New Media We Recommend
Below is a list of new materials that we have read/watched in recent weeks. The comments are not a “review” of the material, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these items are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.
Consensus: A New Handbook for Grassroots Social, Political and Environmental Groups, by Peter Gelderloos – With the recent Occupy Wall Street movement it is clear that more people are being introduced to the idea of using a consensus model of decision making instead of voting or majority rules. While consensus is becoming known to a broader audience, there is always the danger of misunderstanding or misusing the process. This new handbook on consensus is a wonderful tool for people who want to explore the decision-making power of this truly democratic process known as consensus.
Against Equality: Queer Critique of Gay Marriage, edited by Ryan Conrad – The LGBT community has expended a great deal of energy in recent years over the legal fight to allow same sex couples to marry. This new collection of essays and interviews provides fiery and compelling arguments against expanding the state sanctioned institution of marriage to the LGBTQ community. All of the authors identify as queer and argue that state sanctioned marriage is a dead end to assimilation within a hetero-dominant culture. Many of the essays also argue that marriage is the perfect institution for promoting and extending the dominance of capitalism. More importantly, the authors argue that gaining the legal right to marry does nothing to stop the level of suicide amongst LGBTQ youth, homelessness, lack of work place rights or immigration policies. This book is so important that it should be given to every LGBTQ organization/organizer and straight allies.
Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the relevance of Marx, by Chris Harman – This new book by Chris Harman is not only timely it is an important contribution to the ongoing discussion about the current economic crisis. Harman provides substantial historical background of Marxism, but then extends that critique to the 20th and 21st Centuries. The author then provides an analysis of the 2008 financial crisis within this historical framework to make the point that capitalism is not just in crisis, it is the crisis. Harman looks at how capitalism has evolved and adapted in recent decades, but he ultimately argues that because of certain ecological and human limits that it is a system that is doomed to fail. Zombie Capitalism is a useful contribution to the current collective discussion about what is wrong with the economic system and how we can create a new one.
If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (DVD) – Beyond the headlines and the state propaganda, there is a story about the people who have decided to take a stand for the planet and actually try to stop the current ecological rampage. This film investigates some of the people involved with the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), what motivated them to take stronger actions and how they have been labeled domestic terrorists. If A Tree Falls is a powerful film that not only confronts viewers with the seriousness of the current ecological catastrophe, but sheds light on the repressive tactics of the state being used to protect corporate power. An important film that could influence the future of activism.
This post originally appeared on the Our Kitchen Table website.
On Monday Oct. 17, Grand Valley State University screened the documentary film Dive! Living Off America’s Waste as part of its Sustainability Week activities. The film opens with a group of young adults helping themselves to gourmet cheeses, choice meat cuts, organic produce and brown eggs from their local Trader Joe’s dumpster. One dumpster diver quipped, “We have so much food that it’s a chore to take care of it the next day.”
Timmy Vatterott of the film DIVE! talks to OKT's Yvonne Woodard about her work before the film
In fact, with the help of a donated chest freezer, one family featured was able to amass enough meat to last a year within one week of dumpster diving.
The documentary goes on to illustrate just how much food is wasted by the current agriculture and food distribution systems. Here are some fast facts shared during the film:
- Food makes up 20% of landfill waste.
- 50% of food harvested never makes it into anyone’s stomach
- 96 billion pounds of food is wasted in the US annually… enough to fill 453,257 box cars (a train that would stretch from LA to New York City and back again).
- The US wastes 40 million acres of wheat every year – enough wheat to cover the whole state of Oklahoma.
- The food wasted in the US could feed all of Haiti for five years
- 35.5 million people in the US don’t know where their next meals coming from. 11 million are hungry. They simply aren’t going to eat today.
The film narrates the tale of the dumpster divers’ efforts to get Trader Joe’s to donate edible food waste to local food pantries. After Trader Joe’s refuses to engage in conversation about the matter, the dumpster divers organize to deliver truckloads of dumpstered food to a very appreciative LA food pantry on New Year’s Eve.
