7 Occupations That Changed US History

With the spread of political occupations to all 50 states today, lessons can be gleaned from past occupations for a movement that shows no signs of going away. 

By Arun Gupta 
November 14, 2011 
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"

Political occupations have a storied history starting with the first recorded labor strike. Some 3,176 years ago in Ancient Egypt royal tomb builders from the desert village of Deir el-Medina repeatedly occupied temples following the failure of Pharaoh Ramses III to provide wages consisting of wheat, fish, beer, clothing and other provisions.

In the centuries since, other movements have stamped their mark on history by occupying spaces, such as the Diggers who formed a utopian agrarian community on common land in 17^th century England, and the workers, soldiers and citizens who established the ill-fated Paris Commune in 1871.

American history is rich with examples of political occupations that left a lasting impact. Sometimes the 99% pushed progress forward, as with Rosa Park’s occupation of a bus seat that propelled the Montgomery Bus Boycott and ended with Alabama’s bus segregation being declared unconstitutional. Often the 1% of the time – slaveholders, robber barons and merchants of war – re-asserted control with new methods of domination such as after the Great Upheaval of 1877. But each event proved that true democracy lies in collective act of taking space public and private, while corporations and the state are just two arms of the same beast.

With the spread of political occupations to all 50 states today, the most dynamic democratic movement since the 1960s, lessons can be gleaned from past occupations for a movement that shows no signs of going away. Here are seven of the most important occupations that changed American history.

1) The Great Upheaval Of 1877

In his magnificent work Strike!, Jeremy Brecher describes how railroad men sparked the first general strike in U.S. history. Following a second pay cut in eight months, workers for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad seized the train lines and roundhouse in the small town of Martinsburg, West Virginia on July 16, 1877. The strike spread along the B&O line and workers halted freight traffic while continuing to move passengers and mail. Brecher argues that to succeed, the strikers had to “beat off strikebreakers by force [and] seize trains, yards, roundhouses.”

Thousands of miners, industrial workers, unemployed and youth rallied to the cause blocking and sabotaging trains protected by federal troops from moving in much of Maryland and West Virginia. Railroad companies enlisted state militias, but they inflamed sentiments by gunning down scores of strike supporters. In other instances guardsmen deserted, mutinied or handed over their weapons to the crowds.

The strike snowballed into an insurrection between as workers joined from every possible industry. Train yards were occupied in Buffalo, civil authority collapsed in Pittsburgh, strikers assumed policing, the telegraph and railways in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and general strikes flared in cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. Mass actions and strikes cropped up in Texas, Kentucky, Missouri and California.

While federal troops, corporate goons and police eventually broke a strike movement that lacked organization and strategy, and the massive national guard armories in the center of American cities is one enduring legacy, Brecher argues “the power of workers to virtually stop society, to counter the forces of repression and to organize cooperative action on a vast scale was revealed in the most dramatic fashion.”

2) 1930s Labor Movements

The Flint sit-down strikes that began in December 1936 and won union recognition for hundreds of thousands of industrial workers are legendary. But more than two years earlier, workers flexed their militancy through forms of occupation that won wage increases and union representation. Prior to this, argues Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Poor People’s Movements, workers were usually thwarted by intransigent capitalists who relied on vigilantes, police, government indifference and the self-interested leaders of the American Federation of Labor.

By 1934 the winds began to change. In Toledo, a faltering strike at the Electric Auto-Lite Company was bolstered by the radical Unemployed Leagues and local Communists. Defying court injunctions and mass arrests, more than 10,000 people shut down the Auto-Lite plant in May 1934. The crowd held their ground even after 900 Ohio National Guardsmen killed and wounded nearly 20 people. “With the threat of a general strike in the air,” Piven writes, the corporations agreed to a wage increase and limited union recognition.

At the same time, deadly battles raged in Minneapolis between vigilantes retained by the businessmen’s “Citizen Alliance” and workers led by the Teamsters and the Socialist Workers Party. Panic spread among the ruling class as more than 20,000 people joined the street fighting on the workers side, giving them effective control of the city. With the state government taking more of a neutral stance than usual, a settlement was reached that led to collective bargaining agreements with 500 Minneapolis companies by 1936.

The Longshoremen’s strike in San Francisco was less successful. In May 1934 a Communist-led union helped shut down most of the ports and teamsters honored the picket line. In July the police assaulted pickets, killing two and hospitalizing 115 others. Anger and sympathy swelled support for a general strike, but the AFL undermined it and it folded four days later.

It was the sit-down strike that changed the game, aided by government protections. In 1937 more than 500 sit-down strikes took place, building the United Automobile Workers and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee to more than 650,000 strong by 1938.

Piven describes why the sit-down strike was so effective: “With workers controlling the plant, employers could not import strikebreakers. In cases like General Motors, where many specialized factories depended on each other, a few sit-down strikes could, and did, stop the entire corporation. … Moreover, in the climate of the time, the sit-down strike, itself nonviolent, did not usually precipitate police action. And so the tactic spread, from factory workers to salesgirls, to hospital workers, garbage collectors, and watchmakers, to sailors, farmhands, opticians, and hotel employees.”

3) Harvard Building Women’s Takeover

On International Women’s Day in 1971, March 6, hundreds of women began a 10-day occupation of a Harvard-owned building in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Boston Phoenix reported at the time, “The idea originated with some members of Bread and Roses, a self-avowed socialist organization …. However, the plan was carried out by independent women from a least six different women’s organizations.” In the fall of 1970 Bread and Roses had circulated a call for a Women’s Center that could provide space for counseling on healthcare, abortion and birth control, legal aid, day care, activities for high-school girls and other community projects, and a place for lesbians.

There were many feminist organizations, collectives, consciousness-raising groups and communes with different politics and purposes at the time, but almost all supported the takeover. Once the occupation began many women who saw it on television or read about it in the newspapers joined or donated food, bedding and other supplies.

The occupiers did not realize there was already a struggle over the building, which was located in an African-American working class community. Harvard's expansion into the community had wiped out some 500 units of affordable housing due to the subsequent rise in property values and rents. The community wanted Harvard to replace that building and an adjacent one with affordable housing. When the women who took over the building learned that they had stumbled into this fight, they adopted the community's demand as one of their own. The women received an anonymous $5,000 donation from a female trustee of Radcliffe. In 1972 they purchased a house for use as a women's center that continues to provide services for the community and which acts as a base of activism for the women's movement.

