The People's [Censored], Issue 1

Issue 1

January 2012

OCCUPY BATON ROUGE

OccupyBR.com

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Why Occupy? The reasoning behind a consensus-based community

BY DAVID McLAUGHLIN

Occupy Baton Rouge

There has been a lot of criticism of Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movements as a whole. The criti-cisms are varied, ranging from out-right dismissal of the movement as a bunch of unemployed hippies, to the more nuanced complaint that the movement is impractical because there are no leaders, specific policy proposals, or lists of demands. One of the most baffling things to critics, though, is the process by which Oc-cupy makes decisions. That is, Oc-cupy makes decisions through Gen-eral Assemblies, which use a consen-sus decision-making process. Everyone is familiar with the idea of majority rules. When voting on a pro-posal, a majority of the votes are re-quired for its acceptance (usually 60% or higher). Proponents of a cer-tain proposal argue with proponents of counter-proposals in an attempt to persuade others to accept their point of view. If you get 60% of the votes or more, you win. From the perspec-tive of those involved, it is generally a competitive procedure based off the idea that others need to be convinced of your proposal. Consensus decision-making, on the other hand, is a collaborative, rather than a competitive, process. It

The People’s [Censored] is a publication produced by participants in Occupy Ba-ton Rouge. The People’s [Censored] does not—and could not—represent any-one except its participants. We are in no way affiliated with the [Censored] or their corporate overlords Capitol City Press. The views of the authors are their own.

The biggest threat to paid speech is free speech.

is not based on the idea that other individuals need to be convinced of your exact proposal. Rather, it is based on the idea that it is impossible or even undesirable to convince oth-ers to accept your point of view com-pletely. You may be able to convince others of a certain point here or there, but hardly anyone is able to com-pletely convert another person to their point of view. Thus, an uncompromis-ing, combative commitment to your exact version solution is anathema to consensus decision-making. In the consensus decision-making process, proposals should be ratified with the consent of all involved partici-pants. Consent, of course, is quite different from perfect and enthusiastic agreement. A proposal may not be exactly what you wanted, but is ac-ceptable enough for you to let pass. Consensus decision making in-volves a process in which participants contribute to a shared proposal. Rather than constructing individual proposals separately and competing with others to get yours passed, you try to take all input from individual members into account and construct one proposal, which creates an at-mosphere of cooperation. In order for this process to be valuable, all mem-bers of the decision-making body should be afforded equal input in the process. All members must have an

equal opportunity to present and amend proposals. In fact, the deci-sion-making process should actively solicit the input of all members. The idea behind consensus deci-sion making is that by including the input of all stakeholders, potential problems and concerns will be bet-ter addressed. Furthermore, a process that includes and respects all parties will result in greater coop-eration and faster implementation once a proposal is accepted. A common problem with majoritarian democracies is that proposals are passed without taking into account the input of minorities, which leads to feelings of exclusion and resent-ment. This results in less enthusi-asm and more resistance to the proposal once it is passed. Majority rule, in comparison, frames decisions in a win/lose di-chotomy that ignores the possibility of compromise. Also, proponents of consensus argue that majority rule, where 60% can crush the 40%, can lead to a tyranny of the majority. These criticisms of majoritarian democracies make sense if we look at anthropology. The originators of majoritarian democracy, the Greeks, were some of the most competitive people known to his-tory...

☛ See WHY, page 5

Nabi Saleh’s tears

Europe, the second recession?

Flaws in the FDA’s risk assessment of gulf seafood

The dilemma of Occupy: How to parlay popular support into political change

More inside...

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2 January 2012 The People’s [Censored]

BY JOSHUA FINI Occupy Baton Rouge “If America gets a cough, the world gets a cold.” The issue today has changed that phrase, at least slightly. Due to the Shock Doctrine employed by the United States in the late 20

