Judge Mark Fuller

A request for admissions can be one of the most entertaining documents in a lawsuit. The requesting party, in so many words, is saying, “We all know the following statements are true, so why don’t you admit to them so we can haggle about something else?”

It can be a rare moment of clarity in a legal action, where one party is trying to cut through the many layers of BS and establish facts. That doesn’t mean the receiving party is going to admit to everything–or anything–in the request. But the effort to get at what one party considers to be the clear truth can be most enlightening.

From that standpoint, a request for admissions in a divorce case involving U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller certainly does not disappoint. Fuller is a George W. Bush appointee who is best known for presiding over the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and codefendant Richard Scrushy, the former CEO of HealthSouth Corporation.

Lisa Boyd Fuller is suing the judge for divorce. If even half of the items in her request for admissions are true, it’s a wonder Judge Fuller could even pay attention during the Siegelman case–much less rule correctly on key matters of law, with the freedom of two men at stake. (You can read the Fuller request for admissions at the end of this post.)

Lisa Fuller’s request is filled with sex, drugs, and violence–but no rock and roll (so far). The 18 items hint at a judge with a clouded mind, a nasty temperament, a lust for women other than his wife, and a monumental sense of entitlement.

The process for a request for admissions here in my state is governed by Rule 36 of the Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure. It’s one of my favorite rules because it essentially says, “Let’s dispense with all the posing and posturing and get on the record what we all know to be the case–that these statements are true.” A savvy defense lawyer, of course, can take steps to ensure that the truth is clouded–and Mark Fuller’s lawyer is likely to do just that. But you at least have to admire the thought behind Rule 36.

Here is how the committee comments to the Alabama rule sum things up:

The purpose of this rule is to expedite the trial and to relieve the parties of the cost of proving facts which will not be disputed at the trial and the truth of which can be ascertained by reasonable inquiry. The rule is self-sufficient, and clearly defines its purpose and limits its effect, and it should be liberally construed.

Lisa Fuller’s request for admissions can be broken down into four categories–and they are doozies. Let’s take a look:

Extramarital Affairs

1. Admit or deny that you have had an extramarital affair with a person or persons during the course of your marriage to the Plaintiff.

2. Admit or deny that you are continuing to have an extramarital affair.

3. Admit or deny that you have stayed overnight and had sexual intercourse with a person or persons other than your spouse during the course of your marriage.

4. Admit or deny that you have had sexual intercourse with a person or persons other than your spouse during the course of your marriage.

5. Admit or deny that you have admitted to your spouse that you have had sexual intercourse with a person or persons other than your spouse during the course of your marriage.

As you can see, Lisa Fuller and her attorney, Floyd Minor, are not pussyfooting around. On to category No. 2:

Driving Under the Influence

7. Admit or deny that you have driven a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol during the course of your marriage.

8. Admit or deny that you have driven a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol, and with one or more of your children in the vehicle as passengers, during the course of your marriage.

Domestic Abuse

12. Admit or deny that you have cursed your spouse or directed abusive language to your spouse.

13. Admit or deny that you have hit, kicked, struck, or otherwise physically abused your spouse during the course of your marriage.

14. Admit or deny that you have hit, kicked, struck, or otherwise physically abused your children during the course of your marriage to Plaintiff.

Drug addiction

16. Admit or deny that you are addicted to prescription medication.

Whew, that’s a lot to digest. What can we take from this? Mark Fuller might be called “Your Honor” within the four walls of his courtroom, but it doesn’t sound like he’s behaved in an honorable fashion during his marriage. And it certainly sounds like he has no business judging the actions of others.

Mark Fuller Divorce–Admissions

Roger Shuler, a regular contributor to The Public Record, resides in Birmingham, Alabama. A 1978 graduate of the University of Missouri, Shuler worked 11 years as a reporter and editor for the Birmingham Post-Herald before working 19 years in several editorial positions at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He blogs at Legal Schnauzer.

Tarek Mehanna (photo: FreeTarek.com)

Many bloggers and the press have reposted Tarek Mehanna’s impassioned speech to the court as he was sentenced to 17-1/2 years for supposedly providing “material support” to terrorists. (See here, here, here, and especially the ACLU’s Nancy Murray’s widely quoted article at the Boston Globe here.) But few have commented on Mehanna’s charges that he was set up by an undercover agent to participate in a terrorist plot, and that he refused the agent’s overtures.

These are the relevant portions of Mehanna’s statement at his sentencing hearing (bold emphases added):

Exactly four years ago this month I was finishing my work shift at a local hospital. As I was walking to my car I was approached by two federal agents. They said that I had a choice to make: I could do things the easy way, or I could do them the hard way. The “easy“ way, as they explained, was that I would become an informant for the government, and if I did so I would never see the inside of a courtroom or a prison cell. As for the hard way, this is it. Here I am, having spent the majority of the four years since then in a solitary cell the size of a small closet, in which I am locked down for 23 hours each day. The FBI and these prosecutors worked very hard — and the government spent millions of tax dollars — to put me in that cell, keep me there, put me on trial, and finally to have me stand here before you today to be sentenced to even more time in a cell….

It was made crystal clear at trial that I never, ever plotted to “kill Americans” at shopping malls or whatever the story was. The government’s own witnesses contradicted this claim, and we put expert after expert up on that stand, who spent hours dissecting my every written word, who explained my beliefs. Further, when I was free, the government sent an undercover agent to prod me into one of their little “terror plots,” but I refused to participate. Mysteriously, however, the jury never heard this.

The Telegram and Gazette described the uproar in the courtroom when Mehanna brought up the accusations regarding the undercover agent’s attempt to recruit him into a terrorist plot.

After Mr. Mehanna said the government had sent an undercover agent to prod him into participating in a terror plot — that he refused — Mr. Chakravarty rose to call that “categorically false.” Mr. Mehanna yelled to him that “you’re a liar.”

Two U.S. marshals strode to Mr. Mehanna seated at the defense table in an orange prison jump suit, put a hand on him and spoke to him, but Judge O’Toole did not allow Mr. Chakravarty to continue.

What actually lie behind these accusations, the prosecutor’s interruption, and the Judge’s subsequent actions? (O’Toole later chided Mehanna for “lack of remorse” and “a quality of defiance.”)

The answer can be found in a February 25 posting by Mehanna at the Facebook page, “Free Tarek Mehanna.” While one can easily find online the young man’s stirring defense of himself in his April 12 sentencing statement, his statement about the attempt to frame him as part of a government-inspired terrorist “plot,” has virtually escaped coverage outside of some small blogs concerned with defending Islamic or Palestinian causes and defense (with the one notable exception of Richard Hugus at Boston IndyMedia).

This is not surprising as the widespread use of government undercover agents to gin up the terror threat in the U.S. is not fit matter for the mainstream press, who report these incidents as if they were gospel descended from the heaven populated by covert intelligence agencies. I think Mehanna’s accusations merit further investigation, and the way he describes (see below) the way the matter was kept out of court leaves little doubt that there is much to what he says.

In summary, Mehanna claims he was approached by a stranger in late 2005. This individual on numerous occasions tried to get him to “find American soldiers returning from Iraq (whose addresses he supposedly had) and kill them.” Mehanna subsequently cut off contact with this person because he would not let up on trying to seduce Mehanna into some kind of crime.

Mehanna wrote that in early summer 2011, his attorney was contacted by an AP reporter who had heard that “two sources within the NYPD had contacted her and confirmed to her that the NYPD had sent an undercover agent up to Boston to ‘befriend’ me, and try to prod me into carrying out a ‘terrorist attack,’ and that I had refused to go along (bingo!).” Mehanna’s attorneys filed a “motion asking the judge to compel the government to disclose these details so that they could be mentioned at trial.” The motion was denied after Judge O’Toole met with prosecutors in a closed hearing (closed to the defense).

Mehanna notes, “A brief mention of the motion and the hearing was made in an August 2th 2011 article in the Boston Globe, written by Milton Valencia. But the article was published before O’Toole had officially denied the motion. This was the only media attention that this incident received.” I was not able to verify there was such an article or coverage, as nothing about this comes up on Internet search or at the Boston Globe search engine.

What follows is Mehanna’s complete FB post, with only some bolding of certain text added for editorial emphasis:

My arrest and trial had little to do with “terrorism.”

The overwhelming majority of “terrorism” cases in America can fit into a category in which the FBI picks the gullible Muslim youth, sends an undercover agent to “befriend” him, and over a period of time, prod him to agree to carry out some attack. The agreement is recorded on tape. The undercover FBI agent offers the kid weapons, and arrests him as soon as he is about to proceed with the so-called “plot.” While the intended impression is that the Feds swooped in to save the day, the reality is that they “foiled” their own plot. An artificial victory, and this is the formula which you see every other day when you read the news, whose purpose is to compensate for the lack of authentic “terror plots.”

The government attempted this strategy with me, but failed. This has been one of the most underreported aspects of my case, despite it being in the public record. This is what happened:

In late 2005, I was approached by an individual whom I’d never met. Over the course of two years, he attempted to befriend me, and gradually began shifting otherwise mundane conversations to suggesting the need to “do something.” Eventually, this “something” that he was hounding me to “do” emerged as a plan of his to find American soldiers returning from Iraq (whose addresses he supposedly had) and kill them. He would show up at my house uninvited, and always try to steer the conversation in this directions, and I would steer it away and bury it, but he would never give up. Finally, I told this individual to never contact me again.

Two years later, I found myself here in a Plymouth jail awaiting trial on terrorism charges. From day one, I related this to my lawyers, and that I was 100% sure this had been an attempt by the FBI to entrap me in one of their artificial “plots” so that they could have additional firepower in this case. But my lawyers explained that without some acknowledgement from the government, it would be impossible to prove. So we filed numerous motions over the course of the two years before trial requesting exculpatory evidence (i.e., evidence that would be in my favor) from the government regarding this, but they feigned ignorance, and said that they had nothing.

Finally, in the early summer of 2011, my lawyer, Jay Carney, got a call from an Associated Press reporter who said that two sources within the NYPD had contacted her and confirmed to her that the NYPD had sent an undercover agent up to Boston to “befriend” me, and try to prod me into carrying out a “terrorist attack,” and that I had refused to go along (bingo!). Furthermore, these sources in the NYPD told this journalist that when the prosecutors in my case found out about this – the same prosecutors at my trial, Aloke Chakravarty and Jeffrey Auerhahn – they became frantic and called the NYPD to come up to Boston for a meeting, where they admonished them for “interfering” in my case. With this information, my lawyers filed an additional motion asking the judge to compel the government to disclose these details so that they could be mentioned at trial – the logic being that this is a “terrorism” trial, and here was an attempt by the government to actually push me to carry out an act of “terrorism,” and I had refused, and they were trying to cover this up. The motion was filed on July 15th, 2011.

