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#OccupyWallStreet Bleeds and Leads

by Nathan Schneider

A bit after 10 p.m. on Saturday night in occupied Liberty Plaza, there was a celebration around the media tables. Photocopied facsimiles of Sunday’s New York Daily News were being passed around and photographed. After having held the plaza with hundreds of protesters at any given time for a week, and having kept the blocks surrounding the Stock Exchange barricaded by police all the while, the protest was finally getting serious news coverage.

“The Daily News!” I heard someone say on the plaza. “It’s because this is a sustained occupation.”

Exclaimed one of those doing media relations, “We’ve already won!”

Just a few hours earlier, it seemed certain that a full-on police dispersal would come that night. Contingency plans were being discussed by the protesters’ General Assembly. But now the Daily News cover and the presence of TV vans seemed like guardian angels, ensuring that they’d make it until morning.

So what occasioned the media’s sudden interest? To what do these protesters, who purport to represent “the 99 percent” of Americans disenfranchised by a corrupt corporate and political elite, owe these headlines?

Police violence, of course.

Marking the one-week anniversary of the beginning of the occupation, a large march was planned for noon on Saturday. Several hundred marchers paraded around the plaza to their favorite chant, “All Day, All Week! Occupy Wall Street!” They then headed down to the Wall Street area, where police arrested several of them, including filmmaker Marisa Holmes. From there, the march continued up to Union Square, two and a half miles north. It arrived there, then turned south again toward Liberty Plaza. Around 3 p.m., near Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, the police attacked. Unrolling plastic orange barriers, they isolated a crowd of marchers, along with the reporters following them, and began mass arrests for blocking traffic. This was a brutal process. Caught on cameras were scenes of one protester being dragged by her hair, others being slammed into the pavement, and a group of women, netted and helpless, being downed by pepper spray. In total, police say they arrested 80 people. With not enough room for them in vans, many were taken away in regular city buses. The march thereafter dispersed, and those who weren’t arrested made their way back to Liberty Plaza.

In an article that recounts as many gory details as will fit, the Daily News devotes only two short paragraphs to what the protest is actually about and what protesters have been doing all this time: “attempting to draw attention to what they believe is a dysfunctional economic system that unfairly benefits corporations and the mega-rich.” True, but too little. The real story for the Daily News, it seems, is not this unusual kind of protest, or the political situation which it opposes, but the chance to have the word “busted” on the cover next to the cleavage of a woman crying out in pain.

ABC’s Channel 7 Eyewitness News, despite being one of the day’s most zealously-persistent outlets, ran a doubly fallacious headline Sunday morning: “Occupy Wall Street Protest Gets Violent Overnight.” For one thing, the protest itself did not get violent. Protesters attacked nobody. They threw no stones, they carried no weapons. The police got violent. Secondly, the arrests and violence did not happen “overnight” but during the day—an error the article repeats several times. This seems especially odd since the Channel 7 reporter and cameraman were witnesses to what did happen during the night, which their article confusingly splices in with an account of the day’s arrests: a mainly silent, completely peaceful vigil march on the sidewalk to Police Plaza to ask after the protesters arrested that afternoon—with locked arms and peace signs held high—accompanied the whole time by officers carrying orange nets, followed menacingly by empty police vans, and barricaded several times from reaching their destination.

While protesters were stopped at a barricade at Canal and Elizabeth Streets, Channel 7 reporter Darla Miles showed the picture of a protester with his face covered in blood on her Blackberry to help persuade the police to give an update on him. (She was careful to keep it away from the cameras of those who might be able to help publicize it: “Channel 7 News property!”) But  they were gone by the time the protesters finally made it near Police Plaza, calling out in unison, “Our Brothers! And Sisters! You Are Not Forgotten!” as well as the phone number of the National Lawyers Guild, eliciting some chuckles from the police.

Soberer outlets missed the point as well. What the Associated Press and Reuters saw was something along the lines of a typical one-day march-in-the-streets protest, only mysteriously happening over more than a single day. They barely mention the sustained occupation of Liberty Plaza, much less what has been happening there and why. The New York Times’s Ginia Bellafante at least took the time to visit the plaza, though she doesn’t seem to have stayed long enough to notice its main activity, the General Assembly. There, she would have found that the protesters’ purpose is anything but “impossible to decipher”; they’re busy taking part in a purposely-leaderless, consensus-based process based on people, not money, right in the capital of American corruption.

