The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (34 page)

Stéphane Grueso sums up the movement: “We are not a party. We are not a union. We are not an association. We are people. We want to expel corruption from public life . . . now, today, maybe it is starting to happen.”

June 23, 2010

Another World Is Possible, Another Detroit Is Happening

DETROIT—“I have a dream.” Ask anyone where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. first proclaimed those words, and the response will most likely be at the March on Washington in August 1963. In fact, he delivered them two months earlier, on June 23, in Detroit, leading a march down Woodward Avenue.

King said:

I have a dream that one day, right down in Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to live together as brothers. . . .

I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children . . . will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

I have a dream this afternoon that one day right here in Detroit, Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house anywhere that their money will carry them and they will be able to get a job.

Forty-seven years later, thousands of people, of every hue, religion, class, and age, might not have used those words exactly, but they marched down that same avenue here in Detroit in the same spirit, opening the U.S. Social Forum. More than 10,000 citizens, activists, and organizers have come from around the world for four days of workshops, meetings, and marches to strengthen social movements and advance a progressive agenda. Far larger than any Tea Party convention, it has gotten very little mainstream-media coverage. Not a tightly scripted, staged political convention, or a multiday music festival, the U.S. Social Forum defines itself as “an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences.” It is appropriate that the U.S. Social Forum should be held here, in this city that has endured the collapse of the auto industry and the worst of the foreclosure crisis. In Detroit, one is surrounded, simultaneously, by stark failures of capitalism and by a populace building an alternative, just, and greener future.

Environmental writer Rebecca Solnit says of the decay of Detroit, “the continent has not seen a transformation like Detroit’s since the last days of the Maya.” The core of modern Detroit, the automobile industry, helped facilitate the creation of suburbs that ultimately spelled doom for vibrant inner cities. Detroit, which had 2 million residents in the mid-1950s, now has dwindled to around 800,000. Poverty, joblessness, depopulation, and decay have created an almost post-apocalyptic scene here.

Carried within this dystopic, urban disaster, though, are the seeds of Detroit’s potential rebirth. Legendary Detroit organizer/philosopher Grace Lee Boggs helped organize the 1963 King march in Detroit. She turns ninety-five this week, and will be celebrated here at the U.S. Social Forum. We visited her at her home, which might well become a Detroit historic site because of the many organizations that were born there. She has lived in that same house for more than half a century, much of that time with her husband, the late political activist and autoworker Jimmy Boggs. Smiling, she says, “It’s really wonderful that the Social Forum decided to come to Detroit, because Detroit, which was once the symbol of miracles of industrialization and then became the symbol of the devastation of deindustrialization, is now the symbol of a new kind of society, of people who grow their own food, of people who try and help each other, to how we begin to think, not so much of getting jobs and advancing our own fortunes, but how we depend on each other. I mean, it’s another world that we’re creating here in Detroit.”

She reflects on the two delegations of young people attending the USSF with whom she has already met: “I hope they understand from Detroit that all of us, each of us, can become a cultural creative. . . . We are creating a new culture. And we’re not doing it because we are such wonderful people. We’re doing it because we had to, not only to survive materially, but to survive as human beings.”

From urban gardens to collective businesses to electric cars, Detroit is beginning to chart an alternative path. As the great Indian writer Arundhati Roy has said, “Another world is not only possible, she’s on the way, and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully, you can hear her breathe.”

February 9, 2011

Egypt’s Youth Will Not Be Silenced

“In memoriam, Christoph Probst, Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl” reads the banner at the top of Kareem Amer’s popular Egyptian dissident blog. “Beheaded on Feb. 22, 1943, for daring to say no to Hitler, and yes to freedom and justice for all.” The young blogger’s banner recalls the courageous group of anti-Nazi pamphleteers who called themselves the White Rose Collective. They secretly produced and distributed six pamphlets denouncing Nazi atrocities, proclaiming, in one, “We will not be silent.” Sophie and her brother Hans Scholl were captured by the Nazis, tried, convicted, and beheaded.

Kareem Amer, who spent four years in prison in Egypt for his blogging, has disappeared off the streets of Cairo after leaving Tahrir Square with a friend, according to CyberDissidents.org. The group assumes Amer is now among the hundreds of journalists and human rights activists snatched by the regime of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, and has launched a campaign to demand his release.

Amer disappeared just before Wael Ghonim was released. Ghonim is a thirty-year-old Google executive who helped administer a Facebook page instrumental to organizing the January 25 protests in Egypt. The page, called “We are all Khaled Said,” is named in memory of a young man killed by police in Alexandria in June 2010. A photo of Khaled Said’s corpse appeared on the Internet, his face savagely beaten. Ghonim traveled to Egypt to participate in the protests, and was arrested and secretly held by the Egyptian government for twelve days. He was interviewed on Egyptian TV channel Dream 2 upon his release. He broke down and cried on camera when shown the photos of many who had been killed so far in the protests. Ghonim said: “I’m not a hero. I was only using the keyboard, on the Internet. I never put my life in danger. The real heroes are the ones on the ground.”

Ghonim’s release swelled the crowds in Tahrir Square, still demanding an end to Mubarak’s thirty-year regime. Tahrir, which means
liberation
in Arabic, is the heart and soul of the pro-democracy movement in Egypt, but it is not the only place where spirited, defiant people gather. As this is written, a new encampment is being established outside the Egyptian Parliament. Six thousand workers are reportedly striking at the Suez Canal. As the entrenched dictatorship claimed to be making concessions, its shock troops unleashed a wave of violence, intimidation, arrest, and murder.

