MEDIA ROOTS — On Saturday, November 19, 2011, Occupy Oakland (OO) held another mass day of action after the nationwide crackdowns against the Occupy Movement days before.  In response to the coordinated Federalised repression, the OO General Assembly voted unanimously for a coordinated West Coast Port Shutdown, for which ILWU leaders have announced support, even urging a simultaneous East Coast port shutdown.  This would be the first nationwide port shutdown in U.S. history. 

Thousands vigorously took to the streets and jubilantly marched through downtown Oakland and around Lake Merritt before tearing down a fence around an empty lot at 19th & Telegraph to establish another OO encampment.  The uptown location draws attention to the ongoing gentrification in Oakland, as public schools are being closed whilst charter schools are opening.

The demonstrators held a huge dance party in the streets despite the pouring rain, as over thirty tents were set up by occupiers.  Although not enough people held the space overnight to prevent a third raid by Oakland PD the next morning, 11/20, the Occupy Movement continues undeterred.  Even as the long-standing OO encampment a few blocks away at Snow Park was forced out by police, 11/21, OO persisted with at least eight more tents sprouting later that evening “in a West Oakland lot at 18th and Linden streets.”

Messina

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Abby Martin of Media Roots covers Occupy Oakland’s Day of Action Saturday, November 19, 2011.

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On Friday, November 18, 2011, Jack Hayman, of ILWU Local 10, spoke with Steve Zeltzer of Work Week Radio on Pacifica Radio’s “The Morning Mix with Project Censored.”  They discussed the burgeoning solidarity between labour, particularly ILWU, and the Occupy Movement in the wake of the historic Occupy Oakland General Strike earlier this month, the new call for a West Coast shut down of ports, as well as urging East and Gulf Coast ports to also shut down next month.  -Messina

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PROJECT CENSORED

Dr. Peter Phillips (27:56):  “The Occupy Movement certainly is a nuisance to the 1% and increasingly more so, as they worry and coordinate nationally the repression of that.  And we’re just coming back stronger.”

Steve Zeltzer:  “That’s right.  That is a fear that they have.  The other thing is this week the President of ILWU Local 21, Dan Coffman, was here in San Francisco and he spoke last night to ILWU Local 10.  They are under attack by the same repressive forces in Longview, Washington where they brought in, union people are scabbing on their jobs, IUOE 701 [International Union of Operating Engineers Local 701].  But there was a meeting last night.  Jack Hayman is a retired Member of ILWU Local 10 and he’s joining us this morning to talk about the meeting [with] Dan Coffman and a formation of a new committee, the Committee to Defend ILWU.  Welcome, Jack, to the show.”

Jack Hayman:  “Hello.”

Steve Zeltzer:  “I wanted to ask you about a report about what’s happening, of the visit of Dan Coffman.  What’s going on with this Committee to Defend the ILWU.”

Jack Hayman (29:03):  “Well, Dan spoke at the Longshore Clerks Hall first, Local 34, to their union meeting.  And then he came over to address the Local 10 Membership.  And it was quite an event because we’ve all been waiting with bated breath to get a report on what’s happening up in Longview.  And he gave a tremendous talk to our Membership.  We hadn’t quite heard a report like this in a while.  It was very inspiring.  And the key point was that this multinational bank consortium, EGT, that they’re fighting up there is gonna be bringing in a big ship within the next month, he said.  And a call is going to go out to all ports on the West Coast to shut down because what this is about is about union-busting.  And they’re taking on probably the most militant union in the country.  It’s not just a small local up in Longview of 200 people.  It’s a challenge to all of the ILWU.  And, in fact, what Dan said, a call will also go out to the East Coast and Gulf Coast ports to ask longshoremen there to shut down as well.  So, if this happens, it’ll be the first ever nationwide strike of all the ports.  And he got a tremendous standing ovation for that.  The Members were really, really inspired, fired up.”

Steve Zeltzer:  “The ILWU has supported the [Occupy] Movement and maybe you can talk about the march that’s gonna happen this coming Saturday [11/19/11], tomorrow at 2pm.  And Dan will probably be speaking at that march.”

