Tag Archives: protest

Welcome to 1984

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1984

By Chris Hedges

Source: truthdig

The artifice of corporate totalitarianism has been exposed. The citizens, disgusted by the lies and manipulation, have turned on the political establishment. But the game is not over. Corporate power has within its arsenal potent forms of control. It will use them. As the pretense of democracy is unmasked, the naked fist of state repression takes its place. America is about—unless we act quickly—to get ugly.

“Our political system is decaying,” said Ralph Nader when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It’s on the way to gangrene. It’s reaching a critical mass of citizen revolt.”

This moment in American history is what Antonio Gramsci called the “interregnum”—the period when a discredited regime is collapsing but a new one has yet to take its place. There is no guarantee that what comes next will be better. But this space, which will close soon, offers citizens the final chance to embrace a new vision and a new direction.

This vision will only be obtained through mass acts of civic mobilization and civil disobedience across the country. Nader, who sees this period in American history as crucial, perhaps the last opportunity to save us from tyranny, is planning to rally the left for three days, from May 23 to May 26 at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in what he is calling “Breaking Through Power” or “Citizen’s Revolutionary Week.” He is bringing to the capital scores of activists and community leaders to speak, organize and attempt to mobilize to halt our slide into despotism.

“The two parties can implode politically,” Nader said. “They can be divided by different candidates and super PACs. But this doesn’t implode their paymasters.”

“Elections have become off-limits to democracy,” he went on. “They have become off-limits to democracy’s fundamental civil community or civil society. When that happens, the very roots shrivel and dry up. Politics is now a sideshow. Politics does not bother corporate power. Whoever wins, they win. Both parties represent Wall Street over Main Street. Wall Street is embedded in the federal government.”

Donald Trump, like Hillary Clinton, has no plans to disrupt the corporate machinery, although Wall Street has rallied around Clinton because of her predictability and long service to the financial and military elites. What Trump has done, Nader points out, is channel “the racist, right-wing militants” within the electorate, embodied in large part by the white working poor, into the election process, perhaps for one last time.

Much of the left, Nader argues, especially with the Democratic Party’s blatant rigging of the primaries to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination, grasps that change will come only by building mass movements. This gives the left, at least until these protofascist forces also give up on the political process, a window of opportunity. If we do not seize it, he warns, we may be doomed.

He despairs over the collapse of the commercial media, now governed by the primacy of corporate profit.

“Trump’s campaign has enormous appeal to the commercial mass media,” Nader said. “He brought huge ratings during the debates. He taunted the networks. He said, ‘I’m boycotting this debate. It’s going to cost you profit.’ Has this ever happened before in American history? It shows you the decay, the commercialization of public elections.”

The impoverished national discourse, fostered by a commercial mass media that does not see serious political debate as profitable and focuses on the trivial, the salacious and the inane, has empowered showmen and con artists such as Trump.

“Trump speaks in a very plain language, at the third-grade level, according to some linguists,” Nader said. “He speaks like a father figure. He says, ‘I’ll get you jobs. I’ll bring back industry. I’ll bring back manufacturing. I’ll protect you from immigrants.’ The media never challenges him. He is not asked, ‘How are we going do all of this? What is step one? Step two? Is the White House going to ignore the Congress and the courts?’ He astonishes his audience. He amazes them with his bullying, his lying, his insults, like ‘Little Marco,’ the wall Mexico is going to pay for, no more entry in the country by Muslims—a quarter of the human race—until we figure it out. The media never catches up with him. He is always on the offensive. He is always news. The commercial media wants the circus. It gives them high ratings and high profit.”

The focus on info-entertainment has left not only left the public uninformed and easily manipulated but has locked out the voices that advocate genuine reform and change.

“The commercial media does not have time for citizen groups and citizen leaders who are really trying to make America great, whether by advancing health safety or economic well-being,” Nader bemoaned. “These groups are overwhelmed. They’re marginalized. They’re kept from nourishing the contents of national, state and local elections. Look at the Sunday news shows. No one can get on to demonstrate that the majority of the people want full Medicare for all with the free choice of doctors and hospitals, not only more efficient but more life-saving. There was a major press conference a few days ago at the National Press Club. The leading advocates of full Medicare for all, or single-payer, were there, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the heads of Physicians for a National Health Program. This is a group with about 15,000 physicians on board. Nobody came. There was a stringer for an indie media outlet and the corporate crime reporter. There are all kinds of major demonstrations, 1,300 arrests outside the Congress protesting the corruption of money in politics. Again no coverage, except a little on NPR and on ‘Democracy Now!’ ”

“The system is gamed,” he said. “The only way out of it is to mobilize the civil society.

