Comcast is using a variety of sophisticated lobbying tricks to get the company's proposed $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable approved, including using minority groups and an endless roster of think tankers to parrot merger support. They're…
Little more than a week after 9/11, Cofer Black gave instructions to his CIA team before their mission. "I don't want Bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead … I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want Bin Laden's head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to show Bin Laden's head to the president. I promised him I would do that."
A month later, at a meeting sponsored by Schwab Capital markets, CIA executive director "Buzzy" Krongard laid out for investors what such a war would entail. "[It] will be won in large measure by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see and in ways you may not want to know about," he said.
Back then there wasn't a treaty that couldn't be violated, a principle waived or a definition parsed in the defence of American power and pursuit of popular revenge. To invoke the constitution, the Geneva convention or democratic oversight was evidence that you were out of your depth in the new reality. Laws were for the weak; for the powerful there was force. This was not just the mood of a moment; it has been policy for more than a decade.
Obama's arrival offered a shift in focus and style but not in direction or substance. "I don't want [people at the CIA] to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders," he said shortly before his first inauguration. It was never difficult to see what could go wrong with this approach. But it has, nonetheless, been shocking to see how wrong things have gone. As covert operations were shielded from oversight, so human rights violations became not just inevitable but routine.
In a 2004 report military intelligence officers told the International Committee for the Red Cross they believed between 70% and 80% of the detainees in Iraq were innocent. The nods and winks became permanent tics – so reflexive they embedded themselves in the institutional subconscious. "The most serious thing is the abuse of power that that allows you to do," Lawrence Wilkerson, former secretary of state, Colin Powell's chief of staff, told Jeremy Scahill in his book, Dirty Wars. "You find out the intelligence was bad and you killed a bunch of innocent people and you have a bunch of innocent people on your hands, so you stuff 'em in Guantánamo. No one ever knows anything about that. You don't have to prove to anyone that you did right. You did it all in secret, so you just go to the next operation. You say, 'Chalk that one up to experience'… And believe me that happened."
The logic driving this state of affairs is not only self-fulfilling, it's self-perpetuating. The more they act with impunity the more abuses are committed, the more they have to cover up and the more secrecy they need. So long as it happened abroad, the consequences for the American polity were limited. Abu Ghraib and drone attacks cost precious few votes or senior careers. But it was only a matter of time before these ramifications started making themselves felt at home. Foreign policy doesn't take place in a vacuum; it's co-ordinated by and incorporated into the same system that elaborates domestic policy. Once you have told operatives to take their gloves off and fight dirty on the road they don't just start playing by Queensbury rules at home.
Those openly called on to flout international law in the interests of a higher good do not then suddenly submit that goal to domestic law once they've gone through customs. Once the state has deliberately created space for power to be exercised without accountability those who occupy that space will protect it against enemies domestic and foreign. When your war is global and unending it inevitably comes home and keeps going. The monster the US has unleashed on the rest of the world is steadily devouring its own.
This is not new. The origins of the Watergate scandal, in which President Richard Nixon bugged his electoral opponents, lies in Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia; McCarthyism had its roots in the cold war.
But during the war on terror the process has become particularly pronounced. In recent months, it has emerged that the CIA has been spying on investigators from the Senate intelligence committee – the very committee charged with overseeing the CIA. The investigators, who were authorised to examine CIA documents relating to interrogation methods, found a withering internal review which concluded with the finding that torture techniques, like waterboarding, used in "black site" prisons had been ineffective. This was particularly troublesome because the CIA director had argued the opposite before the committee, contradicting the agency's own findings. When the CIA discovered that the investigators had the review, it started going through their computer logs to find out how they had got hold of it.
In short the CIA spirited people away and tortured them, concluded this was useless, suppressed those conclusions, lied about them to elected officials and then spied on the people who had a democratic mandate to discover the truth precisely because they discovered the truth. Those black sites in far away lands have sister cities within the democratic process.
The defence for this duplicity is invariably national security. To be kept safe we must also be kept ignorant; to protect democracy it must be undermined. The unfettered phone surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency revealed the degree to which politicians collude in much of this – asking soft ball questions and apparently happier being fobbed off than taking on the democratic responsibilities.
