This morning at the Kent County Commission meeting three people addressed the commissioners on an issue that we reported on last week, the targeting of gay men in public parks.
Colette Seguin-Beighley, a member of the Board of Equality Michigan, said, “The Kent County Sheriff’s Department is targeting gay men in public parks. In our deeply conservative western Michigan culture, many gay men are still closeted. The arrests are damaging, both monetarily and socially to these men.”
Seguin-Beighley was basing her comments on both ACLU documents and a statewide report from former Judge Rudy Sera called Bag a Fag Operations in Michigan.
Bill Freeman, a minister in Holland, also addressed the commission. Bill said that it seems that gay men are being arrested for nothing more than being gay. He asked the commission to stop harassing gay men and that they needed to do something immediately to stop such a practice.
Mariam Aukerman, from ACLU West Michigan office, told us that despite the County’s non-cooperation on this issue over the past 6 months, she received a call recently from Kent County saying, “things are moving forward on this issue.” Aukerman believes that the effort to shed light on this matter is producing results and hopes that the County will take action to end these unjust practices.
In the meantime, we are encouraging people to send messages to the 19 Kent County Commissioners and demand that they take action immediately. You can find e-mails for your county commissioner or contact all of them here.
Climate Summit succumbs to climate apartheid
This article is re-posted from Occupy COP 17.
Decisions resulting from the UN COP17 climate summit in Durban constitute a crime against humanity, according to Climate Justice Now! a broad coalition of social movements and civil society. Here in South Africa, where the world was inspired by the liberation struggle of the country’s black majority, the richest nations have cynically created a new regime of climate apartheid.
“Delaying real action until 2020 is a crime of global proportions,” said Nnimmo Bassey, Chair of Friends of the Earth International. “An increase in global temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius, permitted under this plan, is a death sentence for Africa, Small Island States, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide. This summit has amplified climate apartheid, whereby the richest 1% of the world have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice the 99%.”
According to Pablo Solón, former lead negotiator for the Plurinational State of Bolivia, “It is false to say that a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol has been adopted in Durban. The actual decision has merely been postponed to the next COP, with no commitments for emission reductions from rich countries. This means that the Kyoto Protocol will be on life support until it is replaced by a new agreement that will be even weaker.”
The world’s polluters have blocked real action and have once again chosen to bail out investors and banks by expanding the now-crashing carbon markets – which like all financial market activities these days, appear to mainly enrich a select few.
“What some see as inaction is in fact a demonstration of the palpable failure of our current economic system to address economic, social or environmental crises,” said Janet Redman, of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies. “Banks that caused the financial crisis are now making bonanza profits speculating on our planet’s future. The financial sector, driven into a corner, is seeking a way out by developing ever newer commodities to prop up a failing system.”
Despite talk of a “roadmap” offered up by the EU, the failure in Durban shows that this is a cul-de-sac, a road to nowhere. Spokespeople for Climate Justice Now! call on the world community to remember that a real climate program, based on planetary needs identified by scientists as well as by a mandate of popular movements, emerged at the World People’s Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth in Bolivia in 2010. The Cochabamba People’s Agreement, brought before the UN but erased from the negotiating text, offers a just and effective way forward that is desperately needed.
GRIID Classes for Winter 2012
We are excited to offer two new classes for the winter of 2012. Both classes are the result of suggestions from previous class participants and an outgrowth of the Grand Rapids People’s History Project.
On Mondays, beginning January 16, we are offering a class entitled Beyond a Rights-based Model: Radical LGBTQ Politics. Using Dean Spade’s book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law, we will explore the limits of a rights-based approach to change and investigate a more systemic change focused organizing model. The class and book will emphasize contemporary LGBTQ organizing, but the analysis applies to any popular social justice movements. We will also use the analysis to assess what is happening in West Michigan around rights-based organizing.
On Wednesdays, beginning January 18, we are offering the second class entitled, A History of US Policy Towards Native 
Americans. We will be using a variety of sources, but the main text for the class is, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present. This book by native scholar Ward Churchill, provides well-sourced details of a genocidal policy that began with the European invasion of North America up until today. We will also explore the significance of this policy on a local level and what it means today in West Michigan.
Both classes are 8 – weeks long and cost for each is $20, which doesn’t include the cost of the books. Classes will take place in one of the community rooms at the Steepletown Center located at 671 Davis NW in Grand Rapids.
There are downloadable PDF documents for each class, which we encourage people to share. For more information contact Jeff Smith at jsmith@griid.org.
State of Surveillance
This article by Pratap Chatterjee is re-posted from CorpWatch.
A German tech company is selling the ability to track “political opponents.” An Italian company promises to remotely seize control of smartphones and photograph their owners. A U.S. company allows security services to “see what they [the targets]see.” A South African company can store recordings of billions of phone calls, forever.