None of these articles captures what is distinctive about this occupation, or how it works, or what the protesters are doing for most of the day, or the courage they have shown in the face of the brutality. These are common oversights in press coverage of nonviolent resistance movements, but that doesn’t mean there’s any excuse.

The thing is, there are tremendous things happening in and around Liberty Plaza, stories in which these mainly-young protesters are anything but passive recipients of police abuse. I’ve already written about the arrests of protesters like Jason Ahmadi and Justin Wedes, who were also portrayed as victims in the media, but who in fact were arrested on their own terms, for simple, peaceful acts of resistance. One could also speak of the stories of how those arrested on Saturday kept each other’s spirits high by singing and chanting together and trying to woo the police while they were being taken away in plastic cuffs. Watch, for instance, between 1:25 to 3:15 on this clip from the occupation’s 24-hour livestream:

There’s a story, too, in the wake of every arrest or other shocking incident, when the protesters’ habitual response is not despair (at least for long), but dialogue: a meeting. It’s a story I still haven’t seen in mainstream reports, yet it goes straight to the heart of what the protest is about.

I also think of things that happened before major news outlets were paying much attention, at times when the watchful crowds were away. At about 9:15 p.m. on Sunday the 18th, for instance, came one of the first police incursions into the plaza, during a General Assembly meeting. I have yet to see it recounted anywhere. The officers ordered, through protesters reporting to the Assembly, that all signs be taken down. There was a fractious reaction at first. Some thought it a reasonable request and wanted to comply. Others refused on principle, not wanting to be taking orders from the police. People made speeches on either side. There were defiant chants of “Occupy Wall Street!” Some took it upon themselves to remove signs, and others tried to stop them, such as by shouting. There were whispers that undercover cops were sowing divisions—though it hardly seemed like the protesters needed any help with that. Just when unity was needed, it wasn’t there. Officers started taking down posters themselves while protesters chanted, “Shame!”

The focal point of it all became a spot in the middle of the eastern edge of the plaza, along Broadway. Several protesters—men and women, young and older—decided to sit down there in front of a Socialist Workers Party poster (whose affiliation has since been stripped from it) that says, “A JOB IS A RIGHT! CAPITALISM DOESN’T WORK.” Others tried to get them to move, but they wouldn’t. The police didn’t move them either. Their willingness to sacrifice, it seems, solved the problem. There were no gory arrests. The sign remained as long as they did, police and fellow protesters withdrew, and the meeting continued.

Events like these are messy, and they’re far from entirely flattering, but they’re human. Properly told, they have the makings of a good story. Reporting accurately and critically on police violence is of course essential—Colin Moynihan of The New York Times has done so extremely well on the paper’s City Room blog—but that is only a small part of the story of what’s going on here. We in the press need to think more highly of our readers, as well as of our own ability to report on stories that don’t depend simply on the shock value of violence, or on cheap-shot ridicule, or on stifling formulas. For many Americans, nonviolent direct actions like this occupation are the best hope for having a political voice, and they deserve to be taken seriously as such.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

Nathan Schneider is an editor of Waging Nonviolence. He writes about religion, reason, and violence for publications including The Nation, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Commonweal, Religion Dispatches, AlterNet, and others. He is also an editor at Killing the Buddha. Visit his website at TheRowBoat.com.

RANT OF THE DAY: TO MSNBC, love US Uncut MN

We, the real 99% of people, versus the 0.01% who rule this country.  THEY have stolen not only our money but our civil rights. It grows worse by the day, as any self-respecting politician running for office who cares about social justice cannot get the money TO run OR they find that the right wing money (esp. via the K-K-K-Kochs and K-K-K-Karl Rove) moves in to revile them.

WE HAVE LOST TOO MUCH - hopes, dreams, rights, the social safety net is unravelled.   In the street, we are all EQUAL and there is no "glass ceiling."

