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Monday, December 30, 2013

Major Social Transformation Is a Lot Closer Than You May Realize


Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice


Major Social Transformation Is a Lot Closer Than You May Realize

How Do We Finish the Job? It starts with winning over the hearts and minds of the American people.


The current social movement that exploded onto the national scene with the 2011 Occupy Movement is following the path of successful movements so far. The social movement in 2014 is poised to begin an exciting era of broadening and deepening the growing consensus for social and economic justice.

This week, our article for the end of 2013 focuses on where we are, i.e. at what stage of the progression of social movements do we find ourselves; and broadly outlines the next steps. Next week, our article for the new year will look more specifically at the tasks ahead for the movement in 2014 and beyond.

Successful people-powered movements follow a similar arc of development. The best description comes from Bill Moyer’s The Movement Action Plan: A Strategic Framework Describing The Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements. We believe this is essential reading for activists and include a link to it on the strategy page on Popular Resistance. Moyer expanded this 1987 article into, Doing Democracy, a book published in 2001, a year before he died. You can see a video of Bill Moyer’s last public presentation where he summarized the insights of his lifetime about how social movements grow and succeed, and about his vision of a new culture emerging through the cracks of a declining empire.

Moyer’s work is heartening for social justice activists because it shows how movements grow, recede and change their functions at different stages. By understanding the current stage of development we can better define the work that must be done to achieve success and predict how the power structure and public will react to our actions. Moyer worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on poverty campaigns. He also worked on a variety of causes over his nearly 50 year career in social movements.

In a recent conversation, Ken Butigan, a peace and justice activist who worked with Moyer, told us that Moyer wrote the first draft of the Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements when he was jailed with more than 1,400 people protesting the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in 1977. Butigan explained that one reason Moyer wrote the Eight Stages was so people involved in movements would not despair when the movement did not immediately succeed and seemed to disappear without success. These are expected stages of development. Just as we would not expect a 4th grader to be doing calculus, we cannot expect a social movement to jump from Stage 2 to the success of Stage 7. Each step in the process serves an important role.

This Historic Moment

Using the Movement Action Plan as a guide, we see that we are closer to success than one might think. The Occupy Movement was Stage Four of Eight. Moyer describes it:
New social movements surprise and shock everyone when they burst into the public spotlight on the evening TV news and in newspaper headlines. Overnight, a previously unrecognized social problem becomes a social issue that everyone is talking about. It starts with a highly publicized, shocking incident, a ‘trigger event’, followed by a nonviolent action campaign that includes large rallies and dramatic civil disobedience. Soon these are repeated in local communities around the country.
Stage 4 is the “Social Movement Take-Off.” During Occupy, it seemed that suddenly the unfair wealth divide, the corruption of Wall Street and the dysfunction of government came into people’s consciousness. These issues were discussed in the media and politicians started using language to show they understood there was a problem. Prior to this, these issues were largely ignored taboo topics that were not on the political radar.

In Stage 4, there are three concepts about which the public must be convinced. The first was accomplished during Occupy, that is: there is a problem that must be confronted. We also began to accomplish the second concept: current conditions and policies must be opposed. During later stages this second goal will be broadened and expanded. The final concept – and this is still ahead of us– is that people no longer fear the alternatives but want the alternatives put in place.

Throughout this process, the movement shows itself to be consistent with the best ideals of the nation, e.g. democracy, equality, justice and fairness; while the movement shows the power structure is out of step with these ideals. The movement exposes the differences between ‘official policies,’ what the government says that it is doing, and ‘actual policies,’ what the policies actually accomplish, which is the opposite of what they claim to accomplish.

Stage 5 is a state of “Identity Crisis and Powerlessness.” Participants feel like they failed and commentators say that the movement is dead and accomplished nothing. Some of the people involved in the Take-Off get burned out and suffer despair and hopelessness. In fact, this is as natural as the receding of a wave and Moyer points out: “The perception of failure happens just when the movement is outrageously successful” because it raised the consciousness and national awareness of a serious problem that was previously ignored.

Moyer quotes the I Ching (Book of Changes), an ancient Chinese text which dates back to the 3rd or 2nd millennium BCE,for guidance. The I Ching describes “Retreat” as a time of “an inner conflict based upon the misalignment of your ideals and reality,” i.e. the unrealistic expectation that long-term goals can be achieved immediately. This is a “time to retreat and take a longer look to be able to advance later.” We know many in Occupy who did just that before moving on to Stage 6, where we are now.

During the stage of Identity Crisis or Retreat, activists who step back may realize we actually created a massive grassroots-based social movement, put our issues on the agenda and gained majority support for many of our views. In addition, people began to learn of the enormity of the problem, agonize over the suffering of the victims of the unfair and corrupt economy and realize the complicity of people in power that they trusted.

The essential lesson of Stage 5 is that resistance from the power structure is a normal stage of the process. When we step back and look at the course of history, within the overall framework of change, the movement is on the path to success. We need to understand “what the powerholders already know – that political and societal power ultimately lies with the people.”

Often simultaneous with this feeling of powerlessness is Stage 6, “Majority Public Support,” which is where we are right now. During the current phase, the movement seeks to create broad and deep consensus over the issues that have been raised in the “Take-Off.” Our job is to win over the hearts and minds of the American people.
The movement must consciously undergo a transformation from spontaneous protest, operating in a short-term crisis, to a long-term popular struggle to achieve positive social change. It needs to win over … an increasingly larger majority of the populace and involve many of them in the process of opposition and change… The majority stage is a long process of eroding the social, political, and economic supports that enable the powerholders to continue their policies. It is a slow process of social transformation that creates a new social and political consensus, reversing those of normal times.
During this phase, the movement must transform from a “loose” organizational model to an “empowerment” model. This requires more structure but in order to be effective and create lasting change, it must follow the principles of being “participatory democratic, efficient, flexible, and capable of lasting over the long haul.” The movement must avoid becoming a “professional opposition organization” (i.e. avoid becoming part of the system or a member of the non-profit, professional complex). The movement must avoid becoming a mainstream group working for “achievable” reforms, focusing on elections and partisanship; instead they must remain “principled dissent groups” advocating for what is right, not what is possible, continuing to protest and resist and be based in the grassroots. Leaders must be “nurturing mothers, not dominant patriarchs.”

The focus at this stage should be grass roots organizing to build a broad-based pluralistic movement. The primary goals are educating, converting, and involving all segments of the population through a variety of means but most importantly through direct contacts at the local level to show people how the big social injustices of our era – the unfair and corrupt economy as well as the dysfunctional and corrupt government – affect them directly. It is important during this phase for the movement to continue to have nonviolent actions, rallies, and campaigns, including civil disobedience at key points of time and key locations – even though the size of protests will be smaller than during the “Take-Off” phase.

