Occupy is still an infant, having been born in New York September 17 with Occupy Wall Street. It is not even five months old and already the local daily tries to editorialize it into ashes. Rumors of our death are premature. We have made mistakes, including in Oakland. We’re learning and experiencing what one activist calls “growing pains.”

Provoked by police violence in Oakland, a few cornered occupiers among the 2000 present reacted. That has not happened here. The Sonoma County Occupy Town Hall Affinity Group,of which I am a member, opposes violence, as do the overwhelming majority of Occupy groups and individuals.

I do, however, respect the right of self-defense by those cornered by the police. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, ”Violence is the voice of the unheard.”  And as President John F. Kennedy said at a 1962 speech at the White House, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

What would you do when surrounded by a large group of armed, masked, threatening, charging, and rioting armored men? I praise the brave souls willing to face such police violence. As one occupier wondered, “What’s next? Live ammunition?”

Punishing people in a democracy should be the job of the courts, not the police, which Oakland police are notorious for doing. They fan the flames.

Court-appointed monitors, according to The Bay Citizen recently wrote in their quarterly report that the police response to Occupy Oakland protests this fall raised ‘serious concerns’ about the department’s ability to ‘hold true to the best practices in American policing,’ and promised a thorough investigation of the matter. Last week, a judge moved the police department closer to a federal takeover, writing that he was in ‘disbelief’ that the department had yet to finish a series of court-ordered reforms.

Why did the Press Democrat not report these relevant facts? The PD carefully selects what to report and what to exclude. A daily newspaper should represent various voices of its community, rather than just the status quo.

Occupy has “officially overstepped its welcome,” the PD alleges. Since when has the PD ever welcomed Occupy or officiated over such matters? The argument that what a few people did in one city reduces the national Occupy movement to ashes is without merit.

The PD asks occupiers to condemn the violence in Oakland. I condemn the police brutality and criticize the much less violent behavior of a few activists. I have done so within our movement and publicly, as have other Occupy co-leaders.

Now, will the Press Democrat denounce the violence of the Oakland police, who exercise unlawful authority? Or is there a double standard here?

Burning the American flag is an inflammatory and futile act of frustration that dilutes the main messages of the majority of occupiers and our many supporters, which is to bring about fundamental changes in our economic and political systems. When I was commissioned an officer in the U.S. Army, I swore an oath to defend my country against external and internal threats. I have kept that vow, which is a big reason that I am part of the Occupy movement, as are many veterans.

Violence by occupiers is a tactical mistake. The guns, other weapons, and media are in the hands of the protectors of the wealthy 1%. Violence is also a strategic and moral error.

The real violence that we should oppose includes the following: banks that gambled and foreclosed on the homes of millions; corporations that buy politicians with their big bucks; and stripping workers’ pensions and health care benefits.

Occupy does need to mature. Young people, especially, are desperate today. Their college debts are astronomical and their job options are minimal. Desperation can lead to violence. Long-term organizing is more likely to be successful.

“Ashes,” you fantasize. Yet on February 9 the Sonoma County Town Hall will host its third of ongoing monthly gatherings in a downtown Sebastopol church; 130 to 140 people attended the previous two. On February 17 the new Occupied Press, North Bay, will show the film “Battle in Seattle,” about the l999 shut-down of the World Trade Organization. On February 25 Occupy Santa Rosa will support teachers unions in a day of action in support of public education.

These are samples of the dozens of activities lead by Sonoma County Occupy groups as we prepare to move from a reflective winter into an action-oriented spring. Do these indicate “ashes?” You wait. You watch. You see.

Perhaps your editorial represents what we can expect from the new conservative Florida owners of the Press Democrat. Perhaps we need a new newspaper here that reflects the 99%.

A boycott bombshell in January was dropped by an 11th-grade American Jewish teenager, Jesse Lieberfeld, who won Dietrich College’s 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr Writing Award for his essay about his moral awakening when he realised his American Jewish culture was unavoidably identified with supporting Israel.

I once belonged to a wonderful religion,” says young Jesse. “I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases, and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. ‘Genocide’ almost seemed the more appropriate term… Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides… I felt horrified at the realisation that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists.” Finally, at the synagogue, he asked, “I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?” and was told by the rabbi, “It is a terrible thing, isn’t it? But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.” “I thanked him and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back.

When American youth like Jesse are forced to give up being Jewish because of Israeli crimes, it cannot be long before Israel crumbles under the weight of its accumulated crimes.

2011 witnessed the rise of Internet attacks on Israeli government sites by public-spirited BDSers determined to enforce a kind of “cyber boycott”. While the Saudi government remains aloof from BDS support, an enterprising Saudi hacker disrupted several Israeli websites in January, prompting Israeli hacker Yoni (most likely a spin-off from the Israeli military’s IDF-TEAM, which brought down Saudi and Abu Dhabi financial exchange websites last year) to threaten war, including “mass credit card exposures, and denial-of-service attacks”.

“Yoni” piously told Ynet, “We do not operate against any specific nationality, and any person who operates against the group’s principles will be harmed, regardless of religion, creed or gender. In addition, I wish to note that the group regrets harm done to innocents and tries to avoid it as much as it possible.” Imagine if Israel adhered to such high standards in its relations with its neighbours — it would not need to hack and steal credit card information from anyone.

Another such anti-BDS feint is by the pro-Israeli Internet NGO Monitor, DPWatchDog and Israel’s Reut Institute, which called on Israeli government agencies to “sabotage” and “attack” the Palestine solidarity movement, and has claimed credit for “price tag” attacks on The Electronic Intifada by Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal, the Palestine Return Centre, the persecution of the Olympia Food Co-op, the Berkeley Daily Planet and the “Irvine 11”. In “2011: The Year We Punched Back on the Assault on Israel’s legitimacy,” Reut lauds the emergence of “our network” and gives credit to the Israeli government and “the Jewish world’s mobilisation against the political assault on Israel”.

This conflation of “Jewish” and “Israeli” is the Israel-firsters’ trump card, perversely stoking anti-Jewish sentiment where none exists, the so-called “new anti-Semitism”, a direct result of Israeli crimes. “Price tagging” is usually associated with Israeli settler terrorism, vandalism, tree-felling, mosque burnings and murder. A particular zealous advocate, Andrew Adler, suggested in the Atlanta Jewish Times in January that US President Barack Obama could be on the hit list. That the Reut Institute associates itself with such criminal activity is yet another sign of Israel’s drift towards outright pariah status, and fuel for the anger of the Jesse Lieberfelds “regardless of religion, creed or gender”.

Boycott activities are not just confined to Israeli products abroad or visits by Westerners to Israel, but are now taking place regularly on land, at sea and in the air, as activists surround Israel and invent ever new ways to break its siege of the Occupied Territories.

The Global March to Jerusalem held a conference in Beirut in January confirming 30 March, the 36th anniversary of Palestinian Land Day, as the date for their land action: “From all continents we will converge and gather along the Palestinian borders with Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in a peaceful march towards Palestine.”

Plans for “Sailing for Freedom” by French and other European activists are moving ahead, aiming for a September yachting regatta in the Mediterranean, starting in Marseilles and proceeding to Tunisia, Egypt and Gaza. Other flotilla organisers have been discussing a new strategy of sending isolated vessels from various ports instead of high-profile flotillas, with the intent of actually breaking the siege, as opposed to merely attracting world attention to Israel (and Greek and US) sabotaging of flotillas.

In April 2012 a Flytilla is scheduled to arrive at Ben Gurion Airport, to “again challenge the Israeli policy of isolating the West Bank”. “Welcome to Palestine” is a French-Belgian initiative, modeled on the Flytilla last July, when 500 people prepared to fly to Tel Aviv. Despite the nightmare that activists experienced both in European airports and in Ben Gurion Airport, 125 actually arrived, and this year, activists are determined to increase their numbers and continue to poke the Israeli watchdog.

“The Israelis have constructed enormous prisons for Palestinians. But prisoners have a right to visits,” says Adri Nieuwhof. The idea has spread to the UK, where towns are sponsoring people to risk Israeli wrath. European airlines are now more concerned with their image in the West than with Israeli authorities, and organisers predict that there will be less collusion to pre-screen flights arriving in Tel Aviv from Europe.

These particularly plucky activists continue the tradition begun in 2011 of a peaceful blitzkreig of Israel from all sides, risking life and limb, enforcing a kind of physical “citizens boycott” of Israel, complementing the spiritual one by the young Jesses. Their co-activists on the “homefront” are now combining the physical and spiritual by the now annual protest during the Israel lobby AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington DC. This year it is called OCCUPY AIPAC, scheduled for 2-6 March. Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters, declared: “The time has come for the Occupy Movement to demand an end to the Occupation of Palestine.” OCCUPY AIPAC will provide a sneak preview of “Roadmap to Apartheid” narrated by Alice Walker (roadmaptoapartheid.org).

Legal actions against BDSers continue to plague activists. But there are principled judges. Twelve French activists from Boycott 68 were acquitted 15 December on charges of “inciting discrimination and racial hatred” for calling on French shoppers at Carrefour supermarkets to boycott Israeli goods. The court judgment is expected to put the kibosh on further persecution of activists.

UK’s National Union of Students endorsed campaigns targeting divestment in Eden Springs and Veolia on 6 January. Veolia suffered considerably from a robust BDS campaign across Europe last year for its light-rail project in Jerusalem, but is defiant in expanding its activities in Israel without regard to their legality. Subsidiaries of Veolia own and operate Tovlan landfill which processes Israeli waste in the occupied Jordan Valley. To sweeten the tons of garbage it dumps illegally on Palestinian land, Veolia recently offered three containers for free waste collection to Palestinians in Jiftlik. Comments Omar Barghouti, “As Desmond Tutu said, we do not need anyone to polish our chains; we want to break them altogether. This is beyond humiliating; it is racist and criminal. Derail Veolia!”

Sanctions — and their removal, in the case of the Palestinians — require foreign governments to stare down the powerful world Zionist lobby. Few states dare to do this, but there are more and more cracks in the walls that Israel puts up.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniya launched a historic tour of Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Turkey, Qatar and Bahrain in January, welcomed throughout the region as a David to the Israeli Goliath.

Three Hamas politicians also left Gaza via Egypt to attend a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Switzerland in January, the first time since Hamas was democratically elected in 2006. Switzerland does not belong to the European Union, which put Hamas on its list of terrorist organisations to please Israel.

“We also met with the Red Cross in Geneva, the vice-mayor of Geneva and with Islamic organisations in different cantons,” Mushir Al-Masri said. A meeting at the University of Geneva to commemorate the anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s attack on Gaza in December 2008, was attended by 500. “All persons who were complicit in the war crimes committed in Gaza should be taken to court,” Al-Masri told the packed hall. Socialist MP Carlo Sommaruga told the audience, “I was an activist against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. Every person has a responsibility. Everyone can participate in the BDS movement.”

Stordalen is one of numerous Norwegian business executives in the Neptune Network, which has been fighting for more than a decade to close down Sellafield. Why does the Norwegian government and the Neptune Network want Sellafield shut down? Studies of accidental and “operational” discharges of radioactive gasses and liquids show that air and water currents carry them directly to the west coast of Norway. The latter would definitely bear the brunt of a major accident, which grows more likely every month owing to the plant’s abysmal safety record.

Including, but not limited to

• between 1950-2000, 21 serious incidents or accidents involving offsite radiation release. This includes the Windscale Pile disaster, when a large heap of radioactive waste that caught fire in 1956
• a 1999 citation for falsifying quality assurance data between 1996-1999
• in 2003 a study commissioned by the Minister of Health revealing an increased incidence of childhood leukemia and non-Hodkins lymphoma in local residents
• in 2005 a plutonium leak that went undetected for three months
• in 2010 three accidental releases, with a fourth in early 2011, that were concealed from the public until a whistleblower leaked the documents to the Guardian

Why Reprocessing Plants Are Especially Dangerous

Sellafield first went on-line as a nuclear power station in the mid-fifties. Its mixed oxide (MOX) processing plant was built in 1996 and went on-line in 2001. Its role as a reprocessing plant means it accepts nuclear waste (spent nuclear fuel rods) from all over the world and reprocesses them for reuse. This entails separating out plutonium and uranium from other fission products. MOX, one of the products that results, is used in thermal and fast breeder reactors. Sellafied’s reprocessing role also means that it accumulates massive amounts of “highly active liquor” (HAL), which requires constant cooling to prevent it from exploding.

The Norwegian government has been extremely concerned about Sellafield becoming a world dumping ground for unwanted nuclear waste. They, along with the government of Ireland (also downwind and downstream from Sellafield), have been pressuring the British government for more than a decade to shut it down.

Even CEOs Have Children

Most Americans have never heard of Sellafield, much less the Neptune Network and the Norwegian business executives turned environmental activists who are fighting to shut it down. The Neptune Network includes hundreds of activists who aren’t business executives. In fact, anyone can sign up (for free) at their website . At the same time the Network is relatively unique in the active role their executive director, long time businessman Frank-Hugo Storelv, plays in recruiting other Norwegian business leaders to play a leading role in the Norwegian antinuclear, toxics and sustainability movement. In this YouTube video, Storelv explains the urgent need for companies to operate more sustainably and be seen as good environmental citizens: . Here, as in all his public presentations, he repeatedly emphasizes the devastating effect increasing nuclear and chemical pollution will have on all our children and grandchildren.

Like Petter Stordalen, Storev and other business executives in the Neptune Network have been arrested numerous times for committing civil disobedience at Sellafield and at various contaminated sites in Norway. In April 2011 he and four other members of the Neptune Network were arrested (under the British anti-terrorism law) outside the gates of Sellafield for blocking a railroad shipment of new nuclear waste. Recently he and two other members of the Neptune Network lost an appeal to the Norwegian supreme court, after being convicted for a nonviolent protest against toxic dumping into the Oslo fjord. According to the website, they now plan to take the case to the International Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Victory for the Neptune Network

The MOX reprocessor at Sellafield closed August 3rd, after Japan (following the Fukushima disaster) announced they would cease buying MOX for use in its reactors. The same week the British government brought forward a new proposal to build a new MOX plant at Sellafield, which would produce fuels appropriate for the more modern MOX reactors. On December 20, Cameron’s coalition government backtracked and announced they would decommission and close Sellafield altogether by 2018. This historic decision, like the decision by German government to decommission their nuclear power plants, was clearly the direct result of massive public opposition.

Nevertheless the Neptune Network has no intention of letting up the pressure. According to Frank Hugo Storelv, the battle at Sellafied will continue, to ensure the UK lives up to their international obligations to clean up the massive stockpiles of nuclear wastes. As long they remain stored in open cooling pits, they continue to pose an immense threat to Norway. He predicts the clean-up at Sellafield will take at least 100 years.

What’s Wrong With American CEOs?

So what’s the major difference between American and Norwegian CEOs? Why is it so hard to imagine Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, the Koch Brothers, George Soros (or any of our elected representatives, for that matter) chaining themselves to a bridge? They have children and grandchildren, just like Norwegian business executives. What’s more they all have enough educational background to understand that massive wealth won’t protect their offspring from the devastating health consequences of radiation poisoning.

In addition to the hundreds of thousands of cancer deaths and deformed babies from nuclear accidents and releases, there is still no solution to the question of safely storing or disposing of massive quantities of radioactive waste. Surely they know all this.

A Deficiency of Moral Courage

I can’t think of a single American member of the 1% who has come out against nuclear technology. Other activists blame the inaction of the 1% on greed or opportunism. I don’t share this view. No one can be so callous as to condone policies condemning their own children and grandchildren to unimaginable suffering. In my opinion it comes down to fear, the overriding emotion that seems to drive most private and public decisions in the US. Americans are too afraid to speak out. This includes our millionaires and billionaires. They fear losing the confidence of their boards and stockholders, tarnishing their reputation if the media attacks them, and losing wealth and/or social standing. The more wealth and status they enjoy, the more fearful they are of losing it.

Why is this? What makes Americans so incredibly fearful in contrast to other citizens of the world? Does their spinelessness and lack of moral courage result from some commonly shared character defect? Has decades of material comfort spoiled them and made them too soft? Has the corporate-run media poisoned them with their constant fear-inspiring messages, along with the reminders to consume more and be more competitive and individualistic?

The Link Between Loneliness, Alienation and Fear

After puzzling over this question for many years, I have come to the conclusion that this pervasive fear is probably a natural outcome of current US social conditions. It’s no stretch to see a link between the pervasive loneliness and alienation so many Americans complain of and their general fearfulness. Both former presidential candidate Ralph Nader and Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, have spoken and written at length about alienation and other negative consequences of the collapse of civic engagement in the US. While most industrialized countries have undergone a decline in community and civic involvement, it had been far more extreme in the US. This surely relates to the distinction Americans enjoy as being the most overworked nationality in the industrialized world. Americans work such long hours that they no longer have time for their kids, much less their parents, friends, neighbors or other community members.

A Radical Solution

Theoretically the problem is fairly easy to fix. To avoid turning this into a self-improvement pitch, let me reframe this as a hypothetical: What if an American –whether from the 1% or the 99% – wanted to somehow find the moral courage to stand up for their beliefs? Exactly how would they overcome their fears and find the strength to do so?

If my hypothesis is correct about moral cowardice stemming from loneliness and social isolation, they would increase their level of family, social and community involvement. This is obviously what happened with the Occupy movement. Hundreds of thousands of activists came together, many for the first time, and found the courage to speak out against corporate rule and capitalism itself.

Another hypothetical: Let’s say long work hours make it impossible for someone to strengthen their relationships with family, friends and neighbors. What if they come home so burned out at night they have no energy for anything but a highly processed junk food meal, TV and bed. What do they do then?

This dilemma is more thorny. It leads to other hard questions, starting with the one I asked myself in the mid-eighties. Is a life totally devoted to work and devoid of strong family and social relationships worth living? My answer then, as now, is a definite no.

Three decades ago, I, like others in what became known as the voluntary simplicity movement, made a deliberate decision to cut back my work hours, live frugally and make do with less. Our goal was to involve ourselves more deeply with family, friends and community organizations that were important to us. These choices become surprisingly easy when made with the support and encouragement of friends. I consider it the most important decision I ever made.

The World Economic Forum is a Swiss non-profit corporation that brings together some 2,500 “top” global business and political leaders every January in a remote Swiss mountain resort. Along with the G-7, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum has a strong pro-corporate agenda and is a regular target for anti-corporate globalization protests. The latter movement is a loosely knit network of anti-corporate groups that started in Asia and Europe in the 1990s, in response to the international treaty that created the World Trade Organization (WTO). Its American counterpart was born in Novemeber 1999, when 50,000 people marched in the streets of Seattle and thousands committed civil disobedience to derail the WTO Third Ministerial meeting. Currently the WTO and so-called “Free Trade” treaties, such as NAFTA, receive scant coverage in the mainstream media. Nevertheless labor and environmental activists remain deeply concerned about the power these international treaties give corporations to overturn democratically enacted labor and environmental protections.

Since 2001, grassroots activists from all over the world have been holding a World Social Forum in a developing country (usually Brazil) at the same time as the World Economic Forum. The philosophy behind the World Social Forum is that ordinary people have an even greater need for international conferences than corporate elites. It’s only by coming together and organizing that they can resist efforts by global elites to strip them of the limited democratic and economic rights they still enjoy.

Emphasis on Global Social Unrest

When the Guardian article that accompanied the report stated that Global Risks 2012 focuses mainly on economic turmoil and social unrest (as opposed to globalization and free trade), I was extremely keen to read it. Would it mention Occupy Wall Street? It sure does, right there on page 16 under “Case 1: Seeds of Dystopia”:

Two dominant issues of concern emerged from the Arab Spring, the ‘Occupy’ movements worldwide and recent similar incidents of civil discontent: the growing frustration among citizens with the political and economic establishment, and the rapid public mobilization enabled by greater technological connectivity.

The document is full of other surprises. Unlike the mainstream media, Global Risks 2012 is surprisingly sympathetic towards the Occupy movement. The authors are deeply concerned about “dystopia,” the opposite of utopia, which they define as “a place where life is full of hardship and devoid of hope.” They go on to talk about the danger of declining economic conditions in Western Europe, North America and Japan jeopardizing “social contracts” between states and their citizens. These they define as has historic understandings that workers will be guaranteed access to health care (by North America they must mean Canada – this has never been true in the US) and decent pensions in old age.

They express concern (implying that corporate CEOs should also be concerned) about the link between global recession and increasing rates of poverty, mental illness, substance abuse, suicide, divorce, domestic violence and the abandonment, neglect and abuse of children (page 18).

They talk about the large numbers of unemployed young people around the world being a “lost generation” (page 22). Even more surprisingly, they identify huge income disparity as being one of the most serious global risks. They caution that when “social mobility” (i.e. individual ability to advance socially and economically) is attainable, income disparity can spur people to work harder. When it’s clearly not, as in the current global recession, feelings of powerlessness, disconnectedness and disengagement can “take root.” (page 19).