A hearing took place in court on August 3rd, 2011 to discuss this. A number of other motions were discussed first, then at the end, Jay got up to argue this one. He mentioned to the judge tat [sic] we were seeking exculpatory evidence from the government, as they had thus far given us none. And then he mentioned that from the items we sought were details of an attempt by the NYPD to prod me to engage in a domestic attack, which I refused, etc. This was apparently the first the prosecutors knew that we were privy to this, and the surprise was evident on their faces. The judge asked them if they knew anything about this, and Mr. Chakravarty’s response was an ambiguous “we have no information from our office on this, and it is the defendant who should know,” to which Jay stood up again, faced Mr. Chakravarty, and asked: “So you’re willing to say, on record, before the court, that no members of the NYPD came up to Boston at anytime to meet with you to discuss an attempt to prod Tarek Mehanna to engage in an act of terrorism that he refused to go along with?” The prosecutor’s response, verbatim, was: “Well, I didn’t say that either…”

O’Toole said he would wait to rule on the motion, and immediately, the prosecutors requested a private meeting with him in the judge’s chambers. He granted their request. My lawyers stood outside the judge’s door as the prosecutors walked in and protested: “Well, that’s not fair. How are you going to meet with the judge privately about this motion, and we have no idea what is being said?” But the judge met with them for almost 20 minutes. We will never know what was said in that meeting, but the next morning, O’Toole denied our motion, and that was the last anyone had ever heard of it: nothing about this topic was allowed to be mentioned to the jury at trial. Not a single word.

A brief mention of the motion and the hearing was made in an August 2th 2011 article in the Boston Globe, written by Milton Valencia. But the article was published before O’Toole had officially denied the motion. This was the only media attention that this incident received.

Conversely, the baseless “shopping mall plot” received the lion’s share of media attention, and was freely introduced at trial by the government. The progression of this particular story is interesting, and quite telling as to how dishonest the government is:

-October 21st, 2009: I’m introduced to the world as having plotted to gun down shoppers at a local mall.

-10/21/09 to 10/24/11: The two year period before my trial: not a single additional detail is presented about this.

-My trial: Not only was no evidence presented to support this, but the government’s own witnesses admitted that I never participated in any such discussions, and that I in fact spoke against such ideas.

-Closing arguments at trial: The prosecutor backtracks, and says that even if these were not my ideas, that I knew people who had these ideas was enough.

In the end, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. At this point, it should be clear that my trial was about many things, but it was not about “terrorism.”

(To be continued…)

- Tariq Mehanna

One can only assume that Mehanna’s story of being approached by undercover operatives and informants, of being “recruited” into government-originated terrorists “plots” is so consistent with other such reports that what we have here is an orchestrated government program (or even, as we see with the NYPD accusations above) competing programs meant to frame-up militant Muslims, radicalized, or even just made angry, about U.S. government policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The end result is meant to feed the domestic police and intelligence agencies need for “enemies” and “threats,” the better to justify their existence. An added justification could be the government’s paranoid need to destroy what it sees as a threat — in this case Muslim “extremism” or opposition to US aims in the Muslim world — and it is using COINTELPRO methods to do just that.

I don’t doubt that bad or even deranged people exist, people who mean to cause harm to others, or who even have adopted terrorist methods as a means of furthering their cause. This certainly isn’t restricted to Muslims (as this Murray article linked above makes clear), nor even to our own time or era. But what is clear is that U.S. government agencies have acted in secrecy and in bad faith, and without any means to hold them to account, we are all Tarek Mehanna, we are all threatened by a government that feels it can any method it wishes to undermine differing points of view.

Originally published at Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

A slide from an FBI counterterrorism training manual pertaining to Muslims. Image/Wired

For those old enough to remember, reports of the latest FBI snooping must have brought back bitter memories of a now-hated program known as COINTELPRO.

COINTELPRO is the FBI acronym for a series of covert programs culminating in the 1970s directed against US domestic groups. In these programs, the Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action defined to “disrupt” and “neutralize” target groups and individuals.

The techniques were adopted wholesale from wartime counter-intelligence, and ranged from the trivial (mailing reprints of Reader’s Digest articles to college administrators) to the degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages) and the dangerous (encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers).

Today, reports of the latest FBI snooping programs create déjà vu all over again. According to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, the San Francisco FBI conducted a years-long Mosque Outreach program that collected and illegally stored intelligence about American Muslims’ First Amendment-protected religious beliefs and practices.

The ACLU charges that FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that from 2004 through at least 2008, the San Francisco FBI conducted a “mosque outreach” program through which it compiled intelligence on American Muslim religious organizations and their leaders’ and congregants’ constitutionally-protected beliefs and activities, without any suspicion of wrongdoing. The ACLU previously disclosed that the FBI turned its “community outreach” programs into a secret and systematic domestic intelligence-gathering initiative.

Now, FBI documents obtained by the ACLU of Northern California, the Asian Law Caucus, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian show that the FBI used the similar guise of “mosque outreach” to gather intelligence on mosques and Muslim religious organizations.

The organization also claims the documents also show that the FBI categorized information about Muslims’ First Amendment-protected and other entirely innocuous activities, as well as mosque locations, as “positive intelligence” and disseminated it to agencies outside the FBI. As a result, the ACLU says, the agency “wrongly and unfairly cast a cloud of suspicion over innocent groups and individuals based on their religious beliefs and associations, and placed them at risk of greater law enforcement scrutiny as potential national security threats. None of the documents indicate that the FBI told individuals interviewed that their information and views were being collected as intelligence, and would be recorded and disseminated.”

The ACLU and human rights and civil liberties groups generally have taken the position that the “FBI’s targeting of American Muslim religious organizations for secret intelligence gathering raises grave constitutional concerns because it is an affront to religious liberty and equal protection of the law. The bureau’s use of outreach meetings to gather intelligence also undermines the trust and mutual understanding necessary to effective law enforcement. Additionally, the FBI’s retention of information gathered through “mosque outreach” in its intelligence files violates federal Privacy Act prohibitions against the maintenance of records about individuals’ First Amendment-protected activity.”

The ACLU says the San Francisco FBI documents described above bear titles such as, “Mosque Outreach Liaison,” “Mosque Outreach Contacts,” or “Mosque Liaison Contacts.” Some of these documents indicate that the FBI begins its “outreach” with questions about possible hate crimes against the Muslim community, but none of the documents appear connected to a mosque protection effort initiated after 9/11 by the FBI Civil Rights Unit to guard against anti-Muslim hate crimes.

That effort operated under a “44” FBI case file number (see for example, this 2007 San Francisco FBI memorandum). In contrast, the file numbers on the “mosque outreach” documents were redacted, and many were classified “secret,” which indicates this effort was conducted under the FBI’s national security-related investigative and intelligence authorities. Although sometimes heavily redacted, all of the documents make clear that the FBI used its outreach meetings to document religious leaders’ and congregants’ identities, personal information, and religious views, practices, affiliations, and travel, as well as the physical locations and layouts of mosques.

Documentation obtained through FOIA has proved to be a treasure trove of information. But, sadly for those who enjoy spy-thrillers, their content is largely prosaic and teetering on boring. Here are but a few of many examples:

• The FBI visited the Seaside Mosque five times in 2005 for “mosque outreach,” and documented congregants’ innocuous discussions regarding frustrations over delays in airline travel, a property purchase of a new mosque, where men and women would pray at the new mosque, and even the sale of date fruits after services. It also documented the subject of a particular sermon, raising First Amendment concerns. Despite an apparent lack of information related to crime or terrorism, the FBI’s records of discussions with mosque leaders and congregants were all classified as “secret,” marked “positive intelligence,” and disseminated outside the FBI.

• The FBI met with members of the South Bay Islamic Association four times from 2004 to 2007. FBI agents documented as “positive intelligence” and disseminated outside the FBI an individual’s complaint of travel delays during the Hajj pilgrimage caused by the No Fly list, as well an individual’s conversation about the Hajj, “Islam in general,” Muslims’ safety in the U.S., and community fears regarding an FBI investigation of imams in Lodi, California. Two memoranda from 2006 and 2007 contain no descriptive information apart from the name and location of mosques contacted by the FBI, which the ACLU said might be appropriate to record in a normal community outreach context.

• Two 2008 FBI memoranda described contacts with representatives of the Bay Area Cultural Connections (BAYCC), which was formerly the Turkish Center Musalla. The first describes the history, mission, and activities of the BAYCC, the ethnicity of its members and its affiliation with another organization. The second memorandum indicates the FBI used a named meeting participant’s cell phone number to search LexisNexis and Department of Motor Vehicle records, and obtained and recorded detailed information about him, including his date of birth, social security number, address and home telephone number.

All the memoranda listed above were described as “positive intelligence” and disseminated outside the FBI. Some were classified as “secret.”

The ACLU says, “Almost every FBI memorandum described above was labeled ‘positive intelligence’, which means the information in it would be uploaded and retained in FBI intelligence files.

The ACLU points out that in its previous “Mapping the FBI” alerts, “we called on the FBI to stop using community outreach for intelligence purposes, to be honest with community organizations regarding what information is collected and retained during community meetings, and to purge all information collected improperly. The latest revelations make the need for these reforms even more urgent.”

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and elsewhere for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. He served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration and now writes on subjects ranging from human rights to foreign affairs for a number of newspapers and online journals.

A March 25 article by Mark Benjamin at The Huffington Post seriously misled readers about a link between the controversial antimalarial drug mefloquine and the mass murder in Afghanistan attributed to Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. Relying on a document he wrongly identified, and with zero evidence backing up his claims, Benjamin’s headline stated “Military Scrambles to Limit Malaria Drug Just After Afghan Massacre.” As a matter of journalistic ethics, Benjamin should apologize to his readers and retract the story.

The article begins with a dishonestly crafted lede that links the Afghan massacre with a “task order” memo from a Department of Defense (DoD) command regarding a review of mefloquine procedures, and goes on to suggest that Sgt. Bales, a victim of traumatic brain injury, may have gone psychotic from use of mefloquine and possibly committed the killings under influence of the drug. Furthermore, the article strongly implied that DoD possibly knew this and then implemented an “emergency review” of mefloquine procedures nine days after the Afghan killings.

