Wall Street Firms Spy on Protestors In Tax-Funded Center
This article by Pam Martens is re-posted from CounterPunch.
Wall Street’s audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits. How else to explain $150 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding citizens.
According to newly unearthed documents, the planning for this high tech facility on lower Broadway dates back six years. In correspondence from 2005 that rests quietly in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s archives, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly promised Edward Forst, a Goldman Sachs’ Executive Vice President at the time, that the NYPD “is committed to the development and implementation of a comprehensive security plan for Lower Manhattan…One component of the plan will be a centralized coordination center that will provide space for full-time, on site representation from Goldman Sachs and other stakeholders.”
At the time, Goldman Sachs was in the process of extracting concessions from New York City just short of the Mayor’s first born in exchange for constructing its new headquarters building at 200 West Street, adjacent to the World Financial Center and in the general area of where the new World Trade Center complex would be built. According to the 2005 documents, Goldman’s deal included $1.65 billion in Liberty Bonds, up to $160 million in sales tax abatements for construction materials and tenant furnishings, and the deal-breaker requirement that a security plan that gave it a seat at the NYPD’s Coordination Center would be in place by no later than December 31, 2009.
The surveillance plan became known as the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative and the facility was eventually dubbed the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. It operates round-the-clock. Under the imprimatur of the largest police department in the United States, 2,000 private spy cameras owned by Wall Street firms, together with approximately 1,000 more owned by the NYPD, are relaying live video feeds of people on the streets in lower Manhattan to the center. Once at the center, they can be integrated for analysis. At least 700 cameras scour the midtown area and also relay their live feeds into the downtown center where low-wage NYPD, MTA and Port Authority crime stoppers sit alongside high-wage personnel from Wall Street firms that are currently under at least 51 Federal and state corruption probes for mortgage securitization fraud and other matters.
In addition to video analytics which can, for example, track a person based on the color of their hat or jacket, insiders say the NYPD either has or is working on face recognition software which could track individuals based on facial features. The center is also equipped with live feeds from license plate readers.
According to one person who has toured the center, there are three rows of computer workstations, with approximately two-thirds operated by non-NYPD personnel. The Chief-Leader, the weekly civil service newspaper, identified some of the outside entities that share the space: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, the Federal Reserve, the New York Stock Exchange. Others say most of the major Wall Street firms have an on-site representative. Two calls and an email to Paul Browne, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, seeking the names of the other Wall Street firms at the center were not returned. An email seeking the same information to City Council Member, Peter Vallone, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, was not returned.
In a press release dated October 4, 2009 announcing the expansion of the surveillance territory, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly had this to say:
“The Midtown Manhattan Security Initiative will add additional cameras and license plate readers installed at key locations between 30th and 60th Streets from river to river. It will also identify additional private organizations who will work alongside NYPD personnel in the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, where corporate and other security representatives from Lower Manhattan have been co-located with police since June 2009. The Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center is the central hub for both initiatives, where all the collected data are analyzed.” [Italic emphasis added.]
The project has been funded by New York City taxpayers as well as all U.S. taxpayers through grants from the Federal Department of Homeland Security. On March 26, 2009, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) wrote a letter to Commissioner Kelly, noting that even though the system involves “massive expenditures of public money, there have been no public hearings about any aspect of the system…we reject the Department’s assertion of ‘plenary power’ over all matters touching on public safety…the Department is of course subject to the laws and Constitution of the United States and of the State of New York as well as to regulation by the New York City Council.”
The NYCLU also noted in its letter that it rejected the privacy guidelines for the surveillance operation that the NYPD had posted on its web site for public comment, since there had been no public hearings to formulate these guidelines. It noted further that “the guidelines do not limit police surveillance and databases to suspicious activity…there is no independent oversight or monitoring of compliance with the guidelines.”
According to Commissioner Kelly in public remarks, the privacy guidelines were written by Jessica Tisch, the Director of Counterterrorism Policy and Planning for the NYPD who has played a significant role in developing the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. In 2006, Tisch was 25 years old and still working on her law degree and MBA at Harvard, according to a wedding announcement in the New York Times. Tisch is a friend to the Mayor’s daughter, Emma; her mother, Meryl, is a family friend to the Mayor.
Tisch is the granddaughter and one of the heirs to the now-deceased billionaire Laurence Tisch who built the Loews Corporation. Her father, James Tisch, is now the CEO of the Loews Corporation and was elected by Wall Street banks to sit on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York until 2013 representing the public’s interest. (Clearly, the 1 per cent think they know what’s best for the 99 per cent.)
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is the entity which doled out the bulk of the $16 trillion in bailout loans to the U.S. and foreign financial community. Members of Tisch’s family work for Wall Street firms or hedge funds which have prime broker relationships with them. A division of Loews Corporation has a banking relationship with Citigroup.