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century, the world became so inte-grated that very few could foresee the crisis about to unfold. The situation that the Lehman Brothers’ collapse caused could only be described as a tsunami. The United States, Europe, and Asia had for the past twenty years, since the fall of the Iron and Bam-boo Curtains, become open for multi-national companies to ex-pand and exploit. During the Bush era, there was major economic competition between the financial sectors of New York and London. The Anglo-American business free market model became the refer-ence for the rest of world to follow, including the rest of Europe. One such country to take the Neo-Liberal Doctrine to the ex-

treme would be Iceland. Their Prime Minister, Geir Haarde, wanted Ice-land to leave its Social-Democrat past behind and push for the Neolib-eral doctrine that many other coun-tries were taking. PM Haarde began full scale priva-tization programs in order to push for his “free-market” agenda; one prob-lem was that the three largest and oldest banks in Iceland came under the ownership of close friends to the Cabinet. The country’s banks bor-rowed 9 times the GDP of the coun-try. When Iceland took over the banks, the average debt per citizen was $350,000! Iceland quickly de-clared bankruptcy, which led to the UK putting the three Icelandic banks on their list of terrorists. This would damage the economy of the UK se-verely. With Europe being hit by the crashing market, Iceland wasn’t alone. Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Greece (PIGS) became major leading countries in the housing bub-ble. The jewel of the crown was clearly Spain. Spain had more houses being

built than France and Germany combined; this led to the country being given the title “The miracle of Europe”. In 2007, the US housing market began to show some cracks and within a year the global economy, including Europe, was on the verge of collapse. The economic powerhouses of Europe—UK, Germany, and France—financed the economic development of PIGS. With the US housing market fueling the global economic growth for the decade, it seemed that the skies were the only limits to the economic growth of the 21st century. The debt of the PIGS was high during the growth period, but due to the growth it was sustainable, at least as long as the US housing market continued to grow. That party ended quickly in 2008. Rapidly, the crisis which started in the United States with the Leh-man Brothers’ collapse spread like a virus across the globe...

☛ See EUROPE, page 5

Europe, the second recession?

BY BRYAN PERKINS Occupy Baton Rouge An article written by research-ers at the Natural Resources De-fense Council and published in the peer-reviewed journal Environ-mental Health Perspectives calls into question the scientific basis of the risk assessment methods used by the FDA when determining the safety of seafood after the BP Gulf oil spill of 2010. The article states that the FDA Gulf seafood risk assessment con-tains numerous assumptions that are inconsistent with the FDA’s own prior practice and with risk assessment guidelines produced by other authoritative entities. Each of the inconsistent as-sumptions would result in an un-derestimate of risk for a significant fraction of the exposed population. The questionable assumptions

include six main issues: 1. High consumer body weight. When determining the threshold for allowable levels (Levels of Con-cern) of PAH contaminants in Gulf Coast seafood, the FDA assumed the consumer weighs 176 lbs. Close to 75% of the female population weighs less than 176 lbs, and the average body weight of a 4-6 year old child is almost ¼ of that. PAHs are the main constituent of crude oil that has a potential to pre-sent a health risk via ingestion of contaminated seafood. Because ac-ceptable intake of PAHs is calculated as a fraction of bodyweight, using an inflated assumption in a risk assess-ment is systematically under-protective of the entire population that weighs below the level used in the calculation. 2. Low estimates of seafood consumption. The Levels of Concern used by

the FDA depended on relatively low estimates of seafood con-sumption. Populations living along the Gulf Coast have a significantly higher rate of seafood consump-tion when compared to the rest of the nation. For example, surveys of New Orleans residents and recreational anglers in Louisiana found con-sumers reporting shrimp intakes of 65.1 and 55.5 grams per day re-spectively, significantly higher than FDA’s estimate of 13 grams/day. 3. Failure to adjust for early life susceptibility to PAHs. The FDA conducted a single risk assessment for adults and did not evaluate potential increased risks to the developing fetus or child...

☛ See FLAWS, page 7

Flaws in the FDA’s risk assessment of Gulf seafood

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The People’s [Censored] January 2012 3

BY CHRISTINE BANIEWICZ ImaginAction Associate Artist I lean against the walls of a small bathroom in Nabi Saleh. Someone knocks on the door. “Just a minute.” I sniff and spit into the toilet. Alright, enough. I emerge. I arrived in Nabi Saleh an hour ago with my colleague, Sarah, and a few students from Jenin. The journey took two hours. “I hope they don’t spray the wa-ter,” I said. Talib turns to face me. Morning sun bounces off his aviators as behind him, steam rises from a paper cup of coffee. “The shit water, khara.” “Ah, yes,” says Talib. “The shit.” Nabi Saleh is a small Palestin-ian village near Ramallah. Every Friday, local and international ac-tivists gather to peacefully demon-strate against Israel’s confiscation of the village’s land and resources. Every week they are met with a mess of soldiers, tear gas and the affably named “shit water.” “It doesn’t come off of your clothes for three weeks,” says Sarah. “It’s chemical.” “Yeah.” I think of the change of clothes I stashed for myself this morning. I hope so. After endless olive trees and terraced, sand-colored mountains, we arrive in Nabi Saleh. The driver pulls onto the main road. The smell is immediate. “Oh my God.” I pull my scarf up over my nose. It’s rancid—like skunk spray and rotting flesh. The land is saturated with it. Everyone in the car follows suit, covering their noses until we pull onto the shoulder and disembark. “There’s food, and a bathroom if you need it, in this house here.” Some folks in kuffias direct us to a stone house down the road. It is one of a dozen homes that line the street. “Beit Bilal,” Bilal’s house. The front door’s open; we walk inside. A large table in the main room is covered with hummus and fried eggs. Tea is everywhere. Welcome, welcome! I shake hands with Bilal. He