But nothing in the record suggests this is true. The word “emergency” is never used in the one document Benjamin cites, and an actual examination of the full documentary record shows that the mefloquine review described in the article was actually ordered last January.

The history of energy exploration, mining, and delivery is best understood in a range from benevolent exploitation to worker and public oppression. A company comes into an area, leases land in rural and agricultural areas for mineral rights, increases employment, usually in a depressed economy, strips the land of its resources, creates health problems for its workers and those in the immediate area, and then leaves.

It makes no difference if it’s timber, oil, or coal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the nuclear energy industry promised well-paying jobs, clean energy, and a safe health and work environment. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima Daiichi, and thousands of violations issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, have shown that even with strict operating guidelines, nuclear energy isn’t as clean and safe as claimed. Like all other energy industries, nuclear power isn’t infinite. Most plants have a 40–50 year life cycle. After that, the plant becomes so radioactive hot that it must be sealed.

In the early 21st century, the natural gas industry follows the model of the other energy corporations, and uses the same rhetoric. James M. Taylor, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, claims on the Institute’s website, “The newfound abundance of domestic gas reserves promises unprecedented energy prosperity and security.”

The energy policy during the eight years of the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney administration was to give favored status to the industry, often at the expense of the environment. In addition to negating Bill Clinton’s strong support for the Kyoto Protocol, signed by 191 countries, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, former oil company executives Bush and Cheney pushed to open significant federal land, including the 19 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), to drilling that would disrupt the ecological balance in one of the nation’s most pristine areas.

A study by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), published in 2004 concluded that fracking was of little or no risk to human health. However, Wes Wilson, a 30-year EPA environmental engineer, in a letter to members of Congress and the EPA inspector general, called that study “scientifically unsound,” and questioned the bias of the panel, noting that five of the seven members had significant ties to the industry. “EPA’s failure to regulate [fracking] appears to be improper under the Safe Water Drinking Act and may result in danger to public health and safety.”

The following year, the Energy Policy Act of 2005—on a 249–183 vote in the House and an 85–12 vote in the Senate—exempted the oil and natural gas industry from the Safe Water Drinking Act. That exemption applied to the “construction of new well pads and the accompanying new roads and pipelines.” The National Defense Resource Council noted that the EPA interpreted the exemption “as allowing unlimited discharges of sediment into the nation’s streams, even where those discharges contribute to a violation of state water quality standards.” The exemption became known derisively as the Halliburton Loophole, named for one of the nation’s major energy companies, of which Cheney, whose promotion of Big Business and opposition to environmental policies is well-documented, had once been the CEO.

Bills introduced in the U.S. House (H.R. 2766) and U.S. Senate (S. 1215) in June 2009 to give federal regulatory oversight under the Safe Water Drinking Act to hydraulic fracturing languished. New bills (H.R. 1084 and S. 587), introduced in March 2011 in the 112th Congress, are also expected to die without a vote.

The natural gas industry has a long history of effective lobbying at the state and national level. America’s Natural Gas Alliance has four former Congressmen as lobbyists, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). Through various political action committees (PACs), the industry has contributedabout $238.7 million in campaign contributions, about three-fourths of it to Republican candidates, since 1990, according to the CRP. For the 2008 election, the gas and oil industry contributed $27.4 million, including contributions from individuals, PACs, and soft money, according to CRP data. Total contributions for the current election cycle, as of mid-March, are $20.6 million, with almost 90 percent of it going to Republicans.

At the federal level, the top recipients of oil and gas contributions during the current election cycle, according to the CRP, are former presidential hopeful Gov. Rick Perry of Texas ($833,674), Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst of Texas ($650,850), presidential hopeful Mitt Romney ($597,950), Senate Majority LeaderMitch McConnell ($264,700), and Sen. John Barasso of Wyoming ($225,400), a member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Every one of the top 20 recipients is a Republican.

Barack Obama, although significantly more environmental friendly than his predecessor, had opened up off-shore drilling just prior to the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast in April 2010. He has repeatedly spoken against the heavy use and dependence upon fossil fuels, and sees the expanded use of natural gas as a transition fuel to expanded use of wind and solar energy. Nevertheless, he has still received funding from the natural gas industry. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he received $920,922 from the oil and gas industry, according to datacompiled by the CRP. His opponent, Sen. John McCain, according to CRP, accepted $2,543,154.

In contrast, the 1.4 million member Sierra Club, since August 2010, has refused to accept any donations from the natural gas industry. The Sierra Club, which has actively opposed the development of coal as an energy source, hadreceived $27 million since 2007 from Chesapeake Energy. By 2010, “our view of natural gas [and fracking] had changed [and we] stopped the funding relationship between the Club and the gas industry, and all fossil fuel companies or executives,” says Michael Brune, Sierra’s executive director.

Mixed into Pennsylvania’s energy production is not only a symbiotic relationship of business and government, but a history of corruption and influence-peddling. Between 1859, when an economical method to drill for oil was developed near Titusville, Pa., and 1933, the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” Pennsylvania, under almost continual Republican administration, was among the nation’s most corrupt states. The robber barons of the timber, oil, coal, steel, and transportation industries essentially bought their right to be unregulated. In addition to widespread bribery, the energy industries, especially coal, assured the election of preferred candidates by giving pre-marked ballots to workers, many of whom didn’t read English.

In a letter to the editor of The New York Times in March 2011, John Wilmer, a former attorney for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), explained that “Pennsylvania’s shameful legacy of corruption and mismanagement caused 2,500 miles of streams to be totally dead from acid mine drainage; left many miles of scarred landscape; enriched the coal barons; and impoverished the local citizens.” His words serve as a warning about what is happening in the natural gas fields.

Pennsylvania’s new law that regulates and gives favorable treatment to the natural gas industry was initiated and passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly and signed by Republican Gov. Tom Corbett. The House voted 101–90 for passage; the Senate voted, 31–19. Both votes were mostly along party lines.

In addition to forbidding physicians and health care professionals from disclosing what the industry believes are “trade secrets” in what it uses in fracking that may cause air and water pollution, there are other industry-favorable provisions. The new law guts local governments’ rights of zoning and long-term planning, doesn’t allow for local health and environmental regulation, forbids municipalities to appeal state decisions about well permits, and provides subsidies to the natural gas industry and payments for out-of-state workers to get housing but provides for no incentives or tax credits to companies to hire Pennsylvania workers. It also requires companies to provide fresh water, which can be bottled water, to areas in which they contaminate the water supply, but doesn’t require the companies to clean up the pollution or even to track transportation and deposit of contaminated wastewater. The law allows companies to place wells 300 feet from houses, streams and wetlands. The law also allows compressor stations to be placed 750 feet from houses, and gives natural gas companies authority to operate these stations continuously at up to 60 decibels, the equivalent of continuous conversation in restaurants. The noise level and constant artificial lighting has adverse effects upon wildlife. As a result of all the concessions, the natural gas industry is given special considerations not given any other business or industry in Pennsylvania.

Each well is expected to generate about $16 million during its lifetime, which can be as few as ten years, according to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center (PBPC). The effective tax and impact fee is about 2 percent. Corbett had originally wanted no tax or impact fees placed upon natural gas drilling; as public discontent increased, he suggested a 1 percent tax, which was in the original House bill. In contrast, other states that allow natural gas fracking have tax rates as high as 7.5 percent of market value (Texas) and 25–50 percent of net income (Alaska). The Pennsylvania rate can vary, based upon the price of natural gas and inflation, but will still be among the five lowest of the 32 states that allow natural gas drilling. Over the lifetime of a well, Pennsylvania will collect about $190,000–$350,000, while West Virginia will collect about $993,700, Texas will collect about $878,500, and Arkansas will collect about $555,700, according to PBPC data and analyses.

Tower for drilling horizontally into the Marcellus Shale Formation for natural gas, from Pennsylvania Route 118 in eastern Moreland Township, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, USA. Photo/Wikimedia

Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 looked at a state gag order on physicians; Part 3 examines why Pennsylvania is giving special consideration to the natural gas companies.

This new “APA members-initiated” proposal is spear-headed by Linda Woolf, the task force chair, and Ellen Garrison, APA’s Senior Policy advisor and “staff liaison” for the task force. None of the supporters of the successful 2008 APA member referendum to end psychologist participation at national security sites that fail to meet international human rights standards have been asked to participate on the new “task force.” Other task force members include psychologists Laura Brown, Kathleen Dockett, Julie Meranze Levitt, and Bill Strickland.

As Coalition for an Ethical Psychology note in their statement reproduced below, three of the five current task force members actually opposed that referendum, which was passed with nearly 60& of the vote. The referendum has never been operationally instituted by APA, which has failed to date to ever state its opposition, for instance, to the presence of psychologists at Guantanamo, a US national security setting long held to be out of compliance with international human rights standards.

But the facilitators of US torture at APA (despite their verbiage to the contrary) must never read articles like this one from only last month:

(Reuters) – The United States is still flouting international law at Guantanamo Bay, despite President Barack Obama’s election pledge to shut the facility, the United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay said on Monday.

“It is ten years since the U.S. Government opened the prison at Guantanamo, and now three years since 22 January 2009, when the President ordered its closure within twelve months. Yet the facility continues to exist and individuals remain arbitrarily detained – indefinitely – in clear breach of international law,” Pillay said in a statement.

The PENS report was fatally compromised by the overwhelming presence of national security/military psychologists. The new “task force” may be slightly differently constituted, as it is heavily loaded with members from APA’s Division 48, the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence. But then, we have been living in an Orwellian world for decades now, and it’s unlikely the new composition will fool very many people. Div. 48 is well-known for having as a group having opposed the 2008 referendum.

Task force member Dr. Stickland, from APA’s Division 19, the Society for Military Psychology, is also the president of The Human Resource Research Organization (HumRRO). As Bryant Welch, himself a former APA official pointed out in an article at Huffington Post, “Today, fifty-five percent of HumRRO’s budget comes from the military”:

In 1951 the military established The Human Resource Research Organization (HumRRO) to develop techniques for “psychological warfare.” HumRRO was run by psychologist Dr. Meredith Crawford who spent ten years as APA treasurer and was deeply involved in APA activities for three decades. Crawford’s former student, Raymond Fowler, became Chief Executive Officer of APA in 1989 and stayed in that position until 2003…. The current President of HumRRO, psychologist William Strickland, has been an outspoken supporter of APA’s policies on the torture issue. He served on the APA Council of Representatives throughout the APA deliberations on torture.

And so it goes.

