October 6, 2011

By Robert Scheer 

How can anyone possessed of the faintest sense of social justice not thrill to the Occupy Wall Street movement now spreading throughout the country? One need not be religiously doctrinaire to recognize this as a “come to Jesus moment” when the money-changers stand exposed and the victims of their avarice are at long last offered succor.

Not that any of the protesters have gone so far as to overturn the tables of stockbrokers or whip them with cords in imitation of the cleansing of the temple, but the rhetoric of accountability is compelling. “I think a good deal of the bankers should be in jail,” one protester told New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin. That prospect has evidently aroused concern in an industry that has largely managed to escape judicial opprobrium. 

“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the CEO of a major bank asked Sorkin. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all this. Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”

It should pose a threat, not because peaceful demonstrators will suddenly morph into vigilantes fatally damaging their cause with violent action, but rather because government prosecutors should fulfill their obligation to pursue justice and incarcerate some of the obvious perps. As Sorkin conceded, in one of the rare instances of the business press attempting to understand the protesters: “the message was clear: the demonstrators are seeking accountability for Wall Street and corporate America for the financial crisis and the growing economic inequality gap.”

Sorkin ended his account with snarky comments about the protesters using ATM machines and about the ever-admirable Code Pink founder Jodie Evans having flown a commercial airline to get across the country to the demonstration. He also offered the predictable dismissal that could be made about any genuinely spontaneous movement, that “the protesters have a myriad of grievances with no particular agenda.” 

But ignore the mass media’s nitpicking and mostly derisive coverage and wonder instead why it took so long for this grass-roots movement to emerge as an alternative to the tea party, which exonerates the thieves of Wall Street. With 25 million Americans unsuccessfully looking for full-time work, 50 million experiencing mortgage foreclosure and an all-time high of 46.2 percent living in poverty, including 22 percent of all children, isn’t it logical that the faux populism of the tea party be confronted with a progressive alternative?

The Republican narrative, which the media have treated with considerable respect, blames “big government” for our ills, not when Washington bails out the banks, or feeds the maws of the military-industrial complex, but only when it might go to the aid of the victims of the financial conglomerates. 

It was the Wall Street lobbyists, with the complicity of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who caused the Great Recession by destroying a sensible regulatory system — one that had kept U.S. banking reliable since the Great Depression — and by legalizing the securitization of homes. But the Wall Street titans escaped being held accountable for the excesses of their greed: They got their lackeys in government to throw them a lifeline bailout while their victims among the unemployed and foreclosed were abandoned. 

“We bailed out the banks with an understanding that there would be a restoration of lending. All there was was a restoration of bonuses” is the way Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz described it in speaking to the protesters on Wall Street.

It was a thought echoed by George Soros in expressing his support for the demonstrators: “The decision not to inject capital into the banks, but to effectively relieve them of their bad assets and then allow them to earn their way out of a hole leaves the banks bumper profits and then allows them to pay bumper bonuses.”

Those bonuses are part of a practice throughout the corporate world that has far less to do with corporate performance than with the power spoils of CEOs. As The Washington Post points out, “The gap between what workers and top executives make helps explain why income inequality in the United States is reaching levels unseen since the Great Depression.” While the median pay for top corporate executives has quadrupled since the 1970s, the pay of non-supervisory workers has declined by more than 10 percent.

“Ultimately this is about power and greed, unchecked,” Jodie Evans told the Times’ Sorkin, and it is a protest that the columnist’s newspaper, along with the rest of a mainstream media that editorially enthused over the radical deregulation that unfettered Wall Street greed, should now honestly cover.

Cross-posted at Truthdig 

Author’s Website: http://www.truthdig.com

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. 

Anatole France 

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October 5, 2011 / Mark Engler

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By Niall Green, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization
Live and learn: tactics and methods of repression 

Given the tyrannical and often brutal rule of the Saudi monarchy, protests are extremely rare. 

Saudi Arabian security forces cracked down on demonstrators in the country’s Eastern Province Tuesday. The protest, near the coastal city of Qatif, appears to have been in response to a raid by Saudi security forces on Monday, in which two local men were abducted from their homes.

The men, both in their seventies, were seized by police in the Qatif suburb of Al-Awamiya. There are reports that they are being held in an effort to force their sons, who are accused of taking part in earlier anti-government protests, to give themselves up to the authorities.

Human rights groups and journalists reported that scores of masked protesters clashed with police in Al-Awamiya in the hours after the arrest of the elderly men.

A video posted on YouTube shows a large group of masked demonstrators in Al-Awamiya chanting, “Down with Mohammed bin Fahd,” the governor of the Eastern Province and a nephew of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah.

Eleven policemen and three demonstrators were reportedly injured in Tuesday’s clashes.

Saudi state media quickly sought to demonize the protesters and whip up sectarian divisions, claiming that those involved in “rioting” were guilty of treason.