Welcome to the new covert world of surveillance contractors. Shining a light on this $5 billion (and growing) industry, Wikileaks today released “Spy Files”: hundreds of secret sales brochures. The companies involved hand this promotional material only to key contacts — often government agencies and police forces — at trade shows that are closed to the public and the press.
“The tools revealed in these brochures demonstrate the previously unfathomable power of mass surveillance. It makes phone-hacking look like a schoolboy’s game,” says Eric King of Privacy International. “Some of the most tyrannical regimes in the world are buying the power to monitor the behavior and communications of every single citizen — and the technology is so effective that they are able to accomplish this with minimal manpower.”
An analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Privacy International of the brochures shows that at least 160 companies in 25 countries from Brazil to Switzerland are selling an array of technologies so sophisticated that they often seem to have come of a Hollywood studio.
But what the “Spy Files” reveal is real. The documents add weight to campaigners’ claim that these proliferating technology companies constitute a new, unregulated arms industry. “What we are seeing is the militarization of cyber-space. It’s like having a tank in your front garden,” says Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks.
The industry brochures state that they only sell “lawful interception” gear to official authorities: the police, the military and intelligence agencies.
But the sales brochures also boast of vast powers of covert observation using off-the-shelf gear that, activists worry, repressive security forces and corrupt officials can easily abuse.
“Why sample, when you can monitor all network traffic inexpensively?” trumpets a brochure from Endace, a New Zealand-based company. “Total monitoring of all operators to plug any intelligence leakage is critical for government agencies,” offers Indian-based ClearTrail.
China Top Communications, in Beijing, claims to be able to crack passwords of more than 30 email service providers, including Gmail, “in real time by a PASSIVE WAY [sic].” In the obfuscating language of the surveillance industry, “passive” is a euphemism for intercepting data without the targets’ knowledge.
The surveillance technology being offered for sale falls into four broad categories: tracking real-time locations of mobile phones and vehicles, hacking into electronic devices such as computers and phones to monitor every keystroke, recording and storing data traffic of an entire telecommunications network, and analyzing vast streams of data to track individual users.
In recent months, news has filtered out on how repressive governments are using these technologies to crack down on dissent. In October, for example, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Privacy International revealed that Syria, despite US export ban, is deploying web filtering equipment from California-based Blue Coat Systems to censor internet traffic. The company later explained the equipment had been diverted from an importer based in the United Arab Emirates.
The Italian company, Area SPA, also aided Syrian government’s repressive policies by installing a surveillance system, an investigation by Bloomberg recently uncovered. The news emerged as Syria was convulsed by mass protests that have left 3,500 dead at the hands of state security forces. Area’s lawyers announced last Monday that the company had cancelled the project. The speed at which this technology is advancing, and the way it is being used raise serious concerns. As technological capacity expands, “the dominant use of surveillance technologies is increasingly the wholesale spying on entire populations, rather than targeted monitoring of a few individuals,” says Dr. Steven Murdoch, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University. “As communication becomes ever more critical to civil society, the abuse of surveillance is a rapidly increasing, and already substantial, threat to democracy, freedom of expression, and human rights in general.”
Phone Tracking
One popular mobile-phone tracking technology is an IMSI catcher. This highly portable device poses as a mini mobile phone tower that can capture all the mobile phones signals in an area, effectively identifying all phone users in a particular place. Today, dozens of companies sell IMSI catchers. Some can fit into a briefcase; others are as small as a mobile phone.
Once up, the IMSI catcher tricks phones into wirelessly sending it data. By setting up several IMSI catchers and measuring the speed of the responses or ‘pings’ from a phone, the surveiller can follow on a computer screen the location and movement of anyone with turned-on mobile, anywhere within the parameters of the IMSI catchers — even when they are not using their phones.
Companies that offer this equipment include Ability in Israel, Rohde & Schwarz in Germany, and Harris Corporation in the US.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which uses these devices to track suspects, claims it can do so without a court order. Many police forces around the world have also bought, or are considering buying, IMSI catchers.
Other companies offer passive surveillance devices that can be installed at phone exchanges, or even stand-alone equipment that can covertly vacuum up all the mobile phone signals in an area.
Specialized gadgets attached to a vehicle can track where it goes. While logistics and trucking companies have long used these devices to ensure on-time delivery of goods, UK-based Cobham sells Orion Guardian covert devices that can be secretly attached to the bottom of a car. Hidden Technology, another British company, sells similar devices.
“For years, there has been a gentleman’s agreement on how these technologies are used,” says Chris Soghoian, a Washington DC-based fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. “The US and the UK know that the Chinese and the Russians are using IMSI catchers — but so are we. Each government believes that the benefit of being able to use it abroad outweighs the risk to their own citizens.
“But today, anyone — a stalker or a private company- – can show up in Chelsea or Tottenham Court Road [London] and listen to everyone else,” adds Soghoian. “It is time to switch to more encrypted systems that keep everyone safe.”
