MEDIA ROOTS – Felipe Messina of Media Roots speaks with Alexa O’Brien of US Day of Rage and Co-Organiser of Occupy Wall Street to ask her about the origins of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its looming interface with MoveOn and the Democratic Party, our broken U.S. electoral system, the false left/right paradigm of our U.S. two-party dictatorship, and what we can do about all of this through collective action and the taking of the public square, physically and digitally.

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MR:  “Alexa O’Brien, with US Day of Rage, is co-organiser at the Liberty Square Occupy Wall Street sit-ins, protests, and encampment, begun on September 17, 2011.  Alexa, thank you very much for your time.”

USDOR:  “Oh, thank you for inviting me.”

MR:  “US Day of Rage organised simultaneous actions  across the United States with other groups to raise awareness of the growing inequality facing the working-class in the United States (and globally).  Um, can you talk about how the organisations came together in the beginning, at the outset?”

USDOR:  “This is a really interesting story.  And, um, you know, US Day of Rage started on March 10^th.  That’s when the profile US Day of Rage and the profile #USDOR, which is a hashtag that we also used on Twitter, um, in the subsequent weeks, were parked, essentially.  Um, and, you know, one night I had been covering Bahrain and Egypt, but Bahrain very intimately for several months.  Um, and, you know, we’d be at work, ‘cos I work a full-time job and having, you know, friends of mine on Twitter emailing me pictures of, you know, heads blown open.  And, sort of, understanding that, you know, my own country had a Fifth Fleet there and that this was sort of at the, um, a couple months into Cablegate.  Sort of, seeing those revolutions sort of unfold and, um.  And, so, you know, watching the activity in Wisconsin on March 10^th, you know, what I saw was, essentially, a really dangerous level of cynicism towards government.  And, really, actually, also the complete blockade of political engagement by what are, essentially, corporate interests.  Um, and so, you know, we started the profile and, much like many things this year, this year has been like a magical year.  It’s, it’s been a very bizarre year.  We got a thousand followers within a week.  It was very weird.  And we knew at that point, US Day of Rage knew that we had, we had a responsibility because we had the kind of, um, what we believed was, sort of, level-headedness and ability to, sort of, get to core problems.  Um, so we wanted to create a space for Americans to be able to voice their grievances against government without the ideological clap-trap that you find in the corporate media.  You know, these, sort of, like, spectacles of arguments.”

MR:  “Right.  I’ve heard David Graeber speak on programmes like Democracy Now! talking about Adbusters, um, kind of initiating a lot of the Occupy Wall Street actions.  Was that similar to your experience?  Was that someone that, uh, did you work with David Graeber and Adbusters and those folks?”

USDOR:  “Well, Adbusters is a magazine and, you know, uh, the, saving our nation from becoming a totalitarian nightmare isn’t a competition and it’s not a sporting event.  So, certainly, many people have played a role in Occupy Wall Street.  And Occupy Wall Street at this point is, you can be parents, but once your children, you know, you give birth to your children and they, they hit a certain age, you know, they become autonomous creatures.  And that’s what Occupy Wall Street is now.  And we respect it as such.  Um, I’m not sure I, I understand what Mr. Graeber’s role was in, I don’t know much about him.  I did see him at General Assembly meetings.  It’s my own experience that, um, you know, I look at Occupy Wall Street from this perspective:  there were a few people within the General Assembly that acted in an independent fashion, except for the Food Committee, um, headed by Chris Underscore and, um, also the Tactical Committee, um, that, basically, you know, combed Lower Manhattan, sort of, trying to, uh, ascertain logistics.  Um, there were mostly independent people who took it upon themselves to organise things so that the protest was safe.  For one thing, you know, the General Assembly, prior to September 17^th, didn’t have any consensus on whether or not it was violent or non-violent in ideology.  You know, we, at US Day of Rage, organised all the non-violent civil disobedience actions.  We made sure in early August that there were actually, uh, videos of civil disobedience talks.  Um, so that people who we reached through digital outreach, um, were able to understand, at least, de-escalation tactics or the idea of non-violent civil disobedience.  The Arts & Culture Committee, Lorenzo and, uh, you know, Jez Bold, I mean, there’s so many people in the Arts & Culture Committee, they were just, and the Outreach Committee, they were phenomenal.  I think what ended up happening, and this is my understanding, I mean, there’s a lot of untold stories and, perhaps, they should remain untold because it doesn’t really matter.  But, if you look at what digital did for this, digital, essentially, magnified the outreach of this particular action of people in New York.  You know, the act of Take the Square, Antibanks, US Day of Rage, WL Central, ROAR Magazine, I mean, all of these, uh, magnified the, and created an exponential awareness and outreach for this action, so that it became what it was.”

MR:  “What I’m interested in is this further magnification of the entire Occupy Wall Street, um, and as MoveOn.org, for example, seems to, uh, begin, uh, its involvement.  Um, well, I understand Occupy Wall Street as an umbrella brand, uh, basically for the organic, grassroots, uh, the one thing in common is the horizontalist philosophy of the General Assemblies of everyday people participating in, uh, this Wall Street Occupation.  Um, and I understand the OccupyWallStreet.org as a, basically, an unofficial de facto online resource.  And that website lists various links, um, from the NYC General Assembly to the We Are the 99% to, your organisation, US Day of Rage.  Um, what impressed me about the interviews that I’ve heard from you, Alexa, are the, um, the critique of the electoral system and, uh, the need for electoral reform, which, since the Occupy Wall Street protests have been magnified, it seems to have largely been absent.  Is this something that I’m missing?  Or is this, uh, how do you see this playing out?”

USDOR:  “Well, you know, one of the things I always say, and, you know, and I quite mean it, you know, I’m a nobody.  And I’m not master of the universe, you know?  To me this—”

MR:  “Sure.”

USDOR:  “—act is an act of conscience.  I can’t see into the future.  I do know that it’s my moral responsibility, as a citizen, and especially someone who, you know, while I did raise children, I don’t have any children that I’m responsible for, at present.  And, therefore, I have much more, I feel like I have more responsibility, you know, myself, because I can take the risk of sticking my neck out and not having to worry about feeding babies.  You know?”  

MR:  “Sure.”

