they’re mostly Christmas/holiday tunes transformed into Occu-Carols, with a couple others thrown in as well. my favorite is #6 “Do You Hear What I Hear?”

let’s be a movement that sings!
alex

image by Larry Swetman

OCCUPY PHILLY SONGBOOK

1. WE WISH FOR A REVOLUTION
(by Alex Knight to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”)

We wish for a revolution
We wish for a revolution
We wish for a revolution
In the coming New Year!

Tunisia was first
Egypt heard the call
Then Occupy Wall St.
Inspired us all.

(Chorus)

In Chile and Greece
Now Russia we see
The people are rising
For democracy.

(Chorus)

Now Philly has joined
We’re ready to rock
We’re just getting started
And we’ll never stop!

We wish for a revolution
We wish for a revolution
We wish for a revolution
In the coming New Year!

2. THE TWELVE DAYS OF OCCUPY
(inspired by other versions, including one by Gina Botel)

On the first day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
A tent and a community.

On the second day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Two woolen blankets and…

On the third day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Three warm meals…

On the fourth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Four clarifying questions…

On the fifth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
FIVE LONG GA’s…

On the sixth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Six working groups…

On the seventh day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Seven drummers drumming…

On the eighth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Eight signs a-painting…

On the ninth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Nine marchers marching…

On the tenth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Ten locked arms…

On the eleventh day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Eleven cops a-raiding…

On the twelfth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Twelve new encampments…

3. DECK CITY HALL
(by Alex Knight, inspired by other versions)

De-eck City Hall with tents
Fa La La La La, La La La La
‘Tis the time to start a movement
Fa La La La La, La La La La
October 6th we came together
Fa La La, La La La, La La La
But this movement lasts forever
Fa La La La La, La La La La

Dilworth Plaza sits before us
Fa La La La La, La La La La
Make a sign and join the chorus
Fa La La La La, La La La La
Follow us and take a chance
Fa La La, La La La, La La La
Grab a drum and let’s all dance
Fa La La La La, La La La La

Direct democracy’s our creed
Fa La La La La, La La La La
Helping those in times of need
Fa La La La La, La La La La
One thing that this movement knows
Fa La La, La La La, La La La
Capitalism has no clothes!
Fa La La La La, La La La La

Fa La La La La, La La La Laaaa!

4. OCCUPY
(by Alex Knight to the tune of “Jingle Bells”)

Occupy, Occupy,
We have come to say
Oh! what fun it is to fight
For a better world today!

(repeat)

Setting up our tents
We are here to stay
O’er the weeks we go
Laughing all the way (Ha ha ha!)

Drums are pounding loud
Keeping spirits bright
What fun it is to occupy
Our city squares tonight!

Oh! Occupy, Occupy,
We have come to say
Oh! what fun it is to fight
For a better world today!

(repeat)

Feeding all for free
And a place to lay
Medics standing by
Meetings all the day!

Our government has failed
To do what we all say
That is why we’ve come to build
Democracy our way!

(repeat chorus)

5. ORGANIZING WORKERS IN THIS LAND
(based on a version by Kelly Karjola to the tune of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”)

CEO’s…
Are you listening?
On respect we’re insisting
In each industry
Our plan’s gonna be
Organizing workers in this land

All you rich politicians
Unions want recognition
You’d better see this,
We’re raising our fists
And organizing workers in this land

We all share a new vision
Occupy has a mission
One day “working poor”
Will be never more
We’ll have a living wage in every town!

So let’s join those committees
Time to build Union Cities
It’s a beautiful sight
When we all unite
Organizing workers in this land!

6. DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?
(based on a version by Gina Botel)

Said the police to Mayor Nutter,
Do you see what I see, do you see what I see?
Way down in the streets, Mayor Nutter,
Do you see what I see, do you see what I see?
A Crowd, a Crowd
Marching in the streets
Waving signs out there for all to see
Waving signs for all to see!

Said Mayor Nutter to the Media,
Do you hear what I hear, do you hear what I hear?
Ringing through the town, Media
Do you hear what I hear, do you hear what I hear?
A Chant, a Chant
The popping up of tents
Saying we are the 99 percent
We are the 99 percent!

Said the Media to the Mighty Banks,
Do you know what I know, do you know what I know?
In your fortress walls, Mighty Banks
Do you know what I know, do you know what I know?
The People, the People
The People of this town
They will come, occupy and shut you down
They will come, occupy and shut you down!

7. O’ DAMN YE WALL ST. GENTLEMEN
(to the tune of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”)

O Damn Ye Wall Street Gentlemen,
You bastards made us pay
For all the debt you piled up
And then you walked away.
You handed out fat bonus checks
And sneered at our dismay.

O, you Swindlers and Liars and Frauds (x2)

O, Damn Ye Wall Street Gentlemen
For we are unemployed.
Our homes are in foreclosure
And our bank accounts destroyed.
You robbed us of our future
For the profits you enjoyed.

O, you Swindlers and Liars and Frauds (x2)

O, Damn Ye Wall Street Gentlemen
You paid off Uncle Sam,
For regulation of the Banks
Is nothing but a sham.
And no one went to prison
For this trillion dollar scam.

O, you Swindlers and Liars and Frauds (x2)

O, Damn Ye Wall Street Gentlemen,
If you do not repent
Prepare for occupation by the 99 percent.
The times are changing once again
And we will not relent.

O, you Swindlers and Liars and Frauds (x2)

8. SOLIDARITY FOREVER
(updated by Alex Knight)

When the movement’s inspiration through the 99 has run,
There shall be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.
But what force on earth is weaker
Than the feeble strength of one?
For the movement makes us strong!

Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever
Solidarity forever, for the movement makes us strong!

It is we who worked our butts off,
Building all the stuff they trade.
Paved the highways, fed the children,
Endless gigs of websites made.
Now we stand outcast and jobless
‘Midst the wonders we have made.
But the movement makes us strong!

Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever
Solidarity forever, for the movement makes us strong!

They have taken untold millions
That they never toiled to earn
But without our brain and muscle,
Not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their fragile power
Gain our freedom when we learn,
That the movement makes us strong!

Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever
Solidarity forever, for the movement makes us strong!

9. RUDOLPH THE BROWN-NOSED BANKER
(based on a version by Loretta Callahan)

Rudolph the Brown-Nosed Banker
Got a very big bailout
He didn’t have to worry
Cause he was “too big to fail”

All of the other banksters
Jealous of his fat cat ways
Cranked up your interest payments
Now they’re really makin’ hay

Then one frantic autumn day
To Rudolph’s great dismay
He’d robbed so many 401k’s
All the markets went away!

Now all the people hate banks
And they’re shouting out angry
We’re gonna stop this nonsense
You’ll go down in history!

10. O’ ONE PERCENT!
(written by Michael Shultz to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree”)

O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
The times they are a-changin;
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
The times they are a-changin;
You foreclose when Summer’s here,
Keep empty homes through Winter’s drear.
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
The times they are a-changin.

O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
No treasure can you give me;
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
No pleasure can you give me;
For me to prop your system up,
While me and mine go belly up.
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
No treasure can you give me.

O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
Your spokespeople lie daily;
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
Your spokespeople lie daily;
The corporations fill our ears,
With things to buy and baseless fears.
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
Your spokespeople lie daily.

O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
You are not our master;
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
You are not our master;
Through Unity we’ll overcome,
Let’s bridge divisions everyone!
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
You are not our master.

11. OCCUPY IS COMING TO TOWN
(adapted from other versions)

You better watch out
You better not lie
You better shape up I’m telling you why
Occupy is coming to town!

You’re cooking the books
We’re checking them twice
We’re gonna find out who’s naughty or nice
Occupy is coming to town!

We see you when you’re cheating
We know when you’re a snake
We know when you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake

Oh, you better watch out
You better not spy
You better not steal I’m telling you why
Occupy is coming to town!

We see you when you’re speaking
We know when you’re a fake
We know when you’ve been doing wrong
So do good for goodness sake

We’re speaking out loud
We’re taking the streets
The 99% cannot be beat
Occupy is coming to town!

12. WE OCCUPY!
(by Dave Marley of Occupy Philly)

We Occupy
It’s what we do
And what we do
We do for you
And also for us
Because we must
We Occupy…
We Occupy

We Occupy
Wherever we go
Wherever we go
Is our new home
And our new home
Is your new home
We Occupy…
We Occupy

We Occupy
Whatever we eat
Whatever we eat
Is Yours to eat
Come have a seat
And tell us why
You Occupy…
We Occupy

We Occupy
Wherever we stand
Wherever we stand
Is occupied land
Come take our hands
And raise them high
We Occupy…
We Occupy

We Occupy
Victoriously
Victoriously
We now are free
So shall we be
Until we die
We Occupy…
We Occupy

We Occupy
We Occupy
We Occupy
We Occupy
We Occupy
We Occupy
We Occupy…
We Occupy!