The Tisch family stands to directly benefit from the surveillance program. In June of this year, Continental Casualty Company, the primary unit of the giant CNA Financial which is owned by Loew’s Corp., signed a 19-year lease for 81,296 square feet at 125 Broad Street – an area under surveillance by the downtown surveillance center.
Loews Corporation also owns the Loew’s Regency Hotel on Park Avenue in midtown, an area which is also now under round-the-clock surveillance on the taxpayer’s dime.
Wall Street is infamous for perverting everything it touches: from the Nasdaq stock market, to stock research issued to the public, to auction rate securities, mortgages sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, credit default swaps with AIG, and mortgage securitizations. Had a public hearing been held on this massive surveillance sweep of Manhattan by potential felons, hopefully someone might have pondered what was to prevent Wall Street from tracking its employee whistleblowers heading off to the FBI offices or meeting with a reporter.
One puzzle has at least been solved. Wall Street’s criminals have not been indicted or sent to jail because they have effectively become the police.
Speaker distorts Coca Cola’s practices at Sustainability seminar
On October 5, Aquinas College played host to a forum organized by the group Michigan Interfaith Power and Light. The forum featured Andy Hoffman with the Frederick A. and Barbara M. Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise.
The Grand Rapids Press was the only local news source to report on this event with an article published one week after the fact. The Press story reads like stenography, with the reporter providing a brief summary of the keynote talk and a few quotes from the speaker.
At one point the article states that Hoffman told students that they could choose to run businesses differently, which suggests that the audience was made up of some business majors.
Hoffamn was then quoted as he, “credited technology and sustainability reporting from the network-based organization, Global Reporting Initiative, for making corporations more accountable with their ecological footprint.” It is true that the Global Reporting Initiative provides some guidelines for reporting on global corporate activity, but the list of supporters demonstrates the limits of such reporting practices.
The article continues with Hoffman telling he story of one activist who started the online site Indian Resource Center, which challenges corporate globalization in India. The site has particularly targeted Coca Cola, which Hoffman claims that the beverage giant “partners with local governments, nongovernment organizations, schools and communities to establish local rainwater harvesting facilities and renews and returns much of the groundwater it uses to local groundwater systems.”
This is what Coke is claiming, but the information on the Indian Resource Center would suggest otherwise with a recent posting that says that ground water levels have decreased significantly near a Coca Cola factory leaving communities and farmers without enough water.
The Press story then states that the online activist “is an example of how one person can force corporations to be transparent with environmental practices.” But Coca Cola has not been transparent with its practices. In fact, they have denied claims of global water rights activists and Colombian union activists around claims of the corporation’s awful ecological track record and its support for human right abuses in Colombia. The denial on the part of Coca Cola is the focus of the documentary The Coca Cola Case.
One reason why Hoffman is misrepresenting what Coca Cola’s practices are is because Coke is a financial supporter of the institute he works for. There is no monetary amount of what Coca Cola gives to the Erb Institute, but Dow Chemical and Alcoa have provided $2.5 million, while the Ford Motor Company has given $250,000. With major corporate polluters like these funding the Institute where Hoffman works, it’s no wonder that he would misrepresent what Coca Cola’s actual corporate practices really are. Unfortunately, this was a fact the Press reported never bothered to investigate.
Local Media Blackout on recent trade agreements
Last week the US Congress passed “free trade agreements” with the countries of Panama, Colombia and South Korea. The Obama administration considered these trade agreements as a victory for the US economy.
However, if you rely on local news for information on these trade policies you would have been in the dark. None of the local media outlets reported on the October 12 vote in both the House and Senate. The three pieces of legislation were HR 3078, HR 3079 and HR 3080.
There was also no local reporting on how area members of the House of Representatives voted on these critical trade policies. According to Vote Smart, both 2nd Congressional Representative Bill Huizenga and 3rd Congressional Representative Justin Amash voted for all 3 free trade agreements.
Representing Michigan in the Senate, senior Senator Carl Levin voted for the South Korea and Panama agreements, while voting against the agreement with Colombia. Levin most likely voted against the Colombia agreement because of the pressure from some labor groups concerning the high level of union activists being murdered there in recent years, but Levin could also get away with voting no since that agreement passed by a large margin in the Senate 66 – 33.
Debbie Stabenow voted for the trade agreement with South Korea, but against the Colombian and Panamanian trade agreements. Stabenow is in a re-election campaign so voting against two of the three trade agreements was in her interest in order to maintain good relations with trade unions, but since both passed in the Senate by a wide margin she could get away with a no vote.
The only coverage we documented in recent weeks was an editorial in the Grand Rapids Press, which endorsed the trade agreements with all three countries.
This lack of coverage on substantive economic policy issues underscores the point we made last week about why the local commercial news media won’t get the Occupy movements, because they fail the public miserably when it comes to reporting on critical economic issues.