“We are organizing the greatest gathering of accomplished citizen advocacy groups on the greatest number of redirections and reforms ever brought together in American history under one roof,” he said of his upcoming event. “The first day is called Breaking Through Power, How it Happens. We have 18 groups who have demonstrated it with tiny budgets for over three decades on issues such as road safety, removing hundreds of hazardous or ineffective pharmaceuticals from the market, changing food habits from junk food to nutrition and rescuing people from death row who were falsely convicted of homicides. What if we tripled the budgets and the staffs of these groups? Eighteen of these groups have a total budget that is less than what one of dozens of CEOs make in a year.”

Nader called on Sanders to join in the building of a nationwide civic mobilization. He said that while Clinton may borrow some of his rhetoric, she and the Democratic Party establishment would not incorporate Sander’s populist appeals against Wall Street into the party platform. If Sanders does not join a civic mobilization, Nader warned, there would be “a complete disintegration of his movement.”

Nader also said he was worried that Clinton’s high negativity ratings, along with potential scandals, including the possible release of her highly paid speeches to corporations such as Goldman Sachs, could see Trump win the presidency.

“I have her lecture contract with the Harry Walker lecture agency,” he said. “She had a clause in the contract with these business sponsors, which basically said the doors will be closed. There will be no press. You will pay $1,000 for a stenographer to give me, for my exclusive use, a stenographic record of what I said. You will pay me $5,000 a minute. She has it all. She can’t say, ‘We will look into it or we’ll see if we can find it.’ She has been dissembling. And her latest rant is, ‘I’ll release the transcripts if everyone else does.’ ‘Who is everybody else?’ as Bernie Sanders rebutted. He doesn’t give highly paid speeches behind closed doors to Wall Street firms, business executives or business trade groups. Trump doesn’t give quarter-of-a-million-dollar speeches behind closed doors to business. So by saying ‘I will release all of my transcripts if everyone else does,’ she makes a null and void assertion. This is characteristic of the Clintons’ dissembling and slipperiness. It’s transcripts for Hillary. It’s tax returns for Trump.”

While Nader supports the building of third parties, he cautions that these parties—he singles out the Green Party and the Libertarian Party—will go nowhere without mass mobilization to pressure the centers of power. He called on the left to reach out to the right in a joint campaign to dismantle the corporate state. Sanders could play a large role in this mobilization, Nader said, because “he is in the eye of the mass media. He is building this rumble from the people.”

“What does he have to lose?” Nader asked of Sanders. “He’s 74. He can lead this massive movement. I don’t think he wants to let go. His campaign has exceeded his expectations. He is enormously energized. If he leads the civic mobilization before the election, whom is he going to help? He’s going to help the Democratic Party, without having to go around being a one-line toady expressing his loyalty to Hillary. He is going to be undermining the Republican Party. He is going to be saying to the Democratic Party, ‘You better face up to the majoritarian crowds and their agenda, or you’re going to continue losing in these gerrymandered districts to the Republicans in Congress.’ These gerrymandered districts can be overcome with a shift of 10 percent of the vote. Once the rumble from the people gets underway, nothing can stop it. No one person can, of course, lead this. There has to be a groundswell, although Sanders can provide a focal point”

Nader said that a Clinton presidency would further enflame the right wing and push larger segments of the country toward extremism.

“We will get more quagmires abroad, more blowback, more slaughter around the world and more training of fighters against us who will be more skilled to bring their fight here,” he said of a Clinton presidency. “Budgets will be more screwed against civilian necessities. There will be more Wall Street speculation. She will be a handmaiden of the corporatists and the military industrial complex. There comes a time, in any society, where the rubber band snaps, where society can’t take it anymore.”

Rent Strikes: ‘together we can defeat the housing market’

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Rent-Strikers-1

By Matt Broomfield

Source: RoarMag.org

As they revive a long-dormant form of protest, rent strikers in London and San Francisco must learn lessons from the great strikes of the 20th century.

When you can no longer afford to pay your rent, only one course of action remains: stop paying it. On both sides of the Atlantic, tenants are militating against the unbearable pressure of the housing market via the only locus of power available to them — going on rent strike.

Midtown Apartments, San Francisco

Jose LaCrosby was an African-American hair stylist to the stars. Nina Simone, James Brown and Miles Davis all frequented his San Francisco salon. Terminally ill at the age of 89, LaCrosby was told by his doctors that he should return to die among his friends in Midtown Apartments.

But the City of San Francisco had just hiked rents by up to 300 percent. If the Korean War veteran wanted to move back in to a ground-floor apartment it would now cost him $3700 a month. LaCrosby had lived in Midtown for two decades, but he spent the last 7 months of his life under fluorescent lights in an anodyne hospice ward, unable to afford the grossly inflated rent.