They conclude the dystopia section with the following warning:

The social unrest that occurred in 2011, from the United States to the Middle East, demonstrated how governments everywhere need to address the causes of discontent before it becomes a violent, destabilizing force. (page 19)

Destructive Corporate Lobbying

Global Risks 2012 also talks about destructive corporate lobbying (my translation – they use more obscure, intellectually lofty language) in trying to enact environmental and health regulations: “By their very nature, the costs involved in implementing safeguards, such as quality standards and risk mitigation practices, may give some individuals, firms or organizations reasons to lobby to minimize them and look for ways around them.” (page 22)

They are equally critical of the “too big to fail” banks: “When losses can be passed on to others – as when banks are defined as “too big to fail” – excessive risk-taking is likely to occur.” (page 22).

They conclude with the argument (making the 2008 banking crisis a case in point) that dangerously lax regulations “in just one jurisdiction could trigger global catastrophe.” (page 22)

How Will CEOs Answer the Discussion Questions?

I have to admit my favorite part of Global Risks 2012 are the “Questions for Stakeholders,” inserted at the end at the end of each section to make sure the corporate elites and the politicians who accompany them to these meetings are paying attention. I would give anything to listen in to the answers JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon, give to some of these:

• What steps can be taken to reduce income disparity? (they need to get Dimon to answer this one.)

• How can appropriate regulations be developed so that firms will undertake effective safeguards?

• How can business, government and civil society work together to improve resilience against unforeseen risks? (the report uses the word resilience, which they borrow from the sustainability movement, a lot).

• How can fostering entrepreneurship prevent the seeds of dystopia from taking root? (this wouldn’t be my approach, but at least they admit urgent action is needed)

How Global Risks 2012 Came to Be Written

The World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network (RRN) was launched in 2004 to provide public and private sector leaders with “an independent, impartial platform to map, measure, monitor, manage and mitigate global risks.” This is the RRN’s seventh annual report. It’s based on surveys completed by 469 international experts in industry, government, academia and civil society about 50 potential global risks across five categories: Economic, Environmental, Geopolitical, Societal and Technological. Risks in each category are rated according to both the potential damage they could inflict and their likelihood of occurrence. In addition, a specific risk in each category is identified as “the center of gravity,” which feeds other risks, both within the specific category and across categories.

How 469 Experts Rated the 50 Risks

• Most likely to occur: chronic fiscal imbalances and severe income disparity.

• Economic “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: chronic fiscal imbalances (debt).

• Most likely to occur: rising greenhouse gas emissions

• Environmental “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: rising greenhouse gas emissions

• Most likely to occur: critical fragile states and pervasively entrenched corruption

• Geopolitical “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: global governance failure

• Most likely to occur: water supply crisis, followed by food shortage crisis

• Societal “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: unsustainable population growth (highly controversial, but a growing number of sustainability activists agree with this view)

• Most likely to occur: cyber attacks

• Technological “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: critical systems failure

Is There a Split in the Ruling Elite?

It’s clear from the spelling (using “our” instead of “or” and “re” instead of “er” at the end of words) that the authors of Global Risks 2012 are either British or Canadian. I find it extremely hard to imagine a report emphasizing carbon emissions and income inequality coming out of the US. I also think it’s it significant that three of the four companies listed as report “cosponsors” are insurance companies.¹ If Exxon had helped write this document, it would surely minimize the risk of increasing carbon emissions, if it mentioned them at all.

At times there are divisions in the ruling elite – between the banking/insurance and the energy/military sectors – over specific issues. Climate change seems to be one of them. Owing to deregulation, there is significant overlap between insurance companies, which derive most of their income from reinvesting premiums, and other financial institutions. AIG, for example, is supposedly an insurance company but had to be bailed out because they owned a substantial chunk of subprime mortgages.

It’s clearly in the interest of oil, natural gas and coal companies for consumers to continue to buy and burn up as much fossil fuel as possible. Insurance companies, on the other hand, serve their shareholders best by reducing carbon emissions. They already face growing claims losses due to a massive increase in weather-related catastrophes. In this context it makes sense for them to cosponsor a World Economic Forum risk assessment document emphasizing the need for international agreement about reducing carbon emissions. It also helps explain why Wall Street investment banker (and New York mayor) Michael Bloomberg has given a $50 million donation to the Sierra Club’s Anti-Coal Campaign.

1. Marsh and McLennan, Swiss Reinsurance Company, University of Pennsylvania Wharton Center for Risk Management, and Zurich Financial Services.

The DC march was also politically similar to previous marches. The January 27 date had been originally reserved by the left-liberal antiwar network calling itself United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ). ANSWER, the other group organizing against the US wars, then had agreed to working with UFPJ in order to make the largest possible showing on that date. This was despite some very sharp political disagreements between the two organizations.

I took a bus from Asheville, NC to that protest. It was one of seven very full coaches from that small city in the mountains. When we arrived at the New Carrolton Metro stop around 7:30 in the morning the parking lot was already full of buses from cities and towns up and down the US East Coast and from as far away as Cleveland and other points west. The Metro system was running extra trains, and it seemed like everyone riding those trains was going to the protest.

After disembarking and imbibing a couple cups of coffee, I headed to the Mall. On the way I ran into several friends from various places and exchanged greetings and conversation. The ultra-right group Free Republic had a couple dozen folks hanging out on the grass in one of DC’s traffic circles harassing protesters and questioning everything from their manhood to their politics. I joked to a friend I was with that being called a communist never bothered me since I pretty much considered myself one anyhow.

I couldn’t tell you what the speakers said that day. I wasn’t really listening that closely. Most of the signs that people were carrying were provided by UFPJ and ANSWER. Most of them simply called for the troops to be brought home immediately. Most of the speakers didn’t mention Washington’s adjunct war in Afghanistan and neither did the pre-printed signs. Some protesters did carry signs demanding an immediate end to that war, too. I asked a friend of mine whose organization had been involved in planning the protest why the war in Afghanistan was not being mentioned. His answer was that the leadership of UFPJ could not agree as to whether or not they opposed that war. His organization had argued to include a demand for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan as a key demand but had been voted down. The reason given by the leadership was that such a demand might diminish the size and message of the protest. His take was that the leadership of UFPJ was too interested in maintaining good relations with the Democratic Party, especially with the presidential elections coming up.

Since that January day there has not been another large antiwar protest. Several smaller ones took place in the following years, but even the larger ones that took place at the Pentagon and in New York City had little or no effect. UFPJ fell apart and many of its members, including elements of the leadership, allowed themselves to be hoodwinked into campaigning for Barack Obama, preferring to believe that campaigning for his presidential hopes would be a more effective way to end the imperial wars of Washington than actually organizing against those wars. We all know how that idea turned out.

But wait, they say, the war in Iraq is over. My response is that this is partially true. Very few US GIs are dying there any more and most of them have indeed been removed from that country. Some of them have been sent to Afghanistan and some have been sent to one of the other 737 military bases the Empire maintains around the globe. Many more have been sent back to the streets and hometowns of the United States to work out the demons they are now possessed with, thanks to their war experiences.

Meanwhile, in Iraq the number of bombings is increasing as various groups fight over turf and control while the democracy and freedom promised by George Bush and heralded by Barack Obama continues to be a figment of some DC speechwriter’s pen. The world’s largest CIA station outside of Langley, VA. operates at will from Baghdad, stirring up trouble in Iraq, Iran, Palestine and other nations in the region while the US client state in Tel Aviv continues to ramp up the war rhetoric against Iran while tightening its grip on the people of the West Bank and Gaza (and the political system of the United States).

Let’s not forget Saudi Arabia, whose autocratic monarchy just purchased 84 F-15s at the cool price of approximately $25 billion.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the guerrilla war waged by the Taliban and other anti-occupation forces continues, as does the close-to-$200-million-per-day US effort to destroy that resistance. Over the Afghan mountains the people of Pakistan wonder if they will be the next targets of US ground troops while US-armed drones fly and kill almost daily into some areas of that country.

There is no group of protesters in the United States currently addressing this. The Occupy Wall Street movement, for all of its positives, has yet to loudly and clearly make the connection between the war industry’s role in the plights they protest against. This is partly due to the organizational structure of Occupy (in fact, unlike many other Occupy camps the DC and Oakland Occupy groupings have worked hard to make this connection), but another reason for this failure is the lack of antiwar organizing in the Occupy movement. The sole remaining national antiwar network–the United National Antiwar Coalition–has been holding the torch in the years since its inception in 2008 and is currently organizing protests against the May meetings of global capital and its army (the G8 and NATO) in Chicago. Indeed, this coalition of political, religious and labor organizations is holding an organizing conference the weekend of March 23rd in Stamford, CT that will focus on these protests.

Despite recent pronouncements by the Obama administration and the Pentagon that the US military is going to shrink, the occupations and wars of the Empire will not just disappear. neither will its aspirations for full-spectrum-dominance. The new Pentagon Plan, titled “Sustaining US Global Leadership:Priorities for 21st Century Defense” has as its goal “protect(ing) the broad range of U.S. national security interests… (maintaining) the free flow of commerce… preventing Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon capability… standing up for Israel’s security… (and) continu(ing) to place a premium on U.S. and allied military presence in – and support of – partner nations in and around this (the Middle East) region.”

Despite its claim that the US military will no longer be depended on to occupy and “build” nations, a key element of this plan is “to assure access to and use of the global commons….” In other words, to go wherever capital demands the military goes, then the military will go there and stay there until capital’s work is done. A close reading of this document will tell the reader that nothing has changed and the military remains ready and happy to do Wall Street’s bidding. All of which balances out to the continued domination of the war-based economy.

In a January 3 letter addressed to his members, ILWU International President Robert McEllrath disclosed that EGT will soon attempt to commence operations at its new $200 million grain terminal located at the Port of Longview.  As McEllrath wrote, “We believe that at some point this month a vessel will call at the EGT facility in Longview, Washington… Prepare to take action when the EGT vessel arrives.”

The Struggle and Its Stakes

At the heart of the Longview dispute has been EGT’s refusal to hire longshoremen from ILWU Local 21 to work its grain terminal at the Port of Longview.  The publicly owned port—as with all West Coast public port docks—has been worked exclusively by the ILWU for decades.

Dismissing this hard-won jurisdiction, EGT chose to break off negotiations with the ILWU last year and contract with a third party employing labor from International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 701.  The ILWU argues that this is in direct violation of EGT’s lease agreement with the Port of Longview, which explicitly stipulates all port work is to indeed be done by the ILWU.

For its part, IUOE Local 701 has been widely condemned within the Northwest labor community, with many accusing the local of conspiring with EGT to break the ILWU.  Both the Washington and Oregon state AFL-CIO bodies, along with numerous other unions, have already passed resolutions condemning Local 701.  The July resolution passed by the Oregon AFL-CIO described 701’s actions at the EGT terminal as “scab labor.”

The national AFL-CIO, on the other hand, has remained conspicuously muted on the dispute.  No mention of the ILWU’s struggle in Longview can be found on the federation’s website or blog.  In fact, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has referred to the entire matter as a mere “jurisdictional dispute.”

Yet despite the AFL’s seeming indifference, the outcome of the struggle couldn’t have greater stakes.  As Kyle Mackey, Secretary/Treasurer of the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Central Labor Council (the umbrella labor body for the Longview area), argues, “If EGT succeeds, they will have essentially broken the ILWU.”  As he explains:

First, they will set a precedent that work on public port docks is no longer automatically longshore jurisdiction. Then within less than a year, when the northwest grain handlers’ agreement is set to be negotiated, all the other grain elevators will seek to either go non-ILWU or to match the eroded standard EGT creates. Shortly thereafter, in 2014, the ILWU will negotiate its master contract with the Pacific Maritime Association. If they lose, you can bet the PMA will take notice and hit hard.

In the midst of a nationwide attack on organized labor and the right to collectively bargain, the defeat of the powerful ILWU would also be sure to have consequences reaching far beyond the docks.

The Call for Solidarity

Responding to the intensifying situation, the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Central Labor Council on January 2 passed a resolution calling for solidarity action to stop the EGT vessel from being loaded.  The resolution read in part:

Be it Resolved: That this Council call out to friends of labor and the “99 percent” everywhere to come to the aid of ILWU Local 21, and to support them in any way possible in their fight against multinational conglomerate EGT. And,

Be it further Resolved: That this Council request that anyone willing to participate in a community and labor protest in Longview, Washington, of the first EGT grain ship do so when called upon by this body.

Accordingly, planning for a regional solidarity caravan to shuttle ILWU rank-and-file and other supporters to Longview on word of the EGT vessel’s arrival is already underway.  With the support of the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, for one, has already pledged funds for a bus to ferry rank-and-file picketers up to Longview once given the word.

The Northwest Occupy movement, meanwhile, has also begun to mobilize.  On December 19, Occupy Longview issued a call for Occupy activists to converge on the port to blockade the loading of any vessel at EGT’s terminal.  As Occupy Longview stated:

We are calling out to all occupies, from New York City down to Florida, all the way through to the West Coast, to join us in solidarity… We ask that tens of thousands travel to Longview to join us and make this action the central action for January 2012.

Occupy and The ILWU

The inclusion and participation of outside activists in the ILWU’s Longview struggle—such as those from the Occupy movement—has not been without its share of controversy.  As was widely publicized, the ILWU leadership refrained from embracing the West Coast Port Shutdown in December, which the Occupy movement had called in part to show solidarity with the ILWU in the struggle against EGT.  In fact, the Occupy-led port shutdown led a few unionist and other observers to question the merits and rationale behind an action conducted without much in the way of ILWU input and participation.

Occupy activist, though, maintained that they did indeed have rank-and-file support for the action.  Moreover, they argued that the antagonistic statements coming from the ILWU leadership regarding the port shutdown were merely for legal cover.  (Local 21, for instance, already faces upwards of $300,000 in fines due to unfair labor practice charges accrued from its ongoing struggle.)

Regardless, the matter of independent action conducted in solidarity with, or in the name of, the ILWU remains an issue.  As President McEllrath cautioned in his January 3 letter, “Any showing of support for Local 21 at the time that a vessel calls at the EGT facility must be measured to ensure that the West Coast ports have sufficient manpower so as not to impact cargo movement for PMA member companies. A call for a protest of EGT is not a call for a shutdown of West Coast ports and must not result in one.”

Facing a Stacked Deck

The dictate to limit any ILWU action to EGT in Longview stems from the severe restrictions American labor law places on unions.  As McEllrath notes in his letter to members, “Locals need to be aware of the narrow path that we must cut through a federal labor law (the Taft-Hartley Act) that criminalizes worker solidarity, outlaws labor’s most effective tools, and protects commerce while severely restricting unions.”

Of course, in addition to repressive labor laws, a key challenge facing any attempt to effectively blockade EGT’s terminal from beginning operations will be the expected heavy-handed police presence.  To date, at least 75 out of the 200 Local 21 members have already faced arrest, citation, fines, or both.  (Little surprise, then, to learn that EGT has made contributions to local police and fire bureaus.)

But as for what to expect once EGT seeks to load a grain barge later this month, McEllrath warns, “We have been told that this vessel will be escorted by armed United States Coast Guard, including the use of small vessels and helicopters, from the mouth of the Columbia River to the EGT facility and that the facility itself will be protected by a full complement of local law enforcement from multiple jurisdictions.”

But even facing such a stacked deck—with the courts, police, and, needless to say, the media conspiring against them—make no mistake: the ILWU has never been a union to back away from a struggle.  As ILWU Local 21 President Dan Coffman has stated, “The ILWU cannot lose this fight; we are in it to it to win it.”

And so it is that as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Wisconsin uprising, the long sleeping giant that is American labor stirs once more.

The actions, moreover, have already achieved limited successes — besides having created space for Americans to come together outside of the established political system, they have rightly been credited with having stopped fee increases amongst the largest banks in the country, as well as having widely validated the American public’s fury over increasing inequality, generating massive media exposure.

Despite its impressive influence, however, the only real material victory of Occupy so far — its having stopped increased bank fees — was entirely incidental, and was in no way a conscious objective of the Occupy Movement.

The Occupy Movement therefore remains increasingly susceptible to losing its momentum if it does not achieve some tangible gains. We can be certain that if people do not see real results from the Occupy Movement soon, they will move on to something which seems to offer them more; and with our two political parties gearing up for election season, we should take this threat all the more seriously.

Concretely, what this is going to mean for Occupy supporters is to re-orient their organizing from mass, symbolic actions — such as “mic-checking politicians” and waving signs at CEO’s — to more targeted campaigns designed to win real, immediate gains for ourselves.

In order to do this, Occupiers are going to have to learn three important organizing guidelines for their campaigns, exemplified by a growing community organization out of Seattle, Washington: the Seattle Solidarity Network (or “SeaSol”).

They will have to make sure their fights are relevant, winnable, and importantly, make sure they hurt.

Make sure the fight is relevant

For social movements to not only sustain themselves, but also to grow, it’s important for them to be relevant to other people’s daily lives. They must offer something that will, at least eventually, markedly improve their quality of life.

The Seattle Solidarity Network has seen a good amount of growth in its relatively short life span because it focuses on solutions to a problem most people face: naked exploitation. Has your boss stolen your wages? Is your landlord refusing to make needed repairs to your home? Have you been discriminated against?

People — mostly working class people — identify with these problems. These problems are things we and our loved ones face daily; that makes campaigns around these issues relevant to our day to day lives, not just because it affects us and our loved ones, but because we intimately understand them.

In order to attract more people to join Occupy, organizers will have to make the case that the issues they are taking on are of great importance to others.

Make sure the fight is winnable

People need to believe they have a chance of winning something. There is no point in turning out to protest after protest, after all, if at the end of the day you don’t feel like progress is going to be made. Organizers need to achieve concrete victories in order to show people that it’s worth fighting on their side.

A brief visit to SeaSol’s website reveals that all of the fights it has taken on — over stolen wages or deposits, for example — have been rather small conflicts. That’s because SeaSol recognizes that to effectively address a problem, you must have the resources and capacity to hurt your target more than it will cost them to give into your demand.

Or, to put it even more simply: to win, you have to have leverage.

SeaSol shows this relationship — between the amount of leverage they have, and the amount it would cost a target to give in to the demands — in its “winnability graph.”

This graph, while only a vague representation of real life — where we obviously cannot quantify “units of pressure” — nonetheless forces us to really look at what our resources are, and what we might be able to achieve with them.

What if instead of using our time at Occupy to make unwinnable demands — things we are simply not yet strong enough to gain — we focused on winning a series of smaller fights? What if instead of trying to get “corporate money out of politics,” we instead tried to stop foreclosures in our cities, home by home?

With the level of participation in the Occupy movement as it stands, demands such as this are demonstrably more winnable — and consequently, help build a larger and more empowered movement.

Make sure it hurts

Once you’ve decided on a demand that people will find relevant — a demand you feel confident you and other occupiers in your city can win, you’ll want to begin fighting for it with all the resources at your disposal.

SeaSol normally approaches a fight with a few principles in mind.

First, they know that the name of the game here is pressure. Essentially, how are we going to make life very, very hard for our target until they give in?

There are a nearly infinite number of tactics you can use to put pressure on a target — it just takes some creativity. You can, for example, hurt them economically with pickets, boycotts, or blockades. You can target their social connections, and embarrass them in front of neighbors, fellow church goers or business partners with flyers, letters, protests, or sit-ins. You can even target other businesses which are financially tied to your target to put secondary pressure on them.

While there are no hard and fast rules for planning which tactics fit any given situation, the general rule of thumb is that you normally want your tactics to be sustainable (meaning you could, theoretically, continue them for a very long time), you want them to hurt your target more than they hurt you, and you want your tactics to escalate.

A SeaSol organizer put the concept of escalation this way: “it isn’t the memory of what we did to the boss yesterday that makes them want to give in, but the fear of what we’ll do to them tomorrow.”

As a campaign progresses, you want to give the target the impression that things are getting increasingly worse for them — that you are constantly escalating your fight. So while yesterday you may have simply been putting up flyers around their business, tomorrow you may be picketing their shop or disrupting a fancy dinner party.

Next Steps:This election season, as is custom, the presidential campaign will dominate most news coverage — pushing needed publicity for Occupy off the front page. Some organizers and participants in your local Occupy groups will leave to organize for Obama, and nearly every union and non-profit which up to now has been somewhat supportive of you will be going into full fledge “get out the vote” mode, attempting to co-opt your movement for the Democrats.

The only effective countermeasure against this will be to draw in new layers of support from people not yet involved.

In order to do that, you will need to start taking on fights which help and empower them.

And, of course, whatever the campaigns local Occupy groups plan to take on next, it will be important to remember these few tips: make sure the fight is relevant, winnable, and hurts.

This month PM Press, the Oakland, CA. publisher founded by AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan and others, is publishing Gilbert’s memoirs. The book, titled Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond, is certain to be included in the top tier of books having to do with the period of US history known as the Sixties. There is no self-pity within these pages, but lots of self-reflection. In what can only be considered a refreshing approach, Gilbert takes full responsibility for the path he has chosen and explains that path in an intelligently political manner and with a decidedly leftist understanding. Love and Struggle combines objective history, personal memory, and a critical perspective into a narrative that is at once an adventuresome tale and a political guide through the past fifty years.