looks tired behind thick glasses. His hands are work-worn. “Please,” he gestures at the table. “Eat.” I oblige him. Talib and Noor enter-tain his five-year-old niece. “Come, come,” says Bilal. “I want to show you a film, to understand the situation here.” He leads us into the living room. We sit facing a large television. Talib lights a cigarette. The film be-gins. It’s a home video of sorts; a twenty-minute collage of footage shot over the years in Nabi Saleh. “They have a machine that fires 60 tear gas canisters at once,” says Bilal, pausing the video in a still im-age of the weapon. “Here’s the spring,” he says. The camera shakes, focused on a pro-tected fresh water spring on a hill. Soldiers guard it. “No Palestinians allowed here.” The film is a nightmare: children dragged into custody, separated from their mothers on suspicion of rock-throwing; streams of high-pressured chemical water sprayed directly on houses; a soldier swats an old woman to the ground with his arm; a tear-gas canister whizzes at fatal velocity past a young girl. In one clip, soldiers break down Bilal’s door and set up camp on his roof. From this vantage point, they shoot tear gas through the windows of the neighboring house, shattering them and causing the families gath-ered inside to panic. I watch as white smoke hisses into the room. Parents shepherd their children into a bedroom away from the fumes. Inside the room, children sniffle. Gas creeps under the door, stinging their eyes. In desperation, parents toss their own children, as carefully as possible, out of the second-story window into the waiting arms of adults below. “Fuck.” The children cry—because their eyes sting, because they’re scared to jump, because they’re confused. The bedroom slowly fills with gas. I paid for this. My face is hot. 20% of US federal tax dollars for defense. Every pay stub, every tax withdrawn

from my measly waitressing salary courses through me. My students curse. Sarah’s head is in her hands. The film ends and I excuse my-self. I evacuate my grief in the bathroom, ribs flapping silently. I finish. I emerge. Ben has arrived with Ghali from Ramallah, so we make our way to the main road and greet them. A pack of protestors joins us. We walk up the hill. When we arrive at the top, pro-gressive-looking westerners pour out of busses and our numbers swell to one hundred, maybe more. “It’s important that you feel safe,” a bearded man says. He wears all black. “If you are ar-rested, don’t resist or struggle. Anything you do or say will be used against you.” I’m standing in a ring of new-comers. We’re being debriefed. “If you breathe the gas, it will hurt. Try to cover your nose and mouth, but if you start to feel it sting, just relax. It’s temporary. Breathe slowly.” He gives us his telephone number, in case we are arrested. “I work with an organization that can represent you if something happens.” Every-one nods. “We will try to walk down to the spring,” he says. “If you don’t want to get arrested, or are scared of the gas, then I suggest you stay back towards the road. Don’t do anything that makes you feel un-safe. Alright?” Already chants are starting, funneled through megaphones in the center of the crowd. The de-briefing ends, and the demonstra-tion begins. “Harree-ay! Harree-ay!” A tiny girl, maybe four years old, toddles ahead of me in a red dress. In a cluster of flags towards the front, a woman leads Arabic chants. I re-peat the words I recognize: Pales-tine, freedom, freedom. We walk together down the hill, slowly: men, women, old and young, European and Middle East-ern and American...

