News Release Archive - 2011

GLENN GREENWALD, via Elizabeth Shreve, elizabeth at shrevewilliams.com
Greenwald is author of the new book With Liberty and Justice for Some. He just wrote the piece “Immunity and Impunity in Elite America: How the Legal System Was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land.”

ARUN GUPTA, ebrowniess at yahoo.com
A founding editor of the New York City based Indypendent, Gupta also helped found the Occupied Wall Street Journal. He is touring occupations around the U.S. and is in New York today. He recently wrote the piece “Occupying the Rust Belt,” which states: “Davina DeLor, a 39-year-old freelance artist and supporter of Occupy Allentown, says, ‘A lot of people are losing their jobs. Food is going up, healthcare is going up, homelessness is going up, but the paychecks are not going up. The jobs are minimum wage or $9 or $10 an hour. And if you have a family you can’t survive on that.’” He also recently wrote “Where OWS and the Tea Party are Coming From.”

Salon just published “Police in Riot Gear Raid Occupy Oakland — And Tear Down Protesters’ Tent City.”

DAVEY D, mrdaveyd at gmail.com
A journalist and hip hop historian, Davey D is on the ground reporting on breaking developments on Occupy Oakland for KPFA. See his Twitter feed.

SCOTT CAMPBELL
Campbell works for an independent nonprofit, was at Occupy Oakland and is now in police custody.

BARBARA EHRENREICH, barbara.ehrenreich at gmail.com
Available for a limited number of interviews, Ehrenreich just wrote a piece on the “occupy” movement and homelessness that appeared in the Los Angeles Times and TomDispatch. She writes: “Political protesters are not alone in facing the challenges of urban camping. Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with cardboard or tarps, and relieve themselves without committing a crime. Public restrooms are sparse in American cities ‘as if the need to go to the bathroom does not exist,’ travel expert Arthur Frommer once observed. And yet to yield to bladder pressure is to risk arrest. …

“As the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless people have known all along, many ordinary and biologically necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets — not just urinating but sitting, lying down and sleeping. In Sarasota, Fla., for example, it is illegal for someone to sleep in public if, when awakened, he says he has ‘no other place to live.’

“Such prohibitions on homelessness began to take shape in the 1980s, along with the ferocious growth of the financial industry — Wall Street and all its tributaries throughout the nation. That was also the era in which we stopped being a nation that manufactured much beyond weightless, invisible ‘financial products,’ leaving the old industrial working class to carve out a livelihood at places like Wal-Mart.”

Ehrenreich is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. She also recently wrote The Guys in the 1% Brought This On.

CRYN JOHANNSEN, ccrynjohannsen at gmail.com
Johannsen is founder and executive director of All Education Matters. She assembled a list of mayors’ phone numbers so that people could easily contact them. She and Ehrenreich said: “We can’t all sleep outdoors in tents, but we CAN all provide a sturdy ‘second line’ of support. When you learn that an occupation is threatened, please use this list to find mayors’ phone numbers and tell him or her how you feel about cities that crush their most courageous citizens!”

She is making available and distributing a document with contact information for hundreds of mayors: see.

MARIA FOSCARINIS, mfoscarinis at nlchp.org,
Foscarinis is executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which is releasing a report titled “Criminalizing Crisis” later this month that Ehrenreich cites in her article. Foscarinis recently wrote in the group’s newsletter: “The protesters may not have to live their lives in public yet, but if present trends continue, more and more will. That’s one important truth illuminated by this convergence of protest and need on streets across the country. We need to acknowledge another truth too: as people with homes occupy parks, it’s time for homeless people to occupy vacant buildings. I’m not talking about illegal takeovers. Rather, we are advocating for public policies that allow unused property — including surplus federal property — to be used for that purpose.”

AP reports today: “On his flight to Indonesia on Friday, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters that negotiations with Iraq on future training possibilities will begin later.

“If such talks are held, they likely would start either when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visits Washington in December or after the end of the year, according to a senior U.S. defense official familiar with the discussions.

