My letter to Walmart, rebutting its claims to DC

After I published “Walmart and the Mayoral Field Give D.C. the Bait-and-Switch” in early August, Steve Restivo, Walmart’s senior director of communications, wrote me an email spelling out his opposition to the article. I disagree with pretty much all of his talking points – the same ones that are fed to the public and to council members – so I decided to share my responses with the city as it nears a decision on the Large Retailer Accountability Act, which would require large, profitable retailers in DC to pay a living wage with benefits. Mr. Restivo’s responses to my original piece are italicized.

1.     There didn’t appear to be a second source for this statement:  “When Walmart first decided to come to town, it privately promised a group of D.C. clergymen that it would pay a starting wage of $13 an hour…”  A credible corroborator is important because (as you point out) we normally only share our average, hourly, full-time wage.  It’s posted for every state where we do business here.

Why is your word more credible than that of a widely supported clergyman with deep roots in DC? This isn’t the first time you’ve implied that Reverend Graylan Hagler misunderstood you – or is “struggling with the difference between starting and average” – a claim that comes off as condescending at best.

As I was told by Rev. Hagler – who was in the room at the time (you were not), “Insinuating that I don’t know the difference between starting salary and average wage is really casting aspersions at the community and our ability to understand simple English. So it points to their playing hardball and insulting the residents of the community. The reality is we don’t tolerate the insults coming from Congress or from big business.”

By the way Mr. Restivo, where is your credible corroborator?

I checked out your website, and found that the listed hourly wages have an asterisk saying they refer to “regular, full-time hourly associates.” How is that defined, and what proportion of Walmart’s hourly workers fit that description? According to a recent Reuters article, “Walmart’s everyday strategy: Add more temps,” most if not all of your new hires are temps, and for the rest, company healthcare is getting even harder to access. One anonymous store manager said, “Everybody who comes through the door I hire as a temporary associate. It’s company direction at the present time.” We’re going to need more transparency before we can believe your claims about your employment practices.

And still the question remains: if, as your website claims, your average hourly wage in the US is $12.78, including $12.04 in Maryland and $12.39 in Virginia, why would you be opposed to legislation that creates a level playing field and forces your big competitors to pay the same amount you already claim to pay?

This special election, vote for the special candidate

Imagine a DC in which someone could run for mayor free of corporate influence. Before you laugh, think about how the political landscape will look if an At-Large candidate wins with a campaign funded 100% by individual donations.

We are at a crossroads in DC history. For the first time in sixty years, the black population is about to fall below 50%. The primacy of the affordable housing issue among the attendees of Mayor Gray’s One City Summit last year offered irrefutable evidence that the double-sided coin of displacement and gentrification is the number one concern in DC. Not surprisingly, corruption was found to be the second highest concern.

A mind-boggling six Walmart stores threaten to both culturally and economically homogenize some of the city’s predominantly black neighborhoods. Development around the new retail behemoths, if they go through, can be expected to raise property values in some of the lowest-income parts of the city. If the Council fails to pass the Large Retailer Accountability Act (LRAA) and obligate stores like Walmart to pay reasonable living wages, income in those areas will remain depressed while property values rise, leading to further displacement.

I read Colby King’s widely-circulated op-ed with some consternation. I felt awkward as a white person dropping a printout of it, with the headline “Race doesn’t belong in D.C. election” at the homes of African-American folks while canvassing for Elissa. Race does matter; in a society with vastly different levels of fortune and opportunity between races it should always be part of political conversation. It matters what effect each candidate will have on the racial makeup of our city – and to figure out what that will be takes a more nuanced approach than just looking at the color of their skin.

The LRAA bill to make Walmart pay a living wage never got a hearing under Council Chairman Kwame Brown, despite being proposed twice under his tenure. Under Phil Mendelson, this legislative hedge against displacement and for good jobs suddenly has a chance. The day Mendelson brought it to hearing, with strong support from At-Large Council Member Vincent Orange and over a hundred advocates, community members and workers, Elissa Silverman released a statement giving it her full support.

What about candidate Anita Bonds, corporate relations director at Fort Myer, which has companies building Walmarts in DC as some of its clients? Not so much. Bonds is the front-running African-American candidate in the race. She brought up the race conversation that had to happen, when she said in a Kojo Nnamdi debate, “People want to have their leadership reflect who they are. The majority of the District of Columbia is African-American… there is a natural tendency to want your own.”

I was surprised at how scandalized a lot of white people were at the truth in there. Of course we have an affinity to want leadership that reflects who we are. Most white people tend to vote as white as black people vote black (Obama being the grand exception). Elissa Silverman is Jewish; I’m Jewish. Many of the people I know who volunteer for her are Jewish. I can’t tell a population that comes from a very different background and history than me how to vote. But I also firmly believe in choosing based on the fundamental qualities of a candidate: who’s paying, what skills does she have, what has she done for the city, what promises she’s made.

