The best among us... Join the revolt or be on the wrong side of history
[Editor's note: We are reprinting the following, which was produced September 30, 2011 and put up on Susan Ohanian's Website on October 2, 2011. Highly recommended by everyone at Substance who has read it].
New York police made more than 700 arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday, October 1. Posted: 2011-10-02. This is from OpEd News, Sept. 30, 2011. See bio below.
The best among us: Join the revolt or be on the wrong side of history. by Chris Hedges There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.
To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say "I am innocent" is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.
Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat.
One week before the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, a police lieutenant sprayed CS gas, a powder commonly known as "pepper spray", at a group of protestors who had been boxed in by police and were not resisting.Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.
The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.
Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children's children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.
Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.
Click here to access OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.
By the third week of Occupy Wall Street, the unions were joining and urging their members to participate.[Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio,Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges' original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009, and granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay "One Day We'll All Be Terrorists." Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University.
He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.
Hedges began his career reporting the war in El Salvador. Following six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief there for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he joined the Times' investigative team and was based in Paris to cover al-Qaida. He left the Times after being issued a formal reprimand for denouncing the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.
He has written nine books, including "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (2009), "I Don't Believe in Atheists" (2008) and the best-selling "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" (2008). His book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His latest book is "Death of the Liberal Class" (2010)
Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows ancient Greek and Latin. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has written for Harper's Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta, Foreign Affairs and other publications.]
By: glen brown
Corporatists
If you live in Illinois, it's the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago by Glen Brown
Have you seen the latest Illinois Is Broke ad, staged in a mockup classroom with a phony teacher’s casual pleading: “I want to talk to you about basic math: Illinois is broke. It’s bad news for our state and, if you’re a teacher, it’s bad news for you too. Your pension fund is in big trouble. There’s not enough money to pay benefits to current retirees, much less you when you retire… By 2045, we’ll need almost 50 cents for every dollar collected in the state… Think that’s gonna happen?... It’s basic math; it’s also the truth.”
Who is the Civic Committee? It is a group that attempts to maintain and improve its membership’s privileges while creating conflict in the public at large by controlling and buying media and by publishing its own website to mold public opinion. The Civic Committee’s tactics include an attempt to convince the shrinking middle class (and now its teachers) that the reason why “Illinois is broke” is the public pension systems in Illinois. Its tactics incorporate deflecting attention away from their avaricious profiteering and elitism; keeping public employees divided by attacking one group, such as teachers instead of firemen or policemen; diverting class conflict by turning the middle class and its teachers upon themselves through use of such rhetorical devices as faulty rationalizations; intentional misinformation; selected instances; repetition and slogans; causal oversimplifications; non sequitur; and appeals to fear, ignorance, and bias found on its obverse group’s website (Illinois Is Broke). Its schemes include using its own membership to compile reports and analyses disguised as impartial data (Sidley Austin LLP) and intimidating legislators in downstate meetings to make laws in the interests of the wealthy and powerful few.
What is the Civic Committee’s agenda? Government by the rich and powerful or by a duplicitous “not-for-profit organization whose mission is to stimulate and encourage the growth of the area's economy and its ability to provide for its people” is based upon the impoverishment of others; the Civic Committee’s power is purchased. The “current mission” is the wholesale destruction of the entire middle class and the pension systems in Illinois, in particular, the Teachers’ Retirement System.
Who writes the laws by which the Illinois government operates? The Civic Committee. Who will profit from pension reform (to free up the cash flow and increase its profit margin) in Illinois? The Civic Committee. What retirement pension is the Civic Committee continuously attacking? The Teachers’ Retirement System of Illinois. There are no equal rights when there is inequity of wealth and when promises are made to support and to preserve the fortunes of a few at the expense and victimization of the many.
What is Tyrone Fahner’s and the Civic Committee’s plan for Illinois teachers? They plan to address the state’s budget deficit in the interests of big business by destroying the teachers’ defined-benefit pension plan with severe and radical pension reform and maintain control of the economic and political policies of state and municipal governments; they plan to redistribute money away from the public employees’ defined-benefit pension plans and to their private interests and profits by proposing an unsecured, non-guaranteed financial option called a Tier 3 defined-contribution plan (or 401k) and rendering the present defined-benefit plan unaffordable and obsolete.
What does the Civic Committee not tell you? Forty percent of its membership is from the financial sector. The Civic Committee’s membership does not publicize the fact that its partners and associates shift the burden of their tax breaks and other loopholes to the public and that some of the state’s lost revenue is based upon promises that they will create more jobs; even though, their outsourcing of American jobs is disguised as “free trade” and has eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs and has eroded the tax base of the State of Illinois; moreover, the Civic Committee members do not publicize the fact that they have hidden vast amounts of their corporate money in offshore bank accounts to avoid taxation and, thus, to increase their excessive profiteering – paid for by the rest of us.