"You can get caught up in that world. There's a certain glamour to it I think for a lot of elected officials," Senator Martin Heinrich, who is on the intelligence committee, told Politico. The price for that glamour is high and we all pay for it.
But nobody can claim we weren't warned: "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world," former vice-president Dick Cheney said shortly after 9/11. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion … That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal … to achieve our objective."
Those shadows are long. They have concealed unspeakable horrors abroad. Increasingly they are casting darkness at home.
[Image via AFP]
China's surge in military spending gains headlines, partly because of the ominous implications regarding its regional contest with Japan, but it's the deeper structures of military spending in general that are far more compelling.
There are few surprises about the distribution of military spending: for all the current focus on China's growing military outlays – and it is significant that they have embarked on a sequence of double-digit increases as a percentage of GDP – the United States still accounts for 40% of such expenditures. However, the distribution is not the only thing that matters; it's the sheer scale of such investment – $1.756tn in 2012. The "peace dividend" from the end of the cold war has long since bitten the dust. Global military spending has returned to pre-1989 levels, undoubtedly a legacy of the war on terror and the returning salience of military competition in its context. In fact, by 2011 global military spending was higher than at any year since the end of the second world war.
So, what is the explanation for such huge investments? Is it simply the case that states are power-maximising entities, and that as soon as they have access to enough taxable income they start dreaming war?
In a very general sense, militarisation could be seen as an integral aspect of capitalism. One of the central ambiguities of capitalism is that it is necessarily a global system, with production and exchange extending beyond national boundaries; yet at the same time, units of capital (corporations etc) tend to be concentrated within national states where they are afforded an infrastructure, a labour force, and a great deal of primary investments. Even the process of globalisation presupposes the investment and guidance of national states. The more deeply companies are intertwined with national states, the more they rely on those states to fight their competitive battles on a global stage. Maintaining a military advantage is arguably an intrinsic part of this.
However, once this rather abstract principle is established, the question still remains unanswered. After all, there is no inherent reason why geo-economic competition should lead to defence spending consuming trillions of dollars of value each year. Part of the answer has to be located in the way that high levels of military spending became such an entrenched part of the global landscape in the aftermath of two world wars.
In the context of the second world war, and then in the subsequent cold war, one thing about military spending that became abundantly clear is that it is never just about conflict. As in the conduct of wars themselves, the institutionalisation of military spending quickly becomes entangled in a series of incentives that are entirely tangential to the ostensive motive.
First of all, states that do embark on large scale military investment quickly assume strategic command of core sectors of the economy, allowing for a degree of planning and co-ordination, a level of state capacity that might otherwise be deplored by business as "socialism". Quite a lot of the major US technological advances made under the rubric of "free enterprise", including particularly Apple's innovations, owe themselves originally to state investments organised under the banner of "defence".
Second, military investment is not just an effect of economic growth, but often a lever in enhancing it. This is a complicated story in itself. Post-war US growth was probably enhanced by arms spending, but the levels of spending required during the Vietnam war sapped too much capital away from other profitable investments. By the same token, it is not clear whether Japan's rise to becoming a major global economic power would have been possible had its military commitments not been constitutionally limited.
Nonetheless, there is some complex evidence of arms spending increasing growth. Barry Rundquist and Thomas Carsey's study of military procurement in the United States demonstrates that this has a distributive aspect. Such spending in the US helps already wealthy, booming locales become even wealthier, but it does not tend to make poor areas wealthier and nor does it reduce unemployment. This is quite significant, because one of the major arguments governments offer for protecting military spending is that it protects jobs – the one situation in which governments almost always feign an interest in employment. There is actually little evidence for this claim.
That brings us to a final point. There is no way to discuss the real dimensions of military competition without looking at how this is represented for particular audiences. One thinks of the way in which struggles over arms spending in the US become inflected with evocations of external threats, which help consolidate domestic power blocs. The Reaganite-era neo-conservative bloc was impossible without an elevated Russian "threat". So, particularly in states with an imperialist role, military spending can become complexly bound up not only with state-building strategies and agendas for regional economic growth, but also with domestic hegemonic strategies in which the legitimacy of governments hinges upon their ability to project violence.
To this extent, to really understand world arms spending it is necessary to penetrate beneath the generalities about sui generis state behaviour, as power-maximisers and so on, and delve into the messy politics of militarism in each society.