Gilbert begins his story by describing his youth and his developing awareness that the United States was not what he had been led to believe it was. An Eagle Scout who believed the myths inherent in American exceptionalism, he was unprepared for the cognitive dissonance he underwent while watching the attacks by law enforcement on civil rights marchers in the US South. That sense of conflict deepened when he headed off to Columbia University. By 1965, angered by the US war on the Vietnamese and armed with a well-researched understanding of why the US was really involved there, Gilbert was organizing Columbia students to join antiwar protests. Like many of his contemporaries, by 1968 he was an anti-imperialist and working full-time against the war in Vietnam and racism in the United States. By 1969, he was one of the original members of Weatherman and by April 1970 he was underground.

Gilbert tells his story with a hard-learned humility. Occasionally interjecting his personal life–his loves and failures, his relationship with his family–with his political journey, it is the politics which are foremost in this memoir. A true revolutionary, every other aspect of Gilbert’s life is subsumed to the revolution. This kind of life is not an easy one. Indeed, it arguably makes the life of an ascetic monk look easy by comparison. After all, the monk is only trying to change himself, while the committed revolutionary wants to change the world into one where justice prevails; a world that by its very structure resists such change.

Love and Struggle carefully examines the history of the periods Gilbert has lived in. From the early days of the antiwar movement and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to the public street-fighting arrogance of early Weatherman; from Weatherman’s transition to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and its growing isolation from the New Left it was a part of; and from the post-Vietnam war US left to the Brink robbery and its aftermath, Gilbert keeps the politics front and center in his text. In his discussion of the period between Weather’s publication of its essential work Prairie Fire and its immediate aftermath, Gilbert provides an insight into the debates inside WUO and among its supporters in the years after the peace treaty was signed with northern Vietnam. His portrayal of the differences around theory being debated in the WUO serve as a broader description of the debates raging throughout the new left as the US intervention in Vietnam’s anti-colonial struggle neared its end. For those of us who were politically involved at the time, the debates ring with familiarity: national liberation over class; the interaction between race and class in the US; the oppression of women and white male privilege. In a testimony to his writing abilities, Gilbert’s discussion of the issues makes them as alive in this book as those arguments actually were in the mid-1970s. His keen political sense reveals the interplay between different political perspectives, understandings of history, and the always present contests of ego. The political arguments outlined by Gilbert (especially when describing the battle inside WUO) are still relevant today. Their echoes are present in the General Assemblies of the Occupy Wall Street movement and in forums more specific and less specific across the nation. Gilbert’s presentation of the essential WUO arguments that challenges the overriding role of class in the nature of oppression is not only reasoned and impassioned, it is worth studying and makes points useful to the future of anti-imperialist struggle in the United States Furthermore, the book includes an ongoing and excellent discussion of the nature of white supremacy and white skin privilege. For anyone who has spent time involved in the Occupy movement the past few months, the relevance of this latter discussion is all too familiar.

For those looking for a sensationalist account of life as a revolutionary or a confession, they should look elsewhere. David Gilbert’s memoir is a political account of a political life. Every action undertaken, every decision made is examined via the eye of a leftist revolutionary. This does not mean there are no page-turning moments in the book, however. Indeed, the sections describing Weather’s move underground and Gilbert’s daily life off the grid are interesting and revealing, as are those describing the attempts by WUO members to evade capture. The descriptions of Gilbert’s clandestine life and his subsequent moving back aboveground and then back under are also riveting.

Underlying the entire narrative is a current of what is best described as self-criticism; of Weather, the New Left, armed struggle and, ultimately, of Gilbert himself. As anyone who has experienced something akin to a self-criticism session can attest, such sessions can be emotionally wrenching episodes of retribution and petty anger. They can also be tremendously useful when conducted humanely. Gilbert’s written attempts at this exercise in Love and Struggle lean toward the latter expression while also providing interesting and useful considerations to the aforementioned issues (along with issues related to those criticisms). Gilbert’s realization that his ego occasionally caused him to make decisions that weren’t based on politically sound rationales is something any radical leader should take into account. In fact, Gilbert’s continuing struggle with his ego and it’s place in the decisions he made while free reminded me of a maxim relayed to me a couple times in my life; once by an organizer for the Revolutionary Union in Maryland and once by a friend from the Hog Farm commune. That maxim is simply: if you start believing that the revolution can’t exist without you, then it’s time to leave center stage and go back to doing grunt work where nobody knows (or cares) who you are. In other words, you are not the revolution so take your ego out of it.

In the well-considered catalog of books dealing honestly with the period of history known as the Sixties in the United States, Love and Struggle is an important addition. Borrowing his technique from memoir, confession, and objective history-telling, David Gilbert has provided the reader of history with the tale of a person and a time. Simultaneously, he has given the reader inclined to political activism a useful, interesting, and well-told example of one human’s revolutionary commitment to social change no matter what the cost.

“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

After speeches and music in front of Sproul Hall, we marched off the campus and were met by a wall of police sealing off Telegraph Avenue. Some of our hard-cores in front tried to break through the barrier but were clubbed down. Cops began firing what looked liked shotguns, and people started screaming and running in panic, but it turned out to be tear gas.

A demonstrator wearing a biker helmet, swim goggles, and a cloth around his face picked up a gas canister with gloved hands and hurled it back at the police — a classic scene of a brave individual defying tyranny. Inspired, I pulled off my old green beret that I’d been wearing and used it to protect my hands as I scooped up a hot canister and threw it back where it came from. I thought about all the grenades I’d thrown in Vietnam and felt much better about this one.

The first line of cops, those who were firing, wore gas masks, but those behind didn’t, and I felt a surge of triumph seeing them run from their own gas. But the ones in masks kept advancing and firing, looking like robots.

The peace marchers fell back, fleeing down side streets. Agonized from the tear gas, I sank to my knees, hacking convulsively. My eyes were seared, nose and throat raw, skin burning. Through the tears I saw the guy in the biker helmet approaching. He helped me off the street into a doorway and pulled out a first-aid kit. From a squeeze bottle he squirted glycerin water into my eyes and nose, helped me rinse my mouth and throat with regular water from a canteen, then rubbed moist baking soda under my eyes. He was firm but gentle, like a good combat medic. I saw the cloth around his face was a towel wet with vinegar to absorb some of the gas. This man was equipped.

As soon as I could walk better, we straggled away from the scene. The police strategy had worked: the march was broken up, scattered in all directions. We walked down to People’s Park, angry, bitter, exhausted.

The park was full, and no cops dared to show, although they and other agents were probably there undercover. Joints were being passed around, and we got high. Smoking grass back then had an innocence to it that it hasn’t had since. Cannabis helped us to abandon the death world we saw around us and resurrect our child-selves. Stoned people were learning to play again, singing, blowing giant iridescent soap bubbles, juggling pine cones, tossing Frisbees back and forth. But under it seethed a mood of defiance and rebellion. A statement in Ramparts magazine summed up our feelings: “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.” But I would have spelled it a-lie-nation. A group of conga drummers were playing, and their furious, insistent beat seemed to herald a rising tidal wave of protest that would sweep the militarists out of power.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but this wasn’t the beginning of the wave but its crest, and in the next years it would dwindle down. But this was better than no wave at all. It didn’t sink the ship of state, but it did slosh over the deck. And now a new one is rising that may go even higher.

The events of the day bonded Trucker and me as friends, and although our lives took different directions after that, we stayed in touch. Years ago he went totally underground, changing his identity and location, and since then all I’ve had for him is a webmail address, through which we held the following interview.

Hathaway: Why don’t you start by telling us why you became a saboteur.

Trucker: Well, like Jerry Garcia said, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” After you went back to New York I joined an anarchist affinity group, and we worked with the Weather Underground to move demos in the direction of revolt — trashing the headquarters of war corporations, barricading the entrance to the Oakland Army Terminal, throwing rocks at the cops. By then the fuzz had refined their tactics and had special squads that would target the activists, rush into the crowd and grab the hard-cores. They clubbed me, kicked me, punched me, then charged me with assaulting a police officer. I did four months in the Alameda County Jail. Later I found out our group had been infiltrated. One guy who was always pushing us to be more violent was actually an agent. He gave them all our plans, even photos of us he’d made with a hidden camera.

After that I gave up on groups and since then have focused on individual guerrilla insurrection, autonome actions, monkeywrenching the machine. Especially now with the Patriot Act, that’s become the safest way to work. There’s a good book, Leaderless Resistance, on how to organize that without getting smashed. You can’t totally prevent being infiltrated, but you can prevent the agents from knowing much.

Hathaway: I remember back then you were complaining about all the infiltration, and I thought you were paranoid, but it turned out you were right.

Trucker: Yeah, the government took our threat very seriously and did everything they could to smash us. But they couldn’t.

Once the war was finally over, I and lots of other people were totally burnt out. We needed a break, to depressurize. But after a while exhaustion turned to apathy, and many people lost interest in the ongoing struggle.

I remember when Nixon violated the Paris Peace Agreement by refusing to pay the reparations we’d promised to help Vietnam rebuild their infrastructure and buy medical supplies. Refusing this humanitarian aid was an outrageous, criminal act, and some of us tried to organize a mass protest. We ended up with a hundred people on the steps of the San Francisco County Courthouse. The momentum was gone.

I too began to focus more on my personal life. I’d met a woman I wanted to build a future with. We were both tired of being poor. Living on the fringe is a struggle, it wears you down. Neither of us wanted to work for the Man and go the yuppie route, and we wanted something with a bit of adventure to it.

I’d done a little dealing before, but now we got into it in a big way. Just grass and hash, though — natural plants. I never liked hard drugs. Went to Mexico and spent a long time in Michoacán finding a good connection. Not just price and quality, but also good personal vibes.

We moved to San Diego, and I cut my hair and shaved my beard. Customs was using dogs on the border by then, but we came up with a way to beat that. Formed a little company called Baha Divers, stenciled this on the sides of a van. I’d drive south across the border about every other day with the van full of scuba tanks and gear, supposedly to give diving lessons to the tourists at Rosarito Beach. The US border guards thought of course American tourists would rather learn to dive from an American. In Mexico we sealed the stuff inside the tanks. We filled them with hash because it’s more concentrated. I had cut the tanks in the middle and had an airtight way to reseal them. Then we would wash them off with ammonia, to get rid of any smell. The first couple of times I was totally nervous and was afraid the guards would pick up on that, but they didn’t. Pretty dull bunch. After a while they didn’t even bother to put the dog in the van, just waved me through.

People I’d known in the Bay area were now spread all over the West Coast, so before long we were supplying all the way up to Vancouver.

But one day the border guards flagged me into the inspection lane. They knew exactly what they were looking for, took the tanks apart and handcuffed me. It turned out that one of our guys on the Mexican side had got busted by the Federales, and he traded his way into a lower sentence by ratting me out.

It looked bad, like I’d be going back to the Bay area — all the way to San Quentin. But we hired a very good, VERY expensive lawyer, and he got me off. I had to plead guilty as part of a plea bargain but ended up with a suspended sentence.

I decided to get out of the business. By then our savings were enough to buy a spread of land with an old farmhouse in Oregon. We settled down, went back to college, got involved in local issues and environmental organizing.

Then it all exploded in our faces. We let a guy, friend of a friend, stay with us for a couple of weeks. He was going through hard times and needed some peace and quiet out in the country. He was active in the Black Panthers, and so of course the cops were hassling him, but what we didn’t know was that they had warrants on him for the armed robbery of three supermarkets. They tracked him out to our farm and arrested everybody there, charged us all with the robberies. He had some of the loot with him, and he’d given us some bills that turned out to be marked, so that tied us in. Cops found a few pot plants in our garden and added drug charges. They could tell we were radicals, so they wanted to send us away for as long as they could. Considering the other busts, I was looking at major time as a repeat offender.

We decided to scram. Sold the house and land. Our forfeited bail took a huge chunk of that, but since we weren’t going to pay taxes, we came out OK. With the help of some of our old contacts, we transferred the money off shore, then followed it and kept moving, got passports under new names. We thought about staying overseas and becoming ex-pats, but we both missed the USA. The thing is, we like the country. We just don’t like the people running it.

We had some facial surgery — my wife loves her new nose — and after a couple of years came back as different people. We haven’t been back to the West Coast, though, don’t want to push our luck. And we’re super law-abiding, except of course for the small matter of burning military vehicles.

Cutting ties was hard. Both our are families are conservative and had shut us out a long time ago, so that part wasn’t so difficult. That was pain we’d already gone through. But we had to let go of a lot of friendships. We have webmail with a few close and trusted folks like you, but none of them know where we live or our names.

Hathaway: Thanks for including me on your list.

Trucker: Well, we go back a long time. And those were very formative times.

But by the time we came back, the country was deep into the Big Chill. Straight and retro. Women were abandoning feminism and returning to femininity, joining the Fascinating Womanhood movement. Guys were majoring in business and wearing suits with suspenders like their grandfathers. Bill Gates replaced John Lennon as the generational hero. Disgusting.

Maybe as part of our trying to fit into the mainstream, we became tamer ourselves. Got married, in church yet. Stopped smoking dope … pretty much at least.

Politically, we started thinking that the way to bring change was through the Democrats, gradual reforms. Now we see that was a trap.

We turned radical again when Clinton ignored the chance for disarmament that the collapse of the Soviet Union offered. He could’ve turned the end of the Cold War into a new era of peace. Instead he saw the chance for empire and went for it. Modernized the military with high-tech weapons, clamped sanctions on Iraq that led to millions of children dying from lack of medicine, bombed Yugoslavia and built a huge base there. Rather than communists, the people who opposed the empire were now called terrorists.

Domestically he declared war on welfare. Thanks to his policies, millions of single mothers were forced away from their children and into crummy, low-paying jobs. Their kids grew up just as poor but much more neglected.

Underneath the big smile, Clinton was just a loyal servant of the corporations and the military. Both Clintons are masters of giving the impression of working for real change, but it’s just show. And Obama is even better at that show than they are.

The Democratic Party leadership serves the interests of the mercantile side of the business establishment. They support slightly higher wages and unemployment benefits so people will have money to keeping buy stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t go any farther than that. The basic injustice of the system is never challenged. The Democrats just bring mildly expansionist policies to stimulate the economy.

The Republicans bring mildly contractive policies that serve the interests of the fiscal side of business. They keep wages low, which holds costs and inflation down and thus preserves the value of capital.

Although these two tendencies conflict, they’re two complementary ways that corporations maintain their control over us, two sides of the same gold coin. Both are necessary for them, and trading the power back and forth keeps things running in a wobbly balance.

The goal of both parties is to continue this system with little changes here and there, fine tuning. Neither one is going to take it apart and rebuild it, which is what we need. And both parties support an aggressive foreign policy to force US economic and military power into other countries, which is what nobody needs except the corporations they represent.

Although there’s little difference in their policies, there’s a great deal of difference in how the parties are marketed to us. Liberal candidates are sold as figures of great hope. We’re supposed to think, Finally someone who’ll change things. But their changes turn out to be trivial. The system stays mostly the same, and we slump back into disappointment. As the disappointment builds to mass discontent, another fresh liberal face is presented to us with new slogans. But they’re all tied to the system. The only candidates that have a chance of getting nominated are those supported by business. They’re in their pockets. That’s the price of their coming to power.

Look back in the past. The only major changes to come out of congress have been the New Deal in the 1930s, passed to stave off a total economic collapse, and the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, passed under the threat of armed insurrection. And congress has been whittling away at them ever since.

We have to take the power away from both parties, close down their whole show. Or else we’ll keep on being their vassals.

We fall for their shell game because we have a desperate need to believe the USA is a great country and our personal lives will turn out well. So we ignore what our leaders are doing in the rest of the world and cling to their mirage of a better future. That’s comforting. But things are not improving, they’re declining. And that’ll continue until we get rid of this corporation government, both parties. We can’t build a new system until we break the power of the current one.

Hathaway: How are you trying to do that?

Trucker: After Bush & Co invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, I knew I couldn’t just sign petitions and march in demonstrations anymore. That wasn’t going to have any effect on these guys. I had to do what I could to keep them from waging war, to take away their equipment, to bankrupt them. The people running the show are just businessmen. If they see it’s costing them more than they can get out of it, they’ll stop. So I decided to start destroying expensive military items.

I took off in a pickup truck with a camper and a dirt bike to become a domestic insurgent. Slept in the camper so I didn’t leave records at motels. Showered at truck stops. I used the bike to scout out targets and escape routes.

I found out that security around the big bases was tight, so I started checking out National Guard branches. I liked the idea of taking revenge on the Guard for Kent State. I found a unit that had all their trucks and humvees locked in the motor pool behind a chainlink fence, but someone had left a staff car parked behind the building. I guess the colonel didn’t want to have to walk very far.

I decided to go for it, but this first time was damn near my last. I set myself on fire. I made the mistake of starting at the top. I poured gasoline over the trunk of the car above the gas tank, and then more under the tank. But without my knowing it, the gas ran down onto the sleeve of my coat. When I flicked the lighter, my whole arm caught fire. The car did too, of course, and I had to run away from it with a blazing arm. By the time I got the coat off, I had third degree burns. Hurt like hell but I couldn’t scream. Scared to.

But it was great seeing the car go up. When the vapor in the gas tank gets hot enough, it explodes, not a huge explosion, but enough to set off the whole tank, which erupts into a fireball that swallows the car. You can feel the concussion and a blast of heat. Everything is flames. It’s quite a scene, a real charge.

Getting away, I could hardly steer the bike, my arm hurt so much. I didn’t sleep that night because of the pain. Terrible oozing blisters, skin peeling off. I’d brought a first-aid kit with salve and stuff, but this was way past that.

I was afraid to go to the emergency room because they might call the cops — a guy comes in with burns right after an arson fire. But next morning I headed for the down side of downtown.

I had tried heroin once years ago and didn’t like its down, shut-off feeling. But now I needed it. I went to the bus station, knowing that’s a good place to score in most cities. I could pick up on dealer vibes, having been one myself, so I talked to this guy who was hanging out there, standing and looking around rather than just sitting and waiting for a bus. At first he was suspicious, but he sensed I wasn’t a cop. A dealer has to have that instinct or he won’t last long.

I probably paid twice as much as his regular customers, but I got a balloon. Mixed a quarter spoonful with orange juice, drank it down. Bitter. I threw up and had to take some more. But a half hour later I was fine.

I bought the newspaper and read about “Arsonist Torches National Guard” with a picture of the burned-out car. I felt great. I knew that the money it was going to take to replace that car couldn’t be used to bomb Afghanistan. This had a lot more impact than writing a congressman or shouting slogans in a protest march. It made a bottom-line difference. I wanted to save the newspaper, but it could’ve connected me, so I threw it away.

By then I was getting woozy. Went back to the truck and passed out. Pain woke me up in a few hours, I took some more smack and nodded out again.

I’ve still got the scars, patches of turkey skin.

Hathaway: That didn’t make you stop?

Trucker: No, it made me realize what all the people who’ve been hit by US napalm and white phosphorous are going through. Right this moment men, women, and children are crying in agony because of our bombing. And they don’t have the luxury of pain killers.

It’s worse for the kids. They have a lifetime of pain ahead of them, because the scars don’t grow. As the skin around them grows, that stretches the scars. The tissue becomes very thin and sensitive. It hurts for the rest of their lives.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Vietnam and Cambodia are still living with this on a daily basis. And now Iraqi and Afghan children are facing this future.

My pain gave me just a taste of what they are suffering. It also made me aware how terrible it would be if someone got caught in one of my fires. I’d never torch a building. Just vehicles. I even look in those to make sure no one’s sleeping in the back.

My burns made me see that what I was doing was important, trying to stop this war machine.

If Americans knew, I mean really opened our hearts to the mass suffering we’re inflicting on Iraq and Afghanistan at this moment, we’d overthrow this government. Not to mention what we did in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Indonesia, the Congo, Iran, and so many more. But we don’t want to know. We turn it off — it’s a long ways away. And the media sure don’t want us to tell about it. Their job is to distract us from it with all sorts of nonsense.

We close our eyes to the killing because it conflicts with the patriotic fantasies about America we learned as children. Reality is too disturbing, so we deny it. Our love of country has blinded us.

But deep down we do know. We push it away, but it sinks into our subconscious and festers there and pops out in sick ways. That’s why we have so many crazy shootings.

We’re convinced our society is good, because that’s what we were taught. But good societies don’t kill millions of people. Pathological ones do that. And you don’t cure pathology with reforms. It needs major surgery.

Hathaway: What do you see as your greatest triumph?

Trucker: The Air National Guard watches their planes pretty carefully, but I found one parked at an unguarded airstrip. This was in the middle of the day, and I was hoping it would still be there at night. It was, and no one around. I needed more gas because the flames had to reach higher, and I wasn’t sure where the tanks were. I soaked some boards with gas and laid them against the fuselage and on the wings. The plane went up fine. A beautiful sight. Had a different smell because of the kerosene.

Hathaway: Are you going to get more planes?

Trucker: I hope so, but the vehicles are easier to find. My favorite are the deuce-and-a-halves, those big trucks with canvas covers. They make a huge fireball, and they’re expensive. That’s what this game is about — make the war too expensive, so it becomes bad economics. There’s lots of ways to do that, and this is my way.

A couple of times a year, but not in any regular pattern, I take off and look for targets of opportunity. My wife keeps the home fires burning while I go out and set a fire. I follow the basic principles of guerrilla warfare — pick the time and place to attack, make it quick, and get out before the enemy can react.

