Occupy the Tea Party?

A few days ago, slate.com columnist Dave Weigel was on The Rachel Maddow Show talking about the Tea Party. Rachel suggested that the Tea Party has pretty much fallen off the political map, since their stunning electoral victory in 2010, and asked Weigel if he agreed. He said he still considers them a factor in national politics, as compared to the Occupy movement, which he said “fell off” much faster than the Tea Party did. To bolster his claim, he mentioned that Tea Party still has 600 chapters, down from a high of 1000.

He mentioned that he has gotten a lot of heat for that comment, as well he should.

First of all, Occupy did not “fall off.” It was violently shoved off. The arrest counter on Occupy Wall Street’s direct action page stands at 6,893 after six months. I’m not sure how many Tea Partiers have been arrested since they showed up with their guns at presidential rallies in 2009, but I doubt the total has cracked 100. They’ve tended to be arrested singly for things like stockpiling guns and drugs, soliciting prostitutes and child sexual assault (honest, you Google "Tea Party arrest" and see what you get).

The highest single-day total I found was an action in November 2009, when ten people were arrested protesting the health care bill outside Nancy Pelosi’s office on Capitol Hill. So the Tea Party has clearly not had the help that Occupy has gotten in “falling off.”

Despite nearly 7000 arrests -- many of them accomplished via chemical weapons and resulting in injuries and days or even weeks in jail, as well as the media's efforts to give it a hasty burial, Occupy is far from dead or dormant. I don’t know exactly how many chapters there are now, and perhaps no one ever did, but I would be surprised if it doesn’t top the Tea Party 600. In the Bay Area alone, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Half Moon Bay, Occupy Point Reyes, Occupy San Francisco, Occupy Santa Rosa, Occupy Santa Cruz, Occupy UC Berkeley, Occupy Walnut Creek, Occupy Housing, Occupy Bernal Heights, Occupy Marin, Wild Old Women, Decolonize Oakland, and Occupella have been engaged in continuous activism. Knit-In at the Sit-in, which began at Occupy Berkeley, has continued knitting away and sending warm garments and blankets to occupations all over the world (maybe they can switch to netting and help out Occupy Little Rock -- see below).

Here are just a few of the thousands of Occupy activities over the last few months turned up by a cursory search:

1. Feb. 5, 2012—As Occupy Maine marked 126 days of encampment, they were preparing for eviction by taking “artifacts, resources and tents” to a safe place. “The OM Dome was dug out of the snow … and loaded on to a sedan for transport.” [my emphasis]  Despite the lack of a camp, OM’s page lists activities every day next week, with chapters all over the state.

2. March 15-18: Occupy the Midwest.

“Nearly 300 members of 20 different Occupy related movements, including Occupy Chicago, headed to St. Louis last weekend for the first regional meeting of representatives from Occupy movements around the Midwest. Representatives from across the country met to both organize and network on a larger level and engage in protest actions against Monsanto and Wells Fargo. …The conference was marred by violence on Thursday, when a group of demonstrators attempted to create an encampment in a park. Protest organizers were given a scant 30 minutes to evacuate Compton Hill Reservoir Park by the city’s director of public safety. Before they could lead everyone away, organizers say, police moved in, beating some with batons, using pepper spray, and arresting at least 14 people, according to the Huffington Post.”

The conference was partly planning for a huge protest convergence at the NATO Summit, which begins very soon in Chicago.

3. Occupy Little Rock: Possibly the longest-running encampment in the nation, OLR’s website announces this week:

Protest Site Needs for Summer Heat Preparation
On Sunday April 22, 2012, between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., OLR will host at the protest site at 4th and Ferry in downtown Little Rock, a project get-together for all supporters of OLR to accomplish the task of making of the shading for the protest site for the summer months. This shading will consist of cammo-style netting (Occu-net)...

The group plans a bar-b-que for people who show up to help with the shade construction.
4. The Boston Occupier just published 10,000 copies of its seventh monthly edition, carrying stories about Occupy MBTA’s Camp Charlie (Charlie on the MTA) and the April 4 Day of Action for Public Transit called by Occupy together with transit worker unions. 

5. Occupy Boise: The camp on the lawn in front of Old Ada County Courthouse, which went up November 11, was spared the fate of the other Occupy camps because a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order after the legislature hurriedly passed a law against camping in February. The challenge by Occupy Boise is scheduled to be heard by Judge Winmill (great name) on June 7, but meanwhile, the city is negotiating with OB over moving off the grass so they can reseed it. I'd be watching out for a special poisonous Occucide cooked up by Monsanto (see #2).

The April 4 roundup on OccupyTogether lists dozens of other Adventures from the Grave over the last few weeks.

How to Protect Students from Sexual Violence: Pepper Spray Them

Last week, the UC Davis “Pepper Spray Incident Task Force,” dubbed the “Reynoso Task Force” for its chair, Law School Professor Emeritus and former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, released its report. The conclusion was that the pepper spraying of students seated in the Quad on November 18, 2011 “should and could have been prevented.” Well it’s a relief that the task force’s three-and-a-half-month investigation proved what pretty much all of us who watched the red spray come out of that hose over and over again on our television screens surmised.

The task force was specifically not charged with recommending discipline against any individuals, though it does find that Chancellor Linda Katehi and police chief police Annette Spicuzza showed “lack of leadership” (no doubt some right-wing pundits will use this as evidence that women should not be chancellors or police chiefs – I might agree but for different reasons). The task force criticized Lt. John Pike for using the spray at closer range than recommended by the manufacturer, though in fact, the report also notes that campus police are not authorized to carry that high-powered spray device at all.