The official SPA news agency quoted the Saudi interior ministry, which said that “a group of outlaws” in Al-Awamiya had tried to create “insecurity with incitement from a foreign country that aims to undermine the nation’s security and stability.”

The claim of foreign involvement is directed against Iran. The Saudi monarchy, which promotes a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam, views the Iranian Shiite clerical regime as its major rival in the Persian Gulf region.

Eastern Province is home to Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority, some 2 million people, which has faced decades of religious persecution and social discrimination. Most of the country’s vast oil reserves are located in the province.

The Saudi government also blamed protests by Shiites around Qatif earlier this year on Iranian influence. The Eastern Province has been subjected to harsh security measures since the outbreak of the outbreak of revolutionary struggles in Tunisia and Egypt this spring, with police checkpoints and raids deployed in an attempt by Saudi Arabia’s rulers to intimidate all opposition.

Despite Riyadh’s claim that any sign of unrest is a product of Iranian incitement, the numerous protests in Saudi Arabia this year—by people from Sunni and Shiite backgrounds—reflect the growing demand by workers and youth for political freedoms and social rights across the Middle East and North Africa.

Just a few miles off the coast of Qatif, in the small Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, the Saudi-backed Sunni monarchy of King Hamad al-Khalifa has also attempted to blame the mass working class uprising by the majority-Shiite population on Iranian “interference.”

The Saudi armed forces led the crushing of protests in Bahrain in March, with more than 1,500 soldiers in tanks and armored vehicles sent across the causeway between the two countries to shore up al-Khalifa’s security forces.

Secure in the knowledge that Riyadh and Washington are behind it, the Bahraini regime has launched a vicious campaign of reprisals against any sign of dissent. Thousands of people have been kidnapped, arrested, tortured, fired from state jobs and otherwise harassed by the Bahraini security forces.

This week, a special military court in the capital, Manama, sentenced another 14 people to lengthy prison sentences in the latest show trial aimed at intimidating all opponents of the regime.

Accused of killing a police officer during the mass demonstrations that rocked Bahrain in March, the conviction of the 14 men is a travesty of justice. They were denied proper access to legal counsel, tortured in prison, and tried by a specially convened National Safety Court.

They face sentences of 25 years each for killing “with a terrorist aim.” In a separate trial, 15 students were imprisoned by the court for up to 18 years on unfounded charges ranging from attempted murder to kidnap to arson.

This follows the frame-up trial of 20 doctors last week, who were sentenced for “occupying a hospital.”

Many international human rights organizations, the United Nations and several foreign governments have criticized the procedures and sentencing of Bahrain’s National Safety Court. The US-based charity Human Rights Watch has condemned the trials in Bahrain as an attempt by the monarchy to “punish anyone and everyone who criticizes the government.”

Throughout the brutal crackdown in Bahrain and the repression of protests in Saudi Arabia, the reactionary Gulf monarchies have received the full backing of the Obama administration and the US military. The US Congress is expected to approve a new $50 million arms deal with Bahrain, already agreed to by the Department of Defense, to replenish King Hamad’s stock of armored personnel carriers, missiles and night vision equipment.

Washington looks to the Saudi regime in particular as its key ally in the Persian Gulf. Not only is Saudi Arabia a source of oil—it has the largest proven reserves in the world—but it is also a key purchaser of US military hardware and a partner in US imperialism’s efforts to police the working class in the region.

As well as playing the leading role in suppressing the mass uprising in Bahrain, the Saudi government has offered sanctuary to Tunisia’s deposed dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and supports the military junta that has ruled Egypt after the ouster of Hosni Mubabak. It has also backed the NATO-led war for regime change in Libya.

Reflecting the closeness of the alliance between Riyadh and Washington, the most recent US State Department communiqué on Saudi Arabia should come as no surprise. Issued by Hillary Clinton on the occasion of Saudi National Day, September 22, it praises absolute monarch King Abdullah’s “leadership” and promotion of “moderation and tolerance” in the kingdom and the region.

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 Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

By Joshua Holland,  AlterNet 

The stupid oligarchy and their henchmen at all levels finally pushed the people too far, and now they may have awakened it past their usual containment  walls.  The message as Jim Hightower explains it, is that “the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans possess more net worth today than the bottom 90 percent of us combined. Worse, these privileged few and their political henchmen have structured a new economic ‘normal’ of long-term joblessness, low wages, no benefits or worker rights, miserly public services, and a steadily widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us.”  We must restore sanity to this nation.—Eds

It should come as a surprise to nobody that the corporate media’s early coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has featured an abundance of hippie-punching but very little about the substantive issues driving thousands of Americans to take over the streets of cities across the country.

