Over 700 people were arrested in a protest on the Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011. Credit: Paul Stein/CC by 2.0

By Lucy Westcott
NEW YORK, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

Stories of struggle can be found all over the world, from a law classroom in Oklahoma and the brutal borderlands between the United States and Mexico to a Bedouin village in Jordan and wedding parties in Morocco, as the 24th Human Rights Watch Film Festival is showcasing.

Some films cover subjects that have been widely reported, such as the Occupy movement and Anita Hill’s sexual harassment case against Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas, but they nevertheless delve beneath the surface, bringing fresh perspectives to well-known events.

In New York, the festival runs through the end of the week in two Manhattan cinemas. The festival revolves around themes such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights, disability rights and migration. It has a separate category this year for U.S. human rights issues."The audience was really upset and moved by how far this country has gone in suppressing protests."
-- John Biaggi

“We don’t want anyone to ever think that we’re giving our country a pass,” John Biaggi, director of the festival, told IPS.

“99 Percent – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film” (Audrey Ewell, Aaron Aites, Lucian Read, Nina Krstic, 2012), which presents the story of the Occupy movement, is part of this theme and has been of particular interest to moviegoers, Biaggi said.

“People have reacted very strongly to [the] film in a positive way…the audience was really upset and moved by how far this country has gone in suppressing protests,” he said.

Remembering Occupy

Kindled by the Arab Spring and a summer of European unrest, the Occupy movement began in downtown New York City on Sep. 17, 2011 as Americans felt the rush of revolution take hold in Zuccotti Park.

Filmmakers Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites told IPS that the film was set up as an experiment with 100 collaborators.

“We went to Zuccotti Park and saw how everyone congregated; [there was] a pastiche quality, a collage-like element, with people talking about a patchwork of issues,” Ewell said.

The filmmakers issued press releases and created a web site asking for collaborators on their project, with a large response. While some people who signed up were inexperienced, Ewell and Aites ensured that an experienced filmmaker always led shoots.

It wasn’t a “free-for-all”, Ewell said; rather, it was a highly coordinated and organised process between coasts.

“A lot of people just wanted to go and film a rally or a march and that was fine,” Ewell said. The filmmakers wanted collaborators to be able to choose the extent of their contributions.

Ewell and Aites became interested in the Occupy movement on Oct. 1, 2011, the day 740 protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. They noticed that the mainstream media wasn’t covering the event at all.

“I was so disturbed by that…I grabbed my camera and went down,” Ewell said. After the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, the media switched from a blackout to a circus, Aites added.

“Now the media writes history,” Ewell said.

The primary goal of “99 Percent”, the filmmakers said, was to present an accurate history of what really happened with Occupy, especially for those who didn’t have access to footage of the movement, whether on television or the Internet, at the time protests and demonstrations were taking place.

Invisible tales of hardship

South of the U.S. border, “The Undocumented” (Marco Williams, 2013) examined the lives of those working on the border, watching hawk-eyed for migrants and tracking the patterns of soles in the sand.

Deaths of border-crossing migrants have increased since the 1990s, with hundreds of bodies found in the scorching Arizona desert every year.

As the immigration reform debate continues in the U.S. senate, “The Undocumented” shows the lengths some migrants will go to achieve their dream of coming to America, even to the extent of ultimately losing their lives.

“Fatal Assistance” (Raoul Peck, 2012) revealed the complications of humanitarian aid following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, uncovering the destructive decisions made by foreign governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Haiti received 5 billion dollars of aid money in 18 months, but the funds were not allocated rationally, Peck, former minister of culture in Haiti, argued. Two years after the devastation, by which time many outside Haiti cease to remember the earthquake, the rebuilding continues.

On the other side of the world, “Camp 14 – Total Control Zone” (Mark Wiese, 2012) followed a former North Korean labour camp inmate, Shin Don-Hyuk, as he adjusts to a new and normal life in South Korea.

Two hundred thousand people live in North Korean camps. Shin was born in one, his first memory of a public execution he watched with his mother.

Shin’s story of escape, which he now travels the world to tell, seem almost unbelievable, but footage smuggled out of North Korea by activists of a violent interrogation show that the horror is indeed real.

“Energising people who come and see the films, to get involved and to take action, that’s really what the festival is about,” Biaggi said.

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival runs until Jun. 23. Co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Centre and the IFC Centre, the festival has included a number of New York premieres.

Human Rights Watch recently established a disability rights division, which accompanies the festival’s dedication to screening films that focus on the issue of disability. The group estimates that there are around 1 billion disabled people across the world.

More films showing this week include “The Act of Killing”, executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog and directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, which shows a group of Indonesian former killers re-enacting their crimes in by mirroring films they enjoy, and “Camera/Woman”, about a divorced Moroccan woman who films wedding parties in Casablanca.

Strike Debt action on medical debt, held in New York in March. Credit: The Eyes of New York/ CC by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Apr 14 2013 (IPS)

Strike Debt, an affiliate of the Occupy movement, has devised a legal and what some consider ingenious way to abolish millions of dollars in consumer debt.