What didn’t get as much airtime in Nnamdi’s debate was his own take: “Why do you think it’s important for there to be a majority of black people on the Council? I tell you why I ask the question – it’s because of the assumption that if a member of the Council happens to be black, that member will be an advocate for poor people. I don’t happen to agree with that.”

I agreed with Bonds when she said, “the council should be representative of the people who live in the District of Columbia.” But it’s hard for me to imagine her representing the people as well as she would represent the company. She has not said she’ll step down from her position at Fort Myer, one of the largest construction companies in the region, which has gotten hundreds of millions of dollars in DC contracts over the last six years. An Anita Bonds victory would seem to be a coup for a company with a well-documented history of political manipulation and fraud.

A Washington City Paper article from 2011, “Paver Power,” enumerates some of the allegations against Fort Myer over the past decade: “knowingly and fraudulently” using another construction company as a shell company to qualify for federally funded contracts; having company employees bribe DC officials and over-billing the city for three years (for which Fort Myer signed a plea deal and paid almost a million dollars to the U.S. Attorney’s office), and being “part of a vast bid-rigging scheme involving a complicit District government.”

“Close doesn’t even begin to describe the nature and extent of” the relationship between DC Council and Fort Myer, The Washington Post editorial board wrote in 2003. Getting one of its own executives elected to the council would be enormous for fraudulent Fort Myer – it would no longer have to break so many laws to wield power in the Wilson Building. This recent report by the Sunlight Foundation shows Bonds having the most corporate donations in this race – largely from construction companies, which push for gentrifying development – and the least campaign finance transparency. Notice that Elissa Silverman is the only candidate with a campaign fully sponsored by individual donations.

If it wasn’t enough for Anita Bonds to have her feet in multiple parts of the revolving door, her regard for democratic processes is further demonstrated by having been put in office not by the voters but by the DC Democratic State Committee. Chaired by Bonds since 2006, the DCDSC is a group of 87 members that last year decided to stop putting its members up for election at the ballot box, so is now full of people elected in 2008 whose terms should have ended or gone up for re-election in 2012. Those are the people who put Council Member Bonds into office and gave her the name recognition, fundraising power, endorsements and general campaign machine inherent in incumbency.

(I’m picking on Bonds because she’s the perceived frontrunner, because race has to be part of the conversation, and because she exemplifies the entrenched, cronyist party institutionalism that Elissa is running against.)

Other candidates in the race have things to offer, but none, other than Redd, have shown Elissa’s dedication to honesty in campaign financing or to important workers’ rights issues like paid sick days for restaurant workers, living wages at Walmart, or a higher minimum wage (Silverman and Bonds both said they would raise the DC minimum wage to $12.50 – Mara said he would keep it at $8.25. Redd, $14; Zukerberg and Frumin, $11.75.). At the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, Silverman did budget analysis and analysis of workforce development programs. Her experience covering DC Council for over a decade at The Washington Post and the Washington City Paper prepares her well for one of the Council’s biggest duties – questioning, examining and overseeing city agencies.

Matthew Frumin has an apparently solid liberal platform, and he would make a fine Ward 3 council member for his upper Northwest community. But he doesn’t stand out as a real change maker, and his focus on education will have little impact with the Council’s Committee on Education already full. Perry Redd has played an important role in the conversation by consistently speaking for black Washingtonians, workers and the disadvantaged, but he hasn’t had enough funding or ground game to make himself a viable winner. Similarly, Paul Zukerberg has moved the conversation on incarceration and marijuana decriminalization lightyears ahead of where it was before; while he’ll help get a win on that someday, he won’t be winning the election this year. Pat Mara, who said at a recent forum that workers don’t need legal protections like paid sick days because they can work that out with their bosses, is soon to be irrelevant.

DC Council corruption – legal and illegal – is endemic. Rare candidates like Elissa Silverman are part of the solution. A win by her will show other candidates, black and white, that they can win without the influence of landed wealth and conflicts of interest, and end the reign of governance by wealthy interests that are displacing people of color and increasingly stratifying society.

Remember that this special election is only happening because of corruption. Why would we choose anyone but an honest, citizen-funded candidate? In the era of Citizens United, with increasing corporate interference in our government bodies, voters must make winners of candidates like Elissa – white or black.

From Palestinian eyes: 5 Broken Cameras

Show me any group of unarmed demonstrators facing an armed, armored group of police or soldiers, and I’m going to side with the former. A power that requires violence or the threat of violence to exist cannot be legitimate. A state power that hates to be watched and breaks video cameras must be doubly illegitimate.

5 Broken Cameras, an Oscar-nominated documentary, is the story of a Palestinian village’s peaceful resistance to encroaching Israeli settlements, shot through the lens of villager Emad Burnat’s five shot and smashed cameras over seven years. If the Israelis did one thing right in this film, it’s that they were keenly aware of how bad they look on camera, and to take that to its logical conclusion, how wrong they must be.

