The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (38 page)

SOPA could, then, shut down a community-based site like YouTube if just one of its millions of users was accused of violating one U.S. copyright. As David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer and an opponent of the legislation, blogged, “Last year alone, we acted on copyright takedown notices for more than 5 million webpages. PIPA and SOPA will censor the web, will risk our industry’s track record of innovation and job creation, and will not stop piracy.”

Corynne McSherry, intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me, “These bills propose new powers for the government and for private actors to create, effectively, blacklists of sites . . . then force service providers to block access to those sites. That’s why we call these the censorship bills.”

The bills, she says, are the creation of the entertainment, or “content,” industries: “SOPA, in particular, was negotiated without any consultation with the technology sector. They were specifically excluded.” The exclusion of the tech sector has alarmed not only Silicon Valley executives, but also conservatives like Utah Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz, a Tea Party favorite. He said in a December House judiciary committee hearing, “We’re basically going to reconfigure the Internet and how it’s going to work, without bringing in the nerds.”

PIPA sponsor Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in a press release, “Much of what has been claimed about [PIPA] is flatly wrong and seems intended more to stoke fear and concern than to shed light or foster workable solutions.” Sadly, Leahy’s ire sounds remarkably similar to that of his former Senate colleague Christopher Dodd, who, after retiring, took the job of chairman and CEO of the powerful lobbying group Motion Picture Association of America (at a reported salary of $1.2 million annually), one of the chief backers of SOPA/PIPA. Said Dodd of the broad-based, grassroots Internet protest, “It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.”

EFF’s McSherry said, “No one asked the Internet—well, the Internet is speaking now. People are really rising up and saying: ‘Don’t interfere with basic Internet infrastructure. We won’t stand for it.’”

As the Internet blackout protest progressed January 18, and despite Dodd’s lobbying, legislators began retreating from support for the bills. The Internet roared, and the politicians listened, reminiscent of the popular uprising against media consolidation in 2003 proposed by then Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell, the son of General Colin Powell. Information is the currency of democracy, and people will not sit still as moneyed interests try to deny them access.

When Internet users visited the sixth-most popular website on the planet during the protest blackout, the English-language section of Wikipedia, they found this message: “Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge. For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet.”

In a world with fresh, Internet-fueled revolutions, it seems that U.S. politicians are getting the message.

February 8, 2012

America’s Pro-Choice Majority Speaks Out

The leadership of the Catholic Church has launched what amounts to a holy war against President Barack Obama. Archbishop Timothy Dolan appealed to church members, “Let your elected leaders know that you want religious liberty and rights of conscience restored and that you want the administration’s contraceptive mandate rescinded,” he said. Obama is now under pressure to reverse a health-care regulation that requires Catholic hospitals and universities, like all employers, to provide contraception to insured women covered by their health plans. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League said, “This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets.” In the wake of the successful pushback against the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood, the Obama administration should listen to the majority of Americans: The United States, including Catholics, is strongly pro-choice.

Rick Santorum most likely benefited from the twenty-four-hour news cycle this week with his three-state win. Exactly one week before the caucus/primary voting, on January 31, the Associated Press broke the story that Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, a $2 billion-per-year breast-cancer fundraising and advocacy organization, had enacted policies that would effectively lead it to deny funding to Planned Parenthood clinics to conduct breast-cancer screenings, especially for women with no health insurance. Linked to the decision was a recently hired Komen vice president, Karen Handel, who, as a candidate for governor of Georgia in 2010, ran on a platform to defund Planned Parenthood. The backlash was immediate, broad-based, and unrelenting. By February 3, Komen reversed its decision. On February 7, Handel resigned from Komen.

Adding fuel to the ire was news that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had issued the regulation requiring employer insurance plans to provide contraception. The coup de grace, on primary/caucus day, was the decision handed down by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturning California’s controversial Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages.

For Santorum, in a primary battle with Mitt Romney, it was “three strikes, you’re in.” As a conservative Catholic and father of seven, Santorum has long waged the culture war, with a focus on marriage, abortion, and sex. He once likened homosexuality to bestiality.

According to the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health issues globally, in the United States, “among all women who have had sex, 99 percent have used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. This figure is virtually the same among Catholic women (98 percent).” According to a Public Religion Research Institute poll, 58 percent of Catholics believe that employers should provide employees with health-care plans that include contraception.

Catholic activists who acknowledge the broad use of contraception among their church members, despite its official prohibition, suggest women can “go elsewhere” to get the preventive care. And if they can’t afford to? Loretta Ross, national coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective in Atlanta, told me: “This rule really allows low-income women, women who are dependent on their health care, to access birth control—women of color, in particular . . . if you don’t want to use birth control, don’t buy it, don’t use it. But don’t block others who do want to use it, who cannot afford it, from accessing it.”