“The officer spoke Sunday on condition that he not be identified because the issue of possible future U.S. training is highly sensitive.”

RAED JARRAR, jarrar.raed at gmail.com
Jarrar is an Iraqi-American blogger and political analyst based in Washington, D.C. He said today: “The Iraq war is not over yet. Shortly after President Obama’s announcement that the U.S. is going to withdraw all of its troops from Iraq, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta started talking about planned negotiations with the Iraqi government on a new role for troops inside the country. Most of Iraq’s politicians believe the Pentagon is trying one last attempt to keep trainers by sending them under the NATO umbrella. The Iraqi government signed a training agreement with NATO in 2009, but did not send it to the parliament for ratification until earlier this month, a day after the immunity talks with the U.S. collapsed. The agreement, which grants NATO trainers some level of immunity, will be debated in the Iraqi parliament after the recess that ends on November 20th. It is not likely the Parliament will pass the agreement.

“But even if the Pentagon’s attempt fails, the U.S. is planning to leave up to 16,000 State Department personnel in Iraq after the end of this year. This number includes 8,000 armed mercenaries and 4,500 so-called ‘general life support’ contractors who provide food and medical services, operate the aviation equipment, etc. This huge presence will be distributed over several sites around the country: The massive U.S. Embassy in the Green Zone, two consulates in Basra and Erbil, two support sites in Iraqi airports, three police-training facilities, and one diplomatic presence office in Kirkuk. A report by the Office of Inspector General in 2009 recommended downsizing the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. The OIG report, number ISP-I-09-30A, described the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as ‘overstaffed,’ and confirmed it should be able to carry out all of its responsibilities with ‘significantly fewer staff and in a much reduced footprint.’ The report claimed that there is a ‘clear consensus from the top to the bottom of the Embassy’ that the time has come for a ‘significant rightsizing,’ and it recommended that ‘the rightsizing process has to begin immediately.’

“The plan to leave 16,000 personnel in Iraq, the size of an Army division, contradicts the OIG’s recommendations and puts the future of the U.S.-Iraqi relationship in jeopardy. The U.S. intervention in Iraq started more than 20 years ago, and it will not be over from an Iraqi perspective until the U.S. downsizes its massive footprint in Iraq.”

Background: “Occupying Iraq, State Department-Style”

Argentina’s election this weekend, in which President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner — who succeeded her now-deceased husband as president in 2007 — is expected to win handily in the first round.

MARK WEISBROT, via Dan Beeton, beeton at cepr.net
Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which today releases a report “Argentine Success Story and Its Implications” that “finds that the Argentine economy and social indicators have done remarkably well since the country defaulted on its debt almost nine years ago.” The paper notes that “Argentina’s dramatic recovery from its severe 1998-2002 recession has significant policy implications for other countries, most notably Greece and some of the other weaker eurozone economies burdened by unsustainable debt.”

Weisbrot said today: “Since its recovery began, shortly after its debt default in 2002, Argentina has had the fastest growth in the Western Hemisphere over the past nine years, and among the highest real growth rates in the world. For the years 2002-2011, including the IMF projections for the end of this year, Argentina’s real GDP has grown by 94 percent.

“There has also been a huge reduction in poverty and inequality, and record gains in employment. Clearly most Argentines have benefitted enormously from the government’s economic policies, and that’s why Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is likely to be re-elected. The percentage of Argentines in poverty and extreme poverty has fallen by about two-thirds from its peak.

“Argentina’s experience contradicts the widely held conventional wisdom that recessions caused by financial crises must be followed by slow, painful, difficult recoveries. Argentina started growing just one quarter after its default, and reached its pre-recession level of GDP just three years later. Greece is expected to take more than a decade to reach its pre-crisis level of GDP.

“It was very important that Argentina defaulted on most of its foreign debt, and freed itself from having to follow destructive policies imposed by creditors. He noted that countries such as Greece and possibly some of the other weaker eurozone governments should see Argentina’s successful policies as a possible alternative to years of recession or stagnation and high unemployment.”