USDOR:  “So, to say this like really specifically, um, US Day of Rage has always had one demand, right?  You know, free and fair elections essentially remedy a myriad ills and abuses of a government that preys on the resources and the spirits of citizens.  Why were Americans so afraid before September 17^th?  One of the most beautiful parts of this whole Occupation Movement across the country is that Americans are starting to lose the fear.  You know, what is the public square?  There are several institutions to democratic society and, you know, we don’t have an opinion on the Left or the Right in any kind of sense.  Like, really, frankly, the ideological bitchfest, excuse my language, of corporate media is really, actually, not the Left or the Right.  It’s, it’s a corporate spectacle.  It doesn’t really represent the hearts and minds of millions of Americans about what’s really in their self-interest.”

MR:  “Right.”

USDOR:  “So, the public square, the press, our elections, these are institutions that underpin the stability and the justness of a society, especially, a democratic society.  So, when you have protests that are conducted like photo opportunities for stars and celebrities where you’re kettled into, essentially, cattle cages and you, you know, hoist your rubber bracelet and say, you know, your piece, it does nothing.”   

MR:  “Right.”

USDOR:  “And we knew that.  We knew that.  So, in order to reform our elections we knew we had to start at the most basic, uh, point of the citizen, which is the public square.  You know, I was joking around with one of the founders of Take the Square like, probably, in maybe April and saying, you know, he was like, ‘well, what about take the square in America.’  And I was like, ‘are you talking about Take the Walmart?  Like, what?  Which squares are you talking about?  Because civic space in the United States is completely fiscalised.”

MR:  “Right, you were talking about that in an interview on The Morning Mix with Davey D and, uh, that was something that gave him pause.  Can you talk more about that?”

USDOR:  “You know we look at problems, like, structurally and in terms of how, what gives people, what enfranchises people?  ‘Cos people always say, ‘well, Americans are apathetic.’  And I don’t doubt that there aren’t apathetic citizens in different countries across the globe.  But it’s really, Americans are demoralised because they know, that on some level, that their elections are a farce.  They know that the legislation that we put out there is a gross aberration of the will of the citizens.  And, you know, it’s like a bad marriage, you know, you don’t have to even get too complicated about it.  If my spouse is off stealing money from our bank account, cheating at, you know, with 15 other people, you know, I’m not gonna be emotionally engaged.  I might stay married.  But I’m not gonna engage in the marriage in an authentic, full-bodied way.  Well, similarly, with Americans in government.  You know, if our government is out there cheating on us, you know, lying to us, spending our money without talking to us, and then giving us some kind of excuse.  Americans disengage ‘cos it’s a lie.”

MR:  “Right.  You know, I’ve seen images from the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York and elsewhere indicating people are tired of the two-party system.  Yet, it’s st-, the, uh, that disaffection with the two-party system or the false left/right paradigm is not really something that I hear on the media and not even on the progressive media.  Mostly, of course, there’s gonna be, uh, discussion and illuminating complaints with the war, you know, anti-war messages and, uh, with economic inequality, anti-Wall Street messages, but the electoral process seems to be something that’s kind of taboo.  It’s not really discussed.  And as we move towards, uh, the 2012 Election year, it just seems like we’re heading towards another year where, uh, we might end up with the same type of, uh, leaders in power.  Is this something that you see?  Does US Day of Rage address this?”

USDOR:  “Well, we do.  I mean we have a plan.  Basically, we are basically taking, firstly, we took a couple weeks, just simply getting grounded again, um, into phase two.  I mean, phase two for us, just to be clear, I mean we called the Occupation of, we endorsed the call for the Occupation of Wall Street because when we talk about taking the money out of politics you wanna go right to the source.  And, like, let’s be honest.  Who are, you know, let’s talk about the pseudo-Left, so to speak.  You know the Democratic Party, I mean, who are their backers?  It’s Wall Street.”

MR:  “Right.”

USDOR:  “You know the Republican Party.  Who are their backers?  It’s Wall Street.  I mean, these are fickle interests.  You know, they don’t really care about the Left or the Right.  They just care about themselves.  So, second to that, you know, we are basically organising now for a call to an Article V Constitutional Convention.  And what that means is, most Americans don’t know this, ‘cos we’ve never done one.  But the framers created a method for escaping from what they called ‘captured government.’  And that’s what we have now is a government captured by factions.  Okay, so, think about government.  Right?”

MR:  “M-hm.”

USDOR:  “Think about the Constitution.  You and I could sit here and pretend we’re on Crossfire and we—”

MR:  “Right.”

USDOR:  “—could talk about the difference between Executive power, which is the power to fight wars, versus Legislative.  But, really, is there any difference when both are owned by Goldman Sachs?”

MR:  “Not much.”

USDOR:  “No, there isn’t.  So, it, it’s a breakdown of checks and balances.  So, they created this Article V Constitutional Convention capability, which means that if 34 States pass resolutions, at the state level, calling for a Convention, all sides would have the opportunity to talk about the changes they believe would restore democracy.  And, so, we could bypass Congress and the Senate and the Executive and the Judicial branch and just get this done.  You know, overturn corporate personhood, you know, overturn Citizens United.  Or, you know, it’ll, it can happen in one amendment.  The point is that, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the NYPD, in conjunction with the CIA, whom they work with, they all defend, look, Wall Street’s still blockaded.  You know, on September 17^th the NYPD occupied Wall Street.  You know, it’s pro-, they will protect banks and corporations’ First Amendment rights under Citizens United.  But they’ll Mace a girl on a sidewalk who’s peaceably standing there in dissent against the system that doesn’t represent her and gawd knows what else.  You know?”

MR:  “Exactly.  That’s right.  This reminds me of, you know, I’ve heard, earlier this year, Ralph Nader talk about, um, I think he talked about a Constitutional Convention for, um, revoking the, uh, corporate personhood.  Is this the same, is this same process that, are you aware of Ralph Nader’s approach that he’s mentioned earlier this year?”

USDOR:  “I’m not aware of Mr. Nader’s approach with regards to a Constitutional Convention.  I do know that he has, sort of, nine points for electoral reform.  Those are, as far as I understand, you know, I’m a human being, I don’t know everything, so hopefully, I’m not getting this wrong, but, you know a lot of them have to do with, like, getting rid of earmarks, open ballot access, holiday voting for working people, so that they can actually vote, uh, honest and open debates, you know, full and balanced representation.  I mean, there’s a lo-, tightly drawn districts.  You know, those are all very honourable suggestions.  I mean, part of the reason and, I’m gonna take a deep breath, so I don’t completely talk your ear off here.  Um, we really wanna just cut to the chase.  You know, like, let’s just make it so that corporations are not people in the eyes of the law.  Or if they are that they are liable for the same things that people are.”

