Declaration of the Occupation of New York City - Thomas Jefferson is Tough Act to Follow

Originally published on forbes.com on October 4, 2011.  Picture is of me at the Women's Rights Museum in Seneca Falls.  T-shirt was a gift from my friend Tom Cahill.
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The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City is well worth reading. It was issued September 29 by the NYC General Assembly (apparently the "official" voice of Occupy Wall Street).  It is clearly modelled on the Declaration of Independence.  That is aiming pretty high, so I'm not inclined to be too critical.  Here is the opening:

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

The grievance part is a bit of a problem for the NYCGA, as they do not have as well defined a bad guy as the colonists did.  The colonists pretty much blamed George III for everything so the grievances, some of which were not all that exciting, could always start with He and both the colonists and He knew exactly who was being referred to.  The grievances kind of worked their way up in terms of drama.  Early on we have something like:

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

But then we get to:

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

Now that's a grievance.

NYCGA uses "They".  It is not clear to me exactly who "They" are and I'll bet it is not clear to "them" either.  Presumably "they" is corporations.  Whether they mean all corporations or just those that "place profits over people", "self interest over justice" is not clear.  In the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls, it was clear that "He" pretty much meant all men.  It is a serious rhetorical problem for NYCGA, which I don't think they managed to work around.  I think the grievance list starts off wrong by using one of the most powerful ones right off:

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

Personally I think the "despite not having the original mortgage" weakens it.  As a matter of fact I would have left it as:

They have taken our houses.

Here are the rest of the grievances:

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

The * is to indicate that the list is not all inclusive. Maybe it's my own view but I don't think the "weapons of mass destruction" is something you can cleanly lay on business corporations.  Of course the colonists came up a little lame in their final grievance:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

There is debate about what they meant by "domestic insurrections", but one view is that they were referring to offers of freedom to slaves who agreed to serve in the British Army.  Getting "all men are created equal" in early and "That SOB is turning our slaves against us" near the end is kind of embarrassing.  As far as the merciless Indian Savages goes, the "inhabitants of our frontiers" appear to have given at least as well as they got.

Seneca Falls came up with a much better final grievance:

He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her conficence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

So I'm not inclined to knock NYCGA for their effort and I appreciate the model they chose to use.  It is interesting to do a compare and contrast with the Tea Party Core Beliefs:

NON-NEGOTIABLE CORE BELIEFS OF THE TEA PARTY
1. Illegal Aliens Are Here Illegally.
2. Pro-Domestic Employment Is Indispensable.
3. Stronger Military Is Essential.
4. Special Interests Eliminated.
5. Gun Ownership Is Sacred.
6. Government Must Be Downsized.
7. National Budget Must Be Balanced.
8. Deficit Spending Will End.
9. Bail-Out And Stimulus Plans Are Illegal.
10. Reduce Personal Income Taxes A Must.
11. Reduce Business Income Taxes Are Mandatory.
12. Political Offices Available To Average Citizens.
13. Intrusive Government Stopped.
14. English As Core Language Is Required.
15. Traditional Family Values Are Encouraged.

Interesting that the second grievance of NYCGA and the ninth core principle are in agreement.  Other than that I don't perceive opposition there.  At least in this statement NYCGA does not say anything about taxes or guns.  You can make inference of opposition speculating that perhaps people having traditional family values as a core principle might think that it is OK for business to discriminate in employment on the basis of "gender identity" or more likely just being kind of puzzled as to what NYCGA is talking about there.

After you are done with the Declaration take a look at We are the 99 Percent, which puts a human face on the grievances.  The biggest problem I see with the whole model is the identity of the 1%.  The critique that Doug Hirschorn provides addresses this point:

.... the top traders, banks and hedge funds are still going to out earn and generate substantial profits from speculating on the disconnects in the prices of things generated from all the moving parts in the global economy and it has nothing to do with why you lost your house or job or can’t find a job. If anything the successful ones are helping you, your pensions funds, retirement savings and the economy in general. If Wall Street stops. The world stops. Period.

Anybody you think is part of the 1% will have a story about their hardship and suffering and their fears for the future and on a world historical basis most of the 99% is in the 1%.  Still I agree with NYCGA that the financial infrastructure is not performing its societal function very well.  We have high unemployment and regular investors who are saving for their retirement face flat or negative returns.  The critique I've been hearing from the aging curmudgeons is that the capital markets have been turned into gambling casinos.  Mr. Hirschorn uses sports psychology to coach elite traders on Wall Street.  I'm skeptical about that being the ideal way for the capital markets to be working.

You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.