The paper also finds that “Argentina’s economic growth success is not the result of a commodities boom, as is sometimes claimed” and that “Argentina experienced its remarkable economic growth despite the challenges of a refusal of a minority of creditors to accept the eventual restructuring agreement in 2005, subsequent legal action by these creditors and ‘vulture funds,’ and problems borrowing from international financial markets over the last nine years.

“This should give pause to those who argue, as is quite common in the business press, that pursuing policies that please bond markets and international investors, as well as attracting FDI [foreign direct investment], should be the most important policy priorities for any developing country government. Argentina’s success suggests that these capital inflows are not necessarily as essential as is commonly believed. And it also suggests that macroeconomic policy may be more important that is generally recognized.”

VIJAY PRASHAD, Vijay.Prashad at trincoll.edu
Author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Prashad said today: “The death of Gadhafi closes a chapter in Libyan history, but it does not settle many open questions for the Libyan people. What, for instance, will be the character of the next Libyan epoch? Gadhafi’s 1969 revolution was an important break with the past, and for the next fifteen years, the experiments in Libya were important for the well-being of the Libyan people. By the 1980s, Gadhafi had come to terms with capitalism and imperialism, and had moved to privatize society and to become a full partner in the emergent war on terror. The revolution of 2011 was against the second Gadhafi, the man of 1988 to the present. What will this new revolution make of the first Gadhafi, the leader of the revolution from 1969 to 1988?” Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.

EMIRA WOODS, emira at ips-dc.org, also via Lacy MacAuley, lacy at ips-dc.org
Woods is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and recently had an piece titled “Libya Must Shape its Own Future.” She said today: “In a post Gadhafi era, Libyans must move steadfastly towards national reconciliation and healing. A clear challenge will be racial justice after the heightened discrimination of dark-skinned Libyans during this transition. The African Union, the Arab League and people of conscience in Libya and beyond must maintain vigilance on this critical issue.”

ALI AHMIDA, aahmida at une.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews, Ahmida is a leading analyst and historian of Libya. He said today: “This is an end of era. It’s unfortunate that he was not arrested and tried in a fair way. But he continued fighting, really leaving no other option. The challenges now are substantial: How to build a new democratic order, fix the infrastructure of the country. It’s a militarized society that just basically had a civil war — what’s most needed is reconciling and resisting the temptation for revenge.” Ahmida is chair of the department of political science at the University of New England. His books include “The Making of Modern Libya” and “Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya.”

KATHERINE GALLAGHER, via Jen Nessel, press at ccrjustice.org
CNN reports today: “Amnesty International called on Canadian authorities to arrest Bush for ‘war crimes’ while activists announced Occupy Wall Street-style protests of the economic summit in Surrey where the former presidents [Clinton and Bush] were scheduled to speak along with world finance experts.”

Gallagher is a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which stated today: “On September 29, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Canadian Centre for International Justice submitted a 69-page page draft indictment to [Canadian] Attorney General Robert Nicholson, along with more than 4,000 pages of supporting material, setting forth the case against Bush for torture. The indictment, incorporated into the criminal information lodged today, contends that by Bush’s own admission he sanctioned and authorized acts that constitute torture under the Canadian criminal code and the Convention Against Torture.

Gallagher has been working with several plaintiffs who were reportedly tortured on Bush’s orders. She said today: “George Bush’s brazen admission to authorizing torture techniques and unlawful detentions, including enforced disappearances, must not be met with indifference. His years of impunity must come to an end. Even if the United States has failed to meet its obligations to hold torturers accountable, Canada has an opportunity and a legal obligation to position itself on the right side of history and the law.” Gallagher appeared on Democracy Now this morning.

JEFFREY WINTERS, winters at northwestern.edu
Author of the new book Oligarchy, Winters said today: “By choosing Wall Street as the origin of their action, and by focusing on the gap separating the 1% from 99%, the Occupy movement has hit upon the chronic problem of oligarchy and democracy in America. The power of concentrated wealth has overwhelmed and effectively disenfranchised the majority of American citizens. One person/one vote will be meaningless in U.S. politics unless the distorting power of wealth is addressed. Failing to do so could result in a deep crisis of legitimacy in American democracy.”