MR:  “Right.  And, uh, kind of going over the point that I mentioned earlier about us living in a kind of a false left/right paradigm, where people perceive the Republicans as the bad guys and the Democrats as the good guys and, uh, the choices being limited to those two and with this opportunity for consciousness-raising with the whole Wall Street occupations spreading across the country, it seems like a really good opportunity for people to, kind of, look beyond that.  And, yet, we’re still, most people are still gonna vote, so it just seems kind of logical to expand the two-party system.  Is that, would that be a half-measure, in your view?  Or is that something that US Day of Rage looks at?

USDOR:  “It’s not a half-measure.  I mean, any kind of political engagement that restores democracy we don’t consider a half-measure.  I mean, listen, we’re human beings.  A lot of us are working people who are just normal, average everyday citizens.  And so, you know, we support and we engage with the larger discussions from other groups, other Constitutional Convention groups, other people who wanna reform our elections, even, you know, the General Assembly at New York City.  I mean, we’re individual members of that body.  So, no, I mean, I hope that any group that wants to engage in electoral reform approach us and we will approach them because united, you know, we can actually get this done.” 

MR:  “Yes, so—“

USDOR:  “And the other thing, too, is that we have a way of getting it done.”

MR:  “Yeah, that’s exactly right.  And with the whole Occupation Wall Street spreading across the country and, if the Occupations persist, it seems like the Article V Constitutional Convention can seem like a very likely possibility.”

USDOR:  “It’s true.  And also, you know, social media has also done wonders in many, many areas and sectors of America’s political conscience.  You know, take, for example, an American I have great respect for, Brandon Neely, a former Gitmo guard, who found his, people who he was a prison guard and detained at Guantanamo.  He reached out to them several years ago and made direct amends to them over Facebook.”

MR:  “Oh, wow.”

USDOR:  “So, the reality of social media, which I think some, the press is just beginning to understand is, you shouldn’t torture people.  But you cannot torture people today because we will find you and we will see your face on Twitter and Facebook.  Now, Neely is a, a vanguard.  I mean, he’s spoken out about Gitmo, so I’m not talking about Mr. Neely per se.  But I’m saying, you know this, earlier on in the year, um, WL Central and myself and on the media, the Senator from Hawaii Tweeted me to confirm that a Republican had placed the anonymous hold on the Whistleblower Protection Act.  So, there are a lot of things that you could do with social media that we couldn’t do before.  And we’re, we just can’t wait to get to it when it comes to the Article V Constitutional Convention.”

MR:  “So, you don’t have any fears that a large organisation like MoveOn.org might subvert the more grassroots, radical, message of the, um, loosely collective Occupy Wall Street folks?”

USDOR:  “What I’ve learned strategically with things like this is that, you know, it wouldn’t surprise me if the American, you know, I’m talking in a general way.  Right?”

MR:  “Right.”

USDOR:  “If the American brain, it needs to unravel from the partisan, you know, the culture war is over, everybody lost.  Right?”

MR:  “Right.”

USDOR:  “The culture war they’ve grown up with.  But the reality of it is that the game generation, the internet generation, does not trust traditional forms of organised politics.  You know, we have learned how to engage with each other through weak social ties online and that has also transferred into our lifestyle.  So, we might lose a few more rounds.  Hopefully, the U.S. government won’t take drastic action.  Um, I think with this movement into the political sq-, into the civic square we have started to change the game.  But it’s like the traditional media.  It’s like, I’m not worried whether or not they’re covering us because they are becoming obsolete.”

MR:  “M-hm.”

USDOR:  “We are getting our information from Davey D on Twitter and then listening to his radio show, or our friends in Bahrain, or our friends in Egypt.  So, more will be revealed.”

MR:  “Yeah, that’s interesting that, well, I heard the input from Egyptians into the original organising for the Occupy Wall Street protests.”

USDOR:  “Yeah, well, it was really funny because right when we were starting to go viral in Egypt there was like a billion Arabic comments on our Facebook profile.  And it was really hilarious because it was appealing to all the racism against Muslims, like, in certain parts of the United States.  So, we were sitting here, we were like, we’re like, ‘we’re an American organisation.’  They’re like, the Egyptians found us and they’re like giving us all this advice.  It was really funny.  Um, but it’s all good, you know?  It’s all good.” 

MR:  “They held, I was gonna say they held out for a long time in Egypt.”

USDOR:  “Yeah.”

MR:  “ I’m hoping that the Occupy Wall Street Assemblies will hold out as long as possible.  I know it’s gonna start getting very cold soon in New York and the East Coast.”

USDOR:  “Well, something to keep in mind, too, is that digital, the internet is a civic space.  I mean, although it’s, in the United States, it’s surveilled and commercialised and there’s no privacy.  You know, there’s no privacy in the centre square either.  Did you see that large, um, monitoring station that the NYPD set up?  It’s like East Germany.  You know?”

MR:  “That’s right.”

USDOR:  “Before the wall came down.  So, you know, the bottom line is this is really about Americans, whether they’re afraid or not.  You know?”

MR:  “M-hm.”

USDOR:  “As long as we’re not afraid we have nothing to worry about.  You know, if we, so I, I’m not worried in a certain sense, like, I trust the good, um, the good people of our country, as the more connected they get, the less afraid they get.”

MR:  “That’s right.”

USDOR:  “You know, we might have a cold winter on the internet or out on the squares, but everything’s gonna be okay if we just keep plugging forward.”

MR:  “Yeah, it seems like that’s the case.  The police tactics of repression of the right to assemble and protest, to dissent, seem to be responded to very quickly, uh, with social media, the illegal arrests, police brutality involving that pepper spraying, and the kettling, of course, what looked like entrapment on the Brooklyn Bridge and so forth.  It seemed to be responded to by the people very quickly and, uh, they seem to be trying to, the police seem to have to adapt to that quick response from the people.”

USDOR:  “Yeah.  I mean, one of the discussions that we had early on because we endorsed, basically, the occupation of public sidewalks early on because at the time, and the situation with Zuccotti has become more sophisticated because a lot of civil rights attorneys have come in and talked about easement laws.  But originally we endorsed a call to occupy public sidewalks because we thought it was the clearest assertion of First Amendment rights.  You know, the NYPD is a para-, one of the largest paramilitary forces in the world.  They have helicopters that can see a cigarette from a mile away.  They have trucks, I’ve been told, that can see through walls.  And they photograph New Yorkers on a daily basis and keep those, you know, facial recognition software.  So, we’re talking about a serious force here.”