Some of the women involved in the takeover went on to form the Boston Women's Health Collective, which wrote the groundbreaking” Our Bodies Our Selves,” They also helped found City Life/La Vida Urbana which is fighting home foreclosures today and is active with Occupy Boston.

4) Free Speech Movement

If you value freedom of speech, then thank an anarchist. Facing an extremely hostile political structure and media a century ago, the “Wobblies” (Industrial Workers of the World), Emma Goldman and other anarchists honed their soap-box speaking to effectively promote their causes and build their ranks. They believed in the power of workers as producers, and put their hope in the general strike and street politics.

Margaret Kohn, author of Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space, writes that street speaking “confronted ‘respectable’ citizens with a visible reminder (and powerful critique) of poverty and deprivation. IWW orators tried to transform the figure of the hobo from a symbol of moral deprivation into an indictment of the capitalist economy and its exploitation of itinerant workers.” Kohn argues that “a democratic society requires public forums,” and that while public space today is controlled by monied interests, a century ago it was government that severely limited political activity in public space.

On the West Coast, the Wobblies were trying to organize miners, loggers, farm laborers and other migrants who worked at privately owned camps in rural areas. During the off-season the Wobblies would set up soap boxes in front of the office of “sharks,” agents who would extort fees for jobs at these camps – jobs that sometimes did not exist, leaving workers penniless and homeless once they arrived at the work site. Businessmen colluded with politicians, courts and police to try to smash the free speech campaign by banning street speaking, mass arrests, jailings, beatings and vigilante attacks.

The press weighed in with opinions like this San Diego Tribune editorial from March 4, 1912: “Hanging is none too good for them. They would be much better dead, for they are absolutely useless in the human economy; they are the waste material of creation and should be drained off into the sewer of oblivion there to rot in cold obstruction like any other excrement.”

Even when the courts ruled in favor of free speech, local police would arrest street speakers who would be convicted by local courts of charges like disorderly conduct or conspiracy. In Spokane, Washington, the Wobblies successfully used the tactic of filling the jails to force the city to relent. As one speaker would be arrested, another would mount the soapbox. Kohn writes, “Often these inexperienced orators simply climbed up and began to read the United States Constitution, barely completing a few sentences before they were arrested.” Arrested Wobblies described jail conditions that included “beating prisoners, confining 30 men in an eight-by-six sweatbox, housing them in freezing conditions without blankets or cots, and turning cold hoses on them in freezing conditions.”

After more than 500 arrests and the failure of brutality to cow the protesters, the city of Spokane agreed to recognize the Wobblies right to free speech, assembly and press. Similar battles were waged in Seattle, Fresno, British Columbia and Kansas City. In San Diego the Wobblies were defeated systematic police violence and “armed vigilante squads” who kidnapped Wobblies arriving by train, and hauled them to the town limits “where hundreds were badly beaten, stripped, tarred and feathered, and run out town,” according to Kohn.

Despite this setback, the Wobbly campaign to open public space to political speech was eventually enshrined in constitutional law.

5)The Stono Rebellion

During the 1730s organized slave rebellions and conspiracies occurred in the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, St. John and Guadalupe. On the morning of Sept. 9, 1973, up to 100 black slaves who had covertly gathered at the Stono River in South Carolina launched the largest rebellion in pre-Revolutionary War America. Slave revolts are by their nature a secretive affair, but Stono’s Rebellion involved the occupation of public space: a procession of liberated slaves who marched toward Florida where the Spanish had promised freedom. The leader of the group was a literate slave named Cato, who “wrote passes for slaves and do all he can to send them to freedom,”according to a descendant. After killing a handful of whites, seizing weapons and freeing other slaves, the growing group continued south, “with drums beating and banners flying, in some show of military order.”

Eventually a militia of some 100 whites caught up with the insurgents, “who fought well and bravely, but the armed militia won the fight,” with 20 whites and 40 blacks killed in total. Many slaves escaped from the battlefield, but captured rebels were shot and some decapitated with their heads mounted on posts.

As a result, South Carolina’s slaveholders imposed draconian measures prohibiting slaves from gathering in groups and learning to read, while also doubling tariffs on new slaves to try to slow the growth of the Black population. Nonetheless, accounts from Georgia indicate freed slaves had managed to escape that far, while Stono’s rebellion presaged even more dramatic uprisings led by Nat Turner and John Brown in the 19^th century.

6) The Battle In Seattle

The immediate pre-cursor to the Occupy Wall Street Movement is the alter-globalization movement that caused the collapse of the WTO ministerial in Seattle in late 1999. Horizontalist and anarchist, the movement occupied areas around conclaves of the ruling elites: the WTO, IMF, World Bank, World Economic Forum and NATO.

While heavily influenced by Mexico’s Zapatista movement, which itself used occupied public spaces to advance its political agenda, the alter-globalization movement built upon other movements that used occupation to advance political and social goals. While many of these began abroad, they found a ready audience in the United States. This included Reclaim the Streets, which began in England in 1995 as a “disorganization” devoted to liberating public roadways – and blocking the construction of new ones. Much of the goal was fun, roving street parties, but it was layered upon a resistance to the socially atomizing and ecologically destructive effects of a car-centric society.

Related to this was Critical Mass, the international movement of bicycles reclaiming public space by organizing a mass rides through streets. An explicitly leaderless movement, the first Critical Mass was staged in San Francisco in 1992, but was inspired by one filmmaker’s experience in China where bicyclists would have to wait until there was a critical mass of bicyclists to cross through major intersections. Rides now take place in thousands of citieswhere bicyclists, roller bladders, skateboarders and others take over the streets for a few hours. In New York City, thousands of bicyclists would occupy the streets in a peaceful procession, changing people’s perception of how the roadways and public space could be used. Starting in 2004, however, the NYPD started arresting riders and seizing their bicycles to deflate the movement, but it still continues strong in hundreds of other cities around the world.