Why doesn't MSNBC talk about the People's Assembly?  Why doesn't it mention how many states are organizing support occupations?  OccupyMN, OccupyLA, occupyChicago, OccupySF, etc. Why doesn't it mention how much caring social media is at work?  Why can't it realize that it is a multifaceted story with legs?  I'll tell you something - our local Fox News outlet does better reporting than MSNBC, by a loooong shot, too.

I do a paper.li paper on US Days of Rage Minnesota Daily.  Folks, take a look at it. Watch the videos that are posted.  Read the articles.  Decide which is more Important - People or Profit$?  Fooling one's self that oppy is just around the corner OR sticking up for yourself and your loved ones?

We are all sick of Grover Norquist, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Kochs, too), graft, corruption, #austerity, high co$t$ of higher education, fear mongering, endless war$, escalating poverty, privatization of prisons/executions, bailouts, sociali$m for the rich, voter fraud, gutting of the EPA, consumerISM, rampant individualISM and "optimism", voodoo economics, xenophobia/ Islamaphobia, WAR CRIMES, torture, campaign RHETORIC,  tax loopholes, offshoring, corporations holding trillions of dollar$ in asset$ as a liquidity hedge, hedge fund$, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Chamber of Commerce, the Supreme Court 5, Tim Greithner, the hahaha Super committee which is a junta of 13, laws against umbrellas and masks in NYC, Big Pharma, GMO frankenfood, hydrofracking, the teabagger stoopidity, Citizens United, imperialISM, racISM, sexISM, homophobiak, child abuse and BAD JOURNALISM - a bought off media.  The three legs of FASCISM;  military, money, MEDIA.
What did happened to Cenk anyway?  We hate insiders in the Beltway, btw.  We LOVE Cenk who exposes Wall Street CRIME and CRIMINALS.

There's more to come . You can bet on it. As in Tunisia, Egypt and other places - Revolution 2.0 will be tweeted, "liked" and shared.  We will win.

Shared at this link:
http://world-news.newsvine.com/_news/2011/09/24/7945486-80-arrested-at-occupy-wall-street-protest?pc=25&sp=50&threadId=3230346#discussion_nav  Page 3

The Fix Is In: Washington's Planned Social Contract Destruction - Stephen Lendman

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Fix-Is-In-Washington-by-Stephen-Lendman-110723-98.html
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Associate Member, or higher).