Once I almost got caught. I always pick Guard units of the edge of town, somewhat isolated. Those are less likely to be patrolled by the police, and they offer quicker access to escape routes, trails where only the bike can go. This place looked good, and they’d left a truck out. Right after it erupted in flames, though, I heard a siren and saw flashing lights. A patrol car must’ve been cruising nearby.

He was between me and my escape route, so I had to take off on the bike in the other direction. He saw me, even though I was running without lights. I was hoping he’d first go to the fire, but no such luck — he charged after me. The bike is fast, but so was he. I kept turning corners because I could do that faster than he could, but he caught up on the straights. I zigzagged back onto the main road towards the escape trail, but by then other sirens were approaching from different directions.

He was right behind me as I got to the trail. I was afraid he was going to run me over and claim it was an accident. As I slowed down to turn left onto the trail, he swung beside me into the oncoming lane and blocked me off. I couldn’t turn, just had to keep going.

Up ahead was an intersection. I sprinted towards it and swung a wide U-turn in the middle of it, so I could get back to the trail. But he turned his car sideways to block the road. His front tires covered the right shoulder I wanted to drive on, and I couldn’t turn sharp enough to get behind him.

I was still going fast and had only a split second to react. I plunged the bike down into the drainage channel next to the shoulder of the road, right in front of his headlights. I could barely hold it stable. I skidded on the wet bottom of the channel, almost laid it down, but kicked out with my foot and managed to stay up. Then I hit an old tire and lost control. The bike bounced up and keeled over, and I scraped through the mud, wrenching my leg and banging my knee, and finally stopped, front wheel still spinning. I was hurting and covered with dreck.

The patrol car was backing around to get me. My engine had stalled, but it started again on the first kick. I roared up the side of the channel at an angle, back onto the pavement.

The cop was closing fast, and I moved onto the shoulder so he couldn’t cut me off from the trail again. Another patrol car was speeding from town, red lights flashing, siren blaring, but he wasn’t close yet. Approaching the trail, I slowed just enough to slue through the turn. As I careened down the trail away from the road, I imagined the cop swearing at me in frustration.

I was on a tractor path leading into a big area of cornfields, and the tall corn swallowed me up in a second, friendly and protective. It was dark in there, but I kept my lights off so they wouldn’t reflect off the stalks and show my position. I slowed down and laughed out loud in the warm, fragrant September night.

The fields ran for miles, gridded with other tractor paths, and I was sure they couldn’t find me here in the dark. The feed corn was so dense that even with a helicopter they’d have to be right above me before they could spot me. I was safe here until dawn.

This was my territory now, but the streets were enemy territory, and I was going to have trouble getting out of here. When I had to try, my best bet would be a road with lots of traffic, so I could blend in. The cops couldn’t be everywhere.

A state highway ran north of town, and I headed for it, now pushing the bike so they couldn’t tell my direction from its sound. It took hours. I had to cross a couple of gravel roads, first waiting out of sight until it felt safe, then running across. Finally I could hear the highway ahead. It was almost dawn, but I wanted to wait until rush-hour traffic, so I lay down and tried to sleep. The ground was cold, I was hungry, my knee hurt, and a field mouse scampered over me, but I managed to doze.

About 7:30 I crept up towards the highway, peering out from my tractor path, afraid again. To my relief, there were enough motorcycles on the road that I figured the cops couldn’t stop them all. I waited until I felt lucky, then started the bike, accelerated along the shoulder, and joined the stream between two big trucks. I saw one cop, but he was going the other way. I kept expecting a patrol car to pull beside me with a shotgun leveled out the window, but it didn’t happen.

I stopped in the next town and hid the bike near a shopping center. I was covered with mud, so I bought new clothes, cleaned up as best I could and changed, then ate a big farmer’s breakfast of steak and eggs, grits, and three cups of coffee. It was the sort of place where cops might stop for doughnuts, but none came in. Poor guys must’ve all had to work overtime.

I took a cab back to near where my truck was parked, drove back to the bike and loaded it in, drove a hundred more miles, and collapsed into the bunk. My body was still clogged with fear, my leg was swollen and aching, I had a nervous tic in my cheek, but I was almost glowing with bliss as I sank into sleep.

It was a long time before I went on another sabotage mission, though.

Once I had a close call at what looked like a perfect set up — a humvee parked behind a Guard admin building, secluded, dark, no one around. As usual I waited an hour after the bars closed, so the streets would be emptier. Also it was a regular work night, so fewer late partygoers. But as soon as I took the lid off the gas can, this car pulls in and two guys get out, drunk. They were fumbling at their zippers to piss when they noticed me by the humvee. They shouted at me — probably thought I was trying to steal it. Seeing their chance to become heroes, they forgot about their bladders and started towards me. One of them pulled out a knife.

Part of me wanted to throw the gas can at them and light it, but I couldn’t do that. I know what burns are like. Instead I threw the can at an angle between us. The gas spewed out in a long trail, and when I lit it, the flames leaped up, high enough to reach their zippers if they’d tried to get through. That stopped their charge long enough for me to take off on the bike while they were shaking their fists and swearing at me.

Never did get that humvee. Went back a year later and everything was locked up.

Once I found two humvees and a truck parked together. What a blaze they made! Someday I’m hoping to get a whole motor pool … or a squadron of planes.

Hathaway: Some people would call that violence.

Trucker: Violence means harming people. I’m very careful not to do that. Destroying war machines is depriving the military of their tools of violence. I’m decreasing their ability to harm people. Since they refuse to disarm, I’m doing it for them.

But I admit I’ve got some psychological quirks. I like fire — the huge eruption of flames is magnificent. Torching is an adrenaline high … like dealing. Apparently I need that. Maybe that makes me neurotic, but if so, I’ve managed to channel my neurosis into a socially useful activity — destroying war machines. The real crazies are those who go along with this system and think they’re sane.

It’s probably true that certain personality traits make people more likely to oppose their society. But conservatives use that to discount the rebels’ objections by branding them abnormal. They say radicals have psychological problems, they’re not well adjusted, they have a bad relationship with their father.

But what does it mean to be well adjusted to a society like this? It means you’ve accepted and internalized its values. If you think about what those values really are, it’s insane to do that. The people who do are normal only in the sense that they’re the majority.

And since most fathers are the spear carriers of patriarchy, since they are the power structure, how can we not oppose them? That kind of authority needs to be defied.

Having a “good” relationship with your father isn’t necessarily good. It tends to make people support the powers that be, to want to please them. Kids who need their father’s approval turn into toadies. That’s the only way to please a patriarch. If we want to build a new kind of person, we have to become different from the old kind, and that usually means displeasing them.

Hathaway: Would you prefer matriarchy?

Trucker: I’d prefer no-archy. No group should have power over another group. That’s what anarchy means.

Conservatives conveniently forget that they’re supporting this culture because of their own personality traits. And look at those — the desire to placate authority rather than defy it, to actually become the authority and have power over others, to preserve with violence if necessary an unjust economic system that denies the majority of humanity the basics of a secure life. Those are conservatives. And if you put them under pressure, they become fascists, as we’re seeing.

Hathaway: You’re in your sixties now. Do you have a protégé, someone to, so to speak, pass the torch on to?

Trucker: No. This business is too risky. I’d feel terrible if something happened to them. Also there’s the security issue. With all the government surveillance and infiltration, this sort of work has to be done alone. No one knows what I do except my wife, and they can’t make her testify against me.

Hathaway: Why tell me?

Trucker: I know you won’t turn me in. And if they waterboarded you — always a possibility these days — well, you don’t know where I live or what my name is now. All you have is a webmail address.

But it is a calculated risk. I want to go public in an anonymous way to let people know what’s happening with the resistance movement. The government is hushing up about all the sabotage that’s going on. It’s not just me. I’m just a small part of it. There’s a growing movement to undermine the machine from within. People are trashing recruiters’ offices, slashing their tires, cutting their phone wires, grafittiing-out their billboards. In universities they’re squirting glue into the locks of ROTC departments, stealing their mail, hacking into their computers. The government and corporations have had to set up internal security units to catch their own people who are sabotaging them — leaking secret memos, destroying equipment, zapping computer files. An autonome threw a log under the wheels of an arms train and derailed it. It’s only a matter of time before a vet sets up a mortar outside an air base and starts blowing up Stealth bombers.

The war is coming home where it belongs. But this is just starting, and the government doesn’t want people to know. They’re scared it’ll spread.

Hathaway: Do you want it to spread?

Trucker: Yes. I’m convinced that’s the only way to stop these wars. Make it too costly for the USA to extend its empire. We need to lame the beast so it can’t attack anymore. We have to maximize chaos on all fronts, a thousand different kinds of uprisings so the country becomes ungovernable. That’s the only way to break their hold and build something new.

Hathaway: That’s going to make things tougher at home.

Trucker: Yep, it will … for a while. And that’s why a lot of people are against it. They don’t want to lose their comfort level. That’s more important to them than the lives of millions of people overseas … and the lives of their own grandchildren.

You can’t blame people for wanting to have a pleasant life, but in times like these that turns them into accomplices with the system. The only way life can stay pleasant now is if you play along. The punishments for opposition are getting increasing unpleasant.

But rebelling is invigorating. It’s an authentic life, not the superficial pleasantries of a lackey life.

Even the lackeys are going to lose their precious comfort level before long. Things are getting worse and worse here because that’s the nature of the system. It devours everything.

The country is run by corporate robots. They’re squeezing the people at home and strangling them overseas. And the military is their enforcer. It’s become a monster rampaging out of control, fighting enemies that it itself created, like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban. This beast knows only to kill, and it does that reflexively, mechanically, massively. The leaders elected to stop it end up serving it. Amerika is running amok in a mania of unconscious killing. Amerika is a berserker battling the universe, a gut-shot hyena devouring its own entrails.

We have to stop doing this … and we can. We don’t need to live this way, by bombing and killing.

I want people to know there’s a movement here to resist militarism. It’s rolling. They can be part of it … in many ways.

Hathaway: Would you recommend that people burn trucks?

Trucker: I would not. It’s very dangerous.

Hathaway: What would you recommend that people do?

Trucker: That’s a question only they can answer.

Hathaway: What if you get caught? Would you shoot it out?

Trucker: No, I don’t have any weapons. I don’t believe in killing people for peace. And cops are still people.

I’d probably spend the rest of my life as a prisoner of war in Guantánamo West, that new supermax in Colorado.

Hathaway: Doesn’t that scare you?

Trucker: You bet it does. But even if that happens, my life will have meant something. I’ll have done what I could to stop this monster from invading more countries and murdering more people.

But I don’t think it will happen. I’m very careful. I want to continue the struggle. As Ed Sanders said, “Resist and Survive.”

“Saboteur” is a chapter from Radical Peace: People Refusing War, which presents the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists in the USA, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Recently published by Trine Day, the book is a journey along diverse paths of nonviolence, the true stories of people working for peace in unconventional ways. Chapters are posted on a page of the publisher’s website.

After a century of scheming in the Middle East and Central Asia by first Britain and then the US, the tables turned much faster than anyone could have imagined. As the pivotal 2011 draws to a close, it is the perfect moment to look at how we got here. The rollercoaster ride has been long and terrifying, and it is vital to understand where it is taking us.

From the 19th century on, it was clear to imperial strategists such as Cecil Rhodes and Halford MacKinder, motivated by the desire to conquer the world, that the “heartland”, Eurasia, was the key to securing the proposed world empire. WWI was supposed to clinch the deal, with the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate leaving the Levant “free” to be carved up and secured. The Indian Raj was the empire’s base for securing Central Asia and the Far East .

But the horrors of the war led to an unforeseen result: revolution in Russia, inspiring a growing anti-imperial movement across Eurasia. Inspired by Russian revolutionaries, the Raj seethed in discontent, demanding freedom from the British yoke, and Chinese patriots coalesced around their own rapidly growing Communist movement. Historic Turkestan was now off limits, part of the Soviet Union or in the case of Afghanistan, unconquerable.

WWII erupted as Germany attempted to snatch the world empire from the British and destroy its Russian nemesis, but this merely accelerated the decline of the Euro-imperialists, their schemes exposed as relying on mass slaughter and cold, calculating privilege for the elite of the imperial centre.

When the war ended, there were hopes that imperialism would end too. The empire had been forced to ally with the Communists to defeat the Germans, and to promise to dismantle the imperial system after WWII. This new world order was to be one of independent nations competing on a level playing field. But what should have been the last gasp of this inhuman system of “free trade” in the service of empire gained a new lease on life, as the US had escaped the 20th century’s cataclysms unscathed, and its capitalists were eager to take on the mantle of empire ceded by the bankrupt Brits.

Moreover, a new, subtle but key force in the new empire was the Jewish state established by the British and Americans in the heart of the Middle East, a blatant colonial entity which draped its imperial role in the language of anti-colonial liberation. This, despite the fact that it was created by dispossessing the native Arabs, even as neighbouring Arabs in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and North Africa were gaining nominal independence from their colonial masters.

This new playing field witnessed a long, bloody match, pitting the empire’s forces against both Communists and anti-colonial forces. After millions of deaths, it culminated in the defeat of the Communists in 1991, and a new game began, with world control once again the prize.

The dreams of revolution and an end to empire were dashed, and this new world order was once again baldly imperial, as planners accelerated their plans, epitomised by the rise of the neoconservatives with their Project for a New American Century, combining market fundamentalism and imperial aggression in a deadly cocktail where there were no longer any geographical limits.

The former Communist union, especially Turkestan, with its strategic location and oil wealth, was quickly brought into the imperial orbit. Even China was accommodated, as it acceded to the world economic order established by the empire after WWII.

But the baggage of empire continued to complicate the picture. The Islamists, so useful in the destruction of the Communist bloc, resisted imperial designs. Israel, also useful throughout the post-WWII struggle against both the Communists and the 3rd world liberation forces, established itself as an independent player and even posed as the new imperial coach, penetrating to the heart of the empire and asserting its own goals of expansion and hostility against its Muslim neighbours.

At its beheast, the resulting wars have been against the Arab and Muslim world, but two decades of attempts to subdue them have merely hardened Muslims’ opposition to empire, even as the devastation caused by imperial designs increases.

Hence, the Arab Spring of 2011 and the accession to power of Islamists via the ballot box across the Middle East . Hence, the unwinnable war against the Afghan people, that brought empire to its knees in fateful 2011, even as the slaughter of insurgents and civilians increased. Yes, the imperialists managed a clever ruse, invading Libya to depose the clownish Gaddafi, but the Islamists and fiercely independent tribes there are unlikely allies of empire.

The tsunami of resistance to imperialism surged throughout 2011 around the world, while the empire’s leaders put a worldwide “missile defence” system in place. But even as radars and missiles were installed in Europe, the rising tide reached the empire’s shores in 2011, as financial crisis led to rising poverty and unrest in the imperial centre itself.

Taking inspiration from the Arab Spring, mass demonstrations in Greece and Spain erupted and Wall Street, the empire’s “heartland”, was occupied. The “99 per cent” entered the political lexicon as the people vs the ruling elite (the 1 per cent who own half of the country’s assets). Even Israel and newly capitalist Russia witnessed mass demonstrations, as ordinary citizens began to realise how the system works, or rather doesn’t work for them. How increasing disparity of wealth is the logical result of market fundamentalism and control of the economy by financial capital.

2011 will go down in history as a year as fateful as 1917, when the blinkers fell away from the common people’s eyes in Russia and they rose up against their oppressors. But while 1917 witnessed a Communist revolution against capitalism and imperialism by a small corps of professional revolutionaries, 2011 has witnessed a mass, leaderless revolution facilitated by telecommunications, and in the case of the key Middle East, inspired by Islam.

There is no Lenin, not even a Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the one Arab leader who managed to slow down the imperial steamroller in the Middle East and is still revered for his defiance. Unlike Communist revolutionaries of yore, the new leaders in the Middle East of what must be called the Islamic revolution of 2011 are not the object of veneration, something that Islam as a religion warns against.

Revolutions always start in the weakest links. Thus, the Middle East has a head start on the revolutionary process over the West, though through the growing Palestinian solidarity movement, notably the global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign, the struggles of East and West are increasingly seen to be one and the same. What will be the decisive test for the new revolutionaries in the Middle East and the West itself is how well they can navigate the political shoals and landmines laid by a century of empire.

How to dismantle apartheid Israel without it unleashing nuclear war on the world? How to put an end to US world financial blackmail centred on the dollar without the US strategists taking everyone else down with them? While the empire is on the defensive, it is still powerful and as its star wanes, it will only become more lethal.

The foes of empire are popping up faster than the empire’s drones can knock them off. They are found not only in Arab (and Persian) lands, or even in a skeptical Russia and still-Communist China. As the links in the system continue to fray, they are increasingly in the heart of the empire itself. Americans and Europeans will continue to develop alternatives to empire, financially, economically and politically, in their own communities and continue to link up with their comrades-against-arms in the heart of the supposed enemy in Eurasia .

More and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to capitalism. Some 130 million Americans are part owners of co-op businesses and credit unions. As Obama cuts funding to states, the latter considers establishing their own banks and use public pensions to fund state economic development.

There is a wealth of expertise in the “heartland” of the empire that can help show the whole world the way out of the imperial dead end. The new generation in America lacks the Cold War paranoia about socialism: Americans under 30 years old are “essentially evenly divided” as to whether they preferred “capitalism” or “socialism”, according to a 2009 Rasmussen poll.

Even as the world environment degrades, even as imperial arms continue to kill, maim and choke demonstrators and insurgents both at the heart of the empire and in the heart of the “enemy”, we can take heart in the new sense of human dignity which 2011 spawned, and fight the intrigues of empire with new vigour in 2012.

Since March 11, local people, long skilled in farming this verdant and fertile region, have added expert knowledge in radiation to their library of stored knowledge, and the persimmons are deemed unsafe; irradiated by the releases from the stricken nuclear plant at Fukushima-Daiichi, 25km south of here.  I am told the dried fruit, until now a local specialty, has particularly high levels of radioactive contamination.

As we drove through the glistening mountains I watched the readings of the omnipresent dosimeter dangling casually from the rearview mirror of Hiroyuki’s car first oscillate, then grow alarmingly.  Arriving in front of a children’s summer camp, and quietly handed a face mask, an ominous beeping sound began as the readings peaked above 1 micro-sievert per hour, corroborated by a second dosimeter brought by Yuuki to check the calibration.  We pass an old local incinerator at work burning refuse and the numbers spike again.

Once confined to nuclear facilities and university laboratories, the people of Fukushima prefecture have become amateur radiologists, tracking radiation from place to place as wind and rain transport it around in random patterns across the local landscape.

Worried and angry because they have not received accurate information from the Japanese government about the radiation threat and because they want the government to evacuate more affected areas, the people of Fukushima have had to take matters into their own hands.  The government’s own recently released Interim Report on the causes and lessons of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster highlights how poorly information was provided, “The following tendency was observed: transmission and public announcement of information on urgent matter(s) was delayed, press releases were withheld, and explanations were kept ambiguous. Whatever the reasons behind (this), such tendency was hardly appropriate, in view of communication in an emergency.”

According to the people of Fukushima, this tendency is continuing, especially now that Prime Minister Noda announced that the nuclear crisis has “been resolved”.

In Fukushima city the people are organizing to protect and monitor themselves.  In a slightly surreal experience, I am directed to one of the many Meccas to Japanese consumerism that are a feature of every town. But rather than shopping, inside the mall I am taken to the recently set-up Citizens Radioactivity Measuring Station.  Just inside are neatly arranged slippers, children’s toys and a blackboard.  Behind the counter there’s equipment to test food for radiation as well as a whole body counter where children and adults come by daily to check their body’s radiation levels.  It’s run almost entirely by volunteers who have received radiological health training from a French NGO and is free for anyone below the age of 20.

On entering an apartment building in Fukushima city, in contrast to your usual art work, neat hand-written columns of radiation levels are posted in the foyer. Data collected every seven days from the surrounding area shows fluctuating radiation levels; particularly high readings are circled in red.

The cows have been evacuated from here but apparently beyond the 20km compulsory evacuation zone it’s deemed safe for humans, even small and growing ones.  Hiroyuki, an employee at a children’s non-profit turned public health activist, evacuated his wife and four year old daughter first to Tokyo, then Kyoto.  He now sees them just once per month as he has stayed to ensure that the national and regional government takes the health risks of the people here seriously.  He is part of a growing campaign by the newly formed organization Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation, to get the government to reverse its new radiation guidelines, evacuate more people from high radiation levels, especially children, and provide support for those who have voluntarily evacuated.

Radiation from the three severely damaged reactors that suffered explosions and core meltdowns at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant complex has spread far and wide. Apart from evacuating those within a 20 km radius, the government raised the allowable radiation does twenty times, from the internationally recognized 1mSv/year to 20.  This means that anywhere over 0.6 micro sieverts/h, an amount previously limited to people working in “radiologically controlled areas”, is no longer cause for evacuation, radically depressing the numbers of evacuees.

Even though the emergency evacuation centers are said to be “temporary”, it is likely that thousands of the 110,000 people who have been evacuated, in particular those from around Fukushima-Daiichi and downwind of the radioactive plume, will never be able to return to their former homes due to long-lived radioisotopes contaminating the ground, food and water.  Indeed, the Interim Report concludes with “bearing in mind that many people are still obliged to spend restricted life in evacuation for a long period of time, suffering from radiation contamination or fears of health due to exposure, contaminated air, soils, water and food.”