LaCrosby’s treatment is symptomatic of the way Midtown is being used as an asset to be stripped for cash, says long-time resident and Save Midtown organizer Jay Majitov. “This community is being displaced by the greed and avarice of property pimps preying on the weak and the disenfranchised,” he explains. Many of Majitov’s neighbors moved into Midtown after being socially cleansed from other areas of San Francisco in the 1960s, on what they understood was a rent-to-buy agreement.

But though Midtown paid off its collective mortgage in 2007, the city reneged on its agreement to hand the building over to the tenants. Instead, Midtowners were hit with a threefold increase in rent, far outstripping the maximum increase set by San Francisco rent controls. Appalled by this betrayal of trust, the tenants of 65 Midtown apartments have been withholding their rent increase since August 2015.

University College London

On the face of it, LaCrosby’s working-class neighbors in Midtown have little in common with the primarily middle-class, primarily white students of University College London. But the price of UCL accommodation has risen by 56 percent in the last six years, and the university extracts £16 million annually in pure profit from their residences. The halls remain shabby, cramped and infested with cockroaches.

As a result, around 150 students are currently striking for a 40 percent rent decrease. “UCL call residents in halls customers, not students,” says David Dahlborn of UCL, Cut The Rent (UCL-CTR). “It’s sheer exploitation.”

There have been rumblings about wider rent strikes across the British left for months, while US activists in Portland and elsewhere are now looking to copy Midtown’s example. Yet until a couple of years ago, no one was talking about rent strikes at all.

The problem(s) with rent strikes

Once a cornerstone of tenants’ rights activism, since the 1980s the rent strike has largely been absent from the arsenal of the left. The most famous rent strike in history occurred in 1915, when the fear of a Bolshevik insurrection forced the UK government to appease strikers in Glasgow by introducing rent controls. As the Communist threat faded after the second Red Scare, so too did the need to form housing policy with one eye on the Kremlin, and the government’s attitude toward rent strikers hardened accordingly.

Given that many rent strikes occurred in mutual relation with industrial strikes, their decline in popularity can partially be ascribed to the decimation of workers’ right to strike by Thatcher and her successors. The UK now loses a tenth as many days to industrial action as it did in the 1980s, and “strike” has become a politically toxic term. (UCL-CTR advise their activists to avoid the word altogether when door-knocking.) The fragmentation of the left and the castration of the trade unions have left Britain without left-wing superstructures capable of amplifying wildcat rent strikes into a broader social movement.

There are also delocalized issues inherent in the mode of protest. The vulnerable people who stand to gain the most from a reduction in rent are also those most imperiled by eviction: working-class people, people of color, single mothers and the disabled, often living in social housing. According to Jay Majitov, many Midtowners will be forced out of state or onto the street if their strike is broken. There is no legal protection for rent strikers in the UK or the USA.

Recrimination can be brutal: after the arrest of rent strikers in Kings’ Cross in 1960, crowds of protesters were baton-charged and violently dispersed by mounted police. Mary Barbour and her army of Glaswegian housewives were forced to fight off heavy-handed bailiffs with wet clothes, rotten food and flour-bombs. Barbour would stomp round the tenements whirling a football rattle to summon her troops as the “factor” moved in.

Midtown property managers Mercy Housing have kept up an aggressive campaign of intimidation, towing residents’ cars for minor infractions and muscling into pensioners’ homes. “They came in as an occupying force, a colonizer. There’s no regard for cultural sensitivity or the long-term tenants,” says Majitov. Tenants have been told they face eviction if their grandchildren visit more than twice a week, or if they hold barbecues on their own property. “I’m sorry, man, but barbecues are what we do,” Majitov adds.

Making rent strikes work

An industrial striker does no work and so loses her pay, but rent strikers actually save money while they agitate, as astronomic rents stop crippling working people and start depreciating from the profits of housing companies. The more unbearable the financial burden on the renters, the keener the loss suddenly felt by the landlord, in an efficacious reversal of power dynamics.

Last year, UCL-CTR organized students from UCL and SOAS in a successful strike, securing £400,000 compensation after the university conceded it had left students in unlivable conditions among cockroaches, rats and incessant building works. London’s first genuine rent strike for 40 years only involved 50 students, but each individual striker made a tangible, measurable impact on the university’s finances. Glasgow 1915 and UCL-SOAS 2015 are century-spanning testaments to the fact that a well-executed rent strike can be devastatingly effective.

Historically, successful mass rent strikes have benefited from a united left providing the infrastructure to exponentially increase the strike’s effect across multiple homes and into the industrial sphere, rather than leaving isolated strikers at the mercy of the bailiffs. A New York strike in 1907 relied on the backing of a strong, active Socialist Party, and the Glasgow strikes would not have succeeded without union support.