MR:  “Yeah.  That’s something to keep in mind.  Well, as I wrap up here do you have any final comments that you’d like to add?”

USDOR:  “Yeah.  I wanna say that, you know, free and fair elections inspire good citizenship and public service because they engage the intelligence and the genuine good will of the American people.  You know, they produce the kind of stewardship our nation desperately needs right now because they insure that citizens can influence their destiny and make genuine contributions to society.  It’s now or never.  Either we do this now or wait a hundred years and have our children grow up in a totalitarian nightmare.”

MR:  “I agree.  Alexa O’Brien with US Day of Rage is co-organiser at the Liberty Square Occupy Wall Street Occupation.  Alexa, thank you very much for your time.”

USDOR:  “Thank you so much.  Have a wonderful evening.”

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Interview and transcript by Felipe Messina for Media Roots

Photo by flickr user Sasha Y Kimel

MEDIA ROOTS – Ralph Nader answers questions from the audience at Berkeley’s Hillside Club on Saturday, October 1, 2011 at the First Annual Peter Miguel Camejo Commemorative Lecture.  [Transcript Below]

Ralph Nader discusses Occupy Wall Street, Gandhi’s ‘Seven Deadly Social Sins’, media reform, his presidential candidacy and what people can do to fight back.

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Ralph Nader:  “Gandhi’s ‘Seven Deadly Social Sins,’ you’ve probably heard them, that’s his words, ‘Seven Deadly Social Sins.’  Everyone has three words.  Gandhi was really the sound-bite champion.  He’d have been great on TV.

“‘Politics Without Principle.  Wealth Without Work.  Commerce Without Morality.  Pleasure Without Conscience.  Education Without Character.  Science Without Humanity.’

“Science is building drones.  You heard about the coming drone.  You heard about the coming drone?  This is one that’s what’s called Self-Automated.  That is, a software will select the suspects, locate the suspects, execute them.  They don’t even need a button-pusher in Nevada or Langley.  The next drone is gonna be a size of a hummingbird.  With nanotechnology, they’ll put the drone in your hair for surveillance.  You’ll never know it.  It’s a, it’s a coming, 1984 is a masterpiece of understatement. 

“And then, ‘Worship Without Sacrifice.’

“You know, that’s like the so-called organised Christians who organise for war.  You know, they organise for destroying the rights of poor people.  I wonder if Jesus Christ would’ve condemned.

“I added two more.  You gotta bring it up to date.

“Belief Without Thought.’  This is what Peter [Camejo] was against.  ‘Belief Without Thought.’  And ‘Respect Without Self-Respect.’  That’s the most important one of all ‘cos if you respect yourself you don’t say, ‘I don’t have any power.  Why should I do anything?  It doesn’t matter.  It won’t change anything.  It won’t have any effect ‘cos everyone else is not gonna do what I’m doing.’  No.  You do what you do.  And you try to talk to others to convince them.  You never say, you don’t wanna go out of your way to discomfort yourself because a million other people haven’t told you, in one way or another, that they’re doing the same thing. 

“So, the key is how to get people who know what the prob-, there are very few people in this country who are ignorant of the injustices.  I mean they get it handed to ‘em every day.  Right?  You have to, you have to have people who say to themselves that if I know something I have a moral obligation to do something about it, personally.  I don’t care if ten million people don’t do it.  I can’t live with myself, unless I do it.  And once that spreads, you’ll get ten million people.  So, that’s, that’s what we have to look ahead for.”

Question:  What do you think about the Occupy Wall Street protests?

Ralph Nader:  “Well, you know, we don’t know what it is, but it’s refreshing whatever it is.  It’s the young people, uh, probably without jobs, a sense of theatre, uh, make sure there’s no leaders, no organisers, so they’re, become [more] resistant to infiltration.  And they’re modestly violating permits.  Like, uh, the permit to march in the City of New York and, therefore, they’re provoking the police to try to channel them with these orange fences.  And they’re spreading to other areas.  And that’s the kind of spark that gets things underway. 

“I wrote a column years ago, months ago.  I said, ‘How do we know when the spark comes?  I mean, the spark doesn’t usually come from [a] predictable source.  It doesn’t come from the usual suspects, like a bunch of oppressed people in some ghetto, in some city.  It comes like the Tunisian spark, see?  Who would have ever thought a fruit peddler, slapped by a police woman who is rippin’ off his stall…?  And look what happened.  So, this may be a spark. 

“What usually launches things are totally unpredictable episodes that suddenly say to a lot of people, ‘That’s it!  We’ve had enough!’  You know?  So, we’ll see how it turns out.  They’ve got a big band coming to get a bigger crowd.  I always worry about that, if people come just for the music.  Cornel West, Michael Moore, they’ve spoken to ‘em.  Uh, the authorities are very worried about this ‘cos they saw what happened in London.  And they saw what happened in the Middle East, the Arab Spring, and all.  They’re very worried about that.  And so we’ll see.  I think we’re gonna have to wait [many] days and see what goes on.”

Question:  “A number of people have asked, Mr. Nader, given the present crisis and this Presidential year, will you make your announcement here for your candidacy for President of the United States?”  [audience chuckles]

Ralph Nader:  “No. 

“I, [audience laughs] I ran unofficially in the Green Party in 1996.  I ran a none-of-the-above, really unofficial, Candidacy in New Hampshire and Massachusetts in 1992, just none-of-the-above.  I got almost as many votes as Jerry Brown.  And he was a rival in New Hampshire.  Then I ran officially in 2000 and 2004 and 2008.  […]

“Four out five people who declared to the pollsters they were gonna vote for us, Nader-Camejo, Nader-Gonzalez, didn’t when they got in the voting booth.  They chickened out and voted for the Democrats or the Republican, whatever.  Mo-, people think all our votes would’ve gone to the Democrats.  No.  The exit polls in 2000 by a Democratic pollster have, uh, Nader-LaDuke, said that 25% of our votes would have voted for Bush, 39% for Gore, and the rest would have stayed home. 

