The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (36 page)

While President Obama has made concession after concession to both the corporate-funded Tea Party and his Wall Street donors, now that he is again in campaign mode, his progressive critics are being warned not to attack him, as that might aid and abet the Republican bid for the White House.

Enter the 99 percenters. The Occupy Wall Street ranks continue to grow, inspiring more than 1,000 solidarity protests around the country and the globe. After weeks, and one of the largest mass arrests in U.S. history, Obama finally commented: “I think people are frustrated, and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” But neither he nor his advisers—nor the Republicans—know what to do with this burgeoning mass movement.

Following the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which allows unlimited corporate donations to support election advertising, the hunger for campaign cash is insatiable. The Obama re-election campaign aims to raise $1 billion. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the financial industry was Obama’s second-largest source of 2008 campaign contributions, surpassed only by the lawyers/lobbyists industry sector.

The suggestion that a loss for Obama would signal a return to the Bush era has some merit: The Associated Press reported recently that “almost all of [Mitt] Romney’s 22 special advisers held senior Bush administration positions in diplomacy, defense or intelligence. Two former Republican senators are included as well as Bush-era CIA chief Michael Hayden and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.” But so is the Obama presidency an expansion of the Bush era, unless there is a new “Push era.”

The organic strength of Occupy Wall Street defies the standard dismissals from the corporate media’s predictably stale stable of pundits. For them, it is all about the divide between the Republicans and the Democrats, a divide the protesters have a hard time seeing. They see both parties captured by Wall Street. Richard Haass, head of the establishment Council on Foreign Relations, said of the protesters, “They’re not serious.” He asked why they are not talking about entitlements. Perhaps it is because, to the 99 percent, Social Security and Medicare are not the problem, but rather growing inequality, with the 400 richest Americans having more wealth than half of all Americans combined. And then there is the overwhelming cost and toll of war, first and foremost the lives lost, but also the lives destroyed, on all sides.

It’s why, for example, Jose Vasquez, executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War, was down at Occupy Wall Street on Monday night. He told me: “It’s no secret that a lot of veterans are facing unemployment, homelessness and a lot of other issues that are dealing with the economy. A lot of people get deployed multiple times and are still struggling. . . . I’ve met a lot of veterans who have come here. I just met a guy who is active duty, took leave just to come to Occupy Wall Street.”

The historic election of Barack Obama was achieved by millions of people across the political spectrum. For years during the Bush administration, people felt they were hitting their heads against a brick wall. With the election, the wall had become a door, but it was only open a crack. The question was, would it be kicked open or slammed shut? It is not up to one person. Obama had moved from community organizer in chief to commander in chief. When forces used to having the ear of the most powerful person on earth whisper their demands in the Oval Office, the president must see a force more powerful outside his window, whether he likes it or not, and say, “If I do that, they will storm the Bastille.” If there’s no one out there, we are all in big trouble.

October 19, 2011

The Arc of the Moral Universe, from Memphis to Wall Street

The national memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. was dedicated last Sunday. President Barack Obama said of Dr. King, “If he were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there.” The dedication occurred amidst the increasingly popular and increasingly global Occupy Wall Street movement. What Obama left unsaid is that King, were he alive, would most likely be protesting Obama administration policies.

Not far from the dedication ceremony, Cornel West, preacher, professor, writer, and activist, was being arrested on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. He said, before being hauled off to jail: “We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions. . . . We will not allow this day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s memorial to go without somebody going to jail, because Martin King would be here right with us, willing to throw down out of deep love.”

West was arrested with eighteen others, declaring “solidarity with the Occupy movement all around the world, because we love poor people, we love working people, and we want Martin Luther King Jr. to smile from the grave that we haven’t forgot his movement.”

Over the same weekend as the dedication, the U.S. military/CIA’s drone campaign, under Commander in Chief Obama, launched what the independent, nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based in London, called the 300th drone strike, the 248th since Obama took office. According to the BIJ, of the at least 2,318 people killed by drone strikes, between 386 and 775 were civilians, including 175 children. Imagine how Obama’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Dr. King, would respond to those grim statistics.

Back in 1963, King published a collection of sermons titled “Strength to Love.” His preface began, “In these turbulent days of uncertainty the evils of war and of economic and racial injustice threaten the very survival of the human race.” Three of the fifteen sermons were written in Georgia jails, including “Shattered Dreams.” In that one, he wrote, “To cooperate passively with an unjust system makes the oppressed as evil as the oppressor.” King revisited the idea of shattered dreams four years later, eight months before his assassination, in his speech called “Where Do We Go from Here,” saying: “Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. . . . Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Earlier in that year, 1967, a year to the day before he was killed, King gave his oft-overlooked “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in New York City. King preached, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.”

With those words, with that speech, King set the tone for his final, fateful year. Despite death threats, and his close advisers urging him not to go to Memphis, King went to march in solidarity with that city’s sanitation workers. On April 4, 1968, he was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

Deeply impacted at the time by the assassination, we can follow two young men along King’s arc of moral justice all the way to Occupy Wall Street. One was John Carlos, a U.S. Olympic track star. Carlos won the bronze medal in the 200 meter race at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Carlos and his teammate Tommie Smith, who won the gold, raised their black-gloved fists in the power salute on the medal stand, instantly gaining global fame. They both stood without shoes, protesting black children in poverty in the United States. Last week, John Carlos spoke at Occupy Wall Street, and he told me after, “I’m just so happy to see so many people who are standing up to say: ‘We’re not asking for change. We demand change.’”