The following is a statement (PDF) by the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, which has been spearheading the drive to annul the PENS report. (The original statement announcing the new APA “grassroots task force,” can be found here.)

Coalition Rejects New “Task Force”

With the support of the Board and Administration of the American Psychological Association (APA), a self-appointed group of APA members has just announced the creation of a “Task Force to Reconcile Policies Related to Psychologists’ Involvement in National Security Settings.” Superficially, the formation of this task force appears to be a step forward in addressing critical issues of human rights and professional ethics. But the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, referenced in the task force’s announcement, opposes this initiative for many reasons. Our call for annulment of the deeply flawed PENS Report has gained broad support. Yet this new task force attempts to redefine priorities and deflect attention away from this urgent issue, asserting that “the PENS report offers unique contributions to APA policy” which need to be integrated into a “unified, comprehensive APA policy.” As such, this task force is primarily an “anti-annulment” initiative. If successful, its agenda will further enshrine PENS policies – policies that were adopted through a fundamentally unethical process and that resulted in grievous harm and the tarnishing of our profession.

Any attempt to clarify possible ambiguities in APA’s statements and resolutions bearing on torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment should be postponed until after the PENS Report has been officially annulled. Otherwise, from the outset the presumption will be that it is ethically permissible for psychologists to serve in aggressive operational psychology[1] roles, including consultation to interrogators of national security detainees. Yet a crucial question has never received broad and open discussion: Should psychologists serve in combatant and aggressive operational capacities in military/intelligence settings where our foundational “do no harm” ethical principle is subservient to military policy? The new task force states that it will not develop any new policy. Their initiative will merely delay these much needed deliberations and possible reform.

The Coalition is also concerned about the composition of the new task force. None of its five members actively supported – and at least three actively opposed – the 2008 member-initiated Referendum prohibiting psychologists from working in national security settings that violate human rights. This Referendum was overwhelmingly endorsed by 59% of voting APA members. Moreover, several members of this task force have been vehement opponents over the past several years of most attempts to change APA policies on interrogations. The three task force members from the Peace Psychology Division (Division 48) have taken this action without any discussion with the division membership, and despite the fact that the Executive Committee officially endorsed the annulment petition two months ago.

Returning to the key issue of annulment, when reports first surfaced that psychologists were aiding and even implementing U.S. programs of torture and abuse in national security settings, the APA turned its ethics process in this domain over to the military–intelligence establishment. The resulting 2005 PENS Task Force had six of nine voting members from that area, including several members who served in chains of command publicly accused of abuses at that time. The three voting members of the PENS Task Force without military ties have all subsequently renounced the report, and two of them have denounced the process as corrupt from the start. Military-intelligence advisors who analyzed the PENS process identified it as “a social legitimization process for a decision made at higher levels of the DoD.”

While stating that psychologists should not participate in abuses, the PENS Report gives the imprimatur of the APA to psychologists serving in detention and other national security operations where their activities are protected by secrecy and information is classified. The Report also reiterates the primacy of U.S. law and military regulations over professional ethics. These two assertions were all that the military and CIA needed from the PENS Task Force and PENS Report. In important ways, the remainder of the Report simply serves to obscure the importance of these two profoundly problematic conclusions.[2]

Thus far, the Coalition’s petition calling for annulment of the PENS Report has been endorsed by 33 groups and organizations – including nine within APA itself – and by over 1,800 individuals. The full list is available online at www.ethicalpsychology.org/pens. Annulment is needed in order to (1) renounce the illegitimate process that enabled the military-intelligence establishment to control our profession’s ethics, and (2) move the profession to engage in a thorough and independent review of the ethics of psychologists participating in various national security activities. For the reasons we have summarized here, we strongly believe that this new task force will stand in the way of annulment. Indeed, its formation is reminiscent of the back-room deals of the PENS process itself. We also believe that the narrow interests currently dominating the APA’s agenda in this area must no longer supersede the ethical commitments and aspirations of the association’s membership and of psychologists outside the APA. The profession’s future depends on what we do now.

We therefore encourage psychologists to reject this new task force initiative, and to communicate your opposition to APA leaders, including Board members, Council members, and division officers. At the same time, we encourage you to visit the Coalition website, to review our materials on annulment of the PENS Report and, if you have not already done so, to sign our petition (www.ethicalpsychology.org/pens).

February 23, 2012

[1] Operational psychologists, who are licensed clinical psychologists, are purportedly using psychology to further military/intelligence operations, as in interrogation support. We distinguish between traditional operational psychology roles (e.g., personnel selection) and aggressive operational psychology, where psychologists are duty-bound to put the mission first and where military regulations and orders supersede the ethical standards of their profession. Further, they often work in classified settings, which severely impedes effective ethical monitoring as they and their employer can deny ethics committees access to the information necessary to adjudicate cases.
[2] Further details about the illegitimacy of the PENS process and PENS Report are documented here: http://www.ethicalpsychology.org/materials/PENS_Annulment_Background_Statement.pdf.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

Editor’s Note

To celebrate the two year anniversary, we are reissuing the report with a new introduction recapping the history and evolution of the movement, from the experience of researching and writing the original call to action, to building up the movement online and organizing occupations worldwide. At the end of the book, we feature statements from occupiers, organizers and supporters of the 99%.

February 2012 Introduction

I: Respect to the Leaders & Support the Troops

II: On Writing the 99% Call to Action: Economic Elite Vs. The People

III: Time for a Second American Revolution – The 99% Movement

IV: Decentralized Global Rebellion

V: A99 Operation Empire State Rebellion

VI: Occupy Wall Street 1.0

VII: Anonymous & Occupy Wall Street Leaders Exposed

VIII: Get Money Out of Politics & Bernanke Must Go

IX: Disclaimer On the Original Report & Call to Action

X: Mic Check: The People Speak

I: Respect to the Leaders & Support the Troops

Respect to the Leaders

The most important point for me to make clear in writing about my experience is that it obviously gives a limited view of all the incredible effort and hard work that many people have put into building this decentralized non-hierarchical crowdsourced movement. It is absurd to give too much credit to any individual or one particular group for its phenomenal growth. The fact of the matter is that this movement has become such a powerful force because millions of people have taken it upon themselves to stand up, be leaders and defend their family and country against global financial interests that have bought control of our government, economy and legal system.

This movement is built upon the courageous people that have sacrificed everything to occupy. All respect to the people on the frontlines, out in the streets; the people who continually show up day in and day out, fighting around the clock. They are the leaders! If it wasn’t for them, I would still be toiling in obscurity.

Support the Troops

I have had many encouraging conversations with very wealthy individuals and people who run large organizations that say that they want to support the movement and help it grow. Many people well within the economic top 1% fully understand that our political process is overrun with corruption and that we are on a critically unsustainable path. They view the 99% Movement and Occupy as our last best chance to turn things around. There are many people within the 1% who do not want to be associated with the “organized criminal class,” which technically only makes up 0.1% of the population, at most. I have a great deal of respect for these compassionate and conscious one percenters.

However, as of this writing, financial and resource support has been minimal. Every day I speak with organizers and occupiers throughout the country who have played a very significant role in building this movement and they can no longer afford to keep fighting fulltime. Just like everyone else, they have bills to pay and families to feed. Other than financially, the past five months have taken a serious physical toll on many of us. Many people have lost considerable weight, have had a nasty cold and cough, and have been getting four hours of sleep on a good night. This struggle is one that is shared by thousands of people who battle every single day. Something that people who are not on the frontlines don’t seem to understand is that we are currently fighting an all-out nonviolent war. This movement is a relentless battle that demands 24/7 commitment.

Since this movement has taken off, many organizations that cover our actions and operate on the periphery of the movement are now receiving large donations and funding, partly as a result of our efforts. They also deserve to be rewarded for their vital work. However, the people putting their bodies on the line daily and doing all the heavy lifting need to have their basic needs met as well. It’s incredibly disheartening to see career “activists,” that have failed for years to do what we have done, fundraise off our backs, while the real fighters and change-makers go hungry. Clearly, after the last five months of intense battle, I’m growing increasingly weary and frustrated by this lack of respect. We need to do a better job of raising funds ourselves. I admire and respect people who try to make the world a better place for a living, but your words of support mean little without substantive actions behind them. This is a nonviolent war, not yet another swanky gabfest conference filled with well-paid suits righteously yapping about someday creating the structural change that anyone with half a political clue knows we urgently need now. Enough with your comfortable talks, it’s time for ACTION! So stop hoarding funds and resources while the real fighters are out on the frontlines.

In other words…

“Your old road is rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand…

The line it is drawn…

Keep your eyes wide

the chance won’t come again…

There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’…

If your time to you is worth savin’

You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone….

The order is rapidly fadin’…

And the first one now

will later be last…

As the present now

Will later be past…

Come gather ’round people

Please heed the call…”

– Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’, #OccupyRemix, 10.24.63 – 2.15.12

II: On Writing the 99% Call to Action: Economic Elite Vs. The People

It was the last weekend of January 2010, and a heavy snowstorm had trapped us in the house. Not that it mattered much, I rarely stepped foot out of my apartment/home office. I had been working over 60 hours a week sitting in front of my laptop researching and analyzing economic news reports, and then posting excerpts and summaries of them to my independent news site AmpedStatus.com. I had posted thousands of excerpts over the past two years and was growing increasingly frustrated and depressed. The full scope of the economic devastation and trillions of dollars in fraudulent activity were still being ignored by the mainstream press. Even much of the so-called independent online press seemed to be missing the in-depth analysis that was needed for the average American to understand the gravity of the crisis that was now confronting the global economy.

After spending years as an online editor operating behind the scenes aggregating and editing the most hard-hitting news and information I could find, by mid-October 2009, I reached a point where I felt there wasn’t enough reporting adequately presenting vital information in a concise and urgent enough manner, so I decided to start writing my own reports. Within a few weeks I pounded out some commentaries. The first one was titled “How Much Longer Will You Remain Passive?” I created a graphic to go with the piece that showed the New York Stock Exchange with text over it that said, “If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention.” I followed that up with an extensive report titled “News Reports from Inside the Financial Coup.” Then, a commentary and video titled “The Wall Street Economic Death Squad.” Those three reports quickly earned me some critical acclaim and attention.

My first big viral report came in November: “The Critical Unraveling of U.S. Society.” That report was picked up by The Public Record and AlterNet, soon it spread to many sites and had over one million page views. In December, I released an extensive report on military spending titled “Af-Pak War Racket: The Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down.” That report was also widely published and I was suddenly getting a lot of interview requests. Knowing that I now had solid attention, I needed to make sure that the next report could become an organizing tool. It couldn’t just be another news report or commentary, it had to be a call to action that directly engaged people.