☛ See TEARS, page 6

Nabi Saleh’s tears

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BY DAVID KIRSHNER Occupy Baton Rouge We in Occupy Baton Rouge, as throughout the movement, are moti-vated by anger, fear, and frustration stemming from government that lopsidedly favors the rich at the ex-pense of the poor, and that increas-ingly seems unresponsive to catas-trophic threats that would engulf even the rich; a government out of touch and out of control. What to do. This is the dilemma of Occupy. We are ordinary people who ‘get it’ that our elected leaders–the ones with the fancy credentials, public policy and political theory expertise, legislative experience–are AWOL. What can we do to wrest control of our government away from pri-vate interests and toward the public good? What we are doing is striking out at the obvious targets, the greedy Wall Streeters, the spineless and unfaithful politicians. But where can this really lead? How does drawing attention to the problems–we’ve done that admirably!–move us to-ward solution, when the very ones who control the levers of power ARE the problem? The Occupy movement really has no answers to these questions. The default strategy that we’re playing out at present goes like this: (1) grow the movement so that it can’t be ignored; (2) disrupt business-as-usual to the extent that those in power feel threatened enough to make concessions. The problem with this strategy is that our oppo-nents hold almost all of the cards. They can work diligently and effec-tively to discredit us (manipulating public opinion IS something they’re good at). They can stall until we fall apart from discouragement or inter-nal conflict–our ability to remain unified by being leaderless is fabu-lous. And if those don’t work they can offer token and superficial con-cessions, the minimum needed to convince the majority of citizens that we’ve won and ought to now go back to our homes. Real, funda-mental change will not come about from our present course. As a result, people within the Oc-cupy movement are considering much more radical alternatives. Perhaps representative democracy

can’t work. Perhaps we need to find a way to rework democracy so that it operates like our GAs, a participatory form of direct democracy. Maybe capitalism can’t work in concert with truly representative democracy. Maybe we need to tear down the sys-tem to effect any real change. These are the ideas that flicker in the back-ground of Occupy consciousness. The obstacles toward achieving any of these radical solutions are ob-vious and monumental. The public may support our clamor for a fairer system, but probably not for a whole new, unknown system that might pro-duce chaos or worse ahead of any possible payoff of justice. Still, if re-writing our democracy or changing our entire economic system is what is needed to obtain a just and rational system of governance, we shouldn’t shirk from our responsibility to strive for a better America for future genera-tions. But we would be remiss not to first consider how our democracy might be corrected before we opt to tear it down and start over. That’s the purpose of this essay, to analyze the roots of the malaise of our democracy and map out a strategy to correct it.

Over time our democracy has be-come more perfect. Within just the past hundred years, women and then African Americans achieved the right to vote. In England, the first election to parliament in 1265 AD (40 years after King John signed the Magna Carta) enfranchised only landowners. American democracy was founded partly in rejection of the classism of English society; the Jeffersonian ideal of all people being created equal (i.e., with equal rights) is firmly entrenched. Still, the undue influence of wealth in our political processes needs to be understood as a legacy of a democ-ratic tradition that originated to serve the interests of the privileged few. This is a democracy that can still be improved to better fulfill our ideals of justice and equality. The immediate problem with which we are faced is a political system that is unresponsive to the needs and in-terests of the electorate. The reason is easily discernible. In order to run for office a candidate must raise money from private interests. People in a financial position to contribute large sums to political campaigns do not do so for altruistic reasons, they do so with the expectation that once elected

the candidate whom they have backed will look out for their special interests. This is not a direct quid-pro-quo. There are no deals worked out in advance. But if candidates fail to act in the interests of their finan-cial backers they can expect their financial support to dry up. In this way, the business of governance becomes the art of legislating on behalf of special interests while paying lip service to the needs and interests of constituents. With the recent elimination of funding limits for corporate spending to influence electoral contests (the Citizens United decision) the art of govern-ance has become easier. No longer does the politician have to figure out how to dupe the electorate. The same special interests that fund his or her campaign can now deliver the electorate directly. Thus even the semblance of responsive gov-ernance is slipping away. In looking at this travesty of de-mocratic process, it is easy to mis-perceive the actors as villains, the politicians, the lobbyists, the corpo-rations, the wealthy. Thus we hear cries of “end corporate greed” and “term limits to get rid of these career politicians.” Each of these refrains is music to the ears of the intransigent wealthy–those determined to hold on to the undeserved political influ-ence they currently enjoy. The first is a direct attack on capitalism–a system rooted in the assumption that people act in their own self-interest. The second is a direct at-tack on representative democracy–a system based on the premise that individuals empowered by their community can act in the interests of their community. By railing against the founda-tions of our system, we lose the broad support we could get for mak-ing the small changes to our elec-toral process that would put politi-cians back in service of the public interest. Our current strategy of re-sistance is based directly on the Arab Spring that served as the in-spiration for Occupy. But we al-ready ARE a democracy. We don’t need to tear down the system to get private money out of politics, we only need to clarify the principles upon which our democracy ought to be working...

