Five years after the 2008 world financial crisis and two years after the Occupy movement it triggered, U.S. critics of the financial sector are coalescing around the idea of a Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions.

Bankers look down onto Robin Hood tax protestors gathered in New York City on Sept 17, 2013. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

“The questions that Occupy raised are the right ones and it’s up to everyone else to come up with some answers,” said Robert Pollin, an economist at UMASS Amherst who works on financial transaction taxes (FTTs).

The idea, first floated by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin in the early 1970s as a way to discourage overzealous currency trading, would, in its current iterations, levy a small duty on stocks, bonds and derivatives.

Though the debate over FTTs has long focused on curbing risky and unnecessary trading and “righting the market”, the Robin Hood movement attempts to shift it to one over human rights, fulfilling basic needs and not least a bit of payback for taxpayer bailouts of the financial sector.

For activists in the United States, the tax is part of what they hope will be a societal reorientation away from the privileging of an industry that has doubled its share of U.S. GDP since 1980 and drains other fields of the best and brightest.

FTTs exist in over 30 countries, many of them, like South Korea and Brazil, with some of fastest growth rates in the world.

“People don’t realise how tiny a tax we are talking about,” said Nicole Woo, director of domestic policy at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

“There’s plenty of evidence out there that if revenues were to go to infrastructure spending, education and other public goods, it could increase GDP in the end and help increase employment,” Woo told IPS.

The Robin Hood Tax coalition, an umbrella group of sympathetic organisations, has put its weight behind a bill, “The Inclusive Prosperity Act,” introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Keith Ellison. The bill’s text is a strong critique of the financial sector and calls for the tax to pay for housing, healthcare and protecting the public sector and the environment.

The legislation would tax stock trades at 0.5 percent, bonds at .1 percent and derivatives at .005 percent.

The mix aims to “tax different markets equally”, Pollin told IPS, making it difficult for traders to flee one asset class for another. A tax in the U.S. would enjoy auto-enforcement on the part of market players because of the judicial security it provides.

“If you want to use the American legal system, you will have to trade here,” says Pollin.

Larry Summers’ decision to remove himself from consideration as chairman of the Federal Reserve in the face of a promised uproar among liberal members of Congress has Robin Hood supporters optimistic.

Summers is seen by many on the left as a leading architect of the financial crisis after he pushed for financial deregulation and opposed transparency in the derivatives market while serving as treasury secretary during the Bill Clinton administration.

A European proposal, agreed to by 11 countries, however, suffered a legal setback this month when E.U. lawyers delivered a non-binding opinion that found a continent-wide FTT used jurisdictional powers within states illegally. The decision is one of many roadblocks that supporters can expect to encounter.

For nurses at a Sept. 17 Robin Hood event in New York City, the events in Europe were noise.

“We looked around the globe and found nurses have the same issues everywhere. Austerity measures are killing us,” said Jean Ross, co-president of National Nurses United (NNU), a union of over 180,000 registered nurses and co-founder of the Robin Hood Tax coalition.

The union sees a Robin Hood Tax paying for many of the medical services which have been cut since the economic crisis.

An enemy weakened

For years, High Frequency Trading (HFT) was the oft-cited boogeyman when it came to pushing for a Robin Hood Tax. Critics claim the billions of daily trades distorted markets and added to volatility.

Fears were realised on May 6, 2010 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than nine percent only to regain those losses in a matter of minutes. Resounding blame was laid on trading algorithms that exacerbated an initial drop in the futures market. By 2012, HFT were estimated to be executing 84 percent of all trades on U.S. exchanges.

But as more HFT players enter the fray, returns in the zero sum game of shaving fractions of pennies off trades have decreased.

Large firms like KCG – itself formed when GETCO merged with near bankrupt Knight Capital after a haywire algorithm cost the latter over 400 million dollars in one day – have seen their profits cut by over three quarters from the height of the HFT boom, a period that coincided with the first volatile spurts of the crisis in 2008. Many have gone out of business.

KCG declined to comment for this story, as did industry leader Citadel Group.

That high-frequency trading may eat itself up underscores its social uselessness, says Woo. HFT proponents cite the volume and liquidity it creates – if bid and ask prices are nearly even, retail investors and pensions should pay lower prices. This is misleading, Woo told IPS.

“The liquidity provided by these traders is a sort of phantom liquidity because as soon as things start going south the computer algorithms pull all their money out, the liquidity just dries up completely,” she said.

HFT profits, even at their height, were small compared to those of the entire financial sector. Pollin’s models, using parametres similar to those set forth in Ellison’s bill, predict a drop in trade volume of at least 50 percent, putting U.S. market volume and capitalisation proportionally on par with Great Britain, where a tax of .5 percent already exists on stocks.

“Financial trading is an undertaxed sector of our economy,” says Woo.

Many even on Wall Street, especially those whose profits are reliant on long-term trends, agree.

A lack of tax on commodity trading can in fact be a burden on the average consumer. Legislation will help consumers by discouraging speculation in commodity markets, says Kenneth Zinn, political director at NNU. “There’s a surcharge on gasoline that’s simply Wall Street speculation.”

After watching a bruising battle over healthcare that ended in the Affordable Care Act, the nurses union is gearing for a fight with the financial industry, another special interest group which will fight tooth and nail to protect its privileged place in the economic pecking order.

Economy professor Arcadi Oliveres has become a popular face of the growing discontent in Spain because he calls a spade a spade.

“I have called for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to be impeached for destroying the welfare state,” he said.

But Oliveres, from Catalonia in northeast Spain, is not alone in his mission. He and Teresa Forcades, a Benedictine nun and medical doctor, have created an unusual platform representing people who are fed up with the country’s leaders who, they say, failed to do anything to prevent the severe economic crisis tearing Spain apart.

Protests, like this demonstration against foreclosures in the southern city of Málaga, are being held almost every day in some part of Spain. Credit: Inés Benítez

The platform is also supported by leftwing parties and sectors related to health, housing and education – areas that have been drastically affected by the conservative Rajoy administration’s budget cuts.