A third occupation movement that heavily influenced the Seattle movement was tree sitting, which took root in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s. By setting up camp in trees, often 100 feet off the ground, ecological warriors stymied logging industry and U.S. Forest Service from felling unique old-growth forests. Supporters on the ground popularized many nonviolent tactics used by subsequent protest movements such as tripods, arm tubes, bicycle locks and concrete lock-ons to passively impede business as usual.

While the alter-globalization fell apart in the United States after the September 11 attacks, the worldwide movement helped to make the IMF irrelevant, while many veterans are playing critical roles in the Occupy Wall Street Movement today.

7) Lunch Counter Sit-ins

On Feb. 1, 1960, four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in a Woolworth store in the city of Greensboro and asked to be served coffee and doughnuts. They stay until the store closes. The next day the four return with other students, and by day four the number of protesters is nearly 300.

As planning began at two historic Black colleges in the area the prior fall, the students responded to the refusal of service by activating phone trees. Word quickly spreads throughout Black colleges and students in the South as does the tactic.

Tactics of nonviolence and returning to the lunch counter while refusing to be provoked by police and violent white mobs broadens the movement and gains it national support and sympathy. In Nashville, the student movement targets lunch counters as well as bus stations and department stores. In Savannah, Georgia, a widespread boycott movement forces some stores into bankruptcy and the next year the city agrees to desegregate buses, swimming pools, parks, restaurants and other public facilities.

In less than two weeks sit-ins, boycotts and pickets take place throughout North Carolina and South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia as well. Within a few months, sit-ins have occurred in every Southern state, and by year’s end an estimated 70,000 people have participated, resulting in more than 3,000 arrests.

The student led sit-in movement sparks the modern civil rights movement, leading to the formal dismantling of American Apartheid. 

Arun Gupta is a founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper. He is writing a book on the decline of American Empire for Haymarket Books.

'Occupy' Protests: Not Tahrir Yet

Demonstrations In The US and Europe Are Important, But Egyptian Style Revolution Is Still An Unlikely Prospect.

By Mark LeVine
Last Modified: 26 Oct 2011 11:17
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"


'Hummus party!'

So texted Synthian Sharp, self-described 'tech dork', singer of the band Exit Ophelia, and General Assembly facilitator for the newly established "Occupy OC" (Orange County) encampment in Irvine, CA at around midnight on day four of the occupation.

I had sent an SMS to Synthian to see how he and the dozen or so die-hard comrades who are at the heart of the local occupation were holding up, given that the City of Irvine was preventing them from sleeping at their camp, forcing them literally to stay awake all night and move around the sidewalk in order to avoid being forced to leave or even arrested.

I was relieved to receive Synthian's upbeat SMS, considering he and his comrades were on their fourth night of sitting on old blankets and beach chairs at one of Irvine's busier intersections. Not quite the level of challenges faced by protesters in Tahrir, Bourgiba Street or The Pearl, to be sure. But it's as close to a revolution as Orange County has witnessed in generations, if ever.

Indeed, the "OC", whose level of wealth and conspicuous consumption made the subject of at least two television series in the past five years, isn't just one of the wealthiest counties in America. It's the Garden of Eden of the West Coast conservativism that swept across the US with the election of Richard Nixon as President in 1968, and has defined the country's political culture ever since.

A Suburban Occupation

It's not just the local political culture that makes Irvine a less than ideal place to stage an occupation. It's also geography and urban planning. Occupy OC is, as of now, the only non-urban "Occupy Wall Street"- inspired occupation in the United States.

And yet, the number of people who came for the first day's rally and march - by some counts well over 1,000 - set a record for an OWS opening, according to activists with the group.

As was to be expected, once the opening weekend turned into the ensuing work week, the number of people on site at any one time dwindled significantly, to as few as a dozen. Despite the fall-off, however, Irvine's leadership is none too keen on having protesters camped at City Hall. And so since day-one, the police have forced the entire encampment to be packed up and removed at 10:00 each night, only allowing it to be reconstructed at 6:00 the next morning.

The City of Irvine won't allow die-hard occupiers to sleep on the edge of the sidewalk, even though it wouldn't violate any municipal ordinances. So to ensure that the Occupy OC Encampment takes root, at least a dozen volunteers have to be willing to stay awake all night, while one particularly noble supporter arrives with his truck every evening at around 9:30 to break the "village" down, only to bring everything back eight hours later to be reconstructed by dead-tired occupiers.

After one week of doing so, the City apparently decided to ratchet up the pressure, so on the morning of the first week's anniversary, workers turned on the lawn sprinklers multiple times after the occupiers had reset the village, soaking computers and other media equipment used to give the public real-time updates of the situation at the village. Despite the damage, a good crowd had gathered by the time of the weekly march, with more families and children than had come any of the previous days.

The Death Of TINA

In the Arab world, protesters have faced down tanks, snipers, helicopters and camels to stake their claim to public space. Fortunately, OWS activists have not faced similar levels of violence. But they have faced down pepper spray, kettling, police commanders with unresolved authority issues towards women, and in Irvine, where well-manicured lawns are something of an obsession despite the naturally dry climate, angry sprinklers. Their ability to continue defying these attempts to repress and expel them will ensure the viability of the OWS movement.

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Indeed, by holding their ground against the various attempts to force their encampments to disband, protesters are helping to chip away at the already frayed hegemony of the neoliberal ideology that has governed America for the last two generations. In so doing, they are offering the rest of the country the inspiration and example of change that President Obama promised to bring, but has so thoroughly failed to deliver upon.
One of the cornerstones of neoliberal ideology, as professed by Thatcher, Reagan and most every Western leader since them is that that "There Is No Alternative" to the neoliberal order; "TINA," as Thatcher used to say. This argument has long been repeated by Western client regimes in Cairo, Tunis, Amman and other Arab capitals, who have survived for decades precisely by convincing their Western patrons and a good share of their own citizens of the same thing.

But a decade after the World Social Forum movement announced that "another world is possible", TINA is finally being revealed to be a lie. The Arab spring gave proof to that, inspiring occupiers across the United States and Europe to imagine another future. In so doing, the OWS protests have helped their fellow citizens break through the wall of fear that has allowed the system to function so well for the last two generations.