Jack Hayman:  “That’s right.  Dan spoke about the march tomorrow.  But he first mentioned the November 2^nd Port Shutdown here in Oakland that was led by Occupy Oakland.  And he said they watched it on television.  And it sent thrills down the spines of their membership.  There was a collective shot in the arm for the entire Membership up there to see thousands of people pouring into the Port of Oakland in solidarity with the Longview longshore workers and shutting the Port down.  I mean, he’s never seen anything like that, he said.  And you could see it in his face, his expression.  So, yeah, they have their union banner, he and Byron Jacobs, the Secretary Treasurer of Local 21 in Longview, will be marching.  The Occupy Oakland march begins at 2pm, 14^th & Broadway.  They’ll be up front on the demonstration march.  But he’s also gonna be speaking tonight, if the listeners out there are interested.  There’s an Occupy Oakland General Assembly at 6pm and then we’ll be addressing that Assembly.  So, I’d encourage listeners to come out to both of those, the General Assembly tonight at 6pm at Oscar Grant Plaza, formerly Frank Ogawa Plaza, and tomorrow, Saturday, at 2pm, 14^th & Broadway.” 

Steve Zeltzer:  “Now, also there’s a committee that was recently formed at your union hall, Local 10.  It’s gonna be meeting this coming Tuesday at 7 o’clock, the Committee to Defend the ILWU.  You can reach it at [email protected].  What exactly is this committee?”

Jack Hayman (32:39):  “It’s a committee to build rank and file support within the longshore unions and the labour movement in general.  One of the activities it will be involved in is organising a caravan from the [S.F.] Bay Area up to Longview [in Washington state].  And that will be led by the ILWU Members.  We’ll have motorcycles and cars and buses.  And when we get the call from Longview, we’ll be heading up there in a caravan.  And we just kind of bounced it around a little bit in a discussion last night with Dan and he seems to think that’s a great idea.  Maybe they’ll have a caravan coming in from Portland and Seattle.  And the idea is that if we can show that kind of support when this ship comes in, there’s a good possibility that Occupy Portland and Occupy Seattle will do the exact same thing that we did down here on November 2^nd and shut the ports down.”

Steve Zeltzer (33:46):  “Well, that sounds like a powerful response to the attack on your Members in Longview, Washington and also the attack on all workers.  I was gonna discuss on the other segment there are many workers who don’t have a contract, Oakland Education Association, United Airline Mechanics, American Airlines.  The Railroad Workers are working without a contract nationally.  They wanna impose a contract.  All these workers have the power.  They’re not even without a contract.  But it would mean fighting and breaking the law, though, to actually go out in some of these cases.”  

Jack Hayman (34:17):  “Well, yeah, what we’re looking at here is a first ever shutdown of all the ports in this country.  And that’s gonna have an inspiring effect on other unions and people that are not unionised.  That’s exactly what happened in the ‘30s when with these convulsive militant strikes by workers occupying plants, mass-picketing.  And that’s what made the Labour Movement grow.  People saw they could challenge the power of capital.  And they organised millions and millions into the trade union movement.”

Steve Zeltzer (34:59):  “I wanna thank you, Jack for joining us.  We have to go on, but hopefully people can, if they are interested, come to the rally tonight and tomorrow at 2pm.  And also on Tuesday night at 7 o’clock, they’ll be a meeting of the Committee [to Defend ILWU] at 400 North Point, ILWU.  So, thanks for joining us this morning.”

Jack Hayman (35:18):  “Alright, thank you, Steve.  And thank you to everybody out there.”

Transcript by Felipe Messina

MEDIA ROOTS — With the Occupy Movement rightly putting Wall Street and the ruling-class on blast, the Federal Reserve and the mechanics of our national money supply in relation to our national economic health and body politic, equally deserve scrutiny.  Despite the complexities of finance, the money supply, and Congressional budgets, we must consider such questions of political economy, and seek to understand them.  In a recent article, Ellen Brown, author of Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, discusses the autocratic Congressional Super Committee.