'You constantly hear the pipeline argument: there are no women here because there are no women over there. VCs [venture capitalists] blame industry, and industry blames universities, and universities blame schools and schools blame the parents."
Anne Marie Imafidon is a 24-year-old tech genius and founder of Stemettes (a charity to get girls into science, technology, engineering and maths). She was talking on Thursday night about the dearth of women in the tech industry, in all these industries, in the lead-up to International Women's Day. Sixty per cent of all graduates are women, but only 17% of computer science grads are, and only 20% of people studying physics. Only 13% of those working in the tech industry are female.
International Women's Day used to be the day we spent arguing about what the most important issues should be for International Women's Day. Is it OK to talk about feminism in rich nations while women are being raped in the Congo? How can you rank the importance of the glass ceiling against the threat of domestic violence? What I never saw coming was this bizarre situation in which the fields that you'd think of as the most modern, the most cutting edge – tech, physics, engineering – were replicating working conditions so sexist they make Mad Men look like Spare Rib. Not only are there no women to start off with in this area, but the ones there are leave.
"Isn't that just because they're having children?" I ask, with my dumb, humanities, 90s sensibilities. Imafidon and Cate Huston, a software engineer at Google, laugh in my face. "No, it is not because they're having children. It's because of the way they're treated. They're not hired, they're not listened to and they're not promoted."
To go back to the beginning: does this start in schools? Charles Wallendahl, a young Teach First ambassador who teaches at a Archbishop Lanfranc, in Croydon, thinks not. "Homophobia is a problem in schools. Sexism is not a problem in schools. Most teachers are women. The number of times I get called "miss" when I do the register … But kids spend most of their time at home, they pick up these things from their parents."
And yet, whatever the source of it, it's definitely at school that the gaps open up. Boys and girls are equally keen on maths at the age of five. By the time they're eight, girls have internalised the message that they can't do it. Nimish Lad, from the Wootton Academy, was at a workshop on Friday about stamping out sexism in schools, and said: "I was just speaking to a girl who's one of our Oxbridge candidates, and she said she didn't want to do physics, because that's not how her mind works."
Dr Anna Zecharia, from Science Grrl (set up to get more girls into science), thinks there's been a change in gender stereotyping; things are moving, fast, in the wrong direction. "If you look at the gender marketing of toys, sexual objectification of all women, boxing people in to very narrow, old-fashioned gender models, everything in my culture values my physicality above all my other attributes."
Paradoxically, science itself – which I think of as smooth and polished like a test tube, impervious to the emotional demands of prejudice – is often the source of this re-domestication drive. Gina Rippon, professor of cognitive neuro-imaging at Aston University (whom I also met at the schools workshop), said: "There's this constant drumbeat of biology as destiny, which doesn't help. People are driven by what they can get published, and what gets published is positive results. So maybe 2% of studies will show differences between men's and women's brains, and those are what will be published."
It's hardly surprising, then, that girls persistently underperform in what they call "self-efficacy tests" (how good you think you are), compared to their performance in, well, everything else.
Universities have a case to answer, too. Huston tells me a story about how the computer science teams had to be allocated handicaps, and were given one AI student and one girl. In Edinburgh university, this century. A geophysicist (who wished to remain anonymous) said: "When you're a female science student, it's a bit like being a professional woman in the Middle East. You're neither male nor female. You're a third sex, to them."
Imafidon (who, just by the by, took her maths and IT GCSEs while she was still at primary school), says: "Look, I don't get hassle. If I can see something's happening, and I look at you, you will shut up. The other thing is, I have a reputation. They expect everything I say to be golden."
Nevertheless, as Huston says: "I still spend all day every day surrounded by dudes." Imafidon laughs. "Yeah, it's a weird situation, being the only person in the room who can understand why their girlfriend got upset."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
[Angry woman at computer via Mark Aplet / Shutterstock]
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In the opinion of one transplanted Brit, it's a soap opera as inept as any other - and it doesn't live up to the new U.S. standard
The other night, rather behind the rest of the known planet and probably some parts still unknown – the deepest Amazon, say, where naked tribesmen agonize weekly over poor old Mary and Matthew – I sat down to catch up on my Downton Abbey.