Whether the occupation on Lower Manhattan lasts, or grows, or dies in the coming weeks, the global upheaval will continue and become an ever-present feature of the 21st Century. Our theory is that capitalism has entered a crisis from which it will never recover. The youth can feel it, we know we have no future within the existing system. The only question is, what alternative models can we move to, when everything feels so bleak?

The Wall St. occupiers have followed the examples of Egypt, Greece, and Spain in using the direct democratic process of the “general assembly.” This means thousands of young people are having their first exhilarating taste of their voice being part of the actual exercise of power – participating in a movement.  In truth, this is our best hope, so spread it and bring that exhilaration to your friends and family.

If we have a general assembly in every town, every workplace, every school, then capitalism is over for real. [alex]

“Occupy Wall St. Rediscovers the Radical Imagination”

by David Graeber

Originally published the The Guardian UK, September 25, 2011.

Youth of the multiracial working class - always at the front of things. Police arrested over 80 people during this 9/24 march, and pepper sprayed more. Photo by davids camera craft

The young people protesting in Wall Street and beyond reject this vain economic order. They have come to reclaim the future.

Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?

There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.

Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?

Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.

But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world’s financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.

Everything we’d been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like “Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?”

It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an “economy” is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.

Perhaps, it’s not surprising. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we’re all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.

What we’ve learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the “third world debt crisis”. But the global south fought back. The “alter-globalisation movement”, was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of “austerity”.

The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What’s different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.

When the history is finally written, though, it’s likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritising of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it’s clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side.

We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We don’t know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can.

Each video is about 10 minutes. I learned a lot from all three interviews, and I’m sure you will too.  Enjoy!

Malalai Joya is an Afghan activist, author, and former politician. She served as an elected member of the 2003 Loya Jirga and was a parliamentary member of the National Assembly of Afghanistan, until she was expelled for denouncing other members as warlords and war criminals.

She has been a vocal critic of both the US/NATO occupation and the Karzai government, as well as the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalists. After surviving four assassination attempts she currently lives underground in Afghanistan, continuing her work from safe houses. After the release of her memoir, A Woman Among Warlords, she recently concluded a US speaking tour. She sat down for an interview with David Zlutnick while in San Francisco on April 9, 2011.

Charles Bowden is an author and journalist whose work has largely focused on the US/Mexico Border region. His writing has especially centered on the Mexican Drug War and Ciudad Juárez, the border city known as the epicenter of Mexican drug violence. His critically acclaimed book, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, was published in 2010 by Nation Books. His latest work, edited along with Molly Molloy, is El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin and was just released, also by Nation Books.

On June 30, 2011 Bowden sat down for a video interview with David Zlutnick while in San Francisco for a speaking engagement. In his responses he argues the extreme violence seen in Mexico is a sign of a deeper societal disintegration resulting from governmental corruption, failed economic policies, and the War on Drugs.

George Katsiaficas is a professor, sociologist, author, and activist. He teaches at the Wentworth Institute of Technology and specializes in social movements, Asian politics, U.S. foreign policy, and comparative and historical studies. He has written extensively on popular social uprisings in various regions and historical moments.

In these selections from an interview with David Zlutnick filmed on on March 27, 2011 in Berkeley, CA, he discusses the recent wave of demonstrations and rebellions throughout the Middle East and North Africa, placing them in a greater context of social transformation.

David is a British radical who goes to Spain to fight the Fascists, and discovers the reality of revolution, counter-revolution, and love.  The film does an excellent job portraying the political debates, struggles and betrayals between the various factions (Fascist, Communist, Anti-Stalinist Marxists, and Anarchists). The entire film is available in one video on youtube (109 min). It is directed by Ken Loach, and is in English and Spanish. Highly recommended!

The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
published 1939 during the last Great Depression.
Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com, May 25, 2010

Also posted on The Rag Blog and TowardFreedom.

Arizona SB1070, signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer on April 23, requires Arizona’s local and state law enforcement to demand the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally, and arrest them if they lack documents proving citizenship or legal residency. Effectively making racial profiling into state policy, this law is the latest in a series of attacks on Latin American immigrants, as well as the entire Latino community, who must live with the fear of being interrogated by police for their brown skin. Then on May 11, Arizona went one step further, outlawing the teaching of ethnic studies classes, or any classes that “are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity”. This same law also states that schools must fire English teachers who speak with a “heavy accent.”

Perhaps these new laws make sense if we imagine that undocumented immigrants are merely “aliens”, a danger to the good, mostly white citizens of this great country. But suppose we look at the problem of immigration from the perspective of the immigrants? Why are they risking life and limb to come to a foreign land, far from their home and families? Why aren’t they deterred from making this trip no matter how many walls we put up, no matter how many police collaborate with ICE, no matter how many angry armed “Minutemen” vigilantes are conscripted to guard the border?

John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, following the Joad family as they migrate to California during the “Dust Bowl” of the 1930s, sheds light on these questions in a way that perhaps every American can relate to. One of the most popular and well-written American books of all time, The Grapes of Wrath provides a very human perspective on the harsh lives of migrants, personified by the Joads – a family of poor sharecroppers from Oklahoma. Evicted from their family farm, just as the millions of Mexicans who have suffered enclosure from their land and become homeless and jobless because of NAFTA, the Joads travel to California in a desperate search of work, only to encounter the harassment of authorities and the hatred of the local population.

There are important differences between the “Okies” who traveled to the Southwest in the 1930s and Latino migrantes of the 2000s. The Joads, of course, were white, and did not cross a national border when they made their exodus. But at its core the story of the Joads is the story of the migrant workers, their troubles, their fears, but also their humanity, and their hope. It is a story that can inspire us to recognize the historic nature of the moment in which we live, understand why these enormous transformations are occurring, and recognize that justice for the immigrants is justice for everyone, regardless of color or citizenship status.

Enclosure

In order to understand the migrantes we first have to understand the story of their displacement, or the enclosure of their land, which has left them homeless and with no other options than to leave their homeland in search of a wage. What can The Grapes of Wrath tell us about this reality?

People usually do not resort to risky and desperate moves unless they have nothing left to lose. Steinbeck begins the Joads’ story with the loss of everything they had: the small farm on which they had sustained their family for generations by growing cotton. Young Tom Joad, fresh out of prison, returns to his home to find it deserted. “The Reverend Casy and young Tom stood on the hill and looked down on the Joad place… Where the dooryard had been pounded hard by the bare feet of children and by stamping horses’ hooves and by the broad wagon wheels, it was cultivated now, and the dark green, dusty cotton grew… ‘Jesus!’ he said at last. ‘Hell musta popped here. There ain’t nobody livin’ there.’” (51).

Mexican farmer with corn / image courtesy of "© Juan_de" on flickr

Whether as tenants or small landholders, either for subsistence or for markets, the vast majority of the poor migrantes now coming to this country are fleeing the loss of their farms and their livelihoods, just as the Joads. Perhaps for generations, maybe hundreds or even thousands of years, they had lived in connection with the land and had been able to depend on it for the survival of their families and culture. The loss of this land is devastating to those cultures, but larger forces stand to gain by driving these people into homelessness.

The phenomenal book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004) details the violent origins of capitalism in 15th-17th century Europe. In it, author Silvia Federici defines the “enclosures” that were necessary for giving birth to capitalism by divorcing the European peasantry from their traditional lands and leaving them with no other choice but to sell their labor for a wage in the emerging industrial economy.

She goes on, revealing that this enclosure process remains a core element of the capitalist economy we live in:

Enclosure is precisely the part of the story we never hear about in the mainstream immigration debate in America. It is never questioned why hundreds of thousands of workers are scrambling to come to the U.S., other than for “our freedom” or to “take our jobs.” But Steinbeck boldly begins The Grapes of Wrath by highlighting the enclosure process as it operated in rural America during the Great Depression.

This famous photograph shows a family of homeless migrants fleeing the "Dust Bowl."

In the 1930s, Oklahoma was ground zero for the “Dust Bowl“. Unsustainable industrial farming practices such as the monoculture of cotton without crop rotation caused the soil to die, then be picked up by the wind and create enormous dust storms. On page 41, Steinbeck laments, “You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.” The settling layers of dust killed the crops and made it harder for small farmers to earn a living, and many were driven into debt and became tenants on land that was then technically owned by the bank. At the same time, large, wealthy landowners were able to use tractors and other new farming machinery to replace the many tenants who had previously been needed to work the land. “Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company – that’s the bank when it has land – wants tractors, not families on the land” (193).