Centre Of The Storm

The City of Irvine is one of the stranger towns in the United States. It has little of the feel of a normal urban space, even though its population is over 200,000 and it was recently chosen by CNN as the fourth best American city in which to live. It has been described as a "master planned utopia," but this description only holds true if you think that placeless grids and largely cookie cutter architecture constitute good planning and the best possible way for people to live together.

Irvine is in many ways a perfect avatar of the neoliberal system writ large against which the OWS movement is protesting. There is no city centre, no civic heart, no "old town" to give a nostalgic flavour of a time gone by, and little sense of civic identity. It is, in a word, placeless and without meaningful identity. Yet, once you live here, it's extremely hard to leave a microcosm of the proverbial Hotel California, for the neoliberal age.

And it's surrounded by even wealthier suburbs and some of California's most expensive beach front developments, whose cookie cutter McMansion's, expensive private schools and corporate restaurants create "la bella vita" for the management of many real estate, technology and financial services companies whose corporate headquarters occupy Irvine's self-styled "financial district".

Cities like New York or Los Angeles have long histories of social protest and significant working class and progressive populations. But Irvine's unique history and dynamics make it a far more important test case for the future of the OWS movement. If OWS can take root in here, there's a good chance it will become a powerful force in American politics, and perhaps even compete with the far better financed and far more partisan Tea Party movement.

But if the OWS can't take root in a Democratic city that's home to a major university, with its broadly liberal population of professors and tens of thousands of students directly affected by the disastrous policies of Wall Street, then there's not much chance it will penetrate deeply into far more conservative "middle America" and give the well-financed Tea Party, never mind corporate America, a run for their money.

A Few Good Omens

Despite the precipitous drop in attendance after the opening weekend, Occupy OC has already revealed some positive indicators about the broad appeal of the OWS movement. Much of it has to do with the ingeniously broad appeal ofthe movement's "We are the 99 per cent" slogan. After all, it quite literally includes 99 per cent of the population as potential allies, even in a wealthy town like Irvine.

When drivers of Mercedes, BMWs, Lexuses and even Porsches are slowing down to honk their horns in support of sign-waving protesters, as I've witnessed in three days of periodic sign-holding, it's clear something is changing in Orange County. Even members of the upper middle and wealthy classes are starting to come around to the notion that an economy driven by war and unaccountable financial services and banking sectors is unsustainable, not just for the working and middle classes, but for them as well.

And indeed, the protests here have brought not just progressives, hippies, and union members to the "village". Republicans, religious people and the very denizens of corporate America who should be opposed to any attempt to regulate corporate capitalism have also participated in the daily marches and rallies.

But most surprising are the numbers of long-term unemployed people, many with college and even professional degrees, that you meet at the village. It is downright frightening to meet so many people who look and act like they've just stepped out of a nice corner office in one of Irvine's semi-sky scrapers explain that they haven't had a steady job in several years and are literally at the end of their economic rope, with little hope for anyone to catch them when they completely drain whatever savings they have left.

Americans, in short, are starting to experience what citizens of Tunisia, Egyptians, and the developing world more broadly have had to live with for decades: a government of elites who are enriching themselves and their corporate friends at the expense of citizens. They are literally stealing the country blind, leaving only the shell of a country in the wake of their greed and duplicity, along with a military that has arrogated a huge share of the country's wealth to its domain and a prison system ready to house - for a profit - anyone who threatens the system.

The Rise Of Neoliberalism

To understand the significance of the dynamics surrounding Occupy OC and Occupy Wall Street more broadly, it's necessary first to understand precisely how remarkable and unlikely has been the neoliberal and neoconservative capture of the hearts and minds of middle America during the last three decades. From the New Deal era till through 1970s here, there was a broad social compact between government, labour and business that helped create and sustain the remarkable prosperity of the post-war era.

During this period, the main way that conservative elites - included so-called southern Democrats - won the loyalty of voters was through appeals to racial, ethnic, or religious solidarity. They couldn’t try to create the extremes of wealth and disparities that exist today because the social compact wouldn’t allow it.

The structure of America’s political economy, whose success was tied to maintaining a balance between the interests of business, workers and the state that mediated between them, helped ensure that the country's growing wealth was distributed evenly enough to enable the fabled "American dream" to become a reality.

Greed and power of the financial instituions are to be largely blamed for the current economic crisis [GALLO/GETTY]

The changes in the world political economy, as well as the computer, communications and transportation revolutions that heralded the age of contemporary globalisation, shifted the balance of power decidedly in the favour of corporations, who have literally bought off government and in so doing, been able to continuously weaken the power and earnings of workers.

Thus real wages have remained stagnant or declined despite the huge growth in America's GDPfor the last three decades (and even today, the regular increase in the number of people earning more than $1m per year), while pensions,healthcare and other benefits have all shrunk during this period. This as corporate profits and executive salaries have soared, producing theone per cent scenario against which the OWS movement is protesting.


A Brilliant Strategy

In order for neoliberalism to succeed, the economic elite had to pull off an incredible trick: to convince millions of Americans - first labelled, in the 1980s, as "Reagan Democrats" - actively support policies that clearly went against their economic interests. At the same time, the policies of conservative and economic elites were geared to expropriating more wealth than ever before, they had to convince the very people whose wealth they were siphoning off that they actually represented their most basic interests and values.

How did they do this? Through a brilliant two-fold strategy. First, they solidified a culture of materialism and hyperconsumption based on the ideology of 'Greed is Good', in which achieving wealth and power and looking out for number one - always resonant with American myth of rugged individualism and self-reliance - became defining markers of American identity and its increasingly bling-obsessed culture.

The corporate elites, from manufacturing to the culture industries, managed to convince most Americans that they both could and should hope to achieve the same wealth as possessed by the super rich. The problem was that the very structure of the neoliberal economy redistributes wealth away from most Americans and towards the top.

The gap between how Americans were being told they should live and how they could afford to live created a huge amount of cognitive dissonance that helped fuel the rise in consumer debt, as tens of millions of Americans used credit card and home equity to live more like the rich whom they were incessantly told they could and should try to be.

But people aren't that easily fooled; soon enough they would start to understand that the economy was shifting in a way that privileged the few at the expense of the rest of the country. How to keep the broad swath of "middle America" from rebelling against a system that was siphoning off a huge share of their wealth to enrich the top tier?