Hacking
Several companies offer “Trojan” software and phone “malware” that allow the user to take control of a target’s computer or phone.
The software can be installed from a USB drive, or delivered remotely by disguising itself as an email attachment or software update. Once in place, a surveiller can riffle through a target’s files, log every keystroke, and even remotely turn on phone and computer microphones and cameras to spy on the target in real-time.
Hacking Team of Italy, Vupen Security in France, Gamma Group in the UK, and SS8 in the US, each offer such products, which they variously claim can hack the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry, Skype, and the Microsoft operating system.
Hacking Team is probably the most public of these companies, advertising on a public website that its “Remote Control System” can “monitor a hundred thousand targets.” SS8 of Milpitas, California, claims that its Intellego product allows security forces to “see what they [the targets] see, in real time” including a “draft-only emails, attached files, pictures and videos.”
These technologies often rely on software vulnerabilities. While major software manufacturers claim to fix these flaws as soon as they are discovered, at least one company, Vupen, boasts dedicated researchers in its “Offensive Solutions” division who are constantly looking to exploit new security holes in popular software.
Hacking systems have recently surfaced in countries with repressive governments. In March when Egyptian democracy activists raided the intelligence headquarters of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, they uncovered contract documents for a hacking program called FinFisher that is marketed by Gamma Group, a UK company. Governments can use this product to “identify an individual’s location, their associates and members of a group, such as political opponents,” according to a brochure from Elaman, a German company with close links to Gamma which also sells FinFisher.
Massive Surveillance
While hacking software targets individuals, other technologies on the market can monitor and censor an entire data or telecommunications network. Massive surveillance works by capturing everyone’s activities — whether they are a suspect or not — and then sifting it for valuable information. For example, US companies Blue Coat Systems and Cisco Systems offer corporate and government buyers technology that can filter web access based on commercial, political, religious or cultural criteria.
Businesses routinely these web-filtering products to catch employees surfing the web when they should be working. But the same technologies can also be used to block social networking websites such as Facebook, multimedia services including Flickr and YouTube, and internet phone services like Skype in countries ranging from China to the United Arab Emirates.
An extension of this technology, “deep packet inspection,” allows the user to scan web and email traffic, and to read through huge volumes of web searches and emails searching for keywords: –Companies including ipoque in Germany and Qosmos in France offer the ability to peer inside email traffic and block specific users such as dissidents. –Datakom, a German company, sells a product called Poseidon that can “’search and reconstruct… web, mail, instant messaging etc.” The company also claims Poseidon “collects, records and analyses VoIP calls,” such as Skype conversations. –Datakom, which offers “monitoring of a complete country,” says it has sold two “large IP monitoring’” systems to unnamed buyers in the Middle East and North Africa region. –South African VASTech sells Zebra, a product that gives governments the ability to compress and store billions of hours of phone calls and petabytes (a billion megabytes) of information for future analysis. In August, the Wall Street Journal reported that VASTech devices had been installed at the country’s international phone exchanges.
Data Analysis
Needless to say, the sheer volume of data form internet traffic, the locations of individuals and their phone conversations could overwhelm. But a parallel analytical technology is providing intelligence agencies, the military, and the police with sophisticated tools that compile and sift information for use in criminal investigations and even in the battlefield.
For example, Speech Technology Center, based in Russia, offers a product called STC Grid ID that it claims provides “reliable identification [of a] nation-wide database of speakers.”
Czech Republic-based Phonexia, with the help of the Czech military, claims to have developed a similar voice-recognition program. Italian-based Loquendo uses ‘voice-prints’ — the unique signature of the human voice — to identify targets and flag up their calls in real-time. And yet another company, Massachusetts-based Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), sells Geospatial Toolkit, a “location-based analytics’ program.”
But legal documents filed in the US show that these technologies do not always work as promised. Another Massachusetts company, Netezza, allegedly bought a copy of Geospatial Toolkit, reverse-engineered the code, and then sold a hacked version to the CIA for use in remotely piloted drone aircraft. IISi, which says that the software could be wrong by a distance of up to 40 feet, sued Netezza to prevent the use of this software. Company founder Rich Zimmerman stated in court that his “reaction was one of stunned amazement that they (CIA) want to kill people with my software that doesn’t work.”
The two companies settled out of court in November 2010. The CIA has refused to comment.
Digital Past, Dystopian Future
Wikileaks warns that the surveillance contractors revealed in the Spy Files are selling the ability to irrevocably alter our lives with their ability to delve into the digital past.
“We all aware of traditional spy stories of intelligence agencies like MI5 bugging the phone of one or two people,” says Julian Assange. “In the last ten years, something else has happened. We now see mass surveillance, where computer systems of an entire country are infected by surveillance programs, where the entire phone calls of a nation can be and are recorded by a company.”