Occupy Wall Street - Let's Have a Student Loan Bailout - But We Need to March on the Colleges

This was originally published on forbes.com on October 7, 2011.  It was the beginning of my following the student loan debacle.
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I'm probably going to aggravate some friends with this one so I should preface it with the overall philosophy that I have on social issues.  My favorite summary of it is this quote by Brendan Beehan:

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

The irreverence extends far and wide and includes many aspects of my own profession and "Wall Street".  For the moment I am going to talk about the education system.  What is aggravating me about the education system is some of the things that I am reading in We Are The 99 Percent.  We Are The 99 Percent puts a human face on the issues that have people out in the streets.  The format is a series of pictures of individuals holding up a hand written note telling their story.  Some of them are heart rending:

22 year old divorced single mom with a two year old daughter. Neither of us can go to the doctor, we can’t afford to get sick. Especially mommy. Mommy works full-time and is considered “lucky” to have a full time job. Mommy makes 7.25/hr and right now her bank account is in the hole -12.00 with a week left til payday… Mommy doesn’t feel lucky. Mommy has lost a lot of weight because she can’t afford to eat more than once a day, but she makes sure I have everything I need. I lose a lot of time with her because she is always gone to try to take of me the best she can. I love my Mommy….. WE ARE THE 99%

Now I sometimes consort with a curmudgeonly bunch of aging tax accountants. I probably make up the left wing of that group.  (When I am with my human rights activist friends, I'm the right wing).  The elderly accountants, including myself, all think there is something out of whack with "Wall Street".  We have clients in hedge funds, which based on the tax reporting headaches they create seem to invest in everything everywhere.  We are puzzled as to why it is that traders are feeling constrained by the speed of light.  Having worked with actually applying the ever changing tax law for 30 or more years, we have no excpectation of it ever making a lot of sense and recognize that it caters to special interest. I'm the most enthusiastic about Occupy Wall Street but I have to part company with it on one of the major grievances.  Student loans.  I agree that you have been ripped off, but I don't think you should be pinning that particular grievance on finance capitalism.  I think the blame for that one falls strongly on the education system.

A typical, although on the extreme end, grievance is from someone who went $150,000 in debt to obtain a masters degree in Minority Womens  Studies.  She received an excellent education and is now extemely frustrated that no one is willing to hire her based on the important things that she has learned.  Now some even among the 99ers, who have posted, would put the blame for that squarely on her shoulders:

Nobody has ever held a gun to my head and said “here sign this student loan” nobody has ever told me I would ever be rich once I get my degree. We are responsible for our own actions and the decisions we make.

That particular fellow is 42.  In his youth, he decided not to go to college and learned a trade instead.

I don't blame her, because I fell into a similar trap in my youth.  It was not nearly as bad back then and actually looking back over my whole life I don't regret it, but it was still a trap.  Here is the trap.  If you are a first generation college graduate there is a good chance that you were heavily influenced and inspired by your teachers.  I remember being inspired by my English teacher (If you can read this thank a teacher.  If it is any good at all,  thank Mr. Moroney).  So I started out majoring in English.  In my sophomore year one professor convinced me I was ill suited for that.  There was something about the whole field that I just didn't get.  For example, I thought that Moby Dick was a story about a bunch of guys working in the whaling industry.  History suited me much better and I had some really inspiring professors including David O'Brien, one of the leading scholars in the history of American Catholicism.  I also had good math skills so I was thinking of a career in the then relatively new field of applying quantitative methods to historical problems.  After a year in VISTA, I went to the University of Chicago.  I bailed out after a year without completing my master degree for some personal reasons but also from becoming discouraged from meeting too many people in their thirties who were still not quite finished with their dissertations and the discouraging job prospects of those that did finish.

So there I was at the age of 24 with no saleable skills and student debt.  I forget how much.   Probably around 5 grand, which was worth a lot more in 1976 than it is now.  When I was a teenager, my mother and I had been techincally living in poverty.  How is it that my circumstances in 1976 were not nearly as desparate and discouraging as today's debt encumbered graduates ?  A couple of things.  I had gotten some scholarships, but there was a little bit of bait and switch.  As tution and room and board rose, the scholarship didn't.  Nonetheless, three summers I worked a union job in the shipping department of a valve factory.  Lots of overtime.  One summer I made 2 grand which was nearly a years tuition.  I received social security survivors benefits until I was 22.  As I understand it social security survivors benefits now cut off at eighteen regardless of whether you go to college.  What the hell can a kid do to make say 20 grand in a summer nowadays ?  Never mind, I don't want to know unless it is avatar levelling.
My mother thought sending me to an all male high school, with an almost all male faculty would be good since I needed male influence.  She was right.  There were really inspiring men there.  Jesuit priests, Jesuit scholastics, career Catholic high school teachers, retired and active duty Army guys who taught military science and drilled the regiment.  I'm glad I went.  There was not one of them there though with the sense to tell me that maybe I should consider something like public accounting, which at the time was in my opinion the absolutely best deal for a first generation college graduate.  Nobody told me to think about being an actuary - I guess I'm lucky I dodged that bullet.  The academic world has an undue influence on first generation college students.  It did not abuse my generation that badly, but it has done a serious number on this one.  And this is one travesty that you cannot lay at the feet of finance capitalism.

