Occupy Rio+20

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

Governments are gathering in Brazil, twenty years after the historic 1992 Earth Summit where nations around the world pledged to devote themselves to ending hunger and conserving the planet’s resources for future generations.

This week, governments gather once again, and food and agriculture are high on the agenda of “Rio+20.” Global leaders will be discussing which way forward to feed the world amidst growing food, climate and water crises. Monsanto & Co. have geared up with slick websites and sound bytes — to the point where some have dubbed the official meeting “Greenwash +20.” But the good news is that people around the world are mobilizing like never before for a new food system.

What, GE won’t feed the world?! 

The first Rio gathering in 1992 marked an important historical moment when nations came together with inspiring goals and commitments to keep our planet from going off the rails and to save and replenish the ecosystems that are required for life to continue. But 20 years on, the report card on progress is bleak, and tragically, this meeting (like Copenhagen and too many others) promises more hot air and no progress.

Of profound concern is the undue influence exerted by multinational corporations who have entered the “sustainability” and “green” debate with predictable zeal. The recently released report Greenwash +20 documents how multinational corporate interests thwart government action toward real sustainable development. In food and agriculture, the report exposes the Big 6 player Syngenta, in particular, for its role in suppressing science, influencing the public conversation to bolster profits, and shadow-writing public policy.

Despite the best attempts of the Big 6 pesticide/biotech companies to persuade us that their toxic chemicals and expensive patented seeds are needed, here’s the real deal: GE crops haven’t delivered on 20 years of empty promises. No yield gains, no drought-tolerance, no nutritional improvement.

Rather, farmers signing contracts with Big 6 players have lost their land and their right to save and exchange seed, have fallen deeper into debt, seen their communities wither, stores shuttered, schools closed...The greatest benefits from the sale of GE seeds and the pesticides that go with them have consistently accrued to their manufacturers, companies like Monsanto which more than doubled its profits at the height of the global food price crisis of 2008. We know this to be true from the words of farmers — whether in Iowa or India — and from the hard facts presented to us by independent scientists.

People Power

The heartening news is that farmers and scientists around the world know better than to believe the Biotech Brigade. From Berkeley to Brazil, there is incredible momentum gathering like never before to democratize our food system. This momentum is manifested in the thousands of people gathering at the People’s Summit in Rio. Here peasant farmers, community and social movement leaders, policy advocates, researchers and academics are sharing their knowledge and stories of how communities and entire nations are building strong and vibrant local and regional food systems without buying into corporate dependency.

This “unofficial” meeting, already going on, is where the smarts and solutions lie. Two full days will be dedicated to agroecology and the science and organizing required to build an ecologically sane and democratic food and farming system. While official meetings miles away in walled-off rooms promise entrenchment and false hope, the agroecology meeting has sparked the analysis and relationship-building needed to fuel our movement for change.

Here are some exciting products already coming out of Rio:

• Agroecology in the U.S., a new brief from PANNA showcasing the success of ecological farming at home and laying out policy recommendations for the U.S. government (also in Spanish);
• Scaling up Agroecology: Spreading the Hope for Food Sovereignty and Resiliency by the Latin American Scientific Society for Agroecology;
• The Global Common Statement for a Toxics-Free Future, co-produced by PAN International and partners in the International POPs Elimination Network;
• The collectively produced Ag Transitions website that demonstrates the ability of small-scale family farming to meet 21^st century challenges;
• Time To Act Rio+20, a powerful civil society statement endorsed by PAN and the Global Agriculture website, both of which take up the call of the pathbreaking IAASTD report.

The global people’s gathering in Rio shows that there’s more movement than ever for Food Democracy. It’s up to us to create this change. Here are three ways to engage today:

• Sign the statement from Occupy Rio+20.
• Join PAN’s alert list, where you’ll get updates on how to take action for food democracy and a healthy planet. Right now, we’re supporting the brave Mothers of Argentina vs. Monsanto in our online action with the White House.
• Play “Game Change Rio,” a game that raises awareness of the issues we’ll need to address if future generations are to enjoy life on this planet. (Demo video here).

As the leader of PAN’s Food Democracy campaign team, I’m thrilled by the public conversations taking place in Rio and the momentum powering social movements around the world. Join us.

Hijacking The Wisconsin Uprising

Why Electoral Politics Sold Out the Popular Uprising in the Badger State -- and Why It’s Not All Over 

By Andy Kroll, cross-posted from TomDispatch

The revelers watched in stunned disbelief, cocktails in hand, dressed for a night to remember. On the big-screen TV a headline screamed in crimson red: "Projected Winner: Scott Walker." It was 8:49 p.m. In parts of Milwaukee, people learned that news networks had declared Wisconsin’s governor the winner while still in line to cast their votes. At the election night party for Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, supporters talked and cried and ordered more drinks. Barrett soon took the stage to concede, then waded into the crowd where a distraught woman slapped him in the face.

Walker is the first governor in American history to win a recall election. His lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, dispatched her recall challenger no less decisively. So, too, did three Republican state senators in their recall elections. Democrats avoided a GOP sweep with a win in the sixth and final senate recall vote of the season, in Wisconsin's southeastern 21st district, but that was small consolation. Put simply, Democrats and labor unions got rolled.

The results of Tuesday's elections are being heralded as the death of public-employee unions, if not the death of organized labor itself. Tuesday's results are also seen as the final chapter in the story of the populist uprising that burst into life last year in the state capital of Madison. The Cheddar Revolution, so the argument goes, was buried in a mountain of ballots.

But that burial ceremony may prove premature. Most of the conclusions of the last few days, left and right, are likely wrong.


The energy of the Wisconsin uprising was never electoral. The movement’s mistake: letting itself be channeled solely into traditional politics, into the usual box of uninspired candidates and the usual line-up of debates, primaries, and general elections. The uprising was too broad and diverse to fit electoral politics comfortably. You can't play a symphony with a single instrument. Nor can you funnel the energy and outrage of a popular movement into a single race, behind a single well-worn candidate, at a time when all the money in the world from corporate “individuals” and right-wing billionaires is pouring into races like the Walker recall.


Colin Millard, an organizer at the International Brotherhood of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental, and Reinforcing Iron Workers, admitted as much on the eve of the recall. We were standing inside his storefront office in the small town of Horicon, Wisconsin. It was night outside. "The moment you start a recall," he told me, "you're playing their game by their rules."

From Madison to Zuccotti Park and Beyond

A recap is in order.

The uprising began with Colin Millard. The date was February 11, 2011, when Walker "dropped the bomb," as he later put it, with his "budget repair" bill, which sought to gut collective bargaining rights for most public-employee unions,  Later that day, a state Democratic Party staffer who knew Millard called him and pleaded with him to organize a protest. Millard agreed, even though other unions, including the AFL-CIO, urged him to back out. Don't make a fuss, they advised. Let's call some lawmakers and urge them to oppose Walker's bill. "Fuck off," was Millard's response.