It's mine by birthright, I suppose, as an Englishman in America, land of the free and home of the binge-watch. Beset with a small child, I had lost much of that free time, and thus fallen far behind – further even than the one-season lag the US must still endure. But perhaps I had enough in me to sync up in time for tonight's season-four finale on PBS.
Indeed, House of Cards may be America's weekend-killing addiction of the moment, but Downton, we are told, is worth it.
The Netflix political drama itself derives from a British series, a suave if aging shocker reanimated with American energy, camp and schlock-horror verve. In Downton, we have a living transplant, a stately if seductive fairytale playing out in the years around the first world war - a time of unchecked elite excess featuring frocks and frock coats that are really rather lovely ... or at least that's as far as I got.
This time around, two episodes was quite enough to remind me that America's love for this rotten show is drawn from the same well as that baseless love so many Americans maintain for the British royal family. You know it's not for you – in fact, it's rather silly. And you know it's not even worth an hour's attention on a Sunday evening, what with True Detective and soon, once again, Mad Men and Game of Thrones. Given the vigor of your own institutions, you know that, ultimately, it's beneath you.
But you watch it anyway.
America, you can do better than Downton Abbey.
You can do better TV, obviously. Where to start? At the beginning of the revolution, perhaps, with The Sopranos. Or with The Wire or Breaking Bad. Even with House of Cards, if you must. And, oh, how you must: at least half a million of you watched all 13 hours' worth of Frank Underwood's maneuvering last weekend.
I understand the need to binge. Oh, how I do. Before I became a parent, my wife was in New York and I was in London, and so I still had hour upon hour for such things. Back then, my entire social life seemed to revolve around Tony, Paulie, Carmela and Artie Bucco. I'd watch two or three episodes of the Sopranos each night and then call transatlantic to express my exhilaration, fear or both.
Surprisingly, I still got married, and once the resulting small child was safely asleep, we pitched into Mad Men, Orange Is the New Black and all the rest.
In such company, Downton Abbey is all show-off and no substance. It is little more than an enormous confidence trick played by writer Julian Fellowes, ITV and PBS on the world – and especially Americans, those suckers for something to talk about around the water cooler. If it looks good and the write-ups say it's good, it must be good. Right, America? Mustn't it even be ... grand?
Grand with what? Its ludicrous melodrama? With its stultifying lack of ambition beyond flogging the hoary old country-house potboiler of upstairs, downstairs and out over the hah-hah and back? Or with its script? With that insulting, inept, dashed-off, corned-beef hash of a script it force-feeds its hugely talented, entirely wasted cast?
It's a grand waste of time, is what it is, enough to leave David Chase, Matthew Weiner and a dozen other talented show-runners weeping into their martinis. Five seasons and Christmas specials – and counting? Big deal with NBC to rehash it all for the Gilded Age? For this?
America, you can do much better than Downton Abbey.
It thinks it's better than you, too. This is a show about class in the way that Britain is about class, which is the way in which America is supposedly not. And Downton is not just about the British class system. (If you want to read or see something about it, read or see The Shooting Party, quickly.) Downton is a product and expression of the British class system. A highly approving expression, a show of and for the 1%. And 99% of America doesn't need any more of that.
Downton's sickly harmony between nobs and proles is a ludicrous facade erected by an avowedly elitist Conservative life peer who is married to the daughter of a real one and once wrote a supposedly satirical novel called Snobs.
Poke this facade, even lightly, and it falls. The Granthams are top dogs. We are constantly told, by every character from Daisy the sweetly dim kitchen maid to the loveable old lord, that "times are changing". Cosmetic codswallop, I tell you. In Fellowes' world, which is the world of Britain's Conservative-led government, the times are not changing – and have not changed. Let the nobles lead, indeed.
Yet still the numberless hordes allow themselves to be cowed and babied, every Sunday night for five seasons and counting. And all while True Detective is on. It's extraordinary.
It's also extraordinary that I even made it through the season and a half that I did. I suppose it was because Downton, despite itself, kept offering consolations. However many times Fellowes allowed Anna the maid to comfort Cora or had Carson the butler offer lonely-hearts advice to Mary, there was always something to lull – or gull – me right back. A nicely delivered line here; a plausibly nasty edge to Thomas there. Or, tellingly enough for an angry but class-bound Brit, an opportunity to tell anyone and everyone I know that, back when I was in London, I used to work with the girl who became Lady Edith.
