FEBRUARY 2012 $10/year

THE NAYSAYER
Box 18026; Denver 80218

24:8 WN 284

The Naysayer of the Month

Occupying the Police Department

art of the political machine dominating Denver is the active role of nonprofits. These are usually corporate entities designed to protect personal fortunes while assuring that private money determines public policy. Often they employ out-ofoffice politicians. The government frequently gives the nonprofits money in the name of privatizing public services. The so-called charities, in turn, often lobby to destroy the integrity of public institutions. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the Piton Foundation. It has been second to none in showering its resources in demanding a veritable privatization of Denver Public Schools. The nonprofit has been a leading champion of charter schools, intervening in school board elections in the name of reform. More than anything, its selfavowed vision is to pluck a few promising youths from poor families and assure that they emerge as successful mandarins. Oil man Sam Gary hovers behind the Piton Foundation. His fortune derives from the oil industry. He has additionally been a major real estate player. In the process, he has been among those profiting from the redevelopment of the old Stapleton Airport. In honor of this, Denver Public Library (DPL) has named its new Stapleton branch for him. In celebrating that action, the librarys publicity coordinator, Consuelo Cosio, said nothing about Garys oil money and political connectionsapparently, he did not bother with the librarys resources to research and elaborate on Garys role. Since it opened its horrid new central branch in 1995, the entire emphasis of DPL has been on honoring big-money interests: galleries recall architects and the rich rather than authors and educators. While claiming a shortage of funds forces it to close existing branches, DPL is ready to open new ones. Simultaneously, the library has poured its funds into a sterile, dated, and irrelevant one city/one book program. Its guards perform as hucksters who disrupt its book sales where it disposes of volumes rather than keeping them as a repository of knowledge. All this makes the honoring of Gary apropos of an institution that reflects a philistine culture rather than being a place of books, learning, and an alternate to the world of the Piton Foundation. It makes DPL the Naysayer of the Month.

Stock Show Droppings

n 1968, during the National Western Stock Show, a group of drunken cowboys barged into a hippie coffeehouse, lassoing and hog-tying a couple of long-haired, bearded young men. The invaders gave them instant haircuts with their sheep shears. In the process, they personified the unthinking brutality which is part and parcel of the cowboy myth. Nobody has more celebrated it than the likes of Ronald Reagan and exponents of modern American reaction. This comes out in the Citizen of the West award. Launched in 1978, it is a foremost part of the Stock Show. Far more than the grand championship steer, it has become the most publicized part of the festivities. Invariably, it goes to a good old boy or girl, somebody who is part and parcel of the corporate/political establishment. Among those honored have been union busters Bill Coors, Pete Coors, and Ken Monfort. Other recipients include banker and construction
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ayor Michael Hancock has announced a reform of the police department. It is necessary in light of the extreme violence of Denvers finest. Among his challenges is finding a new police monitor. John Hickenlooper created that post, citing the need to reform the police department in light of the extreme violence of Denvers finest. Such repetition does not matter to those shaping and reviewing public policy. Nor have questions been raised about when and how the police department became so violent, especially under Wellington Webb. Likewise missing is any mention of the complete absence of the district attorneys office concerning police violence. It has been virtually invisible in calling police officers to account for their brutal behavior even as the city has paid out millions to victims of police beatings. Hancocks vows of reform came right after he had repeatedly mobilized the police to intimidate the harmless protestors of Occupy Denver. To show how tough and mean the forces of law and order are, the mayor saw that the police were deployed in full riot gear against the political protest. In other words, police violence is not a product of a few, seemingly out-of-control officers, but reflects city hall. Webb had especially made this clear: far from being a force to defend and protect, he acted to assure that the police were a virtual occupying army, especially in poor black and Latino neighborhoods. They were to show gangbangers and everybody else that nobody had dare upset the pro-17th Street apple cart of Webb, Hickenlooper, and Hancock. This, in turn, explains the virtual hysteria about Occupy Denver. The establishments crackdown on it is part of a national phenomenon. The Department of Homeland Security has fueled the campaign. Barack Obama has encouraged the repression. Amidst the Occupy movement, he signed the latest defense act which not only whitewashes the crimes of George W. Bush, but allows the government ever greater powers against any and all protests. More than anything, the Department of Homeland Security is an agency designed to induce an atmosphere of omnipresent fear and anxiety. Besides the utter cynicism about the way the unscrupulous have used the flag to advance their police-state agenda, the BushObama measures reflect the very real fear of the politicians and their masters. Some of them, such as Webb and Hancock who grew up in black communities where police violence is part of everyday life, have a strong inkling that the victims of the establishment might and should fight back. Likewise, the massive security apparatus, corporate America shows that capitalists see the need to protect themselves from revenge by those whom they regularly victimize through their arrogance, power, and obnoxious policies. Time and again, it has been clear that armed might of the state threatens the populace far more than any gangsters or terrorists. The more the United States government has engaged in terror bombings and police-state actions against civilians internationally, the more its policies have applied domestically. With the willing complicity of Hollywood, politicians and corporate interests have painted criminals and voices of opposition as such crazed fiends that any measures are justified against them. Nine-Eleven so well served this purpose that anybody with any gumption has strong doubts about the official version of that crime.
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The Naysayers next meet on Saturday, February 4, Enzos Pizza, 3424 Colfax (between Cook and Madison) 5:30 PM