On the Sunday after Walker unveiled his bill, Millard rounded up more than 200 people and marched down Lake Street, past the John Deere factory and Dannyboy's Bar, to the home of Republican Jeff Fitzgerald, the speaker of the state Assembly and a Walker ally. Fitzgerald lived a mile or two from Millard in Horicon. "I've got a message for Scott Walker," Millard told the crowd outside Fitzgerald's house. "This is my union card and you can pry it from my cold, dead hand."

As rumors spread of more protests, Walker threatened to call out the National Guard to deal with the protesting public workers. That's when popular outrage erupted. Students marched on the state capitol, and then a local teaching assistants union led the effort to take over the capitol rotunda, transforming intermittent protests into a round-the-clock occupation. Organizers provided food, shelter, health care, day care, education, and a sense of purpose for those who had taken up residence inside the capitol.

In support of the occupiers, the daily protests outside the capitol grew into crowds of 10,000, 25,000, then upward of 100,000. People marched in the snowy streets to challenge Walker, Wisconsin Republicans, and their political donors. Tractors circled the capitol in protest, as did firefighters and cops, even though their bargaining rights had been exempted from Walker's "reform" proposals. By now, Madison had captured the nation's attention.

A two-week occupation of the capitol and months of protests didn’t, however, deter Walker and Republican lawmakers. He signed his budget repair bill, known as Act 10, into law in March. But that doesn’t mean the Wisconsin uprising had no effect. For one thing, the "Walkerville" occupation of the grounds outside the state capitol helped inspire the "Bloombergville" protest in New York City targeting Mayor Michael Bloomberg. That, in turn, would be a precursor to the Occupy Wall Street events of the following September and later the Occupy movement nationwide. Without Wisconsin, without the knowledge that such things could still happen in America, there might never have been an Occupy.

Hijacking the Uprising

By the time Occupy Wall Street took off, the Wisconsin uprising had swapped its come-one-come-all organizing message for a far narrower and more traditional political mission. Over the summer of 2011, the decision was made that the energy and enthusiasm displayed in Madison should be channeled into recall elections to defeat six Republican state senators who had voted for Walker's anti-union Act 10. (Three Democratic senators would, in the end, face recall as well.) By that act, Democrats and unions hoped to wrestle control of the senate away from Walker and use that new power to block his agenda.

The Democrats won two of the 2011 recalls, one short of gaining control of the Senate, and so the Republicans clung to their majority.

What followed was more of the same, but with the ante upped. This time, the marquee race would be the recall of Walker himself. Launched last November, the grassroots campaign to recall the governor put the populist heart of the Wisconsin uprising on full display. Organizing under the United Wisconsin banner, 30,000 volunteers statewide gathered nearly one million signatures to trigger the election. The group’s people-powered operation recaptured some of the spirit of the Capitol occupation, but the decision had been made: recalling Walker at the ballot box was the way forward.

The Walker recall effort would, in fact, splinter the masses of anti-Walker protesters. Many progressives and most of the state's labor unions rallied behind former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk who, in January 2012, announced her intent to challenge Walker. Tom Barrett, who had lost the governor’s race to Walker in 2010, didn't announce his candidacy until late March, his entry pitting Democrat against Democrat, his handful of union endorsements pitting labor against labor. Unions pumped $4 million into helping Falk clinch the Democratic nomination. In the end, though, it wasn't close: Barrett stomped her in the May 8th primary by 24 percentage points.

By now, the Madison movement was the captive of ordinary Democratic politics in the state. After all, Barrett was hardly a candidate of the uprising. People who had protested in the streets and slept in the capitol groused about his uninspired record on workers' rights and public education. He never inspired or unified the movement that had made a recall possible -- and it showed on Election Day: Walker beat Barrett by seven percentage points, almost his exact margin of victory in 2010. Democrats and their union allies needed to win over new voters and old enemies; by all accounts they failed.

And had Barrett by some miracle won, after a few days of celebration and self-congratulation, those in the Madison movement would have found themselves in the same box, in the same broken system, with little sense of what to do and, in a Barrett governorship, little hope. Win or lose, there was loss written all over the recall decision.

The Fate of the Uprising

The takeaway from Walker's decisive win on Tuesday is not that Wisconsin's new populist movement is dead. It's that such a movement does not fit comfortably into the present political/electoral system, stuffed as it is with corporate money, overflowing with bizarre ads and media horse-race-manship. Its members' beliefs are too diverse to be confined comfortably in what American electoral politics has become. It simply couldn’t be squeezed into a system that stifles and, in some cases, silences the kinds of voices and energies it possessed.

The post-election challenge for the members of Wisconsin's uprising is finding a new way to fight for and achieve needed change without simply pinning their hopes on a candidate or an election. After all, that's part of what absorbed the nation when a bunch of students first moved into the Wisconsin state capitol and wouldn’t go home, or when a ragtag crew of protesters camped out in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park and wouldn't leave either. In both cases, they had harnessed the outrage felt by so many Americans for a cause other than what’s usually called “politics” in this country.

And they were successful -- even in the most traditional terms; that is, both movements affected traditional politics most strongly when they weren’t part of it. The Occupy movement, for all its flaws, moved even mainstream political discourse away from austerity and deficit slashing and toward the issues of income inequality and the hollowing out of the American middle and working classes.

Avoiding politics as we know it with an almost religious fervor, Occupy still managed to put its stamp on national political fights. Last October, for instance, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to repeal SB 5, a law that curbed collective bargaining rights for all public-employee unions. Occupy’s "We are the 99%" message reverberated through Ohio, and the volunteers who blitzed the state successfully drew on Occupy themes to make their case for the law's repeal. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which spent $500,000 in Ohio fighting SB 5, told me at the time, "Every conversation was in the context of the 99% and the 1%, this discussion sparked by Occupy Wall Street."

The money that flowed into Walker's recall fight speaks loudly to the disadvantages a Wisconsin-like movement faces within the walls of electoral politics and the need for it to resist being confined there. On the post-Citizens United playing field, the unlimited amounts of the money that rose to the top of this society in recent decades, as the 1% definitively separated itself from the 99%, can be reinvested in preserving the world as it is and electing those who will make it even more amenable. The advantage invariably goes corporate; it goes Republican.

Historically, the Republicans have long been the party of big business, of multinational corporations, of wealthy, union-hating donors like Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and Amway heir Dick DeVos -- and in recent decades the Democrats have followed in their wake sweeping up the crumbs (or worse). And here’s the reality of a deeply corrupt system: unless Congress and state legislators act to patch up their tattered campaign finance rulebooks, the same crew with the same money will continue to dominate the political wars. (And any movement that puts its own money on changing those rules is probably in deep trouble.)

In the wake of the recall losses, the people of Wisconsin's uprising must ask themselves: Where can they make an impact outside of politics? The power of nonviolent action to create social and economic change is well documented, most notably by Jonathan Schell in his classic book The Unconquerable World. The men and women in Schell's invaluable history -- Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his civil rights fighters, the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, and so many others -- can serve as guides to a path to change that doesn't require recall elections. Already mainstays of the Madison protests have suggested campaigns to refuse to spend money with businesses that support Walker. "Hit 'em where it hurts. Pocketbooks," C.J. Terrell, one of the Capitol occupiers, recently wrote on Facebook.