“There are good, well-intentioned, well-educated people who don’t agree with the economic decisions and the current political process,” Oliveres told IPS. “Our mission is to bring together people from these three sectors and come up with a joint candidate for the parliamentary elections in Catalonia in 2016.”

Oliveres blames the country’s political leadership, both the governing centre-right People’s Party (PP) and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), for the crisis that has driven up unemployment levels in Spain to among the highest in Europe.

Anna Torres, a sociologist from Barcelona, concurs with Oliveres. “The leaders are not connected to the people, and the parties aren’t either. That is why people are looking for answers in social platforms,” she told IPS.

“Europe has gone through many phases and has made leaps and bounds in terms of social welfare,” she said. “It would be a pity to have to go back to working in buildings that collapse, like what happened in April in Bangladesh (where 1,127 garment factory workers were killed), or to working as slaves, like in China.”

Torres said the economic model is changing in Spain. “There is a crisis in the construction industry and traditional productive activities are disappearing, and we haven’t specialised yet in highly technological industries,” she said.

“We were in the process of doing that when the crisis hit, and now there are many trained workers who can’t find jobs,” she added.

Oliveres said his group was working for “a cooperative Catalonia infused with solidarity, without an army, that helps the Third World and is independent.

“I have recently been in Granada (in the south), Alicante (in the southeast) and the Basque Country (in the north), and after hearing me explain our ideas, people want to start doing something similar,” Oliveres told IPS in an interview in the offices of Justicia i Pau, the Christian-based NGO that he heads.

“We have nearly 40,000 people who have signed up to (the web page of) our platform Procés Constituent a Catalunya since it was launched in April, and so many speaking invitations that we could visit all of Catalonia 50 times,” he said.

The Procés Constituent is one of the numerous citizen groups and associations that have emerged in Spain since May 15, 2011, when the “indignados” or 15M movement – Spain’s “occupy” movement – was born out of a protest in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square.

The encampment set up at that time in the square by protesters gave birth to the movement that is opposed to the government’s austerity measures and social cuts and is demanding jobs, affordable housing, solutions to the wave of foreclosures and evictions, economic equality, social justice, and democratic control over banks and corporations.

The growing citizen movement is also protesting the unprecedented corruption that has come to light in this country, in which high-level officials and even members of Spain’s royal family are implicated.

Analysts estimate that just 15 of the 1,600 cases of embezzlement, bribes and tax evasion in the courts today involved at least seven billion dollars in public funds. More than 1,000 of the people prosecuted in connection with the cases are political leaders.

Nearly every day a protest is held somewhere in Spain, and some observers are warning about a social uprising.

Social movements like the Procés Constituent now bring together more people than the country’s traditional trade unions. Most of these new groups are organised horizontally and decisions are reached in assemblies – the legacy left by the 15M.

The protests and demonstrations have taken many forms. An association of writers from Catalonia, Poesia en Acció, held a poetry marathon to benefit the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH), one of the largest citizen associations in the country, which is helping thousands of people who are losing their homes to foreclosures.

According to a report released by PAH in January, there were 363,000 evictions in Spain between 2008 and 2012.

“Poesia en Acció is carrying out actions in solidarity with social groups that are suffering because of the crisis,” poet and literary critic Guillem Vallejo, the president of the organisation, told IPS.

“In the past two years, we have focused on helping Spanish groups due to the situation in our country. We used to help countries in Africa and other parts of the Third World,” said Vallejo, who along with 60 other poets and 80 students from the group’s workshops published the book “Poesía Solidaria” (Solidarity Poetry), whose proceeds will go to PAH.

“We’ll give the money raised in the marathon (12 straight hours of poetry reading and a solidarity breakfast and lunch on Saturday Jun. 15) to PAH for projects that provide activities and psychological support for children whose homes are in the process of foreclosure, while the parents try to solve their legal problems,” Vallejo said.

Several associations of motorcycle riders organised a food drive for the needy on Sunday Jun. 23, in a campaign in the Canary Islands called “Moteros contra el Hambre” (Bikers against Hunger).

The national statistics institute reports that unemployment exceeds 27 percent – or six million people out of work in this country of 47 million. There are more than 70,000 families in Spain with no members working.

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

The United States and Colombia are the leaders in mental anxiety in the Americas.

Both have good reasons: Colombia has witnessed the longest lasting violence in any contemporary country: from 1949, with some interruptions, then on again from 1964 with the notorious guerilla group, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

The U.S., with its conviction that evil is lurking around every corner, domestic and global, believes it better have the arms to handle those bad guys.

Both countries have among the highest rates of structural violence, and the most unequal distributions of economic wealth, in the world.

There is a difference, though: one country submits its problem to third party mediation, of all places in Havana, facilitated by Cuba and Norway; the other submits its problem to nobody, nor does anyone seem to offer their services.

Colombia admits openly to the world that it does not have sufficient capacity for self-regulation; from the U.S. no such admission has been forthcoming.

Recently there was news from Havana: a breakthrough in the peace negotiations about a rather basic economic issue: land, and land reform – a redistribution of land, and of better land, to small impoverished peasants.

There are four other problems on the agenda: political participation (the problem being real democracy), ceasefire, drugs, and the rights of the victims and the bereaved in a country where four million have been displaced and thousands kidnapped and killed.

Reasons to celebrate? Wait. The class differences in a country ruled by the triumvirate of landowners, the military and clerics (like three brothers in many families – the Iberian heritage) force upon us a sad prediction: there will be one more military coup in the chain of coups, supported by the Church.

Let us not pray. Let us hope for disarmament of the FARC and the other guerrillas (particularly the reactionary paramilitary) and control of the army, lest we end up with Nepal: disarmament to the left, not centre-right.

To produce food, not only land, but also water, seeds, manure and some technology are needed. Water and seeds may become privatised – by Monsanto – so where does the credit to buy these inputs come from? And at what price?

What’s needed is collective, cooperative farming on communal land with direct democracy for decisions, not corruptible multi-party national elections. And can farming compete with drug commissions when drugs change hands until finally traveling via submarines to the U.S.? Or on the long road to the Mexican border?

Small farms cannot compete; cooperatives would do better. Well, let’s hope.