In addition to protest, opportunities need to be created for widespread civic involvement in projects that put the people at odds with the current system. These citizen involvement programs need to reflect the movement’s values and goals and the full range of the new world the movement wants to create. The movement should be putting forth a bold vision, a new paradigm, and larger demands beyond mere reforms of the status quo.

Moyers describes a grand strategy that includes 12 phases that lead to Stage 7, “Success.” Throughout this process it is important to remember a movement is only as powerful as its grassroots base and therefore must continue to nourish, support and empower that base. During this phase the movement participants switch roles from being “rebels” to being “change agents.” The 12 phases are to (1) Keep the issues on the political and social agenda; (2) Win majority support against current policies; (3) Cause powerholders to change strategy although they do not solve problems; (4) Counter each change in strategy by showing it is a gimmick, not a solution; (5) Push powerholders to new strategies that take riskier positions and make it harder to hold old positions; (6) Create strategic campaigns that erode support for the powerholders; (7) Expand policy goals as the movement realizes the problems are greater than was evident; (8) Develop stronger and deeper opposition to current policies; (9) Promote solutions and a paradigm shift; (10) Win majority support for the movement’s solutions; (11) Put the issues on the political and legal agendas; (12) Finally, the powerholders change positions to appear to get in line with public opinion while attacking the movement and its solutions (e.g. passing a Wall Street health law that claims to cover everyone while demonizing single payer health care which would be universal as too extreme).

Opposition to current policies will quickly grow to 60%, then rise to 70% or 75%. Support for the movement’s alternatives will grow more slowly during this time, with the public split on the alternatives. The movement must build public support for the alternatives to achieve success.

At this point, even though everyone wants the issue resolved, the government is still unable to take action. As a movement reaches the end of Stage 6, many powerholders begin to join the calls for change. As elites defect to support majority opinion, the political price paid by those who want to maintain unpopular policies exceeds their benefits and creates a political crisis that leads to resolution.

This leads to Stage 7: “Success.” The duration of Stage 6 is unpredictable and can take years. Success can come in several ways (1) a “dramatic showdown that resembles the ‘take off stage.’” There could be a trigger and the movement needs to mobilize with broad popular support. (2) A “quiet showdown” where the people in power realize they can no longer continue the status quo and launch a face saving endgame of “victorious retreat,” changing their policies and taking credit. (3) Through “attrition” where the social, economic and political machinery slowly evolve to new polices and conditions. The result is not guaranteed when this process begins and the movement must continue the struggle until the goals are won. Stage 8 defends the success and begins the social movement again, focusing on the new injustices of that era.

Applying the Model to the Current Social Movement

In recent years there has been a global awakening of people understanding that big finance capitalism’s neo-liberal model of privatization and corporatization while defunding public programs and cutting necessary services to people is the cause of economic inequality and the failed economy. At the same time, the collapsing ecology of the planet with mass extinctions, destruction of the oceans and environment as well as the impacts of climate change have become evident to super majorities. The inability of governments to respond appropriately to these crises because they are corrupted by mega-banks and transnational corporate interests has led to mass protests.

A September study of protests from 2006 to mid-2013 found a rapid rise: “Our analysis of 843 protest events reflects a steady increase in the overall number of protests every year, from 2006 (59 protests) to mid-2013 (112 protests events in only half a year).” They found that what is driving protests are four inter-related issues: economic justice and opposition to austerity, failure of political systems, the injustice of global trade rigged for big business, and the rights of people, e.g. indigenous, racial and ethnic groups, workers, women, LGBT, immigrants and prisoners and the right to free speech and assembly.
Another study that mapped protests from 1979 to the summer of 2013 graphically shows the intense increase in protests in recent years. While there were protests against Thatcherism and during the break-up of the Soviet Union as well as against the Iraq War, no period like the last few years has had the intensity and breadth of protests at any time in the last 30 years. It is visually evident in a dramatic, interactive map of protests based on reports in the media (which we know does not even cover most protests).

This research, and so much more, indicates that the global protests have passed Stage 4, the Take-Off phase. In our daily reporting of movement news (sign up for a daily digest of news here) we have identified ten “fronts of struggle” in which sub-movements are very active. These include (1) mobilizing youth and students and making education a human right, (2) confronting environmental issues around climate change, extreme energy extraction, toxicity, food and mass extinction, (3) creating a national healthcare system based on single payer financing and human rights principles, (4) ending homelessness and creating affordable housing, (5) ending poverty and creating a new democratic economy including confronting the banking and finance system and unfair wages and inadequate employment, (6) ending mass incarceration, police abuse and the drug war, (7) establishing immigrant rights, (8) establishing indigenous sovereignty, and (9) creating a fair global trade system and (10) ending war and militarism. We cover all these fronts on Popular Resistance, and the links above are to weekly newsletters that focused on them or to a series of articles on the issue.

Bill Moyer describes mass movements as being made up of sub-movements. These fronts of struggle combined together in a movement of movements create the foundation of the mass movement on which we will build to broaden and deepen the movement. The uniting theme for these ten sub-movements is a united movement to end the rule of money so the necessities of the people and protection of the planet come before further enriching the wealthiest.

The overarching theme of wealth inequality has already deepened. We see it in the rhetoric of poll-sensitive politicians like President Obama and Mayor-elect de Blasio (whether they do enough about the issue will be in large part dependent on our actions); and we can see it in the criticism of trickle-down economics by Pope Francis. There is no question that the conversation brought to consciousness by Occupy is continuing and deepening.

Economist Dean Baker clarified something that most instinctively understand – inequality is not happening by accident. It is happening because of policy choices made by those in office. This includes trade agreements rigged for transnational corporations, policies favoring big business over small businesses and entrepreneurs, a tax system that protects the wealthiest–especially investors, patent protections for pharmaceuticals that prop up inordinate profits and make healthcare expensive for everyone, continued funding of big banks at a cost of $85 billion a month while not funding a full employment economy or necessary programs like food stamps, raising the budgets of the military and weapons makers while at the same time cutting veterans and government pensions and cutting necessary programs.

Joel Bleifuss of In These Times describes this as a “precarious democracy” where those in office answer to big business, rather than the people. These are policy choices that a well-organized mass movement of people power can change.

Already, the movement is seeing success from its protests, not just in changing the conversation, but in affecting policy. Medea Benjamin points out ten good things that happened in 2013 including stopping the war in Syria, negotiations with Iran, push back on Obama’s drone murders and opposition to the NSA spying program, among other things. While these victories do not constitute our ultimate goals, they show that organized people power is making a difference. They should encourage each of us to increase our efforts to broaden and deepen the movement and to work in solidarity on multiple fronts of struggle.

The Target of Our Efforts Is Mobilizing the People

In the next article we will focus on objectives for 2014 as well as areas where we need to focus our energy and activism. The challenges and opportunities of the upcoming year are important and we can have some important victories.