Israeli soldiers grabbing and killing children. Showing up on Burnat’s doorstep to tell him his house is now in a “Closed Military Zone,” that he can’t film them (even from his own doorway), and that he must “evacuate.” Arresting and shooting people dead for yelling at them in fully justified anger. Burning olive trees to the ground (“What did this olive tree do to them?”) and erecting fences, walls and condos on the land of humble farmers.

While the Israelis dehumanize themselves throughout the film, there are many humanizing moments for Burnat and his kin. At age three or four his son Gibreel, born in 2005 when Emad gets his first camera, is seen toddling over to a soldier and handing him an olive branch. We watch the young boy come of age at the villagers’ weekly demonstrations. “Why did they shoot my Phil?” he asks his dad at age four, after soldiers kill one of the village’s most uplifting and indomitable members. “What did he do to them?”

I’m Jewish, and I work for a Jewish social justice organization. One of our guiding principles is tikkun olam: repair the world. Another Jewish principle is loving the stranger – which the Palestinian certainly is to most Jews around the world. At the point where Israel goes from repairing worlds to destroying them, from loving the stranger to demonizing her, is where I must reject it. When you see what it looks like for soldiers to come into the peaceful, agrarian hills of the West Bank, chucking tear gas canisters and stun grenades, taking people and taking land, the debate over who was there first suddenly feels irrelevant. I’m not from the traumatized post-Holocaust generation of Jews, and I don’t believe Israel should be given carte blanche to do whatever it wants because it’s “our” land. I believe people who identify with Israel because of their religion should hold its behavior up to the moral standards of their faith.

It’s not surprising to see the disregard many American Jews have for Palestinians – it’s ingrained not only in mainstream Israel’s governance and culture but in this country’s as well. When Burnat landed at LAX on his way to the Oscars, he and his family were detained.

“Although this was an unpleasant experience,” Burnat said of the detainment, “this is a daily occurrence for Palestinians, every single day, throughout the West Bank. There are more than 500 Israeli checkpoints, roadblocks, and other barriers to movement across our land, and not a single one of us has been spared the experience that my family and I experienced yesterday.”

Some white people seem to have trouble understanding how systemic this kind of racial profiling is. An article in Buzzfeed used an unnamed source to try to discredit the detainment first as a lie, and then as a “publicity stunt.” Even after Michael Moore and others poked numerous gaping holes in their story, they continue to stick to it. Which demonstrates once more why it’s so important for us to watch and listen when Palestinians and other oppressed people tell their own stories.

Ten things to know from The New Jim Crow

The phrase The New Jim Crow can come across as hyperbolic – it did to author and legal scholar Michelle Alexander the first time she saw it, on a sign announcing a protest. I started her book with the expectation that I would learn about an oppressive criminal justice system locking up disproportionate numbers of black males for cruel lengths of time – but I didn’t see how that was directly analogous to the system of open segregation and oppression that was Jim Crow.

Well, I learned a few things.