THE NAYSAYER, FEBRUARY 2012, p. 2 Occupy the Police ................................................................................................ continued from p. 1
Added to this is a foreboding by those with money and power. They have seen their economic system crash. Far from promising the populace a flourishing future, they constantly talk about the need for austerity and cutbacks. The suppression of the Occupy movement is to show that opposition, even as confused and as harmless as a few people blocking sidewalks and sleeping in the Civic Center, is completely intolerable. Besides, the corporate-political elite cannot escape its own fearmongering. It realizes that the Occupy movement might spread. Instead of simply occupying public places, there is the possibility that disgruntled workers will not accept further layoffs, but will occupy their factories. The populace might well recognize that voting for the likes of Barack Obama and comparable Democratic saviors of the status quo is not what politics is all about. Rather, it is taking their destiny into their own hands. Rather than the mushy, feel-good tone of the Occupyers farcical general assemblies, there might emerge workers councils stating that the interests of the populace, not the bottom line of corporations, are at the heart of the commonweal. To their credit, Occupiers at least knew not to echo Hancock when the mayor hosted a thoroughly hypocritical ceremony in December memorializing the homeless who have died during the past year. They saw it as an obscene farce: that a mayor, ready to employ extreme violence to remove the homeless from the Civic Center, was bemoaning the victims of the system he so fervently supports. That the pompous objected to the crowd puncturing of the mayors balloon showed they demand prim and proper behavior only on the part of the victims of the establishment. They never decry a system which generates homelessness or the viciousness of ruling Denver that is at the heart of police violence. Simultaneously, Richard Rosenthal seemingly woke up to the endemic culture of deceit and violence in the police department. He came to Denver from Portland in 2005 as a supposedly independent monitor of the police. Such a position was necessary because the manager of safety, the civilian charged with overseeing the police department, obviously was not checking improper police conduct. During his tenure, Rosenthal occasionally blasted the police, but virtually nothing happened about disciplining errant offers until both Hickenlooper and his manager of safety, Al LaCabe, had left city hall. Only during the caretaker administration of Bill Vidal did something seem to be done. To assure that the Vidal actions will have no real impact, the civil service commission has reversed some of the firings of police officers. Rosenthal, in turn, has fled to Canada. Only now that he is out of the country has he suggested a federal investigation of the police since neither the Hickenlooper reforms nor his role as police monitor proved effective. Unfortunately, a thorough link between police violence, the way the establishment has come to smear Rosenthal, and the nature of the system as a whole has been missing on the part of Occupy Denver. So has been a means of communication other than its poorly organized meetings. (Many of the homeless and victims of the economic system do not have the fancy cellphones and super-computer equipment so beloved by the Internet illuminati.) Simultaneously, the Occupyers and their supporters suffer from the way official liberalism triumphed in Denver in 198387 with the election and re-election of Federico Pea. By that time, rather than focusing on class and power, self-described progressives and radicals had become politically correct. They more judged an individual on gender, race, and sexual preference than whether he or she supported capitalism or had an alternative vision for society. Added to this, was their extreme intolerance: any mention of the betrayals, sellouts, and hucksterism of blacks, women, homosexuals, and their other favorites was met by charges of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other epithets. Many of these radicals were paralyzed during the first year of the Obama administration, fearing to criticize him as a black. Many still slobber over Hillary Clinton. With the slightest encouragement, they will endorse her as a champion of women and human rights as they shut their eyes to her support of war and imperialism. Given this, the question of power has been missing from analyses of the Occupy movement, especially among the vultures and vampires who have been quick to seize on the movement. Typical is Yes!. This is a progressive West Coast magazine that is fully in tune with the New Age movement of feel-good solutions. It has produced an extremely skimpy instant book on the Occupyers. It is filled with articles by the usual suspects such as Amy Goodman and David Sirota. More than anything, they are pleading for mainstream society to embrace old and tired social democratic reforms of more equitable taxation and a humanistic safety net. Exactly why these have disappeared over the years, the cynical and conservative core of the New Deal and Great Society, and the way reforms of capitalism have repeatedly failed, are beyond them. Even more cynical is a volume issued by OR Books, a leftist publisher. At the behest of a self-avowed Trotskyite, it has given its immediate portrait of Occupy Wall Street. Rather than arranging for unemployed workers supporting Occupy Wall Street to lay out the volume, it farmed out the job to a company in India. Until those backing the Occupyers start seeing that such friends are as dangerous as the most out-of-control, brutal police officer, the sacrifices of those freezing for Occupy will be in vain.

Stock Show ........................................................................................................... continued from p. 1

magnate Nick Petty and oil plunderer Cortlandt Dietler. This year, the Stock Show has named Lynne Cheney the Citizen of the West. The recipient is part of the Dick CheneyGeorge W. Bush school of reaction. If anything, she makes her husband, the former vice president, look like a humane liberal. Like others around the Bush administration, she is among those who are ready to cut welfare and all programs that assist the poor. Simultaneously, the Stock Show has endlessly demanded handouts from the citizenry. Despite past promises that if taxpayers gave it money for its festival, it would commit itself to the city, it has threatened to leave town and ignore its lease. The threat should be treated like much of the other Stock Show hoopla. Typical is that while it claims to include a super rodeo, at the same time the Stock Show opened so did that Professional Bull Riders competition at Madison Square Garden in New York. Added to this was the way the Stock Show publicity machine heralded Federico Pea as the grand marshal of its parade, a politician who personifies the total corporate commitment of the Democrats. He led the procession where the droppings from the bulls were the most accurate and honest advertisement of what the Stock Show and the polices of Pea and Cheney are all about. These animal wastes are far and away the most flourishing part of the Stock Show, an event that is more an imposition on the populace than a proud Denver gathering. Given the choice between the celebration of Pea and Cheney and the Stock Show leaving town, the citizens have a great chance to clean the environment and eliminate this example of corporate welfare. Ideally, Pea and Cheney will so lead the exit of the parade of lies.