“Previously we had all thought, why would the government be interested in me, my brother? My business is not interesting, I am not a criminal,” Assange told the Bureau earlier this week. “Now these companies sell to state intelligence agencies the ability to spy on the entire population at once and keep that information permanently. In five or six years’ time, if your brother or someone becomes of interest to that company or the government, they can go back in time and look to see what you said or what you emailed.”
The fifth principle of journalism, according to the Committee of Concerned Journalists, says, “Journalism has an unusual capacity to serve as a watchdog over those whose power and position most affect citizens.”
There is nothing in the basic principles of journalism, which suggests that journalist should give those in power a free pass or act as their lapdogs. However, once again, this is exactly what the Grand Rapids Press did with its feature story on Sunday, December 11. The article offers nothing but praise for the wealthiest families, no critical voices and no critical perspective on the function and role of philanthropy in a capitalist-driven society.
Praise for Hometown Wealth
The article’s headline reads, “Grandchildren of prominent West Michigan donors are shaping the future of local philanthropy.” As is implied in the headline, the article presents what three generations of the wealthiest families in West Michigan have done with their money as fundamentally a benefit to the community as a whole.
The end of the first section of the Press article states, “The generosity of families like Meijer, Loeks, DeVos and Van Andel is a major reason the Grand Rapids-Muskegon-Holland metro area was ranked second most generous in the nation, behind Salt Lake City, by the Chronicle of Philanthropy.”
Another statement by the Press, which demonstrates their unquestioning function of wealthy families in West Michigan, was the text that accompanied a graph, which tracked 2 families and two generations of “giving.” The text reads, “Generosity instilled in children and grandchildren of business giants could result in the West Michigan community reaping rewards long into the future.”
Such comments reflect the Press writer’ acceptance that philanthropy, and in this case the philanthropy of a few wealthy families, is a huge benefit for West Michigan residents as a whole. The families cited are DeVos, Van Andel, Meijer, Frey, Wege and Loeks. Funny thing is, the Press writer never really demonstrates how the community is reaping rewards from these families.
The only sources cited in the article are a Grand Rapids Community Foundation spokesperson, David Van Andel (Van Andel Foundation), philanthropy “expert” with the Dorothy Johnson Center for Philanthropy, the CEO of the Wege Foundation and Ellie Frey (Frey Foundation).
Each of these sources sites of few non-profits that have received funding from one or more of the family foundations cited in the area, non-profits such as UICA, Mel Trotter Ministries and Gilda’s Club to name a few.
The main source cited in the article, Michael Moody, is referred to as a philanthropy expert. Moody is employed by the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy, which is funded by one of the family foundations in the article – The Frey Foundation. Moody speaks highly of Amway, the DeVos family and Rick DeVos’ venture known as ArtPrize. The philanthropy expert also makes comments about generational family philanthropy and what the current generation is likely to do in West Michigan.
Normalizing Systemic Inequity
There is been a great deal of writing and research that takes a very critical and systemic view of the function of foundations and philanthropy in the US. Researchers such as Michael Barker, Adrienne Pine, Joan Roelofs, Daniel Faber and the women of color collective known as INCITE!
Each of these writers has provided us with important analysis on the historical function of foundations, particularly those of the wealthiest families in the country and in each community.
Michael Barker’s 2008 research on how the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations funding influenced the major environmental organizations to abandon grassroots advocacy to become beltway players is a crucial investigation for anyone looking at what has happen to environmental politics in the past 30 years. Barker has also done important work to track the real outcome of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, particularly their foundation’s impact on a global scale. Barker observes that much of what the large foundations do is fund social engineering.
Foundation funding as social engineering is not generally part of the public discourse on philanthropic giving, but within a critical analysis of neoliberal capitalism one can see how the vast amounts of money given by wealthy families is not merely an act of charity.
There are several reasons why wealthy families and individuals create foundations. First, foundations provide a means to protect some of their money from being taxed. This has a double effect, in that foundation money is in itself sort of a tax shelter and the money these foundations give to non-profit sectors is an additional tax write-off.
Second, foundations created by the wealthy have always served as both a public relations tool and a buffer from social movements that have sought to create systemic change. Philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie gave a small portion of their wealth to create libraries in some communities. This effort by Carnegie both won him praise for funding public access to information, but more importantly it diverted public attention away from the tremendously exploitative wealth he generated off of the backs of steel workers.
The third reason for philanthropic giving, particularly through foundations, is to engage in the social engineering that Barker identifies. This has been the case for the past 100 years in the US, but the biggest growth of foundation funding has developed since the explosion of social movements in the 1960s and 70s. Large foundations realized that the social movements of the 1960s and 70s were a genuine threat to the established order of US society and that using only force was not the best approach to undermining the impact of such movements.