This is where the second half of the strategy comes into view. With one side of their mouths, elites told Americans that maximising wealth and power was the defining culture value in America, even as the neoliberal policies they imposed on the country made doing so increasingly difficult for the large majority of Americans. But out of the other side of their mouths, they told Americans that wealth didn't matter, that religious faith and conservative social values such as being anti-gay and anti-abortion, and patriotism and support for the military, were what defined "real" Americans.

It was this argument that allowed the wealthy in this country to eat their cake and still have it; to foster one ideology that justified the increasing skewing of wealth towards the proverbial "1 per cent" (in reality, it's more like 12 or 13 per cent, but slogans work precisely by intensifying reality for political effect), while at the same time deploying another ideology that said both that wealth didn't matter and that the very people who could help bring the majority of working Americans a better standard of living-the government, unions and other progressive forces-were the greatest danger to the "American way of life."

Occupy Wall Street activists remain defiant

Through this double discourse, America's corporate elite convinced tens of millions of Americans whose most basic economic interests their policies were utterly opposed not merely to acquiesce to their policies but actively support them. Barack Obama won Higher Office in good measure because he offered an alternative to this narrative that made sense to millions of voters who had previously believed in TINA. But once it turned out he was as in hock to Wall Street as every other politician, TINA came back, and the Tea Party movement could use social values and attacks on government to fatally weaken his presidency.

Now, however, it appears that people are finally waking up; most important, they are doing so from the grassroots upwards, not from the top down as happened with Obama or the corporate-run Tea Party. If the OWS movement can peel more of the top 10 per cent of population away from the top one per cent, help them understand that their lives and their children's futures will be served better by throwing their lot in with the bottom 90 per cent than the top one per cent, the entire edifice of neoliberalism, which was always a house of cards, could well begin to collapse.

At least in Irvine during Occupy OC's first week, the odds don't seem too bad.

Becoming Egyptians


The rise of a grassroots level of intelligence that is much harder for corporations and politicians to manipulate is a signature achievement of the OWS movement and mirrors the dynamics that produced the Arab Spring. Indeed, Americans are starting to act like their counterparts in the Arab world, finally standing up for themselves because, essentially, no one in power will do so for them. The Irvine civic centre is not yet Tahrir, but sitting on the sidewalk sometime past midnight on day four, eating hummus and pita, strumming a guitar and talking politics with fellow occupiers, there was at least a hint of the tremendous feeling of empowerment and solidarity felt in Tahrir during those heady last 10 days of the February intifada.

With children leading chants during the day, young people at the helm of the organising efforts, older protesters ("fogies" as they're affectionately referred to) bringing experience and patience to the proceedings, and increasing numbers of people with literally nothing else to do with their time realising this is the place to be, Irvine might just be ground zero in the war between the one per cent and the rest of America.

As we watch the American government continue to intervene politically, diplomatically and militarily to prop up or tear down regimes based on their allegiance to the larger neoliberal system, it's clear that in the same way that events in the Arab world have profoundly influenced the emerging protest movement in the US, the outcome of the OWS movement will strongly influence the balance of power in the Arab world as well.

Today, perhaps more than ever before, we really are living in a global village.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).

Americans Get A Shabak Education

Police have beaten non-violent protestors, veterans and even seniors in order to 'gain compliance'  [GALLO/GETTY]


The World Enters A New Phase Where The Students Are Slowly Becoming The Teachers, Forcing Bloody Change Says Author. 

Submitted By "Sayf Maslul" 

By Mark LeVine 
Last Modified: 23 Nov 2011 08:35 
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Irvine, CA - It was a term that has stuck with me since a Palestinian friend in the Ajami neighbourhood of Jaffa first used it in response to one of my more naive questions. "Why don't you all do to protest against the on-going expropriation of land and discrimination against local residents by the Israeli government," I asked him on a typically sunny summer day, as we stood in front of yet another luxury housing development being constructed on formerly Palestinian land. 

"Because we've all received a good Shabak education," he answered.

The education in question, was dispensed by the Shabak, or Shin Bet, Israel's state security services, to keep the country's Palestinian population from protesting too vigorously against the policies that have kept them second class citizens despite the official political equality granted to them by the Israeli state.

A Shabak education wasn't quite a mukhabarat education - the much more violent repression meted out to citizens of authoritarian Arab countries like Egypt, or to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories by Israel, and as tragic, by the PA and Hamas as well. But it was enough to keep Israel's Palestinian community in line, most of the time, and was part of a continuum of measures that could always be ramped up to include more intense violence if the state felt threatened by the Palestinian minority (as happened most famously at the outset of the al-Aqsa intifada in 2000).

As long as the violence was within "acceptable" limits, and limited to Palestinians, the Shabak educational system didn't disturb the seemingly democratic character of Israel more broadly. But the problem was that the violence visited upon Palestinian citizens in Israel was deeply related to the violence of the Occupation, and ultimately both began to leak into Israeli society.

In recent years, increasing numbers of Israeli Jews have begun receiving a Shabak education, especially as more and more actively join the struggle for Palestinian rights on both sides of the Green Line. They are tear-gassed, doused with "stinky water", arrested, shot with rubber bullets, and worse. At the political level, the government has sought to delegitimise and even outlaw various means of advocacy by progressive Israelis that used to be protected as evidence of Israel's liberal and democratic credentials.

Not surprisingly, this dynamic is evolving as Israel deepens its entrenchment within the West Bank, a process that is inextricably linked to the growing power of ultra-religious Jews, not merely in the political system, but within the country's military system. The situation has lead even mainstream Israelis to declare that the democratic basis of the Israeli state is under threat as never before - not from Palestinians, but from how Jews are treating each other.

Inevitable Blowback

This is the blowback of the Occupation, something even the "father" of Israel, David Ben Gurion, realised would be the likely outcome of a renewed settlement enterprise after 1967. You simply cannot visit so much violence routinely on other people, and devote so much of the resources of your government to enforcing a regime of violence, and not wind up having the very people the violence was meant to protect become the objects of that violence.