Bill Moyer, in his final presentation on his Movement Action Plan, makes a crucial point that is often missed by activists. The critical understanding we must embrace is that organized people have the power to direct the government and the economy. We need to understand that we are not a fringe movement, but a movement in the center of the best ideals of the United States. That is, we believe in a government that is truly run by the people, not by elite corporate and wealthy interests; we believe in equality under the law not special treatment for those who are politically connected and abusive enforcement against certain communities; we believe in a fair economy not one rigged for the wealthiest. This is what the majority of American people believe, but those in power violate these principles.

As we have written in previous articles on strategy to transform the nation, when a movement is able to mobilize a small minority of the population in support of views held by a majority of the people, they win. In fact, a review of the last 100 years of resistance movements found that the people have never lost in a dictatorship or democracy when 3.5% of the people are mobilized.

Bill Moyer sharpens our task, telling us that many activists mistakenly think when they are protesting their target is the government or a corporation when in fact the target is mobilizing the people. We want to show that there is an effective movement speaking to the people’s concerns and putting forth views that they support. This is especially true in the current stage where our task is to broaden and deepen the movement through talking, often one-on one, with people in our communities and creating a national consensus in support of our goals.
Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD co-host Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC, co-direct Its Our Economy and are organizers of the Occupation of Washington, DC. Read other articles by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers.


Friday, December 6, 2013

Bye-bye, fake liberals: The Warren Democrats are winning!


SALON




Bye-bye, fake liberals: The Warren Democrats are winning!

 

The backlash against an inane Op-Ed bashing Elizabeth Warren shows that “economic populism” is the way forward






Bye-bye, fake liberals: The Warren Democrats are winning!Elizabeth Warren (Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts)
 
 
I am very late to the Third Way-trashing party, but that’s a story in itself. I didn’t need to weigh in; progressives erupted in immediate backlash at the group’s latest attack on “economic populism.”

By now everyone knows that the pro-Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party attacked Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York’s Mayor-elect Bill De Blasio in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday, arguing that their “economic populism” was a “dead end” outside of the midnight-blue communards of Massachusetts and New York City.

Not only was Third Way’s argument immediately and widely debunked – Salon’s Elias Isquith did it very well here – but its domination by Wall Street became an issue in itself, thanks to folks at Daily Kos and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.  Warren herself responded by asking Wall Street CEOs to voluntarily disclose their think tank funding – without mentioning Third Way by name – suggesting it amounted to “little more than another form of corporate lobbying.”

And by Wednesday evening centrist Pennsylvania Rep. Alison Schwartz, a Third Way co-chair who’s running for governor next year, had disavowed the group’s attempted takedown of her party’s populist wing, calling it “outrageous.” (Update: Thursday afternoon another co-chair, Rep. Joe Crowley, joined Schwartz.)

Oh, and meanwhile, President Obama gave his best economic speech yet, calling income inequality “the defining challenge of our time.”
Is something going on here? I’d say yes. Wall Street’s domination of the Democratic Party is facing a genuine and sustained fight, and that’s a good thing for Democrats and the country.

Remember, it was only last year that Third Way made big news warning that ol’ devil economic populism would be a dead-end for Obama. No, it was worse than that: Third Way said its polling showed that Obama’s message of “fairness” was a loser; voters preferred to hear about “opportunity.” Fairness, people. They came out against a “fairness” message as too radical. Liberals debunked the poll, but Third Way got a big endorsement from the New York Times columnist Bill Keller, who used the group’s faulty data to warn Obama that he was turning off independents by being “a plutocrat-bashing firebrand” and pushing “Robin Hood” politics like the Buffett Rule.

In fact, as I argued back then, during Obama’s first term his political fortunes improved when he strengthened his message of economic populism, and plummeted the more he preached about bipartisan deficit-cutting and “shared sacrifice” as defined by plutocrats. If Third Way and Bill Keller were right, we’d be debating President Mitt Romney’s new tax cuts for the wealthy right now.

Of course Third Way wasn’t right. But there didn’t used to be a penalty for being wrong in the service of Wall Street’s agenda. Now its plutocracy-defending drivel is both debunked quickly and denounced by politicians – even the one it’s trying to demonize.

That Elizabeth Warren is a great tonic for the Democratic Party is not news (although her decision to attack Third Way’s donor base rather than quail at its attacks merits attention and more admiration). What seems new to me is a sustained feistiness among progressives. The push to expand rather than cut Social Security is already widening the debate and making it harder for any Democrat to fearlessly back even hidden cuts like the chained CPI. And the wave of fast-food strikes and Wal-Mart protests is channeling the anger and moral outrage that inspired Occupy Wall Street, and then seemed to dissipate, into a policy agenda.

Which brings me to the president’s speech. He gave a similar one in the wake of the Occupy uprising, in Osawatomie, Kan., two years ago this Friday, and yet it’s been hard to translate his rhetoric into change. I find it hard these days to get excited about speeches, and yet, given the Republican extremism that’s led to gridlock, that bully pulpit is one of Obama’s most effective tools, and he doesn’t always use it to advantage. He did on Wednesday.

Obama called the “growing deficit of opportunity” a greater threat than the “rapidly shrinking” fiscal deficit. That’s important as Democrats face down Republicans in budget talks. And more vividly than before, he showed how the country’s post-World War II investments in building a middle class created a wider prosperity, while our current 40-year experiment with austerity and tax cuts has cut the heart out of the American dream.

Republicans and Fox News are already attacking the president’s speech as “class warfare,” and that’s fine. We’ve been living through class war for the last few decades, but only one side bothered to fight. For a time they enlisted a lot of Democrats, including Obama. Most people — not only progressives, even some Tea Partyers who aren’t driven by racism — know that Obama’s administration bailed out banks, but not their victims. Yet pampered CEO crybabies responded to the president’s mild chiding over their obscene bonuses and renewed profiteering by comparing him to Hitler and funneling their cash to Mitt Romney.

Now, with income inequality continuing to worsen on Obama’s watch, he has to pick a different side in the class war if he cares about his legacy. I hope that’s what the speech Wednesday was about. I trust that an energized progressive movement, and its congressional allies, can hold him to it. We’ll see. But the energetic backlash against Third Way shows that economic populism isn’t a dead end but the way forward.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Hacker Willing to Spend a Decade in Prison for Exposing the Workings of the Corporate State


Civil Liberties  


The powers that be are rapidly losing credibility and legitimacy, is lashing out like a wounded animal. Hacker Jeremy Hammond's sentencing for 10 years is the latest sign. 


NEW YORK—I was in federal court here Friday for the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond to 10 years in prison for hacking into the computers of a private security firm that works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011 Hammond, now 28, released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some 3 million emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor.