Instead, foundations approached many social movements and offered to fund their work. This funding has resulted in two major outcomes. First, foundation funding has required that the grassroots movements professionalize leadership. People who organically were seen as leaders in social movements were there because of their lived experience of oppression, which gave them insight and passion to organize for change. Secondly, what foundations did was to get movements to create more formal organizations and hire people with specialized educational degrees that would direct the efforts of such groups to call for reformist approaches to change rather than systemic.
Here Dylan Rodriguez notes:
“The structural and political limitation of current grassroots and progressive organizing in the US has become stunningly evident in light of the veritable explosion of private foundations as primary institutions through which to harness and restrict the potentials of US-based progressive activism.”
Stifling political dissent locally
To bring it back to West Michigan, one need only look at how dependent local non-profits are on foundation money in order to survive. It’s not just the social service oriented groups like Mel Trotter Mission that relies on the philanthropy of the areas wealthy families, many of the progressive organizations locally also are dependent on funds from the same families that often have agendas that are contrary to the mission of those non-profits.
In the case of Mel Trotter Mission, it makes complete sense that the Frey family would donate to a homeless shelter, since that organizations doesn’t question any systemic reasons why people are homeless. The same is the case with organization Kids Food Basket, which provides free meals to children in the Grand Rapids area and has received a fair amount of funding from Amway. Not surprising, the director of Kids Food Basket recently said she was not interested in the causes of hunger, just feeding kids.
But local wealthy families are not just funding the obvious entities that in no way will disrupt business as usual politics in West Michigan. Some of the families mentioned in the Grand Rapids Press article even fund groups like Local First. Ellie Frey is listed as donating to Local First, an organization, which encourages people to buy from businesses based in West Michigan. While it might be preferable to drink coffee at a locally owned café instead of a Starbucks, Local First still accepts the basic principles of a free market capitalist system. They don’t question the fundamental principle within free market capitalism of perpetual growth, which is not only unsustainable it undermines localism abroad when Grand Rapids companies sell their products out of state or around the world.
Another entity that seems quite progressive is the Community Media Center (CMC), an entity that got its start as part of the public access TV movement in the 1970s. The original goal of that movement, which was an outgrowth of the social movements of the 1970s, was to provide people whose voices were absent or marginalized in corporate media an opportunity to share their stories and perspectives. The CMC became involved in citizen journalism a few years ago to address some of these media inequities. However, in June of this year the Community Media Center accepted $28,000 from the Amway Corporation to underwrite a segment on their citizen journalism site known as Marketplace. Marketplace features local entrepreneurs, which is the kind of reporting that Amway can support, since it does not address any wealth disparities in West Michigan or question the role of philanthropists like the DeVos family.
The larger benefits for local wealthy families to donate to progressive groups is that it takes attention away from how they acquired their wealth and why we have such inequalities in our society that necessitate philanthropy in the first place. In addition, by funding progressive and charitable causes it makes it hard for people, especially in those organizations, to question the kinds of policies that families like DeVos support.
If your organization is the beneficiary of money from the families listed in the Press article it will be difficult for you to question their funding on anti-LGBT campaigns, anti-Choice campaigns, anti-union campaigns and anti-democracy efforts like the One Kent Coalition and the West Michigan Policy Forum.
Lastly, it makes it difficult for the public as a whole to have a critical discussion about the function of local foundations and philanthropists if the only daily newspaper in town acts as a public relations agent for the wealthy families who use their money to solidify the status quo in Grand Rapids.
Interview with musician/activist Ryan Harvey
On Saturday, musician/activist Ryan Harvey performed in Grand Rapids at an event hosted by the Bloom Collective.
Deirdre Cunningham was able to interview Ryan before his performance, where they talked about his music, his tour, visiting occupy movements around the country, his involvement with the Riot-Folk Collective in Baltimore and his work with US military veterans resisting war.
The first video is the interview, followed by a video of some of Ryan’s performance.
We reported on Thursday, that legislation approved by both the House and Senate in Michigan was headed to Governor Rick Snyder, legislation that would eliminate domestic partner benefits for government/public employees.
As of this writing, Snyder has yet to finalize that legislation. Equality Michigan sent out an action alert yesterday stating:
Governor Snyder has said he may sign the ban on domestic partner benefits if certain groups are exempt. Tell Governor Snyder that he can’t pick and choose which of Michigan’s hard working employees to discriminate against.
We need thousands of people to keep the pressure on Governor Snyder to veto these bills. Please ask your friends and family to contact the Governor right away at http://t.co/I25AvJQF.
Equality Michigan also reports that the ACLU is collecting stories from people who currently have domestic partner benefits, but would lose them if Snyder doesn’t veto this legislation. Here is one story from Kent County:
Deb has worked for the Kent County Department of Human Services for 17 years and covers her partner Michelle through her employment with the State. Michelle recently underwent surgery and suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure. If Governor Snyder signs this bill, it will be almost impossible for Michelle and Deb to find an affordable health care plan.