In the wake of September 11, many commentators pointed out that the US finally understood what it felt like to be Israeli. "We're all Israelis now", or so the saying went. What most people didn't consider as the country geared up for what has become by far its longest and most costly war, was that the violence Americans were prepared to unleash against Muslims around the world, and particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, would sooner or later inevitably return home.

Not in the form of terrorism, which was and remains a very possibility. But more dangerous to the political health of the country, in the form of a state that at all levels is increasingly willing to use violence to quash dissent among its own citizens. You simply cannot spend trillions of dollars invading, occupying, killing and otherwise oppressing - or setting up or supporting governments that oppress on your behalf - other people and not have that violence seep into the internal mechanisms that govern how a society functions.

The first evidence of this trend occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, when the military and counter insurgency weapons, tactics and philosophies developed for Vietnam began to be deployed at home - both in domestic spying as part of the COINTELPRO programmes and through the creation of militarised police units such as SWAT teams, usually staffed by military veterans.

However dangerous to the overall health of American democracy, spying on activists and using military tactics in the ghetto didn't touch the majority of white Americans. The violence directed by the state was able to remain largely hidden from view through the rapid expansion of a prison industrial complex that locks up millions of mostly minority and poor Americans, increasingly for profit, the majority of them for non-violent offences.

The incarceration of African Americans at six times the level of the white fellow citizens has never caused a huge outcry among the majority of (white) Americans. Even the country's first black President has done nothing to address this gross and systematic ongoing racism.

But now, with an economic downturn that is forcing tens of millions of white Americans to understand the economic insecurities with which African Americans and Latinos have long had to live, with privatisation encroaching on every aspect of public life, from schools to prisons, and with an increasingly militarised police culture whose members are literally trained to see people as obstacles to be overcome rather than citizens to be served and protected, the landscape has been prepared for the spread of a Shabak education to the general populace.

All that was needed was the right spark to set more and more citizens into the streets to protest the fundamental order of the neoliberal/conservative system, and the lesson would begin. Occupy Wall Street provided that spark, and in the last two months the increasing number of viral videos of police across the country, on streets and on campuses, beating, pepper spraying, tear-gassing and otherwise assaulting peaceful citizens engaged in the once respected rights of non-violent political speech have shown the country what a Shabak education looks like.

Ugly Scenes With Increasing Regularity

It's not pretty. Eighty-four-year-old grandmothers and rows of college students sprayed with mace from containers, the size of small fire extinguishers by police officers, acting so nonchalantly you might think it was a drill if you didn't hear the screams. Combat veterans shot and beaten to the point of rupturing their internal organs.

Pregnant women tear-gassed, students and faculty assaulted and having guns pointed at them. Police officers talking matter-of-factly, of beating non-violent protesters with batons in order to "gain compliance" with orders to disperse. Mayors of global cities ordering raids that destroy thousands of books, tents and other equipment while hundreds of thousands of homeless sleep without shelter.

And this list doesn't include draconian anti-terror laws such as the Patriot Act, FBI trolling of mosques, infiltration of peace and environmental and animal rights groups and the use of anti-terror laws against them, and the criminalisation of dissent on university campuses. America is slowly descending into the state of emergency under which Egyptians and Palestinians have long lived. We may not have gotten all the way there yet, but like slowly boiling a frog, by the time most Americans figures it out, it will be too late.

This morning, as I chatted on Facebook with Egyptian friends dodging tear gas and bullets in Tahrir, I was receiving a stream of emails describing how students at the University of California Davis, and other campuses, have been pepper-sprayed and otherwise assaulted by campus police. On my own campus, UC Irvine, it turns out that police held SWAT like trainings to prepare to deal with potential student protests over massive tuition hikes being imposed this year.

Whether in Egypt or the United States, the ultimate dynamic is the same. Rather than address fundamental demands of citizens for basic rights, equality and democracy, those in power would rather attack them by whatever means they believe they can get away with. Citizens are not to be served by government, but rather to be shoved aside in order to ensure the system's continued unfettered operation.

Amy Newhall, the Executive Director of the Middle East Studies Association, put it best, explaining that:

"Apparently the students have been inspired by the Arab Spring. I guess the police were inspired by the Syrian nightmare".

Synergy From Below

There is no need to compare campus police in California, or American police more broadly, with the far more brutal Egyptian police and security services. Americans aren't being crushed by APCs and shot by snipers. This is still a Shabak rather than mukhabarat education that Americans are receiving (of course the Iraqis, Afghans and others who are on the wrong end of the US military or CIA are getting much harsher lesson in American values).

But the distance travelled by American democracy to reach this point is far greater than the distance travelled by violent authoritarian regimes attacking their citizens with deadly violence. And when you consider the strong links between the US and Egyptian governments - and of course Israel as well - the larger pattern is clear.

But so are the similarities in the way protesters, whether in Egypt the US or even Israel are responding to the increased level of repression and marginalisation by their governments. OWS protests are witnessing a progressives and Republicans coming together in ways that haven't been seen in decades, as the clear failure of the country's political system is opening spaces for conversations and even solidarities that were very difficult to imagine before. Similarly, in Egypt, secular and religious forces, which have been at odds since Mubarak's ouster last February, are once again fighting on the same side on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and Suez.

In Israel, despite the attempt to marginalise Palestinian voices and concerns in the "tent movement" this past summer the reality is that Palestinian and Israeli civil society activists began talking and acting together in ways that will profoundly reshape Israeli internal politics in the coming years. Moreover, for the first time, Israelis are taking their cues from Arab societies whom they've long been taught to consider less modern than and fundamentally hostile to them.

At the same time, Palestinians across the Green Line are beginning "Freedom Rides" into Israel to force Israelis to confront the essential Apartheid nature of their rule in the Occupied Territories.

The thing about Shabak or mukhabarat educations is that they can't be sustained indefinitely. At some point, the people graduate, the students become the teachers, and the ruling elites are forced to learn the lesson that if removed, even the veneer of civility from the mechanisms of rule, and leave people feeling utterly betrayed by their government and with little to lose, they will lose their fear and you will lose your grip on power.

It's a long and bloody struggle, but it's clearly entered a new phase, not just in the US, Egypt or Israel/Palestine, but across the Middle East and the world.