Even before the report, some people I met are now referring to themselves as the “Fukushima Diaspora” rather than “evacuees” because they don’t believe they will ever be able to return.

We arrive in the small community of Isobe on the coast.  Or at least, what remains of Isobe.  We are met by Toshiko Kooriki at her new temporary housing, orderly rows of small prefabricated living quarters.  She takes us to see the stubby concrete remnants of her original house. They jut a couple of feet up from the barren moonscape that was once a small close-knit community of 400 families just inland from where the tsunami hit.  She points out the different rooms and tells us that she comes here from time to time and cries.

Japan, long a study in contrasts, yields another as we meet Hatsumi Terashima, a fisherman for 54 years though he is no longer a fisherman.

Hatsuma Terashima recounts his experience with the tsunami, standing inside all that is left of his house.  The flat expanse of mud in the background is where the rest of the village used to be. He lost two of his grandchildren, a son, his son’s wife and his mother-in-law in the tsunami.

Immediately after the earthquake, he was inside rearranging fallen items when the tsunami struck.  Due to the shape of the land, there is an old saying in Isobe that no tsunami could hit here.  In disbelief, he watched as a dark wall of water rushed toward him and he was dragged 3km inland by the first wave.  His knee broken, a rope caught Hatsumi and he was heaved to safety, unlike five of his family members who were among the 264 who perished.  But he can’t fish because the ocean here is too radioactive.  He passes his time on the sea catching not fish but rubble and other detritus left by the crushing force of the tsunami.

Iatate, a town directly in the path of the radiation plume but outside of the 20km zone, has been evacuated as a high radiation area.  However, this was done only after the heaviest radioactive releases from the initial explosions because the government’s computerized radiation early-warning system, set up specifically for this purpose, the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, (SPEEDI) was down as “communication links were disrupted and inoperative due to the earthquakes, and the SPEEDI could not receive the basic source term information of discharged radioactivity.”

While SPEEDI could have provided some crucial data and helped with a swifter evacuation so that people were not exposed to so much radiation, the information it could have given to local officials and the public to plan evacuations never reached them because

the local NERHQ [Nuclear Emergency Response Head Quarters] lost its functionality, the Government NERHQ or NISA [Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency] should have taken the role of providing the SPEEDI results to the public. But none of them had the idea of making use of this information. MEXT [Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology], the competent ministry for SPEEDI, did not come to realize to providing the SPEEDI information to the public by themselves or through the Government NERHQ.

As we pass through Iatate on our way back from Soma, the town lies silent and dark.  The only lights are from streetlamps and the still occupied old people’s home, housing those too old and vulnerable to be safely moved, cared for by workers on strict shift rotations.

We stop outside the town’s high school.  Inside the car, the readings have ranged from 0.14 micro-sieverts/hour to 1.8.  We step outside and Yuuki and Hiroyuki bend down to train their Geiger counters on the soil; the displays jump to six micro-sieverts per hour.

Despite the devastation and loss of life caused by the earthquake and tsunami, the people I meet in Fukushima prefecture, rather than talk of the those events, discuss radiation levels and how their land has become polluted with an invisible, enduring danger and made the people fearful as the government tries to convince them that it is safe.

Japan is often portrayed abroad as probably the country most capable and prepared to deal with a nuclear accident.  Yet reading the government-ordered Interim Report, I came away with the clear impression that the agencies responsible for emergency planning had made a whole set of false assumptions which led to mistakes that increased the severity of the crisis and people’s exposure to radiation, and there were a series of operational errors at the plant itself as well as communication breakdowns and general lack of planning. It is highly critical of the emergency preparedness, the actions of TEPCO and the improper use of SPEEDI.

Along with many other operational and emergency response failings, according to the report NISA staff, for example, were not even dispatched to TEPCO’s headquarters to gather information in order to report effectively to the prime minister and the country, even though TEPCO is just down the street from METI and NISA offices.  In echoes of the preparedness of BP to cope with the Gulf Oil Spill, measures by TEPCO to protect their nuclear plants from tsunamis were only “voluntary”, so, off course, being a capitalist entity run in the interests of profit rather than safety, they didn’t take them: “TEPCO did not implement measures against tsunami as part of its AM [Roadmap of Accident Management] strategy. Its preparedness for such accident as severe damage at the core of reactor as a result of natural disasters was quite insufficient.”

In a male-dominated society – only 10% of the Japanese Diet is women, strong female leadership of the movement against the government and nuclear utility, TEPCO, is distinctly noticeable.  In one of the many meetings that I attend organized around the radiation and evacuation of children, I spoke with a group of women who have decided to stay for jobs and the stability of their families but who are wracked by anger at the government and frightened of the consequences of their decision to stay.

One woman, who would only give her name as Nihonmatsu, the town she is from, for apprehension of recrimination for continuing to raise the issue of radiation in Fukushima city, has started meetings for people she trusts to talk about their experiences and strategize actions.  She shows me her government issued papers and radiation monitor.  A long and detailed form, she is daily required to fill out the many boxes with the movements and food intake of her daughter.  When complete, she will mail it back to the government for analysis, along with the dosimeter that her daughter is required to keep on her at all times.  Nihonmatsu asks, “If it’s so safe here in Fukushima, why did the government give us these?”

A second woman, Jinko Mera, who gives her age as “about 50” nods in agreement, “We always have to think about how much radiation our food has.  We want to live free from that.  And the healthiest food is from your own region but we can’t dry persimmons, we can’t eat our peaches, we cannot eat our own food.”

At another organizing meeting on Christmas Day, women lead a discussion of the October sit-in outside the ministry of economy, trade and industry, METI, which contains the Japanese nuclear regulatory body, NISA.

Amidst speeches and reminiscences, we watch the 1983 documentary Carry Greenham Home, about the 19 year women’s peace camp and occupation of the US nuclear missile base at Greenham Common, England.  A new generation of women half a world away are inspired by the songs and collective battle of a different type of anti-nuclear struggle.  They want the government to protect them and their families from the immediate nuclear crisis, but they also don’t want anyone else to go through what they are enduring. They are part of a new campaign to permanently close down all 54 nuclear reactors and eradicate nuclear power from Japanese shores.

According to a recent report by Greenpeace (Japan) and the Tokyo-based Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, Japan could generate 43% of its energy requirements from renewable sources by 2020, easily surpassing and making redundant the 30% that is currently provided by nuclear power (though only 6 of the 54 reactors are currently operational).  With Japan in radical population decline, set to shrink from 125 million people to 100 million by 2050, the only impediment to a sane and safe energy policy is therefore political.

The meeting of activists ends with emotional intensity and spirit as attendees gather in a circle to hold hands and sing; evocative of another circle all those years ago, when 30,000 women formed a ring around the nine mile perimeter of Greenham Common air base and said, They Shall Not Pass.  We sing Furosato, a Japanese song of longing and remembrance:

Someday when I have done what I set out to do,
I will return to where I used to have my home.
Lush and green are the mountains of my homeland.
Pure and clear is the water of my old country home.

The next demonstration of the women of Fukushima is already planned, one bus almost full with exhortations to bring friends and fill more.  On the 28th of December, the people of Fukushima will march once more.

Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a well-conceived and attractive book about the first weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement that was recently published by the Left imprint Verso Books. It reads like a journal, except the entries are not from just one writer, but a collection of several. They range from the well-known like prison activist and Black Panther Angela Davis to a young activist named Manissa Mahawaral. Edited by a small group of occupiers and the editors of the journals n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy, and The New Inquiry, this text primarily covers the scene at the Zurcotti Park encampment in Lower Manhattan where the Occupy Wall Street movement more or less began. Part diary and part reflection, some of its most compelling moments come when the younger occupiers write about various realizations they have during the course of the occupation.

My favorite anecdote of this type is from an activist involved in the Occupy movement in Oakland, CA. When she first began participating, she found the dislike of the police from certain members of the camp to be disturbing. After all, they too were part of the so-called 99%. However, after a few days in the camp and the violent police attacks on the Oakland camp and protests following the first raid on Oscar Grant Plaza, her understanding of law enforcement’s role in protecting the wealthy and powerful changed dramatically. “I am ashamed,” she writes. “I was so naive about the cops in Oakland, but even more than this I am furious… that the police are allowed to brutalize people….” It is moments like this where the Occupy movement becomes transcendent and more than the collection of individuals, groups and and encampments that it is. Interspersed throughout the book are a number of drawings and collages that are not only visually appealing but also clever statements about the essential issues involved.

The book is not just a collection observations from the frontlines. Also included are analyses of the economic reasons behind the movement from Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood and a fascinating discussion of the history of the space where Occupy Atlanta was situated. This latter piece is also one of several pieces that discusses the role of people of color in the movement.

As one of the first of many books about the Occupy movement to be published, Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America sets a high standard. One hopes it is read by many, especially among those that couldn’t or didn’t make it to an Occupy camp before the State’s onslaught on them. This movement should not die.

Hot on the heels of the aforementioned book come OR Books addition. Titled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America, this work covers similar ground to Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America. What it lacks in graphics, it makes up for in content. Written in a continuous narrative broken into chapters, Occupying Wall Street differs from the collection of vignettes contained in the Verso Books text, while also maintaining a more or less chronological telling of the original Zurcotti Park encampment from its beginning to its eventual destruction by the police on November 15, 2011. In addition, Occupying Wall Street spends more time placing the Occupy movement in the context of the international wave of protest that has swept from Greece to Britain to Tunisia and Egypt to the United States and a multitude of other localities around the globe.

Written by a larger collective of writers who modestly call themselves Writers for the 99%, the OR Books text functions as a description of life at Zurcotti Park and within the Occupy movement over the period noted above. If Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a journal of the Occupy Wall Street movement, then Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America is the literary equivalent of a wonderfully written diary. These two books are not exclusive to each other. in fact they are companion volumes that read together provide an engrossing and well-told description of one of the most hopeful protest movements to erupt in the capitalist world in decades.

The Young Lords Rise From the Pages

Speaking of attractive books to arrive recently on my bookshelf, the Haymarket Books reprint of the Young Lords 1971 book Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971 certainly deserves a mention. The Young Lords Party was a revolutionary group of Puerto Rican youth that organized primarily among the young and working-class residents of New York’s Puerto Rican barrios during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Borrowing some of their style from the ideologically similar Black Panthers, this group was a dominant force in barrio politics during much of their existence. Their straightforward approach to solving some of the economic and political inequities in the barrio attracted thousands of supporters in the barrio and hundreds of powerful enemies in Christie Mansion and other edifices of power in New York. When I attended briefly attended Fordham University in the Bronx from Fall 1972 through Spring 1974 one of my smoking buddies was an active member of the group. His knowledge of Marxist theory was impressive as was his commitment to the struggle in the barrio. Needless to say, he and I had many intense discussions that taught me — as no book possibly could — the colonial situation of the Puerto Rican people and helped me unlearn years of misinformation about that island nation.

Palante is a history, explanation and discussion of the Young Lords Party from the perspective of its members in 1971. There is no bourgeois nationalism repeated in these pages. Instead, in the best tradition of other revolutionary nationalism, Palante argues that cultural and social freedom for the Puerto Rican nation is inseparable from economic freedom and a socialist revolution. For those uncertain of the difference, let me quote writer Earl Ofari from a 1969 article he wrote about the two phenomena as they relate to the black people of the United States :

“Revolutionary nationalists, unlike cultural nationalists, recognize that it is impossible to resolve the problems of black people under the structure of American Capitalism. This has led Huey Newton to correctly point out that one who adheres to the philosophy of revolutionary nationalism must of necessity be a socialist. For revolutionary nationalists, by and large, take the position that in order to oppose capitalism it is mandatory that one adopt an outlook of international working class solidarity with particular emphasis on the struggles of Third World people against Imperialism.”

The Young Lords believed the same analysis applied to the situation of the Puerto Ricans.

Looking at it today, the most striking aspect of this book is not the audacious (by today’s standards) writings calling for a revolution in the United States and an independent Puerto Rico. It is the collection of photographs. Difficult to pry one’s eyes away from, the photos herein rank up there with the best photojournalism has to offer. The struggles of the young revolutionaries and the people they worked with are evident in the faces on these pages and the places and actions set down in a darkroom forty years ago. The pride of a people realizing its power and the anger of that people realizing why and who has wronged it radiates from the stark black and white images that fill the last half of this beautiful work.

In her book, Nelson writes that “the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological.” On a practical level, the BPP provided free community health care services, including preventative education. Simultaneously, the BPP railed against the medical-industrial complex, declaring that health care was “a right and not a privilege.” Ronald “Doc” Satchel, the minister of health for the Chicago BPP, wrote in the BPP newspaper that “the medical profession within this capitalist society…is composed generally of people working for their own benefit and advancement rather than the humane aspects of medical care.” A newsletter published by the Southern California chapter argued that “poor people in general and black people in particular are not given the best care available. Our people are treated like animals, experimented on and made to wait long hours in waiting rooms.”

By 1970, People’s Free Medical Clinics had become a requirement for every BPP chapter. In 1972, the BPP revised point six of the founding ten-point-platform, adding a demand for “completely free healthcare for all black and oppressed people…We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventative medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide ourselves with proper medical attention and care.”

While citing Martin Luther King’s 1966 declaration that “of all forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane,” one chapter provides an important historical context for the BPP’s health activism by detailing what Nelson calls “the long medical civil rights movement,” that began long before the BPP. “Mobilized in response to the distinctly hazardous risks posed by segregated medical facilities, professions, societies, and schools; deficient or nonexistent healthcare services; medical maltreatment; and scientific racism, activism challenges to medical discrimination have been an important focal point for African American protest efforts and organizations. The Panthers were heirs to health activism that directly reflected tactics drawn from this tradition,” writes Nelson.

Nelson says the central focus of her scholarly work is on “the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality.” She has co-edited Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001) and Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (scheduled to be released in March, 2012). To learn more, please visit Alondra’s web site.)

Angola 3 News: In our recent interview with Billy X Jennings from It’s About Time BPP, one theme explored was how, with rare exception, the mainstream media has misrepresented the BPP. However, it seems that even the radical and anti-capitalist media has generally underreported the health activism that is the focus if your book. How did the BPP’s health activism relate to their better-known stances against white supremacy, capitalism, and police violence?

Alondra Nelson: Yes, it’s true. The Black Panthers’ health activism has been under-reported across the ideological spectrum. Their critics obviously did not want to cast them in a positive light. And, as your question suggests, even the Party’s supporters said little about this important aspect of the BPP’s work. I think it’s plausible to say that many on the Right and some of us on the Left — in very different ways and for completely opposite reasons — were captivated by a vision of the Party that did not include its health politics. Depictions of African Americans working in their neighborhoods, wearing white medical coats, was unspectacular compared to images of Black radicals wearing leather jackets and carrying guns.

It is ironic that our collective memory of the Panthers remains so incomplete because their health activism — from their political writing about medical issues in The Black Panther newspaper to their practice of DIY healthcare — exemplified the anti-racist, anti-capitalist stance for which they are known. In fact, the reality of health inequality brought the BPP’s political perspective into sharper relief because it offered stark and specific examples of how economic and racial oppression literally damaged bodies, families and communities.

As you know, the BPP was originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a name that reflected that protecting communities from police brutality was a primary motivation for the group’s founding. The BPP exposed the misuse of power whether it was at the hands of police officers or physicians. So, it’s also useful to think of the Panthers as being engaged in medical self-defense.

In Los Angeles, Party members Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown, nursing professor Marie Branch, Dr. Terry Kupers, and others established that chapter’s People’s Free Medical Clinic. But, like all of the BPP’s health activism, this work extended beyond the clinic, including in this case, confronting police brutality. (Branch shared meeting notes with me from the 1970s from her personal archive where the formation of BPP health programs and prisoners’ protection from medical discrimination were seamlessly discussed). The LA Panthers advocated for, and provided health care for, incarcerated persons; some of these men and women needed medical attention because they had been abused while in police custody.

A3N: How does the story of the BPP’s health activism, as presented in your book, contribute to and challenge the traditional presentations of the BPP by both the mainstream and alternative media?

AN: Body and Soul offers an account of the BPP that moves away from the narrow confines of the so-called “culture wars,” in which the Party can only ever be a positive force or a negative element. Paying attention to the Party’s health activism calls into question the inaccurate stereotype of the activists as aimless thugs.

We also gain a different perspective on things we thought we already knew about the BPP; like the fact that the Panthers were avid followers of Fanon, Che and Mao, whose writings were required reading for all members. Through the prism of health, one can see very clearly the influence of Fanon’s dissection of colonial medicine in Algeria on the Panthers’ understanding of medical discrimination in the U.S. We can take seriously the fact that Fanon and Che were physicians as well as political thinkers. We can appreciate that Mao, who established the “barefoot doctors” lay health worker program, made available to the Party not only broad revolutionary principles, but also specific ideas about health care as political practice.

A3N: What do you think were the most successful tactics employed by the BPP as part of its health activism? Strategically speaking, what lessons from the BPP’s health activism do you think are most applicable for today’s activists to learn from?

AN: In addition to setting up their own clinics, they used legal approaches not dissimilar from the NAACP to voice their opposition to problematic biomedical research. The Party leadership realized early on that “policing the police” would not be the only method they used in their effort to topple racism and capitalism. The Panthers were pretty flexible tacticians.

One of the lessons that the BPP offers today’s activists is that they should be more loyal to the desired outcome than to the tactic. The sit-in came to be associated with the southern civil rights movement just as the mic check is now emblematic of the Occupy movement. But these groups also used other tactics: marching, occupying, sermons, etc. Social movements are dynamic phenomena; circumstances are constantly changing. So too should tactics.

One of the BPP’s more fascinating tactics was what I call, after sociologist Lily Hoffman, the “politics of knowledge.” Working in this vein, the Panthers engaged and reinterpreted scientific ideas about race and disease. They reinterpreted scientific theories about the causes of sickle cell anemia, for example, by placing the prevalence of the disease in the context of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the medical-industrial complex and contemporary racism.

The Panthers’ use of this tactic — the politics of knowledge — should remind today’s activists that “framing” matters. It is important to be able to translate political arguments — health-related ones and other ones — into language, into stories, really, that resonate with the broader public. The Party could be expert at this.

The Nixon administration and mainstream philanthropies would ultimately co-opt the issue of sickle cell anemia. But the BPP played a key role in raising awareness about the disease and in situating it in a powerful political language that could mobilize communities.

A3N: Along with chapters focusing on the BPP’s free medical clinics and the campaign to educate the Black community about, and test for, Sickle Cell Anemia, another chapter focuses on the BPP’s involvement with a diverse coalition that successfully organized against the formation of the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA in 1973. You write that BPP felt that the Center’s “biologization of violence” line of research would ultimately “craft a narrative of Black and Latino violent pathology” that would serve to “make already marginalized populations more vulnerable to medicine as a tool of social control,” and “effect the further criminalization of social groups—black males, the incarcerated—and in turn justify calls for increased surveillance and social control.”

While writing that the defeat of the Center was a “notable triumph,” you note further that it “was somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory for Newton and his allies, as blocking resources to the center as an entity would not prevent individual researchers from pursuing other sources of support for their investigations.” With this in mind, how has biologization of violence research progressed since the 1970s? How much influence has it had on public policy?

AN: Attempts to attribute the causes of violence to biology (and closely related to this, criminality) are a very old story. In the late 19th century, the influential Italian criminologist, Lombroso, claimed that new methods (e.g., phrenology) and theories (e.g., social Darwinism) showed that the tendency toward criminal behavior was inherited.

More than one hundred years later, similar ideas persist. In the 1990s, during the first Bush presidency, Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, set-up a “violence initiative” to explore the biological models of social unrest in urban settings. Your readers may recall that around the same time another Bush official, referencing studies on violence among non-human primates, said that disproportionately black and brown “inner cities” were like “jungles.” (The initiative and controversial commentary around it would recall the heated debate the Panthers were engaged in over plans to form a “violence center” at UCLA in the 1970s that may have had an especially harmful impact on black and Latino youth and men).

Recently behavioral researchers have aimed to link the presence of what has been called the “warrior gene” to violent, criminal behavior. At a time when we are learning even more about the complexities of genetic inheritance, about the epigenome and the systems biology, it simply does not make sense that one single genetic marker could have such a dramatic, determinative effect.

A3N: What role has biologization of violence research played in justifying the mass incarceration explosion that began in the 1970s, increasing the prison population from 300,000 to 2.4 million today, giving the US the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prisoner population in the world?

AN: To the extent that the longstanding efforts that I have just described have kept in circulation the fallacy that there is a definitive link between human biology and violence, theses ideas have indeed served as a justification for the expansion of the carceral system.

This is where the policy implications of the biologization of violence come to the fore: If violence is “in your genes” or “in your blood,” then one can justify policies that lock people away because these people are “lost causes.”

And, in turn, the idea that there is a innate predisposition to violence contributes to the decline of support for rehabilitation and reparative justice programs.

A3N: Since the 1970s, has the US come any closer to realizing the BPP’s public health goals? If BPP co-founder Huey P Newton were alive today, what do you think he would say about President Obama’s “Affordable Care Act?”