1. While one out of every 14 black men is behind bars, compared to one in 106 white men, their rates of drug use are equal, if not higher for whites. As the National Institute on Drug Abuse (a government agency) reported in its “key findings” last year, “African-American [high school] students have substantially lower rates of use of most licit and illicit drugs than do Whites at all three grade levels. These include any illicit drug use, most of the specific illicit drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.” Yet three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino.
2. Media coverage and “tough on crime” political rhetoric have worked wonders to connect blacks with drug use and crime in the minds of most Americans. A peer-reviewed study in 1995 asked people to close their eyes, envision a drug user, and describe that person. Ninety five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user. Other studies have shown people more likely to mistake a black person as armed when he is not, and mistake a white person as unarmed, when he is, in fact, armed. Black participants showed a “shooter bias” similar to that of their white counterparts. A study on New Jersey Turnpike vehicle searches found that only 15 percent of drivers were racial minorities, but 42 percent of all stops and 73 percent of all arrests were of black motorists, despite similar rates of traffic law violation by both races. Whites were almost twice as likely to actually be found with illegal drugs or contraband as African Americans. This kind of blatant racial bias is demonstrated in study after study.
3. The start of the War on Drugs did not correspond with an increase in drug use. In fact, illegal drug use was on the decline when Ronald Reagan launched the War on Drugs in 1982, and crack wouldn’t hit the streets until 1985. Drug convictions accounted for the majority of the US penal population’s explosion from 300,000 to more than 2 million people in less than thirty years.
4. We’re number one! In punishment. The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Remember this the next time you hear hawkish criticism of “strong arm” dictators in Latin America and “brutal regimes” in the Middle East – our country imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. Alexander writes, “Between 1960 and 1990, for example, official crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet the US incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period. Despite similar crime rates, each government chose to impose different levels of punishment.”
5. In at least fifteen states, blacks are incarcerated due to drug charges at a rate from twenty to fifty-seven times greater than that of white men. On paper, drug law enforcement is, without a doubt, disproportionately punitive to black men. Time to sue, right? Not so fast. Alexander recounts a history of Supreme Court precedents that makes it essentially impossible to challenge the racist application of laws or the cruelty of unduly harsh sentences. It starts with the profound and widespread racial bias described above in #2, combined with the free rein given police to pick and choose suspects. In the early 1990’s, the Court held in Whren v. United States that it did not violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” for police officers to pull people over based on minor traffic violations – failing to use a turn signal, barely exceeding the speed limit, etc. – and start searching for drugs. The Court also barred people from alleging that racial bias by police falls under “unreasonable” conduct. In 1987, lawyers for Warren McCleskey, a black man facing the death penalty for killing a white police officer in Georgia, found that defendants charged with killing white victims in the state received the death penalty eleven times more often than defendants charged with killing black victims. In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Court accepted this body of statistical evidence, but decided that the appalling disparity in punishments and lethally racist legal climate did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal treatment under the laws.” In the majority’s very own words, the case threatened the integrity of the system itself: “If we accepted McCleskey’s claim that racial bias has impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon be faced with similar claims as to other types of penalty.” Oh the horror!
6. The book’s subtitle is Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and Alexander urges us to be intentional about having a race analysis as we work to dismantle the prison system and other racist institutions. “Any movement to end mass incarceration must deal with mass incarceration as a racial caste system, not as a system of crime control…. We need an effective system of crime prevention and control in our communities, but that is not what the current system is.” A system so characterized by racial control must be confronted honestly in racial terms, lest a new form of structural racism sprout in its place because we were too colorblind to see it.
7. In the struggle to end mass incarceration and institutional racism at large, uncritical devotion to liberal figureheads is a weakness. Despite once being hailed as “the first black president,” Bill Clinton – “more than any other president – created the current racial undercaste,” writes Alexander. Not only did Clinton create a federal “three strikes and you’re out” law and dozens of new federal capital crimes, as well as authorize tens of billions of dollars to expand prisons and police forces, but his Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program put a lifetime ban on welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense – including possession of marijuana. Defying the rules of baseball, he even launched a “One Strike and You’re Out” Initiative, banning people with drug crime convictions from federal public housing. During his tenure, corrections funding went up by $19 billion (+171%) while public housing funds dropped by $17 billion (-61%) – “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.” President Obama, who in 2006 openly acknowledged having smoked pot – and inhaling! – filled his cabinet with veteran Drug Warriors like Vice President Joe Biden, (now former) Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Attorney General Eric Holder, and boosted narcotics enforcement funds twelvefold as part of the Economic Reinvestment Act of 2009. Even Supreme Court saint Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in Lockyer v. Andrade, decided that a sentence of fifty years without parole for a man who stole children’s videotapes from a Kmart – imposed under California’s three strikes law – was not cruel and unusual, and thus did not violate the Eighth Amendment. Justice David Souter wrote in the dissent, “If Andrade’s sentence [for stealing videotapes] is not grossly disproportionate, the principle has no meaning.” Many Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, have worked hand in hand to create the system of mass incarceration, and should be judged by their policies, not by their names or party affiliations.
8. These are humans we’re talking about, not numbers. Every stop-and-frisk is a humiliation. Every arrest – for something they did or did not do – is a loss of someone’s livelihood. Their job, their car, their home, their kids. The War on Drugs is a war on people – mostly black people.
9. Though the War on Drugs has the greatest direct effect on blacks and black communities, it oppresses whites as well. In a system that treats drug use as a serious crime rather than a public health issue, there are few sources of support for the demographic with most of the highest rates of drug use: white people.
10. “‘Felony’ is the new N-word,” said a black minister in Waterloo, Mississippi. “They don’t have to call you a nigger anymore. They just say you’re a felon…. Once you have that felony stamp, your hope for employment, for any kind of integration into society, it begins to fade out. Today’s lynching is a felony charge.” The white elite’s intent in the Jim Crow era was to deflect the working class’s resentment of poverty and redirect it into self-consuming racial hatred. Mass incarceration’s similarity to Jim Crow is this: “tough on crime” politics make it perfectly legal – and culturally acceptable – to discriminate against huge numbers of blacks – and through them, their families and communities – in housing, employment, voting, social welfare, jury duty, child custody and more. The first lines of the book are, “Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy.” In Chicago and other American cities, young black men are more likely to go to prison than to college. In DC, one out of every three black men will spend some time in prison – and many will emerge with the letter F. It’s not that the people running government and the prison system – or those voting them in and paying them – are necessarily full of hate and racism. But many of us are indifferent to a great mass of suffering that’s kept out of sight and out of mind. Glass ceilings in this country are not only for women in the workplace, but also for blacks who have supposedly served their time in prison – and come out to find even more limited options than they had before.

What scared me most about this book was the realization that if I were black, I would probably be in jail. Why? Because, like many people do, sometimes I smoke weed. I’ve gone to court with my white friends for marijuana possession – we got away with fines. Other times I was almost caught with it. The statistics show that if I’d been black in these situations, I could’ve expected to serve time in prison, and possibly still be there right now. I can’t accept my whiteness being the reason why I’m free, and their blackness being the reason so many are in cages. That’s what a structurally racist society looks like.

windowpigeon

I lay awake the night Sandy made landfall, checking twitter obsessively to see who was getting hit and how badly. As I saw the pictures and stories come in – cars floating down the street, hundreds of thousands without power, whole neighborhoods on fire – and compared it to what little we were going through in DC, I felt guilt flood over me.