A musician friend of mine in Cairo put it this way on his Facebook page after Saturday's violence: "25 January was the demo, now comes the album release". To put it in slightly more scholastic terms, it's a new year and class is now back in session. And if governments from Washington to Cairo, Tel Aviv or Damascus don't pay attention, they and their systems are going to fail out of school, and pass into the dustbin of history.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. He is the author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (Random House, 2008), Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Book, 2009) and co-editor, with Gershon Shafir, of Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel (University of California Press, forthcoming).

Follow Mark LeVine on Twitter @culturejamming

Future Of The 99% Revolution

The American Dream 

Submitted by "Sayf Maslul" 

By Press TV 
Courtesy Of YouTube



The 99% revolution is here; it started in New York on Wall Street and has spread all across the country and around the world. 

Form Occupy Anchorage in Alaska to Occupy Sarajevo in Bosnia the movement continues to grow. 

Two months after it started Americans are now preparing for winter. On this edition of the show we will explore the 99% revolution and see where it is headed.

Americans Are Being Lied To About The Deficit

Republicans Want To Gut Social Safety Nets, Not Cut The US Deficit.

By Heather Digby Parton
Last Modified: 22 Nov 2011 11:01
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

So far the super committee charged with stepping up to the plate and dealing with America's deficit does not have a deal. But if they make one, they won't be what you see on the screen. They will be super heroes and they could change sentiment around the world and save America from a debt crisis like Europe's.

- Erin Burnett, CNN host, November 8, 2011

 

So we reach the end of yet another lengthy deficit reduction negotiation, and all signs at this writing point to failure.

 

This is actually very good news, although to hear the pundits tell it, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will be trampling down the doors of the New York Stock Exchange and everyone in the US will soon be force-fed poisoned baklava at gunpoint. Indeed, if you followed the financial and political press over the past couple of weeks, you would have thought the world would literally come to an end if this arbitrary deadline to cut an arbitrary percentage of the deficit isn't met.

 

And yet, no deal means "sequestration" (also known as "the triggers") will kick in, which will mean brutal cuts to discretionary spending and defence starting in 2013. If the goal is to cut $1.2tn in order to set the country's fiscal house in order, why should all these deficit hawks care how the government gets there? Well, it turns out that this isn't really about deficit reduction at all. The entire exercise is about gutting the social safety net, thus giving the markets "confidence" in the United States' ability to govern itself.

 

Ironically, this was considered to be so important that our democratic government had to convene a secretive committee to meet behind closed doors and enact policies that go against the explicit desires of a vast majority of American citizens. In fact, among the chattering classes, defying the citizens has become the defining act of political courage. Nearly all of them have demanded that the Democrats brutally slash their signature social safety net programmes to prove their seriousness while assuming that Republicans could never agree to substantial tax increases.

 

And sadly, Democrats were more than willing to go along with this lopsided demand, labouring under the bizarre illusion that they would be rewarded by the people for doing exactly what the people didn't want them to do. The only thing standing in their way was the Republicans' unreasonable refusal to consider raising any taxes at all on highly profitable corporations and the greedy 1 per cent. In the end, even that small concession to allow the Democrats to save a tiny bit of face was too much and the negotiations fell apart.

 

The GOP intransigence is somewhat mystifying, since Republicans know very well that cutting taxes is always popular and they would have the opportunity to restore the lower rates as soon as they come back into power. It's true that a right-wing ideologue named Grover Norquist has made nearly every Republican sign a pledge to never raise taxes under any circumstances, but that hardly constitutes a commandment handed down from Mt Sinai. And having the Democrats beg them to agree to slash the social safety net doesn't come along every day. Still, they cannot bring themselves to take yes for an answer. And thank goodness for that.

"The public cares far more about jobs than deficits, and a majority of Americns are opposed to cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid."

The Beltway conventional wisdom will be unsparing towards the Democrats, however, regardless of their willingness to throw their own legacy over the cliff. It is an article of faith that despite their clear willingness to slash spending, the fact that they wouldn't agree to only cut spending makes them just as guilty as the Republicans who refuse to raise any taxes, ever, under any circumstances. The Democrats will be given no credit for their fetish for a "balanced" plan and demanding "shared sacrifice". In fact, the Republicans will now go into the election honestly claiming that the Democrats have proposed to cut Social Security and Medicare as well as raise taxes.

 

The polls have been clear and solid over time: The public cares far more about jobs than deficits and a majority of Americans are opposed to cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Even a majority of Republicans believe that the wealthy should pay more and that the "entitlements" should be left alone. Considering that the world is in the midst of an epic economic slowdown, this should not be surprising. At a time when average working families are feeling intensely vulnerable, the last thing they want is for the government to kick out another leg of the wobbly stool of their financial security. One can only wonder what would happen if the powers that be cared as much about the confidence of the citizen consumers as they do about the confidence of the markets.

 

But what about those triggers? Well, because they require large cuts in defence, which everyone knows the Republicans will never actually sign off on, it's highly likely that congress will find a way to scrap them too. After all, any agreement congress makes, it can also break. And it certainly appears that the Republicans have no intention of following through.

 

What about the threat of another downgrade, which has been furiously floated at the last minute? Well, it could happen. There's nothing stopping any of these unaccountable credit rating institutions from dispensing another dire warning. The problem is that the more they do that, the less anyone seems to pay any attention to them. When S&P dropped their ominous declaration after the debt-ceiling agreement, the Beltway had a collective case of the vapours, but the markets yawned. (Perhaps smart investors have figured out that institutions that gave triple-A ratings to sub-prime mortgage securities might not be the most reliable analysts.)

 

Does this mean that there will be no deficit reduction ever, and the country will careen off the cliff burdened by unending debt no matter what? No. In fact, if deficits are one's most immediate concern, there is another looming "trigger" out there that doesn't require anyone to do anything. If congress does nothing but name airports after Ronald Reagan and congratulate winning sports teams for the next year, the Bush tax cut legislation will expire in December of 2012 and most of the deficit will be magically gone. If they do the smart thing and put together a real economic recovery programme that works and fully wind down Bush's wars as well, it will be completely gone. 