However, I could barely afford to pay the rent anymore. I was on the verge of being broke and didn’t know how I could continue to work independently. Almost a year before, I was living in a nice apartment in the Financial District, a few blocks from Wall Street. In early 2009, I ran into financial problems and couldn’t afford the high cost of Manhattan rent anymore. I was working in nonprofit media and the financial crisis dried up key funding sources.

Moving out of Manhattan was a low point in my life. I remember my last night in the city before leaving. I walked down my street, John Street, hung a left on Broadway and walked down to Borders bookstore. I used to go to Borders, get a book and then walk up Broadway to the nearest park and sit on a stone bench with a cup of coffee. This was something of a ritual for me, so on my last night I headed for Borders. But I was too depressed to get a book, so I just headed for the nearby park on Broadway and sat on a stone bench. I sat there facing East, looking toward the NY Federal Reserve building, and Southeast toward Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. I remember thinking about how tragically poetic it was that I was sitting by the two buildings that I felt were most responsible for driving me out of my home. I thought to myself, if the Fed and top Wall Street executives weren’t engaged in trillions of dollars of fraudulent activity and robbing the US public blind, I could probably still get funding for my work and wouldn’t have to move. Well, enough with the pity party digression. Back to that snowy weekend in January 2010.

I felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. I thought, “How am I going to afford to keep up the fight and keep working in independent media? How am I going to use the attention that I have been getting to rally the passive masses into action? If my next report doesn’t do well, I’m screwed.” After dinner, at around 7pm on Friday January 29th, I felt like I was on the verge of a breakdown. I was incredibly stressed out and depressed as I went into my room/office and closed the door. I didn’t come back out until Monday afternoon, 15,000 words later I had a solid first draft of what was initially called “It’s Time for 99% of Americans to Rise.” After spending hours over the next two weeks fact checking and editing the report, I decided to change the title to “The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America,” to have a more descriptive headline that would more effectively grab attention, and hopefully get more people to click on it. I then decided to use the 99% call as a bold tagline under the headline. The report was way too long to put into one post, so I decided to break it up into six parts. The entire report would be a call to action for a “99% Movement.” The last section of the report had a link to an online sign up form where we could begin to collect the email addresses of people who were ready to “take action against the 1% that have robbed our country and set our economic future on fire.”

The first part of the series was posted to AmpedStatus.com on February 15, 2010. Once again, The Public Record and AlterNet quickly picked up the report. AlterNet changed the headline of part one to “The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class.” They also edited out the bold tagline at the top of the piece that called for the 99% to unite and mobilize on common ground. I was upset about that, but their site was key in making that report and my previous two take off online. Once AlterNet posted part one, it instantly became their most popular report and quickly went viral, sections of the report ended up being published all over the internet. Across many sites, the series is estimated to have received over five million page views. Just before publishing the series online, I decided to turn it into a short book, more of a pamphlet inspired by the pamphleteers of the American Revolution, and made it available on AmpedStatus.com for a donation of $15 or more. Some people were generous enough to provide larger donations, so I could afford to give out many copies for free. The money I made off the book was enough to keep our rent paid over the next six months and keep me in the fight.

[I won't excerpt or go into the details of the Economic Elite report and 99% call to action here, as it is published in full starting on page 47.]

III: Time for a Second American Revolution – The 99% Movement

With a flood of interview requests and attention building around the 99% Movement throughout February and early March, I then released another extensive report and call to action to keep the momentum building. On March 31st, this radical essay with a headline asking a highly controversial question was posted: “Is It Time for Law Abiding American Citizens to Stop Paying Their Taxes and Start a New Government?”

The teaser under the headline stated:

“The evidence is now overwhelming. The United States government has facilitated the theft of trillions of dollars of national wealth and 99% of the US population no longer has political representation.”

The introduction continued:

“I torturously spend 60 plus hours a week researching this and the torrent of devastating news and evidence is mounting by the minute. The staggering level of theft continues unabated. As I am watching this unfold, I am horrified thinking about the severe consequences that have only just begun to reap their toll. Our nation is being raped and pillaged. Our future is going up in flames and our government isn’t even making the slightest effort to put out the fire. In fact, they are purposely pouring gasoline all over it.”

The introduction ended with this famous quote from Mario Savio:

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that… the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

After extensively exposing information on the fraudulent activity of Wall Street and laying out the government’s complicity in the theft, the report ended with another call to action titled “Time for a Second American Revolution – The 99% Movement.” That section ended by saying:

“Our politicians won’t defend us and exercise the will of the people, so we must. It’s time to get moving, start organizing and to form a new government that is, as the Constitution states: of, by and for the people.

We will restore a rule of law. The second American Revolution has now begun!

We are US soldiers, police officers, firefighters, teachers, students, business owners, postal workers, transit workers, construction workers, union members, artists, journalists, doctors, nurses, lawyers, social service workers, factory workers, farmers, we are 99% of the population and we will not stand by and let our country be destroyed like this!

We are launching a 99% Movement and all the propaganda and labels that are used to divide us will fall to the wayside. We are not just Republicans and Democrats, or Tea Party and Coffee Party people, we are Americans and we are uniting against our common enemy.”

After that, I featured this quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Mask of Anarchy”:

 

“Rise like Lions after slumberIn unvanquishable number

Shake your chains

to earth like dew

Which in sleep

had fallen on you

Ye are many

they are few”

Next came this quote from Trent Reznor’s song, “The Hand That Feeds”:

 

“Are you brave enough to see?Do you want to change it?”

Then the call to action ended with another link to sign up for the 99% Movement.

Some websites that ran my previous reports felt this one was “too radical” and did not run it. However, many sites that were just becoming aware of my work and leaned toward a more radical approach jumped on it and the 99% Movement became viral amongst a new audience. The 99% meme was now spreading across the political spectrum.

While using the attention to get many interviews in support of the movement, an Anonymous person helped keep the momentum rolling by creating a music remix of my television interview clips and called it “The Road to Revolution: 99% Uprising.” It featured a bunch of sound bites of me ranting about the consolidation of wealth, financial terrorism, a rigged political system and the need for the 99% to unite on common ground and get into the streets. The song in the background of the video was the Muse anthem “Uprising.”

IV: Decentralized Global Rebellion

We were now focused on building the 99% Movement into an online army. We began to build an online network dedicated to creating a “decentralized global rebellion against neo-liberal economic domination.” After beginning to help organize people in the US and throughout Europe online, our attention shifted to Tunisia and Egypt where we first made contact with a “subgroup” within Anonymous that was helping revolutionaries organize online free from government surveillance and censorship.

In early January 2011, our site started to get hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and got knocked offline. The attacks kept escalating and on January 7th an attack took out our entire ISP network, which affected many other sites as well. Our hosting company was helpful at first, but as the attacks kept coming, they made it clear that they couldn’t host the site anymore, unless we moved to a very expensive system, which we couldn’t afford. In complete desperation, we put out a call for help. Several Anons
(“members” of Anonymous) then stepped up and helped us out. Once we were back up and running, I released another extensive report in February 2011 titled “Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion – We Are Egypt [Revolution Roundup #3].”

Here’s the introduction to that report:

“If you think what’s happening in Egypt won’t happen within the United States, you’ve been watching too much TV. The statistics speak for themselves.

In previous Revolution Roundups, before we were knocked offline, we featured mass protests by the people of Ireland, Italy, Britain, Austria, Greece, France and Portugal, as the Global Insurrection contagion spread throughout Europe. And now, as we have seen over the past month, North African and Middle Eastern nations have joined the movement as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Gabon, Mauritania, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria have taken to the streets en masse.

The connection between this latest round of uprisings and the prior protests throughout Europe is one the mainstream media is not making. We are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of living and lack of financial opportunity and security. Throughout the world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and poverty, as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.

Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are against systemic global economic policies that are strategically designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth. These global uprisings, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order.

The global banking cartel, centered at the IMF, World Bank and Federal Reserve, have paid off politicians and dictators the world over – from Washington to Greece to Egypt. In country after country, they have looted national economies at the expense of local populations, consolidating wealth in unprecedented fashion – the top economic one-tenth of one percent is currently holding over $40 trillion in investible wealth, not counting an equally significant amount of wealth hidden in offshore accounts.

IMF imperial operations designed to extract wealth and suppress populations have been ongoing for decades. As anyone researching economic imperialism will know, a centrally planned Neo-Liberal aristocracy controls the global economy.”

Section seven of the report, “A Recipe For Revolution: Tax Breaks for the Rich, Budget Cuts for the Poor,” stated:

“Republicans and Democrats, along with their Wall Street masters, are so arrogant, deluded with wealth, completely lacking perspective, shortsighted and, quite frankly, ignorant.

As the economic top one-tenth of one percent has more wealth than they have ever had, the middle class is quickly disappearing and poverty is soaring. As politicians ignore the needs of the suffering masses in favor of a Kleptocratic Oligarchy, which operates above the law, it is only a matter of time before an uprising takes hold.

After analyzing societal and economic indicators within the US, in comparison to rebelling countries, it is not a matter of whether people will revolt or not, it’s a matter of when.”

V: A99 Operation Empire State Rebellion

Section eight of the “Analysis of the Global Insurrection” report was titled “The Empire State Rebellion.” In that section, we posted a map of New York’s Financial District and called for millions of people to flood into lower Manhattan and camp out “from Wall Street to the NY Fed, spilling over to the corporate offices of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America.” As the report stated:

“Given all the data, due to New York’s geographical layout, population size and proximity to power, it is a prime candidate for insurrection…. One million people gathering in Cairo, Egypt sent shock waves throughout the world, and rightfully so, but just wait until millions of Americans begin flooding the streets. The revolution contagion will spread throughout the world like a category five hurricane.”

Several Anons loved the idea. Having just helped Egyptians Occupy Tahrir Square, they felt it was time to Occupy Wall Street.

The Anonymous subgroup and the 99% Movement then formed a collaborative effort called A99. On March 12, 2011, A99 issued their first video and announced “A99 Operation Empire State Rebellion, #OpESR, Communication #1.” As the video declared:

“We are a decentralized non-violent resistance movement, which seeks to restore the rule of law and fight back against the organized criminal class.

One-tenth of one percent of the population has consolidated wealth in unprecedented fashion and launched an all-out economic war against 99.9% of the population.