As noted above, the male-dominated superstructures traditionally capable of supporting mass direct action have diminished in size and power. If they want to achieve this vital escalation, 21st century rent strikers must look to alternative, grassroots networks of activists.

Alternate support networks

Most successful rent strikes have been led by women. The distinction between rent strikes and industrial strikes should not be collapsed into a crude dichotomy between the male public sphere and the female domestic sphere. In 1907, 16-year-old Pauline Newman led strikes which secured rent reductions for 2000 New York families. She worked till 9pm in a textile factory before campaigning all night in the slums of Manhattan. Working-class women have always worked formally in the marketplace, as well as informally (and unpaid) in the home.

But Newman, the “East Side Joan of Arc”, was supported by housewives who spent the day going from tenement to tenement urging other families to join the strike. Working-class shop-floor networks intermeshed with female-dominated domestic networks. The Glasgow rent strike was sparked by landlords seeking to cow women into submission while their husbands were away fighting in the war. Again, Mary Barbour and her army rapidly spread information through the slums whenever the factor descended, militating via a social infrastructure which their landlords grossly underestimated.

Half of all British housing benefit recipients are single women. The average female flat-sharer in London earns £4236 less than her male counterpart, and twice as many women as men spend over half their salary on rent. Women have a disproportionate stake in the housing crisis, and male politicians continue to underestimate their ability to organize and resist. Though not a rent strike per se, the success of the Focus E15 mothers in resisting eviction attempts by Newham Council illustrates the continued power of localized, female, working-class support networks.

Interlocking working-class communities and communities of color have proven similarly capable of disseminating information and resistance. Rent strikers in 1930s Peckham relied on a rolling guard of unemployed laborers to defend their homes while successfully agitating for an improvement in living conditions. Majitov repeatedly emphasizes the importance of working-class solidarity in Midtown: “We don’t build apps, we don’t code. We drive buses and we deliver mail. And if this working-class community of color hadn’t stood together we would have been out a long time ago. ”

African-American Jean King (another woman) secured rent controls in St Louis after a year-long strike in 1969, while Majitov proudly notes that Save Midtown has the support of civil rights luminary Andrew Young, who successfully organized a rent strike alongside Martin Luther King in 1960s Chicago. Just like in Glasgow in 1907, Save Midtown have appointed tenant organizers with responsibility for contacting strikers across the development, and they are now reaching out to other African-American communities being abused by Mercy to launch a nationwide class action against the housing company.

The university bubble

A rent strike is a very different proposition for students, who are typically more privileged than the general population — a state of affairs maintained by the inaccessible rent conditions UCL-CTR are striking against. Many students have family homes to return to, and this can be leveraged against universities.

David Dahlborn explains: “When nothing had happened by the end of summer 2015, the international students who were on strike said ‘well, fuck it, I’m going home’. The university realized they couldn’t really send bailiffs to Mexico.” UCL capitulated soon after. Again, rent strikes reverse a power dynamic familiar to anyone who has tried to secure the return of a deposit from a suddenly evanescent landlord.

Students can also leverage the disjuncture between the public face of the academic university and its profit-making operations. “They say they’re concerned with education,” says UCL striker Aleksandra Tomaszewska. “But they’ve cut funding and bursaries while raising rent and tuition fees.”

Where housing companies are not hugely concerned with positive public relations, university authorities are at pains to emphasize that they provide a caring, nurturing environment. It would be a PR disaster for UCL to forcibly evict white, well-spoken, middle-class students. As with much student activism, student rent strikers can trade on their privilege to enjoy a much greater degree of security than their counterparts in council housing.

Universities constitute a ready-made network for the expansion of a strike. A successful rent strike at Sussex University in 1972-3 rapidly spread to 23 other universities. UCL-CTR is sharing advice and materials with student activists from SOAS, Imperial and Goldsmiths, as they seek to expand the current rent strike across the capital.

“Anyone could do it,” says Dahlborn, who repeatedly emphasizes the lateral organization of UCL-CTR. “Everybody on the strike is a potential organizer.” Students have more free time than workers; they have access to condensed bodies of left-leaning tenants paying vastly excessive rent; and they are keyed in to networks of information exchange between these bodies.

Rent strikes for the 21st century

Paradigms established by 20th century rent strikers could be instructive for those on the radical left wrangling about their relationship with Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Newman and Barbour instigated their strikes alone, but willingly worked alongside hierarchical, party-rooted structures to replicate these actions on a wider scale.

But as Dahlborn argues, a successful general rent strike must ultimately emerge from coordinated grassroots action, as multiple localized organizations “replicate and generalize” tactics that have worked well elsewhere. An emphasis on the dispersal of power underpins much recent left-wing strategizing, and rent strikes can operate particularly effectively through decentralized, lateral organization.