Expand the zones of peace, have them intersect, and aim at all of huge Colombia.

The U.S.: On May 23, President Barack Obama concluded that he should pull back the drones, and close the Guantanamo prison. Does he have the guts to do so, by executive orders, using vetoes?

There will be no military coup in the U.S. There are permanent, structural links between the Pentagon, Congress, the military industry and the media (owned by the former, and for whom news of peace is bad news) designed to keep the war industry going.

That industry has one major purpose: to stamp out any initiative to eliminate the special status of the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency” – like by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, by Iran, now by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) – so that the U.S. can pay by printing money, and even get the naive to buy U.S. bonds, meaning lending the U.S. petro-dollars or China dollars.

Alas, the U.S.’ efforts are self-defeating. The more wars against terror for U.S. security, the more insecurity and terrorism; the more wars to save the dollar, the closer the collapse of the currency of that bankrupt country: by inflation, by stock exchange crashes, by serving debts rather than people.

The synergy of these three factors will catch up with the economy. In the meantime Monsanto is at work, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other lobbies threatening anyone whose voting is not to their liking that they will not be reelected.

The finance industry is at work forcing the administration to withdraw one step behind the other from the tiny measures introduced after the Grand Repression to control the finance industry.

The U.S. Supreme Court did its part of the job granting money to politicians under “freedom of expression.”

And Obama did his job, offering to cut Social Security entitlements in return for some compromise with Republicans, the average retirement package in the U.S. now being only 40 percent of a salary as opposed to 70 percent in developed countries.

Montesquieu’s plan of separating legislative, executive and judiciary power so that they check each other does not work. In the U.S. today all three powers are on the same course set by the finance industry, to which the dollar status is key.

Politicians are bought and cowed and the president once again betrays those who elected him. Democracy does not work. The U.S. blessing – the Occupy Movement – was itself occupied: by armies of FBI agents.

All of this and worse was Colombia’s fate; the answer was FARC, armed revolt. Will there be a similar armed revolt in the U.S., given that the guns are well distributed?

For Anglo-American global direct violence, yes. As the suspected Boston bombers said, an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, an eye for an eye – except when it comes to domestic structural violence.

Let us hope for the revival of Montesquieu and democracy or, if not, submission to outside mediation.

Excerpt:

The media did their best to make the U.S. presidential election look important, the altar on which democracy is built. But there has been a problem ever since the Supreme Court legalised unlimited campaign spending (six billion dollars this year), thereby authorising one more freedom of expression, called “commercial speech” even though much of this speech is libellous, often neither true nor relevant.

Johan Galtung

There were real disagreements, some kind of rhetorical left-right. However, the real problem lies somewhere else, not in what was said but in what was not. The list is long. The Washington Post on election day (Manuel Roig-Fanza): “A tough day for causes without a candidate”. The article mentions climate change, gun control and immigration as issues that werent picked up by either one of the party conventions, nor in the debates. But there are many more pressing problems confronting the country.

Two major lobbies advocating the use of force were left untouched: the National Rifle Association, NRA, for violence in the U.S., and the American-Israeli Political Action Committee, AIPAC, for violence abroad, mainly anti-Muslim wars.

They both exercise power through their impact on the media, denying critical politicians access to political power, thereby removing obstacles to violence. Dennis Kucinich, a voice for peace in Congress, and other critics, had the boundaries of their districts changed so that they were not reelected, fatally reducing the political spectrum in Congress and elsewhere. Both presidential candidates knew that to take them on would be suicidal.

Foreign policy was twisted in the debates to economic relations with China, trying to sound tough. But the U.S. majority cannot live without affordable Chinese goods with adequate quality/price ratios. Unless a big unless the U.S. restructures its economy from below, with cooperatives and self-employment, activating the countryside and local communities with numerous small enterprises focused on basic needs, food above all, housing and clothing, health and education, direct from producers to consumers.

No country in the world has a population so creative and cooperative. But the blossoming Occupy Movement has so far limited itself to occupation and critique, not to constructive action. They left untouched the basic change in the world: the U.S. grip on elites in other countries is loosening, in Latin America, even Africa, in the Arab awakening.

Instead they recited the “largest economy in the world” (the European Union is bigger, and China will overtake the U.S. soon) and the “strongest military power in the world” (losing Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan is a strange concept of “strongest”).

Climate change: the U.S. is dragging its feet, delaying action in any international fora. Not the candidates, but Nature, in the shape of Sandy, talked, a brutal reminder of climate reality. How much is man-made is uncertain but the change is certain enough. And the self-proclaimed world leader does not lead.

Then, incredible: the fact that 16 percent are in misery and hunger, while one percent live in opulence, feeding on speculation, was drowned in glib talk about the “middle class”. Yes, it is large, and stagnant. But far from 100 percent.

Neither candidate had answers, possibly agreeing to be silent. The U.S. desperately needs more parties that are less afraid of truth (as they will not win anyhow), for democratic transparency, and open dialogue.

Does the election make a difference? What change will the second Barack Obama term bring? Obama said in his victory speech that he will focus on deficit, the taxation system, and immigration. None of the above mentioned issues. In foreign policy Mitt Romney, like George W. Bush, might have been more reckless, accelerating the fall of the empire. Obama, like Bill Clinton, is better informed, more sophisticated, holding up the fall a little longer. And democrats are more inclined to do what Israel wants.

Obamacare will continue, whatever that is worth given the rise in costs for any medical care possibly because the “state will pay”.

On Jan. 1, 2013, the debt ceiling strikes, according to the Congress consensus, with major “austerity” for those who can least afford it, touching the military gently. Misery will accelerate and so could military deployment and wars waged the Obama way, with drones and SEALs, extrajudicial executions.

Imagine a Politburo committee in China studying photos to decide whom to kill abroad for anti-Chinese activity or threats to China’s security. Or China arming Cuba and Haiti countries as close to the U.S. as Taiwan is to China to the teeth; with a fleet cruising in the Caribbean. The U.S. would find this unacceptable.