But what the heck, at least the Grand Rapids Press, channel 8 and channel 13 all reported that Rob Bliss is auctioning off his big water slide. This is news we can all really use?
Wall Street’s Second Occupation: The Police Move In
This article by Tom Engelhardt is re-posted from TomsDispatch.org.
These last weeks, there have been two “occupations” in lower Manhattan, one of which has been getting almost all the coverage — that of the demonstrators camping out in Zuccotti Park. The other, in the shadows, has been hardly less massive, sustained, or in its own way impressive — the police occupation of the Wall Street area.
On a recent visit to the park, I found the streets around the Stock Exchange barricaded and blocked off to traffic, and police everywhere in every form (in and out of uniform) — on foot, on scooters, on motorcycles, in squad cars with lights flashing, on horses, in paddy wagons or minivans, you name it. At the park’s edge, there is a police observation tower capable of being raised and lowered hydraulically and literally hundreds of police are stationed in the vicinity. I counted more than 50 of them on just one of its sides at a moment when next to nothing was going on — and many more can be seen almost anywhere in the Wall Street area, lolling in doorways, idling in the subway, ambling on the plazas of banks, and chatting in the middle of traffic-less streets.
This might be seen as massive overkill. After all, the New York police have already shelled out an extra $1.9 million, largely in overtime pay at a budget-cutting moment in the city. When, as on Thursday, 100 to 150 marchers suddenly headed out from Zuccotti Park to circle Chase Bank several blocks away, close to the same number of police — some with ominous clumps of flexi-cuffs dangling from their belts — calved off with them. It’s as if the Occupy Wall Street movement has an eternal dark shadow that follows it everywhere.
At one level, this is all mystifying. The daily crowds in the park remain remarkably, even startlingly, peaceable. (Any violence has generally been the product of police action.) On an everyday basis, a squad of 10 or 15 friendly police officers could easily handle the situation. There is, of course, another possibility suggested to me by one of the policemen loitering at the Park’s edge doing nothing in particular: “Maybe they’re peaceable because we’re here.” And here’s a second possibility: as my friend Steve Fraser, author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, said to me, “This is the most important piece of real estate on the planet and they’re scared. Look how amazed we are. Imagine how they feel, especially after so many decades of seeing nothing like it.”
And then there’s a third possibility: that two quite separate universes are simply located in the vicinity of each other and of what, since September 12, 2001, we’ve been calling Ground Zero. Think of it as Ground Zero Doubled, or think of it as the militarized recent American past and the unknown, potentially inspiring American future occupying something like the same space. (You can, of course, come up with your own pairings, some far less optimistic.) In their present state, New York’s finest represent a local version of the way this country has been militarized to its bones in these last years and, since 9/11, transformed into a full-scale surveillance-intelligence-homeland-security state.
Their stakeout in Zuccotti Park is geared to extreme acts, suicide bombers, and terrorism, as well as to a conception of protest and opposition as alien and enemy-like. They are trying to herd, lock in, and possibly strangle a phenomenon that bears no relation to any of this. They are, that is, policing the wrong thing, which is why every act of pepper spraying or swing of the truncheon, every aggressive act (as in the recent eviction threat to “clean” the park) blows back on them and only increases the size and coverage of the movement.
Though much of the time they are just a few feet apart, the armed state backing that famed 1%, or Wall Street, and the unarmed protesters claiming the other 99% might as well be in two different times in two different universes connected by a Star-Trekkian wormhole and meeting only where pepper spray hits eyes.
Which means anyone visiting the Occupy Wall Street site is also watching a strange dance of phantoms. Still, we do know one thing. This massive semi-militarized force we continue to call “the police” will, in the coming years, only grow more so. After all, they know but one way to operate.
Right now, for instance, over crowds of protesters the police hover in helicopters with high-tech cameras and sensors, but in the future there can be little question that in the skies of cities like New York, the police will be operating advanced drone aircraft. Already, as Nick Turse indicates in a groundbreaking report “America’s Secret Empire of Drone Bases,” the U.S. military and the CIA are filling the global skies with missile-armed drones and the clamor for domestic drones is growing. The first attack on an American neighborhood, not one in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, or Libya, surely lurks somewhere in our future. Empires, after all, have a way of coming home to roost.
Beehive Collective brings radical art to Grand Rapids this week
The Beehive Design Collective, a radical art group, is coming back to Grand Rapids this week. The Bees will be speaking and doing workshops over a four day span.
On Thursday, at 7pm in the Padnos Student Gallery at GVSU, the Beehive Collective will be presenting their most recent illustration/narrative, “The True Cost of Coal“, having spent several months in the Appalachian region investigating the economic/social/environmental consequences of mountain-top removal.
Then on Friday, Saturday and Sunday the Beehive Collective will be at Red Hydrant Press Studio. On Friday, they will be again be presenting on the True Cost of Coal, but will include more interactive elements in this presentation with participants.