“Together we are powerful, and united we can defeat the market,” Dahlborn says. The unity he describes is not monolithic but dispersed, varied and multiple. Strikes should be generated through grassroots networks, not mandated by top-down frameworks.

Networks of university activists provide one such structure. London’s Radical Housing Network, which unites housing co-ops, community action groups and union representatives, is another. (This organization could also facilitate liaison between university students and working-class activists).

Roger Hallam’s concept of “Conditional Commitment” involves assuring potential strikers that a strike will only go ahead once a certain number of other tenants have committed to the action. Successfully implemented by UCL-CTRE, this system of collective responsibility would function well in enabling dispersed networks of rent strikers to operate in unison.

Industrial strikes expose the gulf between the evaluated worth of employees’ labor and the evaluated worth of the products they manufacture. The fact that a rent strike is even tenable as a concept illustrates the fact that tenants, like workers, are treated as profit-making organs.

Historically, the establishment has therefore reacted ferociously to rent strikes, which expose the cruelty of market logic. A general rent strike called by a hypothetical national tenants’ union would likely meet with overwhelming opposition. But it would be much more difficult for the establishment to defeat a network of localized, coordinated strikes breaking out on university campuses and council estates across the country.

If there’s no justice, there’s escrache!

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escrache

From Wikipedia:

Escrache is the name given in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Spain to a type of demonstration in which a group of activists go to the homes or workplaces of those whom they want to condemn and publicly humiliate in order to influence decision makers and governments into a certain course of action. This term was born in Argentina in 1995 and has since spread to other Spanish-speaking countries.
In Chile these actions are known as funa. In Peru they are known as roche and are often signed “El roche”.
The word was coined for political usage in 1995 by the human rights group HIJOS, to condemn the genocides committed by members of the PROCESO who were pardoned by Carlos Menem.
By 2013, the term was in wide use in Spain, to define the direct action protests of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca.

Origin of the term

The lunfardo term “escracho” has been used for some time in Río de la Plata. It was mentioned by Benigno B. Lugones in 1879 referring to a scam in which a lottery ticket supposedly naming the victim is presented to them and they are asked to pay to receive it, for an amount which is inferior to the amount they have “won” in the lottery. Escrache might also have come from the Genoese synonym for a photo “scraccé”, “scraccé” also passed to mean make a portrait, or more recently to smash someone’s face in. Another proposed origin is the English to scratch (the tickets used in the lottery scam were scratched to modify the number) or the Italian scaracio meaning spit.

The term came into wider use in 1995 by the human rights group HIJOS, when Carlos Menem pardoned members of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional who were accused of human rights violations and genocide. Using chants, music, graffiti, banners, throwing eggs, street theater, etc., they inform neighbors of the presence of criminals in the neighborhood.

From NewTactics.org:

What we can learn from this tactic:

When perpetrators of abuse are granted impunity, whether by law or de facto, they may go on to lead relatively anonymous lives — sometimes in the same communities as their victims. A group in Argentina decided that, even if perpetrators cannot be prosecuted through the courts, they can be revealed — or “unmasked” — to the general public.

Even though amnesty laws have made it difficult to prosecute some perpetrators, H.I.J.O.S. bypasses political and legal systems to encourage a kind of social ostracism, while making use of humor, theater and other cre­ative demonstrations.

This tactic has some serious risks. People adopting this tactic must be certain that they are targeting the right people and that the demonstrations are not used for other political purposes. Organizers of large demonstra­tions around emotional subjects must have mechanisms in place to prevent the events from degenerating into violence.

Origin of the Wal-Mart Workers’ Movement

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walmart black friday strike

Wal-Mart’s unfair labor policies have been a concern of workers’ rights activists for decades but they managed to avoid a retail strike until last year. On October 4th 2012, 60 Wal-Mart employees struck in Los Angeles followed by strikes at 28 stores in 12 states five days later. Shortly after on October 10th, pressure was increased when more than 200 workers protested at Wal-Mart’s global headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, as executives met for its annual financial analyst meeting. More than 400 Wal-Mart strikers, mostly coordinated by Organization United For Respect at Wal-Mart (OUR Wal-mart) with support from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, walked out on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and traditionally Wal-Mart’s most profitable (and chaotic) day of the year.

Wal-Mart’s intimidation tactics have long suppressed employees’ attempts to organize but previous incidents reflecting growing collective outrage and urgency served as catalyst to make the wave of strikes inevitable. On June 4th 2012, eight Mexican guest workers at Wal-Mart supplier CJ’s Seafood went on strike and filed a complaint with the Labor Department and the Equal Opportunity Labor Commission. Plant managers had forced them to work 24 hour shifts with no overtime, locked employees inside the plant, threatened them with beatings and threatened violence against their families in Mexico. As a result of the strike, Wal-Mart was pressured into suspending CJ’s Seafood as a supplier.