The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum the judge could impose under a plea agreement in the case. It was wildly disproportionate to the crime—an act of nonviolent civil disobedience that championed the public good by exposing abuses of power by the government and a security firm. But the excessive sentence was the point. The corporate state, rapidly losing credibility and legitimacy, is lashing out like a wounded animal. It is frightened. It feels the heat from a rising flame of revolt. It is especially afraid of those such as Hammond who have the technical skills to break down electronic walls and expose the corrupt workings of power.

“People have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors,” Hammond told me when we met in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan about a week and a half before his sentencing.

I did not hope for justice from the court. Judge Loretta A. Preska is a member of the right-wing Federalist Society. And the hack into Stratfor gave the email address and disclosed the password of an account used for business by Preska’s husband, Thomas Kavaler, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Some emails of the firm’s corporate clients, including Merrill Lynch, also were exposed. The National Lawyers Guild, because the judge’s husband was a victim of the hack, filed a recusal motion that Preska, as chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, was able to deny. Her refusal to recuse herself allowed her to oversee a trial in which she had a huge conflict of interest.

The judge, who herself once was employed at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, fulminated from the bench about Hammond’s “total lack of respect for the law.” She read a laundry list of his arrests for acts of civil disobedience. She damned what she called his “unrepentant recidivism.” She said: “These are not the actions of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela … or even Daniel Ellsberg; there’s nothing high-minded or public-spirited about causing mayhem”—an odd analogy given that Mandela founded the armed wing of the African National Congress, was considered by South Africa’s apartheid government and the United States government to be a terrorist and was vilified, along with King and Ellsberg, by the U.S. government. She said there was a “desperate need to promote respect for the law” and a “need for adequate public deterrence.” She read from transcripts of Hammond’s conversations in Anonymouschat rooms in which he described the goal of hacking into Stratfor as “destroying the target, hoping for bankruptcy, collapse” and called for “maximum mayhem.” She admonished him for releasing the unlisted phone number of a retired Arizona police official who allegedly received threatening phone calls afterward.

The judge imposed equally harsh measures that will take effect after Hammond’s release from prison. She ordered that he be placed under three years of supervised control, be forbidden to use encryption or aliases online and submit to random searches of his computer equipment, person and home by police and any internal security agency without the necessity of a warrant. The judge said he was legally banned from having any contact with “electronic civil disobedience websites or organizations.” By the time she had finished she had shredded all pretense of the rule of law.

The severe sentence—Hammond will serve more time than the combined sentences of four men who were convicted in Britain for hacking related to the U.S. case—was monumentally stupid for a judge seeking to protect the interest of the ruling class. The judicial lynching of Hammond required her to demonstrate a callous disregard for transparency and our right to privacy. It required her to ignore the disturbing information Hammond released showing that the government and Stratfor attempted to link nonviolent dissident groups, including some within Occupy, to terrorist organizations so peaceful dissidents could be prosecuted as terrorists. It required her to accept the frightening fact that intelligence agencies now work on behalf of corporations as well as the state. She also had to sidestep the fact that Hammond made no financial gain from the leak.

The sentencing converges with the state’s persecution of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Barrett Brown, along with Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Sarah Harrison, four investigative journalists who are now in self-imposed exile from the United States. And as the numbers of our political prisoners and exiled dissidents mount, there is the unmistakable stench of tyranny.

This draconian sentence, like the draconian sentences of other whistle-blowers, will fan revolt. History bears this out. It will solidify the growing understanding that we must resort, if we want to effect real change, to unconventional tactics to thwart the mounting abuses by the corporate state. There is no hope, this sentencing shows, for redress from the judicial system, elected officials or the executive branch. Why should we respect a court system, or a governmental system, that shows no respect to us? Why should we abide by laws that serve only to protect criminals such as Wall Street thieves while leaving the rest of us exposed to abuse? Why should we continue to have faith in structures of power that deny us our most basic rights and civil liberties? Why should we be impoverished so the profits of big banks, corporations and hedge funds can swell?

No one will save us but ourselves. That was the real message sent out by the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond. And just as Hammond was inspired to act by the arrest of Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, others will be inspired to act by Hammond and the actions taken against him. And we can thank Judge Preska for that.

Hammond is rooted in the Black Bloc. As he was escorted out of the courtroom on the ninth floor of the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl St. on Friday he shouted to roughly 100 people—including a class of prim West Point cadets in their blue uniforms—gathered there: “Long live Anonymous! Hurrah for anarchy!” In a statement he read in court he thanked “Free Anons, the Anonymous Solidarity Network [and] Anarchist Black Cross” for their roles in the fight against oppression.
Hammond has abandoned faith not only in traditional institutions, such as the courts, but nonviolent mass protest and civil disobedience, a point on which he and I diverge. But his analysis of corporate tyranny is correct. And the longer the state ruthlessly persecutes dissidents, the more the state ensures that those who oppose it will resort to radical responses including violence. “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable,” John F. Kennedy said. And the corporate state is not only making peaceful change impossible but condemning it as terrorism.

In late October I spent an afternoon with Hammond in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he had been held for 20 months. He said during our conversation, parts of which his lawyer requested be published only after his sentencing, that he believed that the sole way the people will now have any power is to rise up physically and seize it. My column last week was about that interview, and now I am including previously withheld parts of the conversation.

Hammond defines himself as “an anarchist communist.” He seeks to destroy capitalism and the centralized power of the corporate state. His revolutionary vision is “leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment.” He embraces the classic tools of revolt, including mass protests, general strikes and boycotts. And he sees hacking and leaking as part of this resistance, tools not only to reveal the truths about these systems of corporate power but to “disrupt/destroy these systems entirely.”

He participated in the Occupy movement in Chicago but found the politics of Occupy too vague and amorphous, a point on which I concur. He said Occupy lacked revolutionary vigor. He told me he did not support what he called the “dogmatic nonviolence doctrine” of many in the Occupy movement, calling it “needlessly limited and divisive.” He rejects the idea of acts of civil disobedience that protesters know will lead to their arrest. “The point,” he said, “is to carry out acts of resistance and not get caught.” He condemns “peace patrols,” units formed within the Occupy movement that sought to prohibit acts of vandalism and violence by other protesters—most often members of the Black Bloc—as “a secondary police force.” And he spurns the calls by many in Occupy not to antagonize the police, calling the police “the boot boys of the 1 percent, paid to protect the rich and powerful.” He said such a tactic of non-confrontation with the police ignored the long history of repression the police have carried out against popular movements, as well as the “profiling and imprisonment of our comrades."

"Because we were unprepared, or perhaps unwilling, to defend our occupations, police and mayors launched coordinated attacks, driving us out of our own parks,” he said of the state’s closure of the Occupy encampments.