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July 23, 2011 The Fix Is In: Washington's Planned Social Contract Destruction By Stephen Lendman The criminal class in Washington is bipartisan, united against working household interests. In fact, lawmakers yield on virtually everything big money wants, notably when banks and other corporate favorites are affected. Last December, Obama capitulated to Republicans, rigging a deal for up to $1 trillion dollars in handouts, mostly to corporate giants and America's wealthy with working households almost entirely left out.  They still are, enduring a protracted Main Street depression, stiff-armed by Obama-led bipartisan crooks. In fact, he's more crime boss than president - stealing from the many for the few. More on his dirty scheme below. As a result, America and other "(e)conomies are being turned into rentier ('tollbooths') to pay debts that ('real' ones) can't sustain," according to Michael Hudson. "It's a losing game," but goes on, criminally defrauding millions of people to assure creditors are paid, sucking massive amounts of wealth to their coffers, unreported by major media scoundrels, suppressing what people most need to know. In fact, new audit figures show that Bernanke's Fed gave Wall Street and European banksters at least $16.1 trillion (called emergency loans) from December 1, 2007 - July 21, 2010, besides unknown amounts earlier and in the past year. Moreover, it's well known that trillions of dollars are stolen, handed to corporate interests and never returned, as well as gotten in other illegal ways. As a result, taxpayers get stuck with the bill, the nation with unsustainable mounting debt, heading it eventually for ruin. About $13 trillion in Fed bailouts went to US financial institutions, the rest to their counterparts in Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Belgium, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis. In addition, asset swaps (good ones for toxic corporate junk) were arranged with banks in Britain, Switzerland, Canada, South Korea, Norway, Mexico, and Singapore. Moreover, the Wall Street controlled Fed mostly outsourced its lending operations to the same institutions responsible for engineering the financial crisis, letting them profit hugely at the public's expense. Though unsustainable, the dirty game goes on, a take the money and run scam, leaving hollowed out economies and impoverished millions on their own sink or swim.  In dirty back room deals, Obama's out in front arranging it, doing what no Republican leader would dare. No wonder Hudson accused him of governing to the right of George Bush, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann - America's right-wing lunatic fringe. Notably, only Republican Nixon could go to China when America had no diplomatic relations. Only Democrat Obama dares ending America's decades-long social contract, especially Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and publicly funded pensions.  Hudson agrees, saying "(o)nly a Democrat posing as a left-winger could really pull off what (he's) proposing," pretending it's to sustain programs otherwise heading for insolvency.  In fact, pay-as-you-go payroll tax deductions sustain Social Security and Medicare, and will keep doing it if properly administered, needing only occasional modest adjustments.  Most workers, in part, fund public pensions, and Medicaid provides mandated safety net care for poor beneficiaries, jointly funded by the states and Washington, managed at the state level. Moreover, Social Security and Medicare are insurance programs - contractual federal obligations to eligible recipients who qualify. In fact, they're no different from other legal arrangements between willing parties. However, unilaterally abrogating them will strip all Americans of fundamental safety net protections without which millions will become impoverished and desperate.  America's aristocracy chose Obama to do it, and who better than the first Black president, masquerading as a populist, still fooling half the country to think he represents them.  In fact, his disdain for ordinary people is palpable in plain sight and scandalous, once his disingenuous rhetoric is exposed as duplicitous. His policies in the past two and half years show it. Previous yearend articles (each in two parts) explained how much harm he caused in years one and two in office, accessed through the following links: click here click here click here click here Given his overall agenda, his legacy already exposes him as America's worst president. It's no easy achievement given some formidable competition, notably from his predecessor, a corporate stooge/war criminal Obama shamelessly managed to outdo, besides perhaps setting back race relations a century or more. A July 15 article discussed the current debt ceiling debate charade, accessed through the following link: click here It suggested the fix is in, the deal done to slash vital entitlements and other social spending, while leaving in place outsized military budgets and generous handouts to corporate America, including new tax cuts and loopholes letting them save billions of dollars. On July 21, New York Times writers Carl Hulse and Jackie Calmes headlined, "Boehner and Obama Nearing Deal on Cuts and Taxes," saying: A "sweeping deficit-reduction agreement" is nearly completed, "calling for as much as $3 trillion in savings from substantial (social) spending cuts and" alleged tax code changes, benefitting business and wealthy Americans at the public's expense. So far details are being withheld, and White House press secretary Jay Carney denied any deal is close. He lied. It was agreed weeks ago, leaving only final details to be worked out. Negotiated by "Gang of Six" kleptocrats (three Democrat and three Republican senators), a "grand deal" minimally cuts $4 trillion (mostly entitlements), adding tax cuts and other corporate sweeteners in return for raising the debt ceiling.  Public posturing is all theater, no substance, to conceal a deal with the devil plan to wreck social America and devastate the economy, assuring a deepening Main Street depression, including permanent impoverishment for millions of former middle class earners. Part of the subterfuge involves deceptive House/Senate theatrics. On July 19, the House passed the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act of 2011, calling for up to $6 trillion in cuts and a constitutional balanced budget amendment in return for raising the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion.  It's barely enough to sustain annual spending at current levels, meaning more cuts would be demanded to raise it further, and so on to keep slashing additional trillions from vital social programs until all of them are extinguished and ended. That's planned anyway whatever deal is announced. On July 22, the Senate rejected the House proposal, paving the way for the secretly agreed on Obama/Speaker Boehner scheme to be adopted. Besides criminally waging multiple imperial wars, that's Obama's legacy. Progressive historians and analysts one day will wonder how he and other irresponsible officials defrauded the public and got away with it. It's happening now in plain sight. In his new article, Paul Craig Roberts headlined, "An Economy Destroyed: The Enemy Is Washington," saying: "Washington's priorities and those of its presstitutes could not be clearer. President Obama, like George W. Bush before him, both parties in Congress, the print and TV media, and National Public Radio (dubbed National Pentagon or Petroleum Radio) have made it clear that (imperial) war(s are) far more important priorit(ies) than health care and old age pensions for Americans." In fact, power-hungry, greed-driven Obama-led government and corporate scoundrels want working Americans' wealth, homes, jobs, health, welfare, and futures stolen to benefit themselves at their expense.  It means $4 trillion is only for starters. Expect trillions more ahead until virtually all personal and public wealth is in elitist private hands. Moreover, whatever amount of deficit reduction is agreed on (allegedly over the next decade), America's national debt will keep growing. As a result, years from now it'll be greater than ever. It's one of many dirty secrets politicians and media liars won't explain or even touch. Instead they pretend social America is being destroyed to save it by preventing insolvency.  It's one of many Big Lies, showing government abrogated the Constitution's "general welfare" clause - Article I, Section 8, stating: "The Congress shall have power to....provide for (the) general welfare of the United States," meaning all its citizens. Moreover, the Preamble's opening words are "We the People."  They never, in fact, meant everyone, just America's special few, notably since the 1980s, now more than ever in modern times under Obama. Unless public anger derails them, Washington's criminal cabal will transform America into a wasteland, its working class into serfs.  Is it worth just watching from the sidelines, or will reality stir popular outrage to act. It's the only way constructive change ever comes. It's never from the top down, given corrupt politicians put in office to serve their elitist masters - America's aristocracy wanting it all for themselves. So far, in fact, they're well on the way to getting it. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at Email address removed.  Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/ . Author's Bio: I was born in 1934, am a retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.