In early September of 2012, around 30 temp workers at a warehouse storing goods for Wal-Mart went on strike without union backing. Conditions of the freight containers they worked in were becoming dangerously hot in the Summer. In addition, the underpaid workers had no access to clean water, were forced to use malfunctioning equipment, denied work breaks, and threatened by supervisors. The following week another 30 employees at a Wal-Mart distribution center in northeastern Illinois walked out after being retaliated against by supervisors for delivering a list of grievances to management. Their petition shared many of the same concerns listed by the strikers in California: dangerous working conditions, unsafe or insufficient equipment, lack of living wages, no overtime pay, benefits and job security, irregular schedules, work speed-ups and wage theft.

While exploitation and unjust treatment of workers are not unique to Wal-Mart and companies they subcontract to, the wild growth of the Wal-Mart empire can be largely attributed to their business model. Besides maintaining strict anti-union policies, by keeping tight control over their supply chain they force costs and responsibilities onto suppliers, squeezing their margins. Predictably, this results in the lowest paid laborers getting hit the hardest while the highest paid CEOs make obscenely inflated profits. According to Federal Reserve data analyzed by Sylvia Allegretto and Josn Bivens, between 2007 and 2010, while the average American family’s wealth decreased 38.8%, wealth of Wal-Mart heirs rose 22% to nearly $90 billion, equivalent to the wealth of 41.5 percent of American families combined. An article for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee by Zaid Jilani highlighted the fact that Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke received compensation worth $18.1 million in 2011 while the average sales associate at the company was paid $8.81 an hour according to independent market research group IBIS World. Thus, Duke earned 1,167 times as much as his company’s average worker (average CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 209.4-to-1 in 2011). A 2008 SweatFree Communities report brought to light horrendous working conditions at a Wal-Mart supplier in Bangladesh where sweatshop factory workers were forced to work up to 19-hour shifts, frequently subjected to verbal and physical abuse and paid as little as $20 a month.

Societal harm caused by Wal-Mart is hardly limited to poverty and sub-poverty wage employees, subcontractors, and their families. In 2010 Public Advocate for the City of New York Bill de Blasio and Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development released “Wal-Mart’s Economic Footprint”, a comprehensive review of over fifty studies on Wal-Mart’s economic impact across the country. Among their findings:
-For every two low wage jobs Wal-Mart creates, three local jobs are eliminated.
-Wal-Mart stores have a strongly negative impact on a community’s existing retailers.
-Large chain stores such as Wal-Mart send most of their revenues out of communities.
-Wal-Mart has thousands of employees who qualify for Medicaid and other publicly subsidized care.
-Wal-Mart likely avoided paying $245 million in taxes 2008 by paying rent to itself and then deducting that rent from its taxable income.
-Wal-Mart has admitted a failure to pay $2.95 billion in taxes for fiscal year 2009.
-Wal-Mart’s average annual pay of $20,774 is below the Federal Poverty Level for a family of four.

Because Wal-Mart is now the largest food seller in the US, it has an outsized impact on our food system influencing which foods are made available, market prices of food and methods used by food producers. Continuing Wal-Mart’s trend of prioritizing profits over people, last year the company made a deal with Monsanto to sell unlabeled GM corn. This decision was made despite protests of 463,000 signatories of a petition from Food and Water Watch urging Wal-Mart not to carry the potentially harmful product.

The National Labor Relations Board recently decided that it will prosecute Wal-Mart for labor rights violations for firing and retaliating against striking workers and those who have been outspoken about working conditions at Wal-Mart. This case shows that actions over the past year and a half have had a significant impact. Nearly a year after the Tazreen factory fire in Bangladesh that killed at least 117 people, Wal-Mart has refused to contribute to a compensation program for survivors and families (55% of the factory’s production was for Wal-Mart contractors). Wal-Mart has also been in the media spotlight for promoting a holiday food drive for its own employees, many of whom are paid under $9 an hour.

To keep the pressure on Wal-Mart, many workers will be walking off the job again for this year’s Black Friday. Learn more about this year’s action and/or participate by visiting the ActionNetwork.org site.