One possible solution to the debate came from a surprising quarter. Michael Brendan Dougherty, a Catholic commentator, was in church a couple of weeks ago when he heard the priest read out a letter from Archbishop Dolan encouraging Catholics to oppose the president. Dougherty, who supports the church’s opposition to the regulation, suggested to me that a single-payer health-care option could solve the problem: “It would solve this particular problem of conscience, as it has in Europe. The bishops don’t like that the government subsidizes abortion or contraception, but they are not in full mode of fury, because they are not being asked to formally cooperate with things they view as sinful.”

Loretta Ross agrees with the single-payer solution, but says the current contraception controversy masks a “war on women with all this rhetoric about religious freedom and care for not only the pre-born, but now, with the attack on contraception, you’re attacking the preconceived. . . . We’re not going to take it lying down. And as the fight with the Komen Foundation proved, we are a force to be reckoned with. And we’re actually going to work to strengthen President Obama’s stand in supporting contraceptive access.”

June 21, 2012

A Movement Built by Dreamers

Undocumented immigrants in the United States number around 12 million people, a group larger than the populations of most countries on the planet. Among those are as many as 800,000 young people who are now most likely eligible for limited legal status, thanks to executive action taken last week by President Barack Obama. In a Rose Garden speech, Obama said that he and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano were working “to mend our nation’s immigration policy, to make it more fair, more efficient and more just—specifically for certain young people sometimes called ‘Dreamers.’” Behind the speech was a movement for social change, built by millions, each with their own story.

The “Dreamers” are those who are here without legal documentation, often derogatorily referred to as “illegals,” but who came to this country as children, in some cases as infants. As he said in his speech: “These are young people who study in our schools, they play in our neighborhoods, they’re friends with our kids, they pledge allegiance to our flag. They are Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper.” For ten years, people have pushed for an act of Congress to give these young people legal status, through a bill called the DREAM Act, short for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act.

People in the movement don’t consider themselves “alien.” They call themselves “undocumented Americans.” One of those who stands to directly benefit from White House’s decision is Lorella Praeli, from New Haven, Connecticut, a member of the United We Dream national coordinating committee. She fought for passage of the Connecticut version of the DREAM Act. The bill was signed into law last year, making undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition at state colleges. Praeli is a 2011 graduate of Quinnipiac University, which she attended on a scholarship.

“I had a car accident when I was two and a half, which resulted in the amputation of my right leg,” she explained. “My family and I sought treatment at Shriners Hospital. So for many years, we spent time between Peru and Tampa, Florida, which is where the hospital is. When I was ten, my family decided to move to Connecticut. That’s how I ended up here.”

She went on, “I didn’t know I was undocumented until toward the end of my high school career, applying to colleges. . . . You need to fill out FAFSA [Free Application for Federal Student Aid], and you need a Social Security number. That was kind of my introduction to what being undocumented really meant and to start to internalize what it meant to be undocumented, feeling very isolated.”

She was invited by the New Haven mayor’s office to speak at a press conference. She recalled: “I didn’t have anything prepared. I got up, and I said something like ‘I am done standing on the sidelines.’ And that was my coming out, very publicly. And that, I think, just changed my life for the better.”

They call them “coming out” stories. Another young immigrant, Jose Antonio Vargas, said it was, for him, less daunting to come out as a gay teenager than to come out as an undocumented American. He came from the Philippines at the age of twelve, to stay with his grandparents in California. He didn’t learn that he was “illegal” until he applied for his driving permit at the age of sixteen. Vargas ultimately became a reporter at the
Washington Post
. There he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007. By 2011, after hiding his immigration status for almost fifteen years, Vargas “came out” in a
New York Times Sunday Magazine
article.

He explained what prompted his decision: “Watching United We Dream and watching these four activists from Miami, [who] walked from Miami to Washington, D.C., to fight for the DREAM Act, the Trail of Dreams. I felt like a coward, and I felt accountable. And that’s when I decided that, you know what? I’ve got to go do this.”

Movements—whether they are civil rights, gay rights, or immigration rights—are built on a foundation of innumerable small acts of courage. Like the four undocumented students who marched from Miami to D.C., or those who sat in at four of Obama’s campaign offices around the country, immediately before his announcement last week (risking arrest and thus, potentially, deportation), these “Dreamers” are committed, and organizing. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

When Corporations Rule

August 25, 2009

Who Is Obama Playing Ball With?

It looked like it was business as usual for President Barack Obama on the first day of his Martha’s Vineyard vacation, as he spent five hours golfing with Robert Wolf, president of UBS Investment Bank and chairman and CEO of UBS Group Americas. Wolf, an early financial backer of Obama’s presidential campaign, raised $250,000 for him back in 2006, and in February was appointed by the president to the White House’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Economic recovery for whom?

Interestingly, Wolf’s appointment came in the same month that UBS agreed to pay the U.S. $780 million to settle civil and criminal charges related to helping people in the U.S. avoid taxes. Not to worry. UBS, an ailing bank with a pre-existing condition, had great insurance coverage. It was actually receiving $2.5 billion in a backdoor bailout from bailed-out insurance giant AIG. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said, “It looks like we’re simply laundering this money through AIG.” UBS, this bank that shelters wealthy tax dodgers, was actually being bailed out by hardworking U.S. taxpayers.