“So, to make a long answer short, it’s time for other people to do it, uh, because, uh, I’m tired of pushing strings.  I’m tired of having a lot of people agree with our positions and they don’t put their vote behind our positions.  And, uh, unless, that’s what I mean by ‘Respect Without Self-Respect.’  We are supported on many issues by a majority of the American people.  A majority of the people wanted us on the Debates.  These are traditional poll, polling companies.  A majority of the people wanted us on the Presidential Debates.  We didn’t get on.  And a majority of the people, I mean, the people, you meet all over the country, ‘I voted for you!’  And I look at ‘em and I say, ‘Uh, where did you vote for me?  Where?  North Carolina?’  I’ll say, ‘I wasn’t on the ballot in North Carolina.’  [audience chuckles]  You know, I mean, people feel like, you know, they wanted to, but.”

Question:  “I just, feeling, hearing all this, I’m just feeling so much that, you know, we get the government we deserve.  When people voted for the lesser-of-two-evils instead of voting for their heart I felt that we really get the government we deserve.  That’s my statement.  My question to you is:  Is there any way that we can get the, uh, the telecommunications and the communications and the airwaves and all that back to the people.  That was our public domain.  And I think if we control that again, we would be able to control the length of the political season that goes on, which is interminable, because the TV, uh, people wanna make profits and they love to create fights that, that they’re not even, they don’t even care who wins.  They’re just making money.  And I think we can also get the money out of, uh, politics.  If we the people own the airwaves, we give the Candidates the right to be on those airwaves, an equal time kind of situation.  They don’t have to pay the TV, get ‘em, put ‘em on free.”

Ralph Nader:  “Yeah.  Well, that was one of the agendas we ran on.  And probably helped keep us off national TV. 

“We own the public airwaves.  We’re the landlords.  The FCC is the real estate agent.  And the radio and TV stations, the tenants.  And they pay us no rent.  They haven’t paid us any rent for this valuable property since 1934, the Communications Act of 1934.  And they decide who says what and who doesn’t say what on our property, namely the TV and radio, the public airwaves.  So, you know?  That’s an easy one, right?  I mean, who’s gonna be against controlling what we own?  Having our own audience, network, our own radio and TV.  It’s our property.  We can say we want two hours a day, here.  We want three hours a day, here.  And then we’ll rent you the rest of the time.  You’ll have to pay rent.  We’re gonna take the rent and put it into studios and reporters and programmers and producers.  And communicate with one another.  And mobilise one another on anything we want, from serious to humour.  Boy, I mean, can you imagine getting on national TV with that?  You see? 

“So, that was a larger part of the Commons.  We had a policy on the Commonwealth where we control what we own.  We own a third of the, America, the public lands and, you know, who controls it the timber, oil, gas, gold, whatever, the companies.  And we own trillions of dollars of government taxpayer R & D.  Who do you think created the internet?  Who do you think built the biotech industry?  Who do you think built the semiconductor industry?  Who do you think built the aerospace?  It was all government R & D!  You wouldn’t recognise it.  I mean, it was all government R & D, out of the Pentagon, NASA, National Institutes of Health.  Half, three-quarters of the anti-cancer drugs came from tax-payer-supported research from the National Cancer Institute with no controls on the prices that the receiving drug companies could charge us.  They were given all this free.  So, you gotta dialogue like that.  You know, you can’t do it with sound-bite. 

“But we’re shut out of our own property.  That should be the calling card.  Let’s start with our assets!  Our assets are the biggest wealth in America.  $5 trillion dollars of pension funds owned by workers.  That could control the New York Stock Exchange Members.  That could control the companies in the New York Stock Exchange.  I mean, about a third of all stock is held by worker pensions.  But, it’s not controlled by worker pensions.  It’s controlled by the banks and the insurance companies or the intermediate. 

“So, you see, it’s not that hard once you get people, uh, just thinking a little bit, getting excited.  You gotta ask ‘em the basic question, ‘Do you want power?  Or do you want to be powerless?  You want multiple choice tests?  You want power or do you want powerlessness?  So, you need thousands of people talking to millions of people.  Just like the populist tradition.  They call themselves lecturers.  I’d have [texted this, no calling].  And they talk to people.  So, if you have a thousand people who are talking to a thousand people a week with these messages.  They would talk to a million people face to face in rooms like this.  You have 10,000 people.  They talk to a thousand people a week in different venues.  You have ten million people.  That’s the way we gotta think.  The hell with the media for the meantime.  One thing they can’t stop us from doing is talking to one another.  And there are a lot of empty auditoriums and empty spaces around the country that we could use to do that. 

“That’s why we need a few very rich people, like George Soros or Ted Turner or whatever.  You know, there’s always a few tiny ones, a tiny percent.  All you need, a tiny percent to say, ‘Here’s a billion dollars.  We want you to hire 20,000 organisers in the country, all over the country.’  You will see remarkable dramatic changes.  There’s no social movement in the country that was created without organising.  And the lack of organisers delay the maturation of these movements, women’s suffrage, abolition. 

“But remember, and there’s a fella yesterday, he came out, gawd, these guys are like so predictable.  This guy was real hardcore, socialist, idealist.  He said, ‘How dare you write a book called Only the Super Rich Can Save Us.  I said, well, remember, it’s in quotes.  It’s in fiction.  He said, ‘I know!  But I saw you on TV!  You explained it.  And you think that we have to rely on rich people to mobilise the masses.’  So, I said, ‘Well, how are you gonna hire the organisers?’  And he wouldn’t listen.  So, I said, ‘Well, you ever heard of the Abolition Movement?  Slavery?’  He said, ‘Yeah.’  I said, ‘Don’t you know that a lot of proper Bostonian rich people funded William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and others?  How about the Women’s Suffrage Movement?  Some rich women funded those people.  Women who were on the ramparts all over the country.  How about the early Civil Rights Movement?  Did you ever hear?’  He, he went away by then.  [audience laughs]  ‘How about the Stern Family?  How about the Curry Family of the 1950s?  Gave a big lot.  Who’s gonna pay for those buses?  Who’s gonna pay for the expenses, the organisers?  […]

“It’s ridiculous.  But, you know what?  After he left, I said, I had the best response to him.  You always think after it’s over.  Here’s what I would’ve said to him right after that:  ‘Hey, you’re a socialist, right?’  He’d have said, ‘Damn right!  I’m proud of it!’  ‘All power to you.  You gotta fight those corporate socialists.’  Okay.  I’d say ‘Hey, you ever hear of Karl Marx?’  He’d say, ‘What?  Are you bein’ funny?’  I’d say, ‘Well, who do you think funded year after year after year Karl Marx?  His name was Friedrich Engels.  And he got co-authorship of the Communist Manifesto.’  But he funded the living expenses of Karl Marx.  And a number of children.  And he didn’t earn it writing Das Kapital. 