While Trader Joe’s and other chain supermarkets do donate some “waste” foods to food pantries, it seems these items are usually breads or packaged dry goods that are simply past their stamped expiration dates. Most produce, meat, eggs and the other nutritious components of a healthy diet are simply trashed. Reasons cited were logistics and cost.
Our current system of food delivery lives for profits, not people – wasting food is simply more profitable than feeding the hungry. One of the dumpster divers in the film made the astute observation, “We weren’t always like this. There was a time when food was much more than a commodity. Food was life itself. Food was community.”
In conclusion, the film asks its audience to join its Eat Trash Campaign, a project aimed at convincing more supermarkets to donate edible foods to pantries rather than dumping them.
When Vatterott heard Grand Rapids prohibited laying hens, he exclaimed, "There's an ordinance against chickens here? Down with the chicken laws!"
Panel reacts
After the film, two women form Our Kitchen Table, executive director Lisa Oliver King and evaluater Inez Adams were part of a panel that discussed the film. The panel also included Elianna Bootzin of Feeding America West Michigan,Emma Rosauer of Access of West Michigan and Timothy Vatterott, Dive’s producer and composer. Cynthia Price, the panel moderator, asked the panel about their reactions to the film and their thoughts on our “insane, corporate controlled food system.”
Rosauer shared that the film resonated with her and her agency’s work, especially these days in West Michigan when more and more families are turning to food pantries to stave off hunger. She shared that one in four Kent County children experiences hunger, ”People who used to give to food pantries now they are receiving from them.”
Good Samaritan legislation initiated under the Clinton administration legally protects businesses that donate food, but that many in the food industry are not aware of the legislation. Rosauer made a call out for volunteers to build relationships with their local grocer and arrange pick up and distribution of dumpster-destined food to local food pantries.
Bootzin explained the work of Feeding America and went on to say that the amount of food waste is increasing, raising from 30% in 1974 to 40% 2009.
In her reaction to the film, Inez Adams, OKT, commented, “The movie said we don’t value food. I think we do value it but we value it as a commodity and not as a right. Lots of Americans think only certain people are entitled to food. ‘They don’t
have a job so they don’t deserve food.’ ‘I work hard so I can feed my family.’ The discussion needs to change from ‘food is an entitlement if you are a productive citizen’ to food is a human right.”
Lisa Oliver King talked about OKT’s work in providing resources to people who wanted to build their own food system and food security through growing and sharing food and foraging within their own neighborhoods. She encouraged the audience to approach the city and demand that fruit and nut trees be planted ion the parks and greenways.
“We are talking about preserving nature so that it not only pleases us aesthetically but provides for us nutritionally,” she said. She also asked, “How do people define hunger?” Much emphasis is put on feeding belies rather than preventing malnutrition through providing people nutritious foods. “ People in Grand Rapids have access to food pantries that provide substandard, high calorie, high fat, high sugar, high sodium and nutrient deficient food.”
Oliver King also mentioned the media-driven mindset that makes people crave meat at every meal when a vegetable and grain based diet could feed them just as adequately, at a lower cost and with less impact upon the environment. She called for citizens to demand local policy changes that would not only encourage sharing dumpster-destined foods but also make it easier for people to grow their own food, compost food scraps and keep laying hens.
Vatterott agreed heartily. “That really empowers people to understand where food comes from. That places a value on it and strengthens community bonds,” he said. “I really admire the work you do. That kinds of thing really needs to happen, people taking ownership of their food.”
In all, the message of the film Dive! and the campaign that it promotes are good steps towards recognizing the prevalence of food waste here in the US and in other wealthy nations. However, there was no critical conversation about the economic system that perpetuates this kind of waste and injustice—the same economic system that fails working class and lower class people when it comes to health care, housing, education and in the courts.
The Grand Rapids Press and Its Published Comments on Immigrants
Remember when the Grand Rapids Press announced it was going to be “tough on trolls”? Supposedly, the Press was going to use a three-pronged attack to remove racist, homophobic, and defamatory commentary on its MLive website. First, the reporter who wrote the article was supposed to review it and remove posts that violated the MLive terms of use for comments. Second, the Press hired a “sweep team” that was going to do searches of their articles for red-flag words that indicated racism, sexist comments, homophobic hate speech, and defamation. Third, readers could report individual comments for violations.