On Saturday there will be a radical art-making workshop and on Sunday the Bees will offer a children’s workshop.
All 3 sessions will be at Red Hydrant Press Studio, located in the Tanglefoot Building on the Westside, the space is limited to 35 people. The event is free and open to the public, but they would greatly appreciate your donations. The Bloom Collective is also a co-sponsor of the events along with Red Hydrant Press Studio.
Friday 5:30 – 8:30PM general public
Saturday 2:00 – 6:00PM graphic workshop for artists (rsvp only)
Sunday 1:00 – 3:00PM Kids workshop ages 7-12
For more information go to the Facebook event page.
Rev. Billy, Bank of America and the 99%
In only a way that Rev. Billy can articulate, here is a fun and creative way in which the Occupy movement is confronting Bank of America. Rev. Billy also addresses the question of hope and revolution in this video interview.
As part of doing research for the LGBTQ People’s History Project in Grand Rapids, we thought it was important to look at local media coverage and to see how people were being represented.
We decided it was important, since many people not only rely on local news for information and local news often is the only source of information people may have had when it came to the struggles of the LGBTQ community in the 1980’s and 90’s.
However, we know that mainstream commercial news coverage is always limited and often reflects the views of the dominant culture. This is why it has always been important for social movements to create their own media as a means of sharing information and perspectives that are often counter to commercial media.
The Network News was formed in 1988 as a mechanism for not only sharing information for the Gay and Lesbian community, it was a tool to hold commercial media accountable.
In one of the first issues of the Network News (August 1988), there is an interesting article about a journalist at the Advance was fired because she was writing stories that were sympathetic to the Gay and Lesbian community. The Network News article read:
The Advance, an area newspaper serving greater Grand Rapids, has dropped the regular religion column written by freelancer Margie Gage. Termination followed soon after the appearance of Gage’s column about the May building dedication of Reconciliation Metropolitan Community Church. An official of The Advance confirmed that the RMCC column was one of the reasons for termination.
Rev. Bruce Roller and Rev. Maggie Beretz met in early July with Advance associate publisher and managing editor to discuss the paper’s reporting of minority issues. Roller and Beretz were told that news of the gay community would upset advertisers and readers and that, economically, “Your community is simply not a force to be reckoned with.”
Earlier this year The Advance at the last minute killed an article by one of their own reporters featuring RMCC and the gay Catholic organization Dignity. News from other area churches is reported regularly in the publication.
The Network is in the process of determining a course of action to encourage The Advance and other news organizations to accurately report news of their various constituencies. Network News will continue to report information as it becomes available.
The issue of whether or not the LGBTQ community is being accurately portrayed in the local news media today is a matter worth investigating and discussing. It could be a valuable tool today to have local LGBTQ groups monitoring local news and challenging them, if need be, on whether or not they are being covered accurately or honestly.
The Network News still exists today, as do many other LGBTQ forms of media in the growing digital world. However, even though there is a tremendous amount of media being produced, is there enough media being produced by the LGBTQ community that honestly reflects the issues and concerns it has today?
This brief look at the LGBTQ history in Grand Rapids is part of the Grand Rapids People’s History Project. A feature film on the history of the LGBTQ community, will premier on Thursday, November 17 at the downtown campus of GVSU. For details go to our Facebook event page.
Keystone Pipeline Faces Indigenous Trans-Border Opposition
This article is re-posted from CorpWatch.org
In mid-September this year, as sharp winds howled across the Great Plains, indigenous leaders from either side of the U.S. –Canada border held an “emergency meeting” in the basement of a South Dakota casino. They came from all over – one flew in from Canada’s frigid Great Bear Lake near the Arctic Circle, a husband and wife drove east on Highway 18 from their reservation, and several more drove west, on Interstate Highway 90.
The casino (official slogan: “A little bit of Vegas on the prairie”) itself is not much to look at. The low building sits by itself on the prairie near the southern edge of the Rosebud Indian Reservation, almost straddling the border between Nebraska and South Dakota. For two days the indigenous delegates – men and women, mostly middle-aged and older — huddled downstairs, drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups, and nibbling on salted peanuts and M&M candies.
How to radically alter the energy policy of the United States, they wondered, and keep a foreign company far away from their land? They prayed to their ancestors for guidance. They took smoke breaks under an enormous grey sky.
After two days they drafted a “Mother Earth Accord” that they hope will galvanize indigenous opposition to the most contentious infrastructure proposal in North America: a privately-built 1,661-mile-long oil pipeline set to carry crude from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. Some say they’re fighting for the safety of their peoples — and others, to redress generations of conflict, poverty, and injustice. “Our ancestors protected the land when they were alive,” Rosebud Tribal Chief John Spotted Tail said at the meeting. “Our belief is that we need to do the same.”