“So, we have to, people feel overwhelmed.  They feel depressed, discouraged.  They can’t do anything.  The country’s gettin’ worse.  The world’s goin’ to hell.  [audience chuckles]  Break it down and let’s each do our thing.  And then build it.  Someone strikes gold with a enlightened billionaire whose in their 80s or 90s and has a sense of posterity and is quite enlightened.  As far as I’m concerned, if you had two multi-billionaires givin’ us 15, 20 billion.  And mind you, some of these people are worth 30, 40 billion.  15, 20 billion’s nothing.  You can turn the country around.  How do I know?  I wrote 700 pages of this book only just to prove it.  Very, very detailed.  Once the money, the resources, top-down, bottom-up, movement.”

***

Photo by flickr user Sound From Way Out

MEDIA ROOTS- Ralph Nader continues to be one of the most honest U.S. political analysts, despite being such an influential public citizen.

Too often, political pundits spin us with ‘horse race’ coverage that’s confined within a false left/right paradigm, and report under the assumption that U.S. voters are satisfied with the two-party system.  In recent interviews, Ralph Nader has critically analyzed controversial topics such as ‘corporate fascism’ and the ‘US two-party dictatorship’, confronting what many other public figures shy away from.  

Despite low voter turnouts, tens of millions of U.S. citizens will still take to the ballot boxes in 2012.  So, we may as well speak plainly about the reality of our electoral system. As in past U.S. Presidential elections, millions of progressives will admit to holding their noses as they cast a ballot for the ‘lesser-of-two-evils’, instead of voting their consciences or demanding free and fair elections.  Yet, such topics remain taboo. 

As Occupy Wall Street protesters across the country increasingly express disaffection with both corporate-driven political parties, it’s remarkable how difficult it is for our national discourse to lay bare the false left/right paradigm that is propped up by the establishment.  OWS protesters have been photographed with signs rejecting the two-party system.  Yet, amorphous anti-greed or anti-inequality complaints, rather than fundamental structural issues, such as our broken electoral system, are disproportionately featured by the mass media.  This seems as much a cognitive question of mass psychology or taboos associated with appearing partisan, as it is one of mass media complicity in the perpetuation of the two-party system.  However, younger generations see through this false dichotomy, and we can credit those same younger generations for energizing the mass political awakening we are witnessing with the OWS movement. 

In an exclusive interview with Ralph Nader, Media Roots asked, “Do you think the game is rigged?”

“Well, of course,” Ralph Nader candidly admitted, ”two-party dictatorship, completely rigged, right down to the Presidential Debate Commission, which is a fancy phrase for a private corporation created in 1987 by the Republican and Democratic parties to get rid of the League of Women Voters, which supervised Presidential Debates up to then, and to exclude anyone who they think should not reach tens of millions of Americans.”

It may seem an obvious question.  But it’s very empowering to hear it asked plainly and answered so candidly by one of America’s greatest public citizens.

Without broadcasting meaningful discussions about the regressive consequences of perpetuating a restrictive two-party system, which groups like MoveOn, Global Exchange, Code Pink, and even A.N.S.W.E.R. seem to shy away from, progressives are held captive by the Democratic Party. 

Ralph Nader also makes an important distinction in pointing out the Koch Brothers’ astro-turfing of the original Tea Party ideals, because it demonstrates the model by which the same may occur to the grassroots OWS movement by well-funded media darlings like MoveOn. 

It’s important to not only take into consideration the hopes and aspirations of protesters on the ground, but also to follow the money back to who inevitably funds Left organizers, such as billionaire George Soros’ subsidiaries or MoveOn (which although no longer a 527, stands upon a pro-Democratic Party track record).  It may be impossible for organizers to avoid grants from funders with a vested interest in preserving the two-party system, but at least an informed citizenry can better navigate the uphill struggle toward representative democracy.  Most, including Nader, will argue it doesn’t matter from where organizing funds originate, as long as it doesn’t corrupt the message.  However, if the message emanating from mass demonstrations seems to avoid critical electoral analysis, progressive activists may be playing into pro-Democratic influences unwilling to confront such fundamental structural problems.

For example, the Keystone XL protests in D.C. earlier this year was funded in part by the Rockefeller Brothers– the No Tar Sands Oil campaign was funnelled financially through Corporate Ethics International.  This money trail may help explain why none of their spokespersons, including Bill McKibben, ever really slammed Obama or the Democratic Party beyond supplicant appeals, much less threatened withholding mass electoral support if their environmental demands went ignored.

Since well-funded groups like MoveOn (and its charismatic leaders like Van Jones) do not question the two-party system, they thereby function to perpetuate it under the pretence of grassroots transformation.  This illusion in which such groups operate only hurts real activism, progress, and change in the U.S. Even with mass protests reaching historic proportions, we still must confront the reality of a captured electoral system.

By contrast, groups like US Day of Rage, which co-organized the OWS actions from the outset, focus on electoral reform and propose an Article V Constitutional Convention outlining concrete steps, such as restoring representative democracy, abolition of corporate personhood, and the overturning of the Citizens United case. 

Critical electoral analysis is not a partisan issue– it is a question of free and fair elections. The people of this country deserve to have an electoral system which truly reflects the popular will of its people, rather than one which locks them into a false choice between two increasingly identical versions of the same thing.

It’s up to honest journalists, to citizen journalists, to resident journalists, to look beyond symptoms and to causality.  It’s up to the dialectic between independent journalists and a candid Left to broadcast critical, empirically-based, electoral analysis, to cut through the false left/right paradigm, to expose uncomfortable truths, and to help raise the consciousness of the masses toward breaking out of our restrictive two-party dictatorship paradigm. 

Written by Felipe Messina for Media Roots

Photo by flickr user Nick Bygon

MEDIA ROOTS- Abby Martin of Media Roots talks to political activist and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader about Project Censored, the landscape of media censorship, the establishment co-opting of the tea party, the two party dictatorship in the US, Obama’s exacerbation of Bush era policies and the recent assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. [Transcript Below]

Ralph Nader sits down to speak with Media Roots.

***

MR: Ralph, thanks so much for taking the time.  

Ralph Nader: Great.