We are not affiliated with either wing of the two-party oligarchy. We seek an end to the corrupted two-party system by ending the campaign finance and lobbying racket.

Above all, we aim to break up the global banking cartel centered at the Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, Bank of International Settlements and World Bank.

We demand that the primary dealers within the Federal Reserve banking system be broken up and held accountable for rigging markets and destroying the global economy, effective immediately.

As a first sign of good faith, we demand Ben Bernanke step down as Federal Reserve chairman.

Until our demands are met and a rule of law is restored, we will engage in a relentless campaign of non-violent, peaceful, civil disobedience.”

The video ended with the famous Mario Savio quote that was used at the end of the “Second American Revolution – 99% Movement” call to action. That video instantly went viral and tore a hole through cyberspace with hundreds of thousands of views within a few days. Also on March 12th, to coincide with the A99 video release, I did an interview with Max Keiser to discuss the video and call for an occupation of Wall Street. An Anonymous member then released a rough edit dubstep music video of that interview and called it “Empire State Rebellion: An Idea Whose Time Has Come.” Here are some excerpts from the transcript:

“Mainstream media in the United States is the most efficient weapon of mass oppression….

… there is so much divide and conquer rhetoric – it goes from the mainstream media and it filters all the way down into independent media.

So it’s a matter of finding that place where you can overcome the divide and conquer propaganda. And where we can find that place is on Wall Street….

How would a million people clogging lower Manhattan’s financial district play out in the global media?

If we came down there and said: ‘We’re not leaving until we have commitments to break up the banks and end the campaign finance racket.’…

We have the highest, most severe inequality of wealth we have ever had, unlimited campaign spending, budget cuts for the poor, tax breaks for the rich – this is the ultimate recipe for revolution…

Decentralized global rebellion.

Decentralized resistance.

Decentralized revolutionaries.”

It was at this point where I learned from various Anons about their strategy of operating in three-month cycles. With the first video announcement in mid-March, it was then announced that on Flag Day, June 14th, 2011- three months later – they would launch their first offline US operation by holding protests in 23 cities. On June 1st, a call to action titled “Acts of Resistance: What Are You Going To Do To Rebel Against Economic Tyranny?” was released. It stated:

“The big banks have sold us out.

Democrats and Republicans have sold us out.

No one is defending our interests.

Our future is going up in flames.

It’s time for us to stand up and defend ourselves….

#OpESR is a decentralized non-violent resistance movement to end the system of political bribery (campaign finance and lobbying) and break up the big banks centered at the Federal Reserve…”

They were calling for people across the country to “Occupy Public Space.” Being that it was their first day of offline operations, we weren’t expecting much of a turnout, but as the 14th approached, there was an inspiring amount of online attention. On June 9th, I wrote, “Economic Rebellion Update – This Is What Decentralized Resistance Looks Like.”

“Exciting times over here, to say the least! The June 14th Flag Day Rebellion against economic tyranny is growing much stronger and more rapidly than anticipated. As a small part of a decentralized movement, it’s hard to measure the overall impact, but my email inbox is exploding with support and interest. This movement is definitely succeeding in uniting people from all over the political spectrum. Hardcore progressives and libertarians have found common cause. Liberals who are sick of ‘spineless Democrats.’ Conservatives who have had enough of ‘crony-capitalist and imperial Republicans.’ Apolitical people who are sick and tired of living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to get by. The foreclosed upon. The unemployed. People desperately surviving off of food stamps. And especially people who have been impoverished by medical bills. I’ve heard from so many people with horror stories from financial ruin as a result of health problems who are ‘ready to fight back.’ The anger throughout the population is much more intense than even I thought it was.

People who spent their career working on Wall Street are ‘done sitting idle while the market is rigged in favor of a handful of politically connected global banks and firms.’ The people who are taking it upon themselves to take action and spread the word come from all walks of life. Emails have come in from people in the military, veterans, police, firefighters, real estate brokers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, construction workers, accountants, Wal-Mart workers, union members, union haters – they’re all coming together on this. Teachers and students have been strong supporters. College students and recent graduates are feeling completely trapped in debt. Their awareness of their limited opportunities and lack of financial security moving forward is very evident. And, of course, the activists and hacktivists are coming out in force.”

On June 11th, A99 released “OpESR Communication #2: Ctrl+Alt+Bernanke.” This video stated:

“US Politicians have not taken action to break up the Federal Reserve and the ‘Too Big To Fail’ Banks.

US Politicians have not taken action to prosecute the people who caused our economic crisis.

US Politicians have not taken action to end the system of political bribery, the campaign finance and lobbying racket, which allows global bankers to control our political process….

We cannot remain passive while our future is going up in flames.

It is time for us to stand up for ourselves.

It is time for you to stand up for yourself.

We must restore the rule of law and fight back against the organized criminal class.

We must now launch Operation Empire State Rebellion.

The operation will commence on June 14th.

As a first step, we are calling upon you to occupy a public space…”

Once again, that video also instantly went viral and got hundreds of thousands of views. Once that happened, I thought we were on the verge of something big.

VI: Occupy Wall Street 1.0

A member of A99, going by the name of Gary Roland, researched potential Wall Street occupation sites. He told me that he thought a public-private park on Broadway, named Zuccotti Plaza, which was strategically located near the New York Federal Reserve building and Wall Street, was legally the best shot we had at holding a space. I said to him: “Zuccotti Plaza? You mean Liberty Park. I know that park very well. I used to live around the corner from there and go there all the time.” I immediately felt like it was destiny and fate: the very park that I spent my last depressing night at home as an NYC resident would be the place where we would return and the Empire State Rebellion would begin.

With only one day to go before the June 14th launch date, we put up a call for the protesters to “Occupy Liberty Park.” Not wanting to give the police too much lead time, it wasn’t until June 13th that we announced “Activists to Occupy Financial District’s Liberty Park Until Demands Are Met.” The release stated:

“On June 14th at 1pm EST, a group of activists will begin occupation of Liberty Park (recently renamed Zuccotti Park) in lower Manhattan’s Financial District, a few blocks from Wall Street (14971 Broadway, 10007)….

Gary Roland, an organizer of the action, says they will occupy the park ‘indefinitely, to express non-violent dissent to the further consolidation of wealth into the hands of international corporations by the corrupted two-party oligarchy. This is a non-violent action that seeks to express dissent and raise awareness of the failures of our current political discourse, until our demands are satisfied.’…

There are public protests taking place in at least 22 other cities on June 14th to help launch this movement…. This movement has inspired and united supporters from across a broad range of political opinion.”

On the night of June 13th, I packed a bag and sleeplessly waited for the sun to come up on Flag Day, June 14th, 2011. After originally thinking it was going to be a small turnout, I kept thinking: If only 300 people show up, given the attention we were getting throughout the media and the solidarity actions happening in 22 other cities, we might actually pull this off.

However, despite hundreds of thousands of people engaged online and the excitement buzzing around the day’s actions, with such little lead time in shifting the focus to our attempt at occupying Liberty Park, our first occupation attempt was a failed one. We ended up having just as many media cameras there as protesters. Only about 16 of us showed up. It was a humiliating and depressing disappointment. With our bags and folding chairs, we looked pretty pathetic sitting there surrounded by news reporters and cameras. As time went by, the occupation was quickly down to just four of us and one documentary filmmaker. The news crew from Al Jazeera was the last news outlet to leave, giving us a pat on the back, but shaking their heads while saying that they were not going to run a report on our actions. I was extraordinarily frustrated after all the hard work we put in and the attention we got online and throughout the media. I felt as if we just squandered a major opportunity to spark a “relentless nonviolent civil disobedience movement against the organized criminal class.”

Going into June 14th, we were already facing a lot of criticism and ridicule for calling for protests. A prominent journalist that I have a lot of respect for told me I was committing career suicide. People online were mocking us and saying that Americans were too propagandized and passive to take action. However, by the evening of June 14th, reports from protests in the other cities were coming in and people seemed excited. By this time, Gary, Kevin, Oren, me and the documentary filmmaker were the only people left in Zuccotti Park. Disappointed, but still determined, the five of us decided to march down to Wall Street. Standing across the street from the stock exchange, we began to strategize our return. Given the commitment to three-month cycles, mid-September would be the time to try it again.

After having a long discussion on Wall Street, Gary said that he was going to check out the protest that was happening that same day down the road by City Hall. They were calling their protest site Bloombergville. We were hoping to get them to join us at Liberty Park, but they wanted to be closer to City Hall and keep the focus on Bloomberg and his budget cuts. I told Gary that I had to go home to help recap the day’s actions in an online report. We discussed the importance of convincing the Bloomberg protesters that their real enemy is Wall Street. Gary gave his word that he would recruit them for our future actions. He spent the next two plus weeks occupying Bloombergville, spreading the message and rallying the troops for a return to Wall Street. As it turned out, the Bloombergville protesters didn’t need much convincing. They were ready to take on Wall Street next.

While Gary went to help start Bloombergville, I went home on the night of June 14th feeling very depressed, but determined as ever, and posted the following statement to the A99 social network:

“Back home from Liberty Park. It is nice to know that I will be sleeping in a comfortable bed tonight, but pretty depressing that we didn’t get enough people willing to stand up and occupy the park. Despite thousands of emails, tweets, comments and a video that already has 200,000 views, only four people in NYC were ready to put serious action behind their words. (At this point, I don’t know how all the other actions went, so I’ll hold off on commenting on them.)

It seems everyone is content just tweeting and writing strong comments, passively waiting and hoping that other people will do the hard work for them. Unfortunately, as most of you already know, we don’t have much time left to turn things around, some think it is already too late.

Hopefully, now that we have brought a lot of much needed attention to these issues and this movement we can keep building and most of the people who just found out about this, and sat on the sidelines this time, will realize that they actually need to take action next time.

The most frustrating part is that we had so much media attention on this, if only a few hundred people were willing to occupy the park this would have quickly escalated.

I would like to thank Gary Roland, Oren Clark and Kevin Dann – the only other people in all of NYC who were ready to answer this call today and take a stand. It was great spending time with you guys. I’m sure we will meet again very soon.

As disappointed as I am now, given the attention we were able to get online, which obviously doesn’t translate into action, I know that we are building awareness. Americans may not be ready yet, but it is just a matter of time before that awareness grows into the action we need. After all, this was just the first day of the Empire State Rebellion. That’s what we need to keep in perspective. Rome wasn’t built in a day and Rome will not be conquered in a day. We’re getting there, I just hope we can get there before it’s too late.”