But Obama will play, “I am above the parties uniting the nation. In his first term he was leaning over backward to the Republicans and was badly punished mid-term; this time that makes Romney a de facto co-president. The Dodd-Frank finance economy reforms will be very bland, Wall Street will by and large continue its lethal games. The rich may be taxed and may find more loopholes including settling abroad. Like the French super-rich in London?

Is U.S. democracy a two-party system becoming a one-party state? If so, other countries beware. Do not imitate. Democracy is more than elections. It is also transparency and dialogue, for real change. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, is author of “The Fall of the US Empire–And Then What?” ( www.transcend.org/tup)

Occupier tears up symbolic debt. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
SAN FRANCISCO, U.S., Sep 18 2012 (IPS)

Led by a spirited brass band and waving placards decrying corporate greed, hundreds of occupiers took to San Francisco streets Monday to celebrate Occupy Wall Street’s first birthday, culminating in a ceremony where they symbolically ripped apart loan documents.

The anniversary was also celebrated in New York City and some 30 other cities around the world.

“Debt buys us all,” said Amy Oh of Occupy San Francisco, addressing the crowd before the march. “We’ve got housing debt… student debt; healthcare debt; credit card debt…. Your city, your county, your state are also in debt … to the bankers.”

Cities cut social services and the state cuts transportation subsidies to pay the debt, she said. “(Debt) is affecting all of us.”

Neighbourhood occupy groups held anniversary events during the day. On the courthouse steps, occupiers tried to outshout an auctioneer selling foreclosed homes.

At the War Memorial, they held a press conference with seniors facing foreclosure. Robert Moses is a disabled 92-year-old African American World War II veteran. “I was paying my notes – I had no problem paying my notes – but they doubled the payments on my mortgage,” he said. Moses had paid off the original loan, but refinanced to make repairs.

The banks target African Americans and Latinos, said press conference emcee Archbishop Franzo King, of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church. Banks prey on unsuspecting people, he said.

“They begin to tell you stories about…how they can create an inheritance for your children,” he said. “Then you find out that these banksters are just like Satan and they make promises that they have no intention of keeping.”

The day was joyful, with occupiers taking over streets without police intervention. The media turned out in force. Occupiers reminded the nation that they haven’t gone away.

In reality, however, the hard work goes on when the party’s over and TV crews leave. IPS talked to several activists about their day-to-day work and Occupy’s influence on it.

Refusing to be a statistic

On Dec. 6, 2011, Gayla Newsome and her daughters walked back into the West Oakland townhouse from which they’d been evicted five months before. Occupy Oakland joined forces with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) to support the family and keep vigil at the house until they were sure the sheriff wasn’t coming back.

Today, Newsome and her children are still in their home. One of two home loans has been forgiven; the second loan is being modified.

The housing defence movement was born long before Occupy. Bill Chorneau began organising tenants in the 1970s. “I found the whole experience empowering,” he said. “It hooked me for life.”

Now he works with ACCE to address foreclosure issues and applauds the Occupy Movement’s work.

“All of a sudden protesting didn’t seem like such a marginalised activity,” Chorneau said. “The idea of the one percent vs. the 99 percent caught people’s imagination. That really helped change the dynamic; previously the borrower was getting blamed by most people.”

While the fight against foreclosure is among the most visible Occupy targets and perhaps the one that has borne the most concrete success across the country, Occupy has also injected new life into broader struggles for basic rights among the most oppressed groups, especially people of colour.

“Occupy has to reach out…”

Melvin Dickson, a former Black Panther Party member, edits the Commemorator, the newspaper of the Commemoration Committee of the Black Panther Party.

The committee, formed in 1989 after the party’s dissolution, preserves and disseminates the party’s history. But more importantly, Dickson says, it teaches about the past, in particular, the party’s 10-point programme – including the right to self-determination, housing, health care and education, ending police brutality and wars of aggression – in order to transform communities today.

Dickson compares the Panther’s goals to Occupy’s.

“Occupy came on the scene and they have a bigger picture – the 99 percent vs. the one percent – that’s what we’ve been talking about all along,” Dickson said.

“We were talking about U.S. imperialism, particularly the Viet Nam War. We came out denouncing that and took a position…because we recognise a connection between the same class of people who benefit from the wars are also benefitting from the oppression of black people, brown people, and poor whites in the United States.”

Dickson called Occupy’s work an “inspiration to us”, but cautioned that they have some differences with Occupy.

He faults Occupy for not incorporating disenfranchised communities. “Occupy has to reach out to various oppressed groups,” he said. “Every group has a special kind of oppression. The programme needs to be devised on that basis, not just, ‘we’re all in this together.’ You have to have some analysis of the oppression.

“You have to come up with solutions that address those particular problems of the particular people who have experienced that oppression. You can’t solve their problems alone. You can’t be condescending to this group of people. You’ve got to listen to them. And get behind them. Not try to get in front of them.”

Nonetheless, he praised Occupy’s work for connecting like-minded people, for letting them know “that there are many other people around the world, and many other people around the country, who have similar concerns.”

Retaking public spaces

Occupy’s most visible actions have been the occupation of public and private spaces for public benefit. They’ve occupied shuttered schools, boarded-up libraries, parks and universities.

In the small town of Albany, California, not far from the University of California, Berkeley, a group that became known as Occupy the Farm, celebrated Earth Day by marching to open space owned by the university, breaking in, bringing out rototillers and seedlings they’d stored nearby, and creating an urban farm.

The struggle to transform this land into an urban farm didn’t start with Occupy. It began 15 years earlier with a coalition of some 30 groups; the coalition was succeeded by other organisations.

Jackie Hermes-Fletcher, a former teacher living in Albany, got involved a decade ago. She said each time she drove by the land, she’d think about how it could be used for children to learn about farming.

She joined Urban Roots, the successor organisation to the coalition. Like the coalition, they tried working with the city and university to get use of the land. “We were pretty much ignored,” Hermes-Fletcher said.

They got city councilmembers elected who promised to fight for the land, but then ignored their promises, she said.

Over the years people have gotten burned out. There were just a few who would go with Hermes-Fletcher to council meetings, especially to oppose a mega supermarket now planned for part of the open space.

But early this year Hermes-Fletcher got invited to a meeting.