Round up of #hackergate, Newscorp links

Murdoch Scandal: Feds to Investigate Extent of Hacking, Bribes

abcnews.go.com

Justice Department is preparing to launch a preliminary investigation into whether News of the World officials engaged in a systemic conspiracy to pay bribes to British 

The cyber battle continues . . .

Anonymous claims to have obtained trove of News Corp. emails | The Raw Story

www.rawstory.com

Online protest group "Anonymous" said Monday night it had obtained a large cache of emails from the servers of News International, the News Corp. subsidiary which oversees global media baron Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers.

Kevin Zeese We are now pushing them to go further as there is evidence of phone tapping in the U.S. A former Fox News producer, Dan Cooper, wrote about Roger Ailes of Fox knowing about an interview he had done about Fox before the story was published. The producer reported Ailes threatening his agent to drop Cooper as a client or never get any business. See also, "Has Roger Ailes Hacked American Phones for Fox News?,"http://www.thenation.com/b​log/162016/has-roger-ailes​-hacked-american-phones-fo​x-news, "Naked Launch",http://www.dancooper.tv/Na​kedLaunch.htm, "Former Fox News producer claimed network’s ‘Brain Room’ led to phone hacking," which describes a "Brain Room" that was used for hacking phones, the former FOX employee helped to design the room,http://www.rawstory.com/rs​/2011/07/18/former-fox-new​s-producer-claimed-network​s-brain-room-led-to-phone-​hacking. This article, "Rupert Murdoch's Other Hacking Scandal," describes cases settled by News Corp involving phone hacking in the United States,http://mediamatters.org/bl​og/201107180019, see also this NY Times report, http://www.nytimes.com/201​1/07/18/business/media/for​-news-corporation-troubles​-that-money-cant-dispel.ht​ml?hp. This article, "Will Jude Law's claim his phone was hacked in New York mean Murdoch will face court in U.S?" indicates that actor Jude Law believes his phone was hacked by NewsCorp when he was in the United States, http://www.dailymail.co.uk​/news/article-2015624/Rupe​rt-Murdoch-face-US-court-J​ude-Law-phone-hacking-NY-c​laim.html?ito=feeds-newsxm​l. There are enough leads in these public reports for the FBI to expand its investigation and examine whether NewsCorp has been hacking phones in the United States.


 ‎Tigana Too "Rupert Murdoch and Harper conspiring together to destroy canadian media", http://webcache.googleuser​content.com/search?q=cache​%3ADYtHC8Q4_S0J%3Agreenpar​ty.ca%2Fblogs%2F169%2F2010​-09-06%2Frupert-murdoch-an​d-harper-conspiring-togeth​er-destroy-canadian-media+​Rupert+Murdoch+Canada&cd=1​1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&clie​nt=firefox-a&source=www.go​ogle.com

#Do_it_now dossier: Comments on how to avoid another fiasco solicited

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/todays-question/archive/2011/07/todays-question-what-can-minnesotas.shtml

Got an opinion on how to prevent this again?