The next morning, I posted a recap of #FlagDay actions to AmpedStatus that several A99 Anons wrote, “OpESR Status Update: Empire State Rebellion Day 1.” Here are some excerpts from their report:

“While we have launched this movement beyond expectations throughout Media and Online Operations, and have achieved success in Phase 1 of Cyber Operations, our first step in Ground Operations has been insufficient…. If we are to achieve success, you must take your own action and be a leader. We are confident in our numbers and strength online, but we must urgently evolve into a much stronger offline force as well….

The most ambitious ground operation launched on Day 1 was in New York City’s Financial District, just a few blocks from Wall Street, at Liberty Park. The protest only attracted 16 people in total, with only 4 people ready to occupy the park indefinitely…. Getting people to stand up in this way requires a very strong commitment that most people have not yet realized will be necessary and in their best interests. As we continue Awareness Operations and build momentum, we will reactivate this part of our Ground Operation at a future date. We have set up a social network group dedicated to planning this operation. If you are ready to peacefully occupy a public place, please join the planning group here.”

As you will read in the next section, after the June 14th actions we picked up a significant amount of help, both online and offline. Sure enough, after we spent another three months organizing people to Occupy Wall Street, we ended up back at that park in Manhattan across from the Federal Reserve building and Stock Exchange – exactly where I was on my last depressing night at home and had a humiliating failure in our first attempt at occupation. It was time for some redemption. And this time, on September 17th, 2011, thanks to the leadership, hard work and inspiring commitment of hundreds of others, including many of the people who occupied Bloombergville, the occupation of Wall Street was a success and the 99% Movement soon became a household name.

VII: Anonymous & Occupy Wall Street Leaders Exposed

When people ask me who I’m working for, or if I’m a leader of the movement, I realize that they don’t get it. As Bob Dylan once said: “You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones?” In this movement, everyone is free and empowered to do what they want, when they want. No one leads by words or title, they lead by their actions, by putting in the hard work. If your actions are positive, constructive and empowering, a critical mass of people will gravitate toward them. If your actions are counterproductive, people will ignore and/or dismiss them. That’s what a decentralized non-hierarchical crowdsourced movement is all about.

The fact is we are all leaders. Unless everyone looks into the mirror and finds the leader within, this movement will not achieve the success that is necessary to create significant and meaningful change. In the early A99 days, people would always ask, “Who is your leader?” One of the Anons brilliantly posted a reply on the A99 social network with the bold headline “A99 Operation Empire State Rebellion Exposed, Leaders Revealed.” It stated:

“There have been many rumors surrounding A99 Operation Empire State Rebellion. Here we will reveal all you need to know.

We are a DECENTRALIZED non-violent movement. If you are looking to contact one of our leaders, go to the nearest mirror and peer deeply into it. It may take some time, but, eventually, one of our leaders will appear with answers to all of your questions.

Empire State Rebellion is an idea… an idea whose time has come!”

When I look back at all the events that I have witnessed, not to mention all the significant events that I’m unaware of, there are many things that make me think that if it wasn’t for that one particular action, maybe the movement would have never taken off and become as powerful as it is.

What if Anonymous hadn’t been there? Anonymous played such a pivotal role in getting the message out and developing the decentralized non-hierarchal strategy. They had three videos that each went viral in support of this movement. They also played a vital role in helping revolutionaries worldwide organize online free from government surveillance and censorship. After we first made contact with some Anons who were active in Tunisia and Egypt, they came to our defense and saved our site from being knocked off the internet. If they hadn’t done that, the 99% Movement may have been over before it began to gain traction. It was from that critical situation that the A99 collaborative effort began. Out of that relationship grew calls to Occupy Wall Street, Occupy the Federal Reserve and Occupy Public Space.

What if Adbusters hadn’t made the call? It was Adbusters who made the now historic call to #OccupyWallStreet on September 17th. It was also Adbusters who provided the highly controversial “What Is Our One Demand?” framing. We had our demands: Get money out of politics, break up the Federal Reserve and big banks, prosecute the banksters and tell Ben Bernanke to step down. However, it was Adbusters’ invitation for people to come and air their own grievances and demands that played a significant role in bringing people out. Adbusters also had a core group of committed people throughout the world who had admired and respected their work for years that were poised and ready to heed their call. I have been an avid reader of Adbusters since they put out their first issue. They’ve been fighting a media war since 1989, inspired by Situationist theories and tactics that I highly respect and admire.

What if Bloomberg hadn’t made his budget cuts and the Bloombergville camp had never been set up? The Bloombergville protest was pivotal. The group of organizations and people that made up Bloombergville were a driving force in making Occupy Wall Street successful. They had community based organizing and boots on the ground! It was also during Bloombergville that protesters were experimenting with The People’s General Assembly concept that was being used in other countries during occupation protests. Without that experience, the New York City General Assembly (NYCGA) probably wouldn’t be what it is today. The NYCGA was making so many key decisions throughout August and early September, before the occupation started, and many people and organizations that were not involved in Bloombergville were added into the mix during this time frame.

The NYCGA was a key factor in building the participatory direct democratic experience that made Liberty Park a vibrant community. Instead of just being a protest against Wall Street and our corrupted government, the NYCGA created an alternative, a new way of living were everyone’s voice could be heard and mattered. People across the country then wanted to have their own communities based around the GA concept. The GA was another very powerful meme that united people on common ground. And with the New York City rule against amplified sound; the human microphone, mic checks, twinkling fingers and hard blocks became the language of a new revolutionary generation.

What if Global Revolution hadn’t been there livestreaming? After taking part in the Spanish uprising and protests around the world, the Global Revolution team came to Zucotti with a wealth of experience and skill to provide internet video livestream coverage of the occupation as it unfolded. Many people that came to the park told me that they had seen what was happening on the livestream and decided to come down to help out and take part. Global Rev exploded the livestream concept, which became yet another very powerful meme and tool for organizing.

What if the “Stop the Machine” coalition hadn’t been organizing and building awareness for their October occupation of DC? The Stop the Machine coalition featured an amazing collection of veteran organizers who were planning an occupation of DC as we started planning the September 17th occupation. They had already built up awareness and momentum, and they threw their support behind OWS in the run up to September 17th in a significant way. I remember thinking, if we can just make the NY occupation last until October 6th, when the other occupation started in DC, we could really break through to mainstream consciousness. As it turned out, the DC occupation began just as many other occupations began to spring up around the country.

Going back even further, to February 2011, what if the Wisconsin state capital building hadn’t been occupied? As I wrote on February 20th, 2011:

“This battle in Madison, Wisconsin, between the American people and the global financial elite, represents the opening salvo, the awakening of an American resistance movement and a sign of what’s to come.”

You can even look back at some of the crucial individual actions. What if Chris hadn’t proposed making “We Are the 99%” the rally cry, and started the influential WeAreThe99Percent Tumblr blog that allowed people to upload their picture and tell their story? After much debate, the “We Are the 99%” rally cry achieved consensus. When we headed toward Wall Street on September 17th chanting “We Are the 99%,” the feeling I had was comparable to how I felt when I got married and when my son was born. The energy I felt that day was incredible! And once I found out that Chris and Priscilla had put up the Tumblr site, I instantly posted it to AmpedStatus and blasted it out to the 99% email list. That site was a stroke of genius. Priscilla then played another key role in starting the Occupied Wall Street Journal, giving the movement its first newspaper.

What if Justine had never put up OccupyWallSt.org? OccupyWallSt.org became the online voice of OWS. It quickly evolved into the go-to site for news on the occupation, with vital information on how people could get involved. What if Alexa hadn’t built the US Day of Rage Twitter army? What if Nathan hadn’t been covering the run up to September 17th for Waging Nonviolence? What if Ella hadn’t co-created OccupyTogether.org with amazing 99% graphic designs? Her designs spread all over the internet and throughout occupations worldwide. OccupyTogether.org became a key organizing platform where people could find and announce new occupations. These are just a few of many pivotal individual actions that helped build this movement.

What about the significant role of the New York Police Department (NYPD)?

What if some NYPD officers hadn’t committed acts of brutality against peaceful protesters? What if Tony Bologna hadn’t pepper sprayed defenseless women? I was nervous that Saturday, September 24th was going to be our last big day of action. And then, out of the blue, came a white-shirted police officer firing pepper spray at a group of defenseless and peaceful women that were already netted and trapped into a corner. It was one of many shocking and disgusting moments of police brutality. When video of that incident went viral, the movement instantly took off. This incident also demonstrates the power of internet video and citizen journalism. If people didn’t have the ability to share videos instantly and create the news themselves, this act of police violence would have gone unreported by mainstream media.

Then, the following Saturday, we had the Brooklyn Bridge incident where hundreds were arrested after a police officer told us to step off the sidewalk into one lane on the street after we were halfway across the bridge. A few weeks later came the tragic Scott Olsen incident. Then Dorli Rainey, an 84-year old woman who was a school teacher and ran for mayor, got pepper sprayed. Countless incidents of police brutality enraged and energized the movement in ways we could never have. What if Sergeant Shamar Thomas hadn’t been on the frontlines of Times Square to bravely stand up in his Marine uniform and call out the police?

What if small groups of people in cities and towns across the US hadn’t found the bravery within themselves to step up and start a local occupation in solidarity with their brothers and sisters in New York and throughout the world?

What if the courageous people of Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain, Chile and the many other millions of people in oppressed nations throughout the world hadn’t all stepped up and risked their lives protesting under harsh conditions?

All of these “what if” examples are just a few of many. There are so many examples that it is obvious that the birth and growth of this decentralized movement has been the result of many powerful forces standing up and coming together, in the right place, at the right time. Clearly, this movement is built on an idea whose time has come… and we all know that you cannot arrest, evict or kill an idea.

VIII: Get Money Out of Politics & Bernanke Must Go

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is guilty of crimes against humanity. The Fed’s policies have deliberately impoverished tens of millions of people. The Federal Reserve has been the central planning force behind our predatory economy and has played the most pivotal role in the criminal Wall Street mafia racket. To use just one of countless examples of how Ben Bernanke has implemented destructive policies that ultimately led to our current global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic domination, consider his Quantitative Easing (QE) policies and their contribution to rising food costs. As I wrote in February 2011:

“Centrally Planned Economic Repression…

To be clear, there are several significant factors contributing to rising food prices, such as extreme weather conditions, biofuel production and Wall Street speculation; but the Federal Reserve’s policies deliberately threw gasoline all over those brush fires. QE2 was another economic napalm bomb from the global banking cartel.