In this passage, Steinbeck brilliantly exposes the evictions as part of the normal functioning of capitalism, as a land owner arrives to evict a tenant family:

As far as capitalism is concerned, whatever will maximize profit is the arrangement that must be pursued, regardless of the human consequences. The situation in Mexico today resembles that of Oklahoma 75 years ago. Small family farms are no longer profitable enough, and people are being thrown off their land every year by the thousands.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed into law by Bill Clinton on December 8, 1993, created the largest “free trade” zone in the world: Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The treaty stipulated that there could be no “barriers to trade”, such as a tariff/tax on foreign products. In this video MIT professor Noam Chomsky, interviewed by Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha, explains how the modern enclosures in Mexico are a result of NAFTA, which has not had the effect it was promised to have for the U.S. and Mexican economies.

As mentioned by Prof. Chomsky, one direct result of NAFTA was the flooding of the Mexican market with artificially cheap agricultural products from the United States, such as corn, which is heavily subsidized by the U.S. government. From 1990-2000, the price of corn in Mexico fell by 58 percent, and as there is simply no way for the vast majority of Mexican tenant farmers to compete with this artificially low cost of American corn and other products, millions were driven into poverty and debt, and soon faced eviction.

This excellent article from the Institute for Food & Development Policy states that “Since NAFTA, 80 percent of rural Mexicans live in poverty, with 60 percent living in extreme poverty.” It also points out that as of 2004, a total of 1.7 million subsistence farmers had been pushed off their land because of NAFTA. So it should be no surprise that the number of Mexican immigrants entering the U.S. increased by 75 percent in the 5 years after NAFTA became law.

The form of enclosure has changed, but the fact has remained. People driven from their land will search for work in other places.

Xenophobia

The second great lesson The Grapes of Wrath reveals about the immigrants is how they are feared and hated, by the local population as well as the authorities, and what it means to endure and overcome this xenophobia.

Throughout the book, as the weary Joads meander west on their old jalopy, their eagerness and optimism about finding decent work and a better life in California are dashed against the rocks of poverty and hatred. Early in the book, Tom’s pregnant sister Rose-of-Sharon Joad goes on about her expectations for life in California.

But shortly after crossing the border into California, the Joad family encounters the authorities, who are less than pleased by the arrival of more migrants into their state. After setting up camp by a river, Ma settles down for a nap in the tent, only to be disturbed by a law enforcement agent who gives her a threatening welcome.

"Minutemen" vigilantes patrol the U.S.-Mexico border / picture courtesy of boinboing

It becomes clear through the story that the California police and authorities tolerate the presence of the “Okies” so they can be exploited for their extremely cheap labor. Sheriffs and rangers even guard the grounds of large private farms where migrants are bussed in. However, the cops maintain a close eye on the Okies, and are not afraid to resort to violence when they step out of line.

The Joads arrive one night in a “Hooverville,” the name for the slums on the edges of towns during the Great Depression where unemployed would set up camp. Here a contractor comes to find desperate workers, escorted by a deputy sheriff with whom Tom Joad gets into an altercation.

The goal of the authorities in the story, as in the country today, is to keep immigrants in a constant state of precariousness, where they cannot make waves for fear of being imprisoned or deported. This climate of fear is the real effect of Arizona SB1070, not to actually deport all the undocumented workers from the state, because that would hurt the economy that depends on their cheap labor. In fact, this CNN video documents that SB1070 has already driven away too many workers from the state and hurting the businesses that had employed them. It seems it has backfired so much that even Russell Pearce, the author of the legislation, has now reversed his stance and is supporting “guest worker” legislation to invite undocumented workers back into the state.

What does the climate of fear surrounding immigrants do for the U.S. capitalist economy and its ruling class?

First, it keeps undocumented immigrants in that precarious state where they will not seek help or point out injustices, nor will they try to organize unions and demand higher pay or working conditions. It guarantees they will mostly toil for less-than-minimum wages and suffer in silence. Most Americans are not even aware that since NAFTA was enacted, at least 3,000 Mexicans have died trying to cross the border. Every wall that goes up on the border drives the immigrants into more remote deserts to reach their destination, increasing the likelihood of injury and death, but precious few U.S. citizens are willing to stick their necks out to help prevent such unnecessary deaths.

Second, the xenophobia encouraged by measures like SB1070 is useful for the ruling class because it drives a racial wedge into the American working class. Instead of uniting to fight for better jobs, affordable education, health care, housing, an end to environmental nightmare and endless wars, the anger of the common people is directed at the scapegoat of the immigrant. Steinbeck illustrates this phenomenon when “a crowd of men… armed with pick handles and shotguns,” confront the Joads after they flee the Hooverville. Interrogating and threatening the Joad family, these self-styled vigilantes act just as the “Minutemen” who today rove the deserts of Arizona, looking for “illegals.”

Though these people’s anger and fear over the economy and lack of democracy in the U.S. is warranted, they are failing to confront the actual thieves and criminals who have plunged the world into a new Great Depression. Because by identifying “foreigners” and people with brown skin and different accents as the reason why wages are low and jobs are lost, corporations and politicians are able to deflect attention away from the real source of economic hardship: themselves.

Conclusion

The crisis in the Southwest in the 1930s is unfortunately similar to the situation today. Hundreds of thousands of poor migrants, their land enclosed and with nowhere to go, facing long trips through the heat of the desert and the ice of xenophobia, are nevertheless persisting to do what they need to do to feed their families.

There is a tidal wave coming north now, which resembles one that 3 generations ago came west, but like that one there will be no stopping it by putting up walls and threatening people with violence or deportation. Desperate people will always do what they need to do to survive.

The only way to stem the flow is to repair the dam that has burst, through poverty and enclosure. Latinos need decent livelihoods in Latin America before they will stop coming here, “scurrying to find work to do.” Repealing NAFTA and ending the massive corn subsidies for U.S. agribusiness would be two huge steps in the right direction. Rather than making the United States into a nasty place that no one will want to come to, why not focus on helping Mexico, Latin America and the world as a whole, to be suitable places to live, work and raise a family?

The Grapes of Wrath, though it details the hardships of the migrant workers at great length, won the Pulitzer prize and captured the hearts of the nation because it is ultimately a hopeful book that inspires us to act for positive change. John Steinbeck, flexing his radical muscles, argues in the book that by targeting the weak and poor with desperate measures such as those currently being enacted in Arizona, capitalism is only putting off its inevitable demise. “The great owners ignored the cries of history.” “[Especially,] the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”

He explains:

Many people today have heard the cries of history and are taking a stand. The website Alto Arizona is coordinating a national day of action on Saturday, May 29 to repeal SB1070, which they call “a law that creates 21st century apartheid in the United States.” They invite us to “join the right side of history” by standing up for immigrants’ rights and against racial profiling.

A wonderful note that’s currently circulating on Facebook from the Catalyst Project shows us ten ways, large and small, to meet this challenge:

[Thanks to Beau Bibeau for sharing.]

The Civil Rights Movement remains the most inspiring example of successful social movements in the United States, breaking down the evil system of racial segregation and opening up possibilities for Black people, as well as for other races, that never existed before. It’s important to remember that 50 years ago, most African Americans could not vote, but now we have a Black President.

Obviously the work of the Civil Rights Movement remains unfinished, as we still live in a racist society with many other severe social problems caused by capitalism as well. But as Eyes on the Prize displays so dramatically, the hope we seek lies not in politicians but in our very own hands. We must learn from the past in order to change the future.

I watched episode 1 today and will be viewing the others over the next few weeks. Would you like to watch and discuss the series with me? Please respond by leaving a comment!

Love and struggle,

alex

p.s. anyone know how to embed these videos on WordPress?

Episode 1: Awakenings (1954-1956)

Subjects: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Segregation, Black Soldiers in World War II, Brown v. Board of Education, Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr, White Citizens Council, Ku Klux Klan, White Allies

Episode 2: Fighting Back (1957-1962)

Subjects: NAACP, Integration v. Segregation, Little Rock AR, The Little Rock 9, James Meredith, University of Mississippi

Episode 3: Ain’t Scared of Your Jails (1960-1961)

Subjects: Student Sit-ins, Nashville TN, Direct Action, Civil Disobedience, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Ella Baker, Boycott Movement, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Freedom Rides, Southern Jails

Episode 4: No Easy Walk (1961-1963)

Subjects: Martin Luther King Jr, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Freedom Songs, Albany GA, Bull Connor, Birmingham AL, Fire Hoses and Dogs, John Lewis, March on Washington, John F. Kennedy, Civil Rights Act

Episode 5: Mississippi: Is This America? (1962-1964)

Subjects: Medgar Evers, Murder of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, SNCC, Voting Registration Drives, Mississippi Freedom Summer, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Failure of the Democratic Party

[This is the BEST video in the series. What SNCC did in Mississippi changed America forever.]