Winters is professor of political economy at Northwestern University and just wrote the piece “Oligarchy and Democracy” in the new issue of the American Interest, which states: “Measured by income, oligarchs at the very top of American society have an MPI [Material Power Index] just over 10,000, which happens to approximate the MPI of Roman senators relative to their society of slaves and farmers. …

“Over the course of the 20th century, two wrenching things happened within American democracy and oligarchy that together constitute the Great American Inversion. First, early in the century, steep new income taxes were imposed exclusively on the rich. By the end of the century, these same tax burdens had been shifted from the richest Americans to the various strata below them.

“Second and related, there was a sharp reversal of economic momentum for average Americans and the rich. The average income of working-class Americans around 1920 doubled in real terms by 1955 and tripled by 1970. A growing American middle class was taking an ever-larger share of an expanding economic pie. Although the chasm separating the rich from the rest remained huge, ordinary citizens were closing the gap at a remarkable pace. But then this process stopped. In the four decades since 1970, there has been almost no improvement on average for the lower 90 percent of American households. Although the U.S. economy continued to grow, income stopped growing for average citizens. Adjusted for inflation, average household incomes in 2010 were almost exactly what they had been forty years earlier. They peaked and stopped in 1970 at ‘triple 1920.’ Growth America became stagnation America. …

“The Sixteenth Amendment was passed in 1913, after which a Federal income tax was again imposed exclusively on the top 1 percent of earners. Oligarchs immediately began to explore new modes of income defense. … Despite the daunting complexities of taxing wider swaths of the population (and the risks of doing so at election time), the government capitulated to the wealthy few. Beginning with deep tax cuts on oligarchs enacted in 1921, 1924 and 1926, the single most progressive economic policy ever enacted in U.S. history — an income tax exclusively on the rich — was slowly inverted into a mass tax that burdens oligarchs at the same effective rate as their office staff and landscapers.”

COSTAS PANAYOTAKIS, cpanayotakis at gmail.com
Panayotakis is associate professor of sociology at the New York City College of Technology at CUNY and author of the forthcoming book “Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy.” He said today: “What happened in Greece today was the beginning of a two-day general strike in response to the latest austerity package presented by the government in the last year and a half. These successive packages have drastically reduced the salaries, pensions and labor rights of ordinary Greeks, while leading to a deepening of the crisis and skyrocketing levels of unemployment (16.5 percent for the general population and 42 percent for young people). These packages have been dictated by the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund as a condition for releasing loans that will allow Greece to keep servicing its debt to foreign creditors. Today’s demonstration was the largest that Greece had seen in 35 years, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets. Resistance to these austerity policies is increasing, as it becomes increasingly obvious to ordinary Greeks that the strings attached to the loans are designed to protect the interests of the European financial sector and Greek employers even at the cost of throwing the majority of Greek society into a state of growing destitution and misery.”

See Panayotakis’s articles: “Youth in Revolt”

“Greeks on the Move: Capitalism’s Wreckage and the Demand for Real Democracy”

THOMAS FERGUSON, thomas.ferguson at umb.edu
Ferguson is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute. He said today: “A desperate population is plainly losing patience with the leaders of both major parties. At least a quarter of all the signs at Occupy Wall Street meetings highlight the nexus between money and politics. The centralized national political leadership that big money has created is choking the U.S. political process.”

