The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (31 page)

December 22, 2010

President Obama’s Christmas Gift to AT&T (and Comcast and Verizon)

One of President Barack Obama’s signature campaign promises was to protect the freedom of the Internet. He said, in November 2007, “I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality, because once providers start to privilege some applications or websites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out and we all lose.”

Jump ahead to December 2010, where Obama is clearly in the back seat, being driven by Internet giants like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. With him is his appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, his Harvard Law School classmate and basketball pal who just pushed through a rule on network neutrality that Internet activists consider disastrous.

Free Press managing director Craig Aaron told me, “This proposal appears to be riddled with loopholes that would open the door to all kinds of future abuses, allowing companies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, the big Internet service providers, to decide which websites are going to work, which aren’t, and which are going to be able to get special treatment.”

For comedian-turned-senator Al Franken, D-Minn., the new rules on Net neutrality are no joke. He offered this example, writing:

Verizon could prevent you from accessing Google Maps on your phone, forcing you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it costs money to use and isn’t nearly as good. Or a mobile provider with a political agenda could prevent you from downloading an app that connects you with the Obama campaign (or, for that matter, a Tea Party group in your area).

AT&T is one of the conglomerates that activists say practically wrote the FCC rules that Genachowski pushed through. We’ve seen this flip-flop before. Weeks before his 2007 Net neutrality pledge, then Sen. Obama took on AT&T, which was exposed for engaging in warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens at the request of the Bush administration. AT&T wanted retroactive immunity from prosecution. Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton told
Talking Points Memo
: “To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

But by July 2008, a month before the Democratic National Convention, with Obama the presumptive presidential nominee, he not only didn’t filibuster, but voted for a bill that granted telecoms retroactive immunity from prosecution. AT&T had gotten its way, and showed its appreciation quickly. The official tote bag issued to every DNC delegate was emblazoned with a large AT&T logo. AT&T threw an opening-night bash for delegates that was closed to the press, celebrating the Democratic Party for its get-out-of-jail-free card.

AT&T, Verizon, cable giant Comcast, and other corporations have expressed support for the new FCC rule. Genachowski’s Democratic Party allies on the commission, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn (the daughter of House Majority Whip James Clyburn), according to Aaron, “tried to improve these rules, but the chairman refused to budge, apparently because he had already reached an agreement with AT&T and the cable lobbyists about how far these rules were going to go.” Clyburn noted that the rules could allow mobile Internet providers to discriminate, and that poor communities, particularly African-American and Latino, rely on mobile Internet services more than wired connections.

Aaron laments the power of the telecom and cable industry lobbyists in Washington, D.C.: “In recent years, they’ve deployed 500 lobbyists, basically one for every member of Congress, and that’s just what they report. AT&T is the biggest campaign giver in the history of campaign giving, as long as we have been tracking it. So they have really entrenched themselves. And Comcast, Verizon, the other big companies, are not far behind.”

Aaron added: “When AT&T wants to get together all of their lobbyists, there’s no room big enough. They had to rent out a movie theater. People from the public interest who are fighting for the free and open Internet here in D.C. can still share a cab.”

Campaign money is now more than ever the lifeblood of U.S. politicians, and you can be sure that Obama and his advisers are looking to the 2012 election, which will likely be the costliest in U.S. history. Vigorous and innovative use of the Internet and mobile technologies is credited with helping Obama secure his victory in 2008. As the open Internet becomes increasingly stifled in the U.S., and the corporations that control the Internet become more powerful, we may not see such democratic participation for much longer.

May 11, 2011

Tony Kushner and the Angels of Dissent

Tony Kushner will be receiving an honorary degree from John Jay College of criminal justice in New York City. This shouldn’t be big news. Kushner is a renowned playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, along with an Emmy award and two Tonys. The degree became big news when it was abruptly shelved by the City University of New York board of trustees during its May 2 meeting, after a trustee accused Kushner of being anti-Israel.

A campaign grew almost immediately, first calling on previous recipients of honorary degrees from CUNY colleges (of which John Jay College is one) to return them. Within days, what would have been a quickly forgotten bestowal of an honorary degree erupted into an international scandal. The chair of the board, Benno Schmidt, former president of Yale University, convened an emergency executive session of the board, which voted unanimously to restore the honor to Kushner.

The controversy exposed the extreme polarity that increasingly defines the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the willingness by some to suppress free speech and vigorous dialogue to further rigid, political dogma. The trustee who attacked Kushner, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, began his tirade at the original board meeting with an attack on Mary Robinson, who was formerly both the president of Ireland and the United Nations high commissioner for human rights. He then went on: “There is a lot of disingenuous and nonintellectual activity directed against the state of Israel on campuses throughout the country, the west generally, and oftentimes the United States, as well.”

He presented several quotes that he attributed to Kushner to make his case, ending with, “I don’t want to bore you all with the details.”

Tony Kushner told me: “[W]hat he’s doing is sparing them not boring details, but the full extent of the things that I’ve said about the state of Israel that would in fact make it clear to the board that I am in no way an enemy of the state of Israel, that I am, in fact, a vocal and ardent supporter of the state of Israel, but I don’t believe that criticism of state policy means that one seeks the destruction of a state. I’ve been very critical of the policies of my own government.”

