As 100 million people sit down to watch the only one per cent union members, professional sports players, give themselves brain damage in a state that rushed through anti-union legislation just in time for the “Superbowl,” I’m still thinking about the National Park Service mobilized a new eugenics to evict Occupy DC. This is not the eugenics of forced sterilizations, let alone exterminations. It does, however, seek to separate and control populations on grounds of hygiene and the word “deportation” is being freely floated on the right.

it’s worth debunking the hygienist claims for a moment. The much-announced “explosion” in rats around Occupy DC was amazingly widely reported, as was the comment from some minor city official that the encampment resembled a refugee camp in the underdeveloped world. How many journalists bothered to do a Google search which quickly reveals that DC has had a long-term rat infestation problem? Remember the rat-infested Taco Bell in New York? There are at a minimum 250,000 rats in New York, perhaps tens of millions, no one really knows.

The arrival of haz-mat protected workers recalls some not so distant history of right-wing rhetoric and practice. In October 2005, French youth of color erupted in unrest so serious that the then government reauthorized legislation first passed during the Algerian revolution (1954-62) to give itself extraordinary powers. The relatively unknown minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, made himself notorious for his remark that he would take a “Karcher”–a power-washer–to the minority neighborhoods. The overt gesture to extreme-right sentiment stood him in good stead in the presidential election in 2008. Now Sarkozy has twice been by-passed: U. S. cities have implemented his power-washing strategy against the Occupy encampments. And there is even a chance that in April, he will be eliminated in the first round of the French presidential election by the extreme right National Front.

Hygienic repossession

Such casual deployment of highly charged language and practice to find a trumped up justification for the exercise of power is troubling, to say the least. Left economists have been pointing to the contradiction that global capital no longer has a need for as much labor as is available in the developed nations, even for the low-wage service professions. Youth unemployment in particular makes a worrying spectacle in Europe and the US:

If Spain tops the list at 50%, U. S. youth unemployment rivals levels in Tunisia and Egypt prior to the revolutions in those countries. Occupy does not feel like a revolution but it seems that some on the official side are finding cause for concern. The new authoritarianism has been tempted to use the new eugenics as a pre-emptive strategy against any manifestation of dissent, not as a sign of strength but of its weakness. The hoses can clean the streets but no such tool exists to dispose of mass unemployment.