Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  Chapter 5: Days of Revolt

  1. Chris Bryant, “Leipzig Reclaims Its Role in Liberation,” Financial Times, October 9, 2009, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1124a04a-b469–11de-bec8–00144feab49a.html (accessed 6 Jan. 2012).

  2. Victor Sebestyen, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York, Vintage, 2010), 338–339.

  3. Ibid., 122.

  4. Dan Fishers, “A Martyr Is Vindicated in Prague Square: Czechoslovakia: 10,000 Gather to Remember the Ultimate Sacrifice of Jan Palach,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1990, http://articles.latimes.com/1990-01-17/news/mn-97_1_ultimate-sacrifice (accessed 3 Jan. 2012).

  5. Crane Brinton, Anatomy of a Revolution (New York: Random House, 1938).

  6. Paul Arvich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 230.

  7. Ibid., 231.

  8. Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune, 1871 (London, 1971), preface.

  9. Rosie Gray, “Mike Bloomberg: OWS Is ‘Cathartic’ and ‘Entertaining’ in a Bad Way,” Village Voice Blog, November 1, 2011, http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runnunscared/2011/11/mike_bloomberg_39.php (accessed 12 Sept. 2013).

  10. Andy Kroll, “Mayors and Cops Traded Strategies for Dealing With Occupy Protesters,” Mother Jones, November 26, 2011, http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/occupy-protest-coordinate-crackdown-wall-street.

  11. Kevin Zeese, “The 99% Deficit Proposal: How to Create Jobs, Reduce the Wealth Divide and Control Spending,” Occupy Washington, DC, November 17, 2011, http://october2011.org/blogs/kevin-zeese/99-s-deficit-proposal-how-create-jobs-reduce-wealth-divide-and-control-spending (accessed 27 Aug. 2013).

  12. Jenna Johnson, “One Trillion Dollars: Student Loan Debt Builds Toward Yet Another Record,” Washington Post, October 19, 2011.

  13. Kamlesh Bhuckory, “Stiglitz Expects 2 Million U.S. Foreclosures This Year,” Bloomberg News, February 9, 2011.

  14. Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 2.

  15. Ibid., 13.

  16. Ibid., 18.

  17. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classic, 1950), 208.

  18. Robert Pear, “Obama to Ask for $1.2 Trillion Increase in Debt Limit,” New York Times, December 27, 2011. At the time this article was published, the federal debt was $15.1 trillion.

  19. Jason deParle, Robert Gebeloff, and Sabrina Tavernise, “Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘Near Poor’ Startle the Census,” New York Times, November 18, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/us/census-measures-those-not-quite-in-poverty-but-struggling.html (accessed 6 Jan. 2012).

  20. Peter Finn and Greg Miller, “Anwar al-Awlaki’s Family Speaks Out Against His Son’s Death in Airstrike,” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/anwar-al-awlakis-family-speaks-out-against-his-sons-deaths/2011/10/17/gIQA8kFssL_story.html. His sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was killed in a U.S. airstrike on October 14, 2011.

  21. Orwell, 267.

  22. Sebestyen, 386–387.

  23. Adam Michnik, Letters from Freedom (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 146–147.

  24. Alessandro Tinonga and Gaston Lau, “The Struggle Continues in Oakland,” socialistworker.org, November 16, 2011 (accessed 3 Jan. 2012).

  25. Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (Armonk NY: Palach Press, 1985), 14

  26. Ibid.

  27. Havel as president exemplified Julian Benda’s assertion in The Treason of the Intellectuals that we must choose between two sets of principles—justice and truth or privilege and power. The more concessions one makes to privilege and power, the more it diminishes one’s capacity to fight for justice and truth. This understanding should have been heeded by Havel, who as president served systems of state power and supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Havel’s positions as a politician tarnished all he had fought for as an outsider and a dissident. The same can be said of Nelson Mandela, who, once in office, bowed to the demands of foreign investors and international banks and abandoned the African National Congress’s thirty-five-year-old socialist economic policy, known as the Freedom Charter, which called for the nationalization of mines, banks, and monopoly industries.

  28. Jonathan Mirsky, “Liu Xiaobo’s Plea for the Human Spirit,” New York Times, December 30, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/books/review/liu-xiaobos-plea-for-the-human-spirit.html.

  29. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Random House Digital, 1993), 78.

  30. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm (accessed 6 Jan. 2012).

  31. Carolyn Jones, “Berkeley Tree-sitters Finally Down to Earth,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 10, 2008, http://articles.sfgate.com/2008–09–10/news/17157077_1_tree-sitters-uc-berkeley-training-center (accessed 3 Jan. 2012).