The establishment insists budget cuts are inevitable, so its political servants don’t consider a necessary progressive tax code.  Ellen Brown disagrees and offers alternatives.  Brown points to the political theatre of the faux debt-ceiling crisis of 2011, as economist Dr. Richard Wolff, et al., have done.  This faux crisis led to the current incarnation of ruling-class assault against the working-class 99%.  Brown notes that the 1% have pushed for austerity before. So, if the Occupy Movement is to respond effectively to the sophistries of the 1%, they must first demystify the game of neoclassical economics.

Messina

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TRUTHOUT — It is no great surprise that with only days to go, the Congressional “supercommittee,” given the Herculean task of carving an additional $1.2 trillion out of the federal budget, has failed to reach agreement. Why should six Republicans and six Democrats with diametrically opposed views agree in a few weeks, when Congress couldn’t shake hands on it after months of wrangling, despite the guillotine blade of a federal default hanging over their heads?  

Whether the supercommittee reaches agreement or not, however, the deficit hawks win. If they agree, either $1.2 trillion gets cut from the budget or taxes go up by that amount; and the committee co-chair has categorically stated taxes are not going up, so that means the budget will be cut. If agreement is not reached, $1.2 trillion in cuts automatically kick in, split evenly between domestic and military spending. Either way, the economy will wind up with $1.2 trillion less in purchasing power. The result will be to reduce demand, kill jobs and put more people on the streets.

For the deficit hawks, however, it all seems to be going according to plan. The supercommittee is characterized as an emergency measure that was rushed through to avoid an arbitrarily imposed August deadline for freezing the debt ceiling, but it has actually been in the works for years. In 2009, it was called the “Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action.” That plan died when its Senate sponsors, Judd Gregg and Kent Conrad, failed to secure 60 votes for passage in the Senate. The Gregg-Conrad bill was criticized as railroading through legislation that would unconstitutionally slash domestic services without Congressional debate, but its task force would actually have been LESS autocratic than the supercommittee, which has sweeping powers and needs only a simple majority among its 12 members to prevail.

What has been forced out of the debate is whether cutting the budget is a good idea at all. The Peter Peterson Foundation, which has been pushing “austerity” for years, has finally gotten its way. Hedge fund magnate Peter G. Peterson was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations until 2007 and head of the New York Federal Reserve between 2000 and 2004. He made his fortune with the controversial Blackstone Group, which he co-founded and chaired for many years. The Peter Peterson Foundation was established in 2008 with a $1 billion endowment to raise public awareness about US fiscal-sustainability issues related to federal deficits, entitlement programs and tax policies. The money was used to spearhead a massive campaign to reduce the runaway federal debt. Hysteria over the debt then prompted Tea Party newbies in Congress to hold a gun to Congress’ head by arbitrarily capping the debt. 

In the campaign to educate us to the debt’s perils, we were repeatedly warned that when foreign lenders decided to pull the plug, the US would have to declare bankruptcy, that we were mortgaging our grandchildren’s futures and selling them into debt slavery; and that all this was the fault of the citizenry for borrowing and spending too much. The American people, who are already suffering massive unemployment and cutbacks in government services, would have to sacrifice more and pay the piper more, just as in those debt-strapped countries forced into austerity measures by the International Monetary Fund.

The fear mongering, however, is a red herring. A sovereign nation can always find the money to pay debts owed in its own currency. The Federal Reserve can buy the debt itself – just as it has been doing. That alternative would effectively eliminate the problem of interest, since the Fed returns its profits to the government after deducting its costs. 

Alternatively, Congress could reclaim the power to issue money from the banks and fund its budget directly. The US could pay its bills using debt-free US Notes or Greenbacks, just as President Lincoln did to avoid a crippling debt during the Civil War. Congress could do this without changing any laws. Congress is empowered to “coin money,” and the Constitution sets no limit on the face amount of the coins. It could issue a few one-trillion dollar coins, deposit them in an account and start writing checks.