Wisconsinites could also turn to one of their own: Robert "Fightin' Bob" La Follette. He created his own band of "insurgents" within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Republican Party. Together they formed the Progressive Party, which fought for workers' rights, guarded civil liberties, and worked to squeeze corruption out of government.

Ultimately, however, the decision on what comes next rests in the hands of those who inspired and powered the Wisconsin uprising. And with an emboldened Governor Walker, there should be no shortage of reasons to fight back in the next two years. But success, as Tuesday's election made clear, isn’t likely to come the traditional way. It will, of course, involve unions; it might draw on state and local political parties. But in the end, it's in the hands of the people again, as it was in February 2011.

The future they want is theirs to decide.

Andy Kroll is a staff reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine. He is also an associate editor at TomDispatch.com. He has covered Wisconsin politics since the first protests ignited in February 2011.

Quote Of The Day

"Today, the struggle continues to celebrate May Day not as a "law day" as defined by political leaders, but as a day whose meaning is decided by the people, a day rooted in organizing and working for a better future for the whole of society."

-- Noam Chomsky, Zuccotti Park Press

Welcome To The 2012 Hunger Games

Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into The Arena

By Rebecca Solnit, cross-posted from TomDispatch

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital 

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like -- and yet not exactly like -- high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film, and books aspire to reduce.

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The Hunger Games reminds us of that.  Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1%, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1%, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen -- Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one -- who refuses to be disposed of.

Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey, and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage, and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.

In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died.  If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men, and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.

Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.

Our wartime carnage has been on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government, which censored images of returning coffins, corpses, civilian casualties, and anything else uncomfortable (though in our science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other things -- including reality TV, of course.  The US Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan were furious not that our soldiers struck jokey poses with severed limbs, but that the Los Angeles Times dared to publish them last month. And those whistleblowers who took the effort to reveal the little men behind the throne are facing severe punishment.  Witness one Hunger-Games-style hero, Bradley Manning, the slight young soldier turned alleged leaker, long held in inhumane conditions and now facing a potential life sentence.


The Return of Debt Peonage

In The Hunger Games, kids in poor families take out extra chances in their District lottery -- that is, extra chances to die -- in return for extra food rations; in ours, poor kids enlist in the military to feed their families and maybe escape economic doom. Many are seduced by military recruiters who stalk them in high school with promises as slippery as those the slave trade uses to recruit poor young women for sex work abroad.

And then there’s another form of debt peonage that is far more widespread in our strange and ever-changing land: student loans. The young are constantly told that only a college education can give them a decent future. Then they’re told that, to pay for it, they need to go into debt -- usually into five figures, sometimes well into six. And these debts are, in turn, governed by special laws that don’t allow you to declare bankruptcy -- no matter what.  In other words, they are guaranteed to follow you all your life.

One of my close friends wept when her husband began to earn enough money to pay off her $45,000 loan, structured so that it looked like she would continue to pay interest on it for the rest of her life; not so dissimilar, that is, from the debts sharecroppers and workers in company towns used to incur.

In other words, we’re creating a new generation of debt peonage. And she’s not the worst case by far. Early in the Occupy Wall Street moment, she told me, someone arrived at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan with markers and cardboard on which participants were to write their debt.  What shocked her was how many of the occupiers in their early twenties were already carrying huge debt burdens.

According to the website for Occupy Student Debt, 36,000,000 Americans have student debts.  These have increased more than fivefold since 1999, creating a debt load that’s approaching a trillion dollars, with students borrowing $96 billion more every year to pay for their educations. Two-thirds of college students find themselves in this trap nowadays. As commentator Malcolm Harris put it in N + 1 magazine:

“Since 1978, the price of tuition at U.S. colleges has increased over 900%, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the U.S. economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But… wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.”

About a third are already in default. You can only hope that this bubble will burst in a wildcat strike against student debt, and if we’re lucky, a move to force tuition lower and have a debt jubilee.

The rest of us, the 99%, need to remember that, when it comes to public education, the crisis has everything to do with slashed tax rates -- to the wealthy and corporations in particular -- over the last 30 years. We went into bondage so that they might be free. Getting an education to make your way out of poverty and maybe expand your mind is becoming another way of being trapped forever in poverty. For too many, there’s no way out of the hunger labyrinth.

The Labyrinths of Poverty 

Which brings us to the hungriest in our 2012 real-life version of the Hunger Games: the poor. The wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen is full of hungry people. You know it, and you know why. In this vast, bountiful, food-producing, food-wasting nation, it’s a crisis of distribution, also known as economic inequality, described at last with clarity and force by the Occupy movement.

One of the sad and moving spectacles of camps like Occupy Oakland last year was the way they became de facto soup kitchens as the homeless and hungry came out of the shadows for the chance at a decent meal. Some of the camps had really dedicated chefs who cooked superbly.  They also had rudimentary medical clinics where the poor received the healthcare they couldn’t get anywhere else.

We are in a new era of desperation, when lots of people who were getting by these last several decades aren’t anymore. There are no jobs, or the jobs available pay so abysmally that workers can barely survive on them.

Of course, we do have one arena in which meals are guaranteed, and the population there keeps growing. Six million Americans live there, and it often does get gladiatorial inside. It’s called prison, and we have the highest percentage of prisoners per population in the world, higher than in the USSR gulags under Stalin. Half of them are there for drug offenses, 80% of those for simple possession.

Which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, hasn’t stopped the flow of drugs meant to numb the pain we’re so good at creating here.  We should create a measure for Gross National Suffering (GNS) before we even think about the Gross National Happiness they measure in Bhutan.

And once our prisoners get out, they’re a stigmatized caste, uniquely ill-suited to survival in this economy -- speaking of hunger, debt, poverty, being branded for life, and hopelessness. Like universities, prisons are profitable industries, though not for the human beings who are the raw material they process.  In this age, both systems seem increasingly like so many factories.

In the Shadow of 900 Tornados

But if you want to think about all the ways we’re dooming the young, there’s one that puts the others in the shade, a form of destruction that includes not just American youth, or human youth, but all species everywhere, from coral reefs to caribou. That’s climate change, of course.

Our failure to do anything adequate about it has rocketed us into the science-fiction world Bill McKibben so eloquently warned us about in his 2010 book Eaarth. His argument is that we’ve so altered the planet we live on that we might as well have landed on a new one (with an extra “a” in its name), more turbulent and far less hospitable than the beautiful Holocene one we trashed.
There were 160 tornados reported on March 2nd of this year. Remember that, in April of 2011, 900 tornadoes were ripping up interior United States, and this April was similarly volatile.  Remember the unprecedented wildfires, the catastrophic floods, the heat waves, the bizarrely hot North American January and other oddities? That’s science fiction of the scariest sort, and we’re in it. Or on it, on the crazy new planet we’ve made ourselves. Here in the USA sector of Eaarth in the year 2012, 15,000 high-temperature records were broken in March alone, and summer is yet to come. A town in north-central Texas hit 111 degrees -- in April! What turbulent planet is this?