“I found myself– it gives me chills – in a room with all these young people,” she said, beginning to choke up. “They were going to occupy the land – it was incredible.” Some were from Occupy Oakland and the others were university graduate students.

The group, joined by dozens of community members, farmed the land for three weeks before university police evicted them. They’ve returned to harvest, then given away hundreds of pounds of vegetables.

“Occupy The Farm showed the community what an urban farm looks like,” Hermes-Fletcher said. The group is keeping future plans under wraps.

“We’ve got a huge burst of energy again, thanks to Occupy the Farm,” she said. “It’s been so heartwarming, so hopeful.”

Demonstrators rallied in front of Wall Street and several other parts of New York City, amid calls for an end to what some describe as “corporate socialism". Credit: Haider Rizvi

By Haider Rizvi
NEW YORK, Sep 18 2012 (IPS)

Amid a heavy police presence, thousands of anti-capitalist activists in marked the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement against the U.S. political and economic system, which they say favours billionaires at the expense of the middle and working class.

From dawn to dusk, the demonstrators rallied in front of Wall Street and several other parts of New York City, amid calls for an end to what some describe as “corporate socialism”.

“The government in this country should be run by the people,” said Kenneth Manteau, an activist from Connecticut who said he was going to spend the night in front of Wall Street to register his protest against corporate greed.

Joblessness at officially at 8.1 percent in the United States, although some analysts say the number is far higher, perhaps closer to 16 percent, since it only includes people who are still actively looking for work. Last week, the number of people applying for unemployment benefits jumped to the highest level in two months, to 382,000.

“I have no job, no healthcare, no apartment, and my girlfriend has left me too,” Manteau told IPS, adding that he is living on donations from his friends who share his world outlook.

Asked why the turnout for the anti-Wall Street demonstration was relatively low compared to last year, he said, “You know, people have to work every day. They are also afraid of being arrested and roughed up by cops. There are so many homes in this city, but tens of thousands of people have nowhere to get some sleep.”

A person standing next to him held a banner inscribed with the slogan: “Obama 2012: Abolish Serfdom.”

“What do you think about it?” IPS asked a janitor cleaning the street. “I want to be part of this protest,” he replied. “But what can I do? They pay me seven dollars and 25 cents an hour. What can I say?”

A few feet away, another protester, Mavni Halasa, 35, posed in front of photojournalists. She wore fake dollar bills plastered to her body.

“I call myself a marvelous mistress of bank reforms,” she said. “No more exploitation. There should be banking regulation.”

In front of the barricades surrounding Wall Street, the protesters represented a wide spectrum of professional and cultural backgrounds. Amongst them were lawyers, doctors, nurses, construction workers, professors, musicians and poets. However, the majority appeared to be young people from colleges and universities.

“A huge number of university graduates, overwhelmed by the enormous debts they have been forced to assume to pay the cost of their education, face decades of future enslavement to pay off these debts, making it impossible for many of these college and university graduates to even consider raising children, as they will lack the financial resources to support a family,” said Carla Stea, a seasoned journalist who covers the United Nations.

In her view, “the Occupy Wall Street heroes are protesting their own destitution which will inevitably damage the entire American society. The one percent are intellectual zombies, dedicated to accumulating profits, and depleting the very substance of American society.

“All student debts should be abolished, and the government should assume the responsibility for paying these student debts, and for paying mortgages, instead of investing in the military. A country of ignorant and homeless citizens is a destroyed country, and a country to be ashamed of. Military victories are meaningless. An educated, healthy middle class is cause for pride,” she said.

According to the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, New York State rebates 15 billion dollars annually in stock transfer taxes to Wall Street. This potential revenue to the state is lost in the hands of the richest one percent of New York’s population, whose share is currently 44 percent of total New York State income.

Many protesters held banners and placards highlighting the plight of college students who have struggled to keep pace with rising tuition rates, and the 11 million undocumented immigrants who work long hours to keep their heads above water.

Estimates from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau put the country’s outstanding student loan debt at between 902 billion and one trillion dollars.

“This young generation of educated Americans, just emerging from college or graduate schools, will be unable to assume the financial responsibility of raising children because of the massive debts they owe, (and) the already deteriorated intellectual and cultural fabric of this country will be worsened further,” said Stea.

Most U.S. television stations and newspapers covered the protests against corporate influence in Washington in a way that suggested most protesters were indulging in activities that are against so-called “American values”.

“Here we go again,” was the banner headline in the Metro daily, for example. The Wall Street Journal headline said, “Arrests Mark Protesters’ Return to NY,” but didn’t bother to explain at length, except for some quotes suggesting that there was infighting among the activist groups.

Police officals said about 146 were people were arrested in New York.

The paper concluded the story by stating that a protester said he was not planning on attending Monday’s protests because, “I have to earn a living.”

The “Occupy” movement has spread to Mexico, where thousands of university students have taken to the streets, bringing fresh air to a superficial and flat election campaign and forcing political parties to pay attention to a long-ignored segment of the population.

“Our movement is demanding the democratisation of the media, and accurate, unbiased coverage,” said Sofía Alessio, one of the protesters, who belongs to the organising committee at the private Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM).

“This is an apolitical, peaceful movement,” the political science student told IPS.

There are 2.5 million university students in this country of 112 million people, which means it has one of the lowest higher education enrolment rates in Latin America. There are also seven million young people who neither work nor study.

The biggest student demonstrations in Mexico’s history took place in 1968, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets demanding educational reforms and a more democratic political system, which was dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the political force that governed the country without interruption from 1929 to 2000.

The response by the government of then president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970) was brutal. After weeks of student protests, the repression reached a peak on Oct. 2, 1968, when soldiers and their paramilitary allies surrounded Tlatelolco square in Mexico City, which was packed with thousands of peaceful demonstrators, and opened fire on the crowd.

No one has ever been held accountable for the massacre, and the question of the death toll is still controversial, although most sources put the number between 200 and 300.

This time around, the student protests, which are common during election campaigns, are taking aim at “the heavy concentration of the electronic media, which limits freedom of expression and the right to information,” Luís Vázquez, a researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), told IPS.