MR: Why do you support Project Censored?  I know that their, last year’s, book was on your essential reading list.  Why?

Ralph Nader:  Because Project Censored focuses on the courageous media that publishes articles that the mass media doesn’t cover.  And it does it in a very clear way.  And the selection process, I think, has been pretty effective.  They take really important subjects that are censored out by the networks or the major newspapers and they find it being covered, say, in Mother Jones or Multinational Monitor or Nation magazine and they highlight it.  So, it’s a memorable way to show how much censorship there is, still, in the media because these topics that they select are extremely important ones.  They’re not marginal trivial matters.

MR: Do you think media censorship is more of a problem now than ever before?

Ralph Nader:  Well, in some ways there’s more disclosure and reporting because of the internet, because of the blogs, and the websites, and the world-wide range, like if you can’t find the story reported in the U.S., you get it from The Guardian or the independent newspapers or, you know, some newspaper abroad.  Or you see it on Al Jazeera.  So, in that sense it’s better than the past.  In the second, though, there’s far more censorship of citizen activity trying to do something about the very revelations that are reported in the newspapers.  So, you get great feature stories that are Pulitzer Prize-winning in The New York Times or The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal; and then when people rally or march or file lawsuits or give testimony about the very abuses that these papers have exposed they don’t cover it, the citizen efforts.  That is worse, by far.  

For example, we used to be able to get on the Phil Donahue Show; there’s no more Phil Donahue Show.  He opened the door for the women’s movement, the consumer movement, the environmental movement, the displaced worker movement like no one before with a huge audience of eight million people.  And nothing has replaced him since he closed down in 1996.  We used to get on Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin Shows.  They were largely entertainment shows, but they felt a responsibility to devote maybe ten, fifteen percent of their time to serious activities going on.  They, of course, have been replaced by these sadomasochistic shows that are on afternoon daily TV.  So, things are really going down.  A lot of seasoned reporters have been laid off.  Or that their contract has been bought out.  And, so, that memory and experience is not doing much.  

Then you have the embedded journalists.  You know?  Can you imagine being an embedded journalist in Iraq or Afghanistan?  That’s another way of saying, ‘Oh, we’re muzzled journalists.’  So, they’re missing all kinds of major stories and, with the budget cuts for the mass media, there’s less foreign bureaus, less reporters in bureaus in the United States for these big newspapers and television networks.  So, that, all those represent a real decay in the mass media.

MR: Absolutely.  One of the things Project Censored talks about is ‘framing’ and that’s a really crucial aspect of censorship that people don’t really realise is censorship.  And I wanted you to speak, I know that you spoke about this in your talk [here at The Hillside Club in Berkeley], but I wanted you to speak about the framing of how the media portrays elections and that whole false dichotomy of the lesser-of-two-evils, um, basically we’re fear-mongered into voting against our interests.  And I just wanted you to speak about that, even though you did already, just, you know, something that you can say just ‘cos it is, it’s infuriating. 

Ralph Nader:  Yeah, well, framing is a way of excluding.  Let’s face it.  I mean, if they ‘frame’ the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of pro-Israeli, then they slaughter in Gaza, and its precedence and the fact that it was  Israelis that broke the truce, uh, and, and had a continuing embargo, uh, it would’ve been a completely different reporting situation.  

And, and, that’s true in terms of covering the Pentagon, covering the predatory seizure of our natural resources on Federal lands, which belong to us, or a whole host of subjects that simply are not covered.  For example, the stealing of, from the health care expenditures, it’s about $250 billion dollars out of a $2.7 trillion dollars.  That’s $250 billion, with a ‘b.’  

And there’s a professor at Harvard, he’s documented this.  His name is Malcolm Sparrow and he’s the world authority on this and he’s been a consultant on this to various states and federal agencies.  He’s almost never interviewed by the public, eh, the newspapers or by the TV.  And he’s a great source.  That amount of money would cover the uninsured.  And every year it’s $250 billion dollars.  

MR: It’s called shared sacrifice.  Come on Ralph, we all need to cut expenses, except the Defense, of course.

Ralph Nader:  Yeah.  No, this is an oligarchy and a plutocracy, you know?  Pick your word.  And that infects the media, ‘cos the media, the mass media is a conglomerate of corporations.  And six or seven now control the bulk of TV, radio, uh, magazine, newspaper circulation.  When Ben Bagdikian did his first study over 25 years ago it was about 50 media corporations that had that ratio of control.  It’s down to about six now.  So, you see where it’s going.  And that’s why Fox News has such a influence.  And that’s why the Dow Jones has, because they get a bigger, bigger share by fewer and fewer corporations serving their investments.  I mean, they’re out for profits.  When the Wall Street Journal does all these editorials, always against consumer protection, against civil justice, tort system, against, uh, fear of taxation.  Nobody has, ever says, ‘hey, these Wall Street Journal editorials, they’re not so more than servicing the page after page of corporate advertising in their newspaper!’  Why give them any credibility at all?

MR: Right.  Exactly.  And one of the stories in this year’s book is about the Tea Party and the ‘astro-turfing’ of what happened in this. And it, kind of, just goes along with the whole thing that you, you know, there was a question in the audience, ‘oh, I just hate these Tea-baggers.’  It’s the fear that, that prevents people from really voting with their heart and from what they really want to make happen.  And you see the Tea Party was just totally co-opted and ‘astro-turfed,’ it’s not even really real.  There’s no substance there. I really liked what you said about, you know, both parties will get worse if you keep doing that.  And I was wondering if you could, maybe, just elaborate on, on why you said that.

Ralph Nader: Well, the Tea Party started out as, sort of, spontaneously, and there were a lot of different parts to it.  There were Libertarians.  There were conservatives.  There were the corporatists.  There were the militarists.  Whatever reason.  Then, it was hijacked.  And, it’s really interesting how it happened because first it was influenced in numbers, hugely exaggerated.  They really couldn’t turn out that many people.  Especially, since they had their own television network every day pushing it, the Fox Network.  So, the Washington Post wrote an article saying there wasn’t more than three hundred thousand people who had any kind of membership in these Tea Party organisations all over the country.  