One grain of good news: a lot of us, even in this country, finally seem to be of aware of the strangeness of the planet we’re now on. As the New York Times reported, a new survey “shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer, and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.”
If you want to talk about hunger, talk about the unprecedented flooding that’s turned Pakistan from one of the world’s breadbaskets into a net food-importing nation, with dire consequences for the agricultural poor. Talk about China’s many impending ecological disasters, its degraded soil, contaminated air and water, its many systems ready to collapse. There’s more disruption of food production to come, a lot more, and lots more hunger, too.

Around this point in science fiction books and even history books, a revolution seems necessary. The good news I have for you this May Day is that it’s underway.

Revolution 2012

2011 was the year of strange weather, but it was also the year of global uprisings, and they’re far from over. They erupted in Russia, Israel, Spain, Greece, Britain, much of the Arab-speaking world, parts of Africa, and Chile, among other spots in Latin America (some of which got their revolutions underway earlier in the millennium). Uprisings have blossomed even in what the rest of the hungry world sees as the elite Capitol, the United States, and much of the English-speaking world, from London to New Zealand.

Remember that revolution doesn’t look much like revolution used to. That might be the most retrograde aspect of the very violent Hunger Games trilogy, the way in which the author’s imagination travels along conventional or old-fashioned lines. There, violence is truly the arbitrator of power, along with cunning, whether in the ways the teenagers survive in the gladiatorial arena or the Capitol, or how both sides operate in conflicts between the Districts and the Capitol. In our own world, the state is very good at violence, whether in its wars overseas or in pepper-spraying and clubbing young demonstrators. You’ll notice, however, that neither the Iraqis, nor the Afghanis, nor the Occupiers were subjugated by these means.

Violence is not power, as Jonathan Schell makes strikingly clear in The Unconquerable World, it’s what the state uses when we are not otherwise under control. In addition, when we speak of “nonviolence” as an alternative to violence, we can’t help but underestimate our own power.  That word, unfortunately, sounds like it’s describing an absence, a polite refraining from action, when what’s at stake -- as demonstrators around the world proved last year -- is a force to be reckoned with; so call it “people power” instead.

When we come together as civil society to exercise this power, regimes tremble and history is made. Not instantly and not exactly according to plan, but who ever expected that?

Still, many regimes have been toppled by this power, and the capacity to do so is ours in the present.  As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan point out in their recent Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, since 1900 people-power campaigns have been successful in achieving regime change more than twice as often as violent campaigns.

It’s May Day, a worldwide General Strike has been called, and last week tiny Occupy Norman (Oklahoma) announced that it “had won a major battle”: their city is moving all its money out of Bank of America into a local bank. Last fall’s Move Your Money campaign included city money from the outset and quiet victories like this could begin to reshape our economic landscape. Activism in the streets is so intimidating that next month's G8 Summit scheduled for Chicago will hole up at Camp David instead.

Meanwhile last week, both the Wells Fargo and General Electric shareholders’ meetings were under siege from Occupy activists.  The Wells Fargo meeting and protests took place in San Francisco, and afterward an arrested friend of mine posted this on Facebook: “I forgot to mention that Max gave me the Hunger Games salute in jail today. It was awesome.”

In this way do fiction and reality meld in misery and triumph as, this very day, janitors in California go out on strike, and even Golden Gate Bridge workers will be protesting. May Day actions are planned across the globe.

Still alive and kicking, Occupy is chipping away in a thousand places at the status quo. 350.org, the little organization that defeated the Keystone XL Pipeline (so far), is holding a global Climate Impacts Day on May 5th and plans to take on the petroleum industry in its next round of actions.
Of course, this is only a beginning, and the banking and oil companies, the 1%, and the prison and education rackets are more than capable of pushing back.  So we need one more tool in our arsenal, and that’s a picture of what we want, of what a better world looks like. McKibben’s Eaarth and Deep Economy offer such a picture, as does William Morris’s News from Nowhere, even 120-odd years later, but we won’t get that from The Hunger Games, which, for all its thrilling, subversive, and surly delights, is all dystopia all the way home. We may still get it, however, on our stranger-than-fiction planet.

May Day is a day of liberation -- a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was shot down on it and who fought for it.  It’s a day to join those who fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and profound possibilities might look like.

So skip work, flip a bird at the Capitol, commit your deepest love and solidarity to the young whose lives are being gambled away, feed the hungry, take a long look at how beautiful our planet still is, find your way into solidarity and people power, and dream big about other futures. Resistance is one of your obligations, but it’s also a pleasure and a way of stealing back hope. 

Rebecca Solnit grew up in California public libraries and is thrilled to be revisiting them all over the state as part of the Cal Humanities California Reads project, which is now featuring five books, including her A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. 

Occupy May Day

Eric Drooker

 By Sarah Van Gelder, cross-posted from Yes Magazine

If the mainstream media was confused about Occupy Wall Street in its early days in Zuccotti Park, they’re bound to be completely befuddled this May Day.

May Day already has a lot piled on it. In pre-Christian Europe, May Day was a time to dance, light bonfires, sing, and carry on in celebration of the changing seasons. May Day also marks the anniversary of the 1886 Haymarket massacre, which occurred during a Chicago strike for the eight-hour work day. Also called International Workers’ Day, it’s a holiday in more than 80 countries.

And most recently, the U.S. immigrants right movement has used May 1st for massive street demonstrations and strikes aimed at reforming laws and policies that result in imprisonment, deportation, and discrimination against undocumented people.

This May Day, the Occupy movement is getting involved, calling it “The day without the 99 percent.” What will May Day look like with so many traditions riding on it?

May Day Collaborations—from Bike Caravan to Free University

The way plans are shaping up, in at least some locations around the United States, it could be big, festive, and importantly, include elements of all the May Day traditions. And it could be profoundly different than the big days of action we’ve seen in the past. In the weeks leading up to May Day, various movements have been collaborating. And people will not only be protesting, they’ll be liberating spaces for education, the arts, general assemblies, and teach-ins.

There will be marches, of course. Some permitted, planned, and predictable. Others will be spontaneous, possibly disruptive. In spite of all the police planning (and collaboration with Wall Street private security forces) law enforcement will be kept guessing.

There will be fairs, free food, teach-ins, music, bicycling, marches, and fiestas.

In New York, occupiers are leading up to May Day by organizing 99 pickets in support of workers around the city, from jazz musicians to taxi drivers to laundry workers. The LGBTQTSGNC (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, Trans, Two-Spirit and Gender Non-Conforming) contingent will be out in force. They’ll be a “Guitarmy” marching from New York’s Bryant Park to Madison Square Park, with 1,000 guitars.

At Madison Square Park, there will be a Free University, organized by students fed up with tuition hikes and a student debt burden that’s now reached $1 trillion. Educators will bring classes to the park, there will be skill sharing and workshops.

At Bryant Park, they’ll be a “free” market—where everything is actually free— as well as public art and “opportunities for action.”

In Los Angeles, bike and car caravans will travel to the city center from the four cardinal directions. Along the way, there may be union strike action, and there will be “flash occupations,” free food, and direct action along the way, targeting the foreclosure crisis. Tuition hikes, income inequality, immigrant rights, police violence, the criminalizing of the homeless—the Los Angeles caravans each will focus on some combination of these topics.