“It is necessary to democratise the media, to avoid an authoritarian regime. That has become the central demand,” the academic said.

The wave of protests was triggered by a May 11 visit by PRI candidate Enrique Peña to the Jesuit-run Ibero-American University (UIA).

During Peña’s visit, student protesters questioned his human rights record as governor of the state of Mexico from 2005 to 2011.

When the media depicted them as intolerant and sectarian, the students began to protest what they called biased coverage, especially targeting Televisa, Mexico’s leading TV station.

“Young people can have a lot of power if they organise and get involved in politics,” Rolando Cordera, professor emeritus at the economy faculty of the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS. “It’s important for young people to realise the influence they have in society.”

On Jul. 1, Mexicans will elect 500 members of the lower house of Congress and 128 senators, who will be sworn in on Sept. 1, as well as the successor to President Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), who will take office for six years on Dec. 1. State and municipal elections will also be held in 15 of the country’s 32 states.

Out of a total of 77 million registered voters, some 10 million are young people who will be going to the polls for the first time. In 2010, there were nearly 19 million Mexicans between the ages of 20 and 29, according to that year’s census. (Voting is compulsory in Mexico.)

The student protests, which have no clear, visible leaders, have been organised largely over social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The movement has also created a web site to provide information.

“We know that some people will want to make use of the movement for political purposes, but we won’t let that happen,” said Alessio. “We have gotten university students from across the country involved, because we believe that together, we can do more. And it’s not only young people who are going to benefit from the results.”

The Yo Soy 132 (I Am 132) movement, whose name is a symbol of the continuation of the original demonstration by 131 students during Peña’s visit to the UIA, has published a code of ethics declaring that it has no party affiliation, is peaceful, and expresses individual, rather than collective, points of view.

After the demonstration at the UIA hurt the PRI’s image, the party wavered between lashing out at the protesters, saying they were intolerant and maintaining that the left was behind the whole thing, and following a damage control strategy of arguing that all opinions deserved respect.

Karl Marx wrote that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The protest against Peña and the subsequent reaction by his party were reminiscent of a visit to UNAM in 1975 by former President Luís Echeverría, who was practically forced to leave by student demonstrators. As he was leaving the medical school, Echeverría shouted “fascists!” at the protesters

On Wednesday May 23, Yo Soy 132 organised protests in at least 20 large cities around the country.

The phenomenon has already been dubbed “the Mexican Spring” – an allusion to the so-called Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and other countries.

Although the movement has some things in common with Occupy Wall Street and Spain’s “Indignados” protests, such as a horizontal structure and the use of social networking sites, it differs in that it is not seeking in-depth changes to the political and economic systems.

“The movement has to go beyond the electoral question. It could come up with an agenda of political and cultural aims,” said Cordera.

From June to November, the resort city of Cancún in southeast Mexico will host a series of conferences on issues of concern to university students, organised by the Foro Mundial de Universitarios (World Federation for University Education).

“The young people’s vote has been reawakened,” Alessio said. “The scope of this is incredibly important, and we hope to achieve our goals.” (END)

California Occupiers plant crops on an undeveloped 10-acre parcel. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
ALBANY, California, May 14 2012 (IPS)

With hoes, shovels, some 15,000 seedlings and a bolt cutter to break the locks that kept them out, students, community members and participants from nearby Occupy movements have laid claim to an undeveloped 10-acre parcel since Earth Day, Apr. 22, in Albany, California.

But Monday, some 100 university, city and county police took back the land and arrested seven occupiers (see sidebar).

“We are reclaiming this land to grow healthy food to meet the needs of local communities,” the occupiers say in a statement on their website. “We envision a future of food sovereignty, in which our…communities make use of available land – occupying it where necessary – for sustainable agriculture to meet local needs.”

The parcel, owned by the University of California, Berkeley and known as the Gill Tract, is located about two miles from the campus. The university plans to sell a portion of the tract to developers for an upscale supermarket and market rate senior housing. Researchers use around two acres annually, for a few months, for crop studies.

The occupation date coincides not only with Earth Day, but with Via Campesina‘s International Day of Peasant Resistance on Apr. 17, when peasants, small farmers, landless people, migrants and agricultural workers around the world attempt to reclaim land.

Calling themselves Occupy the Farm, the activists address socioeconomic inequity and corporate greed. They cite injustice in the distribution of nutritious food in the United States, with 50 million people lacking regular access to healthy food. And they condemn what they say is the growing influence of corporations on the University of California.

The university reacted to the occupation by turning off the water just a few days after occupiers began farming, forcing them to truck water onto the site. After telling activists to leave for two weeks and being ignored, the university stationed police and private security inside the tract, first locking three gates, then locking all four, forcing occupiers to enter and exit over the fence and walk across fields to water their crops with buckets of water, filled from a truck parked outside a locked gate.

On May 9, the university sued the occupiers for trespassing and preventing researchers from doing their jobs. While the university says the researchers cannot conduct their studies with occupiers on the land, occupiers, and at least two of the five researchers, say they can coexist.

Miguel Altieri is a professor in the College of Natural Resources and has conducted research at the tract for 31 years. He’s outspoken in his support for the occupiers. He said, along with community members and nonprofits, he has been calling for opening up the tract for 15 years, but has been ignored by the university.

Altieri would like to see a centre on the land where people learn urban farming, then teach the skills to others in the community. “We need to start raising food in our cities,” Altieri said, noting that there are some 500,000 people in the Bay Area with inadequate diets.

“There’s 120 acres of abandoned land (in Oakland) that could be used to produce food, if the people had the skills,” he told IPS.

The university administration said it would dialogue with the occupiers, but only after they left the property. In response, on May 12, the occupiers removed tents and camping gear from the land, but left their farming tools.

“We decided that we would in fact remove all of our things that support living (and place them) outside, just to be clear that we’re not here to live,” said Anya Kamenskaya, an Occupy the Farm spokesperson. “We’re leaving all the farming infrastructure inside the farm.

“Now, we can really focus on the issue of access. It’s about the community, about anyone who comes off the street who wants to learn about urban agriculture. And it’s about being able to have access to the crops that we’ve put in, and to continue the educational programmes we’ve planned.”