But this time, in America, re-engaging, I was brought up short. What did it was this: the realization that in the world of Downton Abbey everyone, but everyone, knows their place. The lords, the servants. Branson the chauffeur, who being both Irish and a bit of a lefty should have known his from the start, despite his wholly unlikely success in marrying in. Even, I suspect, everyone behind the camera, down to whatever is the crew equivalent of the girl who lights the fires. Even the audience.
Obviously, this worldwide love for the Granthams, as much as that for the cursed Windsors, springs from all humanity's love of a good soap opera. That I get. In that case, the best that can be said for the soap that is Downton Abbey is, well, at least the sets don't wobble.
But those sets being the unyielding walls of a genuine stately home, Highclere Castle (which could never be in Yorkshire, let me tell you), built with the blood and sweat of others for the continuing profit of a gang of genuine aristocrats, the whole thing should make anyone remotely normal feel distinctly, queasily ill.
America, you can do so much better.
Or if you really think you can't, there's always Sherlock, I suppose.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Conservatives keep trying to use America's religious freedom as a way to limit everyone else's rights, especially women and LGBT
Last week, the Kansas House of Representatives passed a bill (pdf) that would have broadly legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians. Luckily, after national outrage, the bill was halted. But the fight isn't over: the bill's reliance on religious freedom to justify discrimination is a sign of right-wing efforts to come.
The bill's scope was impressive in its expansiveness: Kansans would have been able to legally refuse to provide just about any service to anyone whose relationship they dislike for religious reasons, and could have refused to provide services "related to" any relationship they dislike for religious reasons. The bill specifically enumerated adoption, foster care, counseling, social services, employment and employment benefits, as well as the general categories of "services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges", as permissible areas for discrimination.
In other words, under the bill, any individual Kansan could have hung a "No Gays, No Lesbians, No Dogs" sign on the door of his restaurant. Any individual Kansan could have refused to hire someone, serve someone a drink, rent someone an apartment, sell someone a pair of pants or accommodate someone at a hotel if that someone is gay. Any employer could even have refused to extend insurance coverage to a gay employee's husband or wife if he thinks same-sex marriage is wrong. Even government employees paid with everyone's tax dollars would have had carte blanche to discriminate – social workers don't have to work with gay couples, police officers don't have to come to the assistance of a gay person in need.
And if a gay person discriminated against by an individual or a private business decided to sue? They would not only lose, but under this bill, they would have had to pay the other side's attorney's fees.
This hateful backlash is, of course, a response to the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage, and the fact that marriage equality's inevitability is finally dawning on conservatives. Virginia is the latest state to see laws against same-sex marriage fall, and it won't be the last. But situating the discrimination in religious liberty is about more than just homophobia: it's part of a larger right-wing strategy to allow those who hold particular religious beliefs to make the rest of us live according to their whims.
It's a tactic that well-funded conservative groups are bringing to the courts through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and it's their legal arguments that undoubtedly gave ammunition to the Kansas legislators. In more than 100 cases, a variety of organizations and employers are asserting their right to determine the healthcare their employees may access. The argument in many of the cases is a novel interpretation of religious liberty: that such liberty not only gives individuals the freedom to practice their own religions, but that for-profit companies have religious rights and are not obligated to abide by generally applicable laws if the owner of those companies believes that following the law forces him to pay for something he finds objectionable.
In the ACA cases, the objectionable matter is birth control – a good start, given the propensity of politicians and the courts to see women's reproductive health as less important, and more up for general political debate, than other aspects of basic health care. Religious owners of companies ranging from arts and crafts stores to car dealerships to cabinet makers all claim that because they think birth control is wrong, their employees should not be able to have it covered in their health care plans.
The logic is the same as that behind the Kansas law: religious freedom means the freedom to limit everyone else's rights.
Kansas legislators claimed that this law is about preserving the rights of religious folks to exercise their beliefs without state interference. But that's not the case: no one is forcing a religious individual to violate the tenets of their faith. Many people find same-sex unions morally objectionable, and that is their prerogative. Luckily, no state in the nation is forcing religious Christian men to marry each other. No state in the nation requires religious institutions to perform, promote or sanction same-sex marriage. No state in the nation makes it illegal to hold or express negative views on same-sex marriage.