A week later I put out a call for donations, which two friends and I would bring up to survivors of the storm on a weekend of volunteering. The response was overwhelming – after just a couple of emails, more than fifty people responded and followed through with trash bags full of clothes and blankets, boxes of food and bottled water, and money for us to rent a truck and buy more supplies for donation. I spent a day and a half driving around the city picking…

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9/11 and the for-profit shock to our rights

In both Chile and the United States, 9/11 was only the opening salvo of national tragedy. It was the day in 1973 of a CIA-backed coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s popularly elected administration and replaced it with Pinochet’s brutal neo-liberal regime, trained by Milton Friedman in Chicago, whose military violence against its own people was matched only by its economic violence against them.

Government spending on everything but the military was slashed by 50% over the next few years, food price controls in place for decades were abolished, inflation reached 375% (the highest rate in the world at the time), the opening of “free trade” caused unemployment to go from 3% to 20%, and by 1988 45% of the population had fallen below the poverty line. Meanwhile, the richest 10% of Chileans had seen their incomes increase by 83%.

The only way Pinochet could pull this off in a solidly leftist society was through intimidation – permanently disappearing thousands of people and imprisoning and torturing tens of thousands more. But this isn’t just about 1970’s Chile. We too live under a government that cuts public funds for most things other than the military, that encourages outsourcing leading to American joblessness, that is complicit with and encouraging of wealth disparity, and that has shown serious tendencies toward suppressing dissent, using increased surveillance that we’re supposed to accept as part of the “post-9/11 world”

If there is a post-9/11 world, it’s because we’ve allowed those in power to define it as something different from the world we once knew. It’s a world in which many of us accept the government’s mission of using shock and awe to create democracy and freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan, while forgetting about our own freedoms of privacy and what the PATRIOT Act and NDAA would do to them. Caught between the fear of a sudden new enemy and the patriotic fervor of a million flags, the media gave up its power, and we the people, notwithstanding some huge protests, gave up ours.

It was the picture-perfect shock crisis – as Naomi Klein writes in The Shock Doctrine, “Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones – gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus do not seem to apply.”

As Milton Friedman, the father of neo-liberalism, said in 1982, “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

Klein writes:

“The key figures of the [Bush] administration, veterans of earlier disaster capitalism experiments in Latin America and Eastern Europe, were part of a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain, and the way Christian-Zionist end-timers pray for the Rapture. When the long-awaited disaster strikes, they know instantly that their moment has come at last.”

9/11 gave the Bush administration, with its ideas of total privatization “lying around,” a blank slate to create an entirely new, and entirely privatized industry – the War on Terror. It was an industry that couldn’t fail to expand – the enemy was all around us, in an “unconventional war” without end. The document that launched the Department of Homeland Security says, “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.” On December 31, 2011, this mentality of paranoia was taken to its absurd extreme with President Obama’s signing of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), which declared the entire world a battlefield, and anyone on it – including American citizens – subject to indefinite detention without trial. It represented a 180 degree reversal from the 2008 Democratic platform’s rhetorical challenge to the PATRIOT Act, none of which reappeared in this year’s platform.

Five years after 9/11, the homeland security business had already eclipsed Hollywood and the music industry in revenue, with DHS and our taxpayer money as the biggest buyer in the field. “We don’t make things,” said Jane Alexander, deputy director of the research wing of DHS. “If it doesn’t come from industry, we are not going to be able to get it.” There’s certainly a lot coming to industry – between 9/11 and 2006 alone, DHS gave out $130 billion to private contractors – more than the GDP of Chile or the Czech Republic.

Only 17 of the 13,000 people killed in terrorist attacks last year were private US citizens, but don’t let that stop you from being scared enough to give up your civil liberties. The expanded powers of war-making, surveillance, imprisonment, torture and “intelligence” legislated in a time of shock eleven years ago were great for the(ir) economy. The average American CEO saw his compensation go up by 6% between 2001 and 2005; the average CEO of the top 34 defense contractors got 108% pay raise. The loss of our rights was the rise in their stock prices.

Both 9/11’s were flash points of the shock doctrine used to restructure political and economic systems for the enrichment of the elite. If we don’t pay attention to how both 9/11’s were used to change the rules of the game, we’re bound to let the freedoms we once had become distant memories.

Occupy (v): to fill up or take up, to people

As the people’s occupation snaked through the streets of Manhattan it felt like we were doing something the city of millions had never seen. We were at least two thousand or three thousand strong. We were angry, but we were peaceful. A cluster of balloons floated in the sky ahead, tethered by the head of the pack, seeming to emit a buoyant sense of what Gandhi called right against might.