AN: The revised ten-point platform was prescient in capturing one side of the recent debates about widening health inequality in the U.S. and what to do about it. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that Newton and the Party would have appreciated the historic nature of what President Obama accomplished — a feat that many administrations before his had variously tried to accomplish and failed to do. Perhaps Newton would have even observed that the Affordable Care Act is a very small step in the right direction.

However, some journalists and pundits have noted the similarity between President Obama’s historic Affordable Care Act and the national insurance plan that former President Nixon backed unsuccessfully. Given the animus between the Party and Nixon, and the way this administration and its agents worked to destroy the BPP, it is hard to imagine that Newton would have been in strong support of recent healthcare reform legislation. There would have certainly been opposition to the fact that President Obama’s plan is a boon for insurance companies because the Panthers demanded, “healthcare for the people, not for profit.”

So said 64-year-old Chieko Shiina, a member of the group Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation and a traditional farmer from Miyagi Prefecture, in reference to nuclear radiation, as I sat inside the tent on the floor across from her on Day 102 of the sit-in.  In years gone by she would have been 100 miles north on her farm tending her crops and doing such things as fermenting rice to make sake, harvesting leaves to make tea or manufacturing tatami mats.  However, her farm, in southern Miyagi Prefecture is just north of Fukushima and so, while Chieko’s farm is not in an evacuation area, it is too heavily contaminated with radiation for her to farm or sell her products: “I cannot let people eat these things.”

The tent encampment where we met is directly outside the Tokyo headquarters of METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) and NISA (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) and began on September 11, the six month anniversary of the combined disasters of the March 11 genpatsu shinsai, a new term that combines a catastrophic quake with a nuclear disaster. Mothers from Fukushima traveled to Tokyo and launched the sit-in with the slogan “We Stood Up to Sit Down,” as they demanded that the Japanese government provide accurate information on the levels of radiation, better protection, and expansion of the evacuation zone for their children.

Over the last three months, the sit-in has become an organizing hub for the anti-nuclear people’s resistance in Japan as well as other protest movements against free trade agreements, the American military base in Okinawa, and the movement to stop any alteration of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution that prevents Japanese troops from being deployed offensively beyond the shores of Japan.  For these reasons, the camp has been regularly targeted for harassment by groups from the Japanese Right.

While large protests of delegations from Fukushima and around the country occur regularly, Chieko is there full-time, braving the elements and frigid temperatures of winter time Tokyo.  She intends to continue the encampment for 10 months and 10 days, the length of time that Japanese traditionally consider that a mother carryies a child as she believes that “the style of fighting should be derived from life” and “that is why it is 10 months and 10 days.”  Emblazoned across the top of one of the many hand-outs at the camp is her slogan: “Women are Pregnant with the Future.”

Another woman I met there, Hisako Tsuruta, told me why she had joined the sit-in: “I am 73 years old, but I can still move and I can still walk.  I need to act before I perish.  I have been building this society of destruction and pollution since the Second World War and I didn’t say anything before, so I am responsible.  Now I must make change.”

Echoing the language of the Occupy Movement, [a large banner at the encampment proclaims “We are the 99%”], Hisako was keen to make broader connections to environmental and social problems that could only be solved by the people acting in unison:

We are all the same, people cannot eat, don’t have jobs, there’s money for war but not people.  Within ourselves we have the power to solve these problems.  With people’s collaboration we can do anything; politicians should leave these problems to us to solve.  People are making the connections and so there is hope in the world.  Before, the image of Fukushima women was quiet, not emotional, now they start to stand up – and sat in.  Even if we lose, we must resist.

The theme of resistance was in the air at a meeting I attended between government representatives of NISA and METI and environmental organizations such as Green Action, Friends of the Earth (Japan) and the Citizens Nuclear Information Center, (CNIC).  Over 150 people, representing 125 organizations had endorsed two demands and were there to grill the government functionaries about cracked pipes between the reactors and the coolant system at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant.

As a result of scheduled maintenance, safety concerns and popular protests, only 8 of the 54 nuclear reactors in Japan are currently operational and producing power.  Due to energy conservation efforts, there are nevertheless no blackouts.  This fact had not escaped the people in the room, who questioned what the need for any nuclear power was if, through a combination of energy conservation and a switch to clean, renewable energy, nuclear power in Japan, which previously supplied over 30% of electrical demand, could easily be made entirely redundant.  The room broke into strong applause when Ryoichi Hattori, Social Democrat member of the House of Representatives, came to the microphone to ask why this summer, rather than restarting any reactors, they couldn’t all be shut down and the Japanese people would see how they could live without any nuclear power.

Despite this, the government and NISA is pushing to restart some of the reactors early next year after completion of “stress tests” that they claim will show that the reactors are safe to operate, even in the event of another earthquake.  Environmental and other concerned citizen groups contend that the stress tests are based on a faulty and potentially fatal premise: that the earthquake itself did not cause pipes to crack and release steam and radiation, even before the tsunami hit.

Activists were there to present their two demands and provide evidence to back up their claim that pipes were indeed damaged by the earthquake, thereby invalidating the basis of the stress tests which are based on reactor earthquake-resistance analysis that rules out pipe damage from the earthquake.  If the stress tests on the reactors that the government wants to restart are without foundation and based on incorrect analysis, then none of the idled nuclear plants should be restarted.

The backdrop to the discussion and contributing to the tension in the air and the intensity of the meeting is the continuing disaster at Fukushima that has so negatively impacted the 80,000 evacuees and led to Chieko being forced from her farm, as well as those who are still trying to live nearby outside the official evacuation area but are scared of the radiation and unsure of whether it’s actually safe for themselves or their children.

Three reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi are now known to have suffered meltdowns of the highly radioactive fuel rods, with the strong possibility of some fuel melting through the inner containment vessel and pooling on the reactor floor.  Elevated radiation levels have shown up in food staples such as rice and milk in Fukushima prefecture, an area known for its agriculture and a significant farming region of Japan as radiation vented to the atmosphere when hydrogen explosions blew the roofs off two of the reactor buildings after the reactors lost electricity and therefore coolant.

Radioactive plutonium, the most toxic element known to humanity and one that does not exist on earth – it is only manufactured inside nuclear reactors as part of the fission of the uranium fuel – [EPA states: "Plutonium is considered a man-made element, although scientists have found trace amounts of naturally occurring plutonium produced under highly unusual geologic circumstances." -- Ed.] has been detected far from the plant itself, indicating beyond doubt that the inner and outer containment structures have been ruptured and the core of at least one reactor has been exposed.  The dumping of vast quantities of radioactively contaminated water into the oceans has also occurred as workers at the plant struggled to prevent further explosions by keeping the fuel rods cool and were forced to release the largest ever amounts of radiation into the sea when they ran out of storage space.  As the plants are still leaking, groundwater continues to become contaminated and because of the extremely high levels of radiation inside the plant and all of the wrecked equipment it’s still impossible to know the full extent of the damage to the cores and how badly melted they are.  Despite this, the new Japanese Prime Minister Noda declared on December 16 that the reactors were now stable and in “cold shutdown” and the nuclear crisis had “been resolved” which brought heavy editorial criticism from the Japan Times under the title “Nuclear Crisis Far From Resolved.”

Hence, the two demands at the meeting were that there should be no publishing of a report on the accident until all of the facts were collected, and secondly, that until the government knows the exact causes of the accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi plants, they should not restart any of the inactive nuclear reactors around the country.

Local activist groups are also pushing for an enlarged evacuation zone and better compensation for those forced to relocate and who have lost their jobs along with their homes.  The four hour meeting grew increasingly fractious as it became apparent that the government bureaucrats were not in a position to relay any fresh information or answer any questions from the floor.

The meeting brought strong reminders of a similar meeting in New York in late spring that I attended between community members and the US’s equivalent of NISA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).  At that meeting, 600 attendees grew increasingly enraged by the lack of real information or space for dialogue from NRC representatives until local activists took over the meeting and ran it in a democratic manner where people were allowed to present evidence against the 36 year old Indian Point nuclear power plant and finally have a say in how energy would, or would not, be produced in their community.

After one ministerial representative had repeatedly read aloud the exact same non-answer to people’s questioning, Ryoichi Hattori demanded that he be replaced by someone who could answer the people’s questions as they had the right to be informed.

A lower level bureaucrat was replaced, another quickly came in and eventually it was admitted that the government cannot confirm whether the pipes were cracked by the earthquake, nor can they rule out that the cracks were made worse by the tsunami.  Not at all to the reassurance of anyone there, the new bureaucrat said that this was partly because the government had not yet received all of the necessary information from the plant’s operator and owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the infamous TEPCO, and that they were not sure that they would get all of the information in the future.

In Japan, the term “nuclear energy village” refers to the tight connections between the government, the government’s regulatory body, NISA and nuclear corporations such as TEPCO which, to all intents and purposes, regulate themselves, a point highlighted by a New York Times investigative report detailing the “culture of complicity” and corruption by TEPCO at Fukushima-Daiichi that undermined safety at the plant.

As the Japanese government seeks to sweep the nuclear disaster under the rug, and maintain Japan’s dependence on nuclear energy, continuing to put the Japanese people, who live on a volcanically and geologically active island in tremendous danger, it is clear that only the combined pressure of valiant fighters like Chieko Shiina will force the government to rethink its pro-corporate energy policy and move Japan toward a renewable and safe energy future.  As she told me, “it’s human nature to fight.  And this fight is international.  The actions to change the system make you change.  Both are important and necessary.  This unequal power structure will lead to change, but we must fight”.

Tomorrow, I travel to Fukushima to spend Christmas in the radiation zone, speaking with those most directly affected by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.

That’s because billionaires now thoroughly control an economy designed to “fabulously” enrich a privileged few by stealing the wealth that results when everyday toilers get low pay and substandard or nonexistent benefits.

Still, some regular folks, enduring painful exploitation under this reverse Robin Hood status, support rightwing con artists that FOX News and Rush Limbaugh shamelessly dupe them into backing.

It’s about as sensible as someone saying, “Jump off this bridge into those boulder-strewn, raging waters below. It’ll do wonders for your health!”

Lowering taxes for the upper crust and abolishing “onerous” government regulations on rapacious Big Business and High Finance is what they’re really asking, but the result would be just as lethal.

Let’s quit listening to manipulative propagandists’ disguised calls for our mass emasculation and complete impoverishment.

After all, further lavishing and empowering our oppressors would hardly improve our wretched lot.

When abolitionists, suffragettes, and labor organizers first emerged, parties who gained from mistreating blacks, women, and workers demonized those change-making activists.

They were slandered as being anti-American and un-Christian.

Sadly, similar charges are directed against homosexuals today, whose civil rights continue to be opposed with the same Bible-thumping false rectitude once used to defend slavery.

A bloody civil war had to be fought because part of the country couldn’t comprehend what Jesus really stood for, preferring benighted bigotry instead.

Much later, in a laudable reversal, many citizens opposed the Vietnam war because they were conscientiously convinced that napalming Southeast Asian civilians into smoldering heaps of cinders and ash wasn’t a Godly thing to do.

For holding that view, they were labeled “smelly hippies” and “Marxists.”

Today, as the growing Occupy movement protests Wall Street’s plunder of our country’s wage-earning majority, it also gets called dirty names. Exactly the same names that ’60s war resisters were called.

Given all this, could it be that the slanderers secretly wish they could still own other human beings? Or prevent females from voting? They’re certainly anti-union.

Just wondering…

Thank you, conservatives, for revealing to us that the 99% movement is nothing but a bunch of crybaby/loser/Bolshevik members of a silly “Flea Party.”

Now we no longer have to worry about capitalists getting obscenely bloated while typical workers’ billfolds virtually disappear when viewed sideways.

What a relief it is to ignore the correlation between the length of fat cats’ yachts and the shortening time many millions of us have before going hopelessly broke.

Instead, we can fulminate against “irresponsible” young people protesting exorbitant college tuition costs, and lifelong student-loan debt, as they try to become educated for jobs that likely won’t even exist when they graduate.

What’s with value-less, complaining kids these days anyhow?

Now that we’ve seen the light, we can hardly wait till Newt Gingrich becomes President and brings back child labor, which he recently advocated at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

After all, there’s nothing wrong with America that a little Dickensian discipline for spoiled brats won’t fix!

Right?

(Extreme right, actually…)

Where in the First Amendment are tents and sleeping bags prevented from being used by American citizens as they peacefully assemble in public places to seek redress of compelling grievances?

Such a prohibition doesn’t exist, of course.

But that isn’t stopping mayors of several cities from behaving like foreign despots as they attempt to quash the Occupy cause, which resists the increasingly Third World-like economic inequity that having our lives ruled by upper crust thieves has painfully visited upon countless U.S. households.

Pitiful wages, lousy benefits, and pepper-sprayed violations of basic liberty are becoming the overall norm, while exploitative oligarchs ostentatiously luxuriate in gated communities.

Winding up essentially indistinguishable from the downtrodden, tyrannized “wretched of the earth” shouldn’t be our collective fate.

Join Occupy and the 99% to demand a different, better outcome for ourselves and our progeny!

Without substantial social reform and redistribution of economic assets, representative institutions – no matter how ‘democratic’ in form – will simply mirror the undemocratic power relations of society. Democracy requires a change in the balance of forces in society. Concentration of economic power in the hands of a small elite is a structural obstacle to democracy. It must be displaced if democracy is to emerge.¹

All reformers, no matter how radical they thought themselves to be, could be (and have been) caught up in reform structures whose underlying purpose is to reduce the inharmonics of the existing social system.²

Even as attempts to curb protests through evictions and violence are conducted across the country, the movement is spreading – every day, more and more flock to their local  parks and city centers, rallying under the banner of “Occupy!” First it was Occupy Wall Street, a call put out by Adbusters, a quasi-Situationist organization that has been at the forefront of the “culture jamming” ethos since 1989. From there, it was Occupy Chicago, Occupy Los Angeles, Occupy Boston, Occupy Omaha. The movement has gone global, with protestors catching the Zeitgeist in London and Rome. Regionalized discontent led to international solidarity in Greece, as further austerity measures loom on the horizon – imposed by none other than a government that dares to call itself socialist.

The central concept of the OWS movement is populist in nature, harking back to those that resisted capitalism’s harsh realities in the earlier parts of the 1900s: there is a major disconnect between the 99% of the population and the 1% that acts as the center of wealth and power. At the core, this division is rooted in Marxist terminology, the proletariat versus the bourgeois and their exploitation. We demand democracy, the multitude is saying, from Lexington, Kentucky to Madrid, Spain. We demand freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from indentured servitude to the moneyed class, freedom to live our lives with a higher degree of autonomy than has been allowed by those who seek to manipulate and oppress for their own material gain. Be they students in the universities, underpaid workers who need government aid to live, or citizens horrified that a piece of every paycheck is going to bail-out reckless firms and to support foreign wars, the multitude is gradually realizing that they are the engine of this world, and that it is time for them to sit in the driver seat. But all is not right in the movement. It is in times of unrest and cries to social change that hegemony rears its ugly head. Since time immemorial, overt repression has been swapped for the far more subtle process of assimilation – the system acknowledges its defects, and then harnesses people power and guides it by hand into compromises that leave the primary mechanisms of domination intact. Radical change is exchanged for the more “mature” approach of working within the system. This is a very real threat to the Occupy movement, one that needs to be acknowledged and resisted by any member who truly believes in striving for a better tomorrow.

Egypt: The Inspiration

OWS’s genesis lies not just in Adbusters, but in the Spanish Indignants movement, a coalition advocating grassroots democracy in reaction to the impact of the international financial crisis on their nation. Leading the coalition is a group by the name of ¡Democracia Real YA! (Real Democracy NOW!), which called for international solidarity and protests on October 15th. Adbusters responded with a poster portraying a dancer atop the Wall Street bull, and request for people to join together to occupy the “second capital” of wealth and power in the United States – Wall Street.

¡Democracia Real YA!’s initial inspiration for the international protest was the shocking success of Arab Spring,³ the multi-country revolt that succeeded in toppling one of the world’s worst dictators, the US-backed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. The opposing coalition, consisting mainly of tech-savy youth organizations such as the Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution and the 6 April Youth Movement, has been a consistent icon and inspiration for the Occupy movement, and rightfully so – it is one of the rare examples of people pushing for social change and getting it. So often we see revolt being crushed under the wheels of power, organization shattered, and violence suppressing hope. But even with Egypt, questions must be asked.

Ideological solidarity is giving way now to direct ties being formed between these desperate threads that are disrupting the international order. Egyptian activist Mohammed Ezzeldin gave a rousing speech to protestors in NYC’s Washington Square Park, discussing the direct lineage between the two revolts. “”I am coming from there — from the Arab Spring. From the Arab Spring to the fall of Wall Street,” he said. “From Liberation Square to Washington Square, to the fall of Wall Street and market domination, and capitalist domination.”⁴

Wired magazine has also reported that Ahmed Maher, one of the founding members of the 6 April Youth Movement, has traveled from Egypt to Washington D.C.’s McPherson Square to directly interact with the Occupiers there and advise them on courses of action. For sometime now Maher has been communicating with the protestors in the multitude’s medium of choice – “We talk on the internet about what happened in Egypt, about our structure, about our organization, how to organize a flash mob, how to organize a sit-in, how to be non-violent with police”⁵ – but this will mark the first time that he has come face to face with the people he refers to as his “brothers.”

Behind and Below the Masses: the revolution factory

The Egyptian revolt, much like its counterparts in Tunisia and Libya, was a direct fall-out from the processes of globalization; namely, the domestic impact of US policies that were driving high the price of essential living commodities. As reported in the McClatchy Newspapers:

The Fed [Federal Reserve Bank] has been engaged in what economists call “quantitative easing,” buying U.S. Treasury bonds to attack the threat of deflation — the phenomenon of falling prices across an economy.

Quantitative easing has the effect of raising asset prices, whether they’re the prices of stocks or what traders are willing to pay for commodities such as wheat or corn. One of the side effects of this policy is that the dollar weakens against other currencies, and that’s helped push up the global prices of commodities.⁶

As the article notes, the Fed’s quantitative easing has led to wheat prices rising 70% over the past year, certainly bad news for the country of Egypt, which stands as the US’s eight largest export market. With an economy pried open by the International Monetary Fund to a flood of international products under the banner of benevolent “structural adjustments,” the skyrocketing prices in the US means skyrocketing prices in Egypt. With an oppressive leader under the thumb of the United States military, the stage was ripe for revolution. In other words, Egypt, like the other countries involved in Arab Spring, was on the surface revolting against domestic policies; at its core; however, the revolt was against the structures of Late Capitalism, the mechanics of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to as “Empire” – the international monetary system that is rapidly rendering the concept of the “nation-state” obsolete.

So Mubarak is toppled and the Egyptian people seemingly liberate themselves. And what is the result? The country comes under the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Led by Mohamed Hussein Tantawi (a man described as “Mubarak’s poodle” for his loyalty to the disposed leader⁷ the Council has declared to honor all existing political treaties and agreements, as well as maintaining the neoliberal stance of its predecessor. “We are not moving back to a socialist past,” Egypt’s temporary government has declared,⁸ as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and the European Investment Bank plan to descend upon the country with an “action plan” for foreign investment and “sustainable growth.⁹

Thus, Washington and the IMF’s program will go unchanged as it moves from Mubarak’s dictatorship to the new parliamentary democracy. How did it happen? How did we get from point A (the masses, infused with revolutionary potential) to point B (a cosmetic facelift of the prevailing economic system)? An analogous situation can be found in South Africa, where the spirit of the revolution was laid down in a document known as the Freedom Charter. In this document we can find declarations such as “the national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people… the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.¹⁰ Yet when the dust settled after 1994, a radically different picture emerged: the apartheid-era finance minister, Derek Keyes, remained in his position as head of the South African bank; the ANC signed onto the international General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; the World Bank was free to impose restrictions on socialized business models; and the IMF exerted authority over the approach to issues such as minimum wage. In the words of one activist, “they never freed us. They only took the chain from around our neck and put it around our ankles.”¹¹

The dominant system will always resist widespread structural change, and the most common method of doing this is through the power of non-governmental institutions. Foundations constitute a main apparatus of this process – “everything the Foundation did could be regarded as ‘making the World safe for capitalism’, reducing social tensions by helping to comfort the afflicted, provide safety valves for the angry, and improve the functioning of government,” said McGeorge Bundy, the long-time president of the Ford Foundation.¹² There is also the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a brainchild of the Reagan administration that seeks to provide a capitalist economic framework for developing nations, and ease former left-wing states into a financial and militaristic stance in line with Washington’s key values. The NED receives its funding from the State Department through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and in turn funnels the money into four subsidiary organizations: the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (Solidarity Center). The NDI and IRI are allied with their respective American political parties, while the CIPE is affiliated with the US Chamber of Commerce. The Solidarity Center, on the other hand, is a program of the AFL-CIO labor union consortium. Other NED funds flow into Freedom House, a US-based human rights organization that has been described as a “Who’s Who of neoconservatives from government, business, academia, labor, and the press.”¹³ American libertarian politician Ron Paul has provided an excellent analysis and critique of the whole “democracy promoting” apparatus:

The misnamed National Endowment for Democracy is nothing more than a costly program that takes US taxpayer funds to promote favored politicians and political parties abroad. What the NED does in foreign countries, through its recipient organizations the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute (would be rightly illegal in the United States. The NED injects “soft money” into the domestic elections of foreign countries in favor of one party or the other. Imagine what a couple of hundred thousand dollars will do to assist a politician or political party in a relatively poor country abroad. It is particularly Orwellian to call US manipulation of foreign elections “promoting democracy.” How would Americans feel if the Chinese arrived with millions of dollars to support certain candidates deemed friendly to China? Would this be viewed as a democratic development?¹⁴

After playing a role in the “color revolutions” of Georgia and the Ukraine, the NED’s attention then turned to Egypt. A recent New York Times article has revealed, citing WikiLeaks cables, that the disparate bands of dissident groups have been receiving “training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and Freedom House.”¹⁵ Verification independent of the New York Times article can be found as well. Madeleine Albright, former Clinton-era Secretary of State and chairman of the NDI, appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show to give her analysis of the events in Egypt. “You mentioned that I was chairman of the board of the National Democratic Institute,” Albright says to Maddow in the interview, responding to the pundit’s questions concerning the post-Mubarak government. “We have been working within Egypt for a very long time, in terms of developing various aspects of civil society, and dealing with various and talking to opposition groups who are prepared to participate in a fair and free election.”