This much-touted policy might leave readers with the impression that anything left on the site was there with the approval of the Grand Rapids Press. If that were the case, then comments which are supposedly reviewed twice by people paid by the newspaper and which are still online must be there because the Press sees nothing wrong with them….right?
If so, this places the Press in seeming support of some pretty interesting opinions. Take a look at an article covering a presentation by distinguished author and professor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, founder of the Harvard Immigration Project. Some of the commentary left after this article—in other words, passing the approval of both the “sweep team” and reporter Garret Ellison—offers extreme suggestions about immigrants. Here’s a small selection:
1. It’s OK to shoot undocumented immigrants when they are found in the United States.
Quite frankly, we don’t want any new citizens. If there here illegally, ship them home or shoot them.
2. It’s OK to use a White Supremacist website as a preferred source for information on immigration in the States. This site, the name of which I’ve blanked out in the quote, has been cited as a hate group by the Poverty Law Center.
Good internet sites [sic; he only cites one] with the truth about immigration are. http://www.xxxxx.xxx. read what the real costs are to our schools , hospitals, prison system and your freedom.
3. Having a child in the United States if you are not a citizen or a documented worker is a criminal act.
I don’t care if they had a child here, that was the commission of fraud. They had no right to come to this country and everything they did was a crime because of their illegal status.
4. It’s OK to present as facts the false claims that no undocumented immigrants are paying taxes or Social Security (they are); all collect welfare (they are unable to do so—only citizens can collect welfare); and that they supplement their illegal wages via drug dealing and theft.
They work, get paid under the table,(no social security No. means no legal job) and collect welfare at the same time. So they pay no taxes, take jobs, take our tax dollars, and then send the money home to Juan. How great is that? Plus they deal drugs and steal on the side if necessary.
5. It’s journalistically sound to use a debunked quote by a Latino leader as if were true—and then, in a move worthy of the Darwin Awards, use the very website that shows how these and other fictitious quotes by Gutierrez were circulated in racist emails as “proof” that he said it.
Jose Angel Gutierrez, professor, University of Texas, Arlington; founder of La Raza Unida political party; and beneficiary of American generosity: “We have an aging white America. . . . They are dying. . . . !” “We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him. http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/hispanicleaders.asp scroll down
6. We should murder any immigrants that attempt to cross our borders, because they are not human beings but “vermin.”
They are a vermin that eats away the the fabric of the american way of life. They want nothing but a free ride. Mine the border. Stop this madness of thinking they contribute to this country in any usefull way except tucking in a bed sheet in a motel or picking an apple.
This is only a small sampling of what the Press presents on its website on any given day. Press staff and paid contract workers have allowed remarks like these to remain “published” (that is, made available to the public) at the paper’s expense and under the proud banner of the Grand Rapids Press.
As a side note: I did not bother to contact Press diva and non-stop Tweeter Garret Ellison; he has taken even requests by various readers to fix typos in his headlines and incorrect names in his articles as personal insults. I did report each of these racist comments, and about two dozen more on various articles, to the so-called sweep team. As of this writing, all comments still remain on the site. I also emailed the above comments and a few more to Press Editor Paul Keep and Online Editor Meegan Holland to make them aware of the remarks. If the comments are removed after this point, it will be because of my unpaid time in reporting them, not due to any Press staff or contractors.
Visitors to the site tend to read articles on the same day they’re posted. These remarks have gotten five days’ worth of viewing by the Press readership…because no one at the Press seemed to have found anything wrong with them.
Speaker addresses Climate Denial at GVSU
Yesterday, as part of their Sustainability Week, GVSU hosted Michigan native Peter Sinclair, who talked about the issue of global warming.
Sinclair stated that several years ago he became increasingly bothered by the amount of bad and misleading information on global warming. With an interest in media, Sinclair started a video blog called Climate Crocks of the Week.