This chart tells the tale:

 

Obviously, those Bush tax cuts include tax cuts for the middle class, the expiration of which both parties have been unwilling to allow. And it may be unwise to do it at a time when there is already a lack of demand. But citizens have a right to some honesty from their leaders about what they are being asked to give up long-term in exchange for keeping those taxes below what they were during the Clinton years. And that is essentially what we are talking about here.

 

Perhaps they will agree that it's worth it to slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on top of a whole host of other government functions rather than pay the same taxes they paid in the year 2000. Or they might say that they would rather the government turn its attention to getting the economy back on track by raising taxes on the wealthy to fund it. They might just say that they want the government to ignore the deficit for a time until the economy is working again and see what happens. (Certainly interest rates don't indicate that the markets are particularly worried, in spite of non-stop fear-mongering for months on end.)

 

The point is that the American people are being lied to about the deficit and their choices for fixing it (or not fixing it). And this dishonest campaign is being led by people with a long-standing animus towards the social safety net, who are seizing this moment of confusion to push through something without the permission of the people. This bait-and-switch is happening because financial and political elites insist on demanding "sacrifice" from ordinary people in order to preserve an unsustainable financial system, not an unsustainable debt.

 

Among those few politicians and economists who are not licking their chops over this unique opportunity to finally destroy any vestige of a welfare state, it is acknowledged that the economic slump and runaway healthcare costs are the main drivers of future debt, neither of which will be fixed by slashing government spending and health benefits. They will, instead, make both of those problems worse, in both the short and the long term. It is exactly the wrong thing to do at the wrong time. 

 

But austerity is the new black plague expanding across the globe, and there seems to be no stopping it. In the US in 2011, gridlock is the only medicine, we have to fight it. If we are lucky, this Supercommittee failure will break the fever and refocus the government where the people want it to be - on jobs, economic justice and financial reform. If they don't, there's a little election coming up about a year from now, and the people may decide to find some representatives who will. 

 

Heather Digby Parton writes the liberal political blog Hullabaloo.

Fallujah Veteran: 'I Served The 1%'

Wall Street's Wars 

Thoughts On The Role Of veterans In The Occupy Movement 

By Ross Caputi 
November 08, 2011 
Courtesy Of "Answer Coalition"

I did not serve my country in Iraq; I served the 1%. It was on their behalf that I helped lay siege to Fallujah, helped kill thousands of civilians, helped displace hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and helped destroy an entire city. My "service" served Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, and other multinational corporations in Iraq.

My family in Massachusetts is not safer because of my service, and Iraqis are not freer. I helped oppress Iraqis in a manner far more brutal than what has been experienced by the Occupy movement at the hands of the New York and Oakland police departments.

I was an occupier and am now an #occupier. I once served the 1%, but now try to serve the 99%. That is why I must speak up when I see the Occupy movement being led astray by the same nationalism and “Ameri-centrism,” the same thoughtless praises for U.S. troops and veterans, and the same hypocrisy that led us into the so-called “War On Terror” and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many of us have joined the Occupy movement, because we identify as members of the 99%, but the media only began to highlight our participation after Cpl. Scott Olsen was shot in the head by the Oakland police with a projectile on Oct. 25. Olsen was immediately rushed to the emergency room, and his name soon became a rallying cry. A nationwide call was put out for vigils in solidarity with Olsen.

Going To War Is Not "Serving Our Country" 

The Occupy movement was quick to highlight Olsen's "service" and his two deployments to Iraq. The New York Times noted that "his injury—and the oddity of a Marine who faced enemy fire only to be attacked at home—has prompted an outpouring of sympathy, as well as calls for solidarity."

Although Olsen appears to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—he is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace,—the Occupy movement's response to his attack has revealed ambivalence on these issues.

The Occupy movement has glossed over the irony that Olsen was put in the hospital by some of the same tactics that his Marine Corps has used against Iraqis. It has not drawn a connection between what happened to Olsen and what happened to Iraqis who peacefully protested against the U.S. occupation of their country—like in Fallujah on April 28, 2003, when the U.S. fired into a crowd of protesters and killed 13 civilians. Countless other identical incidents have taken place, even today as Iraqis also protest unemployment, corruption and lack of services.

When the Occupy movement mentions Olsen's "service" without clarifying who he served, they hide the lies of the 1% and ignore the more than 1 million dead Iraqis, the millions of refugees and orphans, and the dramatic rise in cancers and birth defects in Iraq.

We Must Stand For The Most Affected Victims Of Wall Street

I watched a Youtube video the other day of U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Shamar Thomas shouting at the NYPD: "If you want to go kill or hurt people, go to Iraq. Why are you hurting U.S. citizens?" as a crowd of Occupy Wall Street protesters cheered him on.

Over 2.5 million people have watched this video, and Thomas appeared on Rosie O'Donnell's television show and made several appearances on Keith Olbermann. Everyone championed his "service" and decried police brutality against U.S. citizens. Nobody questioned the dismissal of the value of Iraqi lives.

We should all decry police brutality wherever it rears its ugly head. Yet police brutality and the murder of innocent civilians in foreign countries in service of the 1% are both moral issues, and to decry one without decrying the other suggests a serious disconnect.

These attitudes in our movement are deeply troubling to me. We decry economic injustice at home, but stay silent about the unjust occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. We decry police brutality at home, while the U.S. war machine brutalizes innocent people abroad. We need to understand that Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, Libyans and everyone else who has fallen victim to the 1% and its war machine are part of the 99%, too.

We can love our country, but we should not value American lives more than any other. We can set up a Scott Olsen Support Fund, but we should not ignore the rise in cancers and birth defects that U.S. weapons have caused in Iraq.

Veterans have an important role to play in this movement, but we are not heroes because of our participation in the wars, and it is shameful for anyone to use us to appeal to patriotism; that only serves the 1%. What we have to offer this movement is a first-hand account of what the 1%  has done all over the world at the expense of the 99%. We as veterans are in a better position than anyone else to fight against the dangerous beliefs that put veterans on a pedestal. It is our responsibility to speak out against injustice, no matter where it occurs in this world.

The author is a Marine Corps veteran of the second siege of Fallujah and a member of March Forward!. He is the founder of the 'Justice for Fallujah Project' which will host various events during the second annual 'Remember Fallujah Week,' Nov. 16-19. Click here for more information.