Indeed, corporatists are alive and well in Illinois. The history of our State has been one of excessive greed and shameless hypocrisy, of corruption and oppression, of extortion and domination, of exploitation and deception, of selfishness and subjugation, of poverty and unemployment and inequitable taxation, of protection for the wealthy and their powerful interests, of exorbitant wealth for the few and scarcity of wealth for the many, in other words: government of the Committee, by the Committee, and for the Committee.
Besides cleverly disguising its economic terrorism against public employees, the Civic Committee’s manipulation and exploitation of the citizens of Illinois closely rival the history and spirit of conniving, arrogant capitalism evident in this country. The Illinois Is Broke website claims that state employees are getting a “sweet deal,” one that is better than “95 percent” of workers in the private industry. Apparently, members in this powerful and wealthy club are not in that 95 percent.
When Chairman of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago CEO Miles D. White of Abbott Laboratories retires, he will draw from two defined-benefit pensions worth a combined $20 million. This is for a man whose company’s stock fell 11% last year and who announced the layoff of 1,900 employees in January (1,000 of them in Lake County)—a cut that followed with an additional 3,000 layoffs last September. Nonetheless, Miles White believes in “shared sacrifice”: his total compensation declined 8 percent last year—to $18.4 million (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees).
A few of the many wealthy members of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club to take note of are W. James Farrell, retired CEO of Illinois Tool Works, who will receive an annual pension of $1.4 million; John W. Madigan, retired CEO of the Tribune Company, who will receive an annual pension that is more than $220,000, and Richard L. Thomas, a retired bank executive, who will receive an annual pension that is more than $600,000. (R. Eden Martin makes more than $330,000 in compensation from two companies where he sits on the board—and that's in the addition to the retirement benefits he receives from the law firm, Sidley Austin LLP, where he once worked). Sidley Austin LLP attacked the TRS pension clause last year, claiming that it is “constitutional” to amend Article XIII, section 5 of the Constitution of the State of Illinois. For such a self-proclaimed “champion of accountability and transparency,” the firm's retirement benefit information is not publicly available (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees).
Some of the few wealthy and influential members of the Civic Committee include:
TYRONE C. FAHNER, President, Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago; GREG Q. BROWN Chairman & Chief Executive Officer - Motorola Solutions; THOMAS A. COLE Chairman, Executive Committee - Sidley Austin LLP; ELLEN COSTELLO, CEO and US Countryhead - BMO Harris Bank; MARY N. DILLON, President and Chief Executive Officer - U.S. Cellular; CHARLES L. EVANS, President and Chief Executive Officer - Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; HERBERT W. KRUEGER, Chairman - Mayer Brown LLP; PAUL V. LA SCHIAZZA, President - AT&T Illinois; EDWARD M. LIDDY, Retired Chairman and Chief Executive Officer - The Allstate Corporation; TIMOTHY P. MALONEY, Illinois President - Bank of America; ANDREW J. MCKENNA, Chairman - Schwarz Supply Source Chairman - McDonald's Corporation; W. JAMES MCNERNEY, JR. Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer - The Boeing Company; JAMES S. METCALF, President and Chief Executive Officer - USG Corporation; DAVID W. NELMS, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer - Discover Financial Services; DONALD S. PERKINS, Retired Chairman - Jewel Companies, Inc.; THOMAS J. PRITZKER Chairman - Hyatt Hotels Corporation; IRENE B. ROSENFELD, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer - Kraft Foods Inc.; GORDON I. SEGAL, Chairman - Crate & Barrel; JAMES A. SKINNER, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer - McDonald's Corporation; RUSS M. STROBEL, Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer - Nicor Inc.; GLENN TILTON, Chairman of the Midwest Region - JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chairman of the Board - United Continental Holdings, Inc.; GREGORY D. WASSON, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer - Walgreen Co.; THOMAS J. WILSON Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer -The Allstate Corporation; ROBERT J. ZIMMER, President - University of Chicago; MICHAEL J. HOGAN, President - University of Illinois; MORTON O. SCHAPIRO, President - Northwestern University; HON. RAHM EMANUEL, Mayor - City of Chicago…
“Does this seem fair to you? If not, please contact your elected officials and tell them [that this state’s resources are intrinsically bound up with the Civic Committee’s corporate interests and that legislators who will not truly represent their constituents and who are subservient to the business interests of the wealthy few will be voted out of office next election]!”