Episode 6: Bridge to Freedom (1965)

Subjects: Voting Rights Movement, Selma, AL, March from Selma to Montgomery, Lyndon B. Johnson, Voting Rights Act

Episode 7: The Time Has Come (1964-1966)

Subjects: Malcolm X, Nation of Islam, Lowndes County Freedom Organization, Stokely Carmichael, Black Power, March Against Fear, James Meredith

Episode 8: Two Societies (1965-1968)

Subjects: Urban Rebellions, Martin Luther King Jr, Housing, Chicago IL, Richard Daley, Watts CA, Detroit MI, Kerner Commission

Episode 9: Power (1966-1968)

Subjects: Black Power, Carl Stokes, Cleveland OH, Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Oakland CA, Education, Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn NY

Episode 10: The Promised Land (1967-1968)

Subjects: Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, Vietnam War, Poor People’s Campaign, Resurrection City, Washington DC, Sanitation Workers, Memphis TN

Episode 11: Ain’t Gonna Shuffle No More (1964-1972)

Subjects: Muhammad Ali, Black Consciousness, African Heritage, Howard University, National Black Political Convention, Gary IN

Episode 12: A Nation of Law? (1968-1971)

Subjects: Fred Hampton, Black Panther Party, Chicago IL, Police/State Repression, Attica Prison Rebellion

Episode 13: The Keys to the Kingdom (1974-1980)

Subjects: Boston School Busing Controversy, Maynard Jackson, Atlanta GA, Affirmative Action, Allan Bakke

Episode 14: Back to the Movement (1979-1985)

Subjects: Miami 1980 Riot, Harold Washington, Chicago, Unemployment, Gangs, Jesse Jackson, Operation PUSH, New Hope

Douglas Rushkoff is author of the book Life Inc. – How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back.

[update 2/5: I should also mention the completely misguided funding of nuclear power plants as well, see Obama's Nuclear Giveaway]

This news came alongside an announced “spending freeze”, which would exclude military/war and only affect social programs, like jobs, housing, education and health care. These are precisely the programs which need to be dramatically increased in this economic crisis, not frozen. This proposed freeze would last 3 years, meaning for the rest of Obama’s term in office we could see no new spending on any of the social programs that are desperately needed. The poor, the middle and working classes, and everyone who has hope for a more compassionate United States is essentially being locked out in the cold.

Candidate Obama himself campaigned against exactly such an “across the board spending freeze,” as we may recall if we can muster our memories back through one year of hazy distractions (luckily Youtube never forgets):

If they’re so interested in reducing spending, why not cut totally useless and destructive programs – like NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

Why is Obama backsliding on all of his campaign promises? It just so happens that even though there’s no sane use of additional nuclear weapons (the US stockpile is already over 10,000 warheads, and the Cold War is over), nuclear weapons corporations like Lockheed Martin spend millions of dollars to lobby politicians for this funding anyway. And sadly, they’re getting it because Obama is afraid of the Republicans.

Once again we are seeing the continued march towards war, death and neo-fascism. The needs of the population – from decent jobs and housing, affordable education and health care, to a healthy environment – are being denied in order to protect corporate and financial interests.

Here’s Democracy Now! with the nuclear weapons story, and an article from Norman Solomon on the spending freeze below:

Despite Non-Proliferation Pledge, Obama Budget Request Seeks Additional $7B for Nuclear Arsenal

As part of a record $3.8 trillion budget proposal, the Obama administration is asking Congress to increase spending on the US nuclear arsenal by more than $7 billion over the next five years. Obama is seeking the extra money despite a pledge to cut the US arsenal and seek a nuclear weapons-free world. The proposal includes large funding increases for a new plutonium production facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico. We speak with Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico. Watch video.

I was glad to read Erinn’s review, even though I’m not planning to see this film, because it highlights both the racist/classist elements, as well as the lack of grounding in analysis about social change, that continues to hinder the peak oil “movement.”

What Ruppert, and other scaremongers like William Catton of Overshoot and Jay Hanson of dieoff.com have failed to comprehend is that peak oil and other ecological limits do not in themselves guarantee social disaster just because capitalism is collapsing.  There are non-capitalist, non-fossil fuel-driven ways of organizing society, some of which would be much better, and some much worse.

Peak oil does present us with a stark dilemma, but like any dilemma we have two paths we can go down – of course there’s the path of continued plunder and violence, militarism and neo-fascism – but there’s also that of freedom, democracy, and sustainability.  By hiding this second path from their readers and viewers, Ruppert and other ‘doomers’ inadvertently present compelling arguments for the first.

There’s still plenty of resources to meet everyone’s basic needs of food, shelter, water, etc. But because those in power have control over production, resources are being diverted to socially and ecologically inappropriate ends, like the military, banks, private jets, prisons, tar sands, etc.  Never ever forget that there is always a fundamental political choice of how to allocate resources. Until the peak oil ‘movement’ catches on to this reality, it will continue to be dominated by scared, privileged white folks worried about a future catastrophe yet who don’t see the catastrophes that are already affecting most of the peoples of the world.

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Happy MLK Day!

[alex knight]

COLLAPSE: A Review

by Erinn

So, I went to see a movie called “Collapse.” I read about this movie a little bit before seeing it (full disclosure: I get caught it weird Internet spaces and was reading an article about Mein Kampf. This movie was mentioned in the article for some reason). The premise of the movie is pretty simple: Michael Ruppert believes that he know how and why the US and global economies are currently collapsing (Get it? That’s the movie title…and the country…). The ticket was like $4, which in LA is pretty much like highway robbery.

Originally I went to see this film because it looked interesting and because of the whole $4 thing. About 30 minutes into the movie, I realized that there was a larger discussion to be had here that went beyond reviewing a film. There are aspects of this film that I found interesting and problematic from a practical political perspective, but I think that there is even a more interesting discussion here on the limitations of some supposedly “leftist” and “revolutionary” political ideologies and the complicated nature of the political moment that is in our near future.

So, just to summarize: The film really focuses on Ruppert and the Peak Oil Movement (which to be fair I know little about.) For those of you that are in the same boat as I am, the Peak Oil Movement refers to the idea/scientific principle that there is a limited amount of fossil fuels in the world. Ruppert looks at the fact that Saudi Arabia, which has the largest, recorded landed oil reserves, now drills for oil offshore. As offshore oil drilling is a much more costly endeavor than drilling for oil on land, this could be an indication that the oil in Saudi Arabia, and thus countries with even less oil, is on the global decline as a “dependable” resource. Ruppert identifies the fact that the economic system that the US and the rest of the world operates with requires “infinite resources” while depending on the “finite resource” of oil as the central paradox of our existence today. The movie goes on to note the limitations of other fuel possibilities (with the exception of solar and wind power, Mike identifies other fuel resources as economically and environmentally unfeasible) and declares that “revolution” (which isn’t ever defined in the film) will come from the anger people feel because of the fuel and food shortages that will plague the world in the upcoming decades.

Ruppert constructs a parable to help the audience understand his perspective. He describes the Titanic and himself as a boat-builder on the ship. He’s just been informed that the ship is going to sink and that there are not enough boats on the ship to save everyone on board the ship. (While telling this parable Ruppert seems to be ignoring the racial and gendered histories of this moment…aka white dudes locking poor and “colored” folks in the engine room of the ship.)

Ruppert says that as a boat-builder, he can select from a group of three sets of people to help:

1. People that are just trippin’. They can’t figure out what to do and generally run around, scatterstyle like a squirrel.

2. People that are ready and willing to build boats and do what’s necessary to get off the boat.

3. People that have drank the Haterade, don’t believe that the boat can ever sink, and want to go back to playing shuffleboard or whatever it is that you do on a boat for that long.

According to Ruppert, years of work in this field have taught him that the people he wants to save are the people that hang out in that second category. Beyond this, he notes that his only responsibility really is to only help himself. Basically, everyone else on the boat can go suck it. Ruppert’s goal is not to save everyone on the boat, or even anyone for that matter. He simply operates as the key master for access to the New World with no real mechanism for helping people either do something about the end of the world or get a ticket to this new spot. So, to continue Ruppert’s boat metaphor, he seems stoked to have saved these “conscious” people on the deck of the boat, helping him, but he never thinks about where all the people of color that work on the Titanic went. Something tells me my Black ass isn’t invited on that damn boat.

I should discuss Ruppert’s background because it clearly has an impact on the film and his perspective. His mother was a code-breaker for the US Army and his Dad worked as a creepy CIA spook guy. He got a Bachelors at UCLA in Political Science and graduated as the Valedictorian of his class at the LAPD Police Academy. After that crowning achievement, he went on to work in South Central Los Angeles, a community that he describes as “the jungle” in the opening moments of the film. After working on DEA taskforces for narcotics, he found out that the CIA was helping to facilitate the importing and distribution of cocaine from Nicaragua to communities of color, specifically in Black communities in South Los Angeles. Apparently, Ruppert bucked up and complained to his superior about this shady behavior and was effectively run out of the LAPD. He’s the guy that told John Deutch off at that community forum in South Central. He went on to do investigative journalism through his newsletter Into the Wilderness and hang out with his dog.