Most disturbing to me was the section called “Background,” which explained that the context for the administration’s decision to break up the encampment on campus violently nearly as soon as it began was based on reports – false, as it turned out – that there were “non-affiliates” from Occupy Oakland participating.

Such “outside agitator” claims have been leveled at campus movements since – well probably since Harvard, the first college in the thirteen British colonies on American soil, opened its doors in 1636. Writes Jo Freeman, in “What Happened at Berkeley: How the Cold War Culture of Anti-Communism Shaped Protest in the Sixties”:

“The pivotal event in California was the San Francisco general strike of 1934, which badly scared the Regents of the University of California. To appease the Regents and reassure the legislature that the University was in safe hands, President Robert Gordon Sproul issued some new regulations. These regulations limited on-campus speakers to persons approved by the administration, and prohibited "exploitation" of the University’s prestige by unqualified persons.”

In the early sixties, the presence of non-student activists from the Congress On Racial Equality at a literature table touched off U.C. Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. When I was at Oberlin in the late seventies, a forum on divestment from South Africa was nearly cancelled by the administration because of the threat that one actual Black South African, who was not a student, might try to speak.

In fact, the fears expressed by the UC Davis administration hearken back to those halcyon days.

… the Chancellor explained her concerns about the involvement of “non-affiliates” with the UC Davis Occupy movement and encampment. Chancellor Katehi stated, “We were worried at the time about that [nonaffiliates] because the issues from Oakland were in the news and the use of drugs andsex and other things, and you know here we have very young students . . . we were worried especially about having very young girls and other students with older people who come from the outside without any knowledge of their record….”

Vice Chancellor Meyer expressed similar concerns in an interview conducted on Dec. 7. He explained, “our context at the time was seeing what’s happening in the City of Oakland, seeing what’s happening in other municipalities across the country, and not being able to see a scenario where [a UC Davis Occupation] ends well . . . Do we lose control and have non-affiliates become part of an encampment? So my fear is a longterm occupation with a number of tents where we have an undergraduate student and a non-affiliate and there’s an incident. And then I’m reporting to a parent that a nonaffiliated has done this unthinkable act with your daughter, and how could we let that happen?”

It’s good to know that university administrators are so concerned about protecting women on their campuses from rapists. One assumes that we are going to see police wielding pepper spray canisters at the doors to every fraternity party at Davis from now on.

The website of UC Davis’s Men Acting Against Rape provides these statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice-Violence Against Women Office.

• In a survey of college women, 38% reported sexual victimization which met the legal definition of a rape or attempted rape, yet only 1 out of every 25 reported their assault to the police.
• In a study of college students, 35% of men indicated some likelihood that they would commit a violent rape of a woman who had fended off an advance if they were assured of getting away with it.
• 1 in 12 male students surveyed had committed acts that met the legal definition of rape. Furthermore, 84% of the men who had committed such acts said what they had done was definitely not rape.

So how does the University of California deal with “affiliates” who actually victimize their women students, as opposed to theoretical nonaffiliates who might?

According to a 2000 report, “Reports of rapes and sexual assaults at University of California campuses are seldom included in the campus security report.” Speaking specifically about the Davis campus, the Sacramento Bee charged that “Students and parents have not been provided with adequate safety information.”

At UC Irvine last year, the student regent was found guilty of “unwanted touching” – i.e., sexual assault – by a college disciplinary board and placed on academic probation, but not removed from his position representing the student body on the powerful Board of Regents. By contrast, 30 students who participated in civil disobedience actions at the college were criminally prosecuted for misdemeanors, and given suspensions and community service by the college disciplinary committee.

Besides being racist fear-mongering, the claim that the encampment at Davis was full of “nonaffiliates” from Occupy Oakland also turned out to be completely fictitious. According to the Task Force report:

“One UC Davis police officer who spent the night at a Mrak Hall protest on Nov. 15 wrote that “the majority (of protesters) were NOT affiliated with the University [but were] part of the ‘Occupy’ movement.” UC Davis Police Chief Spicuzza informed the Leadership Team that her officers suggested that 80% of the protesters participating in the encampment on the Quad were not students….

Assistant Vice Chancellor Castro informed the Leadership Team that based on her observations of the Occupy encampment on the quad on Nov. 17, “the only non-affiliates I saw were people from the interfaith communities providing food … and they were not spending the night.”

99% Spring vs Occupy: Coopting, Colonizing or Complementing?

Two weeks ago, three different people sent me invitations to the 99% Spring Training.

When I looked at the announcements, my first thought was, “Why would people think I need this?” The Spring Training seems intended to bring in people who have not done direct action before, teach them what it is and how to do it, motivate and organize them into groups. I would only clog it up with my overwrought, jaded energy, if I could find the time to go.

I was also surprised that MoveOn is organizing direct action trainings. I associate them with electoral politics, and if I have been understanding my MSNBC and Comedy Central talk show hosts correctly, there’s an election brewing, right? Why isn’t MoveOn organizing people to go out and register voters?

My third thought was, “Wow, this is coming from three really different places.” One was from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, home of Books Not Bars and Green for All and various other social justice movements in Oakland. One had come from a friend in India, and I think she had gotten it via someone involved in immigrant women’s organizing. The third was from 350.org, and the email was focused on climate justice activism but mentioned that the training would not be solely around that issue.

Whatever else you can say about the 99% Spring Training, it’s broad-based.

