Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  “We started an Occupy house in Mount Rainier in Maryland,” Zeese says. “Its focus is Occupy the Economy. This is the U.N.’s year of the co-op. We want to build on that. We want to start worker-owned co-ops and occupy our own co-ops. These co-ops will allow Occupiers to have resources so that they can continue occupying. It will allow them to get resources for the community. It will be an example to the public, a public where a high percentage of people are underemployed and unemployed although they have a lot of skills. People can band together in their community and solve a problem in the community. They can create a worker-owned collaborative of some kind. They can develop models of collective living.

  “We looked at polling on seven key issues and found supermajorities of Americans—sixty-plus percent—were with us on issues including health care, retirement, energy, money in politics,” he says. “We are more mainstream than Congress. We aren’t crazy radicals. We are trying to do what the people want. This is participatory democracy versus oligarchy. It’s the elites versus the people. We stand with the majority.”

  The Washington encampment, like many Occupy encampments, has had to deal with those society has discarded—the homeless, the mentally ill, the destitute, and those whose lives have been devastated by substance abuse. This created a huge burden for the organizers, who decided that they were not equipped or able to deal with these wider, societal problems. The encampment in Washington’s Freedom Plaza enforces strict rules of behavior, including an insistence on sobriety, in order to ensure its own survival. Other Occupy movements will have to do the same.

  “We don’t want to become a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter,” Zeese says. “We’re a political movement. These are problems beyond our ability. How do we deal with this? Let’s feed the Occupiers first, and those who are just squatting here for free get food last, so if we have enough food, we feed them. If we don’t, we can’t. We always fed people, of course. We usually have enough peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for everyone. But as we debated this issue, we stated talking about things like, ‘How about a Freedom Plaza badge, or a Freedom Plaza wristband, or a Freedom Plaza card?’ None of those ideas were passed. What we ended up developing was a set of principles. Those principles included in them participation. You can’t be there because you want a [tent] or free food. You have to be there to build the community and the movement. You have to participate in the general assemblies.

  “The first principles, of course, were nonviolence and non-property destruction,” he says. “We don’t accept violent language. When you’re violent you undermine everything. If the protesters in [Manhattan’s] Union Square, who were pepper-sprayed, had been throwing something at the police, you would not have had the movement. It was because they were nonviolent and didn’t react when they were being pepper-sprayed that the movement grew. At U.C. Davis, when those cops just walked down the line and sprayed, the nonviolent reaction by those kids was fantastic.”

  “We constantly kept hearing in the beginning, what are our demands, what are our demands, is our demand to meet with Obama?” Zeese says. “We said: ‘Oh no, that would just be a waste. If we meet with Obama, he’ll just get a picture opportunity out of that. We won’t get anything.’ You don’t make demands until you have power. If you make demands too soon, you don’t demand enough and you can’t enforce the demand that you get. So if you get promised an election, you can’t enforce that the ballots are counted right, for example. We realized late into our discussions—we had six months of planning, so four months into it—’we don’t have the power to make a demand.’ That was very hard for a lot of our people to accept.

  “Instead of making demands, we put up what we stood for, what principles we wanted to see,” Zeese says. “The overarching demand was end corporate rule, shift power to the people. Once you make that as your demand, as your pinnacle, you can pick any issue—energy, health care, elections—and the solution becomes evident. For health care, it’s get the insurance companies out from between doctors and patients; on finance, it’s break up the big banks so that six banks don’t control sixty percent of the economy, and break them up into community banks so that the money stays at home rather than going to Wall Street; energy is to diversify energy sources so people can build and have their own energy on their roof and become energy producers. The overarching goal was: End corporate rule, shift power to the people. We developed a slogan: ‘Human needs before corporate greed.’ After that, everything fell into place for us.”

  When the congressional supercommittee was meeting, the Occupy Washington movement formed its own supercommittee. The Occupy Super Committee, which managed to get its hearing aired on C-SPAN, included experts on the wealth divide, fair taxation, the military budget, job creation, health care, and democratizing the economy as well as giving voice to the ninety-nine percent. A report titled “The 99%’s Deficit Proposal: How to Create Jobs, Reduce the Wealth Divide and Control Spending,” resulted from the Occupy hearing.11 The report made evidence-based recommendations Zeese knew would not be considered by Congress, but still he saw the report as foundational for the movement.

  “History shows the demands made by those in revolt are never initially considered by government,” he says. “Our job is to make the politically impossible the politically inevitable.”

  This rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, or those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with one another and the planet are radically reconfigured. And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are at once terrified and befuddled. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don’t understand.

  “Something is happening here,” Bob Dylan sang in “Ballad of a Thin Man.” “But you don’t know what it is,/ Do you, Mister Jones?”

  The corporate state, if it understood the depth of the suffering and rage of tens of millions of Americans, would institute profound reforms to mitigate the poverty and despair. The $1 trillion in student debt, which now surpasses credit card debt, would be forgiven.12 There would be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions, which took the homes of seven million people between 2008 and 2011 and was expected to dispossess another two million in 2011.13 There would be a $1 trillion jobs program targeted at those under the age of twenty-five. And this is the minimum. The New Deal in the 1930s, for all the vicious assaults it endured from business interests and right-wing politicians, was in fact the mechanism that saved capitalism, which had come perilously close to collapse. The misguided attempt by the corporate state to physically eradicate protests and the Occupy encampments without addressing the issues that brought people into the streets is a dark and ominous sign. The rage will find other nonviolent organizing outlets. Or it will eventually descend into violence.

  The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term inverted totalitarianism in his book Democracy Incorporated to describe our political system. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation, and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise, and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. Corporations, hiding behind this smokescreen, devour us from the inside out. They have no allegiance to the country.