In the San Francisco Bay area, nurses and social workers have declared a strike. Bridge and transportation workers and occupiers will attempt to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge. There will be “flying pickets” to shut down banks and business associations.

In Seattle, the group Hip Hop Occupiers to Decolonize is inviting artists, families, and the general public to a day of music, dance, live art, and speakers. There will also be marches of immigrants, occupiers, and workers.

Seattle occupiers will be serving free breakfasts to get the day off to a good start, something that can get you fined in Philadelphia, where the mayor has made it illegal to feed the hungry in city parks.
In Portland, occupiers plan to occupy a vacant home and hold a block party.

In Kalamazoo, Mich., they’ll be camped out on the sidewalk in front of the Bank of America, and there’s a good chance they’ll be doing civil disobedience to stop the auction of public land for hydraulic fracking.

The list goes on and on, from small towns in Wyoming to the place where it all started, lower Manhattan.

This broad range of topics and tactics may bewilder mainstream pundits, but it reflects a transformation in activism as profound as anything that’s happened in social change over the past decades. People are moving out of their isolated interest groups and causes. They’re coming together in a shared analysis, demonstrating their agreement about sources of some of our biggest problems—the overwhelming power of Wall Street and big corporations and our society’s continuing struggle with exclusion of people based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, etc. And they’re developing shared ambitious goals and bold strategies that add up to real power and real possibility.

As often happens in the planning of a big event, some of the most important work began well before the actual day, with undocumented workers, union organizers, occupiers, and students coming together to plan events. They’re mixing it up across races, ages, backgrounds, and interests.

It’s a day without the 99 percent, say organizers. No work. No school. No housework. No shopping. No banking.

Even more than what people won’t be doing on May 1, though, the day is about showing up and protesting, but also building the world we want.



Creating a Different World

That part of Occupy seldom gets reported on. The media is too fixated on police action and on its own angst over whether Occupy has (or should have) a list of demands. What is too often missed is that the movement is about occupying the space and the time to create a different world. People outside the political establishment understand that conventional way of doing things doesn’t work anymore. Too many people are hurting.

The wealth of the 1 percent, dangled in front of the rest of us like a carrot, is more and more out of reach. The austerity budgets, the decaying of our towns and cities, the decline of schools and rising costs of college, the disruption of people’s live through immigration raids and deportations, the foreclosures, evictions, homelessness are increasing people’s thirst for change.

And we’re using up our heritage of natural resources, undermining the stability of the climate and the ecological systems that support life in order to channel more and more wealth to the 1 percent?
Few now believe that one or two changes in policy will solve The Mall of this. A financial transaction tax and the restoration of Glass-Steagall would help—and there will be people calling for both on May Day. But what people increasingly understand is that these fixes would not be enough.
Instead, it will take we the people recreating a society, way of life, democracy, and livelihoods that make sense for today.

This May Day—of, by, and for working people (and people who wish they had work), immigrants, and everyone else in the 99 percent—could be a place to begin creating that new world.

Sarah van Gelder is co-founder and executive editor of YES! Magazine and editor of This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99 Percent Movement. She will be doing live commentary on May Day at Free Speech TV, as part of a collaborative effort of independent media organized by The Media Consortium.

Spring Has Sprung For The 99%

The Next Stage For The 99% Spring

By Isaiah J. Poole, cross-posted Campaign for America's Future

This past weekend, tens of thousands of people participated in what amounted to the largest effort to train progressives in nonviolent direct action in recent history. But for those who missed out in the wave of "99% Spring" training sessions, organizers today launched an online training page that people can use individually or in groups.

The 99% Spring training sessions offer coaching on how to talk about what's wrong with the economy, how a cadre of corporate leaders and conservative ideologues hijacked our democracy, and how citizens can channel their passions in ways that will enable them to regain some measure of control.

I attended a session Saturday at the Communications Workers of America headquarters in Washington and had an experience similar to the one Josh Harkinson reports on in Mother Jones. I joined with a diverse group of about 35 other people who began the day by sharing personal stories and watching videos that set the context for our learning how to put our bodies on the line for our values.

Harkinson writes that while there has been some resentment that groups such as MoveOn.org have been trying to co-opt the Occupy movement, the 99% Spring is perhaps better viewed as the Occupy movement forcing online mobilization groups to rethink their strategies. Justin Ruben of MoveOn.org concedes as much.

"It's clear that the sorts of tactics we've engaged in in the past are no longer enough," Justin Ruben, MoveOn's Executive Director, wrote in an email to his staff last week, arguing that the growing corporate influence on policy-making has left the group little choice but to take to the streets. In a subsequent interview with Mother Jones, he added, "We know that whoever wins in November, they are still going to be listening more to the 1 percent than to the rest of us because our political system is completely broken. So we don't have the luxury of not engaging in this kind of action."

A good opportunity to use the 99% Spring training is coming up May 9, when Bank of America is holding its annual shareholders meeting in Charlotte, N.C. The annual shareholders meeting of Wells Fargo in San Francisco is also being targeted April 24. As efforts continue to stall to have mortgage write-downs for underwater homeowners and prosecutions for bankers whose actions caused the economic crash, the need for hundreds of thousands of people trained in nonviolent direct action is as great as ever.

The online training session can be completed in less than two hours, in segments at your own pace. You will be rewarded with a better understanding of how we have gotten into the mess that we are in and a sense of how like-minded people can work together to set things right. Plan today to take the training.

Occupy At Six Months

Eric Drooker

As the Occupy movement comes out of its winter hibernation, it is worth looking at its impressive record of achievement over its first six months.

As Travis Waldon puts it, "Occupy groups have shifted the national debate on taxes and inequality, helped homeowners stay in their homes, forced major policy issues to the forefront of debate at the state and federal level, and gotten the attention of the institutions they’ve challenged most forcefully."

Here is list compiled by ThinkProgress of Occupy's accomplishments:

Income Inequality: The 99 Percent movement refocused America’s political debate, forcing news outlets and eventually politicians to focus on rising income inequality. While debt and deficits were the primary focus of the media before the movement started, their attention after the movement began shifted to jobs, Wall Street, and unemployment. By the end of October, even Republicans were talking about income inequality, and a week later, Time Magazine devoted its cover to the topic, asking, “Can you still move up in America?”

Occupy Our Homes: The movement has drawn attention to many of the predatory, discriminatory, and fraudulent practices perpetrated by banks during the foreclosure crisis, and across the country, Occupy groups, religious leaders, and community organizations have helped homeowners prevent wrongful foreclosures on their homes. Activists in Detroit are working to save their fifth home, and similar actions have taken place in cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Atlanta. The movement has drawn so much attention that local political leaders and even members of Congress have stepped in to help homeowners facing foreclosure.