While Ruppert spends considerable time discussing the nuances of oil reserves around the world, he seems to overlook and/or out-in-out ignore fundamental principles for the discussion he’s having. He never seems to want to say the word “capitalism.” In fact, I think that he said the word only once throughout the entire film. Along with this, the biggest gaping hole in this film is the lack of a racial or gendered discussion. He talks about the destruction of markets and how demand will wash up as prices go through the roof, but he never explains how white supremacy ensures that people of color are first in line for this path of destruction and upheaval that he describes. He discusses this conflict using a universalized “we” when in reality, the “we” he’s talking about throughout the film is clearly “we, white people.”

Ruppert’s analysis clearly misunderstands US history. The conflict he describes is not a new one; rather the US has been waging in this war against people of color since the country’s inception. What becomes apparent in listening to Ruppert is that while he was hanging out in Oregon, he never used his library card to borrow some DuBois or C.L.R. James or pretty much any race scholar of the past 100 years. His unwillingness to examine social histories and his social position as a white man living in the United States makes his movement almost cannibalistic. His perspective is built on understanding how the drive by capitalist governments to colonize the Brown world for access to power and resources (which, depending on the era has been gold, slave labor, sugar, cotton, diamonds, oil, etc) has lead to/will lead to the end of the world. But the foundation of the Peak Oil Movement as described by Ruppert seems to be to sit around and wait for the shit to hit the fan, while basking in their dopeness in these “eco-villages” or other sustainable, sealed off communities, populated by those that “got it.” Essentially, Ruppert’s solution seems to be to use his white privilege as a way to compile information about the end of the world and protect others (see: white folks), while those that are tied to the system (and locked in the bottom of the boat shoveling coal in the engine), reified by his very identity as a white man, are left to fend for ourselves.

Ruppert looks to compare two countries that have faced changing political landscapes, he says, primarily because the collapse of the U.S.S.R. took their access to fossil fuels away: North Korea and Cuba. He says that North Korea responded with “Socialism” (I quote this because this was his description, not mine. All these years and I thought that totalitarian, authoritative regimes and Socialist republics were different…), Cuba responded with a local growth model. Ruppert goes on to describe the Agrarian Land Reforms of Cuba as the quintessential capitalist idea, one that has provided Cuba with stability through this fuel decline.

At this point in the film, my brain actually popped out of my skull and said, “Shut the fuck up.” So since I didn’t have the time nor desire to spend time thinking about just how flawed that analysis was, I started to think about the tone of the film. The idea behind the movie really just seems to be to show how fly Ruppert and his group of other activist road dogs are. The movie shows clips of him “predicting” the current global financial crises, clips of him claiming to have “predicted” the attacks on 9/11, and “predicting” the growing increase in oil prices and decline in oil production. He starts to cry in the film only when he notes how hard it is for him to always have been right about these crises.

This, coupled with his perspective of individualism/his boat analogy, present a perspective that must be interrogated. Ruppert seems to be caught up in the paradox of a wanting to inform people of all the fucked up things in the world but not caring enough (maybe?) to offer solutions to fix these things.

It becomes clear in the film that Ruppert is right about one thing: there is a global decline and this decline is going to lead a lot more people going down Pissed Off Ave. Most of us, I think, have been waiting for a moment where people can recognize the flaws of the system and will look to reshape the world using a different model. Shit, all we have to do is watch 20 minutes of the nightly news or “Flavor of Love” to know that shit is fucked up right now. But what Ruppert’s movie along with other crazy clips of people trippin’ like this one, this one, and this one, show is that while this is clearly a critical moment, it isn’t a moment that is exclusively seen and/or owned by those prepared to develop a world where exploitation isn’t the central principle. There are others, on both sides of the political spectrum that see moment as a time to capitalize on “collapse” and incorporate their political ideology into the mainstream.

What becomes clear when watching this film or watching various white people flip the fuck out at political “rallies” and tea party shit is that people are legitimately frightened. Whether they’re scared of Black people, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, liberals, religious zealotry, crazy ass white folks, or turtles (seriously. fuck turtles.), people are straight up scared right now. And while fear will lead up all to some revolution, it may not lead up to the one that we all want.

By the end of the movie, it becomes pretty clear that the goal of the film is to frighten people. And that shit worked because I was scared shitless. Ruppert doesn’t seems to want to offer any suggestions to help his audience either. Instead, he spends the final moments of the film chiding the audience for not listening to him and all the things that he knows. The line of the film that best summarizes Ruppert’s political/moral perspective is when he tells the audience “If a bear attacks your camp, you don’t have to be faster than the bear. You just have to be faster than the slowest person in your camp.”

I think the flaws of this movie highlight ideas that should constantly be engaged by any radical organization that is participating in the liberation of people from systems of racism, capitalism, and oppression around the world. The free society we envision cannot come about without the majority of the world becoming participants in their own liberation. I think that the goal of any group doing this work should be to help all those people on that boat, even those dumb motherfuckers that think the boat is fine.

And if a bear attacks your camp, you should all get together, collectively scream, and jump in the car. Fuck running from a bear; the car’s faster dumbass.

But first, “Jake Gyllenhaal Challenges the Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize” by Diran Lyons, a political remix video of scenes from Jarhead and Donnie Darko mixed with Obama’s own words displaying the hypocrisy of power – as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to devastate. Check it out! [alex]

And here is the transcript of the Democracy Now! interview with Allan Nairn, entitled “Obama Has Kept the Machine Set on Kill.”

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s almost been a year since President Obama’s inauguration and his promise to close the prison at Guantanamo.

For a critical look back over the Obama administration’s foreign policy and national security decisions in the last twelve months, we’re joined here in New York by award-winning investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn.

In 1991, we were both in East Timor and witnessed and survived the Santa Cruz massacre, in which Indonesian forces killed more than 270 Timorese. The soldiers fractured Allan’s skull.

Over the past three decades, he has exposed how the US government has backed paramilitary death squads in El Salvador, in Guatemala, in Haiti. He also uncovered US support for the Indonesian military’s assassinations and torture of civilians.

He’s joining us now for the rest of the hour.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Allan Nairn.

ALLAN NAIRN: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don’t you start off with a broad overview, as we move into this first anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration, of his term in office?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism, the cultural blow. And he accomplished that on Election Day. That was huge. This is one of the most destructive forces in world history, and by simply—by virtue of becoming president, Obama did it major damage.

But once he became president, by virtue of his actions, just like every US president before him, just like those who ran other great powers, Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off. The President has—turned it off. The President has that power, but he chose not to do so.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean? Explain more fully.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the machine. The US spends about half of all—almost half of all the military spending in the entire world, equal to virtually all the other countries combined. More than half of the weapons sold in the world are sold by the United States. The US has more than 700 military bases scattered across dozens of countries. The US is the world’s leading trainer of paramilitaries. The US has a series of courses, from interrogators to generals, that have graduated military people guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in dozens upon dozens of countries. The US has a series of covert paramilitary forces of its own that get almost no attention. For example, right now in Iran, there are covert US paramilitaries attacking Iran from within, authorized by secret executive order. This was briefly reported, but it dropped from notice. In addition to that, there are the open attacks, the open bombings and invasions. Just in the recent period, the US has done this to Iran—to, I’m sorry, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Kenya. Currently in the Philippines, there are US troops in action in the south. And you could go on. This is the machine.

And then, in addition, there’s the support for a series of what the RAND Corporation itself—you know, RAND is an extension of the Pentagon—called US support for repressive non-democratic governments and for governments that commit aggression. There are about forty of them that the US backs. And I could run through the list. And the point is, Obama has not cut a single—cut off a single one of these repressive regimes. He has not cut off a single one of the terror forces. He has increased the size of the US Army, increased the size of US Special Forces. He has increased the level of overseas arms sales. In fact, the Pentagon, his Pentagon, was recently bragging about it. The same thing happened under the Clinton administration with then-Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. He has tuned it up. But you could just run down the list of countries where civilians are being killed and tortured with US weapons, with US money, with US intelligence, with US political green lights.

ANJALI KAMAT: So, Allan, what would you say is the difference between the preceding eight years under the Bush administration and this past year, as we move forward under Obama?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, in this respect, on matters I was just talking about, there’s no substantive difference. In fact, as far as one can tell, Obama seems to have killed more civilians during his first year than Bush did in his first year, and maybe even than Bush killed in his final year, because not only has Obama kept the machine set on kill, but he had his special project, which is Pakistan and Afghanistan. He used this to get elected. He had to prove himself. He had to go through what the New York Times once called the “presidential initiation rite,” under which each president must, in their words, demonstrate his willingness to shed blood. Obama did that by saying, “I’m going to attack more vigorously Afghanistan and Pakistan.” And he’s brought chaos.

I mean, you just saw the report from Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has squeezed the Pakistani military to attack their own tribal and border areas with extensive civilian death and retaliation from the residents of those areas through a series of bombings across the major cities of Pakistan.