Great Plains country
From the air, South Dakota resembles a tile floor where earthy rectangles of green, brown, yellow, and red line up with geometric precision. The view from the ground reinforces that image, adding texture, sound and smell. Highways run to distant points on the horizon. Fields of corn, wheat, soybeans, and sunflowers ripple in the wind. The odor of manure drifts across the land, sometimes wafting even to Sioux Falls, the state’s largest city.
Driving down the interstate highway, you can tune to KBHB 810 Five State Ranch Radio near Rapid City; catch the daily “Farm and Ranch Review” on KWYR Country 1260; or listen to KILI Radio 90.1, the “Voice of the Lakota Nation.”
Scattered among the farmer-settlers, South Dakota has the largest indigenous population in the U.S., with more than 71,000 Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples (“Sioux”, as they are known by outsiders) spread across eight reservations and beyond. Theirs is often a marginalized existence, separated by history and culture, as well as poor health and poverty, from the agricultural mainstream that surrounds them.
But local leaders are hoping to wield outsize influence in coming weeks over one of the most important environmental decisions in Barack Obama’s presidency: whether or not to approve TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.
Keystone XL is the Calgary-based energy company’s most important project. Canadian analysts expect it to add Cnd$500 million to $700 million to its balance sheets each year. Those earnings hinge on Obama’s acceptance of the argument–promoted by Alberta’s oil sands industry and its political supporters–that pumping an extra 500,000 barrels of oil each day from friendly Canada will help wean the U.S. off Middle Eastern oil.
A fierce opposition, including Democratic party members of the U.S. Congress, environmental activists, and local ranchers, has delayed the proposal for years, framing it as a mortal danger to the planet’s climate and to the rivers and aquifers of the “American heartland.” For some indigenous peoples on South Dakota’s Great Plains, the controversy has an added, historical, significance. They see TransCanada as the latest in a long line of unwanted intruders on their ancestral homeland.
‘Something bad is coming to our nation’
“Excuse if me if I just spoke too fast for you to understand,” Alex White Plume said, moments after delivering an opening prayer in the Lakota language. His quick laughter softened the joke at the expense of the white English speakers in the casino basement. The 59-year-old White Plume and his wife, Debra, were among the first to arrive at the “emergency meeting” of indigenous leaders at the Rosebud Tribal Casino. They sat at the right arm of a U-shaped table configuration, notebooks open.
The meeting had been organized only the week before, and opening attendance was modest. Down the short end of the “U” to their left were several local farmers, dressed in flannel shirts and blue jeans. Nearby were representatives from the Rosebud Tribal council and on the other side was an anti-pipeline activist from Nebraska. Enclosed in the center, facing a large projector screen, was Marty Cobenais, the pipeline campaigner of the Indigenous Environmental Network and one of the meeting’s organizers. An aerial shot of an oil sands operation in northern Alberta filled the projector screen: miles of strip-mined blackness where thick woodland used to be. “Jesus,” muttered one of the farmers. White Plume remarked: “Something bad is coming to our nation and to our land.”
The future of oil?
Whatever your view of Alberta’s oil sands industry, there’s no denying its sheer visual spectacle. Picture the boreal forest, like a great green blanket spread across northern Canada. Now picture a gash in the fabric that reveals 426 square miles of toxic lakes and bare, black earth, where shovels and trucks the size of small buildings mine “bitumen,” a thick mixture of sand, clay and oil. (A tiny patch measuring 0.64 square miles has certified by the provincial government as reclaimed). At the edges of this rip, the green blanket appears to fray, cut through with production wells, pipelines, access roads, and processing facilities — essential elements of the system of high-pressure steam injections that let producers access deeper deposits. Each year, this frenzy of industrial activity pumps out close to 40 megatonnes of greenhouse gases, more than all the cars on Canadian roads.
Much of the bitumen produced here is diluted with a chemical cocktail of industrial solvents — including benzene, a known carcinogen — and then sent via pipeline to the U.S. Midwest. So much of this “dilbit” is shipped south, in fact, that Canada has become the number-one supplier of crude oil to the U.S., shipping one million more barrels each day than Saudi Arabia.
And this output is only the beginning. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers expects production to more than double in the next 14 years. But for that to happen, the Cnd$100 billion industry needs a way to get that oil to foreign markets. It needs pipelines. “If there was something that kept me up at night,” Alberta energy minister Ron Liepert told the Globe and Mail this summer, “it would be the fear that before too long we’re going to be landlocked in bitumen. We’re not going to be an energy superpower if we can’t get the oil out of Alberta.”
Pipeline Politics
Climate change activists hoped to keep Liepert sleepless in late August, when they began staging a massive protest against TransCanada’s Keystone XL. Each day for two weeks, people from across the continent stood, sat, and chanted in an off-limits area in front of the White House in Washington DC. More than 1,250 activists, including actress Daryl Hannah, writer Naomi Klein, and environmental leader Bill McKibben were led away in handcuffs. (After some time in a detention center and payment of a $100 fine, all the detainees were freed). ”We’re pretty sure that without serious pressure, the Keystone Pipeline will get its permit from Washington,” reads a release signed by McKibben, Klein, and others. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper countered during a visit to New York, calling the project a “complete no-brainer,” and telling reporters: “I’m confident that it will be built.”