The project is called Rolling Jubilee, and by raising money from other citizen activists to purchase debt on the secondary market, Rolling Jubilee has purchased millions of dollars in unpaid medical debt that is – or, was – owed by consumers.

The secondary market is where companies go to sell bad debts, often for pennies on the dollar, to other companies who then try to collect the debts.

These debt collectors often engage in relentless phone calls, letters, negative credit reporting, legal threats, actual litigation and other tactics to attempt to collect the debts. Sometimes these additional tactics involve breaking laws intended to protect consumers, media reports have shown.

But instead of trying to collect the debts through practises that range from threatening letters to lawsuits, Rolling Jubilee is mailing letters to families saying that their debts have been forgiven. Thus the debt is actually being abolished for pennies on the dollar – a fraction of what it would have cost for the families to pay off the debts.

So far Rolling Jubilee has raised 578,795 U.S. dollars. With that they were able to purchase some 11.5 million dollars in medical debt owed on the secondary market by families who either live or once lived in Kentucky or Indiana.

They also previously made a small debt purchase of medical debt from upstate New York.

“The point of Rolling Jubilee was to tunnel under Wall Street to help the 99 percent,” Aleks Perisic, a member of Rolling Jubilee, told IPS.

Illegitimate debt

Most, if not all, of the money in the United States lent by banks is money that the banks never originally had in the first place, as previously reported by IPS.

In other words, most of the money that U.S. banks lend out is conjured into existence through a stroke on a keyboard, by way of a practise called fractional reserve lending, where banks are allowed to create and lend a certain multiple of funds that they have on deposit with the Federal Reserve.

That method is just one of the reasons Strike Debt believes that so much bank debt is illegitimate.

“Money is really created out of thin air,” Perisic said, who said the group had done extensive research on the matter. “This debt is really illegitimate, and it never should have existed in the first all place,” she added.

“The first thing is they [the families] should never had gone into debt for basic necessities in the first place. Beyond that, the fact that banks get a write-off when they discharge the debt, yet people are pursued to pay the full amount,” Perisic said.

Economist Ellen Brown said she thought the idea was interesting and noted that bankruptcy is the “original debt jubilee”. However, U.S. Congress and former President George W. Bush in 2005 made it more difficult for families who are not in poverty to discharge their debts through bankruptcy.

Brown suggested there is an easier way to forgive debts in the United States.

“The Federal Reserve could just step in and buy the debt. Let’s say they bought a trillion dollars in debt. When they rip it up, they add money into the money supply anyway,” Brown told IPS. “When you forgive the debt, it’s the same as giving them money, which creates demand, and the stores put in more orders to make the stuff – that’s how you stimulate the economy.”

The Federal Reserve has actually engaged in three rounds of quantitative easing, known as QE1, QE2 and QE3, purchasing bad debts from banks with the intent of freeing those banks to lend to consumers. However, the strategy has largely not succeeded, Brown said, because the banks have not used those funds to make new loans to small businesses or consumers.

“What they [the Federal Reserve] are buying now is mortgage-backed securities and government debt. Instead of mortgage-backed securities, they could buy student debt and rip it up, but they’re not there to serve the people,” Brown said.

Brown said she believed U.S. Congress and the President could authorise the Federal Reserve to buy and forgive student loan debt.

The purchases would not be inflationary because the U.S. monetary supply lost four trillion dollars since 2008, so it would take at least four trillion dollars in debt forgiveness to get the money supply back to where it was in 2008.

‘It won’t make a dent’

Not all, however, are convinced by Rolling Jubilee’s strategy.

“The Rolling Jubilee increases the profitability of [a] bad system by providing more revenues to the incumbents, while the debt purchases are unlikely to do more than help a few random people,” according to Naked Capitalism, a blog. “It might make for feel-good PR, but it won’t make a dent in the problem.”

Naked Capitalism also raised questions about the tax treatment of the forgiven debt and whether it would be viewed as income for tax purposes. However, Rolling Jubilee insists they have consulted with attorneys and that forgiven debt is not income.

“The Rolling Jubilee is just one of the projects of Strike Debt, so it’s part of a bigger picture, one of the big strategies we’re using to attack the debt system,” Perisic said.

“We started by holding different Debt Assemblies. It was really to just create a space where people can come and tell their debt stories…making that leap where people start envisioning, instead of something personal, it’s a systematic problem. I think that’s part of any organising around debt,” Perisic said.

Strike Debt has also put together a Debt Resistance Operations Manual.

As for what is next, Rolling Jubilee is hoping to go national with its debt purchases.  “We’d really like to have a national portfolio.  Whether it’s one large national portfolio, or several regional portfolios, depends on what we find,” Perisic said.

Using grant funding from the Dept. of Homeland Security, UC Berkeley is preparing to buy an armoured vehicle, which it will share with the city. Credit: Gary Dorrington/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, California, Jun 22 2012 (IPS)

The city of Berkeley, California has long been regarded as a leader in the movements for peace, free speech and civil liberties. But this very city is now poised to follow the lead of hundreds of others around the United States where local police deploy armoured vehicles to fight crime and terrorism.