They say - what should LEADERS do?  Well, we saw NO LEADERSHIP.  We saw bullying by ALEC, tea partiers .. because they refused to illume the real issues. That's cowardice, not leadership.

Go and give them a good rant, folks

"GO FOR IT" Where to look for threads/write Opeds in MN

Minnesota Newspapers

Here are links to the letter to the editor email addresses and websites of Minnesota newspapers.  Keep your letter to under 150 words.  Make sure to include your name, address, and telephone number as the paper will want to contact you to verify that you wrote the letter.

Bemidji Pioneer

Crookston Daily Times

Duluth News Tribune

Grand Rapids Herald-Review

Mankato Free Press

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Rochester Post-Bulletin

St. Paul  Pioneer Press

Woodbury Bulletin

Free Speech – At a Price by Michael Parenti (1996)

Posted on July 1, 2011 by dandelionsalad

by Michael Parenti
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.michaelparenti.org
July 1, 2011

Image by Toni Kaarttinen via Flickr

Excerpted from Dirty Truths.

What does it mean to say we have freedom of speech? Many of us think free speech is a right enjoyed by everyone in our society. In fact, it does not exist as an abstract right. There is no such thing as a freedom detached from the socio-economic reality in which it might find a place.

Speech is a form of interpersonal behavior. This means it occurs in a social context, in homes, workplaces, schools, and before live audiences or vast publics via the print and electronic media. Speech is intended to reach the minds of others. This is certainly true of political speech. But some kinds of political speech are actively propagated before mass audiences and other kinds are systematically excluded.

Ideologically Distributed

In the political realm, the further left one goes on the opinion spectrum the more difficult it is to gain exposure and access to larger audiences. Strenuously excluded from the increasingly concentrated corporate-owned media are people on the Left who go beyond the conservative-liberal orthodoxy and speak openly about the negative aspects of big capital and what it does to people at home and abroad. Progressives people, designated as “the Left,” believe that the poor are victims of the rich and the prerogatives of wealthy and powerful interests should be done away with. They believe labor unions should be strengthened and the rights of working people expanded; the environment should be rigorously protected; racism, sexism, and homophobia should be strenuously fought; and human services should be properly funded.

Progressives also argue that revolutionary governments that bring social reforms to their people should be supported rather than overthrown by the U.S. national security state, that U.S.- sponsored wars of attrition against reformist governments in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, and a dozen other countries are not “mistakes” but crimes perpetrated by those who would go to any length to maintain their global privileges.

To hold such opinions is to be deprived of any regular access to the major media. In a word, some people have more freedom of speech than others. People who take positions opposing the ones listed above are known as conservatives or rightwingers. Conservative pundits have a remarkable amount of free speech. They favor corporations and big profits over environmental and human needs, see nothing wrong with amassing great wealth while many live in poverty, blame the poor for the poverty that has been imposed upon them, see regulations against business as a bureaucratic sin, and worship at the altar of the free market. They support repressive U.S. interventions abroad and pursue policies opposed to class, gender, and racial equality.

Such rightists as Rush Limbaugh, William F. Buckley Jr., John McLaughlin, George Will, and Robert Novak enjoy much more exposure to mass audiences than left liberals and populists like Jim Hightower, Jerry Brown, or Ralph Nader. And all of them, conservatives and liberals, enjoy more exposure than anyone on the more “radical” or Marxist Left.

It is the economic power of the rich corporate media owners and advertisers that provides right-wingers with so many mass outlets, not the latter’s wit and wisdom. It is not public demand that brings them on the air; it is private corporate owners and sponsors. They are listened to by many not because they are so appealing but because they are so available. Availability is the first and necessary condition of consumption. In this instance, supply does not merely satisfy demand; supply creates demand. Hence, those who align themselves with the interests of corporate America will have more freedom of expression than those who remain steadfastly critical.

People on the Left are free to talk to each other, though sometimes they are concerned their telephones are tapped or their meetings are infiltrated by government agents and provocateurs– as has so often been the case over the years. Leftists are sometimes allowed to teach in universities but they usually run into difficulties regarding what they say and write and they risk being purged from faculty positions. Likewise, they are free to work for labor unions but they generally have to keep their politics carefully under wraps, especially communists.