Move Your Money: On Bank Transfer Day, activists helped more than 40,000 Americans move their money from large banks to credit unions, and more than 650,000 switched to credit unions last October. Religious groups have taken up the cause as well, moving $55 million before Thanksgiving. This year, a San Francisco interfaith group moved $10 million from Wells Fargo and other groups marked Lent by moving more money from Wall Street. As a result, analysts say the nation’s 10 biggest banks could lose $185 billion in customer deposits this year “due to customer defections.”

Fighting For Positive Policies: Occupy groups have pushed for positive policy outcomes at both the state and federal levels. Occupy The SEC submitted a 325-page comment letter on the Volcker Rule, a regulation to rein in big banks. Pressure from protesters forced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) to reverse his opposition to a millionaire’s tax, and activists fought Indiana Republicans’ union-busting “right-to-work” law, and have pushed big banks to stop financing destructive environmental practices like mountaintop removal mining in coal states.

Waldon notes that while "many of the camps across the country have been disbanded, the 99 Percent Movement isn’t going away," with organizers continuing to fight on the state level, "pushing back against banks on fraudulent foreclosures and other issues, and [turning] their attention to the 2012 presidential elections."  Meanwhile, leaders in New York "are developing high-tech ways to organize protests and keep the movement going" and "Occupy is starting to assert a political influence, pushing multiple candidates and even running for office themselves — in both Maine and Pennsylvania, former Occupy activists are running for public office."

The Dismantling Of California's Schools

By Rose Aguilar, cross-posted from Al Jazeera

I recently invited University of California-Davis sophomore Sarena Grossjan-Navarro to join my radio show - focusing on the Occupy Education actions taking place across the country, and the recent plan to descend on Sacramento to Occupy the Capitol, but she wasn't available. She's taking a heavy load this term, hoping to incur as little debt as possible. She was almost forced to drop out last term because the financial aid she receives is not enough to cover the basics. She's currently sleeping on friends' couches because she can't afford housing.

Grossjan-Navarro was one of the UC-Davis students who got pepper-sprayed by a police officer wearing riot gear during a peaceful protest on November 18, 2011. The students were speaking out against tuition hikes and the brutal treatment of Occupy demonstrators at UC-Berkeley, who were beaten and billy-clubbed a week earlier.

You've might have seen the video, which went viral and received international outrage. Nineteen UC-Davis students and alumni recently sued the University for constitutional violations over the incident, which was not only traumatising, but caused them burning sensations for days.

To say that students and faculty are angry and fed up is putting it lightly. Over the past year, we've seen students across the United States protest, hold walk-outs and teach-ins, and even shut down freeways and bridges. The Occupy movement has energised and yes, even radicalised, a new generation of students who haven't been politically active until now.

They're barely making ends meet. They're going to the school food pantry because they can't afford enough food. They're either racking up debt or are on the verge of dropping out because of ongoing tuition hikes. They deserve better.


Tuition hikes

Tuition and fees at the University of California's 10 campuses are up a whopping 21 per cent this year, according to the College Board. According to this UC-Davis fact sheet, the total cost of attendance for an on-campus undergraduate is $31,199 a year. Commuters living with parents should expect to pay $24,542. Those figures include books, which can cost more than $100 each, supplies, room and board, personal expenses and transportation.

Students attending one of California State University's 23 campuses will see their tuition increase by $498, or another nine per cent, for the 2012-2013 academic year, bringing the annual bill to $7,017. It's the ninth tuition increase in nine years. Tuition at community colleges is going up another $10 to $46 a unit in May. Full-time students typically take 15 units a semester.

Over the past four years, California state lawmakers have cut more than $1.5bn from the state's colleges and universities. Students are struggling to take the classes they need, class sizes are growing, faculty are seeing their salaries and benefits cuts, and services are being slashed.

As states across the country tighten their budgets, California's higher education cuts have been the most severe. For decades, California has been lauded for making its public institutions accessible and affordable for all of its citizens, but because of severe cuts, students are now being turned away. The students who are admitted are not being served. And once they graduate with piles of debt, their job prospects are dim.

And it's not just colleges. Ask any K-12 teacher what they're facing. I was shocked to learn recently that a dear friend, who is a dedicated and passionate 4th-grade teacher in the South Bay, is on the verge of quitting because her situation has become untenable. Her class size is growing every year, many of her students have special needs and she has no support.

She's burned out and is tired of being forced to focus on reading and math, while subjects like art and science are disregarded. Like so many teachers, she brings food to class for hungry students, buys supplies with her own money and acts as a counsellor for the growing number of students whose parents have lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet.

Olive Mitra, a high school literature teacher at the June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco, has to spend his own money on school supplies and books. Try doing that on a teacher's salary in an expensive city like San Francisco.

Mitra's friends recently raised enough money for him to buy Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude for his 11th and 12th grade students, but he still can't afford dictionaries. There are no dictionaries in Mitra's literature classes because he can't afford them. When students don't know the meaning of a word, they look it up on their phones or on the one working computer in class.

"I feel frustrated that banks are getting bailed out and I have to write grants, in addition to grading papers and preparing curriculum, in order to provide dictionaries to my youth," he says.

Let's not forget about the multi-billion dollar occupations. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the state of California over $52bn since 2001, according to the National Priorities Project (click here to find out how much the occupations are costing your state).

Prisons over schools

And yet politicians say we're broke. We all need to make sacrifices. The students, teachers and professors I've interviewed over the past year know better. In 2011, California spent $9.6bn on prisons and $5.7bn on higher education.

According to Critical Resistance, an organisation seeking to end the prison-industrial complex, spending on prisons has grown 1,500 per cent since 1980, while spending on higher education has plummeted.

Over the past 30 years, California has built one university and 20 prisons. The state spends about $50,000 per inmate each year. According to the latest Quality Counts report from Education Week, the state spends $8,667 per student per year. California, once known for its stellar education system, now ranks 47 in overall per-pupil spending.

What message does this send? We have plenty for the military, banks, and prisons, but when it comes to education, you're on your own. It's all about priorities.

Students, faculty and their supporters are occupying the state capitol in Sacramento today to make their voices heard, demand an end to further cuts, and raise awareness about solutions like The Millionaires Tax of 2012, a ballot initiative that would require Californians who earn $1m or more to pay an extra three per cent in state income tax; those who earn $2m or more would pay an extra five per cent.

According to the California Federation of Teachers, these taxes would raise an estimated $6bn per year for all schools, senior, child and disabled services, local fire services, and roads and bridges.
The ReFund California coalition notes that when President Obama signed a bill to extend the Bush tax cuts in December 2010, California's wealthiest received a windfall of $9-14bn per year, nearly equal to the entire state budget deficit.

A group called the Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength is calling for an end to the Bush tax cuts, but no one in DC seems to be listening.

And then there's the oil severance tax. California is the only major oil-producing state in the country that doesn't tax oil companies. A 15 per cent tax on crude oil and natural gas could bring in an estimated $3bn a year, according to the group Rescue Education California.

California-based Chevron recently disappointed investors by posting $5.1bn in fourth-quarter net income, a 3.5 per cent drop from a year earlier. Despite what reports call "weaker" profits, the company's 2011 earnings jumped 41 per cent to $26.9bn.