Yesterday, another email was going around like wildfire. This one is called “The ‘99% Spring’ Brings Co-optation into Full Bloom: Counter-Insurgency as Insurgency.” Written by an Occupy Oakland militant who is also a Ph.D. candidate at UC Santa Cruz, the piece accuses the 99% Spring campaign of being a ruse to “contain and defang” the Occupy movement by “sucking a large cross-section of Occupy into Obama’s reelection campaign, watering down it’s [sic] radical politics, and using these mass trainings as a groundwork to put forward 100,000 ‘good protesters’ to overshadow the ‘bad protesters’ (who actual take [sic] personal risks and/or have radical politics), to ease the State’s ongoing campaign to pick us off one by one….This is not a riding of the coattails of a hip social movement; this will be a form of counter-insurgency. This will be used to disrupt, discredit and destroy the Occupy movement.”

Okay, as I said, I was (and remain) suspicious too, but those are some strong accusations!

The writer has some legitimate points. It’s very true that the “good protester/bad protester” trope has been worn to death in the press about Occupy. To allege, however, that “Those in power would like to see nothing more than for 100,000 people to be trained to chain themselves to local bank branches for 6-9 months, hooting about their ‘greedy side,’ get disillusioned at how fruitless that is, and go back to playing video games and downloading pirated music after Obama’s election,” is, to say the least, hyperbole.

There’s no evidence that those in power – whether you are talking about the Obama administration or the mayors and police departments of Oakland, San Francisco or New York, are anxious to see hundreds of thousands – or even hundreds – chain themselves to local banks. Remember NYPD pepper spraying people marching around closed Wall Street institutions on a Saturday? At least two people I know had their arms broken by police for occupying Bank of America at a student-led (nonviolent) action (of far less than 100,000) in San Francisco last year.

Author Mike King suggests that “Every single Occupation that doesn’t want to turn into nothing more than an ample pool of chumps registering people to vote for the same Obama administration that has declared an all-out war against us, should bring forward a resolution at their General Assembly to condemn this clear attempt to destroy our movement.”

I have a better idea. How about some old-fashioned noncooperation? Don’t go to the trainings. Don’t participate in their actions. Do nothing to help them, and don’t waste your energy fighting them. Concentrate on the great organizing you’re doing, and make your exciting street actions the irresistable next step for the people who cut their teeth on choreographed blockades.  People who go to a training because they want to blockade banks are not going to accidentally start registering voters for Obama, and the arguments about property damage and confrontations with the cops were going on in the Occupies long before the 99% Spring came on the scene.

What’s the truth about the 99% Spring?

An Occupier from New York who attended the training for trainers, with some skepticism, writes:

“I’m just back from two days of training for trainers, and this is my verdict: the Training for Trainers was fantastic. Hundreds of people in attended the same training as me in New York, and thousands more took part across the country.

“The folks attending the training represented a cross section of our country’s progressive, 99% movement. I met community organizers, peace activists, union members, occupiers, and many more. The group was inter-generational, racially diverse, gender balanced, and included folks from all NYC boroughs, Long Island, CT, NJ, and upstate. My impression is that most are experienced organizers, but from many different traditions and organizational homes.

“There was zero, none, nada discussion of the Obama campaign, electoral politics, the Democratic Party, or MoveOn. To sum up then, the critiques against the 99% Spring are false. Those who lobbed uninformed critiques are now in a position of having to apologize and take back their words or lose credibility. They ‘proved’ that MoveOn provided support for an amazing, collaborative effort resting on teachings used widely inside the Occupy movement…. the 99% Spring is an example of a large powerful organization placing resources in the service of a fairly radical agenda and allowing others to take the lead.”

Now that’s obviously one person’s opinion, and what will happen remains to be seen. But it seems ridiculous and self-destructive for any of the Occupy movements to wage a big campaign against another grassroots movement.

The 99% Spring is not going to draw people away from Occupy. What’s more likely to do that, if anything – and I’m rooting against this – is the factionalism and ideological purity that is already threatening many of the groups. Parts of Occupy Oakland, as I write, are fighting with Decolonize Oakland over getting a permit for a May Day rally. The Decolonize folks, who are primarily queer people of color, have built a big coalition including many immigrant rights organizations and want to make sure that undocumented people can participate without fear of being arrested and held for deportation.

In Bahrain I attended both permitted and unpermitted marches. The permitted marches were organized by a coalition of opposition parties, and stayed on approved routes determined not to be disruptive to business or traffic (though in fact, all the cars arriving for the marches caused some pretty serious traffic jams).

At first, I was unenthusiastic about the permitted marches. We were there to witness human rights violations and we assumed the permitted marches wouldn’t have any. And here at home, I always prefer militant street actions to permitted marches; we used to call the annual spring mobilizations “activist church.” But as an outsider, I had a very different reaction to the big marches in Bahrain. When I saw the thousands and thousands of people streaming in from every direction, I was deeply impressed.

That doesn’t mean every march should be permitted. The smaller groups of people marching in Manama being doused with tear gas, Abdulhadi Al Khawaja starving himself to death in prison, even the young men throwing Molotov cocktails – all are also moving in their own way. But there is an impact to having masses and masses of people involved.

Occupy has brought in a ton of people. Occupy Oakland has had a series of barbeques in different neighborhoods in the last month which have had great participation from diverse communities. 99% Spring is likely to appeal to a very different group of people, who share Occupy’s goals but are uncomfortable with some of its rhetoric, tactics or culture. It’s a liberal movement, yes. But a liberal movement is not a bad thing for a radical movement to have. I’ve spent most of my life doing radical activism in a political climate where liberals are in short supply. I haven’t gotten very far. I’ll be glad for a chance to be a radical pushing on liberals who are pushing on moderates.

Just the Facts, Ma'am … Wait, What's a Fact?