People on the Left can even speak publicly but usually to audiences that seldom number more than a few hundred. And they are free to write for progressive publications, which lack the promotional funds to reach mass readerships, publications that are perennially teetering on the edge of insolvency for want of rich patrons and corporate advertisers.

In sum, free speech belongs mostly to those who can afford it. It is a commodity that needs to be marketed like any other commodity. And massive amounts of money are needed to reach mass audiences. So when it comes to freedom of speech, some people have their voices amplified tens of millions of times, while others must cup their hands and shout at the passing crowd.

The Freedom of Power

We are taught to think of freedom as something antithetical to power. And there is something to this. The people’s hard-won democratic rights do sometimes act as a restraint on the arbitrary power of rulers. But to secure our freedom we have to mobilize enough popular power to check state power. In other words, freedom and power are not always antithetical; they are frequently symbiotic. If one has no power, one has very little freedom to protect one’s interests against those who do have power. Our freedoms are realities only so far as we have the democratic power to make them so.

People on the Left have freedom only to the extent they have rallied their forces, have agitated, educated, and organized strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations, and have fought back against the higher circles. They have no freedom to reach mass audiences because popular power and iconoclastic opinion have not penetrated the corporate citadels that control the mass communication universe.

We were never “given” what freedoms we do have, certainly not by the framers of the Constitution. Recall that the Bill of Rights was not part of the original Constitution. It was added after ratification, as ten amendments. When Colonel Mason of Virginia proposed a Bill of Rights at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, it was voted down almost unanimously (Massachusetts abstained). Popular protests, land seizures by the poor, food riots, and other disturbances made the men of property who gathered in Philadelphia uncomfortably aware of the need for an effective central authority that could be sufficiently protective of the propertied classes. But such popular ferment also set a limit on what the framers dared to do. Belatedly and reluctantly they agreed during the ratification struggle to include a Bill of Rights, a concession made under threat of democratic agitation and in the hope that the amendments would ensure ratification of the new Constitution.

So the Bill of Rights was not a gift from that illustrious gaggle of rich merchants, land and currency speculators, and slaveholders known as our “Founding Fathers.” It was a product of class struggle. The same was true of the universal franchise. It took mass agitation from the 1820s to the 1840s by workers and poor farmers to abolish property qualifications and win universal White male suffrage. Almost a century of agitation and struggle was necessary to win the franchise for women. And a bloody civil war and subsequent generations of struggle were needed to win basic political rights for African Americans, a struggle still far from complete.

During the early part of the twentieth century a nationwide union movement in this country called the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) struggled for the betterment of working people in all occupations. To win gains, the Wobblies had to organize, that is, they had to be able to speak out and reach people. To speak out, they had to confront the repressive tactics of local police who would beat, arrest, and jail their organizers. The Wobblies discovered that if they went into a town with five hundred people instead of five, then the sheriff and his deputies could do little to stop them from holding public meetings.

The right to free speech was established de facto during the course of class struggle. The Wobblie free speech fights were simultaneously a struggle for procedural democracy impelled by a struggle for substantive economic democracy. This fight continued into the Great Depression, as mass organization and agitation brought freedom of speech to hundreds of local communities, where police had previously made a practice of physically assaulting and incarcerating union organizers, syndicalists, anarchists, socialists, and communists.

So it went with other freedoms and democratic gains like the eight-hour day, Social Security, unemployment and disability insurance, and the right to collective bargaining. All such democratic economic rights, even though they may be seriously limited and insufficiently developed, exist to some degree because of popular struggle against class privilege and class power.

Freedom for Criminal Intelligence Agencies?

Like other freedoms, free speech is situational. It exists in a social and class context, which is true of democracy itself. Once we understand that, we can avoid the mistaken logic of a news columnist like Nat Hentoff who repeatedly attacks left activists who commit civil disobedience protesting CIA campus recruiters and military recruiters. Hentoff says they interfere with the freedom of speech of those students who want to talk to the recruiters (as if students had no other opportunity to do so). Hentoff also is worried that the CIA was having its rights abridged.