Ferguson just wrote the piece “Posted Prices and the Capitol Hill Stalemate Machine” for Washington Spectator, which states: “The Congressional party leadership controls the swelling coffers of the national campaign committees, and the huge fixed investments in polling, research, and media capabilities that these committees maintain — resources the leaders use to bribe, cajole, or threaten candidates to toe the party line. This is especially true of ‘open-seat’ races, where no incumbent is running; or in contests where an obscure challenger vies to upset an incumbent of the other party. Candidates rely on the national campaign committees not only for money, but for message, consultants, and polling they need to be competitive but can rarely afford on their own. As though by an invisible hand, Congressional campaigns thus insensibly acquire a more national flavor. They endlessly repeat a handful of slogans that have been battle tested for their appeal to the national investor blocs and interest groups that the leadership relies on for resources. And crossing party lines becomes dangerous indeed, as the recent vote to raise the debt ceiling vividly illustrated. More than half the Tea Party Caucus voted with Speaker Boehner, despite heavy pressure from well-financed ultra-right groups…”

Ferguson’s books include Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems.

JARED BALL, freemixradio at gmail.com
Ball is an associate professor of communication studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore and is the author of I Mix What I Like! A Mixtape Manifesto. He wrote the piece “The Corporate King Memorial and the Burial of a Movement,” which states that the MLK Memorial is designed to ensure that “King be forever separated from his anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-patient work for a genuine revolution.” Ball writes that in addition to TV ads for GM, King’s image and narrative have been walled in by the likes of “JP Morgan, Murdoch’s Direct TV, Exxon, Target and Wal-Mart — other bastions of workers’ rights and liberty.”

While some have argued that the “occupy” movement is a re-manifestation of King’s activism, Ball criticizes its overwhelming white composition. Ball is featured in the video “Dr. MLK Jr.: Struggling Not To Lose Him”

Background: King’s often referenced “I Have a Dream Speech” was given at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was the vision of A. Philip Randolph, a union organizer and socialist.

Here are excerpts from King’s sermon “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated:

“There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. …

“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores … A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.”
Full text and audio.

After King was attacked for his remarks at Riverside, including by media such as the New York Times and Time magazine, he spoke out more passionately, including later that month:

“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. … There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would praise you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward [segregationist Selma, Ala. sheriff] Jim Clark!’ but will curse and damn you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children!’ There is something wrong with that press! …

“I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. … When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. … True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation.”
– From Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam” at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967; audio and text.
Excerpts of audio on YouTube.

Tavis Smiley in a special program, reported earlier this year that by the end of his life, “King had almost three-quarters … of the American people turned against him, 55 percent of his own people [African Americans] turned against him.” See: “Obama vs. Martin Luther King?”

King’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was addressed to clergy who stated they were pro-reform, but were advocating a slower approach than King, calling his actions “unwise and untimely.”

AP reports: “The cleanup of a plaza in lower Manhattan where protesters have been camped out for a month was postponed early Friday, sending cheers up from a crowd that had feared the effort was merely a pretext to evict them.”

For more, including video streams from various cities, see.

MICHAEL RATNER, mratner at michaelratner.com
MARGARET RATNER KUNSTLER, margaret at kunstlerlaw.net
Available for a limited number of interviews, Michael Ratner is president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He and Margaret Ratner Kunstler, who is with the National Lawyers Guild, are authors of the just released book  Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st Century America.

Ratner told IPA last night that “We have written a letter to the property owners, the city and the police making clear that closing down Occupy Wall Street violates the First Amendment and is flatly illegal.” This morning, he spoke to Democracy Now from the square, describing the protesters’ General Assembly decision making process and organizing that brought out thousands to defend the park. Ratner described the “roar of joy” that went through the park before dawn when it was known that Bloomberg had backed down. He noted that the protesters had done a massive cleaning of the park: “The health emergency was a pretext to destroy something all Americans should be proudest of. … You can eat off the ground in this park.”

GEORGE MAGIROS, gmagiros at gmail.com
Magiros is with the National Lawyers Guild.

DANNY SCHECHTER, danny at mediachannel.org
Producer Schechter’s documentaries include “Plunder: The Crime of Our Time” and “In Debt We Trust.”

ARUN GUPTA, ebrowniess at yahoo.com,
A founding editor of the New York City based Indypendent, Gupta also helped found the Occupied Wall Street Journal. He is currently in D.C.

NATHAN SCHNEIDER, nathan at wagingnonviolence.org
Schneider is an editor of the website Waging Nonviolence.