A couple weeks ago, in my piece about Mike Daisey and the Apple Factory, I questioned why both This American Life host Ira Glass and Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz appeared to take the word of Daisey’s translator about facts that contradicted Daisey’s version of events. A friend objected to my “throwing barbs suggesting that the translator is lying.” I didn’t intend to do that. I have no reason to believe the translator is lying; I know nothing about her. My point was that Glass and Schmitz don’t know anything about her either. Of course, Daisey admitted to many of the inaccuracies the translator revealed, and that would lead us to believe that where there’s a contradiction between their memories, hers is likely to be more accurate. But is that true?

Daisey’s credibility is shot because we know he lied. Fair enough. But we also know he told the truth, and that’s the piece that’s easy to forget. (In what could be an accident of good timing, last Friday the Fair Labor Association released a report which substantiates many of the stories in Daisey's show.)

The other night, Rachel Maddow, whom I adore, led off her show with a critique of Rick Santorum’s campaign speeches. She played a clip of Santorum reporting that according to something he read, “At eight of the ten University of California campuses you can’t take a class in American history.” She played the clip a few times, she asserted that it’s absurd, and then to contradict it, she read from the course catalog of one U.C. campus, UC Davis, showing that it offered numerous classes on U.S. history.

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Then she moved on to debunk a previous claim by Santorum – this one alleging that old people in the Netherlands wear “Do Not Euthanize Me” bracelets and leave the country rather than go to Dutch hospitals because they fear involuntary euthanasia. Santorum claimed that 10% of the country’s deaths are from euthanasia, and half of those are involuntary. Rachel then said, “It’s not hard to fact check this assertion. All you have to do is ask a Dutch person.” She then played a clip of herself sitting down with a Dutch journalist, Erik Mouthaan, who assured her that this is “totally not true.”

Actually, asking a Dutch person does not qualify as “fact-checking.” If a Dutch politician said that half of Americans are poor, I’m sure you could find lots of U.S. citizens, sadly even journalists, to confidently assert that that was rubbish. They’d be wrong, however.  I recently told a friend I was pretty sure both she and I have incomes in the top 30% of U.S. households. This friend, who is quite well-informed, emphatically disagreed. She is wrong. A single person who earns $65,000 or more is in the top third, and without knowing her exact salary, I know she is well above that. Of course, being in the top third of households in a country where half the people are poor is no great feat.
I waited for Rachel to give the real statistics on euthanasia in the Netherlands, but they never came. Those statistics are not difficult to come by. The Washington Post blog Fact Checker reports:

In 2001, The Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia, setting forth a complex process. The law, which went into effect a year later, codified a practice that has been unofficially tolerated for many years.

Under the Dutch law, a doctor must diagnose the illness as incurable and the patient must have full control of his or her mental faculties. The patient must voluntarily and repeatedly request the procedure, and another doctor must provide a written opinion agreeing with the diagnosis. After the death, a commission made up of a doctor, a jurist and an ethical expert also are required to verify that the requirements for euthanasia have been met.

… In 2010, the number of euthanasia cases reported to one of five special commissions was 3,136, according to their annual report. This was a 19 percent increase over 2009, but “this amounts to 2.3 percent of all 136,058 deaths in the Netherlands in 2010,” said Carla Bundy, spokeswoman for the Dutch embassy in Washington.

Rachel’s guest was right, but she did not prove it, any more than Santorum proved his "Don’t euthanize me" bracelets claim. Going back to the University of California and American history, Santorum said that eight out of the ten campuses don’t offer such classes. In order to prove him wrong, she would need to show that at least three do, but she stopped with the one.

As it happens, UC Berkeley offers at least four, including:

100.007: The Great Exhaling
1948 was the year that America-after the Great Depression, after the Second World War, after sixteen years of the all but revolutionary experiment in national government of the New Deal and even in the face of a Red Scare that in many ways would dominate the next decade-let out its breath. Finally, that great exhaling said, we can go back to real life- but what was ";real life";? Centering on 1948, but moving a few years back and a few years forward, this class will explore the sometimes instantly celebrated, sometimes all but subterranean experiments in American culture that tried to raise and answer that question. The artists who emerged to tell the national story were male and female, black and white, from the west, the east, the south, and everywhere in between. They included Tennessee Williams of Mississippi and Marlon Brando of Nebraska with A Streetcar Named Desire; Jackson Pollock of Wyoming with abstract paintings so big they seemed like visionary maps of the country itself, a country where anything could happen; Miles Davis of St. Louis, with the spare, quiet walk down noir streets of the music that would come to be known as "The Birth of the Cool"; the cross-country explorations of Jack Kerouac of Massachusetts, Neal Cassady of Colorado, and Allen Ginsberg of Newark, New Jersey, following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, certain that the real American remained to be discovered; the grind-house, B-movie spread of noir, with the faces of Barbara Stanwyck of Brooklyn and Gloria Grahame of Los Angeles spreading the suspicion that in America nothing was as it seemed and rules and morals were for fools...

UCLA’s History Department website has a “United States” link you can click on and it tells you that:

“With more than twenty-five distinguished faculty members in the field of U.S. history, the UCLA Department of History offers one of the country’s broadest, most diverse, and successful graduate programs in the subject. Faculty expertise ranges from the pre-colonial history of the Americas to the present.”

How many facts does it take to screw up a monologue?

Marches, Men and Maniacal Managers

Those who remember Herb Caen will recognize this as “three-dot journalism”.

I wanted to write something about the Global March to Jerusalem. 

This extraordinary series of (mostly) nonviolent direct actions, which took place on Friday, was an ambitious multinational organizing drive that began at least eight months ago, an effort to give voice to the millions of Palestinian refugees –inside Israel and the Occupied Territories, in refugee camps in the Arab world and in exile around the world – who are in danger of being forgotten and finally robbed of their inalienable right to return home. The date, March 30, is known in Palestine as Land Day. It commemorates the 1976 killing of six Palestinian Israelis by Israeli police, and is dedicated to the national unity of all Palestinians everywhere.