This is no a hodge-podge hippie movement, as is always the stereotype pinned on civil disobedience, but a peaceful, well-aimed, and growing consciousness that some of the money and power stuck at the top needs to trickle back down to the rest of the American people. About 80 percent of all new income generated in the last 30 years has gone to the top 1 percent. That’s not okay.

There has been a lot of talk about why we walked up the bridge – who did we think we were to block traffic in the middle of a Saturday afternoon? For one thing, this is civil disobedience. By definition it is offensive and obstructive to many; that’s how it gets attention. If we had just walked around lower Manhattan for an hour we wouldn’t have garnered half the attention. As for what actually happened, this is how I saw it:

As we reached the bridge, part of the pack began to walk up the pedestrian ramp that rises between the two directions of traffic. From my vantage point halfway back in the crowd, the front of the line seemed to hesitate at the road, then suddenly surge up it with a heady determination. I was shocked but invigorated by our assertiveness, and when I looked to my right and saw a line of police calmly separating us from the next lane of cars I figured they must somehow be okay with it. In fact it almost felt like they were escorting us up the bridge.

Once we had gotten almost halfway across the bridge, the police were suddenly no longer okay with it. The lane of cars was gone; the march stopped abruptly, and I could sense a pushing and pulling up at the front. The people behind us called for us to keep going, and the people in front of us told us to go back. What I later saw on YouTube was police at the front of the crowd literally dragging what seemed to be random people out and arresting them. “The whole world is watching!” the crowd chanted. Hey, it was true. Then, “This – is – a peaceful protest!”

It suddenly dawned on the thousand or so people that we were trapped, and likely to face arrest. A “Let us go!” chant began. Though the crowd had every reason to panic, everything stayed very orderly. Some people climbed 15-20 feet up to a walkway overlooking the road until the police stopped them and cordoned off the crowd. A man standing on the walkway above initiated a human microphone, a tactic frequently used in the occupation because megaphones are not allowed, in which the person speaking yells a few words at a time, and those words are yelled by the people within earshot, and the message expands outward in waves. In this case, the man with the vantage point was telling us we were probably about to be arrested.

My friends and I got arrested on the bridge at around 6pm. We were loaded onto an MTA bus with our hands behind our backs in plastic cuffs. The Transport Workers Union is now suing to stop NYPD from using them as accomplices in obstructing the people’s movement. As we were led to our bus, the crowd was singing the Star Spangled Banner. “The land of the free, and the home of the brave,” serenaded me as I stepped into the makeshift, extra large paddy wagon.

Some of the people with me began to lose circulation in their hands because their cuffs were too tight – they say theirs wrists and hands still hurt days later. I was lucky enough to have loose cuffs, only strong discomfort. We sat cuffed on that bus for a total of five hours as the Crown Heights, Brooklyn Precinct 77 struggled to process the hundreds of us. Feeding off of each other’s optimism, we made conversation with each other and with the policemen in charge of watching us.

The more talkative cop professed not to care much about the country’s economic situation, as he himself had a comfortable salary and benefits. When asked if he would join the force now, though, since compensation has been reduced, he said hell no. He also asked why we had clogged the bridge. We told him to ask his superiors why they let us.

He was a nice guy though – when my friend Jon was at the point of pissing himself, he unzipped Jon’s fly and let him relieve himself down the back stairs of the bus. We all got a good laugh out of that.

When we were finally let into the precinct station, they cut our arms loose and put us in 7’x5′ cells with six or seven of our comrades. At this point it was around midnight. We all pissed in the toilet before flushing it, in order to reduce the risk of it overflowing, as the toilet in the neighboring cell had done. We had nothing but each other – they had temporarily confiscated our shoes and every possession but our wallets. No phones for communication, nor to check the headlines and see what the world was seeing. Soon we had one more thing. A cop came by pushing a big plastic crate labeled “Jail sand.” They were peanut butter sandwiches that tasted like they’d been made months ago. Having eaten nothing since leaving Liberty Plaza nine hours earlier, I ambivalently ate mine. An Asian 38 year old in my cell used his to cushion his head against the wall. At one point I reached through the bars and threw my crust down the hall in frustration. We had no way of knowing how much longer we’d be in captivity. But we conversed warmly, bonding quickly in a climate of shared oppression, shared victory, and the shared knowledge that we are all firmly in this together.

For all we knew we could have been left there all night – and it crossed my mind that if anyone had to take a crap, our cramped cell, half occupied by the toilet and a bench, would become unbearably awkward. “Anyone got any TP?” I called out. Said Jon: “Use the sandwiches!” Laughter all around.

Around 1:30am, as conversations waned, Jon called out from the next cell down, “Okay, we’ve learned our lesson!” The whole row burst out in laughter.