Here is an example of one of his videos:
As a response to his videos, now numbering around 80, Sinclair says that he knows that many climate scientists and educators are using his videos and several have stepped forward to be advisors for the media work he is doing.
Sinclair then provided some basic data to support the global scientific community’s claim that humans are causing the planet to warm in such a way that it is causing tremendous ecological stress and unnecessary human suffering.
One of the claims of the climate deniers is that not only is the planet not warming, but we are entering into a global cooling period. It is true, as Sinclair noted, that because of the historical cycles of planetary orbiting we should be in a cooling period, but the exact opposite is happening.
Sinclair then showed a map dealing with the Arctic polar region and demonstrated how polar ice caps are melting. In addition to scientific data he says that numerous governments, particularly Russia, is constructing shipping facilities near the Arctic region, because new shipping routes are developing as the ice melts.
Sinclair also says that the two largest ice packs, Greenland and Antarctica, have both been decreasing in size since 2007. Sinclair even cites the US Navy’s chief oceanographer, Admiral Titley, who agrees that the ice packs are melting. Titley’s assessment falls on the conservative estimate side, but Sinclair says that the analysis by James Hansen is most likely more accurate.
Sinclair followed with comments about how there is a growing concern over the impact that global warming will have on places like Greenland and Antarctica, which have ice as much as a mile thick that is holding in a tremendous amount of carbon. The thawing of these areas, which are also referred to as permafrost, would be devastating, since it would release a great deal of carbon and humans would not be able to stop that process once it began. Here is a video with Steven Chu talking about permafrost.
The information that Sinclair shared was solid and in many ways alarming, considering the small window we have as humans to actually prevent cataclysmic outcomes.
However, when Sinclair got to talking about solutions, he responded with the business as usual model. Sinclair said that many large corporations understand the predicament we are in and are making a difference, such as Dow Chemical. Sinclair even showed a slide on how Dow Chemical is reducing its Carbon foot print.
In many ways hearing him talk about Fortune 500 corporations as part of the solution was quite disheartening, considering how much ecological destruction and human harm Dow has perpetrated. On top of that, by saying that Dow Chemical was reducing its Carbon foot print, it diverts attention to what they do and what there primary motive is. Dow Chemical doesn’t make products in order to promote sustainability, they make products to make a profit within the capitalist model.
Sinclair went on to talk about solar shingles, wind energy and how Michigan could be a leader in green energy jobs creation. When talking about solar shingles he played a commercial from Sungevity, to illustrate a business model that could be a solution.
So, if we save money on home energy costs we should take several trips to a tropical country? This absurdity underscored the extremely flawed solutions part of his presentation. It was most disappointing to know that the students who were in attendance were not exposed to a more systemic critique of what has contributed to global warming and how we can possibly avert a disastrous outcome. Sinclair did not even address the need to stop the main forces of global warming, the oil & coal industries, militarism, agri-business and so much of industrial capitalism.
Black Is Back Coalition: Defining Our Own Place in the 99%
This article by Glen Ford is re-posted from Black Agenda Report.
It’s been two years since the formation of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. The original coalition of fifteen organizations was formed in the close quarters of a Washington, DC, apartment in late September 2009, and in just seven weeks pulled together the first national Black march and rally against President Obama, at the White House.
Back then, the Black Is Back Coalition occupied a very lonely place, not just in Black America, but in the larger spectrum of the U.S. Left. Sisters and brothers who had long opposed U.S. imperial wars and the rule of the rich, who had for decades proudly proclaimed themselves fighters in the Black liberation struggle, turned their backs on their own lives, their own words, their own experiences and on the historical wisdom of our greatest leaders, to become apologists and cheerleaders for a Black corporate Democratic warmonger. It was, possibly, the lowest point in Black political history, a comprehensive collapse of the last remnants of what had once been a mighty movement.