“I fully support and have participated in Black Bloc and other forms of militant direct action,” he said. “I do not believe that the ruling powers listen to the people’s peaceful protests. Black Bloc is an effective, fluid and dynamic form of protest. It causes disruption outside of predictable/controllable mass demonstrations through ‘unarrests,’ holding streets, barricades and property destruction. Smashing corporate windows is not violence, especially when compared to the everyday economic violence of sweatshops and ‘free trade.’ Black Bloc seeks to hit them where it hurts, through economic damage. But more than smashing windows they seek to break the spell of ‘law and order’ and the artificial limitations we impose on ourselves.”

I disagree with Hammond over tactics, but in the end this disagreement is moot. It will be the ruling elites who finally determine our response. If the corporate elites employ the full force of the security and surveillance state against us, if corporate totalitarian rule is one of naked, escalating and brutal physical repression, then the violence of the state will spawn a counter-violence. Judge Preska’s decision to judicially lynch Hammond has only added to the fury she and the state are trying to stamp out. An astute ruling class, one aware of the rage rippling across the American landscape, would have released Hammond on Friday and begun to address the crimes he exposed. But our ruling class, while adept at theft, looting, propaganda and repression, is blind to the growing discontent caused by the power imbalance and economic inequality that plague ordinary Americans at a time when half of the country lives in poverty or “near poverty.”

“The acts of civil disobedience and direct action that I am being sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community and equality that have guided my life,” Hammond told the courtroom. “I hacked into dozens of high-profile corporations and government institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront injustice—and to bring the truth to light.”

“Could I have achieved the same goals through legal means?” he said. “I have tried everything from voting petitions to peaceful protest and have found that those in power do not want the truth to be exposed. When we speak truth to power we are ignored at best and brutally suppressed at worst. We are confronting a power structure that does not respect its own system of checks and balances, never mind the rights of its own citizens or the international community.”

“My first memories of American politics was when Bush stole the election in 2000,” he told me at a metal table as we met at the prison in a small room reserved for attorney visits, “and then how Bush used the wave of nationalism after 9/11 to launch unprovoked pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. In high school I was involved in publishing ‘underground’ newsletters criticizing the Patriot Act, the wars, and other Bush-era policies. I attended many anti-war protests in the city [Chicago] and was introduced to other local struggles and the larger anti-corporate globalization movement. I began identifying as an anarchist, started to travel around the country to various mobilizations and conferences, and began getting arrested for various acts.”
He said that his experience of street protest, especially against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was seminal, for he saw that the state had little interest in heeding the voices of protesters and others in the public. “Instead, we were labeled as traitors, beaten and arrested.”

“I targeted law enforcement systems because of the racism and inequality with which the criminal law is enforced,” he admitted in court. “I targeted the manufacturers and distributors of military and police equipment who profit from weaponry used to advance U.S. political and economic interests abroad and to repress people at home. I targeted information security firms because they work in secret to protect government and corporate interests at the expense of individual rights, undermining and discrediting activists, journalists and other truth seekers, and spreading disinformation.”

An FBI informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur, posing as an Anonymous member and using the online name “Sabu,” prodded Hammond to break into Stratfor and informed him of technical vulnerabilities in websites of the company.

"Why the FBI would introduce us to the hacker who found the initial vulnerability and allow this hack to continue remains a mystery,” Hammond said as he faced the judge.

“As a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the unregulated private intelligence industry are now known,” he said. “It has been revealed through WikiLeaks and other journalists around the world that Stratfor maintained a worldwide network of informants that they used to engage in intrusive and possibly illegal surveillance activities on behalf of large multinational corporations.”

At Sabu’s urging, Hammond broke into other websites, too. Hammond, at Sabu’s request, provided information to hackers enabling them to break into and deface official foreign government websites, including some of Turkey, Iran and Brazil. The names of these three countries are technically under a protective court order but have been reported widely in the press.

“I broke into numerous sites and handed over passwords and backdoors that enabled Sabu—and by extension his FBI handlers—to control these targets,” Hammond said.

“I don’t know how other information I provided to him may have been used, but I think the government’s collection and use of this data needs to be investigated,” he went on. “The government celebrates my conviction and imprisonment, hoping that it will close the door on the full story. I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but when will the government be made to answer for its crimes?”

“The hypocrisy of ‘law and order’ and the injustices caused by capitalism cannot be cured by institutional reform but through civil disobedience and direct action,” Hammond told the court. “Yes, I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must be broken in order to make room for change.”

© 2013 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

People Across America Are Waking Up to the Effects of 'Disaster Capitalism' -- a Much Better Way of Life Is Possible


  Activism  


People are taking initiative rather than waiting for leaders.

 

 
September 28, 2013  |  
In her book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein explains how crises are used by governments to distract and frighten people so that unpopular and exploitative policies can be pushed through.
It seems that now there is a different reaction disaster capitalism. Rather than disasters providing cover for the implementation of dangerous capitalist policies that lower wages and increase the wealth divide, the disasters being caused by these dangerous policies have woken the public and are leading to a more active and empowered people.

We face a triple threat of the “e”crises - in the economy, environment and energy - which are all connected, says journalist and academic Nafeez Ahmed, but rather than allowing them to overwhelm and weaken us, people are rising to the challenge of solving these crises through direct confrontation with the forces that created them and by building alternative solutions. People are taking initiative rather than waiting for leaders.

Ahmed states, “People are really hungry actually for answers, hungry for solutions, hungry for alternatives, so really this is actually an unprecedented opportunity. It’s an unprecedented crisis but it’s also an opportunity to dream-weave and say ‘well actually everything is going to go to pot over the next 20-30 years if we don’t change, so here’s an opportunity to think outside the box.’”

Enough people appear to recognize that the political system is dysfunctional and does not serve the public’s needs or interests. We saw this recently with the President’s call for an attack on Syria. Instead of falling for the media propaganda telling us that we must intervene to save Syrians from more chemical attacks, the public demanded that the President go to Congress, that there be an investigation into the facts and that the rule of law be followed.  The attack was averted.

US foreign policy is rarely attacked but stopping the war on Syria shows that something may be changing.  There were numerous critical reviews of President Obama’s speech to the United Nations.  One of the most important was Jeremy Scahill’s analysis of a portion of the president’s speech where he openly talked about the US using military force to protect our “core interests,” a virtual admission of imperialism.  Another was David Swanson’s review of the speech were he listed the top 45 lies in Obama's speech at the UN.

But the article that was most relevant to the building of the resistance movement was by David Lindorff who focused on the president telling the world that the US opposes violence to suppress dissent.  Lindroff pointed to the coordinated attack on the Occupy Movement, where Homeland Security and other federal agencies worked with local police to arrest more than 8,000 protesters, use pepper spray, flashbangs, clubs and fists as well as infiltration and creating internal dissension in an attempt to destroy the movement.  The hypocrisy of President Obama in making this statement to the world was astounding.