As I approached the 30 or so activists who have been camped out for weeks in front of the Federal Reserve Building as part of OccupySF – a protest smaller than those in New York, Boston or Los Angeles – I’d been primed by news stories heaping scorn on these ostensibly confused, foul-smelling rebels-without-a-cause, but what I encountered was very different.

I discovered that while their style may not have been as mainstream as that of the retirees attending a Glenn Beck rally, they knew precisely what they were there for. They had specific demands and even a simple-to-understand “bumper-sticker” message. “We stand for the 99 percent who don’t have much of a voice in this system,” a young woman named Melissa told me. A recent graduate with “not much in the way of job prospects,” she said she’d never been involved in a protest before.

Genuine grassroots movements don’t begin with poll-tested messages or slick media operations and aren’t fronted by polished spokespeople. In any group of ordinary citizens, be it a Shriner’s convention or an uprising against the Wall Street hucksters who took down the global economy, there will be some number who are in fact confused or clueless. A visiting reporter can shape whatever narrative he or she chooses by simply selecting whom to interview and which parts of those interviews make the cut.

At OccupySF on Saturday morning, I too could have crafted a story of hapless, unfocused hipsters had I chosen to focus on the 20-year-old kid serenading confused tourists with a bullhorn rendition of “You Are So Beautiful.” But it wouldn’t have been honest. A minute after he began crooning, several other activists told him that he wasn’t doing much good for the cause.

Instead, I decided to speak with a man named John, who I found collating and stapling a box of leaflets fresh from the copy store. A 30-something dressed in a tie-dyed shirt who had been “out of work for about two years,” John was noticably uncomfortable being interviewed. He asked me several times if he could start an answer over. “You’ll edit that part out?” he asked me more than once. “I’m really not good at public speaking,” he said, awkwardly.

Then, in stops and starts, John proceeded to lay out a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of our economic straits, and offered a series of very specific prescriptions for making the economy work for everyone, rather than just those at the top. It was a breakdown that made most of the pundits looking down their noses at the Occupy Wall Street movement look like superficial dilettantes obsessed with trivia.

“We know what we’re against,” he told me, “but what do we stand for?” John had a 12-point agenda, which he acknowledged would “probably need to be condensed.” “We need to bring back Glass-Steagal,” he said, referring to the Depression-era law that created a firewall between investment- and commercial-banking. “It’s really ironic that a law whose purpose was to prevent another Great Depression was repealed and now we have an economy that is worse than at any time since the Depression,” he said. “That’s strange.”

“We need a massive investment in infrastructure, in green technology, high-speed rail, things like that,” he said. “We need to abandon or significantly modify these free-trade agreements like NAFTA… these weren’t the result of some democratic groundswell. They were written by lobbyists,” he told me. “You know, to oversimplify things, they’re intended to maximize corporate profits.”

John talked of a shorter work week to bring down unemployment, like the successful work-sharing programs in Germany; an idea economists like Dean Baker have espoused since the crash. He said we needed lobbying reform, and to mitigate the damage wrought by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case. He advocated a Medicare buy-in be open to all citizens.

Was he a regular activist? “I protested in the past off and on, but I didn’t always think there was much of a purpose for it,” he said.

What did he think the overarching message of the movement should be? “We don’t have a government for ‘we the people’ anymore,” he said, “and I do believe we’re going to have to have ongoing, non-stop protests for months to fix it.”

I asked him if he thought Americans had reached a tipping point. “It really seems like there’s something happening here,” he told me. “I don’t know if we’ve reached that point yet, but I think we probably will in the next few months. I think the movement is going to grow. And it’s not a matter of voting in the right amount of Democrats, or Tea Partiers or whatever. The whole system is broken. You know, where were the Democrats when they were outsourcing our jobs for the last 30 years?”

As I wrapped up the interview, I added an unsolicited word of advice: “I’d consider just calling them trade agreements, instead of free-trade agreements,” I offered. Gesturing to the shuttered Federal Reserve building behind us, I added: “That’s what they want you to call them.”

I returned late Sunday night to drop off some books and see what the “camp” looked like bedded down for the evening, after the usual mobs of tourists had left the area. I was surprised to see that the number of people had grown since the previous day. About 40 or 50 were gathered on Market Street, in sleeping bags and tents. Some brought their dogs; others played guitars. They had a first-aid station, a kitchen, a sanitation system. A nearby Starbucks had been “good about letting us use their bathrooms,” one protester told me. They appeared to be in it for the long-haul.

No, they didn’t have poll-tested messaging or polished spokespeople like the Tea Partiers, another grassroots movement with an abundance of top-down messaging courtesy of GOP front groups like FreedomWorks and the Republican PR firm of Russo Marsh and Rogers. But they had something that’s become increasingly rare in our political culture: a sense of community, of shared purpose.

As I left them, I couldn’t help thinking, “Yes, there’s definitely something happening here.”

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

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