The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (3 page)

Well, as promised we did go double-check the numbers on the bank bailout and this is what we found. Yes, the bank bailouts made money for American taxpayers, right now to the tune of $10 billion, anticipated that it will be $20 billion. Those are seriously the numbers. This was the big issue, so we solved it.

Burnett ambushed one person, asking about what is likely the largest and most complex emergency financial program in the history of money, claiming that the purported revenue from the U.S. Treasury’s TARP should mollify the OWS protesters. Jump over to nonprofit investigative news organization ProPublica’s detailed reportage on the bailout, and you see that the $10 billion to $20 billion in reported revenue from TARP is dwarfed by the hundreds of billions still outstanding, likely never to be recovered. Burnett’s coverage was sadly typical.

Skeptical of the corporate media, people have developed their own. The decade that preceded OWS saw the rapid maturation of the digital media sector. In late 1999, media activists set up an independent media center and website to cover the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle, Washington. Days after going live, Indymedia.org was getting more hits than CNN.com, exposing police violence denied by the mainstream news. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002–2003, when the public was being force-fed pro-war propaganda through the mainstream media (weapons of mass destruction? mushroom clouds?), millions turned to the Internet as an alternative source of information, and people around the globe used it to organize the largest antiwar protests in history. On February 15, 2003, millions rocked the globe for peace. During major protests in New York City in 2004, against President George W. Bush and the Republican National Convention, technology activists deployed a program that allowed protesters to coordinate actions, TXTMob, which later evolved into Twitter.

Justin Wedes explained media strategy as we walked through Liberty Square, the name given by OWS to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan: “Throughout this process, we understood the importance of having an independent media center—in other words, of creating our own media. We could never rely on the mainstream media to depict us fairly. And we wanted to be the most go-to, responsible, accurate depictors of what is happening in this space. So, from day one, we set up an Indymedia Center, which includes a live stream.”

The live video streams of OWS advanced independent media strategy by making the unfiltered activity of the occupation available in real time to a global audience. The way the protest was organized, how the General Assembly operated and how working groups were established, was all streamed live, serving as an organizing template for solidarity occupations that began sprouting around the world. GlobalRevolution.tv, a group formed at OWS to video-stream the events there and to aggregate live video feeds from around the world, was co-founded by Vlad Teichberg, a Muscovite whose parents were forced out of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Teichberg was a derivatives trader on Wall Street until 2001, when he saw both the negative effects of globalization pushed by his industry and the rightward political shift in the United States following 9/11. He quit and became an activist opposing corporate power.

Teichberg told
Democracy Now!
that the media center “allows many people to work together to push out the message of what is being done, why it’s being done. . . . About a week and a week and a half into the protests, we finally broke through the mainstream media wall. At least the event was no longer boycotted or blocked. And, you know, the rest was history.”

The live video stream, along with increased interest in the story from mainstream journalists, and the near ubiquity of cell phone cameras and social media, allowed for another aspect of the protests to become widely and instantly publicized: the police crackdown. Thousands of arrests have been made since OWS started, in New York and around the country, including those of an extraordinary number of journalists. Josh Stearns of the media policy group Free Press started documenting the stories and amassed a list of close to sixty journalists arrested at the time of this writing.

In New York City, the volume of the arrests, and the police harassment and intimidation of journalists, led a consortium of news outlets and professional organizations, including the
New York Times
, the Associated Press, Reuters, and Dow Jones, to appeal for action from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

During the November 15, 2011, early-morning raid on Zuccotti Park, BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray told the police she was press and was told back, “Not tonight.” In mid-December, police raided the Brooklyn building to which Global Revolution TV moved after the shutdown of Liberty Square, arresting Teichberg and five other volunteers. Other occupants of the building, which the city’s Department of Buildings abruptly deemed “imminently perilous to life,” were not arrested.

Arrests of reporters, as Stearns’ data show, are not limited to New York City, and present a serious threat to journalism. Targeting of journalists is by no means a new phenomenon. What seems to be accelerating, along with the technological ease with which both the press and the public can record, stream, post, and otherwise publish events as they occur, is police interference, through intimidation, forced relocation away from sites of newsworthy events, assault, destruction of equipment or the erasure of digital media, and arrest.

Three years earlier, two colleagues and one of us (Amy) were violently arrested while covering the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. The police pulled the battery from my coworker Nicole Salazar’s video camera as they pinned her to the ground, bloodying her face. After Sharif Abdel Kouddous and I were handcuffed, a U.S. Secret Service agent tore our press credentials from our necks, declaring, “You won’t be needing these anymore.” More than forty journalists were arrested there that week. St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington offered no apologies. Rather, he suggested we could “embed” with the mobile field force. He was referring to the Pentagon system of embedding reporters with the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has brought the media to an all-time low.