Sources:

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/10/walmart_workers_in_12_states_stage#transcript

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/17/warehouse-workers-strike-illinois_n_1891499.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/oct/18/walmart-supply-chain-agencies-accused-wage-theft

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/17/534591/walmart-heirs-wealth-combined/

http://boldprogressives.org/why-they-strike-wal-marts-ceo-earns-1167-times-as-much-as-an-average-worker-at-the-company/

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwH0nSyYMDxtNzZlYTBkN2UtNDQyMS00MzhkLTlkZTctMGQ4NjQ5NGNlZTRj/preview?hl=en

http://advocate.nyc.gov/files/Walmart.pdf

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/08/04-0

http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/pressreleases/national-community-labor-and-food-leaders-explain-why-walmart-cant-fix-new-york-citys-food-system/

Judging from footage such as this compilation video of various Black Friday sales last year at Wal-Mart and other stores, many employees may also want to skip work that day for personal safety reasons:

Remember, Remember, the 5th of November

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In honor of Guy Fawkes Day I’d like to bring attention to a few intriguing statements from Alan Moore (writer of the graphic novel V for Vendetta) on the connections between his fictions and reality from an interview he did shortly after the start of the Occupy Movement.

Via The Guardian:

I suppose I’ve gotten used to the fact that some of my fictions percolate out into the material world.

…I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It’s peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction.

…And when you’ve got a sea of V masks, I suppose it makes the protesters appear to be almost a single organism – this “99%” we hear so much about. That in itself is formidable. I can see why the protesters have taken to it. It turns protests into performances.

The mask is very operatic; it creates a sense of romance and drama. I mean, protesting, protest marches, they can be very demanding, very grueling. They can be quite dismal. They’re things that have to be done, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re tremendously enjoyable – whereas actually, they should be.

I think it’s appropriate that this generation of protesters have made their rebellion into something the public at large can engage with more readily than with half-hearted chants, with that traditional, downtrodden sort of British protest. These people look like they’re having a good time. And that sends out a tremendous message.

The reason V’s fictional crusade against the state is ultimately successful is that the state, in V for Vendetta, relies upon a centralised computer network which he has been able to hack. Not an obvious idea in 1981, but it struck me as the sort of thing that might be down the line. This was just something I made up because I thought it would make an interesting adventure story. Thirty years go by and you find yourself living it.

I have no particular connection or claim to what [the protesters] are doing, nor am I suggesting that these people are fans of mine, or of V for Vendetta…So there’s always… Now I didn’t feel responsible, but…at the moment, the demonstrators seem to me to be making clearly moral moves, protesting against the ridiculous state that our banks and corporations and political leaders have brought us to.

…It would probably be better if the authorities accepted this is a new situation, that this is history happening. History is a thing that happens in waves. Generally it is best to go with these waves, not try to make them turn back – the Canute option. I’m hoping that the world’s leaders will realise this.

…Vox populi, Voice of the people. And I think that if the mask stands for anything, in the current context, that is what it stands for. This is the people. That mysterious entity that is evoked so often – this is the people.

Read the full article here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/27/alan-moore-v-vendetta-mask-protest

Last July Moore was interviewed by Salon.com to talk about his new Kickstarter project, Jimmy’s End, but he also shared the following relevant observations about emerging NSA revelations, the surveillance state and technology:

There seems to be something going on, even from the briefest appraisal of the news, with the amount of events transpiring. This is such a connected world, it’s useless to isolate any part of it as a discrete phenomenon. You can’t really talk about the problems in Syria, because its problems are global. The waves of discontent and outrage — whether in the Arab countries, or in Brazil, or in America and Europe over the degrees to which its citizens are being monitored — are not separate phenomena. They are phenomena of an emergent world, and the existence of the Internet is one of its major drivers. We have got no idea how it’s going to turn out, because the nature of our society is such that if anything can be invented, then we will invent it. Sooner or later, if it is possible.

So the Internet is changing everything, but I wouldn’t yet want to say for good or ill. I suspect, as ever, that it will be an admixture of both. But we are all along for the ride, even those people like me who do not have Internet connections, mobile phones or even functioning televisions. I’m slowly disconnecting myself. Basically, it’s a feeling that if we are going to subject our entire culture to what is an unpredictable experiment, then I’d like to try to remain outside the petri dish. [Laughs] It’s only sensible to have somebody as a control.

To me, one of the biggest surprises of these recent surveillance revelations is how surprised people are. The level of surveillance we’ve had over here for the past 20 years now is ridiculous — and useless, I would add. Eerily enough, the security cameras on every street corner of Britain was instigated by the incoming Blair government in 1997, which was when I decided, back in 1982 or so, to set the first episode of “V for Vendetta,” which had cameras on every street corner. So yeah, we’ve had those for awhile; they’ve proliferated and multiplied for decades. More recently, there have been troops of police who have said that all these things are useful for is alienating the public. [Laughs] They are not actually useful in the prevention of crimes, or even actually apprehending their suspects.