My cellmates represented a diverse (though almost all white and male) cross-section of reasons for supporting the protest. JC had recently graduated from one of the top fashion schools in New York, and said his previous company had wanted desperately to hire him full time but simply couldn’t. He had just been fired and had spent the last week living and breathing Occupy Wall Street – something his employed friends couldn’t understand. A guy from the city and a guy from Rochester both had stories of restaurant managers trying to get them to work for free. Another cell mate, Julien, said he considers himself lucky because he does art handling for people who are, essentially, in the one percent. But he’s still very much of the protest – in fact he had been pepper sprayed the previous weekend. Sean, a sophomore at Wesleyan, sat awkwardly through a conversation we had about how a college degree is no longer remotely a guarantee of employment in this country. (Some 22 percent of college grads are unemployed, and another 22 percent are working jobs that don’t require a college degree. The average college grad is entering the real world with $20,000 of debt.)

I couldn’t help feeling the intense irony of the situation. Every day on Wall Street, stock brokers gamble with the world economy. Finance CEOs know that when something goes wrong they can take the money and run. The government will bail them out just like it did last time (the financial reforms made since then haven’t been nearly strong enough to change that). The people in cuffs are fighting for their own futures, and incidentally, for the future of this country. On the other hand, the last Wall Street manipulators I remember being penalized were Martha Stewart, Jonathan Lebed, and Bernie Madoff. Each of them was guilty of doing no more than what Wall Street does everyday, but on a scale that was respectively too high-profile, too embarrassingly juvenile, or too huge to ignore. They were isolated individuals who could take the fall without seeming, at first glance, to be impugning the entire system.

At around 2:30am, the cell next to me was finally released and handed their tickets. An hour later, they came back for us, taking a few every fifteen minutes. Finally it was just Julien and me, out of the 100+ protesters who had been jailed in that precinct in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn. We told each other whoever got out first would wait for the other outside and walk to the metro together. “I’m gonna go crazy if they leave me alone in here for too long, man,” he said. I was called first. Before, everyone had clapped when another protester was released. Now there was no one left to clap. The officer hurried me along as I put on my shoes and belt, placed my things back in my pockets. He said they were about to close and if I didn’t hurry I might be stuck overnight.

“You know where to go?” an officer asked me after I got my tickets and headed to the door. “Be careful out there,” he said. “Put that camera bag on your front.”

When I walked out of the Brooklyn Crown Heights jail at 3:30am there were several people standing across the street in the wet cold. One held a sign saying “Thank you!” and another held one saying “Occupy Precinct 77.” They took my name to give to the Lawyer’s Guild, and sent me around the corner to the welcome station.

Anyone who thinks Occupy Wall Street is unorganized is under-informed. Waiting for me around the corner were several more OWS people with cookies, chips, tobacco, water – all the comforts one craves on such a night. (Aside from beer and a deli sandwich, which came later.) My friends who had been released earlier were there too. As my friend Jon said while we were marching along the bridge, just before the cops sandwiched us – I had never felt more alive.

Occupy Wall Street is a self-explanatory movement. To be in Zucotti Park aka Liberty Plaza is to be in a warm, stimulating, relatively non-monetized community. There is plentiful food, donated by people around the city and around the world. When it rains, people walk around handing out ponchos. When it rains at night, people sleep there anyway. There’s a media and information center with people who, in my experience, were highly accessible. Conversations are happening all around. There’s a library, witty and incisive signs everywhere, meditation groups in the mornings.

Sure, many of the occupiers are too out there for most Americans to identify with. And in our fast-paced, pre-digested media culture the occupiers have befuddled superficial analysts by lacking one clear demand. But the underlying message should be obvious:

Wall Street in its current, loosely regulated, risk-encouraged form = too much private money in politics = rapidly growing wealth disparity = loss of democracy and the American dream.

It’s a message with the potential to truly resonate with the masses – dare I say, to even have party crossover appeal. Some 628 cities around the country and the world (up from 160 in the two days since posting this) – from Birmingham and Wichita to Dallas and Fargo to Tokyo and Tijuana – are preparing to occupy public spaces and condemn elite money in politics. They feel in their gut that now is the time to make something happen. If half of those cities have the audacity, patience and creativity of Occupy Wall Street, change is simply inevitable.

I and many others in my generation have been waiting our entire lives for the opportunity to coalesce our multitudes and right the ethical wrongs we’ve watched our country perpetrate under the guise of democracy. Indeed, for us American democracy has been, if not a guise, then a farce. We’ve come of age watching a president steal arguably two elections and lie his way into a costly war we’re still fighting – a war waged under the flimsy pretense of spreading democracy. Meanwhile the president we thought was the last great hope has fallen in line and largely been cowed by corporate influence – directly as well as indirectly, via the GOP. As a result it has become impossible to ignore the juxtaposition, and indeed causal effect, between steadily rising poverty and exploding wealth in the top 1 percent.

A middle-aged friend of mine, who came from DC to meet me in Liberty Plaza, said this movement reminded him of the Vietnam protests – except those were more social, more fun. People didn’t go to those protests alone, the way some seem to be doing now. There was no specter of economic depression. Now there is. For that reason we may be on the cusp of a global Tahrir Square – and it will be fascinating to watch how each city, state and country reacts.