Freedom House also openly admits their role in fomenting the unrest. In a May 2009 report, the organization discusses their “New Generation Project” within Egypt, seeking to empower the nation’s “Youtube generation” by “promoting exchange” between “democracy advocates” and “emerging democracies” to “share best practices,” “providing advanced training on civil mobilization” and helping them understand the benefits of “new media.”¹⁶ In 2008, representatives from the organization attended the “Alliance of Youth Movements,” an activist summit funded by the State Department, Facebook, MTV, Google, and Youtube to provide a fertile meeting ground for ‘digital activists’ and the corporate leaders behind “new media.” The summit has subsequently been the topic of a set of leaked WikiLeaks cables, describing an ‘unnamed activist’ who there presented “his movement’s goals for democratic change in Egypt.”  This same unnamed activist then met with a series of US Congressmen, discussing with them an “unwritten plan for democratic transition” of Egypt into a parliamentary democracy, a plan that had been accepted by “several opposition parties and movements.”¹⁷

Disturbingly, this is the same milieu that Ahmed Maher, now an adviser to OWS, travelled in. As researcher Tony Cartalucci has reported:

This of course  isn’t Maher’s first trip to the United States. Years before the Egyptian revolution, the United States was quietly preparing a global army of youth cannon fodder to fuel region wide conflagrations throughout the world, both politically and literally. Maher’s April 6 organization had been in New York City for the US State Department’s first ‘Alliance for Youth Movements Summit’ in 2008. His group then traveled to Serbia to train under the US-funded ‘CANVAS’ organization before returning to Egypt in 2010 with US International Crisis Group (ICG) operative Mohamed ElBaradei to spend the next year building up for the ‘Arab Spring.¹⁸

CANVAS (Centre for Applied Non Violent Action and Strategies) was founded in 2003 by the Serbian youth organization Optor! (Resistance!), which utilized nonviolent methods of revolt to bring down Slobodan Milošević. Not surprisingly in the least, the organization had received millions of dollars in funding from both the NED and IRI¹⁹ while CANVAS itself has worked closely with Freedom House.²⁰ Given the close ties between these youth-based activist organizations and US State Department’s bureaucracy, perhaps it is distressing to note that former Optor! Member and leader of CANVAS, Ivan Marovic, has given talks at the OWS rallies in NYC.²¹

The Right’s Favorite Boogeyman – and a useful opportunity

Perhaps the centerpiece of the Egyptian Revolution was the individual Mohamed ElBaradei, a director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and presidential hopeful for Egypt’s parliamentary democracy. ElBaradei, however, has ties of his own to suspicious Western interests – he sits on the board of trustees of the International Crisis Group, which has been described by Madeleine Albright as a “full-service conflict prevention organization.” Despite this astute observation, the membership rosters of the Crisis Group’s various chairmen, trustees, and directors shows a significant overlap with affiliates of the National Endowment for Democracy: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Morton I. Abramowitz, and Stephen Solarz are just a handful of Crisis Group members who represent the interests of both. Here we can find the favorite whipping boy of the right-wing media, the billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Vilified as some sort of a socialist by the likes of Glenn Beck and Michael Savage, Soros, in truth, is far from that sort of ideology. A key figure in the transition of former Soviet states into the world of globalized capitalism, Soros helped engineer the economic ‘shock therapy’ that thrust Poland into a financial tail spin as extensive structural adjustments rattled the already crumbling economy.²²

Soros, despite being a clear member of the 1%, has publicly stated his support of OWS:

Billionaire financier George Soros says he sympathizes with protesters speaking out against corporate greed in ongoing protests on Wall Street… Soros says he understands the frustrations of small business owners, for instance those who have seen credit card charges soar during the current crisis.²³

There are ties, albeit indirect ones, that can tie Soros to the fledgling Occupy movement. MoveOn.org, a regular recipient of Soros funding, has thrown its weight behind the protestors in an apparent sign of solidarity. As TruthOut’s Steve Horn writes:

On October 5, Day 19 of Occupy Wall Street, MoveOn.org sent out an email calling on clicktivists (as opposed to activists) to “Join the Virtual March on Wall Street.” “The 99% are both an inspiration and a call that needs to be answered. So we’re answering it today, in a nationwide Virtual March on Wall Street to support their demand for an economy that serves the many, not the few … Join in the virtual march by doing what hundreds have done spontaneously across the web: Take your picture holding a sign that tells your story, along with the words ‘I am the 99%,’” wrote Daniel Mintz of MoveOn.org.²⁴

MoveOn.org has a long history of left-wing co-option; as people flooded the streets of American cities in protest of the Iraq War, the online institution dove right into the populist fervor and proceeded to utilize people’s discontent with the Bush administration to garner support for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. The same process was repeated just a handful of years later, with MoveOn.org acting the second largest lobbying organization for Barack Obama (aside from the President’s own Organizing for America). Through a strategic ad campaign – one of MoveOn’s personnel is John Hlinko, a “social media marketing expert” – the organization managed to create a literal army of voters for Obama, reinforcing that the same “hope and change” imagery that was being pumped out by the campaign itself. Both MoveOn and Organizing America’s methodology was a foreshadow to the systems of new media utilized by the Arab Spring protestors; this tool is now being called “netroots,” the transporting of traditional grassroots activities into the virtual sphere.

MoveOn.org is not the only group chiming in to support for OWS. Rebuild the Dream, a progressive-style organization founded by former Obama White House adviser Van Jones, has championed the protestors – “Let’s all support Occupy Wall St.” reads a blurb on their website homepage. During an MSNBC interview, Van Jones directly linked the OWS movement to the Arab Spring, stating “you are going to see an American Fall, an American Autumn, just like we saw the Arab Spring.”

However, the institution changes that OWS is calling for contrast sharply with Jones’ vision of how to take America back: “We’re talking about U.S. senators who want to run as American Dream candidates – soon to be announced. We’ve reached out to the House Democratic Caucus; there are House members who want to run as American Dream candidates.²⁵ Simply put, Rebuild the Dream is an unofficial organ of the Democrat Party, much like how MoveOn.org utilized, mobilized anti-war protestors to generate a large sector of the Democrat’s voting base. In actuality the ties run closer than that – Jones had worked hand in hand with MoveOn.org to initially launch Rebuild the Dream. Furthermore, he had been a senior fellow at Center for American Progress; the progressive institution has received funding from both George Soros²⁶ and the Democracy Alliance organization, where Soros sits on the board of directors.

Co-option of social activism has always been the modus operandi of the Democrat Party. They play “’the role of shock absorber, trying to head off and co-opt restive [and potentially radical] segments of the electorate’” by posing as ‘the party of the people.²⁷ President Obama, riding the crest of the MoveOn.orgs of the country – and not to mention a well orchestrated propaganda campaign – has fit this concept to a T, something that has even been noted by members of the liberal establishment:

Two and a half weeks after Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election, David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, commented on the president-elect’s corporatist and militarist transition team and cabinet appointments with a musical analogy. Obama, Rothkopf told the New York Times, was following “the violin model: you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.²⁷

Liberal commentator Thomas Frank has observed the process of “voting for one thing, getting another” at work in the Republican Party:

The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again, receive deindustrialization … Vote to get governments off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking … Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.²⁸

Is it really any different for the Democrat Party? Vote to end wars, receive troop escalation and change only years after the fact. Vote to allow workers to retain their rights, receive trade agreements that export jobs overseas. Vote to reign in the power of Wall Street, receive taxpayer-funded bail-outs that create moral hazards and prop up corrupt financial regimes. From the left to the right, the story is the same – the great violin keeps playing cheerfully as the world burns. It’s only the hands grasping it, not the system that change.

One of the clearest portraits of co-option in recent history would be the history of the conservative Tea Party Movement. In its infancy, the Tea Party was a movement launched by libertarian politician Ron Paul, a staunch opponent of the government’s infringement on civil liberties, its use of military force on foreign soil, the monopolization of the financial market by entities such as the Federal Reserve Bank, and the crony capitalism that eventually erupted into the bail-outs. Aside from certain economics view, there is certainly a great deal in Ron Paul’s – and the early Tea Party Movement’s – agenda that is entirely compatible with the demands of the Occupy Movement; it is for this very reason that libertarians have begun to reach out and join in solidarity with the protestors. Furthermore, given the anti-foreign aid and anti-Federal Reserve stance of the early Tea Party Movement, there can perhaps be observed an unspoken lineage between the Tea Party and the uprisings in Egypt and surrounding countries, triggered by Western support of the people’s oppressors and the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve.

Just as Soros controls the purse strings to disrupt and redirect leftist movements into positions aligned with the Democrat Party, the right can find his counterpart in the Koch brothers, the billionaire owners of the little-known Koch Industries. With their money bankrolling organizations such as Americans for Prosperity, David and Charles Koch were able to train torrents of so-called Tea Party activists whose espoused viewpoints far more in line with typical Republican dialogue than with Ron Paul’s libertarian ethos. The focus was shifted from attacking the Fed and ending the wars and towards union-busting, securing borders, and more often than not, reinforcing unequivocal US support for Israel – a direct clash with stance that Paul has taken on the topic.

This “astro-turfing” of grassroots movements, of course, requires multiple organizations and front groups to create the veneer of a unified public opinion, and operating alongside Americans for Prosperity is FreedomWorks. Perhaps it is worthy to take into consideration that when the organization was created from a 2004 merger between the Koch-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy and the neoconservative Empower America, several prominent NED officials sat on the board of directors of the former – including Vin Weber (an adviser to Mitt Romney’s ill-fated 2008 presidential campaign), Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (one of the most prominent of Cold War-era hardliners), and Michael Novak (an expert at the neoconservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute).

The Tea Party’s assimilation into the broader spectrum of the Republican political arena was marked by the establishment of the Tea Party Caucus, a coalition of House of Representatives and Senate members that represents perhaps the most powerful political body sitting in the US government – this consortium of leaders are essentially calling the shots when it comes to the right-wing of the American political system. Its members show utter disregard for the original protests of the Tea Party: Louie Gohmert has been a strong and vocal supporter of the war in Iraq, Steve King has openly supported the lobbying industry for their “effective and useful job[s]²⁹ and Dennis A. Ross was a member of the United States House Oversight Subcommittee on TARP, Financial Services and Bailouts of Public and Private Programs. Joe Barton eviscerated any ideological tie between himself and the early stages of the movement that he claims to rally behind (not to mention a disregard for any allegiance to the notion of really existing free markets) by arguing that the removal of subsidies to oil companies would act as a “disincentive” and result in the corporations going out of business.³⁰

Curiously, the place where this whole process of right-wing co-option began – the corporate-financed milieu of Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks – was intended to be a “powerful answer to the challenge presented by the Left and groups like America Coming Together (ACT), MoveOn.org, and the Media Fund.³¹ All three of these organizations are Soros-financed, revealing the hidden irony that ultimately, these seemingly opposing institutions are simply moving potentially disruptive individuals into an entirely compatible paradigm of power that sits in the dual capitals of Washington D.C. and Wall Street. However, this odd dialectic can be entirely useful. Realizing this process will allow individuals who yearn for legitimate change on either side of the aisle to separate themselves from the system, and hopefully, discover the disparate strands that are ideologically compatible between them and their counterparts. It is a rare opportunity for the discontents of “left” and the “right” to shake off the labels applied to them and create an open dialogue and eventual solidarity with one another.

Conclusions and Other Thoughts

Though it may certainly seem like it, this essay was not written to belittle the OWS movement, or attack the actions of those who stood in opposition to Milosevic, apartheid, or Mubarak. However, it was my intention to acknowledge the shortcomings in the aftermath of these fights – Serbia and South Africa both jumped into bed with the IMF, imposing austerity measures in their nations that allowed persistent poverty to fester and even continue to grow. Egypt is certainly following suit now, so even though the brutal fist of the American-backed regime is gone, the slow-burning fires of neoliberalism continue to carry on the torch. For Serbia and Egypt, their revolts, though brilliant displays of the potential of people power, were in no small part shaped by the technicians in State Department, operating through the long arm of the NED. For South Africa, money from George Soros ended up in the coffers of activist groups who quickly changed their tune from the ANC’s quasi-socialist demands to jump starting South African neoliberalism.³²  Not surprisingly, these same groups showed a willingness to work closely with the NED.³³

The NED, much like Soros’ civil society empowering programs, promotes a little known methodology called low-intensity democracy.

Low-intensity democracies are limited democracies in that they achieve important political changes, such as the formal reduction of the military’s former institutional power or greater individual freedoms, but stop short in addressing the extreme social inequalities within… societies. …they provide a more transparent and secure environment for the investments of transnational capital… these regimes function as legitimizing institutions for capitalist states, effectively co-opting the social opposition that arises from the destructive consequences of neoliberal austerity, or as Cyrus Vance and Henry Kissinger have argued, the promotion of “pre-emptive” reform in order to co-opt popular movements that may press for more radical, or even revolutionary, change.³⁴

Thus, it can be considered to be worrisome that individuals who were trained under institutions that implement this system are turning up at OWS rallies. While the NED’s agenda is to establish low-intensity democracies around the world, this is precisely the type of governance that we are dealing with in the United States, the very system that produced the antagonism found in both the Tea Party and OWS. To consent to it would be a rejection of the spirit of the protest and an embrace of what is opposes.

It is the Democrat Party that could possibly represent this system even more so than the Republicans. It is the party of Social Security, government-provided medical care, and other welfare programs. Does this function of the party not dim and obfuscate the fact that it is also the party of bail-outs and NAFTA? Realizing this simple fact is paramount to creating a movement of legitimate change in the world; we must seek deconstruct low-intensity democracy and replace it with Really Existing Democracy. We have already seen this functioning in a micro-sense at OWS rallies, where leadership positions are voluntary and voted in by the whole of the people. Decisions are made in a similar matter, putting the course of action and the direction of the movement in its entirety in the hands of the protestors, not in bureaucrats and moneymen with agendas of their own. It is organic and autonomous, and on an international level holds to be what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari referred to as a ‘rhizome’ – “a nonhierarchal and noncentered network structure.³⁵

There are further reasons to be optimistic about the movement’s direction. The official OWS website hosts a petition with a “formal demand that MoveOn.org leaves” – “this is OUR movement and it is NOT Obama’s personal reelection campaign,” it reads.³⁶ The leftist online newspaper TruthOut has called attention MoveOn.Org and Rebuild the Dream’s attempts to cozy up to the protestors, while Michel Chossudovsky, the professor emeritus of the economics department at the University of Ottowa, has published a piece for his Centre for Research on Globalization detailing the arrival of NED associates at OWS rallies.

There is an opportunity here. We live in a time marked by crisis, catastrophe, poverty, and war, but it is in times of disruption like these that rifts open in the landscapes of the global system, providing people with a chance to take the wheel, if they so choose. For America, this time arises from the great disappointments of our so-called democratic process – the hookwinking of the masses by the left-right one-two punch by the back to back presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama has led more people to step back, reconsider their presumptions about the world’s machinery, and begin to demand that their voices be heard. What happens from here, with the choices marked by the path to liberation or the well-worn roads of hegemony, is entirely contingent on the will of the people.

1. Barry Gills, Joen Rocamora, and Richard Wilson, Low Intensity Democracy: Political Power in the New World Order Pluto Press, 1993, quoted in Michael Barker “Do Capitalists Fund Revolutions? (Part 1 of 2)” Znet, September 4th, 2007.>
2. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 Beacon Press, 1968, pg. 254, quoted in Michael Barker, “Liberal Elites and the Pacification of Workers,” State of Nature.>
3. Lauren Frayer “Inspired by Arab Protests, Spain’s Unemployed Rally for Change,” Voice of America May 19, 2011.
4. Matt Sledge “Occupy Wall Street Egyptian Activist Goes ‘From Liberation Square To Washington Square’,” Huffington Post, October 8, 2011.
5. Spencer Ackerman “Egypt’s Top ‘Facebook Revolutionary’ Now Advising Occupy Wall Street,” Wired, October 18, 2011.
6. Kevin G. Hall “Egypt’s unrest may have roots in food prices, U.S. Fed Policy” McClatchy Newspapers, January 31, 2011.
7. “‘Mubarak’s Poodle’ at Head of Egypt’s Transition,” CBS News, February 16, 2011.
8. Emad Mekay, “http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54544″>Egypt takes a step back from IMF ways,” Inter Press Service, February 20, 2011.
9. “Multilateral banks join forces to aid Arab nations,” Yahoo! News, April 14, 2011.
10. Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Picador, 2007, p. 247-248.
11. Ibid., p. 256-257
12. Quoted in Michel Chossudovsky, “Manufacturing Dissent” Center for Research on Globalization, September 20, 2010.
13. Diana Barahona, “The Freedom House Files,” Monthly Review, January 3, 2007.
14. Ron Paul “National Endowment for Democracy: Paying to Make Enemies of America,” October 11, 2003.
15. Ron Nixon, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” New York Times, April 14, 2011.
16. Freedom House, “New Generation of Advocates: Empower Civil Society in Egypt.”>
17. “Egypt protests: secret US document discloses support for protesters,” The Telegraph, April 23, 2011.
18. Tony Cartalucci “US State Department Funded Agitator in DC Advising #OWS,” Land Destroyer Report, October 18, 2011.
19. Roger Cohen, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?” New York Times November 26, 2000.
20. Peter Ackerman, “Skills or Conditions: What Key Factors Shape the Success or Failure of Civil Resistance?” Conference on Civil Resistance & Power Politics, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 15-18 March 2007.
21. Michel Chossudovsky, “Occupy Wall Street and ‘The American Autumn’: Is It a ‘Colored Revolution?’” Centre for Research on Globalization, October 13, 2011.
22. This topic is covered extensively in Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p. 215-229 and 241-243
23. “George Soros Says He Sympathizes With Occupy Wall Street Protesters,” Huffington Post, October 23, 2011.>
24. Steve Horn, “MoveOn.Org and Friends Attempt to Co-Opt Occupy Wall Street Movement,” TruthOut.
25. Horn, “MoveOn.Org and Friends Attempt to Co-Opt Occupy Wall Street Movement”
26. Laura Blumenfeld “Soros’s Deep Pockets vs. Bush,” Washington Post, November 11, 2003.
27. Paul Street, “Obama’s Violin: Populist rage and the uncertain containment of change,” ZCommunications May 2009.
28. Thomas Frank What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Henry Holt & Company, 2004 pg. 7
29. Bara Vaida “Rep. King: “Lobbyists Are Useful,” The National Journal’s Under the Influence Monday, March 1, 2010.
30. Brian Beutler “Barton: Govt Subsidies Necessary To Keep Exxon From Going Out Of Business,” Talking Points Memo March 10, 2011.
31. “Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America Merge to Form FreedomWorks,” Media release, undated, archived from July 25, 2004.
32. This topic is covered in Michael Barker, “George Soros And South Africa’s Elite Transition,” Swans Commentary May 31, 2010.
33. This is not the only case of NED/Soros collaboration; I have covered the role of both in fomenting unrest in Iran in “Soros and the State Department: Moving Iran towards the Open Society,” Foreign Policy Journal May 14, 2011.
34. William Avilés Global Capitalism, Democracy, and Civil-Military Relations in Columbia State University of New York Press, 2006, p. 18-19.
35. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire Harvard University Press, 2000 p. 299.
36. “Formally demand that Moveon.org leave,” October 16, 2011.