  32. Avrich, 8–10.

  33. Marx, “Eighteenth Brumaire.”

  34. Avrich, 7.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Ibid., 9–10.

  37. Suzanne Goldenburg, “U.S. Eco-activist Jailed for Two Years,” Guardian, July 27, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/27/tim-dechristopher-jailed-two-years.

  38. Fran Spielman, “Downtown Will Be on Lockdown During NATO, G-8 Summit,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 12, 2012.

  39. Shanthi Bharatwaj, “Bank Foreclosures to Surge in 2012: RealtyTrac,” MainStreet, January 4, 2012, http://www.mainstreet.com/article/real-estate/foreclosure/bank-foreclosures-surge-2012-realtytrac (accessed 7 Jan. 2012).

  40. Peter King, “1 in 5 Predicted to Default,” mortgageloan.com, September 21, 2011, http://www.mortgageloan.com/1–5-predicted-default-8856 (accessed 6 Jan. 2012).

  41. Susan Heavey, “Study Links 45,000 U.S. Deaths to Lack of Insurance,” Reuters, September 17, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/17/us-usa-healthcare-deaths-idUSTRE58G6W520090917 (accessed 6 Jan. 2012).

  42. Aparna Mathur and Matt Jensen, “Tracking the Unreported (15.6%) Unemployed,” Real Clear Markets, January 4, 2012, http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2012/01/04/tracking_the_unreported_156_unemployed_99440.html (accessed 7 Jan. 2012). The authors note that the official unemployment rate of 8.6 percent masks an actual unemployment rate that is closer to 15.6 percent. This is because the Bureau of Labor Statistics takes the number of unemployed people and divides it by the number of people in the labor force. The disparity in the percentages occurs because of those who are included and those who are excluded officially from the labor force. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures the labor force as those who are employed or who have actively looked for work within the last four weeks. The official rate, the authors point out, excludes workers who have decided to stop looking for employment. It also excludes those who have part-time work but seek a full-time job. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, aware of the disparity, publishes an alternative measure of the unemployment rate based on an analysis of the Current Population Survey, a household survey. This measure, referred to as the “U-6 rate,” includes those who have looked for work in the last twelve months rather than the last four weeks. It also includes people who opted to work part-time even though they seek full-time jobs. The U-6 rate moved from 8.8 percent in December 2007 to 17.4 percent in October 2009 and 15.6 percent in November 2011. More than 5.7 million Americans had been unemployed by the end of 2011 for more than twenty-seven weeks, or forty-three percent of all unemployed.

  43. Orwell, 263.

  44. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 3.3.148–167, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

  45. Commodity index investing, as Matt Taibbi does a good job of laying out in his fine book Griftopia, was originally designed as
a space for two main parties—those producing, like farmers who grow corn, and those purchasing, like cereal companies in need of corn—to buy and sell a particular commodity in large quantities. But it also allowed each party to buy futures contracts as a form of protection. If a cereal company’s success next year depends on corn being at $3 a bushel, it might buy six months worth of futures contracts guaranteeing corn at $3 a bushel, so that if there’s a spike in price and corn goes up to $3.20, which it can’t afford, the business doesn’t collapse. The same is true for farmers. If a farmer anticipates a glut during which the price of corn might sink down to, let’s say, $2.50 a bushel, he’ll buy futures contracts so that he can keep selling corn at $3 a bushel. The third party—composed of speculators—ensures that business runs smoothly. Say there’s a shortage of demand. Companies aren’t buying enough from the corn supply. A speculator will come in and buy the remaining futures contracts, hold on to them, and sell them later at a slightly higher price when there’s more demand. Speculators ease periods of stagnancy, and keep everyone happy. Too much speculative involvement, however, destroys the market. This is what prompted Franklin Roosevelt’s Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) of 1936, which prevented speculators from manipulating the prices of day-to-day commodities. Speculators only want the prices of commodities to go up. It’s how they make a profit. But farmers rely on a steady price. So does the cereal company. When prices swell, the farmer loses money because he sells less, the cereal company loses money because corn is more expensive, and finally the consumer loses money because food is more expensive.

  Goldman Sachs in 2003 convinced the government to lift the position limits Roosevelt had set up in the CEA, despite the evident danger. It argued that, like the farmer or the cereal company, it was at the whim of fluctuating prices, that position limits discrimination against the speculators who took on the same risk. The government conceded, allowing Goldman Sachs to buy up all the futures contracts and generate an artificial commodities bubble. So from 2003 to 2008, the commodities index market increased by a factor of twenty-five, from $13 billion to $317 billion. And prices increased two hundred percent. International relief agencies estimated that one hundred million additional people starved during the summer of 2008 because of an increase in food prices. See Taibbi’s chapter “Blowout: The Commodities Bubble,” in Griftopia (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010), 124–155.

  46. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Random House Digital, 2009), 31.

  47. Ibid., 52.

  48. Ibid., 95.

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