Occupy Education states:

We refuse to pay for the crisis created by the 1 per cent. We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits. We refuse to accept educational re-segregation, massive tuition increases, outrageous student debt, and increasing privatisation and corporatisation. They got bailed out and we got sold out. But through nationally coordinated mass action we can and will turn back the tide of austerity. If we make the rich and the corporations pay we can reverse the budget cuts, tuition hikes, and attacks on job security, and fully fund public education and social services.

We must do the right thing for the students, teachers, faculty and parents who are bravely marching, speaking out, and working to change this horribly broken and unfair system.

Rose Aguilar is the host of Your Call, a daily call-in radio show on KALW in San Francisco. She's the author of Red Highways: A Liberal's Journey into the Heartland.

How To Fund An American Police State

By Stephan Salisbury, cross-posted from TomDispatch

At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California.  American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere.

There should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades exploding in Oakland and the sound cannons on New York’s streets simply opened small windows onto a national policing landscape long in the process of militarization -- a bleak domestic no man’s land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases growing quietly on unobtrusive server farms everywhere.

The ubiquitous fantasy of “homeland security,” pushed hard by the federal government in the wake of 9/11, has been widely embraced by the public.  It has also excited intense weapons- and techno-envy among police departments and municipalities vying for the latest in armor and spy equipment.

In such a world, deadly gadgetry is just a grant request away, so why shouldn’t the 14,000 at-risk souls in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, have a closed-circuit-digital-camera-and-monitor system (cost: $180,000, courtesy of the Homeland Security Department) identical to the one up and running in New York’s Times Square?

So much money has gone into armoring and arming local law-enforcement since 9/11 that the federal government could have rebuilt post-Katrina New Orleans five times over and had enough money left in the kitty to provide job training and housing for every one of the record 41,000-plus homeless people in New York City. It could have added in the growing population of 15,000 homeless in Philadelphia, my hometown, and still have had money to spare. Add disintegrating Detroit, Newark, and Camden to the list. Throw in some crumbling bridges and roads, too.

But why drone on?  We all know that addressing acute social and economic issues here in the homeland was the road not taken. Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security alone has doled out somewhere between $30 billion and $40 billion in direct grants to state and local law enforcement, as well as other first responders.  At the same time, defense contractors have proven endlessly inventive in adapting sales pitches originally honed for the military on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to the desires of police on the streets of San Francisco and lower Manhattan. Oakland may not be Basra but (as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld liked to say) there are always the unknown unknowns: best be prepared.


All told, the federal government has appropriated about $635 billion, accounting for inflation, for homeland security-related activities and equipment since the 9/11 attacks. To conclude, though, that “the police” have become increasingly militarized casts too narrow a net.  The truth is that virtually the entire apparatus of government has been mobilized and militarized right down to the university campus.

Perhaps the pepper spray used on Occupy demonstrators last November at University of California-Davis wasn’t directly paid for by the federal government. But those who used it work closely with Homeland Security and the FBI “in developing prevention strategies that threaten campus life, property, and environments,” as UC Davis’s Comprehensive Emergency and Continuity Management Plan puts it.

Government budgets at every level now include allocations aimed at fighting an ephemeral “War on Terror” in the United States. A vast surveillance and military buildup has taken place nationwide to conduct a pseudo-war against what can be imagined, not what we actually face. The costs of this effort, started by the Bush administration and promoted faithfully by the Obama administration, have been, and continue to be, virtually incalculable. In the process, public service and the public imagination have been weaponized.

Farewell to Peaceful Private Life

We’re not just talking money eagerly squandered.  That may prove the least of it. More importantly, the fundamental values of American democracy -- particularly the right to lead an autonomous private life -- have been compromised with grim efficiency. The weaponry and tactics now routinely employed by police are visible evidence of this.

Yes, it’s true that Montgomery County, Texas, has purchased a weapons-capable drone.  (They say they’ll only arm it with tasers, if necessary.) Yes, it’s true that the Tampa police have beefed the force up with an eight-ton armored personnel carrier, augmenting two older tanks the department already owns. Yes, the Fargo police are ready with bomb detection robots, and Chicago boasts a network of at least 15,000 interlinked surveillance cameras.

New York City’s 34,000-member police force is now the ground zero of a growing outcry over rampant secret spying on Muslim students and communities up and down the East coast.  It has been a big beneficiary of federal security largess.  Between 2003 and 2010, the city received more than $1.1 billion through Homeland Security’s Urban Areas Security Initiative grant program. And that’s only one of the grant programs funneling such money to New York
.
The Obama White House itself has directly funded part of the New York Police Department’s anti-Muslim surveillance program. Top officials of New York’s finest have, however, repeatedly refused to disclose just how much anti-terrorism money it has been spending, citing, of course, security.

Can New York City ever be “secure”? Mayor Michael Bloomberg boasted recently with obvious satisfaction: “I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh largest army in the world.”  That would be the Vietnamese army actually, but accuracy isn’t the point.  The smugness of the boast is. And meanwhile the money keeps pouring in and the “security” activities only multiply.

Why, for instance, are New York cops traveling to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and Newark, New Jersey, to spy on ordinary Muslim citizens, who have nothing to do with New York and are not suspected of doing anything? For what conceivable purpose does Tampa want an eight-ton armored vehicle? Why do Texas sheriffs north of Houston believe one drone -- or a dozen, for that matter -- will make Montgomery County a better place? What manner of thinking conjures up a future that requires such hardware? We have entered a dark world that demands an inescapable battery of closed-circuit, networked video cameras trained on ordinary citizens strolling Michigan Avenue.

This is not simply a police issue. Law enforcement agencies may acquire the equipment and deploy it, but city legislators and executives must approve the expenditures and the uses. State legislators and bureaucrats refine the local grant requests. Federal officials, with endless input from national security and defense vendors and lobbyists, appropriate the funds.

Doubters are simply swept aside (while legions of security and terrorism pundits spin dread-inducing fantasies), and ultimately, the American people accept and live with the results. We get what we pay for -- Mayor Bloomberg’s “army,” replicated coast to coast.

Budgets Tell the Story

Militarized thinking is made manifest through budgets, which daily reshape political and bureaucratic life in large and small ways. Not long after the 9/11 attacks, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, used this formula to define the new American environment and so the thinking that went with it: “Terrorist operatives infiltrate our communities -- plotting, planning, and waiting to kill again.”  To counter that, the government had urgently embarked on “a wartime reorganization,” he said, and was “forging new relationships of cooperation with state and local law enforcement.”

While such visionary Ashcroftian rhetoric has cooled in recent years, the relationships and funding he touted a decade ago have been institutionalized throughout government -- federal, state, and local -- as well as civil society. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security, with a total 2012 budget of about $57 billion, is the most obvious example of this.

That budget only hints at what’s being doled out for homeland security at the federal level. Such moneys flow not just from Homeland Security, but from the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Commerce Department, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Defense.