Speaking of extreme reactions to protest, we continue to see examples in the US.  Last week a Modesto Junior Collegestudent was prevented from handing out free copies of the Constitution.  And in Maryland a parent who tried to ask a question about the Common Core curriculum was arrested.  He tried to speak because the authorities were only taking questions from index cards and had not asked any questions about the curriculum that many parents were concerned about.  These types of actions show the power structure is very insecure about Americans speaking up and taking action.  

General David Petraeus has been a target of people opposed to war. On the way to his first class the retired General and former CIA director was chased down the street by people calling him a war criminal and threatening to protest at every class he taught at CUNY.  Then he was protested at a fundraiser. The protests keep growing. This week, when veterans announced they would protest a luncheon in Los Angeles, Petraeus cancelled his appearance. This is a major change as it is rare to see a former general called a war criminal in the United States.

This week, we are being told that there is a budget crisis and that we must accept more cuts, more austerity measures. But many Americans understand that austerity actually causes more economic decline rather than recovery. In response, nurses and health care workers in 13 countries had a global day of action against austerity, cuts to healthcare and for a tax on stock transactions. And there have been some victories. This week in New York City, nurses won a series of battles in the courts and electoral arena that will keep community hospitals open.

We know that the economy is rigged so that the working class is subsidizing the richest, that our wealth is trickling up.  An analysis published this week found the average U.S. family subsidizes Big Business by $6,000 annually.  This is outrageous at a time when most Americans are struggling to survive.

Instead of accepting cuts and declining wages, workers are fighting back. We’ve been reporting on the striking Walmart and fast food workers. Now people are realizing that they are fighting for all of us. And, in North Carolina where teachers are not allowed to unionize or strike, there is talk of a teacher walk-out.

Labor unrest is building and big labor needs to change to catch-up to American workers anger. There is lots of criticism of big labor for its ties to the Democratic Party and cautious lack of activism, but there are some good signs in labor as well.  United Students Against Sweatshops which has been winning victories, is allying with the AFL-CIO.  Our hope is the students pull the AFL-CIO toward more activism.

People are seeing that the Democratic Party is behind the neo-liberal economic agenda. Democrats are joining the GOP to privatize and log national forests and cut education funding.  And the husband of Senator Feinstein is selling our commons, in this case publicly-owned Post Office buildings, to his friends cheap in order to line his family’s pockets with our commonwealth.

On the bright side, as people speak-up, mobilize and take action not only is there a growing movement but the power structure is being divided. Divisions are occurring in the Democratic Party where some are being pulled away from Obama’s pro-Wall Street, market-based policies that undermine the social infrastructure.  

We hope that trend will continue, especially with regard to the mother of all neo-liberal policies, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that has been negotiated in secret for more than three years. This is a rigged corporate trade agreement (falsely called “free trade” for marketing purposes) that will do very little to get the economy going but will add to many of the mistaken market policies that hinder the economy and make it unfair. A study published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research made some amazing findings about the TPP: (1) the impact on economic growth will be almost nothing, only a .1% increase in the GDP, but (2) the impact on most Americans will be negative with 90% of workers seeing their wages decline.  The TPP will add to the decline of the middle class, race to the bottom in wages and continue the expansion of the wealth divide.

As it comes down to the wire – we expect a push by the President for Congress to grant him Fast Track (Trade Promotion Authority) so that he can sign it before Congressional review – resistance to the TPP is growing. In Maine, where the state House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution opposing “Fast Track,” Rep. Sharon Anglin Treat sees the a broad, bi-partisan opposition developing. The OWS made the TPP a focus of its anniversary protest with Adam Weissman of Occupy Trade Justice describing it as the “anti-Occupy” agreement, “a 1% power grab.”

In Washington, DC, a coalition of unions, environmentalists and Public Citizen organized a protest against the TPP on Friday, while lead negotiators were inside discussing the agreement. Over the weekend as part of a TPP Training organized by Flush The TPP  (which includes both authors), activists produced light projections on a federal building.  And, then on Monday, protests escalated as activists  scaled the US Trade Rep’s building and covered it with four massive banners in order to expose their secret negotiations, as captured in this video.  The Washington Post said the “guerrilla theater . . . demonstration could rank among the best ever.” On Tuesday the activists celebrated with a “Don’t Fast Track a Train Wreck” March that began at the White House went to the US Trade Rep, World Bank, US Chamber of Commerce, through the business district, and ended at Congress. You can see a video of the Fast Track train march at the end of this article summarizing the spectacle protests.

Opposition to the TPP is going to continue to grow as more of the secret agreement becomes public knowledge.  This week information about the impact of the TPP on two of the hottest environmental issues – hydro-fracking and tar sands – came out. The TPP could allow an end run by the oil and gas industry around local opposition to fracking and gas exports. And, the US Trade Rep, Mike Froman, is pushing less regulation of the already inadequately regulated tar sands industry.

As environmental justice activists realize the TPP could undo all of their good work to stop extreme energy extraction, they will join the effort to stop the TPP.  Already 75,000 have threatened civil disobedience if Obama approves the KXL pipeline, and they reiterated that threat in letters to President Obama this week.  

Activism for environmental justice has been constantly building in recent years, especially this summer.  There were protests across the country in recent weeks. Here are a few examples to highlight some of the diverse tactics used:  a renewable energy barn was built in path of Keystone XL Pipeline in Nebraska, activists in Montana stopped a coal train, student artists, activists are aiming for fossil-free investment at Washington University. This is a global movement as can be seen from the protests in Russia with an extreme reaction from the Russian government and in Ecuador this week.

A strong environmental movement that is independent of the corporate political parties is critical to addressing climate change effectively. Naomi Klein is seeing divisions between the Big Green environmental groups and the grassroots environmental groups; indeed, she says the Big Greens may be more damaging than the climate deniers.  And, the corrupt linkage between some Green groups and the Democrats can be seen in the Blue Green Alliance that is giving the environmentally-damaging governor of California an award, at which there will be protests.  In fact, the Big Greens and the Democratic Party are critical parts of the power structure that keeps the status quo in place.  For the popular resistance movement to be successful we need to divide those groups and pull people from them into the movement.

This video produced by the Post Carbon Institute explains why our current way of life cannot continue. Access to fossil fuels is declining and their extraction increasingly destructive. It requires us to change our way of living but this can be a positive transformation. The current crises are activating more of us and are forcing us to work together to create new solutions, such as the ones described by Gar Alperovitz in Ten things You Can Do to Democratize the Economy. In fact, it is already happening. Cooperatives employ more people than multinational corporations.  Join us.  People are taking up the challenge. It is time for the people to lead and create the kind of world we want to live in.
This article is produced by PopularResistance.org in conjunction with AlterNet.  It is based on PopularResistance.org’s weekly newsletter reviewing the activities of the resistance movement.

Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD are participants in PopularResistance.org; they co-direct  It’s Our Economy  and co-host  Clearing the FOG  shown on UStream TV and heard on radio. Their twitters are @KBZeese and MFlowers8.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Our Invisible Revolution





 
 
 
 
(Image: Shutterstock)


“Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”

Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.

It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public’s imagination.
"It is certain now that a popular revolt is coming."

Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable.

“Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,” Berkman wrote. “It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.”

Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has largely been completed. Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct alternative ideas for society, ideas often embodied in a utopian revolutionary myth. The articulation of a viable socialism as an alternative to corporate tyranny—as attempted by the book “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA” and the website Popular Resistance—is, for me, paramount. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, the old regime is finished.

An uprising that is devoid of ideas and vision is never a threat to ruling elites. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, descends into nihilism, random violence and chaos. It consumes itself. This, at its core, is why I disagree with some elements of the Black Bloc anarchists. I believe in strategy. And so did many anarchists, including Berkman, Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin.

By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case free market capitalism and globalization—that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Berkman wrote. “Evolution becomes revolution.”

This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. Violent revolutions usually give rise to revolutionaries as ruthless as their adversaries. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

Violent revolutions are always tragic. I, and many other activists, seek to keep our uprising nonviolent. We seek to spare the country the savagery of domestic violence by both the state and its opponents. There is no guarantee that we will succeed, especially with the corporate state controlling a vast internal security apparatus and militarized police forces. But we must try.

Corporations, freed from all laws, government regulations and internal constraints, are stealing as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The managers of corporations no longer care about the effects of their pillage. Many expect the systems they are looting to fall apart. They are blinded by personal greed and hubris. They believe their obscene wealth can buy them security and protection. They should have spent a little less time studying management in business school and a little more time studying human nature and human history. They are digging their own graves.

Our shift to corporate totalitarianism, like the shift to all forms of totalitarianism, is incremental. Totalitarian systems ebb and flow, sometimes taking one step back before taking two steps forward, as they erode democratic liberalism. This process is now complete. The “consent of the governed” is a cruel joke. Barack Obama cannot defy corporate power any more than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton could. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Bush, who is intellectually and probably emotionally impaired, did not understand the totalitarian process abetted by the presidency. Because Clinton and Obama, and their Democratic Party, understand the destructive roles they played and are playing, they must be seen as far more cynical and far more complicit in the ruination of the country. Democratic politicians speak in the familiar “I-feel-your-pain” language of the liberal class while allowing corporations to strip us of personal wealth and power. They are effective masks for corporate power.

The corporate state seeks to maintain the fiction of our personal agency in the political and economic process. As long as we believe we are participants, a lie sustained through massive propaganda campaigns, endless and absurd election cycles and the pageantry of empty political theater, our corporate oligarchs rest easy in their private jets, boardrooms, penthouses and mansions. As the bankruptcy of corporate capitalism and globalization is exposed, the ruling elite are increasingly nervous. They know that if the ideas that justify their power die, they are finished. This is why voices of dissent—as well as spontaneous uprisings such as the Occupy movement—are ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state.

Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Fighting Back Against the Tyranny of the National Security State



  Activism  

      

Fighting Back Against the Tyranny of the National Security State


Protests against the surveillance state continue to grow, including a mass protest planned for Oct. 26 in DC against the NSA.

 
 

 
This week may be seen as a turning point in the fight back against NSA spying by creating new systems to overcome the surveillance state.

There have been protests against the NSA’s spying program but they focus only on legislative solutions. While legislation is needed, many of the solutions lie within our own power and often merely require the government to get out of the way.  Technological solutions to government surveillance may be more important than legislation.

President Obama’s independent commission is anything but independent; it is filled with members of the surveillance state and organized under the auspices of the NSA.  We are not going to get a “Church Committee” in the current Congress.  The leadership of both parties and President Obama are too tied to the surveillance state – or, perhaps too afraid of it – to challenge it. The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper was not even reprimanded or forced to resign when he committed perjury before Congress about surveillance on Americans – something for which he should be criminally prosecuted.

Protests against the surveillance state continue to grow. There is a mass protest planned for October 26th in Washington, DC against NSA surveillance.  We encourage everyone reading this to participate if possible no matter whether you are an Occupier, Tea Partier, progressive or libertarian – the security state is something we all oppose.  Public opinion is on our side and the people need to show Washington, DC that there is growing anger about spying on Americans as well as abusive spying on countries and diplomats who are not threatening the United States.

Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation and long-time advocate, wrote an important article which asks the question:  “How much surveillance can democracy withstand?” He provides an analytical framework as well as some solutions to surveillance by security cameras, smart meters, corporations in commerce, travel on airplanes, trains and roadways, as well as in the major area of communication on telephone and the Internet.

He urges that we consider “surveillance [as] a kind of social pollution” and consistently seek to limit the “surveillance impact of each new digital system.” The key to solving the surveillance crisis is recognizing that once data is collected it will be misused, so we need to shut down data collection at the outset through a combination of law and technology.  Sometimes this requires designing a dispersed surveillance system, e.g. a security camera in a store should not be linked to the Internet where government or others can acquire it.  Other times, the system needs to be designed to keep key information secret, e.g. in commerce creating anonymous payment systems so the payer’s identity is kept secret.  He points out there is already technology available for digital cash.  When it comes to communications by phone and Internet, laws are needed to limit how long such information can be stored as well as prohibiting government acquisition without a warrant.

He begins his essay discussing an area where we saw a lot of progress this week:

“The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use.”
 
To start, a first-ever report on press freedom in the United States was issued last week by the Committee to Protect Journalists, which described the Obama administration’s attack on the Freedom of the Press and attacks on whistleblowers.  The report, authored by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie, Jr., found that government officials were afraid to talk to the media because of the aggressive felony prosecutions and the NSA spying program.  Downie interviewed 30 experienced investigative journalists and none could find any precedent for the attack on the media and whistleblowers that has been seen in recent years.

There is big news on two fronts regarding these issues this week.

First, a technological breakthrough: the Freedom of the Press Foundation announced that it is completing development of an open source software system that will allow whistleblowers to submit documents to the media securely and anonymously.  One of the beautiful ironies of the SecureDrop system is that it was originally developed by the late Aaron Swartz who committed suicide due to prosecutorial abuse against his transparency activism.  Swartz developed SecureDrop with Kevin Poulsen, an editor at Wired.  The Free Press Foundation will provide installation support and information on security best practices and long-term technical support.  The New Yorker is the first news organization to use the SecureDrop through its StrongBox project.
Second, the major leak about Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras teaming up with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to form a new media outlet.  The new outlet, which has not yet been clearly defined, will be a general audience media source funded with the $250 million Omidyar considered using to buy the Washington Post. Greenwald et al. will focus on the security state and investigative reporting built on the philosophy that journalism should expose the lying of the powerful rather than be subservient to it.  Indeed, a week before this story was leaked Greenwald and Scahill announced they were working together on a major investigation of the NSA.  As the Columbia Journalism Review points out, the combination of three established, dissident journalists joining with one of the first Internet-era billionaires is “the best news journalism has seen in a long, long time. Here’s hoping this remarkable pairing realizes its full potential.”