Then, near the end of September, more than 100 activists were arrested leaping police barricades at a solidarity protest outside the Canadian parliament in Ottawa. Rancor over the pipeline continued to crescendo at emotional public hearings in the six U.S. states along Keystone XL’s proposed route. News reports detailed how one packed eight-hour meeting in Nebraska pitted local ranchers, fearful of oil leaks into their water supplies, against blue collar workers, insistent the project will create thousands of much-needed construction jobs.
With the Obama administration expected to step into this political war zone by year’s end to decide the fate of the pipeline, chances to intervene are dwindling..
Against this high-stakes environmental showdown, indigenous voices have struggled to be heard. But in the basement of the Rosebud Casino, tribal leaders began enacting a compelling battle-plan.
Cross-border Alliance
Four hours into the Rosebud casino meeting, the Canadian delegation arrived: Dene Nation leader Bill Erasmus, from Great Bear Lake in the North West Territories and George Stanley, a tribal leader from northern Alberta’s Frog Lake, right near major oil sands operations. The basement group welcomed them like long-distant friends. In fact, meeting organizer Cobenais had been at the Washington DC, protests with Erasmus and Stanley only weeks before. It was there that Erasmus had experienced a bit of a revelation. “Our peoples in Canada and the U.S. have been working in isolation to fight [Keystone XL],” he said. “I became intrigued by the idea of bringing us together.”
Many North American indigenous communities do not recognize the 49th parallel, preferring to think of themselves as continental peoples. Yet to date, local priorities and distance had thwarted cross-border cooperation on Keystone XL. The plan at this meeting was to draft a unified two to three-page “Mother Earth Accord” opposing the pipeline.
Erasmus and Stanley, who sit on the executive of Canada’s Assembly of First Nations, hoped to get the document adopted by the wider leadership (which they did, not long after the meeting). Cobenais, in turn, would help push it to the National Congress of American Indians, the biggest indigenous lobby group in Washington, DC (still an ongoing process). Both organizations eventually hope to present the “Mother Earth Accord” directly to President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. “With an accord at that level,” Cobenais said, “we believe the administration would have a hard time saying ‘yes’ to this pipeline.”
450 mile Benzene Plume
During a break in the meeting, Alex White Plume smoked a hand-rolled cigarette under a small alcove outside the casino. “The ones with filters give you bad breath,” he explained. Dark clouds spat rain onto the parking lot in front of him. For White Plume and many other indigenous peoples, Keystone XL is both a risk to the safety of their peoples, and the latest chapter in a centuries-old struggle to defend their land.
Although TransCanada’s proposed route does not enter any indigenous reservations as it slices diagonally across South Dakota, the pipeline will burrow under several tributaries of the Missouri River (the White, the Bad and the Cheyenne) that flow near or alongside tribal territory. Earlier this summer John Stansbury, a professor of water resources engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, released a report on Keystone XL, predicting 91 major spills over a 50 year life period. “If this thing ruptured into a waterway,” Stansbury told this reporter in an interview, “the oil itself wouldn’t go too far. But what would happen is [that] chemicals in the oil, like benzene, would start to dissolve and form a plume, possibly stretching for 450 miles.”
TransCanada disputed Stansbury’s report, telling Nebraska media that “as a pipeline operator across North America for over 60 years, safety is a top priority…We would not put our reputation or the public at risk.” And a final environmental assessment from the U.S. State Department predicted “no significant impacts” from Keystone XL.
Descended from Crazy Horse
Hundreds of years of history and personal experience have made White Plume skeptical of the promises of outsiders. Still smoking his cigarette, he explained how his attempt to grow industrial hemp 11 years ago ended with a gun pointed in his face. Some 36 heavily armed U.S. federal agents raided his Pine Ridge Reservation farm, and shut it down by enforcing a law that drew no distinction between hemp and marijuana. The incident strengthened his resentment toward big business and the U.S. government, and his belief that, in the end, his peoples have little say over their land or future.
This widely-held conviction among local tribes dates at least to 1851, when Washington signed the first Treat of Fort Laramie with Lakota leaders, giving them control over tens of millions of acres across the Great Plains. Then, generations of settler encroachment, renegotiated treaties, and all-out war shrank tribal sovereignty to the confines of a few poverty-stricken reservations. Some believe the full 1851 territory is still indigenous land, and are rankled that TransCanada’s Keystone XL might gain the legal power to slice right through it.