I’ve known about the march from the beginning, and I also knew that it was fraught with controversy and conflict. Having had enough of that kind of bickering in my activist life. I decided to wish everyone the best and continue with the work I’m already doing – primarily on boycott, divestment & sanctions (BDS).

By some accounts the Land Day marches were a huge success, by others a dismal failure. One young man was killed in Gaza, an eight-year-old shot in the eye in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, and the New York Times reports that “Security troops in riot gear were out in large numbers, using rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons filled with putrid green liquid and high-pitched noise machines.”

The best thing I found articulating the goals and aspirations of the march was by author Ghada Karmi, in AlterNet:

Global March to Jerusalem: An Act of Homage to a City in Danger

On March 30th a ground-breaking event will take place. I had not expected it would ever happen when I first heard about it. While teaching at the Summer University of Palestine last July in Beirut, I met a group of Indian Muslims taking the course. They told me they were organising a people’s march to Jerusalem to bring to the world’s attention to Israel’s assault on the city’s history and culture, and its impending loss as a centre for Islam and Christianity. They explained how they and their friends would set out from India, drawing in others to join them as they passed through the various countries on their way overland to Israel’s borders.

They seemed fired up and determined, and I could not but admire their zeal and dedication to try and rescue this orphan city which has been abandoned by all who should have defended her. But I thought their ambitions would be thwarted by the harsh reality of trying to implement their dreams. It would never succeed, I thought, but I was quite wrong. The movement they and their fellow activists spearheaded, called the Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ), is now in its final stages. A distinguished group of 400 advisers, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nobel Laureate, Mairead Maguire, are promoting the GMJ. The marchers will head for Jerusalem or the nearest point possible on March 30th.  Read the rest

...

As I was reading the Karmi piece, my eye drifted inexorably to an ad on the right-hand side of my screen. Below the photo shown here, the headline read:

The 4 Dangers Destroying Men Today

The ad did it’s job. I had to click on that link. Here’s what I learned:

I have some bad news for you today...


“I'm not sure if there's a conspiracy behind it but these dangerous trends have been robbing you of the vitality, zest and success that you truly deserve...”

Okay, this ad wasn’t directed at me. Still, I found it pretty interesting. At least one of the dangers was not feminism. The point was that various environmental forces are lowering men’s testosterone, and that in turn lowers their chances of conquering the girl in the picture. The author promised men “today I'm going to show you why and deliver and ton of free information on how to take charge of your life and get to the top…while feeling healthier, stronger and much more confident…” It’s kind of the Tom Cruise character in Magnolia brought to the micro screen.

Part of the advice:  "Let's get started by going back in time to our Neanderthal days..."

What I'd like to know is, by what algorithms did that end up as a companion to my perusal of AlterNet?

…

Despite years of gentrification, AIDS and assimilation, the Castro remains the center of Gay San Francisco. A couple months ago, a member of QUIT! (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism) reported that Cliff’s Variety, one of the fixtures of Castro Street, has a big display of SodaStream, the home seltzer maker manufactured in the illegal Israeli settlement of Mishor Edomim (the industrial zone attached to Maale Adumim, in East Jerusalem). We approached the housewares buyer and explained about the international boycott of SodaStream and asked Cliff’s to drop the product. The buyer, after reading the material we sent and doing some research of his own, informed our representative that Israel “seemed to be operating within legitimate occupation” and anyway, the product is very popular and they are not political.

So yesterday, we set up a table outside Cliff’s, armed with information from the website “Who Profits” run by the Coalition of Women for Peace. We passed out fliers and asked those who expressed interest to give the cashier a coupon letting them know that they would like them to drop SodaStream. Many people were determinedly apathetic, as we’ve come to expect, but quite a number stopped to chat. All was very amiable for about fifteen minutes, and then the manager came out. She told the person handing out leaflets that she couldn’t stand by the door, because that’s their property, but had to move farther away. This we expected and Deni obligingly moved out to where we had set our table, even with the parking meters and bike racks.

Then the manager said that we could not have a table unless we had a “street use” permit. This I was 98% sure was not true, and I said so. She insisted that it was. Lisa explained that the permitting process only applies to people who are selling on the street, not free speech activities. When she didn’t go away, we suggested she call the police. She was clearly surprised by that –no doubt the threat of calling the police was going to be her trump card. She said, “Well, if that’s how you want me to handle it, I will.” Five minutes later, an unassuming policewoman showed up. She didn’t speak to us right away, but went into the store. When she emerged, she explained that the owners wanted us off of their property, which extends to the curb, that they are responsible for maintaining the safety of their sidewalk, and we were interfering with their business. I said we were not hurting their business, but even if we were, I was pretty sure the law allows us to do that. She said she would call her sergeant and find out.

A few minutes later another policewoman arrived in a car, and a little later, the male sergeant got there. The sergeant went into the store and the other woman stayed outside keeping an eye on us. They were there for quite a while, while we continued to talk to customers and anyone else who were willing to talk to us. A surprising number of the people who came by said they were visiting from Canada.