The big violation of religious freedom at issue here is the requirement to live in reality – in a country where same-sex marriages exist, and where gay people exist, and where it's increasingly impermissible to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation. The Kansas law tried to give religious people who dislike homosexuality not only the right to live according to their beliefs, but also the right to exclude gay people from any facet of public life over which the religious have power.
Religious freedom is a cornerstone of the US constitution. The right to live and worship as we choose is a foundational American value, highlighted in the very first of the original amendments. But your freedom only extends as far as my nose. I shouldn't be allowed to refuse to help a Christian crime victim if I'm a Wiccan cop. I shouldn't be allowed to refuse to serve black patrons if I'm a white restaurateur whose sincere religious beliefs hold that black skin is the mark of Cain and therefore the races shouldn't mix. And I shouldn't be allowed to refuse to accommodate a lesbian guest if I'm a fundamentalist Christian hotel owner.
Shifting American power structures make those happy with the earlier hierarchy increasingly uncomfortable. And that makes sense: if you're a middle-class white Christian in the United States, you're used to broader social norms both reflecting and revolving around your beliefs, values and experiences. As other groups gain recognition, rights and power, those who are uncomfortable with progress will come up with new and creative ways to maintain their hold on power.
That's what underlies the right-wing hostility to reproductive freedom: all over the world, access to family planning tools translates into social, economic and political gains for women. It's not about birth control; it's about gender equality, and how that equality undermines a conservative vision of an ideal male-led society and family. Societal acceptance of homosexuality poses the same threat: if a nuclear family can have two women heading it, there's not much of an argument for keeping women and men tied to restrictive, heterosexual gender roles.
Attempts to keep us straightjacketed into traditional roles, and the power structures that serves, is what's behind hostility to both women's rights and LGBT rights. The legal strategies to advance and scale back those rights have also gone hand in hand – the right to sexual privacy underlying the cases that legalized birth control and abortion also played in Lawrence v Texas, which invalidated a Texas law against sodomy. And now, the arguments presented in the ACA cases seeking to limit women's access to birth control are being used to push the envelope on discriminatory laws seeking to exclude LGBT Americans from public spaces, and situate them as second-class citizens – quite literally secondary to the comfort of those who would use religion as cover for bigotry.
The Kansas bill didn't become law because the forces behind it are losing. That's cold comfort to gay Kansans who were just issued a very clear "you are not welcome here" message from their elected officials. The Republican party, whose members have yanked the welcome mat out from under the feet of too many groups, should perhaps consider whether a strategy of alienation is a winning one. After all, are there many strong supporters of this law in Kansas who weren't already voting Republican? On the flip side, younger voters overwhelmingly support gay rights. And so do gay people – increasingly, so do their families and friends. A plan of aggressively antagonizing LGBT people is not a winning one.
The many of us who abhor blatant, legal discrimination are rightly incensed about even the fact that this law was ever put on the table. But we should also see it for what it is: just one piece of a much larger puzzle. The really crucial part – the legal backing for laws like this one – will be decided by the US supreme court very soon. If the court allows for as expansive interpretations of religious freedom as the anti-ACA plaintiffs have argued, expect to see more of these laws proposed and passed in the states. And then, segregating Friends of Dorothy won't just be in Kansas anymore.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
The US constitution's Bill of Rights is envied by much of the English-speaking world, even by people otherwise not enthralled by The American Way Of Life. Its fundamental liberties – freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom from warrantless search – are a mighty bulwark against overweening state power, to be sure.
But what are these rights actually worth in the United States these days?
Ask Cecily McMillan, a 25-year-old student and activist who was arrested two years ago during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan. Seized by police, she was beaten black and blue on her ribs and arms until she went into a seizure. When she felt her right breast grabbed from behind, McMillan instinctively threw an elbow, catching a cop under the eye, and that is why she is being prosecuted for assaulting a police officer, a class D felony with a possible seven-year prison term. Her trial began this week.
McMillan is one of over 700 protestors arrested in the course of Occupy Wall Street's mass mobilization, which began with hopes of radical change and ended in an orgy of police misconduct. According to a scrupulously detailed report (pdf) issued by the NYU School of Law and Fordham Law School, the NYPD routinely wielded excessive force with batons, pepper spray, scooters and horses to crush the nascent movement. And then there were the arrests, often arbitrary, gratuitous and illegal, with most charges later dismissed. McMillan's is the last Occupy case to be tried, and how the court rules will provide a clear window into whether public assembly stays a basic right or becomes a criminal activity.