Historical grievances cut especially deep for White Plume, who is descended from the same tribal band as Crazy Horse, the famed 19th century Lakota warrior who helped wipe out General George Custer’s cavalry regiment at Little Big Horn. “When the settlers came and killed off all our buffalo, they wiped out an ecosystem that we depended on,” White Plume said. “And now they’re trying to bring dirty oil through our country.” He paused for a second, then began to laugh. When he finished the only sound came from the prairie wind.
Argentina to Wall Street: Latin American Social Movements and the Occupation of Everything
This article by Ben Dangl is re-posted from Common Dreams. Also, to further illustrate the historical context of this movement, check out the timeline of the People’s Global Actions.
Massive buildings tower over Wall Street, making the sidewalks feel like valleys in an urban mountain range. The incense, drum beats and chants of Occupy Wall Street echo down New York City’s financial district from Liberty Plaza, where thousands of activists have converged to protest economic injustice and fight for a better world.
As unemployment and poverty in the US reaches record levels, the protest is catching on, with hundreds of parallel occupations sprouting up across the country. It was a similar disparity in economic and political power that led people to the streets in the Arab Spring, and in Wisconsin, Greece, Spain and London. Occupy Wall Street is part of this global revolt. This new movement in the US also shares much in common with uprisings in another part of the world: Latin America.
This report from Liberty Plaza connects tactics and philosophies surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement with similar movements in Latin America, from the popular assemblies and occupation of factories during Argentina’s economic crisis in 2001-2002, to grassroots struggles for land in Brazil.
Latin America: Economic Crisis and Grassroots Responses
Almost overnight in late 2001, Argentina went from having one of the strongest economies in South America to one of the weakest. During this economic crash, the financial system collapsed like a house of cards and banks shut their doors. Faced with such immediate economic strife and unemployment, many Argentines banded together to create a new society out of the wreckage of the old. Poverty, homelessness, and unemployment were countered with barter systems, factory occupations, communally-run kitchens, and alternative currency. Neighborhood assemblies provided solidarity, support and vital spaces for discussion in communities across the country. Ongoing protests kicked out five presidents in two weeks, and the movements that emerged from this period transformed the social and political fabric of Argentina.
These activities reflect those taking place at Occupy Wall Street and in other actions around the US right now. Such events in Argentina and the US are marked by dissatisfaction with the political and economic system in the face of crisis, and involve people working together for solutions on a grassroots level. For many people in Argentina and the US, desperation pushed them toward taking matters into their own hands.
“We didn’t have any choice,” Manuel Rojas explained to me about the occupation of the ceramics factory he worked at outside the city of Mendoza, Argentina during the country’s crash. “If we didn’t take over the factory we would all be in the streets. The need to work pushed us to action.” This was one of hundreds of businesses that were taken over by workers facing unemployment during the Argentine crisis. After occupying these factories and businesses, many workers then ran them as cooperatives. They did so under the slogan, “Occupy, Resist, Produce,” a phrase borrowed from Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), which has settled hundreds of thousands of families on millions of acres of land through direct action.
In 2008 in Chicago, when hundreds of workers were laid off from the Republic Windows and Doors factory, they embraced similar direct action tactics used by their Argentine counterparts; they occupied the factory to demand the severance and vacation pay owed to them – and it worked. Mark Meinster, the international representative for United Electrical Workers, the union of the Republic workers, told me that the strategies applied by the workers specifically drew from Argentina. In deciding on labor tactics, “We drew on the Argentine factory occupations to the extent that they show that during an economic crisis, workers’ movements are afforded a wider array of tactical options,” Meinster said.
Many groups and movements based in the US have drawn from activists in the South. Besides the 2008 occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, movements for access to water in Detroit and Atlanta reflected strategies and struggles in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where in 2000, popular protests rejected the multinational company Bechtel’s water privatization plan and put the water back into public hands. The Take Back the Land movement in Florida, which organized homeless people to occupy a vacant lot and pairs homeless families with foreclosed homes, mirrors the tactics and philosophy of the landless movement in Brazil. Participatory budgeting in Brazil, which provides citizens with direct input on how city budgets are distributed, is now being implemented by communities across the US.
These are just a handful of movements and grassroots initiatives that provide helpful models (in both their victories and failures) for decentralizing political and economic power, and putting decision making into the hands of the people. In the face of corrupt banks, corporate greed and inept politicians, those occupying Wall Street and other spaces around the US have a lot on common with similar movements in Latin America. Besides sharing the same enemies within global banks, international lending institutions and multinational corporations, these movements have worked to make revolution a part of everyday life. And that is one of the most striking aspects of about what’s happening with the Occupy Wall Street movement right now.
Occupying Wall Street
The organization and activities filling Liberty Plaza in New York are part of a working community where everyone is taking care of each other and making decisions collectively. During a recent visit, a kitchen area in the center of the park was full of people preparing food for dinner with donated cooking supplies. Other spaces were designated for medical support, massage therapy, sign-making and meditation. One area was for the organization of recycling and garbage; people regularly walked around the park sweeping up debris and collecting garbage.