Media Justice and the 99 % Movement
This article by Betty Yu is re-posted from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
It all started with one message posted on a blog on July 13, 2011. The magazine Adbusters, a not-for-profit, reader-supported, 120,000-circulation magazine that combats corporate consumerism, issued a call: “On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.”
On September 17, a thousand people marched to Wall Street, and then hundreds stayed to occupy Liberty Plaza in New York’s Financial District.
Even after a solid two weeks of this Occupation, corporate media largely blacked it out. What coverage there was depicted protesters as drug-abusing hippies (the Fox News spin—Hannity, 10/10/11), or, in the “liberal” version, as directionless naifs with no message (New York Times, 9/23/11). As the OWS Declaration in New York City put it, the 1 percent “purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.”
But grassroots, independent media outlets like Democracy Now!, Pacifica Radio, the Indypendent newspapers and public access TV channels, with a combined audience of millions, covered the Occupation from the perspective of the people—the 99 percent. These independent outlets provided a platform for protesters to talk about why they were supporting the Occupation—speaking out about rising unemployment, declining wages, diminishing quality of life, foreclosures, education budget cuts, lack of healthcare and unjust wars, just to name a few.
What elevated the activism to a national and global movement, though, was the sophisticated and widespread use of social media. Independent mediamakers, citizen journalists, everyday people with camera phones were capturing the voices and faces of this burgeoning movement and uploading them to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, mostly within minutes of being captured. Group text-messaging was used to share information and media quickly.
These tools for instant communication not only helped to mobilize thousands to marches and events, but also captured police brutality toward the protesters. It was only when images were disseminated of a senior New York City police official pepper-spraying peaceful women protesters, temporarily blinding them, that corporate media began paying attention. The pepper-spraying incident was documented by fellow protesters and uploaded to YouTube—where it was viewed more than 2 million times—then posted on Facebook and tweeted to be shared with the world.
In the age of digital media, anyone with an Internet connection can watch OWS’s General Assembly meeting on the livestream of the Occupy website. They can share an Occupy update on Facebook, or tweet it on Twitter—providing an ongoing venue for people to show support and participate virtually in the protests. One Tumblr site houses the stories of thousands of supporters who share why they are a part of the 99 percent, holding up handwritten signs and telling their stories.
Of course, human, face-to-face interaction and relationship building is irreplaceable. Social media have helped get people out of their nests and into the streets of Liberty Plaza and elsewhere, to attend a General Assembly or a working group meeting. In New York, the working groups, many of them self-organized, have grown from 10 to over 70, largely through outreach done on the Internet. People in nearly 900 cities formed MeetUp.com groups, using the OccupyTogether.org website as their central hub.
The democratization of media-making tools, particularly an open and unfettered Internet, has made all this possible. Right now, though, this open access is under threat. Network neutrality is the principle that requires Internet service providers to treat all content equally, guaranteeing a level playing field for all websites and Internet technologies.
Since the invention of the Internet, net neutrality has facilitated democratic participation, allowing social justice organizations, cultural workers, citizen journalists, artists and small businesses to create, share and receive information freely. Right now, the livestream of Occupy Wall Street downloads just as quickly as the website of Goldman Sachs. Without net neutrality, small businesses, nonprofits and individuals who can’t afford high-speed services would have their ability to reach a mass audience online severely limited.
The telecommunications corporations that provide Internet connections, like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, want to increase their already mammoth profits by controlling websites, video, content and applications. These corporations want their own sites and services to be easily available to the public, while slowing down access to those owned by their competitors—or by independent groups who can’t afford to pay the gatekeepers’ tolls.
In December 2010, the Federal Communications Commission issued new rules on net neutrality that were a devastating blow to media democracy. Labeled “fake net neutrality” by media justice advocates, the new regulations have no real enforcement mechanism. Worse yet, they provide zero protection for wireless devices—the mobile devices that have been so vital in the OWS movement for documenting police misconduct and spreading the word. As Extra! went to press, the Senate was considering a “resolution of disapproval” that would effectively remove all existing protections for Internet users and give unrestricted power to corporations like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.
The communities that will be most affected by the lack of wireless net neutrality provisions are low-income and people of color. A recent Pew Center study (7/7/10) showed that nearly two-thirds of people of color, mainly Latinos and African-Americans, access the Internet through their phones.
One of the biggest media justice fights now is to break up the emerging duopoly between AT&T and Verizon, potentially controlling 80 percent of the mobile market. In March 2011, AT&T announced plans to acquire T-Mobile USA for $39 billion. The loss of a low-cost wireless carrier like T-Mobile threatens to limit affordable mobile broadband access and stifle competition in the broadband market—making the absence of net neutrality protections for wireless devices even more problematic.
It’s clear how vital the mobile Internet has been to Occupy Wall Street and the flourishing global Occupy movement. But an open Internet is also a basic communication right. In a 21st century digital age, access to jobs, healthcare, housing, government assistance and education require Internet access.
