Thursday, May 09, 2019

A plea for a citizen's tribunal on impunity

In Paris two months ago a feminist group went about and affixed stickers with female names to streets. This was more than about those streets that are named after people, and by people I mean 95 percent male, but also about the claim to the public space and how it has tended to be normatively male.
Are the street names going to change? I don’t know; I do know that this action was taken because they are never going to change – people in established positions, people in power are never going to change them – if there is no activity on the ground, from the ground, and in your face.
The division of political labor has the permanently pernicious effect that there is a political class – a circle which, as it were, runs both the discourse and the institutions of power. This effect is only partly off-set by “representative democracy”, especially when these democracies continue to generate judicial systems that are, basically, non and anti-democratic.
What has happened in the neoliberal era, as democracy from the street has been de-legitimated, is a slow, steady impunity creep that separates the powerful and wealthy from the rest in the sphere of justice. Not just rich crooks, but their minions, their protectors, the whole lot, are now less likely than ever to suffer the lot that is borne by the working class poor. It is from this point of view that I have been watching the discussion in the U.S. about whether or not to impeach Trump, look at his taxes, look at the Mueller report about him, get the Attorney General of the U.S. to testify before a Congressional committee, all that jazz, is being treated as a fun Washington thing. The political reporters will treat it all as a partisan butting head contest, with the main question being which butting head is going to be crowned the winner. In other words, elite shit. The winner doesn’t matter a damn.
Impunity is elite shit. It isn’t just Trump, it is the entire system, groaning under the privileges accorded to the most privileged and the jail sentences allotted to the least. Wachovia bank launders money for the cocaine cartels. Wachovia bank gets a fine, because, as Justice Department officials will tell you, we can’t do anything to disturb the fine economic activity of Wachovia bank. A small time African American dealer sells five caps of crack to an undercover cop. The dealer gets twenty years. The Justice Department doesn’t comment, because this is same old same old in every District Attorney territory in the U.S. And the wheel goes around, crushing us underneath it
So let’s put a stick in the wheel, shall we?
When the military junta in Argentina folded in 1983, President Alfonsin came to power, and started proceedings against certain members of the military high command who had participated in the Dirty War, as well as the leaders of the Monteneros (those who survived) for kidnappings and murders. However, the trials affected only a few. In 1986, the full stop law was enacted, the limited suits to those that would be enacted within 60 days of its passage, all others to be rendered null, and the due obedience law, in 1987, which halted the trials that had passed the full stop law. Then, when Menem was elected in 1989, he began issuing mass pardons, mostly for the military but some of them for the Montenero leadership (which, it must be said, has always been suspected of actually being led by agent provacateur, notably in the case of the leader, Mario Firminich – see Martin Edwin Andersen’s Dossier secreto for details).
Collectively, Alfonsin’s decrees were known as the impunity laws. In this way, the State covered up for the almost thirty thousand murders committed by the military junta.
Against this coverup, a civil rights organisation began to hold Tribunals against Impunity in Buenos Aires in 1990, with the aim of revealing as many facts as possible and shaming the state.
I’ve been thinking about this vis-à-vis the United States. It seems to me that we have been living through the era of Impunity, here: from the horrors committed in the name of fighting terror to the invasion of Iraq through the Obama directed drone war; from the unwillingness of the Justice department and the SEC to reign in or jail anyone for the financial meltdown of 2008 to the widespread fraud by the banks in the paperwork they have submitted to courts concerning mortgages; from the abolition of jury trial in the case of suits for damages to corporations to the Supreme Court’s increasing willingness to lend cover to any plutocratic attempt to buy elections and change laws in their favor. From, finally, the massive defiance of the Trump administration to recognize the Legislative branch as a co-equal, while being cheered on by the dysfunctional millionaire’s club known as the Senate.  On the cultural front, there is the impunity enjoyed by those in the media who have cheered along all these things, and who have never lost a dime for being not just wrong, but disastrously wrong; not just mistaken in their reporting or analysis, but being willing conduits of propaganda and lies. From their pumping up of Rogoff/Reinhart nonsense in the most recent Depression to the center-right logic of the editorial war against “entitlements” waged by the supposedly liberal press, we have an elite culture that collaborates with the predatory class because, well, it is owned by it.

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