So here is my proposal.  Anyone with a student loan should be allowed to have an appraisal done on the monetary economic value of whatever credential they have received.  They should have their debt written down to that amount or alternatively be permitted to surrender the credential in exchange for total debt forgiveness.  The woman with the degree in Minority Womens studies would still have the education just not the credential and the associated debt.  

We have laws to protect unsophisticated investors from certain types of investments.  In order to invest in them you have to show you have net worth to spare.  There should be similar protections for unsophisticated 18 year olds being encouraged to go into debt that they will have no prospect of getting out of.  Will this mean that all the degrees in Gender Studies might end up being gobbled up by the children of the wealthy?  Maybe.  So lets require the professors to publish the reading lists since  that's where most of the real education will come from.  Should we stick the banks with this bailout or the taxpayers ?  No.  It should be funded by an excise tax on university endowments.  There is probably a lot to blame "Wall Street" for, but this part of the mess, I don't think so.

Warning to Occupy Wall Street - Rape Can Still be Part of the Penalty

This was originally published on forbes.com on October 2011.  It is a guest post by Tom Cahill.  There are three words that I considered cutting, but left alone, which sparked a bit of controversy.  See if you can spot them.

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A brief stint in custody as the result of acts of civil disobedience might be an event that you can reminisce on.  Something that can add a bit of color to your life.  Think about Henry David Thoreau turning a day in the Concord jail into the classic On Civil Disobedience.  He had refused to pay his poll tax to protest the Mexican War.  A little more contemporary, although quite old now, is the indie cult classic Return of The Seacaucus Seven, where a group of boomers fast approaching the watershed age of 30, gather in New Hampshire and talk about how they didn't make it to the big Washington protest, because they were arrested in New Jersey.  The brief  jail visit can be much more horrifying for some.  I personally have known two activists, who were brutally gang raped during brief incarcerations for minor acts of civil disobedience.  Stephen Donaldson died in 1996, but Tom Cahill still feels his spirit alive.  Tom asked me to share this caution with the young occupiers out there. 

DONNY’S   MESSAGE

Donny phoned me up very early this morning from Valhalla.  He wanted me to warn the young 99 Percenters who are now “Occupying Everywhere” of the possibility of being raped in jail even if in for a short time and what they could do to prevent it.  I agreed with him that he and I most definitely were NOT the only political activists to receive this “Royal Treatment,” as Joan Baez sang about in one of her songs a generation or so ago. 

What better way is there to “neutralize” a dissenter than by having her and especially him sexually assaulted or even merely threatened.  The humiliation is unbearable.  Thus rape is self-silencing in most cases but not for Donny who, as you know, was the first prisoner rape victim to go public.  And he did so immediately after his release from the hospital.

In fact, he called a press conference. 

For your readers unfamiliar with Stephen Donaldson, he was a US Navy Vietnam War-era veteran arrested on the grounds of the Nixon White House at a pray-in to end the bombing of Cambodia in 1973.  Refusing to make bail of ten dollars because he felt it discriminated against the poor, he was first placed in a cell block with mostly white prisoners like himself, among whom was G. Gordon Liddy who was locked-up for the Watergate break-in.  In his autobiography “Will,” Liddy expressed remorse that he may have been responsible for Donny being transferred to a cell block containing only black prisoners where the small, youthful-looking Donny was gang-raped for several days. 

A Korean War-era veteran of the US Air Force, I had been raped a few years earlier, in October 1968--in San Antonio where I had been publishing an underground newspaper named “Inferno” in Spanish and English.  Two memos from my FBI files indicate COINTELPRO may have set me up to be “neutralized” (their word) by being beaten, gang-raped and otherwise tortured for twenty-four hours while jailed for civil disobedience. 

With Donny working out of his tiny apartment in Harlem to stop prisoner rape and me on the opposite coast working out of the camper of my pick-up truck while homeless in San Francisco, we hooked-up in the early Eighties with an organization that went through several name changes and great metamorphosis.  Just Detention International (JDI) now has a paid staff and offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. and, of course, a website.

And Joan Baez, like her sister Mimi Farina before she died, is on our advisory council. 

JDI was instrumental in passing the Prisoner Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003.  It should have been Donny who witnessed the signing ceremony in the Oval Office that September but he had died in 1996, just days short of his 50th birthday from AIDS contracted from being raped again years later while confined—again--for civil disobedience. 