Just as the larger Occupy Movement shines a light on corporate greed, the occupiers are using the farm occupation to confront what they say is increasing corporate influence on the university.

“The global food regime is controlled by a handful of monopolies,” said Eric Holt-Gimenez, speaking at a May 12 workshop at the tract. Holt-Gimenez is executive director of Food First, a non-profit Oakland-based organisation that addresses issues of poverty and global hunger.

“The monopolies that get rich when there are food crises are the same monopolies that get rich over the food insecurity in this country, and they are the same monopolies that have monopolised the research agenda of our public universities like the University of California at Berkeley in which, literally, a half-billion dollars is dumped into agrifuels,” he said. “Virtually no money is put into community food security, and no money is put into urban farming.”

Holt-Gimenez was referring to the half-billion dollars for biofuels research that BP is giving the university.

University spokesperson Dan Mogulof countered that only a “tiny fraction” of research money comes from the private sector and that, when it does, corporations don’t tell academics how to conduct their research. He further pointed out that nonprofits also fund research, such as studies on issues in human rights.

Police guard Gill Tract after making seven arrests. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

Until Monday, University of California police had been relatively low-profile since protesters arrived at the Gill Tract. Some have suggested that is because the university and its police departments in Berkeley and Davis have been heavily criticised for police beatings and pepper spray use against Occupy activists in November.

A May 4 report, authored by the dean of the UC Berkeley Law School and the university’s general counsel, said the university needs to change the way it handles protests: “The Chancellor and other administrators should develop and follow a set of guidelines designed to minimize a police response to protests, and to limit the use of force against protesters wherever possible,” the report says.

While police and private security were stationed at the gates and around the perimetre of the tract, they maintained a generally friendly demeanor, unlocking the gates for those who want to leave and ignoring those who scale the fence – or climb up the newly-built stairs and use the slide to slip inside.

At this point, the future of the tract is uncertain. In a May 11 letter, the chancellor’s office recognised value in the occupation: “As much as we abhor the tactics embraced by the occupiers, we acknowledge that their actions helped to raise the public profile of urban agriculture and generate constructive conversation about its value,” it said.

In that letter, the university invited occupiers to a meeting with about a dozen participants the university selected to discuss the tract’s future, with occupiers’ participation conditioned on completely vacating the property.

The occupiers responded by packing up their tents, but refusing to abandon their crops and refusing to participate in a planning process that wasn’t open to all.

Gopal Dayaneni, an Occupy the Farm spokesperson, said on Sunday that he hopes the university will join activists in an open planning process “that isn’t based on sabre-rattling and threats”.

In the meantime, “We’ll be watering our fields and tending our crops,” Dayaneni said.

(END)

"Indignados" in Málaga transformed a waste lot into a community garden. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, May 11 2012 (IPS)

A filthy vacant lot is now sprouting strawberries, tomatoes and carrots. This small community garden in the centre of the southern Spanish city of Málaga was created by the “Indignados” protest movement, which is celebrating its first anniversary Saturday by taking to the streets across the country.

“This urban vegetable garden is a symbol and a space for freedom,” Málaga resident Miguel Ángel, who has been involved in the movement since it emerged a year ago in response to the severe economic crisis in Spain, told IPS.

Organised over the online social networks, the movement spread throughout the country on May 15, 2011 (giving it the name 15M). Demonstrators calling themselves the “indignados” – indignant or angry – occupied the central squares of Spain’s major cities to protest an economic model they perceive as socially unjust and political parties they see as subordinate to the economic-powers-that-be.

The movement later expanded to smaller towns across the country, where people began to hold citizens’ assemblies. Then it crossed national borders, spreading to other parts of the world under different names, such as Occupy Wall Street, where protesters first set up camp in Zuccotti Park in New York City’s financial district.

“The vegetable garden in the central Málaga neighbourhood of La Trinidad is an example of what ordinary citizens can do when they get organised,” said Miguel Ángel, referring to the local effort that began in September 2011 to clean up and farm a vacant lot and share the produce.

Protesters in at least 1,000 cities worldwide are holding demonstrations Saturday May 12 to celebrate the birth of a global movement that sprang up in response to the economic and financial crisis that broke out in the United States in 2008.

The new global day of action will be called 12M-15M, according to the web site of True Democracy Now (DRY), a platform that lit the fuse of the original uprising under the slogan “We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers.”

The movement has managed to “put backbone into civil society and reconstruct the torn social fabric by means of neighbourhood assemblies,” said Miguel Ángel. It has fostered cooperatives and mutual support networks that have provided alternatives to the system, he said.

“15M has awakened people’s critical consciousness,” said Fabio Gándara, a lawyer who supports the movement which, he says, “has changed the political agenda” in Spain.

The Platform of Mortgage Victims, created in the northeastern city of Barcelona in 2009 by people who could not meet the monthly payments on their homes, succeeded in drawing attention to the plight of evicted families in Spain, thanks to support and public airing provided by 15M.

The protests also proved influential in parliament, which approved debtor protection measures, like raising the level of wages exempt from seizure to pay mortgage debts, and proposed a legal reform so that surrendering a house to creditors would settle the entire outstanding mortgage debt (in many cases greater than the original loan, because of interest rate rises).

The government of centre-right Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, in office since Dec. 20, 2011, approved a code of good practice for banks in April, advocating full debt forgiveness for poor families in arrears who return their homes to the banks.

Crisis, criticism and self-analysis

Some voices in the 15M have criticised the movement from within. “We have failed to establish the organisational basis for a long-term, enduring movement,” said Gándara.

“Commitment to a purely ‘assembly style’ model has greatly detracted from the effectiveness of the movement, and is preventing the achievement of real changes in the system,” he added.

In his view, the movement will not survive unless it “adopts more democratic and effective methods of organisation to complement the citizens’ assemblies.”

Spain is one of the European Union countries hit hardest by the crisis, with more than five million people out of work – a record unemployment rate of 24 percent.

Rajoy’s deep cutbacks, especially in health and education, stoked the protests which triggered a widely supported general strike Mar. 29, convened by the two largest trade unions.