Likewise in Somalia, Bush backed Ethiopia in an invasion of Somalia, basically an Ethiopian-US invasion of Somalia. Now Obama is pumping in new arms, new weapons, into the midst of the killing and chaos there. Somalis are streaming into Yemen as refugees. The already disastrous level of hunger and starvation is increasing. His body count probably exceeds that of Bush.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what we’ve been seeing over the last few days, I mean, what happened with the jetliner, now President Obama coming out yesterday talking about other attempts that were thwarted, like even on Inauguration Day, and that was actually Somali. And what are the approaches you think that President Obama should take?

ALLAN NAIRN: Right. Well, you know, the issue is not the safety of Americans. The issue is the safety of people. All people. You have to count not just the American deaths and potential American deaths, but the deaths everywhere, since—you know, since everyone counts. And the best solution is the one that protects the maximum number of people. And if you happen to be the party that is committing the largest number of killings in the world, as the US is now, then the solution is easy: stop committing the killings.

In this case, in the present moment in history, that would have the added side benefit of most likely making Americans safer, as well, because you would take away the main provocation. Tom Brokaw, on TV this weekend, made a very interesting comment. He described what the US was engaged in as the “war against Islamic rage.” That’s actually the most telling definition I’ve seen. I mean, think about it. In Afghanistan, Karzai, the US/UN-installed president, basically the man thought of as a US puppet, the man previously lionized by the US press before he started speaking out against the US aerial killings of civilians, Karzai started to get enraged after a series of bombings of wedding parties by the US and NATO forces. Think about it. Somebody bombs your wedding, a foreign air force bombs your wedding. How are you supposed to react? Are you supposed to be delighted? Rage is the normal human response. If you stop that, you lower the rage, and you probably get fewer attacks on Americans.

You know, there’s a man named Kilcullen, who’s Australian by origin, who’s now one of the main intellects behind the US counterinsurgency policy. He advises Secretary Gates, who of course was Bush’s Defense Secretary, as well. He said that if he were a Muslim today in a Middle Eastern country, he would probably be a jihadist. Robert Pape, the leading academic specialist on suicide bombings who studied the entire database of all the suicide bombers in recent years, said it’s a consequence primarily of occupation. So, you stop committing mass murder overseas, and you immediately, immediately, just by that action, achieve the main goal, which is minimizing the overall deaths of people, and you most likely get the side benefit of also minimizing the deaths of Americans—

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Pape—

ALLAN NAIRN: —because you’re prodding fewer people.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Pape is a conservative academic?

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes. In fact, he went on TV recently saying he was a big fan of aerial bombing. I mean, he is no peacenik. But he honestly studied the data on suicide bombings, and that was his conclusion.

And by the way, the tactic of, you know, bombs in civilian places, like outside mosques, it was not originated by the current jihadists. You know, the current jihadists, of course, as is well known, grew out of the US and Saudi Arabian operation in Afghanistan to repel the Soviet invasion, and bin Laden and the others were backed by the US. But that actual tactic dates back to times like when the CIA used it in Lebanon to try to kill a cleric, and they blew up people as they were leaving the mosque. They used a car—the US used a car bomb to do that.

Even aerial bombings, even bombings of airplanes, three of the biggest incidents before 9/11 were actually incidents of US culpability. In ’76, a Cuban airliner was brought down with—I believe the death toll was—what was it? Seventy-three, I think, something on that order—by Luis Posada Carriles, a longtime CIA operative, who was later indicted for terrorism. And the US refused to extradite him. They’re harboring—they’re harboring him. Later, in—let’s see, what year was it? The Indian Airlines bombing in ’85, I believe, an Indian jetliner was blown up, almost—about 300 killed. The bombers were later found to have received training at a US camp in Alabama, US paramilitary camp that had also, with Reagan backing, had done operations against Central America. The Iranian jetliner shot down by a US ship, the Vincennes, also with roughly 300 killed, in ’88, the captain of the ship who did that, he got a medal from Bush Senior for exceptionally meritorious service.

So these tactics, you know, bombing civilian places, even blowing up jetliners specifically, are not new. And the US itself has used them.

And, you know, they talk about how the jihadists target civilians. Well, it’s certainly true. But when bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center, he was basically using—the attack on 9/11, he was basically using US targeting principles. He attacked the Pentagon, a military target, and he attacked the World Trade Center, which had a CIA—in fact, did have a CIA office in it. Now, on this end, especially here in New York, we can see that those targeting standards are absolutely insane. I mean, we could see the cooks and the firemen dying. You know, we could breathe the dust. We could see, no, even if you are going after a CIA office, you do not do this. We can see that that’s wrong on this end. It’s also wrong on the other end, when the US does it.

When the US opened—so it’s not just a matter of targeting, and it’s not just a matter of targeting civilians. The Goldstone report found that Israel targeted civilians specifically, when they invaded Gaza, and the US has often done it. For example, in Iraq, the US adopted what they called the El Salvador option, which is a reference back to the El Salvadoran death squads of the 1960s and ‘70s, which is something I investigated extensively. And these were launched under the Kennedy administration and basically sponsored and run by the US for decades. And similar operations were done in Iraq by the US, under the direction, by the way, of General McChrystal, who now runs Afghanistan. The technical term the Pentagon used for it—uses for it is “manhunting.” So they do target civilians.

But even when they’re not targeting civilians, which is probably most of the time, they end up killing massive numbers of civilians. The Pentagon has a word for that, too. They call it “bugsplat.” In the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, they ran computer programs, and they called the program the Bugsplat program, estimating how many civilians they would kill with a given bombing raid. On the opening day, the printouts presented to General Tommy Franks indicated that twenty-two of the projected bombing attacks on Iraq would produce what they defined as heavy bugsplat—that is, more than thirty civilian deaths per raid. Franks said, “Go ahead. We’re doing all twenty-two.” So that adds up to, you know, about 660 anticipated, essentially planned, what in domestic terms would be called criminally negligent homicide, at the least, probably second-degree murder. You might even be able to get it up to first, first-degree. And that, just if—if that was the actual toll, the bugsplat estimate of the toll on the first day, that right there would give you a third of the World Trade Center death toll, just on the first day of the Iraq operation. And, of course, the Iraq operation has gone on. And that’s essentially what’s happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They claim—or they claim—or let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and they say, OK, they have an al-Qaeda target, or whatever target, some armed man in some compound somewhere, and they bomb it, and they also kill the person’s wife and the kids and their extended family and the friends who were there for dinner. Imagine. Imagine if that happened here. Let’s say al-Qaeda occupied New York. They set up checkpoints on Seventh Avenue. And if a car tried to run the checkpoints, they’d machine-gun the car, as the US does in Iraq. Or they ran drones over Washington, DC, and they were taking out US officials in their backyards as they did barbecues in suburban Virginia or as they were going for coffee in Dupont Circle. How would Americans react to that? In fact, how would Americans react if some young American went out and killed some of those al-Qaeda occupiers? The question answers itself.

I mean, when you do things like this, when you make humans into bugsplat, you invite response. So, stop the killing, and you get a benefit. You’ll probably make yourself safer, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to award-winning journalist and activist Allan Nairn. We’re going to go to break, then come back. Want to get your reaction to President Obama’s Nobel address, also to his condemning torture just about a year ago. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOOMAN: Our guest for this hour is Allan Nairn, award-winning journalist and activist.

Allan, I want to get your response to President Obama’s invocation of the concept of a just war, this in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We must begin by acknowledging a hard truth: we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations, acting individually or in concert, will find the use of force not only necessary, but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naïve, in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people, for, make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.

AMY GOOMAN: An excerpt of President Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo just about a month ago. Allan Nairn, your response?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, he’s right. There is evil in the world. And Obama should stop committing it. He should stop bombing, doing bombing raids that kill civilians. He should stop backing forces that kill civilians.

You know, it’s probably true that nonviolence couldn’t have stopped Hitler. There are just resorts to violence. If you’re standing there with your mother, someone comes in with a machine gun, you step in front. And if you’ve got a gun, you try to kill the machine gunner before they blow away you and your mother. Sure, there are lots of situations like that in life.

But that’s not in the situation of the US in foreign policy. As Obama was making that speech, he was saying, when we resort to violence, we will abide by the rules. This was exactly at the moment when the US was blocking the UN from doing precisely that. The Goldstone report had recommended, in just one example, that Israel be brought to the International Criminal Court for their assault on Gaza and that—as well as Hamas—and that let the chips fall where they may. Do an objective investigation and see if rules of law were violated, see if crimes against humanity were committed, as he said they were. And Obama blocked it.