Earlier in 2003, I had been in Iraq where I served as a volunteer human shield at a water treatment plant near Baghdad during the US-led bombing and invasion.  I wasn’t home long when I was invited to the White House for the signing ceremony because I was a survivor of prisoner rape and the activist who had worked on the issue longest.  Watching Pres. George Bush sign the PREA into law while Sen. Teddy Kennedy and others looked on was, for me, far more surreal than any acid trip I ever took in the Sixties and early Seventies.

Now, almost a decade after the signing ceremony, the Obama/Holder Justice Department is dragging its feet in putting it’s full support behind the PREA.  On the “phone” early this morning, Donny and I agreed that “someone” may want to keep this “management tool”—as Donny and I call prisoner rape—an option for rebellious young people.  Isn’t it at least strange that the allegedly most liberal or at least most moderate presidential administration in years is NOT supportive of a humane bill passed by perhaps the most conservative and most corrupt presidential administration in US history? 

But as a long-time, non-violent, left-wing radical activist and survivor of torture, institutionalized barbarism is not strange to me.  For instance, I’ve been keeping my eye on FEMA prison camps since construction began a decade or two ago.  Now there are between six and eight hundred all over the country—waiting empty but stocked with supplies for a national “emergency.”  Just two years ago, Pres. Obama gave his approval to the prison camps managed by FEMA by signing into law the National Emergency Centers Act (HR 645) of 2009.  Yes, I’m a “conspiracy nut” and for many bloody good reasons. 

Meanwhile the 99 Percenters need to be informed about prisoner rape as well as the prison camps.  And one way to avoid both is by spreading the word, exposing these un-American methods of crushing dissent.  This is Donny’s message from his aerie.

 My View

The work of JDI and other human rights organization has sparked great progress in eliminating this horrible human rights abuse.  It still occurs at an epidemic level.  If arrests of OWS protesters run into the thousands it will not be a question of whether some of them will be raped, it will be question of how many.  My "It is what it is. Deal with it" perspective would say to demonstrators that you should avoid arrest.  It is just not worth the risk. I'm skeptical about Tom's theory on the FEMA prison camps, but the risk of rape in jail is extremely well documented. For a greater understanding of the issue check out the JDI website or watch the powerful documentary Turned Out by Interlock Media.

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The post was picked up by radfem Hub, which sadly now is just an archive.  It sparked my interest in contemporary radical feminism, something which I followed without writing about very much, but when I did write about it it got interesting.

Occupy Wall Street In Boston

Originally published on forbes.com on September 30,2011.   Some of my Occupy coverage on forbes.com was close to breaking.  There was a lag between the heavy social media coverage and coverage in mainstream media.

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I just received this press release.  So it looks like I may not have to wait to get a better feel for what is going on.  The protest is right by South Station so I'm thinking about taking the train.  Boston has about the worst parking situation in the country, but nothing in downtown is really very far from anything else.

I ended up not being able to make it, but I did get a report, which I may post later.

"OCCUPY WALL STREET" INSPIRES PROTESTS IN BOSTON

*Friday, September 30th, Concerned Citizens Gather for the Kick-off of Occupy Boston*

The conversation that began on Wall Street on September 17 has swept northward to Boston, and inspired a powerful national movement. Joining with nearly 100 actions in cities from Los Angeles to Dallas, Chicago,and Washington D.C., concerned citizens have come to speak out for greater economic equality.

Occupy Boston will gather at Dewey Square in Downtown Boston on Friday,September 30 at 6 p.m., to begin an ongoing protest, discuss the state of the union and develop out of that discussion a list of specific changes to ensure our government actually works for the benefit of all citizens.

Planning this event began with a group of over 200 people from all walks of life who assembled on Boston Common Tuesday evening to discuss taking action.  Paul Harris of the Guardian covered the meeting, saying,"[..]the people behind Occupy Boston showed a strong dose of media savvy and organizational skill on [Tuesday] night, as they drew a committed crowd of volunteers to their cause: to occupy a slice of the city."

Occupy Boston is the beginning of an ongoing discussion about the problems with America's economic system and how it has damaged government and the fabric of society as a whole. The top 1% owns 50% of the nation’s wealth -and more importantly, how that wealth is used undermines the founding principles of America’s democracy.

Through the use of direct democracy, Occupy Boston is working to define and solve the problems of: an opaque and exclusive government, a Wall Street without conscience, and a state struggling to guarantee basic human rights.  Everyone is invited to join this conversation about reforming how business and government operate.

In the coming days and weeks, Occupy Boston will persist in advocating the need for change, defining the change we need, and reaching out to policy-makers, business leaders, and the citizens of our Republic in this mission."Our country is owned by the top 1%.  We are the 99%."

Join the conversation!

For more information about Occupy Boston visit http://occupyboston.com/