Neither option need inflate prices. As long as the money is used to purchase goods and services, the result will simply be to increase demand, increasing production. Prices will not increase until the economy reaches full employment and, at that point, any excess in the money supply can be taxed back to the government, keeping prices stable.

The key to all this is that our debt is owed in our own currency – US dollars. Our government has the power to fix its solvency problems itself, by simply issuing the money it needs to pay off or refinance its debt. The US federal debt has been carried on the books since 1835. It has NEVER been paid off during that time, but just continues to grow. This has not hurt the economy, which for most of that period has been among the most vibrant in the world. The federal debt IS the money supply. All of our money except coins is created as bank debt. Historically, when the deficit has been reduced, the money supply has been reduced along with it, throwing the economy into recession.

The real problem with a growing federal debt is the interest on it, which WILL become an insurmountable burden if allowed to grow exponentially. Interest paid on the federal debt in 2010 was $414 billion, or about one-half of personal income tax receipts. That’s about as high as we dare let it go. But this problem can be eliminated either by funding the debt through the nation’s own central bank, effectively interest free; or by the Treasury issuing the money outright, interest free.

The burgeoning debt has been blamed on reckless government and consumer spending; but the debt crisis was created, not by a social safety net bought and paid for by the taxpayers, but by a banking system taken over by Wall Street gamblers. The banking debacle of 2008 caused credit to collapse, businesses to go bankrupt and unemployment to soar, drastically reducing the federal tax base. If anyone should be held to account, it is Wall Street; but the bankers were bailed rather than jailed and the taxpayers got billed for the crime.

We have been deluded into thinking that “fiscal responsibility” is something for our benefit, something we actually need in order to save the country from bankruptcy. In fact, it has simply been an excuse to impose radical austerity measures on the people, measures that benefit the 1 percent while locking the 99 percent in a dungeon of debt peonage.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Image by Donkey Hotey

MEDIA ROOTS — Reminiscent of the December 2010 act of self-immolation in Tunisia by Mohammed Bouazizi, which helped inspire the globally influential “Arab Spring,” a Chinese man surnamed Wang has undertaken this extreme form of protest at China’s Tiananmen Square on October 21.  Whereas, Mr. Bouazizi’s act of protest was widely covered around the world, Mr. Wang’s act of self-immolation was quickly wiped from public record, consciousness, and memory per China’s state-censored media in Orwellian fashion. 

A state-issued report narrated the action as an isolated case of personal dysfunction.  But the fact that such reports leak out every year in China points to Mr. Wang’s frustration with China’s justice system as being indicative of larger structural problems, similar to the conditions of corruption which led Tunisia’s Bouazizi to commit the ultimate form of protest. 

Censorship in America over such selfless acts of protest exists as well. In 2004, a man named Malachi Ritscher publically burned himself to death in protest to the Iraq War. In the statement he released before self-immolating, he explains that he would rather die than to pay taxes to kill others abroad. The corporate press painted him as a lone lunatic instead of giving heed to his powerful and eloquent message.

MR

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THE TELEGRAPH— The incident – which happened on October 21 – appeared nowhere in China’s censored state media, but was also witnessed by a Daily Telegraph reader who photographed the aftermath as Chinese police rushed to douse the flames using fire extinguishers.

“The man did it right in front of me. He stepped over the low railing in front of the cycle-lane that runs past the picture of Chairman Mao. He was only two or three metres away from me,” recalled Alan Brown, a retired RAF Engineer from Somerton, Somerset.

“He said something quickly and a policeman nearby was suddenly agitated, but this chap whipped out his lighter and set himself on fire. Without being melodramatic, he looked straight at me and set himself on fire.

Despite being witnessed by several hundred other Chinese bystanders there is no record or mention of the incident either in China’s heavily censored state media, or on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, where news deemed sensitive or undesirable by the state often leaks out.

Chinese authorities in Tibet have also been dealing with a wave of self-immolations this year, with 11 monks and nuns setting themselves on fire in protest against Chinese rule in the Tibetan region since March.

Read more about Chinese man sets himself on fire in Tiananmen Square.

© 2011 Telegraph Media Group Limited

Photo by flickr user Gary Lerude