The US itself, in its operations in dozens upon dozens of countries, is violating not just international law, but US law. People have forgotten about them, because they’re not enforced. Here are four US laws currently on the books. There can be no US weapons used for aggression. That’s the old Harkin amendment. There can be no US aid for foreign internal security forces of any kind. That’s Section 660 of the 1974 Foreign Assistance Act. There can be no US military aid for any regime that engages in a pattern of gross human rights violations. That’s 22 US Code 2304(a). There can be no US aid for any military unit that commits atrocities. That’s the Leahy amendment. Now, these are not radical political demands; these are existing US law. And the US systematically violates its own laws, not to mention the murder laws of local countries.

AMY GOOMAN: Where? Name the countries.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, just—you know, we mentioned before some of the places where the US is bombing and attacking. Less known, these are some examples of the machine being set on kill, repressive—what in RAND’s words—RAND Corporation’s words, repressive regimes being backed by the US: Algeria, where they annulled an election, they stole an election, they do systematic torture; Ethiopia, where there’s mass hunger among the population, but where the US is building up the Ethiopian army and using them against Somalia; Saudi Arabia, the most religious extremist, anti-woman dictatorship in the world; Jordan, a torture center—the Jordanian intelligence outfit was, in the words of George Tenet, owned by the CIA, and both the CIA and Israel use it for torture; Rwanda, whose army and paramilitaries have been pillaging and raping and massively killing in the eastern Congo; Congo itself, Secretary of State Clinton went there and made a good denunciation of rape by the Congolese army, and as that was happening, the US was delivering weapons and training to that same Congolese army; Indonesia, where the army now de facto occupies and terrorizes Papua and has recently resumed assassinations in Aceh, the other end of the archipelago; Colombia, where army and army-backed militaries are the world’s number-one killer of labor activists; Uzbekistan, massive torture backed simultaneously by the US and Russia; Thailand, where officers who—US officers who I spoke to use their US training in what they call “target selection” to assassinate and disappear Muslim rebels in the south; Nepal, where US Green Berets for years created old Guatemala-style civil patrols that carried out lynchings against pro-Maoist forces and civilians in the countryside; India, where the police do daily torture and where their own officers talk about using terror against villages in the Naxalite rebel areas; Egypt, one of the world’s leading torture states and Israel’s accomplice in the blockade and hungering of Gaza; Honduras, where the army recently staged a coup when the oligarchy’s president, Zelaya, turned against his fellow oligarchs; Israel, which committed aggression against Gaza using US white phosphorus and cluster bombs as the US was—the US was shipping in new materiel as this, you know, attack was underway; and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, where, as the British Guardian just reported, the security forces are doing systematic torture of Hamas people and other dissidents under CIA sponsorship. And that’s only a partial list. We’d need another twenty-minute segment to complete the list.

But in not one of these cases has Obama decided to comply with US law, comply with international law, and cut off the killer forces. In fact, in a number of them he has stepped it up. In Indonesia, for example, he’s made a push to renew aid to the Kopassus, the Red Berets, the most deadly of the killer forces, hated by the people, long trained by the US Green Berets.

AMY GOOMAN: You made a provocative statement at the beginning of this broadcast, comparing an Obama presidency with a possible Palin presidency, and whether you would see a difference when it comes to foreign policy.

ALLAN NAIRN: Right. Well, in terms of killing civilians overseas, no difference. Every single action I’ve laid out could easily be adopted by Palin. In fact, Obama is carrying them out using Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Gates, using Bush’s old counterterrorism man, Brennan, using Admiral Blair, Admiral Dennis Blair, who personally—this is something that we discussed on an earlier show and which I personally reported on—who green-lighted church massacres, massacres of Catholic churches by General Wiranto in occupied East Timor in 1999 to punish the Timorese for voting for independence. So Palin could do all those things.

AMY GOOMAN: Dennis Blair’s position at the time?

ALLAN NAIRN: He was head of the US Pacific forces, and he’s now Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. And he’s now getting some political heat over the Detroit underwear bomber incident, which I actually think is unfair. You know, you can reinforce the—I mean, Blair should have been indicted for crimes against humanity and put on trial. Blair should be in prison now for what he did with General Wiranto. But this is unfair criticism of him on the bomber. I mean, you can’t prevent someone from, you know, trying to sneak in. If you want real security, you stop it on the other end. You stop the provocations and turn down the heat.

ANJALI KAMAT: And Allan Nairn, one of the things that Obama promised—one of the ways he promised he would be different from the Republicans, different from previous presidents, and different from the enemy he’s fighting, is that he would adhere to the rule of law. There would be standards. He’s banning torture. He’s going to close Guantanamo. These were promises he made last year. Can you talk about where—you mentioned the Goldstone report and US efforts to block the Goldstone report at the UN. But can you give us an assessment of where Obama stands in terms of international law? You told us a little bit about domestic law.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the violations—and this is not—you know, we’re talking about Obama, but this is the whole US system. I mean, Bush did the same. Clinton did the same. Bush’s father, Reagan, Carter. It’s institutional policy. He’s violating not just law, but especially international law, which defines aggression as the supreme crime. And when you go in and bomb countries because you say there’s a—you know, there’s a militant there you want to kill, that is easily defined as aggression.

When you back forces that are systematically killing civilians, as many are in that list of countries I ran through, you are a party to crimes against humanity and maybe even, arguably, in some cases, genocide. That was certainly the case in Central America in the ’80s, where—actually, now a Spanish court has indicted and is trying various Guatemalan generals for those crimes, charging them with an array of crimes against humanity. And they did it with US backing, with US weapons.

Obama issued a torture ban, a supposed torture ban, which was actually a sham.

AMY GOOMAN: Let me play a clip of President Obama. It was just about a year ago, this executive order banning torture. On January 22nd of last year, this is what Obama promised to do.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This morning, I signed three executive orders. First, I can say, without exception or equivocation, that the United States will not torture. Second, we will close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and determine how to deal with those who have been held there. And third, we will immediately undertake a comprehensive review to determine how to hold and try terrorism suspects to best protect our nation and the rule of law.

AMY GOOMAN: That was President Obama just about a year ago. Allan Nairn?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, his torture ban is empty. Ninety-eight, 99 percent of the US-backed torture is not done by Americans; it’s done by foreigners acting under US sponsorship. And that continues. His ban does not affect that. And even when it comes to Americans doing hands-on torture, his ban only says they are prohibited from doing so in situations of armed conflict, like in the middle of a war. That means that even an American could today go into Venezuela, go into Cuba, going into Egypt, go into Jordan, go into most of the countries of the world and commit hands-on torture, and it would be perfectly permissible under the so-called Obama torture ban. So it’s fake.

AMY GOOMAN: And what do you mean that others can do it?

ALLAN NAIRN: An American can do it if it’s in a country that’s not in a state of armed conflict. But the vast majority of the torture is carried out by proxies. That’s the way they did it in El Salvador. That’s the way they did it in Guatemala. There’s an intelligence officer, an Army man, a policeman of the local country, and they are trained by the US, they are paid by the US, but they’re not an American citizen. And they’re the one who wields the razor blade. They’re the one who puts the hood on.

AMY GOOMAN: Allan, you spend your time traveling the world. Talk about wealth and poverty.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the biggest issue is there are more than a billion people hungry in the world. It recently increased by a hundred million or so because of the Wall Street-induced financial collapse, but it was at about 900 million during the days of top prosperity, as defined by our current economic system. That’s completely intolerable. Until everybody eats, no one should live in luxury.

You know how much it would cost to feed those billion people? Less, much less, than was spent on just the bailout of Citibank. No one in the US, no one in any party leadership, talks about shifting those resources to do that. In fact, the President could do that with his own executive authority. For a deeper, longer-term solution, you’d have to change trade rules, you would have to change the IMF and the World Bank, so that farmers in currently hungry areas would have the same opportunities and protections that US yeoman farmers once had back in the age of Jefferson, when the US protected its farmers. But a president or even a rich person like a Gates or a Carlos Slim or a Buffett could instantly feed half the world. The World Food Programme, every few months, comes out with a desperate bulletin, saying we’ve got to cut back the calorie rations because we’re not getting enough for this or that program.

You know, in US politics, people face a bitter choice. You can’t vote for the—with a two-party system, you can’t vote against murder, you can’t vote for ending starvation. So they say, “My god, I guess I’ll go for the Democrats, because if I don’t, they’re going to move my Social Security to Wall Street, they’ll end gun control, they’ll end women’s choice.” So you end up backing these direct mass murders and the allowing of babies to have their brains deformed due to lack of food. That’s not tolerable.

I agree with those lunatic tea party people: we need a revolution. We need—now, they’re talking about a revolution to put a white person in charge. I’m talking about a revolution for change. Nothing radical, really. Just enforce the laws, those US laws, the murder laws, and shift a few dollars from people who merely want it, people like us who—you know, we live in luxury; we have all the food we could possibly eat in many lifetimes—and shifting it to people who need it to keep from being stunted, who need it to keep breathing, people—we can do that. You know, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan—

AMY GOOMAN: We have fifteen seconds.