In a recent McClatchy news article titled ‘Egypt’s unrest may have roots in food prices, US Fed policy,’ Kevin Hall reports:

‘The truth of the matter is that when the Federal Reserve moved on the quantitative easing, it did export inflation to a lot of these emerging markets…. There’s no doubt that one of the side effects of the weak dollar and quantitative easing has been rising commodity prices. It helped create this bullish environment for commodities. This is a very delicate balancing act.’

‘It’s a view shared by Ed Yardeni, a veteran financial market analyst, who reached a similar conclusion in a research note to investors…. He joked that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke should be added to a list of revolutionaries, since his quantitative easing policy, unveiled last year in Wyoming, has provoked unrest and change in the developing world.

‘Since he first indicated his support for such a revolutionary monetary change… the prices of corn, soybeans and wheat have risen 53 percent, 37 percent and 24.4 percent through Friday’s close,’ Yardeni noted. ‘The price of crude oil rose 19.8 percent over this period from $75.17 to $90.09 this (Monday) morning. Soaring food and fuel prices are compounding anger attributable to widespread unemployment in the countries currently experiencing riots.’

The people throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa, on the fringe of the Neo-Liberal economic empire and most vulnerable to the Fed’s inflationary policies, are the first to rebel.”

It is important to point out that the people of countries like Tunisia and Egypt have long suffered from grotesquely exploitative International Monetary Fund economic policies under puppet dictators like Mubarak and Ben Ali. However, as stated above, it was Bernanke’s QE policies that ignited this global revolution. And the QE policies were yet another facet of the $29 TRILLION criminal bailout of the global banking cartel, centered on Wall Street, that caused the collapse of the global economic Ponzi scheme that enriches the world’s wealthiest one-tenth of 1%, at the expense and suffering of the 99%.

Due to Bernanke’s central role in all of this, when we held protests and attempted to occupy Liberty Park on Flag Day 2011, we came there, inspired by Egyptians that called for Mubarak’s resignation, to demand that the Mubarak of the global economy step down as well – that, of course, being Bernanke. Obviously, Bernanke is only a figurehead, an interchangeable puppet like Mubarak and Obama. The fact that President Obama supported Bernanke’s reconfirmation as chairman, and the fact that Obama has chosen people like Geithner, Summers, Dailey and Lew to run the economy and his administration, also shows that the President – whether it’s Obama or Romney – is ultimately a bankster propaganda puppet in a rigged system. The presidency of the United States has been reduced to a public relations operation. The president is an empty suit reading from a teleprompter designed to sell and deceive the American public into passively accepting whatever it is that the masters on Wall Street want.

When politicians talk about the need to have an “adult conversation” about fixing the problems that have put us into this severe crisis, if they were serious that conversation would be about getting money out of politics. No matter what your issues of concern are – healthcare, education, foreclosures, unemployment, the environment, war, debt, etc. – when you get to the root of that particular problem, it all boils down to the system of political bribery. Through campaign finance, lobbying and the revolving door between Washington and the most powerful global corporations, our government has been bought off. A stunning 94% of the time, the candidate who spends the most money on their campaign wins the election. Therefore, we have a country that is run by a Wall Street mafia that bribes and pays off politicians to do whatever they want at the expense of 99% of the population.

This is not some debatable opinion. If you pay attention to our current political system, it is common sense.

As a first step in fixing our problems, we need a Constitutional Amendment that clearly states that “corporations are not people” and “money is not speech.” Until we make this first common sense step to get money out of politics, all the changes we need to make urgently will not happen in a meaningful and significant way.

In my opinion, we need to create entirely new decentralized governmental and economic systems. However, to evolve our current obsolete system of rule to a point where that is possible, without bloodshed, we must engage in a relentless campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience until money is removed from our political process. And we cannot wait years and election cycles for this to happen! The damage has already been done and our crisis is too severe for anyone with an aware conscious to remain passive any longer.

Most of us who are active within this movement and fighting on the frontlines are not doing this because it’s fun. We are doing this because we are aware enough to know that we have to. We have no choice. You can remain passive and die a slow death while leaving future generations in catastrophe, or you can stand up for yourself and your family and fight a nonviolent war for a sustainable future.

Which side of history do you want to be on?

The choice is yours.

IX: Disclaimer On the Original Report & Call to Action

Since this movement has taken off and evolved far beyond our original conception, my opinions and sense of possibility have also evolved. After spending countless hours at Liberty Park in conversation and debate with people from across the world, I can see how I, too, was trapped in a certain type of groupthink when I originally wrote this call to action two years ago. However, I still firmly stand by the opinions expressed and the facts are still the facts.

The opinions expressed throughout the report are solely mine and are not endorsed by the overall movement.

So here it is… the exact original report and call to action as it was written two years ago.

(Read full original report here.)

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

See you on the frontlines,

David

X: Mic Check: The People Speak

In the last section of the book, we feature many statements from occupiers, organizers and supporters of the 99%. I do not agree with everything they say, nor do they agree with everything I say. This is what democracy looks like.

David DeGraw, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is an investigative journalist whose work has been featured in numerous publications and websites. He is the founder and editor of AmpedStatus.com, editorial director of MediaChannel.org and author of The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States.

Image/New Internationalist/Mediachannel.org

“Between the public sector and the private sector, we have wreaked untold havoc on the media environment.”

These aren’t the words of a progressive media advocate such as University of Illinois professor Robert McChesney or The Nation’s John Nichols, but of ex-FCC commissioner Michael Copps in January. In an interview on Democracy Now!, Copps attributes his claim to “the abdication of public interest responsibility by the FCC” over the last 30 years and their failure to enforce public interest guidelines and a stronger focus on news.

Here’s another example of how the FCC has failed in their responsibility to the public good: In 1995, the FCC forbade companies ownership of more than 40 stations. Clear Channel Communications now owns over 1,500. This rate of consolidation clearly shows no sign of slowing.

The closing of news rooms and the number of reporters on the street instead of the beat goes on as the corporate state continues its relentless and undemocratic consolidation of America’s media landscape. Layoffs continue despite a number of companies like McClatchy posting a 21% profit margin, according to the book The Death and Life of American Journalism. McClatchy fired a third of their newsroom staff in 2008.

Twenty-five “or 30 years ago, only 50 companies controlled more than half of what we see and hear every single day. Now, that 50 – which was alarming enough – has shrunk to six or even five,” says Johnathan Lawson, the co-founder of Reclaim the Media. Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp owns the top newspaper on three continents: The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, and The Australian. According to a 2008 GAO report, the company was operating over 150 subsidiaries in off-shore tax havens. How much of those subsidiary holdings could have gone to funding NPR, or towards community initiatives to help expand minority media in communities?

The assault on our airwaves first began in earnest in 1980, when “the FCC did away with public interest guidelines for broadcast television licenses, and the renewal period went from three to eight years,” according to Copps. Now all a broadcaster has to do is “mail in a postcard” and their license is renewed, because the FCC – against the very reason it was created – has watered down attempts to ensure that the public’s airwaves are by-and-large for the public good.

Michael Powell (son of former Secretary of State Colin Powell), who was the head of the FCC in 2003, attempted to eliminate 30 year-old rules that prohibited any television network from reaching more than 35% of the national population. These rules were, in part, created to prevent the homogenization of news and to ensure that there was an attempt at quality local coverage. Predictably, the broadcast industry spent $249 million attempting to convince the federal government to allow new rules which would expand that limit to 45% of the public. And they won.

Fast forward to 2006: the FCC passed rules “which allowed broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership in the top 20 markets,” as Katy Bachman wrote in AdWeek. “The last thing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski [who became the FCC head in 2009] wants to talk about are the media ownership rules.”

A media system dominated by such a narrow coterie of owners has a direct impact on the quality of news presented to the public – affecting a diversity of viewpoints as well as the depth of coverage on issues such as corporate greed, poverty, corruption, racism, climate change and a host of other topics that an electorate needs to know in order to make educated decisions which directly affect their lives.

One major casualty of corporate domination of news is investigative journalism. Be it in print or in broadcast news, this time-intensive and not always profitable aspect of news is crucial to a healthy democracy. One need only look, for instance, at the media debacle of the Iraq War to see how the corporate state perverts information consumed by Americans. The first Gulf War was a huge boon for corporations like GE, which turned nightly news into “a media hardware show,” as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! stated. GE had a significant stake in the production of parts for many of the weapons in the Persian Gulf war.

The shrinking of diverse views on war was evidenced by the firing of MSNBC host Phil Donahue in February of 2003. He approached the invasion from a critical perspective and maintained the highest rated show on that network. The killing off of diversity is also a perfect example of how corporate media perpetuates the concept of “just” wars to increase profits, as GE’s role in the Persian Gulf war and the reporting on that war and Operation Iraqi Freedom demonstrate.

Media consolidation also plays a profound role in how our society prioritizes values, from self-esteem to consumerism. “It gives them [corporate media] a great deal of influence over how our culture thinks about itself,” points out author and activist Anne Elizabeth Moore.  The deluge of advertising, for instance, which takes up a lot of broadcasting and radio, certainly has an impact on shopping habits as well as more serious issues like body-image.

Enter Occupy Wall Street. The movement has set its sights on corporations and the elite who continue without apology to commodify health care, public education, and other vital necessities, and has subsequently kicked issues like income inequality and corporate greed back into the national conversation. Some even argue that President Obama’s recent State of the Union speech carried a hint of the spirit of the movement, which isn’t surprising in an election year.

How would corporate media respond to civil disobedience in their lobbies? What would happen if a group of protesters went to a news station and demanded a revoking of that outlet’s license? This is what happened in the WLBT case, when civil rights activists challenged a racist broadcaster and ultimately forced a judge to pull the station’s license for not serving the public interest.

If the people are going to stand up to big banks and corporations for wrecking our economy and destroying our environment, the theft of our airwaves and newspapers must not be ignored.  As each occupation tackles issues local to their cities and towns – such as police brutality in minority communities – directly challenging broadcasters and newspapers through sit-ins or other creative tactics to cover issues that aren’t properly covered by major media could be a good start. But that would just be the beginning.

One Occupy Philadelphia protester sums it up best:

“It’s bullshit that our country’s main source of news is owned by a few large corporations that have a GLARING conflict of interest in providing us with accurate, honest information.  They have an agenda both in downsizing news rooms as well as promoting certain political views.  It’s time for us to hold them to account and demand a true separation of corporation and government, both in the running of and in the reporting of.”

Dustin M. Slaughter is the Founder of The David and Goliath Project. Follow him on Twitter: @DustinSlaughter.