The government justifies the budget cuts by the imperative need to reduce the fiscal deficit from the 2011 level of 8.5 percent of GDP, to 5.3 percent by the end of this year.

“The policies adopted by the governments of representative democracies like Spain, far from addressing people’s real needs, reflect the interests of a privileged minority anxious to maintain their advantages at all costs,” said Gándara.

Activist Esther Vivas told IPS that 15M “is profoundly critical of the democratic system.”

“It has given us back the capacity to believe in ourselves,” but like all social movements, it is cyclical in nature and during its first year of existence it has had peaks and troughs, said Vivas, of the Centre for the Study of Social Movements at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

The challenge now for the “Indignados” movement is to maintain its level of support in society, and to improve and increase coordination on a global scale, said the sociologist, who is co-author with Josep María Antentas of the book “Planeta Indignado: Ocupando el futuro” (Indignant Planet: Occupying the Future).

Antentas, a professor of sociology at the University of Barcelona, told IPS the eruption of 15M marked “the start of a new cycle,” allowing social protest to resume its place in society.

Saturday’s demands are the same ones voiced a year ago, because “we continue to bear the burden of economic measures adopted behind the people’s back, as well as the lack of direct participation by civil society in government institutions, endemic corruption, and the gradual dismantling of the ‘welfare state’,” Gándara said.

That is why True Democracy Now has called on people around the world to “take the streets” Saturday, “in favour of decent housing and quality public health and education, and against precarious employment and the bailout of banks with public funds.”

The Spanish government warned that it would not permit tents in the squares, which it said were illegal, after 15M proposed camping in the Puerta del Sol, in central Madrid, from Saturday May 12 to Tuesday May 15. (END)

Shawn Deez, a freshman in peace and conflict studies, says she thinks she knows why some classes are scheduled at the University of California, Berkeley, and some are not. It’s corporate influence that makes the difference, she said.

It was Mar. 1, Occupy Education’s National Day of Action, observed with marches and rallies at some 30 California universities and at a number of venues around the country.

While much of the media focused on the steep tuition hikes at state universities and community colleges, many participants at UC Berkeley used the lens of the Occupy Movement – the 99 percent versus the one percent – to examine the underlying problems in education.

Deez spoke to IPS during a downpour while waiting for a noontime rally on the UC Berkeley campus. She contended that the influence of corporations such as BP – formally British Petroleum – which has partnered with the university and its affiliated laboratories on a 400,000-dollar biofuels institute, heavily influences the departments in which university funds are spent. She said the humanities have no corporate funding and face increasing cuts.

Moreover, she said, corporate interests have turned the university away from its mission.

And then there’s the question of who profits from the steep tuition hikes. Banks have been frequently targeted by the six-month-old Occupy Movement, for their bad home loans and foreclosures. But University of California, Davis instructor Joshua Clover explained to the Berkeley crowd of around 300 how banks profit from the hike in their tuitions.

“The public university wants to raise its price of admission much faster than any increase in people’s ability to pay,” he said. “Those banks really need you suckers for those loans. The university and banks enter into an alliance through which the banks make staggering profits from the university’s huge fee hikes.”

After that, the banks control the debtor’s lives. “This is the outcome of the university’s laying down with capital,” he said, telling the students that the answer isn’t a “kinder, gentler capitalism”, but an end to the system.

Before the rally, “teach-outs” were held in small groupings around the campus. Matt Williams, a senior in sociology, led one on affirmative action. UC Berkeley statistics for 2010 show there were just four percent African American and 13 percent Latino undergraduates.

He said that part of the problem is the different quality of high schools, where some schools offer advanced placement classes in which a student can earn 4.5 points (an A is four points), and where counselors steer students into college preparatory classes and even help students write their entry essays.

Donnell Vital-Gibson, an eleventh grader at Oakland Technical High School, was listening to the speaker on affirmative action and talked to IPS afterward, explaining that he was one of the lucky ones in Oakland. His high school has advanced placement classes, he said, but schools in Oakland’s poorer neighbourhoods do not.

“We’re fighting the one percent right here,” he said.

After the rally, the students took off on a march to Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, the former home of Occupy Oakland, to meet up with community college students and others from Occupy Oakland.

Then some 60 among them marched again, heading to a church in Richmond, about 12 miles away, where they would join students from San Francisco, spend the night at a church, then walk 99 miles over several days, to UC Davis, near the state capitol in Sacramento.

They are planning “Occupy the capitol,” a statewide education rally in Sacramento Mar. 5.

“The march is a way to engage the community,” said Stephan Georgiou, a student at San Francisco City College, a community college where 67 classes were cut this year. Georgiou said they’re facing the “dismantling of community colleges in California,” and that people are not aware of the programme cuts and layoffs.

He said some legislators are trying to “take the autonomy away from the colleges and turn them into vocational schools.”

Around the time Georgiou was marching from Oakland to Richmond, 13 demonstrators were arrested in San Francisco for refusing to leave a state office building until their demands for education funding were met. A City College engineering instructor was among the arrestees.

Around 3 p.m., another rally was held in Berkeley. This one, at the K-12 school administration building, was put together by Occupy Berkeley High and attended by some 600 students, whose signs and t- shirts said: “Wake up! Stand up! Speak up! Shake up! We are the 99 percent. Tax the rich.”

The “tax the rich” refers to a proposed “millionaires tax” that will be on California’s November ballot, if its supporters collect the required signatures. It would levy an additional state income tax of three percent for Californians whose annual adjusted gross income is over one million dollars, and five percent for those making over two million dollars a year.

The funds would restore budget cuts to education, public safety, and other services. The California Federation of Teachers is backing this measure.

Berkeley High senior Amelia McCrea spoke to the crowd, calling for the millionaire’s tax and asking: “Doesn’t the government realise that someday, we’re going to be running the show?

“We are the future innovators, artists, politicians, shapers of the world and we are the ones who supply the hunger for knowledge and drive to learn. We must show the state, the country, that we won’t sit idly by while education is being undervalued.”

McCrea continued, “I believe that students should be recognised as a priority over the funding of prisons,” and then she invited the audience to enjoy the dance performances and music provided by fellow students.

(END)