ALLAN NAIRN: —horrible regimes. Today, they’re peaceful and productive. They were crushed by violence. That’s how they transformed their societies. I hope we don’t have to be crushed in that way. We can transform ourselves, but people have to stand up and do it. Surround Congress. Occupy the military bases. The US can become peaceful also, but only if we decide to do so. And we do have that choice. We have freedoms here.

AMY GOOMAN: Allan Nairn, I want to thank you for being with us. Allan Nairn is an award-winning journalist and activist.

Reposted from Feminist Frequency, Dec. 7, 2009

The Bechdel Test is a simple way to gauge the active presence of female characters in Hollywood films and just how well rounded and complete those roles are. It was created by Allison Bechdel in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1985. It is astonishing the number of popular movies that can’t pass this simple test. It demonstrates how little women’s complex and interesting lives are underrepresented or non existent in the film industry. We have jobs, creative projects, friendships and struggles among many other things that are actually interesting in our lives… so Hollywood, start writing about it!

Check out other great blogs and commentary about the Bechdel Test:

1. The Bechdel Test Movie List: here you can find a long, long list of movies and where they rate on the Bechdel Test.
2. Why Film Schools Teach Screenwriters Not to Pass the Bechdel Test’s by Jennifer Kesler. This is a must read – exposing the systemic problems of the film industry starting with film school.
3. See the original comic strip “The Rule” here.
4. You can visit Allison Bechdel’s site here and I highly recommend her graphic novel Fun Home
5. Over at the Blog “The Angry Black Woman” she adapted the Bechdel Test to apply to race. Take a look: The Bechdel Test and Race in Popular Fiction

Annie Leonard, creator of the original “Story of Stuff,” has hit another one out of the park by breaking down complex political issues into simple, accessible and visually appealing viral videos. Check it out (And share with family and friends)! [alex]

And here is the original, highly-acclaimed “Story of Stuff”

see more at storyofstuff.com

Anti-Capitalism Goes Mainstream
Michael Moore’s New Film Names the System and Presents a Radical Democratic Critique
Alex Knight, October 16, 2009

Capitalism: A Love Story, which opened in 962 theaters earlier this month, is Michael Moore’s most ambitious work yet – taking aim at the root cause behind the injustices he’s exposed in his other films over the last 20 years. This time capitalism itself is the culprit to be maligned in Moore’s trademark docu-tragi-comic style. And by using the platform of a major motion picture to make a direct assault at the root of the problem, Moore has created space in the political mainstream for a radical conversation (radical meaning “going to the root”).

It’s a conversation that is desperately needed as the economic crisis continues to devastate low- and middle-income Americans in spite of President Obama’s and Congress’ efforts to stop the bleeding by throwing trillions of dollars at the banks. Yesterday, Democracy Now! reported that while the Dow Jones topped 10,000 for the first time in a year, foreclosures have reached a record level of 940,000 in the third quarter. But with this film airing in major chain cinemas across the nation, the normally taboo topics of how wealth is divided, who owns Congress, and how vital economic decisions are made are now open for discussion in a way they haven’t been in the U.S. for decades.

In Capitalism, Michael Moore features the reality of the economic crisis for America’s usually-invisible poor and working class. The movie begins with a family filming their eviction from their own home. In a terrifying scene, we watch from inside their living room window as 7 police cars roll up to throw the ill-fated family onto the street for failing to make their payments. Moore explained in an interview, “You see [a foreclosure] really for the first time from the point of view of the person being thrown out of the house.” This same bottom-up viewpoint carries the audience through the rest of the film, from the stories of kids in Pennsylvania sent to private detention centers for minor offenses by judges who received kickbacks from the prison company, to airline pilots whose wages are so low they have to go on food stamps.

By grounding the viewers in the human costs of out-of-control capitalism, Moore finds firm footing for launching his attacks on the Wall St. firms who he believes are responsible for this crisis. As the film points out, the richest 1% of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 95%, a sorry state of affairs that has grown steadily worse since the 1980s. Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan, and his two buddies Larry Summers and Robert Rubin are implicated in Capitalism as responsible parties behind the gutting of regulations and the deliverance of the federal government into the hands of the bankers.

Michael Moore’s conversations with congressmen and women about the $700 billion bank bailout passed last October best illustrate this transfer of sovereignty. The congresspeople are remarkably candid in their dismay at what was essentially a blank check to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup. Representative Baron Hill from Indiana recounts that the bailout bill was pushed through Congress in a similar manner as the Iraq War authorization, under threat of catastrophe and terror. Marcy Kaptur, congresswoman from Ohio, however, does one better. “This was almost like an intelligence operation,” she laments. And when Moore asks her if the bailout represents a “financial coup d’etat” by the bankers, she responds, “I could agree with that. Because the people here [pointing to the Capitol] really aren’t in charge. Wall Street is in charge.”

We also see Kaptur’s courageous honesty on the floor of the House, urging Americans to resist foreclosure by remaining in their homes. Detroit sheriff Warren Evans stands out as another hero in the film when he announces he will cease foreclosure evictions in his jurisdiction because of the damage to the community caused by making more houses vacant and more families homeless. Moore also features grassroots organization Take Back the Land, which has dramatically responded to the crisis by moving evicted families back into their homes in the Miami area.

Regular folks fighting back against a system that is depriving them of income, housing, health care and other basic needs is inspiring stuff to watch, and it’s not something we’re used to seeing up on the big screen. Capitalism displays this grassroots defiance surprisingly well by humanizing those on the bottom of the pyramid. One man whose farm is foreclosed angrily warns, “There’s got to be some kind of rebellion between people who’ve got nothing and people who’ve got it all.” His words are buttressed by a behind-the-scenes look at Republic Windows & Doors, where laid-off workers occupied their Chicago factory and refused to leave until receiving their promised severance pay. For Moore this represents the kind of direct action that everyday people must now begin to take to protect themselves from having to pay for the misdeeds of the wealthiest one percent.

This call to action is well taken. However, one piece lacking in the film’s analysis of capitalism is how the system of economic power interlocks with other structures of oppression, for example U.S. imperialism, patriarchy and white supremacy. Capitalism affects different people in extremely different ways, and while some fear losing their jobs, others fear imprisonment, rape, or even being hit by a drone attack. But Michael Moore seems to avoid a conversation about racism, sexism and homophobia in order to appeal to a mythical homogeneous American working class. And besides a brief comparison to Rome, the movie also shies away from discussing the U.S. role in the world and how a militaristic foreign policy serves the interests of corporate and financial elites – even though opposition to the wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq have never been greater.

Another weakness is how Moore handles Barack Obama with kid gloves. Even while his economic advisers are skewered in the film, President Obama’s role in the bank bailouts is downplayed, and he comes out looking like a champion of the people, or at least a potential champion. In this respect Michael Moore bestows honors like the Nobel Committee, not so much for what the president has done, but for the “hope” of what he might do.

So what does Michael Moore propose as an alternative to capitalism? Not socialism, but a kind of economic democracy – an opportunity for average folks to have a say in how their money is used, from the workplace on up to the government. Moore takes us inside co-ops in America where workers vote on decisions about finances democratically, and where salaries are equal and adequate for everyone in the company. In one factory, assembly line workers and the CEO each make about $60,000.

To reinforce his economic prescription, Moore even dug through archives to recover lost footage of FDR’s long-forgotten proposal for a “Second Bill of Rights,” which called for guaranteeing meaningful work and a living wage, decent housing, adequate medical care, and a good education for every American. It is striking how such common-sense ideas in our current political climate appear dangerously radical, even coming from the lips of a U.S. president. It seems the overriding purpose of Capitalism: A Love Story is to flip these expectations on their heads. For Michael Moore, guaranteeing basic economic security is as American as apple pie; what is radical is a system that would deny such prosperity to bolster the wealth of a tiny few.

If there is to be any solution to the economic crisis that doesn’t involve millions more people thrown out of their homes or dropped from their health care, it will have to involve a sharp break from a system that values private profits higher than meeting people’s basic needs. To this end, Michael Moore has done a great public service by making a film that is essentially an invitation for views outside the bounds of established mainstream discourse to propose what might be done about the economic quagmire we now find ourselves in. It is time for an American Left to come out of the wilderness and speak out with proposals for better ways of organizing our economy. I see no reason to be any less bold than President Roosevelt was 65 years ago.

Here is an excerpt from President Roosevelt’s 1944 “Second Bill of Rights” speech:

“We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.”

$12 Trillion has been given by the US government to large banks and corporations since last year

 
Great short news video on why the protesters were in Pittsburgh.

Exposes the police repression felt by the whole city last week, not just protesters.

The successes of mass protest.

IVAW held a press conference and action Friday morning about no longer sacrificing for war

Finally, see this audio report from Free Speech Radio News for more context.