This is not just an isolated issue about media policy—it is a social justice, civil rights and human rights issue. This is about the lives of the 99 percent.
Michigan’s Radical Assault on Public Education Michigan’s Radical Assault on Public Education
This article by Andy Kroll is re-posted from Mother Jones.
The list of initiatives reads like a grand plan to dismantle public education as we know it: Slash education spending. Outsource public teachers. Curb collective-bargaining rights. Kneecap teachers’ unions. Open the floodgates to charter and “cyber” schools.
Welcome to education reform in the state of Michigan, where a Republican-dominated Legislature and a GOP governor are pushing one of the broadest anti-union, pro-privatization agendas in the country. Michigan is grappling with budget shortfalls like other states including Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Jersey—all places where GOP leaders (and occasionally Democrats) are exploiting the economic downturn to launch an ideological assault on teachers’ unions and public school systems. Although some of Michigan’s legislative attempts to overhaul public education have met resistance, state lawmakers have made an unprecedented push toward for-profit schools, dubious online curricula, and budget cuts and anti-union measures that would make the public teaching profession ever more insecure.
Michigan GOPers have gotten help from outside organizations, including Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst group (made famous by the documentary Waiting for Superman) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market-centric think tank. So extreme is their agenda that one recent bill even tried to justify bullying in schools on ideological and religious grounds, drawing outrage and national media attention.
Michigan is at the forefront of a badly misguided reform movement sweeping the country, says Diane Ravitch, a preeminent education historian and a former Education Department official under President George H.W. Bush. “They want to save money on education, and the best way for them to do it is by cutting the number of teachers, getting rid of higher-paid teachers—and to do that they must eliminate tenure and seniority,” she says. “The unions are an obstacle to almost everything they want to do, so they have to neutralize them.”
In April, first-term Gov. Rick Snyder unveiled his new vision for public education in Michigan in a 13-page “special message” to state legislators. Snyder called for eliminating the cap on charter schools, heavily weighting student test scores in teacher evaluations, and weakening teacher tenure. Such changes were necessary, Snyder insisted, to turn around an education system that “is not giving our taxpayers, our teachers, or our students the return on investment we deserve.”
Weeks later, the GOP-controlled state House approved a $13.8 billion budget that slashed education funding by $900 million for K-12 and state colleges and universities. Met with howls of protest, Republicans backtracked but ultimately cut funding by $564 million, according to the Michigan Policy Network. The move helped offset $1 billion in lost revenue after Snyder eliminated taxes on all Michigan businesses save for large-shareholder corporations.
Snyder said in April that his planned reforms wouldn’t meddle with the collective-bargaining rights of teachers and other school employees, but GOP lawmakers went ahead and cut them anyway. They passed legislation during the summer banning unions from bargaining over tenure for teachers and teacher placement across school districts—issues once on the table during collective bargaining. The anti-union Mackinac Center praised the changes, and despite his pledge, Snyder signed them into law in July.
Throughout the summer and fall, the GOP’s union-busting continued apace. In September, state House Republicans pushed legislation banning teachers from emailing about union or political activities on school computers. The punishment for lawbreakers: a maximum fine of $1,000 and up to a year in jail. (The bill remains under consideration in the state House.) That same month, Snyder also signed into law a measure forcing public school employees to pay at least 20 percent of the cost of their health care coverage and, in so doing, take cost-sharing out of the bargaining process. (Before, public school employees’ share of their care costs ranged from zero to more than 20 percent.)
In October, GOP state Sens. Randy Richardville, the majority leader, Phil Pavlov, and Arlan Meekhof unveiled right-to-work legislation for most public school teachers. Also known as “right-to-teach,” the bill would let teachers work under union-negotiated contracts without chipping in a dime for the cost of negotiations. (Right now, unions collect dues from all affected teachers—members or not—for bargaining, but can’t make them pay for political activities.) Richardville said right-to-teach legislation would let teachers “keep more of the money they earn.” The Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, blasted the bill as politically motivated and an effort to diminish the MEA’s clout.
As Mother Jones reported in October, Pavlov had also hatched a plan to let public school districts outsource the teacher hiring process, effectively privatizing their jobs. Doing so would shift pension and health care costs off the books of school districts and so save money, Richardville said. Unions and Michigan Democrats blasted it as an assault on public education itself. “Gov. Snyder and Republicans have made no bones about it: They’re trying to dismantle public education in Michigan,” state Sen. Gretchen Whitmer, the minority leader, said at the time.
In early October, after a small uproar, Pavlov’s privatization measure got yanked out of a package of right-wing education bills compiled by Republicans. Included were bills to eliminate the cap on charter schools in Michigan, which previously stood at 150, and to pave the way for more “cyber” schools in Michigan. Still another bill in the package would allow home-schooled students to take elective classes at any virtual, charter, or public school in their local school district—a move that the MEA decried as a “back-door voucher scheme” that could drive more students to private, nonunionized schools.