New York is not the only place where the first amendment's right to assembly continues to get gouged by police and prosecutors. In Chicago, police infiltrators goaded three activists into making Molotov cocktails; the young men were then charged with terror crimes – charges of which they were acquitted by an Illinois jury last week. Now that North Carolina has erupted into enormous protests against its far-right state government, we can likely expect police there to seek creative ways, legal and otherwise, to stifle mass political participation.
The freedom to assemble remains strong – as long as you're a single person holding up your sign on a highway embankment or some other lonely spot. But the right to engage in real public demonstrations has been effectively eviscerated by local ordinances and heavy-handed police tactics like aggressive surveillance, "kettling" protestors with movable plastic barriers, arbitrary closures of public spaces and the harassment and arrest of journalists who would tell the tale.
It's not exactly one of our sexier inalienable truths, the freedom to assemble. It was supposed to be a done deal, a ho-hum "first-generation right" clinched long ago in our society, threatened only in places like Ukraine or Thailand while Americans raced forward developing new "positive" rights like the right to water, or internet access. But like other "negative" freedoms against state interference – freedom of religion and freedom from warrantless and invasive searches – the right to assemble is being challenged at a time when thousands of Americans are taking to the streets.
As our rights melt away, we have taken some solace in the nasty responses to Pussy Riot's punk-rock protests in Putin's authoritarian state. At least we're not like Russia, where free speech is policed and controlled by law.
But what might happen to a homegrown Pussy Riot in New York? If, say, a politically conscious hip-hop group plugged in their amps near the altar of Saint Patrick's cathedral in midtown Manhattan, you can bet that misdemeanor trespassing would only be the beginning. Given that US police often have such an easy time padding their charges – remember Cecily McMillan – it's conceivable that an American Pussy Riot could face resisting arrest and assaulting an officer as well. That's two years in jail, which is the same as the sentence handed down to Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.
For decades, any hint of a comparison between freedom-loving America and authoritarian Russia has been viewed as the whiny hyperbole. But anecdotes and hypotheticals aside, how do Russia and the US compare when it comes to that fundamental index of negative liberty? Namely, how many people does the state lock up?
The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In 2012, the incarceration rate in the United States (707 per 100,000) was about one and a half times that of Russia (472) and over triple the peak rate of the old East Germany (about 200). The incarceration rate for black men in the US is over five times higher than that of the Soviet Union at the height of the gulag (pdf). These are of course different societies with different histories – but the brute fact of our hyperincarceration cannot be explained away.
Our clearly enumerated rights are supposed to guarantee our freedom, but in a landscape of extreme inequality – economic, racial and gender inequality – the letter of the law doesn't always amount to much. Changing this socioeconomic landscape requires mass mobilization – often raucous, often messy, and utterly vital to the health of any real democracy. With this channel of political activity overpoliced to the point of blockage, the result is a positive feedback loop of rising inequality and eroding freedoms.
Can this circuit be broken? The trial of Cecily McMillan could end in a lengthy prison term or it could end in probation. But such cases matter not just for the defendants, and not even just for our freedoms as ends in themselves. They matter for the future of the good life in the United States.
His party just caved on holding the debt ceiling ransom in exchange for gutting the Affordable Care Act and other nutty ideas. Aghast at just how badly their party fared in past such adventures, all the top Republican leaders in the House from Speaker…
If George Orwell and Laurie Lee were to return from the Spanish civil war today, they would be arrested under section five of the Terrorism Act 2006. If convicted of fighting abroad with a "political, ideological, religious or racial motive" – a charge they would find hard to contest – they would face a maximum sentence of life in prison. That they were fighting to defend an elected government against a fascist rebellion would have no bearing on the case. They would go down as terrorists.
As it happens, the British government did threaten people leaving the country to join the International Brigades, by reviving the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870. In 1937 it warned that anyone volunteering to fight in Spain would be "liable on conviction to imprisonment up to two years". This was consistent with its policy of non-intervention, which even Winston Churchill, initially a supporter, came to see as "an elaborate system of official humbug". Britain, whose diplomatic service and military command were riddled with fascist sympathisers, helped to block munitions and support for the Republican government, while ignoring Italian and German deployments on Franco's side.
But the act was unworkable, and never used – unlike the Crown Prosecution Service's far graver threat to British citizens fighting in Syria. In January 16 people were arrested on terror charges after returning from Syria. Seven others are already awaiting trial. Sue Hemming, the CPS head of counter-terrorism, explained last week that "potentially it's an offence to go out and get involved in a conflict, however loathsome you think the people on the other side are ... We will apply the law robustly".
People fighting against forces that run a system of industrialised torture and murder and are systematically destroying entire communities could be banged up for life for their pains. Is this any fairer than imprisoning Orwell would have been?
I accept that some British fighters in Syria could be changed by their experience. I also accept that some are already motivated by the prospect of fighting a borderless jihad, and could return to Britain with the skills required to pursue it. But this is guilt by association. Some of those who go to fight in Syria might develop an interest in blowing up buses in Britain, just as some investment bankers might be tempted to launder cash for drug dealers and criminal gangs. We don't round up bankers on the grounds that their experience in one sector might tempt them to dabble in another. (The state won't prosecute them even when they do launder money for drug gangs and terrorists, as the HSBC scandal suggests.) But all those who leave Britain to fight in Syria potentially face terrorism charges, even if they seek only to defend their extended families.
Last week a British man who called himself Abu Suleiman al-Britani drove a truck full of explosives into the gate of Halab prison in Aleppo. The explosion, in which he died, allowed rebel fighters to swarm into the jail and release 300 prisoners. Was it terrorism or was it heroism? Terrorism, according to many commentators.
It's true that he carried out this act in the name of the al-Nusra Front, which the British government treats as synonymous with al-Qaida. But can anyone claim that liberating the inmates of Syrian government prisons is not a good thing? We now know that at least 11,000 people have been killed in these places, and that many were tortured to death. Pictures of their corpses were smuggled out of Syria by the government photographer employed to record them. There are probably many more. That combination of horror and bureaucracy – doing unspeakable things then ensuring that they are properly documented – has powerful historical resonances. It haunts us with another horror, and the questions that still hang over the Allied effort in the second world war: how much was known, how much could have been done?
As no one else is now likely to act, and as the raid on the prison would probably have been impossible without the suicide bomb, should we not be celebrating this act of extraordinary courage? Had David Cameron not lost the intervention vote, and had al-Britani been fighting for the British army, he might have been awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.
When you think of the attempt by the British battalion in the Spanish civil war to defend a place they called "Suicide Hill", with the loss of 225 out of 600 men, do you see this as an act of terror – a suicide mission motivated by an extreme ideology – or as a valiant attempt to resist a terror campaign?
Sue Hemming claims it is "an offence to go out and get involved in a conflict", but that is not always true. You can be prosecuted if you possess a "political, ideological, religious or racial motive" for getting involved, but not, strangely, if you possess a financial motive. Far from it: such motives are now eminently respectable. You can even obtain a City & Guilds qualification as a naval mercenary. Sorry, "maritime security operative". As long as you don't care whom you kill or why, you're exempt from the law.
I expect that's a relief to Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary who now chairs parliament's intelligence and security committee, where he ramps up public fears about terrorism. For several years he was chairman of ArmorGroup, whose business was to go out and get involved in conflict. The absence of one word from the legislation – financial – ensures that he is seen as a scourge of terrorism, rather than an accomplice. The British fighters in Syria should ask their commanders to pay them, then claim they're only in it for the money. They would, it seems, then be immune from prosecution.
Talking of which, what clearer case could there be of the "use or threat of action ... designed to influence the government ... for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause" than the war with Iraq? Tony Blair's ministers were, of course, protected by crown immunity, but could they have experienced no flicker of cognitive dissonance while preparing the 2006 act?
Whatever you might think of armed intervention in Syria, by states or citizens, Hemming's warning illustrates the arbitrary nature of our terrorism laws, the ring they throw around certain acts of violence while ignoring others, the risk that they will be used against brown and bearded people who present no threat. The non-intervention agreement of 1936 was not the last elaborate system of official humbug the British government devised.
• Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com
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