Twenty-four months later, the Black Is Back Coalition prepares to hold its national conference, on November 5, in a vastly different political environment. The Obama delirium has broken, like a fever that has spent itself. The First Black President has proven with sickening consistency to be a tool of Wall Street and the Pentagon, and as contemptuous of Black people in word and deed as any president in modern times. His verbal attacks on Black culture and Black character have been vicious in the extreme, a series of egregious, hurtful harangues cynically designed to signal to whites that he, too, rejects the legitimacy of Black grievances – both historically, and in the here and now.
Those of us in the Black Is Back Coalition have a right to say “I told you so” – and we do. But it takes more than just being right, to win the battle. One must constantly take advantage of changes on the battlefield.
The political terrain has changed, decisively. People’s “occupations” are the watchword all across the nation and the world, there is a general disgust and rejection of the rule of finance capital, and for the first time in four decades the word “revolution” is heard outside the context of the newest consumer product. There is a ferment, a great stirring, that has Black Americans speaking in a language that was once so familiar we thought we owned it: “All power to the people!” Variations of the old war cry are on everyone’s lips. But achieving the meaning of the phrase “Power to the people” requires new strategies and tactics to suit new conditions on the ground.
The sudden appearance of a still very amorphous movement under the loose heading “Occupy” presents a huge challenge. That is especially true for those of us at the Black Is Back Coalition, whose analysis was essentially correct in 2009. We should be a lot smarter now, and share our insights and experiences with the new forces that have suddenly emerged. The slogan “the 99% versus the 1%” is fine and catchy and quite effective, for now, but real revolutions are made up of their constituent parts. In the United States, especially, homogenization always tends, in practice, to result in a whitening of the process. And that would be a tragedy for the emerging movement.
The Black Is Back Coalition’s responsibility, on November 5 in Philadelphia, is to put forward a strong, unabashedly Black analysis and program for the world revolution, and share it with everybody.
Many North Americans claim to have known nothing about the insidious control that the United States asserted in Central American countries in the 20th century. Our insular tendency to only study American and European history and literature is partly to blame. But so is our distaste for the bald truth. Because since the 1930s, we have had the truth in the form of Miguel Angel Asturias’s work as our guide.
On June 19, 1899, Miguel Angel Asturias was born in Guatemala City. His father was the magistrate of the Guatemalan Supreme Court, and his mother was a teacher. Asturias himself became many things: a voice of clarity about the corrupt dictators of Guatemala and U.S. imperialism in his native land; a poet of remarkable skill; an attorney, a professor, and a diplomat; and a novelist of tremendous power. And yet, his work still goes almost completely ignored in the United States.
Asturias attended college and law school in Guatemala, and then, with a group of friends, founded the Popular University of Guatemala, offering courses to citizens who couldn’t afford tuition at the traditional colleges. He later taught at the university. But in 1923, Asturias left to study in Paris, and because of the incendiary nature of his writing, he spent much of the next decade there.
Among the works that Asturias wrote in Paris were beautiful reworkings of Mayan legends, collected under the title Legends of Guatemala; a volume of his poetry; and El Señor Presidente, his first political/social justice novel. It was a thinly veiled indictment of Estrada Cabrera, one in a line of infamous dictators. Both Asturias’s father and mother were arrested and lost their jobs during the Cabrera regime. His whole family, along with the rest of the country, suffered under Cabrera’s harsh policies. It was unsafe for Asturias to even bring his manuscript into Guatemala, so he left it with friends in Paris. Completed in 1933, it was not published until 1946.
Asturias was reluctant to return to Guatemala, and El Señor Presidente makes it clear why. The book portrays the daily fear under which the people of Guatemala lived, never knowing if they would be arrested or shot for some “crime” of which they were ignorant. At one point in the novel, a character says to a military commander, “Whether you’re guilty or innocent is irrelevant, General; what matters is whether you’re in favor or not with the President. It’s worse to be an innocent man frowned on by the government than a guilty one!” The novel closes as the main character watches a group of people he knows being marched away by El Presidente’s soldiers. Then he returns home, where his mother is saying rote Catholic prayers for their leader and also protection for those who are persecuted by the law. The irony of the moment is a bitter conclusion to the book. Clearly, to pray for both is no longer possible in Guatemala.