First, a little history on Kushner’s work. He won the Pulitzer for his play
Angels in America
. The play is subtitled
A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
, and addresses the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the struggle that many gay and lesbian people endure in the United States. A key character in the play is a fictionalized version of Roy Cohn, a prominent attorney who, early in his career, was a key adviser to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Cohn helped McCarthy with his fanatical pursuit of suspected communists in the U.S. government and beyond. He was considered a lifelong closeted gay man, despite the fact that he helped target people for political persecution for being gay. Cohn died in 1986 of complications due to AIDS, although he publicly described his illness as liver cancer. Thus, in a dramatic, real-life turn of events, Kushner, who has written extensively on the witchhunts of the McCarthy era, has now become the object of such a witch hunt himself.

The CUNY Board of Trustees’ version of Roy Cohn here is Wiesenfeld, appointed by a former Republican governor of New York, George Pataki.

I interviewed Tony Kushner soon after he got word that his honorary degree had been restored. He said U.S. policy toward the Middle East “based on rightwing fantasies and theocratic fantasies and scripture-based fantasies of what history and on-the-ground reality is telling us, is catastrophic and is going to lead to the destruction of the state of Israel.” He went on: “These people are not defending it. They’re not supporting it. They’re, in fact, causing a distortion of U.S. policy regarding Israel and a distortion of the internal politics of Israel itself, because they exert a tremendous influence in Israel and support rightwing politicians who, I think, have led the country into a very dark and dangerous place.”

During the McCarthy era, the U.S. was a dark and dangerous place as well. Now, amid the uprisings in the Arab and Muslim world, the recent rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas, and the likely recognition of Palestinian statehood by the United Nations general assembly, there is no more urgent time for vigorous and informed debate.

The future of peace in the Middle East depends on dissent. Those, like Tony Kushner, with the courage to speak out are the true angels in America.

May 18, 2011

Andrew Breitbart’s “Electronic Brownshirts”

Judy Ancel, a Kansas City, Missouri, professor, and her St. Louis colleague were teaching a labor history class together this spring semester. Little did they know, video recordings of the class were making their way into the thriving sub rosa world of rightwing attack video editing, twisting their words in a way that resulted in the loss of one of the professors’ jobs amid a wave of intimidation and death threats. Fortunately, reason and solid facts prevailed, and the videos ultimately were exposed for what they are: fraudulent, deceptive, sloppily edited hit pieces.

Rightwing media personality Andrew Breitbart is the forceful advocate of the slew of deceptively edited videos that target and smear progressive individuals and institutions. He promoted the videos that purported to catch employees of the community organization ACORN assisting a couple in setting up a prostitution ring. He showcased the edited video of Shirley Sherrod, an African-American employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which completely convoluted her speech, making her appear to admit to discriminating against a white farmer. She was fired as a result of the cooked-up controversy. Similar video attacks have been waged against Planned Parenthood.

Judy Ancel has been the director of the University of Missouri–Kansas City’s institute for labor studies since 1988. Using a live video link, she co-teaches a course on the history of the labor movement with Professor Don Giljum, who teaches at University of Missouri–St. Louis. The course comprises seven day-long, interactive sessions throughout the semester. They are video-recorded and made available through a password-protected system to students registered in the class.

One of those students, Philip Christofanelli, copied the videos and, he admits on one of Breitbart’s sites, that he did “give them out in their entirety to a number of my friends.” At some point, a series of highly and very deceptively edited renditions of the classes appeared on Breitbart’s website. It was then that Ancel’s and Giljum’s lives were disrupted, and the death threats started. A post on Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com summarized the video: “The professors not only advocate the occasional need for violence and industrial sabotage, they outline specific tactics that can be used.”

Ancel told me, “I was just appalled, because I knew it was me speaking, but it wasn’t saying what I had said in class.” She related the attack against her and Giljum to the broader attack on progressive institutions currently: “These kinds of attacks are the equivalent of electronic brownshirts. They create so much fear, and they are so directed against anything that is progressive—the right to an education, the rights of unions, the rights of working people—I see, are all part of an overall attack to silence the majority of people and create the kind of climate of fear that allows for us to move very, very sharply to the right. And it’s very frightening.”

Ancel’s contact information was included in the attack video, as was Giljum’s. She received a flurry of threatening emails. Giljum received at least two death threats over the phone. The University of Missouri conducted an investigation into the charges prompted by the videos, during which time they posted uniformed and plainclothes police in the classrooms. Giljum is an adjunct professor, with a full-time job working as the business manager for Operating Engineers Local 148, a union in St. Louis. Meanwhile, the union acceded to pressure from the Missouri AFL-CIO, and asked Giljum to resign, just days before his May 1 retirement, after working there for twenty-seven years.

Gail Hackett, provost of the University of Missouri–Kansas City, released a statement after the investigation, clearing the two professors of any wrongdoing: “It is clear that edited videos posted on the internet depict statements from the instructors in an inaccurate and distorted manner by taking their statements out of context and reordering the sequence in which those statements were actually made so as to change their meaning.”

The University of Missouri–St. Louis also weighed in with similar findings, and stated that Giljum was still eligible to teach there.

On April 18, Andrew Breitbart appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, declaring, “We are going to take on education next, go after the teachers and the union organizers.” It looks as if Ancel and Giljum were the first targets of that attack.