Egypt’s burgeoning youth population is driving the revolution. The April 6 Youth Movement was formed last year to support textile strikers in the Egyptian city of Mahalla. One of the founders of the movement, Asmaa Mahfouz, who has just turned twenty-six, posted a video to Facebook January 18, days after the Tunisian revolution forced the ouster of that country’s dictator. She said:

Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and degradation they had to live with for 30 years. Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire thinking maybe we can have a revolution like Tunisia, maybe we can have freedom, justice, honor and human dignity. . . . I’m making this video to give you one simple message: We want to go down to Tahrir Square on January 25. If we still have honor and want to live in dignity on this land, we have to go down on January 25.

Her call to action was another spark. From the Internet, people began organizing in the neighborhoods, bridging the digital divide with printed fliers and word of mouth. Following January 25, the epic first day of protest, she posted another video message: “What we learned yesterday is that power belongs to the people, not to the thugs. Power is in unity, not in division. Yesterday, we truly lived the best moments of our lives.”

The first week of protests breached what many are calling “the fear barrier.” Since the government-backed violence of January 28, according to Human Rights Watch, at least 302 people have been killed in the cities of Cairo, Alexandria, and Suez.

President Barack Obama continues to insist that the U.S. can’t choose the leader of Egypt, but that the people of Egypt must. That is true. But the Obama administration continues to supply the Mubarak regime with economic and military aid. The “Made in U.S.A.” stamped on the tear gas canisters used against protesters in Tahrir Square enraged the people there. In the past thirty years, the U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars to shore up the Mubarak regime. It is time to turn off the cash and weapons spigot now.

February 23, 2011

Uprisings: From the Middle East to the Midwest

As many as 80,000 people marched to the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison on Saturday as part of an ongoing protest against newly elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to not just badger the state’s public employee unions, but to break them. The Madison uprising follows on the heels of those in the Middle East. A sign held by one university student, an Iraq War vet, read, “I went to Iraq and came home to Egypt?” Another read, “Walker: Mubarak of the Midwest.” Likewise, a photo has circulated in Madison of a young man at a rally in Cairo, with a sign reading, “Egypt supports Wisconsin workers: One world, one pain.” Meanwhile, Libyans continue to defy a violent government crackdown against masses seeking to oust longtime dictator Moammar Gaddafi, and more than 10,000 marched Tuesday in Ohio to oppose Republican Gov. John Kasich’s attempted anti-union legislative putsch.

Just a few weeks ago, solidarity between Egyptian youth and Wisconsin police officers, or between Libyan workers and Ohio public employees, might have elicited a raised eyebrow.

The uprising in Tunisia was sparked by the suicide of a young man named Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old university graduate who could not find professional work. Selling fruits and vegetables in the market, he was repeatedly harassed by Tunisian authorities who eventually confiscated his scale. Unbearably frustrated, he set himself on fire, a spark that ignited the protests that became the wave of revolution in the Middle East and North Africa. For decades in the region, people have lived under dictatorships—many that receive U.S. military aid—suffering human-rights abuses along with low income, high unemployment, and almost no freedom of speech. All this, while the elites amassed fortunes.

Similar grievances underlie the conflicts in Wisconsin and Ohio. The “Great Recession” of 2008, according to economist Dean Baker, is now in its thirty-seventh month, with no sign of relenting. In a recent paper, Baker says that, due to the financial crisis, “many political figures have argued the need to drastically reduce the generosity of public sector pensions, and possibly to default on pension obligations already incurred. Most of the pension shortfall . . . is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007–2009.”

In other words, Wall Street hucksters, selling the complex mortgage-backed securities that provoked the collapse, are the ones who caused any pension shortfall. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Cay Johnston said recently: “The average Wisconsin state employee gets $24,500 a year. That’s not a very big pension . . . 15 percent of the money going into it each year is being paid out to Wall Street to manage the money. That’s a really huge high percentage to pay out to Wall Street to manage the money.”

So, while investment bankers skim a huge percentage off pension funds, it’s the workers who are being demonized and asked to make the sacrifices. Those who caused the problem, who then got lavish bailouts and now are treated to huge salaries and bonuses, are not being held accountable. Following the money, it turns out Walker’s campaign was funded by the notorious Koch brothers, major backers of the Tea Party organizations. They also gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which gave substantial support to Walker’s campaign. Is it surprising that Walker supports corporations with tax breaks, and has launched a massive attack on unionized, public-sector employees?

One of the unions being targeted by Walker, and by Kasich in Ohio, is AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The union was founded in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, in Madison. Its 1.6 million members are nurses, corrections officers, child-care providers, EMTs, and sanitation workers. It is instructive to remember, in this Black History Month, that it was the struggle of the sanitation workers of AFSCME local No. 1733 that brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, Tennessee, back in April 1968. As Jesse Jackson told me as he marched with students and their unionized teachers in Madison on Tuesday: “Dr. King’s last act on earth, marching in Memphis, Tennessee, was about workers’ rights to collective bargaining and rights to dues checkoff. You cannot remove the roof for the wealthy and remove the floor for the poor.”

The workers of Egypt were instrumental in bringing down the regime there, in a remarkable coalition with Egypt’s youth. In the streets of Madison, under the capitol dome, another demonstration of solidarity is taking place. Wisconsin’s workers have agreed to pay and pension concessions, but will not give up their right to collective bargaining. At this point, Walker would be wise to negotiate. It is not a good season to be a tyrant.