Embed with the police? Rather than do that, we sued and, after three years, won a settlement, which included, in addition to a monetary penalty, the requirement that the St. Paul police receive training in how to conduct themselves while being covered by the press. The court ordered that the course curriculum meet the approval of the three journalists who had been arrested, along with that of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. While enormously time-consuming, the lawsuit was one of the only available means by which to hold the authorities accountable.

At the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the critique that wealth and opportunity are not equitably distributed, and our media system, largely controlled by corporations, contributes to that status quo. The Internet has created a seismic disruption to the balance of power in the media. It is getting easier and easier to post your thoughts, photos, or videos. Yet the Wild West of the Web is being tamed. Small Internet service providers are being driven out of business, with corporations like Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and AT&T dominating the market. Privacy, security, and the freedom to publish without fear of censorship are dwindling with each merger, with each effort by corporate lobbyists to further restrict the open Internet in favor of a narrow profit advantage.

While fighting to preserve a free Internet, journalists, press organizations, and the public must not give up on the older legacy media institutions. Television is still how most Americans get their news. We have a public television system in the United States that is a shadow of public broadcasting abroad, forever hobbled by congressional threats to “zero out” its budget. Groups like the Prometheus Radio Project fought for over a decade to win an opening for potentially thousands of new, low-power FM community radio stations to open. To take advantage of that, groups will have to organize and do the hard legwork to submit applications to the Federal Communications Commission. Public access television stations around the country are under attack from cable companies, who want to defund and shutter them, which will require time and organizing to combat.

The “crisis in journalism,” which has been blamed on the Internet’s disruption of traditional advertising business models, is also traceable to the very corporate behavior that many of the Occupiers are protesting. Leveraged buyouts of media properties have left newspapers with massive debt, forcing layoffs of journalists and support staff. By stripping away the profit motive, by removing the Wall Street bankers from the picture, solid, disciplined, nonprofit journalism is possible.

When the police raided Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011, and evicted the entire occupation, they destroyed the 5,000-plus-book OWS People’s Library, along with the tent that housed it, which had been donated by legendary rocker and National Book Award winner Patti Smith. The
Democracy Now!
team managed to get behind police lines to document the raid. Amid the rubble, we found one tattered book that escaped the library’s destruction: Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World Revisited
, published in 1958.

Huxley wrote in the book: “Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State—that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders. In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite.” Huxley goes on, “This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country’s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody.”

To avoid Huxley’s grim vision, to turn the tide against it, we need a strong, independent media, a media that serves the interest of the silenced majority.

Obama’s Wars: A Tragedy in Three Acts

Act I

The Wars Abroad

September 16, 2009

Let Us Not Become the Evil We Deplore

On September 14, 2001, the U.S. House of Representatives considered House Joint Resolution 64, “To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.” The wounds of 9/11 were raw, and the lust for vengeance seemed universal. The House vote was remarkable, relative to the extreme partisanship now in evidence in Congress, since 420 House members voted in favor of the resolution. More remarkable, though, was the one lone vote in opposition, cast by Barbara Lee of San Francisco. Lee opened her statement on the resolution, “I rise today with a heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and loved ones who were killed and injured in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.” Her emotions were palpable as she spoke from the House floor.

“September 11 changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. . . . We must not rush to judgment. Far too many innocent people have already died. Our country is in mourning. If we rush to launch a counterattack, we run too great a risk that women, children and other noncombatants will be caught in the crossfire.”

The Senate also passed the resolution, 98–0, and sent it on to President George W. Bush. What he did with the authorization, and the Iraq War authorization a year later, has become, arguably, the greatest foreign policy catastrophe in United States history. What President Barack Obama will do with Afghanistan is the question now.

On October 7, the U.S. enters its ninth year of occupation of Afghanistan—equal to the time the United States was involved in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. Obama campaigned on his opposition to the war in Iraq, but pledged at the same time to escalate the war in Afghanistan. On his first Friday in office, Commander in Chief Obama’s military fired three Hellfire missiles from an unmanned drone into Pakistan, reportedly killing twenty-two people, mostly civilians, including women and children. He has increased U.S. troops in Afghanistan by more than 20,000, to a total numbering 61,000. This does not count the private contractors in Afghanistan, who now outnumber the troops. The new U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is expected to ask for even more troops.

This past August was the deadliest month yet for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with fifty-one killed, and 2009 is by far the deadliest year, with 200 U.S. troops killed so far. These statistics don’t count the soldiers who commit suicide after returning home, nor those injured, and certainly don’t include the number of Afghans killed. The attacks also are increasing in sophistication, according to recent reports. So it may be no surprise that more comparisons are now being made between Afghanistan and Vietnam.

When asked about the comparison, Obama recently told the
New York Times
: “You have to learn lessons from history. On the other hand, each historical moment is different. You never step into the same river twice. And so Afghanistan is not Vietnam. . . . The dangers of overreach and not having clear goals and not having strong support from the American people, those are all issues that I think about all the time.”