Perhaps the most controversial of the GOP’s moves came in November, concerning a new anti-bullying bill. Named “Matt’s Safe School Law,” after a student who committed suicide in the face of incessant bullying, the drafted bill contained an audacious loophole: Teachers or students couldn’t be penalized for bullying so long as they attributed that harassment to a “sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction.” The father of Matt Epling, the bill’s namesake, called the law “government-sanctioned bigotry,” the national media seized upon it, and even satirist Stephen Colbert mocked it on his show. In the end, the exemption was cut from the measure.
Throughout all this, Michigan Republicans had help. Rhee, the former Washington, DC, education chancellor, worked with GOP lawmakers (PDF) to write the legislation that curbed bargaining rights and weakened teacher seniority rules, among other bills. And providing intellectual cover for the assault on unions and public schools was the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which as Mother Jones reported belongs to a national network of free-market-geared think tanks modeled after the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation in DC. Funded by a slew of right-wing charities, the Mackinac Center has publicly supported many GOP education reforms, battling the MEA all the way. As Jack McHugh, a Mackinac Center policy analyst, put it in a June email to a GOP lawmaker: “Our goal is [to] outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan, which in practical terms means no more MEA.”
Michigan Republicans say their reforms save money (PDF), empower teachers, and fix a broken, archaic education model. “These reforms are vital in that we’re trying to turn the focus back to the students,” says Ari Adler, press secretary for state House Speaker Jase Bolger. “The speaker feels that people have been fighting to keep the status quo for too long, and we have seen that that does not work.” (Richardville and Pavlov did not respond to requests for comment.)
The Michigan GOP has felt some blowback for its radical education agenda. On November 8, Republican state Rep. Paul Scott, the House education committee chairman, narrowly lost his seat in a recall election partly triggered by his role in the GOP’s education push. The MEA went all-out to unseat Scott, injecting $140,000 into the election, while Rhee’s StudentFirst reportedly spent $70,000 to defend him. Not missing a step, Republicans named state Rep. Tom McMillin to be Scott’s replacement as chairman. McMillin’s anti-union bona fides brought to mind a brutal image from “The Godfather” for one local radio reporter, who called McMillin’s selection “a horse head in the MEA’s bed.”
According to Ravitch, Michigan’s education agenda reflects a nationwide push among conservatives to blame “bad teachers” for the ills afflicting public education. The problem, she says, is that the reductive “bad teacher” paradigm—and the accompanying push for more charter schools, data-based evaluation, virtual learning, and other policies—fails to address the complexity of education reform and isn’t supported by facts. Reams of evidence cast serious doubt on, say, any link between unions and student achievement, the efficacy of charter schools, or the usefulness of test scores in gauging good teaching. As conservative state legislators in Michigan and elsewhere march ahead with their ideas for reform, there is little about their initiatives to suggest that quality education for school children is their top priority.
Earlier today, MLive posted a story about what “West Michigan Leaders” think about the likelihood that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder will sign off on legislation that will ban government employers from offering domestic partner benefits.
The MLive article cites four difference sources as being West Michigan leaders. The first is Matt McLogan, spokesperson for GVSU, who says that Senator Mark Jansen told him this legislation will not effect university employees who currently receive domestic partner benefits, even though the House version of the bill that passed yesterday would include public universities in the ban.
However, McLogan acknowledges that it is ultimately up to what the Governor says about the issue and how he interprets the language of the bill. “We will await the governor’s treatment of the bill and a legal analysis,” said McLogan.
A second source cited is Rockford School Superintendent Mike Shibler, who thinks the issue is a waste of time. “There are too many other important issues that the state legislature should be working on.”
The two remaining voices in the MLive article are a Kent County Commissioner and an Ottawa County administrator, both of whom believe that a ban on domestic partner benefits would be in line with West Michigan values.
Kent County Commissioner Ted Vonk said, “It’s a very conservative area. We’re not going to be cutting edge on any of those liberal ideas.”
While one can debate the notion of who are and who aren’t leaders in West Michigan, it is quite dishonest of MLive to not seek out a single voice that takes the point of view that domestic partners in government/public employee should have the same benefits as people who are legally married.
There are plenty of heterosexual couples that are domestic partners who could be impacted from this legislation, but it is clear that the legislation introduced by Rep. Dave Adgema is targeted at taking away benefits from the LGBT community. This is the irony of the MLive story, which never mentions the LGBT community, despite the fact that it has been primarily the LGBT community that has monitored this issue for sometime and has put out action alerts in the past few days calling on people to pressure Snyder to veto this legislation.
It’s bad enough that the story does not explore how this legislation, if passed, will impact the LGBT community, but to have not one voice from that community is unacceptable. There are plenty of organizations and individuals in the LGBT community that are considered “leaders” in West Michigan, but their voices are effectively muted in this MLive story.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 