About five minutes before we were planning to pack up, the cops came out. The first woman who talked to us said we should listen carefully, because she was going to tell us that she was wrong, and that’s not something you hear cops admit very often. She said in fact, we had the right to have our table there, we just couldn’t block the door or the sidewalk. We said that was fine, we hadn’t and we wouldn’t. The other woman, who was for some reason much more hostile, yelled at Deni that she had seen her having conversations with people on the sidewalk, forcing people to go around them. I pointed out that people stop and talk on sidewalks all the time. She said that was true, but if we did anything Cliff’s didn’t like, they were going to call the police back. The police finally left. We stayed for another fifteen minutes, and Deni used her “teacher voice” to call out to Cliff’s shoppers, “We’re asking Cliff’s not to carry SodaStream.” Hard to believe that’s less disruptive to their business than letting us stand quietly in front of the door leafleting, but there you have it.

Of course, all that hooplah made us feel much more effective than we would have if we were just standing there for an hour with most people ignoring us. When we were done leafleting we went for a beautiful walk in an area called Corona Heights. A lot of work has been done to reclaim the land and make walking trails – surely a much better use of public money than having three cops protecting Cliff’s from three middle-aged women leafleting for half an hour.

The Crimes of Mike Daisey



Two years ago, a friend and I were looking for billboards to modify. We were working on art related to Hewlett Packard and the clothing manufacturer H&M, both of which had big ad campaigns on, but the city was awash in iPads. Every surface we really wanted to hit had an apple in the corner. Then I saw a piece in the paper about workers at one of the iPad manufacturing plants in China committing suicide because the working conditions were so terrible. I sent it to my friend with a note – “something to do with all those iPad billboards.” She mocked up some great art, but before we had it ready to go the ads were down, the iPad was old news, the company had agreed to pay the workers a few cents more per hour and the story was forgotten.

Flash forward a year. Just about one year ago, a friend invited me to a play her aunt had given her tickets for. It was a monologue called “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” A one-man show by someone named Mike Daisey. When we settled into our seats and I looked at the program, I looked at my friend doubtfully. “A two-hour monologue with no intermission?” When I saw Mike Daisey, I had even more doubts. He didn’t present like a guy who could carry that kind of thing.

Two hours later, I walked out shell-shocked. The first thing I did was call my friend. “We have to do that iPad campaign.” The iPad2 was on the way, and there was a whole BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station covered in iPads. I took a picture of a couple perfect spots and sent them to my friend. Problem was, I was leaving town in a few days for a month-long writing retreat at Hedgebrook. I hoped my friend would be able to do it with someone else, but she was busy too. Didn’t happen.

I carried that regret with me to Whidby Island, but I also carried something I had gotten from the show: a newfound awe for the written word. I went into my precious writing month mesmerized by what I had seen.

It was not the content that was so powerful to me. Many of the stories I had heard – the one about the suicides, the one about the people poisoned by the toxic cleaning solution. Some, like the ones about the overcrowded dorm rooms and the workers frisked on their way out of the plants, I had seen for myself, years ago at an export-processing zone in the Philippines. The one about the 13-year-old workers I did not find particularly memorable. Child labor and China have been virtually synonymous for decades.

What captivated me was the way Daisey wove the stories into a powerful drama. He created a seamless emotional roller coaster without ever making you feel manipulated. The story begins all light and fluffy, his Hawaiian shirt, his bumbling attempts at cultural sensitivity, his efforts to make a passable business card in a foreign city where he doesn’t speak the language, and then the fact that it all works! Sasha and I exchanged knowing looks, because we’ve both been there. I thought about giving Israeli soldiers at military checkpoints a laminated business card proclaiming me a “legitimate human rights worker” in Hebrew, and them nodding and letting me through. And then he is talking about people jumping off roofs and standing up doing repetitive motions for twenty-four hours in a row without the opportunity to rest their arms, all so we can have cheap iPhones. Sasha felt for hers in her pocket. She’d been telling me about how she was watching the Arab Spring on the alJazeera app all day long.

I thought, how is this guy ever going to pull us back from this abyss without it seeming incredibly hokey? I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly I found myself laughing again.

I write mysteries about Palestine. I do it because it’s fun. I also do it because I want people to care about Palestine. Now my first one, Murder Under the Bridge, is pretty Manichean. There are moral complexities in it, but basically there are some really really bad Israeli guys and a lot of the Palestinians are damned near saintly and there’s a teenage girl for angst and good measure. That’s okay, it’s a first mystery. But Murder Under the Fig Tree, which I was going off to Hedgebrook to write, is much more ambitious. It has a lot more shades of gray, but I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I think there’s any gray about the Israeli occupation. I never want to leave any doubt that the biggest problem facing every Palestinian in the world today is the theft of their land and denial of their national rights. Seeing Mike Daisey’s show made me believe, more than I ever have before, that if I write a good mystery, people will understand what I want them to understand and care about it.

Two weeks ago, Mike Daisey was all over the Twittersphere, and it wasn’t good news. “Mike Daisey Apologizes For Fabricated ‘This American Life’ Foxconn Story”, screamed the Huffington Post. “We're horrified to have let something like this onto public radio,” said Ira Glass, Executive Producer on the website of “This American Life.”

“This American Life,” which had broadcast parts of “The Agony & the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” ran a full hour called “Retracting Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” In what many have called one of the most painful things ever broadcast on radio, Ira Glass interviewed Mike Daisey about the lies he told and why he did it. There’s a long bit of silence in which you can hear Daisey wrestling with his conscience before he answers the question “So you lied about that” with a Santorum-esque “I wouldn’t express it that way.”

The crux of the problem is this: The show is based on a 5-day trip to China, during which he worked with a translator. When This American Life’s producers asked if they could talk to the translator to corroborate what he told them, he lied and said he couldn’t reach her and said her name, which is “Cathy” in the show, is really Anna. TAL, having checked the basic facts about how Apple products are manufactured and found them solid, let it go. Then Rob Schmitz, a reporter for NPR’s “Marketplace,” who lives in China, heard the piece and was surprised by a few things and went and found the translator, whose name really is Cathy (it’s not, but that’s the name she uses with Westerners). She contradicted a number of things in the story Daisey tells onstage, which he also told on TAL.