  The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive and eloquent spokespeople like Barack Obama,
control the uses of science, technology, education, and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”14

  The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, officially anointed experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists, or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics are banished. Acceptable opinions, as Dorothy Parker once said of Katherine Hepburn’s emotional range as an actor, run the gamut from A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident, or successful, as we are steadily stripped of rights, money, and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like The Oprah Winfrey Show, promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.”15 We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”16

  Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, once guaranteed under our Constitution, have been stripped away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit.

  But the façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we move from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to George Orwell’s 1984. In Orwell’s novel most of the citizens in Oceania did not live there. The Inner Party composed about two percent of the population.17 The Outer Party composed another thirteen percent. The remaining one hundred million people were outcasts or “proles.” A similar configuration of wealth and power, one replicated by most centralized totalitarian systems of authority, is now our own. The well-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history18 mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state, dominated by two corporate parties, has devolved from a capitalist democracy to a stark neo-feudalism. The elites have squandered the country’s wealth on two of the costliest and most useless wars in American history while blithely pretending the environmental crisis does not exist. News and entertainment bleed into each other to become indistinguishable. There is constant reporting on the foibles of those in shows such as Jersey Shore, Keeping Up with the Kardashians or The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. But as our predicament becomes more apparent, anger is replacing the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity and chatter of celebrity gossip. The bleakness of our postindustrial pockets, where more than fifty million Americans live in poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,”19 coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions, and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism no longer works.

  And the global elite know it. They have lost all sense of proportion. They wage vast and expanding wars and proxy wars against desperate groups of fanatics who have no conventional military and little more than box cutters and assault rifles. They build ever more elaborate walls and security systems to protect themselves, including the vast internal security apparatus of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, with some one million employees. The elites are lashing out with such disproportionate force, fury, and viciousness against peaceful protestors, many of whom come out of the middle class, as well as Muslims in the Middle East, that they are turning ever greater numbers of an alienated mass, at home and abroad, against them.

  We, like those who opposed the long night of communism, no longer have any mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will protect or advance our rights. We, too, have undergone a coup d’état carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic Communist Party, but by our largely anonymous corporate overlords. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The internal security and surveillance state, justified in the name of the war on terror, will be the instrument used against us. The corrosion of the legal system, begun by George W. Bush and codified by Barack Obama’s Democratic administration, means we can all be denied habeas corpus. The warrantless wiretapping, eavesdropping, and monitoring of tens of millions of citizens, once illegal, is now legal. The state has given itself the power to unilaterally declare U.S. citizens as enemy combatants and torture or assassinate them, as Barack Obama did when he in September 2011 ordered the killing of the American-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.20 The state can deny U.S. citizens suspected of what it vaguely defines as “terrorist” activities the right to a trial. It can turn these citizens over to the military, which can hold them without charges indefinitely. Our country’s capacity for draconian control in the face of widespread unrest means we will be no different from other totalitarian regimes throughout history. Police forces in major cities have been transformed into paramilitary units with assault rifles, helicopters, and armored vehicles. Almost certainly, if the pressure mounts, as I expect it will, these militarized police forces will become ubiquitous and people will be killed.

  The corruption of the legal system—the ability of the state to make legal what was once illegal—is always the precursor to totalitarian rule. The timidity of those tasked with protecting our Constitutional rights—the media, elected officials, judges, the one million lawyers in this country, and the thousands of law school professors and law school deans—means there is no internal mechanism with which to decry or prevent abuse. Occupy encampments were violently shut down by police in major cities, including St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Denver, Portland, Oakland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York City. Voices tasked with defending the rule of law and the right of dissent and nonviolent protest remained silent. If peaceful protest is not defended, if it is effectively thwarted by the corporate state, we will see widespread anger and frustration manifest in an ascendant militancy, rioting, the destruction of property, and violence.

  “Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?”21 Orwell wrote in 1984. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”

  Despotic regimes, in the end, collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers ordered to carry out acts of repression and violence to protect the elite no longer obey orders, disgraced regimes swiftly crumble. They never appear that fragile from the outside. In the fall of 1989, the massive machinery of the Communist Party in then-Eastern Germany, and the expansive internal security network of the Stasi, seemed to those of us who were there, including those leading the street protests, unassailable. And yet as soon as peaceful protests rocked the country, the East German state crumbled within weeks. The Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, referred to as the Conducător or “Leader,”
ruled through terror and a state-sponsored personality cult. He stood on a balcony in Palace Square in Bucharest on December 20, 1989, before a crowd of one hundred and ten thousand people bused in from factories and offices or press-ganged off the streets of the capital by the Securitate, the state security apparatus. Ceauşescu, with his wife Elena at his side, walked out and stood before the crowd at 12:31 in the afternoon and began to speak into a bank of four microphones. The rally of adulation for the leader began the way countless events in the past had begun. There were cheers and applause. But eight minutes into his speech, there were faint sounds of booing and catcalls and a steady chant of TI-MI-ŞOA-RA, the name of the city where the regime had launched a bloody crackdown on protestors. Ceauşescu looked first confused and then frightened as crowds for the first time began to shout him down with the words: “Ceauşescu, we are the People!” and “Down with the Killer!” He stopped speaking and hastily ended his speech. He and his wife attempted to flee the city in a helicopter, but they were captured and executed four days later by a firing squad. Victor Stănculescu, the army general whom Ceauşescu had depended on to crush protests, was the one who oversaw his Christmas Day execution.22 Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak lost power once a passive and cowed population found its voice and these dictators could no longer count on the security forces or the military to fire into crowds.