In 2010, the Office of Management and Budget reckoned that 31 separate federal agencies were involved in homeland security-related funding that year to the tune of more than $65 billion. The Census Bureau, which has itself been compromised by War on Terror activities -- mapping Middle Eastern and Muslim communities for counter-terrorism officials -- estimated that federal homeland security funding topped $70 billion in 2010. But government officials acknowledge that much funding is not included in that compilation. (Grants made through the $5.6 billion Project BioShield, to offer but one example, an exotic vaccination and medical program launched in 2004, are absent from the total.)

Even the estimate of more than $635 billion in such expenditures does not tell the full spending story. That figure does not include the national intelligence or military intelligence budgets for which the Obama Administration is seeking $52.6 billion and $19.6 billion respectively in 2013, or secret parts of the national security budget, the so-called black budget.

Local funding is also unaccounted for. New York’s Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly claims total national homeland security spending could easily be near a trillion dollars. Money well spent, he says -- New York needs that anti-terror army, the thousands of surveillance cameras, those sophisticated new weapons, and, naturally, a navy that now includes six drone submarines (thanks to $540,000 in Homeland Security cash) to keep an eye on the terrorist threat beneath the waves.
And even that’s not enough.

“We have a new boat on order,” Kelly said recently, alluding to a bullet-proof vessel paid for by, yes, Homeland Security (cost unspecified). “We envision a situation where we may have to get to an island or across water quickly, so we’re able to transport our heavy weapons officers rapidly. We have to do things differently. We know that this is where terrorists want to come.”

With submarines available to those who protect and serve (and grab the grant money), a simple armored SWAT carrier should hardly raise an eyebrow. The Tampa police will get one as part of their security buildup before the city hosts the Republican convention this summer. Tampa and Charlotte, which will host the Democratic convention, each received special $50 million security allocations from Congress to “harden” the cities.

Marc Hamlin, Tampa’s assistant police chief, told the Tampa city council that two old tanks, already owned and operated by the police, were simply not enough.  They were just too unreliable. “Thank God we have two, because one seems to break down every week," he lamented.

Not everyone on the council seemed convinced Tampa needed a truck sheathed in 1.5-inch high-grade steel, and featuring ballistic glass panels, blast shields, and powered turrets. City Council Vice Chairwoman Mary Mulhern claimed she found the purchase “kind of troubling,” a sign that Tampa is becoming “militarized.” Then she voted to approve it anyway, along with the other council members. Hamlin was pleased. “It’s one of those things where you prepare for the worst, and you hope for the best,” he explained.

When Mulhern suggested that some of the windfall $50 million might be used to help the city’s growing homeless population, Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn set her straight. “We can’t be diverted from what the appropriate use of that money is, and that is to provide a safe environment for the convention.  It’s not to be used for pet projects or things totally unrelated to security.”

Tampa will also be spending more than $1 million for state of the art digital video uplinks to surveillance helicopters.  (“Analog technology is almost Stone Age,” commented one approving council member.) Another $2 million will go to install 60 surveillance cameras on city streets. That represents an uncharacteristic pullback from the city’s initial plan to acquire more than 230 cameras as well as two drones at a cost of about $5 million. Even the police deemed that too expensive -- for the moment.

All of this hardware will remain in Tampa after the Republicans and any protestors are long gone. What use will it serve then? In the Tampa area, the armored truck will join the armored fleet, police officials said, ferrying SWAT teams on calls and protecting police serving search warrants. In the past, Hamlin claimed, Tampa’s tanks have been shot at. He did not mention that crime rates in Tampa and across Florida are at four-decade lows.

The video surveillance cameras will, of course, also stay in place, streaming digitized images to an ever-growing database, where they will be stored waiting for the day when facial recognition software is employed to mix and match. This strategy is being followed all over the country, including in Chicago, with its huge video surveillance network, and New York City, where all of lower Manhattan is now on camera.

Tampa has already been down this road once in the post-9/11 era. The city was home to a much-watched experiment in using such software.  Images taken by cameras installed on the street were to be matched with photographs in a database of suspects. The system failed completely and was scrapped in 2003. On the other hand, sheriffs in the Tampa Bay area are currently using facial recognition software to match photographs snapped by police on the street with a database of suspects with outstanding warrants. Police are excited by that program and look forward to its future expansion.

The Rise of the Fusion Centers

Homeland Security has played a big role in creating one particularly potent element in the nation's expanding database network. Working with the Department of Justice in the wake of 9/11, it launched what has grown into 72 interlinked state “fusion centers” -- repositories for everything from Immigration Customs Enforcement data and photographs to local police reports and even gossip. “Suspicious Activity Reports” gathered from public tipsters -- thanks to Homeland Security’s “if you see something, say something” program -- are now flowing into state centers. Those fusion centers are possibly the greatest facilitators of dish in history, and have vast potential for disseminating dubious information and stigmatizing purely political activity. And most Americans have never even heard of them.

Yet fusion centers now operate in every state, centralizing intelligence gathering and facilitating dissemination of material of every sort across the country. Here is where information gathered by cops and citizens, FBI agents and immigration officers goes to fester. It is a staggering load of data, unevenly and sometimes questionably vetted, and it is ultimately available to any state or local law-enforcement officer, any immigration agent or official, any intelligence or security bureaucrat with a computer and network access.

The idea for these centers grew from the notion that agencies needed to share what they knew in an “unfettered” environment. How comforting to know that the walls between intelligence and law enforcement are breached in an essentially unregulated fashion.

Many other states have monitored antiwar activists, gathering and storing names and information. Texas and other states have stored “intelligence” on Muslims. Pennsylvania gathered reports on opponents of natural gas drilling. Florida has scrutinized supporters of presidential candidate Ron Paul. The list of such questionable activities is very long. We have no idea how much dubious data has been squirreled away by authorities and remains within the networked system. But we do know that information pours into it with relative ease and spreads like an oil slick.  Cleaning up and removing the mess is another story entirely.

Anyone who wants to learn something about fusion center funding will also find it maddeningly difficult to track.  Not even the Homeland Security Department can say with certainty how much of its own money has gone into these data nests over the last decade. The amounts are staggering, however. From 2004 to 2009 alone, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that states used about $426 million in Homeland Security Department grants to fund fusion-related activities nationally. The centers also receive state and local funds, as well as funds from other federal agencies. How much? We don’t know, although GAO data suggest state and local funding at least equals the Homeland Security share.

Yet, as Tampa, New York City, and other urban areas bulk up with high-tech anti-terrorism equipment and fusion centers have proliferated, the number of even remotely “terror-related” incidents has declined. The equipment acquired and projects inaugurated to fend off largely imaginary threats is instead increasingly deployed to address ordinary criminal activity, perceived political disruptions, and the tracking and surveillance of American Muslims. The Transportation Safety Administration is now even patrolling highways.  It could be called a case of mission creep, but the more accurate description might be: bait-and-switch.

The chances of an American dying in a terrorist incident in a given year are 1 in 3.5 million. To reduce that risk, to make something minuscule even more minuscule, what has the nation spent? What has it cost us? Instead of rebuilding a ravaged American city in a timely fashion or making Americans more secure in their “underwater” homes and their disappearing jobs, we have created militarized police forces, visible evidence of police-state-style funding.

Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a TomDispatch regular. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland.