[Peace-discuss] Fw: CONVENTION DISPATCH: Dinner With the Ruling Class, Lunch In the Police State

[unionyes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Sirota" <ds at davidsirota.com>
To: <unionyes at ameritech.net>
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2008 9:01 PM
Subject: CONVENTION DISPATCH: Dinner With the Ruling Class, Lunch In the 
Police State


> FYI - Here is the fourth of my regular dispatches about the Democratic
> convention in Denver for In These Times magazine. With Barack Obama
> set to take the stage at Invesco Field, this one looks at the parts
> of the convention that were largely ignored in favor of happy
> "change" rhetoric. - D
>
> http://www.theittlist.com/site/ittlist/ind/5108/
> <blocked::BLOCKED::http://www.theittlist.com/site/ittlist/ind/5108/>
>
> Convention Dispatch: Dinner With the Ruling Class, Lunch In the
> Police State
>
> By David Sirota
> In These Times, 8/29/08
>
> As the world waits to hear Barack Obamas message of change tonight
> at Invesco Field, I am still marveling at how I got to eat dinner
> last night with the American ruling class. Well, OK, not with, but
> near - and the experience was one of those 
more things change, more
> things stay the same
 moments that make it hard to hear Obamas
> soothing bromides - and that led me to opt out of the final night of
> the convention.
>
> Following Bill Clintons speech at the Pepsi Center, I headed over to
> Elways to have dinner with my friend Bill Hillsman, the iconoclastic
> media consultant who I got to know on Ned Lamonts campaign. We were
> later joined by Working Families Party executive director Dan Cantor
> and a few other progressives, and our conversation inevitably ended
> up focusing on whether Barack Obama would really push the kind of
> change he is promising.
>
> Thats when the ruling class showed up.
>
> Over the course of about 10 minutes, a few Obama advisers trickled
> into the restaurant, followed by a flood of some of the biggest
> sharks that swim in the murky delta where money and Democratic
> politics meet. Among others, Bob Rubin (Citigroup chair), Larry
> Summers (former Treasury Secretary), Jim Johnson (political
> rainmaker) and Laura Tyson (former Clinton economic adviser) filed in
> and sat down at a long dinner table - clearly some kind of economic
> pow-wow with Obama officials, leavened with other political
> celebrities like former-vice-president-turned-corporate-board-member
> Walter Mondale and journalist Al Hunt.
>
> I tried to capture the room in a photo you can see at
> www.theittlist.com <blocked::BLOCKED::http://www.theittlist.com/>
> . In the foreground you can see a goofy Hillsman posing as a bandit
> (left) and a grinning Cantor, and in the background, you can see
> those Ruling Class suits kibbutzing in the background (the tiny gray
> head above Hillsmans head is Rubins). The whole scene really summed
> up the strange oxymoronic forces that collide at conventions like
> this. Here we were, progressive grassroots activists plotting how to
> pressure Obama to fulfill his populist promises on issues like trade
> and corporate power. And right next to us, the American Ruling Class
> feasted on the Obama campaigns innards.
>
> Yes, in some persistent ways, the more things change, the more they
> stay the same.
>
> While my newspaper column tomorrow looks at some of the positive
> aspects of conventions, this dark conniving has been happening all
> over Denver this week, too. And unlike dinner last night, most of the
> worst kind of influence peddling happens in total secret at
> invitation-only parties like AT&Ts - the one that feted conservative
> Democratic lawmakers who recently granted that company legal immunity
> in the whole warrantless wiretapping scandal.
>
> Perhaps most troubling has been the involvement of government
> security agencies in trying to repress those protesting and reporting
> on the corruption. During a walk through downtown at lunch today, the
> police were (as they have been all week) patrolling the street in
> full riot gear.
>
> While I understand the need for security at events like this, the
> visual expression of force - the billy clubs, armor, helmets, and
> military-style patrols - are clearly designed to intimidate anyone
> from raising any kind of uncomfortable questions in any kind of
> public way. And that intimidation includes jailing reporters.
>
> ABC News reports that just yesterday, 
Police in Denver arrested an
> ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to
> take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic senators and VIP
> donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.
 ABC
> caught the whole thing on tape - and it perfectly captures the
> obscene use of Denvers municipal government to trample the First
> Amendment and cover-up brazen corruption.
>
> Denvers municipal government has, in effect, used the need for
> enhanced security as a rationalization to declare a kind of marshal
> law over the whole city - a marshal law enforced by taxpayer-funded
> security forces whose mission is to serve the public, yet which has
> too often been deployed this week to crush the public and serve the
> private Big Money interests that still run the Democratic Party.
>
> As a Denver taxpayer and voter, I am frankly embarrassed for my city,
> and for its political leaders. Nearly everyone I have talked to in my
> reporting during this convention has told me how disgusted they are
> at the citys authoritarian response to what is supposed to be a
> celebration of democracy.
>
> Between the scene at dinner last night and the constant sound of
> marching boots that continue to thrum through the Denver police state
> this week, I opted to bail out on Invesco and head home to my quiet
> residential neighborhood, where Im confident that the event telecast
> will - as it always does - filter out all the real-life ugliness and
> substantive issues that this election and this convention is supposed
> to be about. Maybe thats a cop out - like dropping some Soma in a
> Brave New World.
>
> But then, at least for the final night, Id rather remember this
> event for its truly valuable moments that brought together organizers
> and progressive movement builders, than for its moments that show the
> ugliest impulses of money, incumbency, and authoritarianism that
> still eat away at the Democratic Party.
>
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