As previous initiative sponsors have discovered, getting sufficient qualifying signatures with an all-volunteer effort is difficult; and, if I-103 does make it to the November ballot, expect overwhelming opposition from the local political, economic, and media leaders who benefit from the current system. That’s exactly what happened – twice – in Spokane.

Nonetheless, last fall, Spokane’s Proposition One, a similar effort, failed by only about 1,000 votes in a city of 200,000. That suggests I-103 has a good chance in what is by every measure a more politically progressive city. The question of whether the sensibilities of Seattle voters outweigh the interests of its economic elite is exactly what I-103 is all about.