Asturias returned to Guatemala at the urging of a Parisian friend, who told him, “You are writing about things about which we Europeans don’t even dream,” and said that it was Asturias’s duty to be a truth-teller, reporting on events in his homeland.
Asturias took that duty seriously. In addition to El Señor Presidente, he wrote his famous trilogy (sometimes referred to as the Banana Trilogy) about American imperialism devouring Guatemala. These three novels, Viento Fuerte (1950), El Papa Verde (1954), and Los Ojos de Los Enterrados (1960), show what was happening to Guatemalan farmers when large U.S. companies moved in. They captured land, turned the former farmers into virtual slaves, and burned whole villages down with the approval of the current dictator. The United Fruit Company in these novels stands for all early corporations that invaded Central America and impoverished farmers who had made a living on their land for centuries.
Asturias brilliantly lampoons the American corporate representatives as affable, somewhat slow-witted, but amiable people who initially seem kind and generous to the native workers. But this is a façade that hides their actual agenda to overpower and control. Across four decades, more than 200,000 Guatemalans died just because, as Gabriel Maria Marquez summed it up, some gringos wanted to eat bananas.
Hombres de Maíz, which Asturias originally finished in 1946, is perhaps his best-known work in Central America. It tells the story of a tribe of Indians in Guatemala who begin to rebel as their tribal mountain lands are invaded by U.S. corporations that start planting corn there. The army is sent in to destroy the tribe on the orders of the U.S.-approved dictator in power. Asturias evoked all of his knowledge about Mayan myths and legends and wrote this story as if it were an ancient myth, using the same storytelling devises. The format, familiar to Guatemalans, made the book less accessible to North Americans and Europeans. It was not until after the novelist’s death that the book was understood by these audiences as his masterpiece.
The struggle of the “men of maize” takes on epic proportions, with the Indians led by a populist leader, Gaspar. He represents the voice of truth itself. When he is ultimately silenced as he’s shot by the soldiers, the tribe loses both its land and its former power to do magic. Asturias intended these losses to represent the death of a life that had once nurtured the people of Guatemala before new regimes of puppet dictators and creeping U.S. control replaced it.
Asturias’s politically charged writing came with a price: when Castillo Armas came into power in 1954, the novelist was forced to flee Guatemala. He traveled to Chile, where he lived with poet Pablo Neruda. Later, he moved to Buenos Aires where he wrote for the state newspaper. But another political coup there forced Asturias to move again, this time to Italy. Shortly afterward, the new president Méndez Montenegro of Guatemala named him ambassador to France.
Miguel Angel Asturias was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was honored with the Lenin Peace Prize, the el Primo Galvez Award, the Chavez Prize, and the Sylla Monsegur Prize for his own translation of Legends of Guatemala into French. Asturias died in 1974 while on a lecture tour of Spanish universities.
Asturias’s view on his writing was wholly activist in nature; he once told students in a lecture, “If you write novels merely to entertain…then burn them!” Someday, maybe students in the United States will become more familiar with this great author and voice for social justice. They’ll read, from a Central American viewpoint, about the ugly side of U.S. domination in other countries, routinely presented here in America as our charitable desire “to bring democracy to the world.”
Feliz cumpleaños, Miguel Angel Asturias…que se recuerdan.
Farm worker advocate to speak at GVSU Wednesday
Jaime P. Martinez was born in 1946 in San Antonio, Texas and was reared by his Mexican migrant worker grandparents in the Westside barrio, a Spanish speaking community.
His involvement in activism began in 1966 as a member of his local union in San Antonio, Texas IUE-AFL-CIO Local 789, Friedrich workers. He marched and fasted for justice for the farm workers alongside Cesar Chavez, President of the United Farm Workers of America.
Mr. Martinez has defended the rights of workers and marches for civil rights throughout America and has worked with community leadership such as Rev. Abernathy, right hand man of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks.
Jaime P. Martinez will speak about his experience working for social justice and human rights in the United States.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
4:30 – 6:00PM – Reception following lecture
Cook-DeWitt Center, GVSU Allendale Campus
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?