 The main things are:

• He said he visited ten factories, then when Ira pressed him on it on air, he said it was really five, but the translator says it was three.
• He said he met twenty workers who belong to an illegal union, but it was only three to five.



gizmondo.com put this image on its story

• He said he met some workers who were twelve to fourteen, but the translator says he did not meet any underage workers. No one disputes that there are underage workers at that plant and others, but they dispute that Daisey met any. He insists that he did.
• He said he met some workers who had been exposed to the solvent n-hexane and had lasting injuries from it. In fact, he did not meet those workers; he heard about them from activists he met in Hong Kong.
• He said he saw security guards with guns but security guards in China are not allowed to carry guns and the translator says they don’t.
• He said there were cameras in workers’ dorm rooms, but the cameras are only in the halls.
• He tells a story about a worker who had lost his hand in an accident at the factory where iPads are made. When the worker saw Mike’s iPad, he got wide-eyed and wanted to touch it, because he’d never actually seen one assembled. The translator says the incident happened but that man did not say he’d ever worked at that plant.

On his blog last week, he posted a talk he gave at Georgetown. In that talk, with the same cadence and intensity I found so riveting in the show, he explains how it all happened. How one little lie became a bigger one, how he ended up going on TAL, how he got interested in the labor issues related to Apple, which he says he never had been. He says he never was an activist, but when he heard the stories and saw what there was to see at FoxConn and the other factories, he felt he needed to make people care. And he says something that made perfect sense to me: He just happened to get to China at the time that the suicide story had broken. At the time that he was there, everyone was buzzing about it, and while he was there, a memo from the government went out about how to contain it, and he saw the story die. And that’s what fueled his passion for telling the story, because he’d been there and seen it with his own eyes and now everyone was moving on.

I’m not trying to say that Daisey didn’t screw up. Obviously, he did. But what did he really do wrong? Well, he lied to Ira Glass, which is a big mistake, because that’s someone you sure don’t want to piss off. He probably made sure that he’ll never be taken seriously as a “reporter” again, but of course he is not a reporter.

Without trying to cast aspersions on people I don’t know, let me just raise a couple questions:

• Why do both Ira Glass and Rob Schmitz assume everything the translator said is true? According to the TAL piece, neither she nor Daisey took notes. But for Daisey, this was a world-changing mission on which he was going to base his next several years of work. For the translator, he was one five-day client out of dozens – this is what she does. She has apparently taken lots of foreigners to these factories. So without notes, why do we assume she’s going to remember every interview she did with this one guy better than he does?
• According to Schmitz, a lot of the things in the show are things that are confirmed by Apple’s own audits of the manufacturing plants, and the disputed facts are things that it denies. The Chinese government, he says, wants corporations to have better labor practices, but maybe it doesn’t care as much about that as keeping its economy growing. Given that, is it possible that people like this translator know that confirming things that Apple says are not happening would be bad for her business, or could even get her in trouble with the government?
• What support does “Marketplace” get from Apple?
• Isn’t it ironic that Mike Daisey’s exaggerations have had a longer news cycle than the original suicide story did?

In the first draft of Murder Under the Bridge, probably about 40% of the story was lifted from my Palestine journals. As a novel, it was pretty terrible. The more I went through it, the more real stuff got cut and the more my ever elusive imagination began to take over and supply better stories. It doesn’t matter, because it’s a mystery, not a memoir. But even more than that, it doesn’t matter because at its core, it’s still true. Even though I never heard of a trafficked nanny-cum-prostitute being murdered in an Israeli settlement, I have little doubt that something like that has happened.

But something else is interesting, and that’s that when readers say, “That part just struck me as completely improbable,” they’re almost always talking about one of the things that really did happen.

Cracking the Twitter Code

The other day I was trying to figure out which of the appalling things that happened over the last few weeks I had anything to say about.  Candidates included the massacre in Afghanistan, of course, and the U.S. cutting off money to UNESCO because they had the nerve to recognize Palestine.  Then there are the hunger strikers, Hana Shalabi in Palestine and Abdulhadi al Khawaja in Bahrain both about to hit the one-month mark, and definitely getting close to the danger point, and Christian Gomez, who died in Corcoran prison here in California just a few days after renewing a hunger strike over prison conditions.

Also-rans are Rush Limbaugh and the Slut Wars, state-legislated transvaginal ultrasound, and the fact that the Nazis began their ascent to power by targeting women’s liberation (in 1930, Hitler campaigned on a promise to remove 800,000 women from the depressed workforce, so that men could have their jobs).

A part of me wanted to skip all that depressing stuff and write about the highly amusing “Game Change,” the HBO movie starring an eerily great Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin.

Since nothing was singing my song, I decided to look at Twittter to see what other people were talking about that I could riff off of.  My twitter feed was unusually quiet.  At least three quarters of the tweets were from Serena Williams, because as it turns out it was a #SerenaFriday, where people can tweet questions and she answers them.  No one had tweeted, “What social issues are most important to you?” so the most interesting revelation about my favorite athlete is that she hates breakfast.  In between the SerenaFriday minutiae, Billie Jean King congratulated Michelle Kwan on being inducted into the Figure Skating Hall of Fame.  Democracy Now! thanked me for listening.  Apparently my usually enlightening and prolix friends were as stymied by the state of the world as I.