A massive People’s Library contained hundreds of books along the side of the park. As with the cooking, sign-making and medical supplies, the movement had received donated materials and support to keep these operations thriving. Occupy Wall Street also has its own newspaper, the Occupy Wall Street Journal, copies of which were being handed out in English and Spanish editions on nearly every corner of the park. A media center where various people sat around computers and cameras provided ongoing coverage of the occupation.
Within this community were pockets of areas with blue tarps and blankets where people were resting and sleeping, having meetings or simply holding home made signs on display. Singing, drumming, chanting, guitar and accordion playing were also going on in a wide array of places.
Ongoing meetings and assemblies, with hundreds to thousands of participants, dealt with issues ranging from how to organize space in the park and manage donated supplies, to discussions of march plans and demands. Police outlawed the use of megaphones, so people at the park have just been relaying what others say during these assemblies by repeating it through the layers of the crowd, creating an echo so everyone can hear what is said.
At the Comfort Station, where well-organized piles of clothes, blankets, pillows and coats were stacked, I spoke with Antonio Comfort, from New Jersey, who was working the station at the time. Antonio, who had his hat on backwards and spoke with me in between helping out other people, said that the donations of clothes and sleeping materials had been pouring in. People had also offered up their showers for activists participating in the occupation to use. While I was at the station someone asked for sleeping supplies for an older man, and Antonio disappeared into the Comfort Station piles and returned with an armful of blankets and a pillow.
“I’m here so I can have a better life, and so my kids can have a better life when they get older,” he said about his reasons for participating in the occupation. Everything at the station had been running smoothly, Antonio explained. “Everybody works together, and it’s very organized. We’ll be here as long as it takes.”
Adeline Benker, a 17-year-old student at Marlboro College in Vermont who was holding a sign that said, “Got Debt? You are the 99%,” told me that for her – like many other young students participating in the occupation in New York and elsewhere – it was all about debt. “I will be $100,000 in debt after I graduate from college, and I don’t think I should have the pay that for the rest of my life just to get an education in four years.” Benker said this was her very first protest, and her first time in New York City. When I spoke to her, she had been at the occupation for a few days, and would be returning the following week.
Down the sidewalk was activist Tirsa Costinianos with a sign that said, “We Are the 99%”. Costinianos said, “I want the big banks and the corporations to return our tax money from the bailout.” Costinianos had been at the occupation on Wall Street every weekend since it started on September 17th. “I love this and I’m glad we’re doing this. All of the 99% of the people should join us – then we could stop the stealing and the corruption going on here on Wall Street.”
Ibraheem Awadallah, another protester holding a sign that said “Wall Street Occupies Our Government: Occupy Wall Street”, told me, “The problem is this system in which the corporations have the biggest influence in politics in our country.”
These types of encounters and activities were happening constantly in the ongoing bustle of the park, and underscore the fact that this occupation, now nearly into its third week, is as much of a community and example of participatory democracy as it is a rapidly spreading protest.
As the late historian Howard Zinn said, it is important to “organize ourselves in such a way that means correspond to the ends, and to organize ourselves in such a way as to create the kind of human relationship that should exist in future society.” That is being developed now within this movement, from the leaderless, consensus-based assemblies, to the communal organization of the various food, media and medical services organized at the occupation.
Similarly, movements across Latin America, from farmer unions in the Paraguayan countryside to neighborhood councils in El Alto, Bolivia, mirror the type of society they would like to see in their everyday actions and movement-building.
As Adeline Benker, the 17-year-old student at the Wall Street occupation said, echoing the struggles from Argentina to the Andes and beyond, “We need to create a change outside of this system because the system is failing us.”
Dive! Living Off America’s Waste screening and panel discussion
DIVE! Living Off America’s Waste
Screening and Panel Discussion
Monday, Oct 17 at 6pm
Loosemore Auditorium,
Downtown Pew Campus , GVSU
Grand Valley State University is screening the documentary, Dive! Living off America’s Waste as part of the GVSU Campus Sustainability Week activities.
The film’s website says, “Inspired by a curiosity about our country’s careless habit of sending food straight to landfills, the multi award-winning documentary DIVE! follows filmmaker Jeremy Seifert and friends as they dumpster dive in the back alleys and gated garbage receptacles of Los Angeles’ supermarkets. In the process, they salvage thousands of dollars worth of good, edible food – resulting in an inspiring documentary that is equal parts entertainment, guerilla journalism and call to action.”
After the screening, there will be a panel discussion featuring Timothy Vatterott, the film’s composer and producer, as well as:
- Lisa Oliver King and Inez Adams, from Our Kitchen Table
- Elianna Bootzin of Feeding America West Michigan
- Emma Rosauer of Access of West Michigan
The screening is free and open to the public. Watch the trailer:
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 