The other person is the Rev. Jesse Jackson. He was with King when he was assassinated. Late Monday night, the New York Police Department seemed to be making a move on Occupy Wall Street’s first-aid tent. Jackson was there. Just days past his seventieth birthday, Jackson joined arms with the young protesters, defying the police. The police backed off. And the arc of the moral universe bent a bit more toward justice.

October 26, 2011

Globalizing Dissent, from Tahrir Square to Liberty Plaza

The winds of change are blowing across the globe. What triggers such change, and when it will strike, is something that no one can predict.

Last January 18, a courageous young woman in Egypt took a dangerous step. Asmaa Mahfouz was twenty-five years old, part of the April 6 Youth Movement, with thousands of young people engaging online in debate on the future of their country. They formed in 2008 to demonstrate solidarity with workers in the industrial city of Mahalla, Egypt. Then, in December 2010, a young man in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the frustration of a generation. His death sparked the uprising in Tunisia that toppled the long-reigning dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

Similar acts of protest spread to Egypt, where at least four men attempted self-immolation. One, Ahmed Hashem el-Sayed of Alexandria, died. Asmaa Mahfouz was outraged and posted a video online, staring directly into the camera, her head covered, but not her face. She identified herself and called for people to join her on January 25 in Tahrir Square. She said (translated from Arabic): “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. We’ll go down and demand our rights, our fundamental human rights. . . . I won’t even talk about any political rights. We just want our human rights and nothing else. This entire government is corrupt—a corrupt president and a corrupt security force. These self-immolators were not afraid of death but were afraid of security forces. Can you imagine that?”

Nine months later, Asmaa Mahfouz was giving a teach-in at Occupy Wall Street. Standing on steps above the crowd Monday night, she had a huge smile on her face as she looked out on a sea of faces. After she finished, I asked her what gave her strength. She answered with characteristic humility, speaking English: “I can’t believe it when I saw a million people join in the Tahrir Square. I’m not more brave, because I saw my colleagues, Egyptian, were going towards the policemen, when they just pushing us, and they died for all of us. So they are the one who are really brave and really strong. . . . I saw people, really, died in front of me, because they were protecting me and protecting others. So, they were the most brave, bravest men.”

I asked how it felt to be in the United States, which had for so long supported the Mubarak regime in Egypt. She replied: “While they giving money and power and support to Mubarak regime, our people, Egyptian people, can success against all of this, against the U.S. power. So, the power to the people, not for the U.S. bullets or bombs or money or anything. The power to the people. So that I am here to be in solidarity and support the Wall Street Occupy protesters, to say them ‘the power to the people,’ and to keep it on and on, and they will success in the end.”

The Egyptian revolution has not been without consequences for her. Last August, she was arrested by the Egyptian military. As my colleague Sharif Abdel Kouddous reported from Cairo, Asmaa sent two controversial tweets that prompted the arrest by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the military government that has ruled Egypt since Mubarak’s fall.

Her arrest provoked a worldwide response, with groups ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to Amnesty International condemning it. She was released, but, as Sharif noted at the time, Asmaa was only one of 12,000 civilians arrested since the revolution.

The arrests are happening here in the U.S. now, at many of the protest sites across the country. As Asmaa was preparing to head back to Egypt, hundreds of riot police descended on Occupy Oakland, firing beanbag rounds and tear gas. The University of New Mexico is threatening to evict the encampment there, which is called “(Un)occupy Albuquerque” to highlight that the land there is occupied native land.

Asmaa Mahfouz is running for a seat in the Egyptian Parliament, and maybe someday, she says, the presidency. When I asked her what she had to say to President Barack Obama, who had given his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, she replied: “You promised the people that you are the change and ‘yes, we can.’ So we are here from the Wall Street Occupy, and we are saying the same word: ‘yes, we can.’ We can make the freedom, and we can get our freedom, even if it’s from you.”

November 2, 2011

Call of Duty: Veterans Join the 99 Percent

11–11–11 is not a variant of Herman Cain’s much-touted 9–9–9 tax plan, but rather the date of this year’s Veterans Day. This is especially relevant, as the U.S. has now entered its second decade of war in Afghanistan, the longest war in the nation’s history. U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are appearing more and more on the front lines—the front lines of the Occupy Wall Street protests, that is.

Video from the Occupy Oakland march on Tuesday, October 25, looks and sounds like a war zone. The sound of gunfire is nearly constant in the video. Tear-gas projectiles were being fired into the crowd when the cry of “Medic!” rang out. Civilians raced toward a fallen protester lying on his back on the pavement, mere steps from a throng of black-clad police in full riot gear, pointing guns as the civilians attempted to administer first aid.

The fallen protester was Scott Olsen, a twenty-four-year-old former U.S. Marine who had served two tours of duty in Iraq. The publicly available video shows Olsen standing calmly alongside a Navy veteran holding an upraised Veterans for Peace flag. Olsen was wearing a desert camouflage jacket and sun hat, and his Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) T-shirt. He was hit in the head by a police projectile, most likely a tear-gas canister, suffering a fractured skull. As the small group of people gathered around him to help, a police officer lobbed a flashbang grenade directly into the huddle, and it exploded.