Of course, major challenges lie ahead. The winter is coming, which will make it harder for people to continue occupying outdoor spaces. And though the movement calls itself the 99 percent, many at the lower end of that group are repelled by the image of a largely white, somewhat middle class movement they see as being ungrateful for what it already has.

But with each passing week the occupation is gaining more momentum and more penetration into mainstream consciousness. This Wednesday, major New York labor unions and NYU student walk-outs will join the march. All signs point to a relentless mounting of pressure. Sooner or later something – or someone – will have to give.

The devolution will be televised

In a perverse way it was the perfect disaster to catch our attention. Two towering monuments to our national identity (or at least that of our elites) spectacularly felled in one swift morning. It was an attack that shocked everyone, immediately. Even if you weren’t in New York, you saw it, heard it, felt it, in your living room or office or almost anywhere you happened to be.

Almost immediately there was a clear enemy group whom you didn’t understand and didn’t have to feel guilty about hating. It was never worthwhile considering their point of view; they were simply deranged, woman-abusing haters of freedom. Most importantly they were all the same – the Saudis who flew the planes were the Arabs who had WMDs in Iraq were the Muslims living in caves in Afghanistan was probably the turbanned man on the street – but was definitely not the Saudis and Iraqis to whom we pay $80 billion per year to fuel our addiction to oil.

“Except for our own Civil War, this [war on terror] is the only war we have fought where we are paying for both sides,” said former CIA director Jim Woolsey. “We are paying for these terrorists with our SUVs.”

The tragedies of 9/11 were gripping, made for TV material. Even in an age of high-metabolism media, the events of one single morning had staying power. They were visual and visceral, and they directed – and distracted from – the greatest disasters of the past decade (constant war and Wall Street’s self-enriching destruction of our economy, respectively). Ten years later they captivate us again, as they will continue to on many anniversaries hence.

But there are other tragedies, other emergencies, evolving over years and decades and even centuries, that can’t seem to get one blue, sunny, Tuesday morning’s worth of news coverage. They aren’t burning – or if they are, understanding what hit them takes more than a video clip. They don’t implicate people on the other side of the world as much as they do us. They’re slow and systemic, and if we began to acknowledge them we’d have to get start getting angry at someone. If we began to truly understand how someone is creating for our children a world that is technology-dependent yet nearly resource-depleted, totally alienated from nature at a time when nature is more unstable than ever – well, we’d have to get angry at ourselves.

But that won’t fit into one morning – and you won’t see it on TV.

On getting jumped

A few nights ago, three friends and I got jumped. I would certainly say we did nothing wrong – but people don’t punch strangers in the face for no reason. They don’t kick a man on his back just because they’re drunk. They flex and yell and physically dominate because they live in a material world where they have no material – and their hopes are fading fast.

Did you know that between 1980 and 2005, 80% of all new income generated in this country went to the richest 1%? That means 99% of us – in other words, you, me and everyone we know, worked our asses off for about 20% of what we deserved. In fact if median income had kept pace with economic growth since 1970, it would now be $92,000, not $50,000. Something’s wrong, folks.

From grades 7-12 I went to school with impoverished blacks from DC. From the beginning, the whites were put in mostly advanced classes thanks to the tracking system – a system that, purposely or not, looked a lot like segregation. In one non-track 8th grade class, a black student at my table started asking me to read him the board. I soon realized that he didn’t have bad eyes – he was illiterate. I had to wonder what kind of home he could possibly come from. Then I had to wonder why he should care about art, or arithmetic, or standardized tests. In 9th grade I watched two black girls rip each other’s earrings out in a playground fight. I watched in awe as a yelling, howling crowd formed around them. I wondered why they were so angry.

Now I know. This country more than ever before is leaving its disadvantaged behind. Meanwhile the few people on top are telling them, in the words of Bill Maher, “Shine my shoes, fuckface.”

No wonder they’re pissed.

I’ve read a few people who have described the anger of the poor much better than I can. Now I’ll turn it over to one of them. The following is from a brilliant book on Bombay called Maximum City, a Pulitzer Prize finalist by Suketu Mehta:

The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve-hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train, they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweat and farts. When they get home to the slum, their mothers and their fathers and their grandmothers will ask them what income they have brought home. Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob, part of a contingent of seventy patriots fighting for the country’s honor, walking unmolested into movie theaters, posh apartments, and the offices of the cricket lords of the country, smashing trophies, beating up important people who drive fine cars. All the accumulated insults, rebukes, and disappointments of life in a decaying megalopolis come out in a cathartic release of anger. It’s okay to be angry in a crowd; the crowd feeds on your anger, digests it, nourishes your rage as your rage nourishes it. All of a sudden you feel powerful. You can take on anybody. It is not their city anymore, it is your city.

You own this city by right of your anger.

 

With shit education, no money and nary a leg up through connections to the professional world, the inter-generationally abused members of our society still, at the end of the day, want something they can be proud of. Don’t we all?