The University of California, Berkeley police department is using grant funds from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase a Lenco Ballistic Engineered Armoured Response Counter Attack Truck, better known as BearCat. The university will share the BearCat with police from Berkeley and the neighbouring city of Albany, where it will house the vehicle.

Purchasing the vehicle was raised at a Berkeley City Council meeting as part of a larger discussion on the city’s relationship to Homeland Security agencies that award grants and collect information on citizens.

Police Chief Michael Meehan defended the BearCat, telling the council he would have used it last year in a situation where a mentally ill man held off police officers with a gun for several hours. An armoured vehicle would have allowed negotiators to safely approach the suspect, Meehan said, although in this instance, police eventually took the man into custody without incident.

But Daniel Borgstrom, Occupy activist and former Marine, warned the council on Jun. 19 that the vehicle could be used to chill free speech.

“I’m asking, please stay out of this urban warfare stuff,” he said.

While Meehan called the armoured personnel carrier “a defensive resource” without weapons, Councilmember Max Anderson argued that the vehicle has gun ports and that weapons would be easy to supply.

“While we might count [the vehicle] as being protective of officers, they also carry an offensive component that could be misused under certain circumstances,” Anderson said.

No transparency

Citizens and councilmembers also criticised the secrecy with which the purchase was taking place.

Because the vehicle is being purchased by the university, and not a city governed by elected bodies, and because no matching funds were required – which the council would have had to approve – the Berkeley police department was not required to disclose the grant application.

Berkeley citizens found out about it only when the watchdog organisation, Berkeley Copwatch, discovered the project as a result of a Public Records Act request for general information on police equipment, according to Andrea Prichett of Copwatch.

The armoured vehicle has not been publicly discussed in Albany, and no such discussions are scheduled, according to Albany’s city clerk. Occupy Cal activists contacted for this story were unaware that the university was buying the armoured vehicle.

“I feel a certain level of – I have to use the word – betrayal,” attorney Sharon Adams told the council.

Adams works with a community coalition that has been meeting with police over concerns about local Homeland Security agencies, including the Urban Areas Security Initiative that is awarding the university about 200,000 dollars to purchase the BearCat.

“During all this time, police never told us they were going for this armoured tank,” she said.

Militarising cities – and police forces

Since 9/11 and with a surplus of combat equipment, armoured vehicles have become popular in larger higher-crime cities like Oakland, California, as well as tiny crime-free places like Keene, New Hampshire, where just two murders have been reported since 1999.

These armoured vehicles are part of “an alarming increase in militarisation” of the police, said Norm Stamper, former Seattle police chief and author of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing.

Stamper explained in a phone interview that, in addition to 9/11, the war on drugs has fuelled the drive toward police militarisation, exacerbating conflict between those targeted – people of color, youth and the poor – and law enforcement.

Once targeted, these communities become the enemy. “We start adding the military nomenclature and the military equipment and military tactics and strategies, and we find SWAT units hitting the house of somebody suspected of having half a bag of marijuana,” he said.

Locally, police militarisation was evident at the Nov. 9, 2011 Occupy Cal demonstration at UC Berkeley, where combat-gear clad police injured peaceful protesters with baton strikes, and on Oct. 25, 2011 in Oakland, when similarly armed police nearly killed a young former Marine when they fired a tear-gas canister that hit him in the head.

“There’s this mistaken belief, that if we harden the image of the police officers, that will give the forces of law and order more legitimacy,” Stamper said. “What it does, I think, is precisely the opposite.”

When police carry weapons and use chemical agents on non-violent demonstrators, they “appear to be the repressive arm of an oppressive establishment”, Stamper explained. An armoured personnel carrier would serve to reinforce that impression.

A necessary piece of equipment?

However, Stamper allowed, an armoured vehicle can save lives, when used correctly. When Stamper was on the San Diego police force in the 1980s, a man shot and killed 21 people at a McDonald’s restaurant over the course of more than an hour. An armoured vehicle could have ended the event more quickly, he said.

“That was a situation that calls for exactly what I’ve been condemning in our approach to demonstrations,” he said. “You need police officers with ballistic gear, ballistic helmets…you need an armoured personnel carrier, in a situation like that. But you certainly don’t need it when people are peaceably assembling and expressing their first amendment rights.”

Police Chief Meehan acknowledged the growing militarisation of police, noting that in a highly armed society and country like the United States, which has 200 to 300 million gun,”there’s a limited way to protect our officers, especially when you’re talking about gunfire”.

“However much I would love to have something that doesn’t look military that still does the same job, it is what it is,” he argued. “The equipment that is available to us is what we avail ourselves of.”

The question of whether the armed vehicle is necessary remains: the last time Berkeley police officers were killed by gunfire was in the 1970s; no UC Berkeley or Albany officers have been killed by guns, according to the website Officer Down Memorial Page.

Councilmember Kriss Worthington placed the armoured vehicle on next week’s Berkeley council agenda for further discussion. “If this is a joint application that includes the city of Berkeley and the city of Albany, it seems to me that there should be a public vote of the Albany City Council and the Berkeley City Council,” he said.

“It seems to be against the spirit of Berkeley for us to be using it.”