Such a view of freedom of speech has no link to the realities of human suffering and social justice, no connection to the realities of class power and state power, no link to the democratic struggle against the murderous force of the CIA, no acknowledgment that the CIA routinely suppresses the basic rights of people all over the world in the most brutal fashion. With a $25 billion yearly budget, with its tens of thousands of operatives unleashing death squads and wars of attrition against democratic forces and impoverished peoples around the world, with its control of hundreds of publications, publishing houses, and wire services, with thousands of agents pouring out disinformation, the CIA has more “free speech” than all those who protest its crimes—because it is backed by more money and more power.

With his tendency to treat rights as something apart from socio-economic realities, Hentoff would have us think that the CIA is just another participant in a campus democratic dialogue. In fact, the CIA is itself one of the greatest violators of free speech both at home and abroad. Those who take the one-dimensional Hentoff approach say nothing about the freedom of speech that millions might gain by shutting down the CIA and all such agencies of violence and repression, nothing about the lives that would be saved and the freedom salvaged in Third World countries that feel the brunt of the CIA onslaught.

By coercively limiting CIA recruitment, the campus demonstrators made a statement that goes beyond discourse and becomes part of the democratic struggle. By dramatically—through direct confrontation—questioning the CIA’s legitimacy on college campuses and thereby challenging (even in a small way) its ability to promote oppressive political orders around the world, the demonstrators were expanding the realm of freedom, not diminishing it.

Of course, this has to be measured against the violations these same protestors commit, specifically the inconveniencing of some upper- and upper-middle-class students who don’t want to have to travel off campus in order to ask CIA recruiters about pursuing a career of political crime. This latter right seems to weigh more heavily in Hentoff’s mind than all the attendant misdeeds perpetrated by the CIA.

If we take Hentoff’s position, then there can be no direct actions, no civil disobedience by the powerless against the established powerful because these would constitute infringements on the recruitment efforts of the CIA. Hentoff’s failure to deal with the power and wealth context of most of free speech leaves him in the ridiculous position of defending the CIA’s freedom of speech—and worse, its freedom of action. It is the same position that led to the overthrow of the Fairness Doctrine: the poor corporate media bosses were being limited in their free speech because they had to grant it to others.

Struggle for More Democracy

If the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years have taught us anything, it is that our freedoms are neither guaranteed nor secure—unless we agitate and show our strength. If democratic struggle has taught us anything, it is that our rights are not things that must be “preserved.” Rather, they must be vigorously used and expanded. As with the physical body, so with the body politic: our capacities are more likely to grow if exercised and developed. Freedom of speech needs less abstract admiration and more militant exercise and application. Use it or lose it.

Democracy is not a “precarious fragile gift” handed down to us like some Grecian urn. Rather, it is a dynamically developing process that emerges from the struggle between popular interests and the inherently undemocratic nature of wealthy interests. Rather than fear an “excess of democracy” as do some of our media pundits and academic mandarins, we must struggle for more popular power, more victories for labor and human services, more victories against racism, sexism, and militarism, and against capitalism’s apparent willingness to destroy the environment. And we need to muster more opposition to U.S. interventions around the world.

We must push for more not-for-profit economic development, more democratic ownership of productive forces and services, more ideological variety and dissidence in the mainstream media, more listener-controlled access to radio and television stations. In every field of endeavor we must learn to see the dimensions of the struggle that advances the interests of the many and opposes the interests of the outrageously privileged, overweening few; in other words, a struggle for more democracy, of the kind that brings an advance in social conditions for everyone, a socially conscious allocation of community resources for the sake of the community rather than for the greed of private investors, and an equalization and improvement of life standards that in effect brings less freedom for the CIA and the interests it serves but more freedom for the rest of us. Essential to such an agenda is a freedom of speech that is not limited to media moguls and their acolytes but is available to persons of all ideological persuasions.

Michael Parenti’s most recent books are The Culture Struggle (2006), Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007), God and His Demons (2010), Democracy for the Few (9th ed. 2011), and The Face of Imperialism (2011). For further information about his work, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.

see

In This New World Lies Will Become True by Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges: MSM Feeds Masses “Road Kill”

Bill Moyers: Democracy Should Be a Brake on Unbridled Greed and Power

Freedom of Speech – First Amendment