We agree, this project has truly amazing potential.  We can think of many important stories that the establishment, mass media does not cover (beyond the security state) and having an independent, well-funded media outlet that will cover these stories will be a very good thing for democracy.  We spend a lot of time on Popular Resistance reporting on news that is not covered in the establishment media, like protest movements throughout the nation, the crisis at Fukushima that is a grave risk to the world, the continued pollution from open pit uranium mines which are America’s secret Fukushima (these are few examples among many, you can sign up for our daily digests here, better than a daily newspaper!).

We believe that the first step to mobilizing people is making sure they get the information they need to understand what is going on around them.  The corporate, mass media does more to mislead and create myths than to actually report critical news. As we noted in one of our series of stories on Columbus Day, “The US is a myth filled country where citizens have to make a conscious effort to find the truth.”  This new venture is an opportunity for reporting reality, rather than creating myth.
The other part of the security state beyond surveillance is the use of police to attack protesters and suppress dissent, rather than to protect our freedoms of speech, assembly and our right to petition the government for redress of grievances.  Popular Resistance consistently reports on people exercising their Free Speech rights, working to expand them as well as government attacks on those rights. This week a new coalition, the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations, issued a report,  “Take Back the Streets: Repression and Criminalization of Protest Around the World,” a collection of case studies showing patterns of police crackdown and abuse against peaceful assembly, accompanied by concrete recommendations to expand free speech.

In order to end the abuse of active citizens, government needs to change its philosophy on protests. The report begins its recommendations saying:

“Participation in protest and public assembly should be viewed not as a ‘necessary evil’ in democratic countries, but as a healthy democratic exercise that ensures good governance and accountability. It is a social good that is a vital part of a vibrant democracy. Unfortunately, however, the case studies profiled in this publication highlight that, whether through violence, criminalization or unnecessarily obstructionist laws, protest is being stifled rather than encouraged.”
 
When viewed as a social good the appropriate policies, laws and regulations become evident, i.e. government should be facilitating the right to protest rather than undermining it, they should recognize the human rights of people to protest their government with or without a permit and they should restrict the use of force by police including lethal and non-lethal force, e.g. tasers, tear gas, water hoses.

This abuse of police power was on display in Canada on Thursday, October 17, when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched an attack on peaceful protesters of the  Elsipogtog First Nation who were blockading hydro-fracking on their tribal lands.  According to this insider’s report, the police sent in hundreds of troops, with camouflaged sharpshooters and lethal weapons to attack the indigenous people protecting their land from extreme energy extraction.  They used fire-hoses on the crowd and several dozen, including the chief and council were arrested.  Five police cars were set on fire in response to the attack. (Twitter reports indicate this was done by a police informant.) The next day solidarity actions were held in more than two dozen locations in North America.  Canada has indicated it intends to steal resources from native lands and destroy them with hydro-fracking.

The attack on the Elsipogtog protesters who were protecting their tribal land occurred two days after the Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights left Canada.  After spending nine days in Canada he issued preliminary observations that said:  “From all I have learned, I can only conclude that Canada faces a crisis when it comes to the situation of indigenous peoples of the country.” He found Canada was taking insufficient steps to confront this crisis despite being aware of it and is failing to respect the treaty rights of First Nations peoples and gave as one example the rapid development of resources while negotiations with First Nations were ongoing.

The abuse of power in the United States has been evident against the occupy movement, climate justice, economic justice, antiwar, animal rights and so many others who are seeking to create a better world. Since the late 1990’s when Bill Clinton added 100,000 police and the military began to provide civilian police with equipment, gear and training, police abuse, a long-term problem, has become routine. It infects not just police but prosecutors who are using grand juries to intimidate protesters, a phony court proceeding for mass deportations of immigrants and the unjust treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo.  When an officer who was arrested in a motorcycle gang attack was found to have been undercover in the Occupy Movement, it led the New York Times to write – undercover police are everywhere.   October 22nd is a national day of protest against police abuse.

We can expect conflicts in the United States to continue as the government moves toward an austerity budget that is likely to cut basic social services like food stamps, healthcare and Social Security.  People know, as Joseph Stiglitz wrote this week, that inequality is a choice elected officials are making. While partisans cheer the Democrat’s victory over the abusive shut down of the government by the Republicans, the reality is this was no victory for the people.  Part of the agreement requires a new budget that begins with the austerity budgets of the House, based on Rep. Paul Ryan’s extreme plan, and the less extreme but still austere Senate budget.  This debate among two neoliberal budgets will result in more protest as the people lose but banks continue to be bailed out. At the local level people see examples like in Philadelphia where the city closed 23 schools and laid off thousands but is building a huge prison.

Cutbacks in government combined with corporations that do not even provide their employees a wage on which they can live – paying them so poorly that they require $7 billion annually in public assistance –  as well as unsafe working conditions will stoke unrest.  And, the continued privatization of government services which puts America’s poor and working class at risk, will fuel citizen anger.  The corruption of the economy and government by the rule of money is more evident to more Americans.  On November 2nd there will be an international day of protest against corruption caused by money-dominated government and a corrupt economy.

Fred Branfman, who recently completed a five-part series on the abuses of executive power in the United States, wrote in concluding his series:

“For those alarmed by the steady growth of lawless, violent and authoritarian U.S. Executive power for the last 50 years, the events of the past few months have been exciting. The emergence of a de facto coalition of progressives and conservatives opposing the National Defense Authorization Act giving the Executive the right to unilaterally detain or execute American citizens without a trial, and NSA mass surveillance of phone and Internet data, has been unprecedented, and offers the first hope in 70 years that Executive power can be curbed.”
 
He writes that citizens must unite across the political spectrum in a “Coalition for Freedom” to make the United States a functioning democracy.   We need to demand transparency, real congressional and judicial oversight, protection for whistleblowers and journalists (including citizen and independent journalists) as well as create new technologies that protect our privacy.  The beast of the national security state can be controlled, but it will take millions of Americans demanding that our nation become a functioning democracy to end this tyranny.

This article is produced by PopularResistance.org in conjunction with AlterNet.  It is based on PopularResistance.org’s weekly newsletter reviewing the activities of the resistance movement.
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers are participants in PopularResistance.org. They also co-direct It’s Our Economy and are co-hosts of Clearing the FOG, shown on UStream TV and heard on radio. They tweet at @KBZeese and MFlowers8.