So, it was hijacked because the brand name, corporatist wing of the Republican Party figured, ‘hey,’ you know, ‘this is the trademark, politically, de jour, grab it, it’s valuable!’  And, so, it’s really the wing of the Republican Party that has hijacked the Tea Party brand and appropriated this exaggerated aura, whose balloon has now been punctured by vigorous investigative reporting.  And you know, in Washington, as they say, ‘perception is reality,’ even though it doesn’t reflect any force of numbers out there in the country.  So, the Tea Party now is the conservative, corporatist wing of the Democratic, excuse me, the Tea Party now is the resurgence of the conservative, largely non-Libertarian, wing of the Republican Party.  And it’s ensconced in Congress.

MR: We interviewed Mike Gravel a couple weeks ago and he was just talking about, you know, during the 2008 Election.  He felt like the game was rigged.  He wasn’t allowed on the MSNBC or NBC debates because of GE.  How do you feel about candidates who try so hard to get in there and the game’s rigged all along?  The establishment won’t let you.  They’ll phase you out.  And we saw what happened to you in 2000 and 2004 when people, still, to this day, ‘Ralph Nader cost the Election,’ when, really, there was widespread voter fraud that no one really followed up on, even though it was very blatant.  And Greg Palast did a great report on it.  It’s just, it’s just amazing that those talking points are still perpetuated and that the game is really rigged.  I was wondering if you could talk about that.

Ralph Nader:  Well, Mike Gravel, he got on the debates early on. But he tried to wing it too much.  If he raised enough money just to have an office in Des Moines or an office in New Hampshire, by the rules of the Democratic Primary, they couldn’t have excluded him. So, he could’ve lasted a little longer and maybe got a foothold, so as to get at least as much attention as Ron Paul did, who spent time trying to raise money.  Mike Gravel has a very good proposal, but he thinks, has legs on no money.

MR: Right.  Well, do you think the game is rigged?

Ralph Nader:  Well, of course. Two-party dictatorship, completely rigged, right down to the Presidential Debate Commission, which is a fancy phrase for a private corporation created in 1987 by the Republican and Democratic parties to get rid of the League of Women Voters, which supervised Presidential Debates up to then, and to exclude anyone who they think should not reach tens of millions of Americans.

MR: How do we get people out of this paradigm that they’re living in where they need to do one or the other when both mirror each other?

Ralph Nader:  Well, they have to do what no one can stop them from doing.  That is vote their belief and conscience.  Don’t go tactical and vote for least worst.  And every four years both parties get worse.  And get out and march and demonstrate.  That’s the first rampart, uh, that get’s attention and gets more and more people on board.  And last I learned about our system, they can’t stop you from marching and demonstrating in front of the right buildings and the right places at the right time all over the country in ever greater numbers.

MR: Civil disobedience at the, I love Cornel West, kind of turnaround on that.  And I know I  said that was my last question, but I wanted you, really quickly, I just remembered, I mean as it’s still relevant that al-Awlaki assassination, you were talking about Obama’s exacerbation of a lot of Bush’s foreign policy.  And this is, I mean, is this, you’ve been in politics for a long time, is this open kind of accepted assassination now of American citizens, is this kind of par for the course, is this just playing the game of politics, or is this kind of an unprecedented thing that we should be standing up and saying what’s going on?

Ralph Nader:  President Obama, who is a Constitutional lecturer, has just torn up another part of the Constitution.  He now believes in summary execution of suspects, even American citizens, which violates the due process of law guaranteed by our Constitution.  That is an impeachable offence.  And that should be a issue in the Campaign.  He has made Bush look modest in terms of his aggressiveness abroad.  And he’s, Obama is doing exactly what he said he was gonna do.  That he thinks he can send the armed forces anywhere in the world irrespective of international law, U.N. Charter, national sovereignties, kill, injure, and crush anything that he, as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, thinks needs to be destroyed.  That is about as radical and anti-American [a] position, given the founders of our Constitution and our Constitutional heritage, as can be imagined.  It was done by an expert in Constitutional Law, the former President of the Harvard Law Review, and a Black American.  We better get worried.

MR: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Ralph.

***

MEDIA ROOTS- The news that King Abdullah would permit women to vote and run in local elections in 2015 was met with the predictable array of responses in the corporate media. Very little was said about American-Saudi relations going back more than half a century. Unmentioned were the anti-egalitarian campaigns that the plutocrats of both societies colluded on, to squash any dissent and threat to the flow and control of oil or petrodollars. 

American policymakers may rehearse and make emphatic speeches in international meetings on human rights or the status of women in other countries, but it’s pretty clear that the policies of succeeding administrations since FDR have created income inequality, political disempowerment, widows, orphans, broken societies, lack of opportunity for education, populations vulnerable to sex trafficking, patriarchy, especially in the majority-Muslim world. 

Conservatives like Laura Bush and well-intentioned but counterproductive liberals often exacerbate the situation for women worldwide, and refuse to acknowledge the role that American foreign policy–serving the interests of a global capitalist class–has in perpetuating, amplifying, and worsening disparities and trauma of women.  

MR

***

SLATE– King Abdullah announced on Sunday that Saudi women will be allowed to vote and run for office in municipal elections beginning in 2015. Saudi watchers view the move as a weaker step than allowing women to drive, a right women have been demanding publicly for more than two decades. Why did Saudi women find it easier to get the vote than a driver’s license?

Because the right to vote is meaningless. Elections are mostly symbolic in Saudi Arabia. Only half of the seats on the municipal councils are up for election, while the ruling al–Saud family appoints the other half of the members and the mayors. The councils have little power. The government reserves the right to postpone elections, as it did in 2009. There’s no guarantee that the 2015 elections, in which women are supposed to participate, will happen on time, or at all. Moreover, King Abdullah’s announcement doesn’t carry the force of law. He could change his mind at any time. Or, if the 87-year-old king isn’t around in 2015, his successor could easily go back on Abdullah’s promise to Saudi women.

While voting in municipal elections is hardly a move toward true political authority, Saudi conservatives view female driving as the first practical step away from the kingdom’s guardian system, which keeps women reliant on men. As things stand, women in Saudi cities can’t get around unless they can afford a driver or have a male family member who’s willing to chauffeur them. (Young men with many sisters have it tough in the kingdom.) Public buses have separate doors and seating areas for women, but they are slow and unreliable. Some women are afraid to ride in taxis because there have been reports of inappropriate comments by Saudi drivers. (Foreign-born drivers don’t have the same reputation, because the Saudi criminal justice system has treated immigrants brutally.)

Read more about Why is King Abdullah Willing To Let Saudi Women Vote But Not Drive Cars?

© 2011 Slate 

Photo by Flickr user Dmunk–huulei