At a time when Irish peace activists have been illegally imprisoned in Israel after their humanitarian ship the MV Saoirse was hi-jacked in international waters by Israeli commandos, hosting these ‘Israeli Film Days’ sends out the worst possible message: that Filmbase is indifferent to its exploitation as a site of propaganda for the state that perpetrates such atrocities.  To cancel the event at this point would… be perceived worldwide as an honourable gesture of solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian people who have called for an international cultural boycott of the Israeli state.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) also issued an “Open Letter to Filmbase“, expressing its surprise

that a prominent Irish cultural institution would allow the Israeli embassy to carry out this audacious ‘Brand Israel’ activity on its premises hardly two weeks after Irish peace activists were illegally apprehended by the Israeli navy in international waters, humiliated, and imprisoned in Israel…

These approaches were rejected by Filmbase, despite much dissension among its employees, not all of whom supported the decision to host the event. The opening of the festival, a wet and miserable evening, saw Filmbase “defended” by a force of at least two dozen Garda­í. Members of the IPSC, the Irish Anti-War Movement, Act for Palestine  and others demonstrated noisily and peacefully, displaying Palestinian flags and placards with such slogans as “End the Siege of Gaza” and “Boycott Israel”.  The arrivals of the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore, and the Minister for Defence and Justice Alan Shatter were greeted with particularly vociferous cries of  ”shame! shame!”

A number of individuals engaged in peaceful direct action by infiltrating the proceedings; some of these – including a female Palestinian IPSC member wearing hijab – were ejected from the foyer. Others gained access but were ejected one by one after successively interrupting the Israeli Ambassador’s welcoming speech, during which the chanting of slogans from outside was clearly audible.

All in all, the atmosphere was fraught but good-humoured. Nonetheless, shortly after the guests had retired to a sound-proof cinema within Filmbase to view the first film, and just before the demonstration was scheduled to disperse, the Gardaí suddenly decided to clear Curved Street, thus prolonging the protest and, indeed, contriving to direct it partly against themselves. While not descending to the levels of their Egyptian or Syrian colleagues, the Gardaí behaved with a roughness they had hitherto reserved for demonstrations outside the Israeli Embassy itself.

Ironically, inside Filmbase at that very moment Minister Gilmore was referring to those who “are demonstrating outside this theatre as I speak and they are fully entitled to do so in a peaceful fashion.” Clearly his colleague Minister Shatter, the former Chairman of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties who now has ultimate responsibility for police tactics, was of a different opinion.

Those demonstrators standing in front of Filmbase were pushed unceremoniously on to Dame Lane, a side street flanking the building. Shortly thereafter, the decision was taken to march around the block to join up with the demonstrators on the parallel side street, Eustace Street. At this, the Gardaí blocked Eustace Street at the point where it meets Curved Street, thus denying access to the IFI to anyone wishing to enter it from the north and, quite ineptly, denying Eamon Gilmore – whose official car was parked outside the IFI – an escape route. At this point the luckless Tánaiste chose to emerge from Filmbase, and was forced to make an ignominious exit on to Dame Street in reverse gear.

Fintan Lane, co-ordinator of the Irish Ship to Gaza, who barely two weeks previously had been one of those Irish citizens detained in an Israeli prison with little or no support from Mr Gilmore, started to speak about his experience. At that moment, a senior Garda officer stepped up behind him and forcibly wrested the megaphone from him. The officer explained that he was confiscating the megaphone, which could be collected from Pearse Street Garda Station once the “Film Days” were over, i.e. in four days’ time. Contrary to regulations, no receipt for the confiscated property was supplied to the IPSC.

Thus ended the first protest against the “Israeli Film Days”.  Each successive day saw demonstrations of varying sizes, none as dramatic as the first, but all stewarded by a host of Gardai sometimes outnumbering the protestors.

*****

Filmbase, by its own account, “is a not-for-profit resource centre for filmmakers. Our building… is a public space where filmmakers can network, hire filmmaking equipment, take training courses and receive support and information about working within the Irish film industry.”

There appears to be no mention here of providing cinematic showcases for rogue regimes. One suspects that the Israelis approached Filmbase rather than the nearby Irish Film Institute (IFI) because of the IFI’s decision in 2006 to cancel the Israeli Embassy’s partial sponsorship of its Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in the wake of Israel’s murderous onslaught on Lebanon that summer. The then IFI Director Mark Mulqueen stated that:

[t]he decision [was] taken in light of the current activities of the Israeli Government and prompted by the performance of your Ambassador in explaining these acts to the Irish public.

Either no such considerations deterred Filmbase, or a specific body-count must be met (a few hundred? a few thousand?) before the “activities of the Israeli Government” are deemed unacceptable.

It should be noted that Mulqueen did not cancel the showing of an Israeli film in the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, but merely rejected Israeli sponsorship (which should not, of course, have been accepted in the first place). Similarly, when the classic “shooting and weeping” Israeli film Waltz with Bashir was on show in Irish cinemas in 2008, the IPSC neither protested nor advised anybody not to see it, because there was no direct propagandistic link between its screening and the Government of Israel.

In the case of the “Israeli Film Days”, something quite different was at issue: the festival was organised, funded and presented by the Israeli Foreign Ministry (which has stated that it “sees no difference between propaganda and culture”) through its Dublin Embassy. Furthermore, the presence of two high-ranking ministers of the Irish Government alongside the Israeli Ambassador at the opening turned the entire festival into a kind of interstate love-in, and Filmbase into an ersatz Israeli Embassy.

In a letter sent by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) in reply to a number of people who had protested about Irish Government involvement in the “Film Days”, we read that the Tánaiste “believed strongly that efforts to prevent the festival being held at all amounted to an attack on free speech in Ireland, which he did not hesitate to oppose. He attended the opening of the festival to make this clear.”

But, as we have seen, free speech was never the issue: had Filmbase chosen to show the films concerned without any Israeli Government backing, it would have been welcome to do so – although clearly this was never an option, as the festival was purely a money-making venture for the “cultural institution” in question.

However, the question arises: if the Government of Iran hired Filmbase for “Iranian Film Days”, would Messrs Gilmore and Shatter have attended the opening in company with the Iranian Ambassador? Undoubtedly there would be protests against such a festival, but would the Tánaiste’s purported respect for free speech nonetheless have obliged him to take such a stand?

According to the DFA’s letter,

[a]ttempts to impose a cultural boycott only play into the hands of those in Israel who claim that Ireland’s consistent criticisms of Israeli policies are based on antipathy rather than on our genuine and valid concerns about the human rights abuses arising from the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories.

However, surely “antipathy” is the only valid response to Israel’s “abuses”? The DFA’s stance seems to echo the Christian maxim “hate the sin, love the sinner”, the love being proven by trading and diplomatic privileges that allow the sinner to go on sinning against the dispossessed Palestinians.

The truth would appear to be that the Irish Government has been coming under steady pressure from Israel to “clean up its act” and dissociate itself from Irish civil society’s predominantly critical stance towards the Zionist state. A notorious article in Ynet, the most influential Israeli online news site, flatteringly described Ireland as “the most hostile country in Europe”, recycled a lie circulated online by Israel’s supporters that “Anti-Israel elements recently vandalized a Dublin auditorium [i.e. Filmbase] slated to host a concert by Israeli singer Izhar Ashdot”, and cited a statement by an Israeli official that “the Irish Government is feeding its people with anti-Israel hatred…What we are seeing here is clear anti-Semitism.”

Thus the Tánaiste’s presence, rather than attesting to his noble commitment to free speech, would appear to have been a placatory gesture to the Israeli regime. No doubt this was deemed particularly politic given the parlous state of the Irish economy, and the fervent desire of the Government to keep on the good side of its vehemently pro-Israeli EU “partners” and of Uncle Sam, provider of so much investment in our vulnerable little island.

In a sense Mr Gilmore was emulating the former Greek Prime Minister Papandreou who, in violation of Greece’s foreign policy traditions, blocked the June 2010 Gaza-bound flotilla from leaving Greek waters after Israeli Prime Minister “Netanyahu… decided to come to the aid of his newfound friend in a meeting of foreign ministers and European leaders, imploring them to provide Greece with financial aid.”

The DFA letter began with an assertion that “[t]he Government does not support academic, cultural or other boycotts against Israel.” Given that Palestinian civil society is calling for precisely such boycotts, and that this call is inspired by the campaigns that helped end Apartheid in South Africa, what Mr Gilmore is, in fact, admitting is that the Irish Government rejects the will of the persecuted Palestinian people in favour of enhanced links with the regime that persecutes them. No longer can Irish people bask in the illusion that their Government is somehow an exception to the pro-Israeli EU norm – and perhaps it is good, finally, to have this exposed.

Inevitably, given its vulnerability in the face of hostile free market norms, culture is engaged in a constant negotiation with the state. That negotiation is traditionally transacted with what Pierre Bourdieu called “the left hand of the state, the set of agents of the so-called spending ministries which are the trace, within the state, of the social struggles of the past. They are opposed to the right hand of the state, the technocrats of the Ministry of Finance, the public and private banks and the ministerial cabinets.” Thus culture survives while staving off enlistment as a mere reflection of the state’s invariably suspect self-image.

In this instance Filmbase has chosen, fatally, to negotiate with the right hand of the state, indeed to transform itself temporarily – for profit – into an arm of the state. The result has been an occupation of Temple Bar by police who, at the behest of a Zionist Justice Minister, violated the civil rights of Irish protestors in the interests of the rogue Israeli state. In the process, Filmbase betrayed many of its own constituents – those film directors and actors, for example, who signed the PACBI-IPSC “Irish artists’ pledge to boycott Israel“.

Simultaneously it betrayed Temple Bar’s self- image as a kind of utopian cultural space, preserving an ethos of bohemianism and independence. Perhaps it is also good, finally, to have this exposed.

Karl Marx may not have referred to the 1% and the 99% when he wrote of those extremes in the 19th century, but they certainly capture this moment in the 21st. Americans appalled at minority domination of national wealth as they pay for endless wars, increasing inequality and vanishing public services have joined a rising global movement for democracy.

65% of the planet’s 7 billion people are poor, bringing the 21st century still closer to Marx’s words of the 19th. Humanity’s call for another world is growing louder and more insistent. The forces of reaction are working to smother that voice through their private governments and media but also through supposedly public and even progressive political circles.

In a particularly sad irony, a budding form of anarchic democracy in America grows through the “Occupy” movement, while an attempt at such governance in Libya has been crushed, at least temporarily. The NATO attack succeeded in obliterating a governing force that tried representing a majority of the Libyan people. While Gaddafi’s regime made many mistakes after its initial socialist phase, perhaps most seriously in re-aligning with the treacherous west, its Green Book attempt to create real and not simply representative democracy was laughed at by cynics but in line with anarchist dreams of power coming from collective will and not individual leadership. Many in the Occupy movement may not know what really happened in Libya, but under thought control exercised by agents of the 1% relatively few have any idea.

More important, growing numbers of people are learning that minority ruled society is the root cause of most problems facing humanity. That these problems grow more severe each day makes the increased demand for change both timely and ever more necessary. The Climate Change meetings in Durban that found the 1% ruling powers standing in the way of any change threatening their fanatic worship of private investment and belief in the market deity only showed more conclusively that democracy of the 99% must become reality to end the hypocritical sham that has gone by its name far too long.

Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly urged “the people of the world…create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.”

These solutions are impossible under the domain of private capital’s 1%. The un-regulated markets of obsessive profit seeking are like un-protected sex. Even at their best they can produce unwanted results and at their worst they may produce terminal disease, which is what present global market forces have created. We cannot opt for a temporary remission via private profiteering which carries the disease; the 99% need to consider the abolition of minority dominated market forces and the beginning of democratic control of global resources, in the interest of all the earth’s inhabitants and not just a tiny group of multi billionaires. In an alleged modern, civilized, digitized society, it’s time we end stupid mythology about hard work earning people incredible sums of money that bring them the power of gods.

How do people come by such wealth? How many packages must they deliver, students must they teach, patrons must they serve, miles must they drive, wounds must they bandage, legal briefs must they submit, floors must they sweep, children must they raise, to end up with a billion dollars? Ten billion dollars?

What sense does it make to have one human living on millions of dollars a week while billions of humans live on less than five dollars a day?

The imperial rulers maintain dominance only by virtue of military might. Without massive murder power such as was exercised in Libya and is threatened in Syria and Iran, they would already be gone and as global opposition grows that power will soon not be enough to dominate the planet. Newer threats to powerful nations like China and Russia only show the near dementia of rulers nearing the end of their reign.

But the madness of the diminishing cult, with nuclear weapons at their disposal, threatens our future, just as humanity shows signs of coming together to create a different world of peace, social justice and protection for the environment that sustains all mankind. Leaving control of social wealth in private hands would be suicide for the human race.

Henry Ford once said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” He was correct. We need to understand that system and transform it by creating federal, state and municipal public banks, owned, administered and investing according to the wishes of the people whose funds are held by these institutions. We cannot rely on some wealthy people investing according to moral principles unknown to most of their class. They should be taxed and their money democratically invested in the societies that created this wealth in the first place. We need to create a sensible maximum wage and a higher minimum wage that guarantees survival, with a social safety net that allows no one to go hungry, experience untended illness, or live without shelter.

There is far more than enough wealth to house, feed, clothe and benefit everyone, if we simply stop squandering that wealth on minorities who use it to perpetuate a system that is bringing us closer to social disaster. Capitalism is in a crisis which will get much worse before we make it better. In order to do that we need to end inequality and begin to recognize that the survival of one is dependent on the survival of all.

Happy New Year. 2012 could be a big one.

The uprising united the usually fractious liberals, nationalists and Communists, with slogans “Swindlers and Thieves!”, “Russia without Putin!” and “Churov Resign!” – references to United Russia (UR) and election commission chief Vladimir Churov. Russian expats in more than 20 countries also demonstrated in a show of solidarity outside embassies and consulates.

To date under Putin, rallies have been forbidden or limited to a few hundred. Unauthorised attempts bring beatings and arrests. But most of Saturday’s protests had official sanction; Moscow officials authorised a crowd of 30,000 and did not send riot police into action when 40,000 turned up, and the follow-up rally has been authorised for 50,000.

This new embrace of Western norms indicates that Putin is deeply concerned about his weakened position. 42 per cent of Russians in September said they would vote for Putin in the presidential election, but only 31 per cent by November. And that was before the 4 December debacle. Whether this new leniency shows yet another face for the inscrutable autocrat, or is a nod to advisers, who warn that a harsh crackdown could threaten the wobbly “Restart” button and even the precious 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, is a good question.

If the latter, this would be an especially cruel irony, as the last Russian Olympics in 1980 were boycotted by the West because of Soviet actions in Afghanistan, signalling the beginning of the end of that version of the Russian bear. Just as the Soviet Union let itself be seduced by Western human rights talk resulting in the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which became a weapon in clever Western hands, so Putin et al are forced to hold their noses (or plug their ears) faced with noisy, persistent protests if the Sochi Olympics are to be a successful showcase for the new Russia.

Uncharacteristically ploddingly, Putin charged Western interference: “They heard the signal and with the support of the US State Department began active work.” It was the protesters who showed wit and resourcefulness this time: “Are we here because Hillary Clinton texted us?” Some protesters carried badminton rackets, a reference to Putin and Medvedev’s squeaky-clean sportiness. A riot police officer was photographed holding a white flower, a symbol of the protest, behind his back.

The fact is there was blatant vote rigging in some areas. This was documented, especially in Moscow, central Russia and the North Caucasus. The FOM (Fund for Social Opinion) exit poll, the most comprehensive in Russia, estimated the UR vote in Moscow at 23.6 per cent, a full 23 per cent less than the official results. Similarly in the Caucasus, there was a difference of 20.8 per cent, and in Russia as a whole a gap of 6.3 per cent between official and exit polls. FOM’s regional breakdown was mysteriously removed from the FOM site, but not before it was saved by enough observers to verify its authenticity.

The North Caucasus is dominated by local clans who are part of the power structure, so vote rigging is to be expected. But fiddling with the vote in Moscow and other large cities, where an independent-minded middle class has the latest in communications gadgets is no longer acceptable. People were observed voting in a “carousel”, taking a bus to vote up to 15 times at separate polling stations. One voter was told that if he voted for Putin’s party, there was a present waiting for him outside the booth, a bottle of vodka and plastic cups inside a plastic bag. Moscow voting stations with electronic voting machines, which are hard to mess with, reported 30 per cent for UR vs the 46.6 per cent average. Communist headquarters received thousands of calls from regional offices about ballot-box stuffing and other violations. A flustered President Dmitri Medvedev finally agreed to ordered an investigation into reports of election fraud, according to his Facebook page.

It appears the fraud was indeed necessary to preserve UR’s majority, but unfortunately for UR, it was more that the 1-2 per cent that is the upper limit of acceptable fraud in close elections in, say, the US (remember Ohio’s cliffhanger vote in 2004, with a Republican controlling the voting and a Republican company providing the notorious voting machines, that gave George W Bush just enough extra votes to steal the election from John Kerry?). Or the 2006 Mexican presidential election, which almost all observers acknowledged should have gone to the socialist Obrador?

What Russians are now living through is the neoliberal version of democracy which Russia adopted after 1991, better described as polyarchy, where factions of the ruling elite allow for some cosmetic change of faces, but where elections are controlled by the corporatised state and commented on by the corporatised media, all in league. When a populist (or even a Kerry) tries to buck this formidable machine and his support approaches a danger zone, the necessary stops can be pulled, allowing an illusion of “almost” victory for the underdog but keeping the system intact.

Of course, the corruption charge is not just about stuffing boxes or bribing voters. It is about the entire post-Soviet economic and political structure, the result of massive economic theft of state resources and widespread official corruption, resulting in personal dynasties where the 22-year-old niece of the governor of Krasnodar owns a major stake in a massive pipe factory, poultry plant and other businesses, and the 18-year-old daughter of the governor of Sverdlovsk owns a plywood mill and a dozen other local businesses. “How does all this wonderful entrepeneurial talent appear only in the children of United Russia members?” asks rising opposition star Alexei Navalny.

What about claims of Western interference? Of course. Opposition leader Vladimir Ryzhkov’s World Movement for Democracy (WMD) is a veritable franchise of the National Endowment of Democracy’s WMD. Opposition stars recently attended the NED-funded seminar “Elections in Russia: Polling and Perspectives” along with sundry Soros groupies and USAIDers. Navalny is a co-founder of the NED-funded DA! (Democratic Alternative) activist movement, as stated in his Yale World Fellows bio.

But it is far worse in, for example, Egypt, where US aid has gone and continues to go to both sides — Mubarak/ the army and democracy activists — just in case. But even here, US interference can backfire. It is no secret that Egyptian revolutionaries were trained and inspired by Colour Revolutionaries from Serbia and American pacifist legend Gene Sharp. That, in itself, is not a sin, nor are all recipients traitors. Western media/election-savvy young people mustering all the latest technology and strategies and precipitated the toppling of their dictators. Who can possibly deny this was a good thing? And now disaffected Russians and even Americans themselves are taking inspiration from their Arab fellow-dispossessed. Wow.

Besides, the Russian state has full access to all the gadgets and pamphlets and is quite good at hacking computers and devising counter-strategies, and if all else fails, beating up and arresting (and possibly worse) gadflies who dare to defy authority. All’s fair in love and war.

But at the same time, whether or not Hillary’s twitters inspired the Russian unrest, it is clearly in America’s interest to keep Russia weak, and encouraging political unrest is the perfect vehicle. Russia’s defiance on Western plans to invade Syria and Iran infuriates Washington. Washington gambles that “democracy” will bring its flunkeys to power in the Kremlin, just as it hopes that pro-US Arab liberals can be put into power with a little scheming. Very risky politics, but this is clearly what’s going on, and NED is doing its part, as it did throughout eastern Europe in the 1990s. Putin has a point.

Protest organisers met on Sunday, trying to pull together some sort of leadership council. It is most unlikely, even if a few recounts are allowed, that UR will lose its majority, but the momentum of the demonstrations will make the presidential campaign in February very heated. Putin will now face at least four serious candidates: charismatic billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, the perennial Communist Gennady Zyuganov, Sergei Mironov of the Just Russia Party, and rising star Navalny.

Those elections will be much harder to falsify with box-stuffing and vodka payoffs, and Putin will most certainly face a runoff. Again, it is unlikely that he will lose to the corrupt playboy oligarch, the dour Communist, the ex-Putin groupie who ran as token opposition to Mr UR in 2004, or the 35-year-old black sheep of the Yabloko Party, who was kicked out for racist threats. But he will have a rough ride.

The up side of this electoral tempest is that Russian politics have come back to life. Russians are taking electoral politics seriously, and new parties are in the works as the UR begins to unravel. The new middle class that Putin’s decade of one-man rule produced is on the march, much like in Pinochet’s Chile, where a new middle class also rose up against the strongman to demand their political rights. If Putin is a true statesman, he will see the writing on the wall, seize the opportunity to entrench honest elections, and retire early, leaving a legacy as important as his role in saving Russia from the predatory neoliberals a decade ago.

Egypt’s uprising, too, started not with the starving peasants (though they soon joined in). The result, which is still in process, despite much turmoil and many setbacks, is probably the freest election in modern history anywhere, as the corporatised Egyptian state, with its control of the media and elections, was pushed aside. This allowed what was, until a few short months ago, the illegal opposition — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis — to gain a constitutional majority virtually overnight, much like in Russia in 1917.

Russians, too, want to know that their dysfunctional state apparatus can be successfully challenged, so that real elections can take place. And how long will it be before Americans see the light and push their dysfunctional state apparatus aside and enjoy the “democracy” that the NED and Soros croon so beautifully about?