Here’s the thing: If you’re monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. [Laughs] How are you going to process that amount of information? That’s when you get all these wonderful emerging paradoxes. Recently over here, there was a case where it was suspected that the people who monitor security screens were taking unnecessary toilet breaks and gossiping when they should be watching us. So it was decided that the only sensible thing to do was to put a security camera in the monitor room. [Laughs] This is answering the question that Juvenal asked so succinctly all those years ago: Who watches the watchmen? The answer is more watchmen! And yet more watchmen watch them, and of course it will eventually occur to them to ask: Can those people who are watching the people doing the watching really be trusted? Much better if they were under surveillance.

That’s the level of absurdity these Orwellian solutions bring to our increasingly complex world. George Orwell’s vision was 1947. Yes, the world was more complex than it had been, but nowhere near as complex as it was going to get. We currently have in Northampton — and I think we might be the first to have it — security cameras in some places that actually talk to you. “Pick that cigarette end up! Yes, you!” [Laughs] Which is so much like Patrick McGoohan’s vision for the Village in “The Prisoner,” all those years ago.

…Technology is always a two-edged sword. It will bring in many benefits, but also many disasters. Because of the complexity of our situation, we cannot predict what things will be until they happen. It’s just part of our responsibility as people in the modern world to do our very, very best to deal with them, and think them through, as they occur. While I’m remote from most technology to the point that I’m kind of Amish, I have played a couple of computer games — until I realized I was being bloodied with adrenalin over something that wasn’t real. At the end of a couple of hours of very addictive play, I may have procured the necessary amount of mushrooms to save a princess, but I also wasted hours of my life that I’ll never be able to get back. This is the reason I am not on the Internet. I am aware of its power as a distraction, and I don’t have the time for that.

Despite the constant clamor for attention from the modern world, I do believe we need to procure a psychological space for ourselves. I apparently know some people who try to achieve this by logging off, or going without their Twitter or Facebook for a limited period. Which I suppose is encouraging, although it doesn’t seem that remarkable from my perspective. I think that people need to establish their own psychological territory in face of the encroaching world.

Read the full interview here: http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/alan_moore_the_revolution_will_be_crowd_funded/

Despite the fact that Moore said he disowned all Hollywood adaptations of his works, in my opinion the quality of his writing can transcend limitations inherent in such attempts, retaining power and resonance even in “watered down” form. Though I was disappointed by the film version of V for Vendetta overall, many who would not have otherwise been exposed to Moore’s work were able to absorb important aspects of his message through it and viral clips such as this:

NSA Under Fire

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(PHOTO by Nemo, 21WIRE/GMN)

(PHOTO by Nemo, 21WIRE/GMN)

The past few days have been especially turbulent ones for the NSA and its Director Keith Alexander. On Friday afternoon the NSA website experienced a shutdown which was widely reported as a denial of service attack, possibly involving members of hacker collective Anonymous. The NSA later claimed the problem was due to an “internal error” during a scheduled update. It goes without saying that we should take what the NSA says with an industrial-sized carton of salt.

On Friday night Foreign Policy magazine reported a multinational coalition has formed in the U.N. to draft a General Resolution to curb the power of the NSA’s surveillance network. The delegations involved include Brazil, Germany, France, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Hungary,
India, Indonesia, Liechtenstein, Norway, Paraguay, South Africa,
Sweden, Switzerland, and Uruguay. This action follows the political upheaval caused by Thursday’s release of Snowden documents which revealed at least 35 world leaders were spied on by the NSA. Since it’s doubtful they were under suspicion of terrorism, what’s a more likely explanation for the spying? Blackmail.

Just yesterday a massive “Stop Watching Us” rally demonstrated near the White House demanding an investigation, regulatory reform and accountability for those found to be responsible for unconstitutional surveillance. Twelve large boxes of 575,000 petition signatures were shown to the crowd at the foot of the US Capitol. According to a Reuters report:

The march attracted protesters from both ends of the political spectrum as liberal privacy advocates walked alongside members of the conservative Tea Party movement in opposition to what they say is unlawful government spying on Americans.

…The event was organized by a coalition known as “Stop Watching Us” that consists of some 100 public advocacy groups and companies, including the American Civil Liberties Union, privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, Occupy Wall Street NYC and the Libertarian Party.

As damaging as the NSA has been to our privacy, they may prove to be more damaging to the government itself. The first steps towards ending an abusive relationship are to snap out of denial, seek support, and address the underlying root of the problem. A positive aspect of the NSA spying scandal is that it’s helping the world wake up to the previously hidden (to many) evil behind the friendly facade. It’s truly a hopeful development to see countries around the world and groups of different political stripes in solidarity organizing around the issue of NSA criminality. We need more of this type of focus and cooperation if we are to confront the sources of our biggest problems and make positive changes in this arena and others.