So I thought I would see what other people, that I don’t follow, were talking about.  Here’s what was trending in the U.S.:

• #PenguinCam Promoted
• #WhyDoWeAlways
• #BlackPersonSecret
• Boy Lovatics
• Victoria Azarenka
• Textaholic
• #DOITFORTHESHEEP
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall
• Saint Louis
• Rick Majerus

Other than Victoria Azarenka (the new tennis #1) and Saint Louis, I don’t know what any of the other topics mean.  Wasn’t “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” like three years ago?  Why is it trending now?

Well, I thought, everyone knows the U.S. public is primarily nabobs.  Let’s see what’s trending somewhere where people care about weighty things.  I looked at the options and chose India, and got a popup asking which city I wanted.  Since my friend Preeti lives in Chennai, when she doesn’t live in Oakland, I chose Chennai.  These were the top trends in Preeti’s enviros:

• #PenguinCam Promoted
• #indvspak
• #GirlsFavoriteLine
• #ragstorichesstories
• Virat Kohli
• Swiss Open
• Saina Nehwal
• Rohit Sharma
• Wahab Riaz
• Karnataka BJP

Obviously, I’m going to have to study up on PenguinCam.

Before I went to Bahrain, I didn’t really get Twitter.  I occasionally ran across a good link that way, but it was probably something I would have found eventually somewhere else.  In Bahrain, where many people have smart phones but not computers, I saw how it could be used for organizing, disseminating information quickly and even getting around the government censors.  Photos and video from demonstrations could go around like lightning, where if they were just posted on a website, that site could easily be blocked.  It’s a way to spread the word rapidly about a change in plans or an arrest – when some Witness Bahrain folks were arrested a few days after I returned home, I heard about it from their lawyer’s tweets.  That’s also how I learned about Whitney Houston’s death, and apparently I’m not the only one.  Willie Brown, who was staying at the same hotel, saw the ambulances but found out what had happened from British tweeps.

But the real power of Twitter is in skillful use of hash tags to create trends.  This is an art that has developed over the last few years.  Apparently the TV show “The Voice” was the first U.S. organization to use it well.  The idea is that tweeps – people who tweet – on a particular subject agree on particular ways of tagging their posts so that they will clump and create a trend.  So the Bahraini protesters agreed to use #Feb14 and #LuluReturn (Lulu is the Arabic name for Pearl Roundabout) as well as #Bahrain.  When we arrived, they added #WitnessBahrain to their tags, which resulted in us getting 2700 followers in a single day.  You have to be careful not to create too many tags, though, because they count toward your 140 characters.  One of the things we learned when tweeting from WitnessBahrain is that tweets marked @WitnessBahrain were easier to find in our feed than #WitnessBahrain.  @ is a direct reference or response to someone, so someone who wants to argue with me can tweet “@katrap40 is an idiot” and that will go to my followers (of which I do not have many) as well as to me.  Within our group we had some discussion about whether responding to the people who attacked us on Twitter was a good idea.  Our instinct is to rise above, and obviously we are not going to change their minds, but Twitter’s all about creating buzz and we all know that controversy helps with that.

The other day I saw posts claiming that the Bahrainis had trended both #FreeAlkhawaja and a hunger striker in Saudi Arabia.  I can’t seem to get to the Bahrain trends from here, but I’ve never seen anything that profound trending here.  In October, there was a big article about the fact that #OWS and #OO had never trended, despite many people tweeting about Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland.  Activists were accusing Twitter of manipulating the algorithms to keep them off the top trends, and Twitter responded that their algorithms are picking up trends in the moment and not over time.

“Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously. The Trends list is designed to help people discover the 'most breaking' breaking news from across the world, in real-time. The Trends list captures the hottest emerging topics, not just what’s most popular. Put another way, Twitter favors novelty over popularity” 

Needless to say, the ability to rapidly disseminate unsubstantiated rumors has resulted in some Twitter-bloopers.  A few false reports spread on Twitter:

Warren Buffett died

Wesley Snipes died

Lauren Spierer (missing child in Bloomington, Indiana) found

Michele Bachman going on Dancing with the Stars

Kim Jong Un assassinated

But as the late unmourned Andrew Breitbart demonstrated more than once, Twitter definitely has no monopoly on sending false information around the world at the speed of light.  Rachel Maddow’s show last night had a montage of Mitt Romney repeating over and over that President Obama has “made the recession worse” and “doubled the deficit,” both claims that are “counter-factual.”

On the other hand, getting anyone to pay attention to your tweets is harder than it sounds.  According to a 2011 blog post, “05% of entire the Twitter population (~20,000 users) attract almost 50% of attention on Twitter; 71% of Twitter tweets receive not reaction whatsoever.”

In general, as someone who finds even the blog format constricting, I’m predisposed against anything that leads to the expectation that you can get information in 140 characters.  I suspect it’s intensified the tendency to try to get the full story from the headline.  But is that the case?

According to a recent study of social media usage, the average Twitter visit lasts 14 minutes.  That would suggest that people are clicking on at least some of the links posted and at least skimming the articles.  It does seem clear that the reliance on electronic media leads to more skimming and less word-for-word reading.  But as for the perception that people are generally reading less, that seems to be debatable.

In November 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts published a report called “To Read or Not to Read,” which contained the alarming news that “Americans are reading a lot less.”  One year later, the same agency released another report called “Reading on the Rise.”  This one found that “the percentage of adult Americans who read literature (defined as fiction, poetry, and plays) grew from 46.7 percent to 50.2 percent” from 2002 to 2008.  The report did not, however, endorse the contention of Carolyn Kellogg of the New York Times blog Jacket Copy that “the next generation of young adults found their way to literature through all the reading they do with new media.”

Just more evidence that Twitter has no monopoly on sketchy and incomplete information.