☛ See CHANGE, page 8

The Dilemma of Occupy: How to Parlay Popular Support into Political Change

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As a society, Greece tended to make everything into a public con-test, from athletics to philosophy to tragic drama. So it’s not really that surprising that the same society that gave us the Olympic Games also turned political decision-making into a public contest. Greece was also a democracy of citizens in arms, which allowed the majority to violently crush minori-ties that protested too strongly. As far as anthropologists can tell, consensus decision-making has been around as long as hu-mankind has existed. There are countless examples, past and pre-sent, of indigenous people making decisions through consensus. Ex-amples include the fokon’olona (communal assembly) of the Mala-gasy to the popular assemblies of the Tzeltal speaking peoples of the Chiapas. Most of these societies

were anarchist in nature. By that, anthropologists mean that there was no organization with a monopoly on violence (i.e. a state) to coerce a dissenting minority (or a dissenting majority) into compliance. It’s there-fore natural for these societies to gravitate towards consensus deci-sion-making, a process that reduces the need for coercion in the first place. In North America, the consensus decision-making process was popu-lar among the Native Americans. After Native Americans and their so-cieties were largely wiped out by the European invaders, consensus deci-sion-making made a comeback through the modern feminist move-ment. The consensus decision-making process was in no small part a broad backlash against the macho, sexist, self-aggrandizing, mostly male leaders of the student and civil rights movements of 1960s and 70s. Much of the procedure they used originated with the Quakers. The Quakers in turn claim to have been

inspired by Native American prac-tice, though it is difficult to deter-mine the veracity of this claim. It is true though that most Native Americans practiced a form of con-sensus decision-making. In fact, almost all human communities throughout history that aren’t draw-ing upon the ancient traditions of Greece use some form of consen-sus. Ultimately, consensus decision-making is a reflection of the “you get what you put into it” view of society. It is more tedious and time-consuming than other deci-sion making processes, but results in decisions, and a society, that serves the interests of all much better than the rule of a minority, or a majority, could. This article was inspired by the Al Jazeera article "Occupy Wall Street's anarchist roots" by anthro-pologist and activist David Grae-ber.

WHY

Continued from page 1

One direct problem came into light with the likely collapse of the world’s largest insurance company, AIG. If AIG would have collapsed, the economic structure of the West and the world would have col-lapsed. With the crash of the US housing market, it became appar-ent the economic growth of the PIGS was in decline, which meant that their debt would sky rocket. When a country borrows money from another country, it is done through the purchase of bonds of the country that needs the loans. In the case of Europe and interest rates on bonds, there is a number which sounds the alarms for a real crisis, 7%. In the spring of 2010 Greece reached 7%, which led to a Euro Zone bailout of 110 billion Euros. Later that year, Ireland re-ceived a bailout, and in 2011 Por-tugal received a bailout. The worst possible issue had come up in Au-gust of 2011 with Italy reaching the 7% mark. In 2008, the expression was “too big, too fail”, but in the case of Italy, it is “too big, too save”. Italy’s GDP reached past $2 trillion, but its debt was over 100%

of the economy’s GDP. This crisis began to escalate to the level of a liquidity crisis, which would have led to another crisis just like the fall of Lehman Brothers’ but would have been even worse. As a result, six central banks, including the US, de-cided to pump liquidity into Europe to prevent another possibility of col-lapse. The debt crisis is under con-trol, at least for another 6 months. There is another side to the coin of economic chaos in Europe, protests. Since 2010, Greece has seen major protests and strikes against austerity measures which were made to prevent the growing debt. Greeks took to the streets, and Athens be-gan to look even worse than Cairo. In 2011, the largest general strike in the nation’s history took place. In the UK, a major destructive riot took place in London and lasted for weeks. It was sparked by a murder by police and quickly escalated into a full scale riot. In France, the unions began “boss-napping” and staging major protests which literally intimi-dated the government. Later on in 2011, the M-15 movement of Spain began a full scale occupation of Ma-drid in order to push for change. This solidarity movement actually is one of the main sources of inspiration for

the American Occupy Wall Street Movement. The crisis in Europe is deep and problematic for the stability of the US. Not only is Europe the largest market for US goods, but European debt happens to be a major investment for the US finan-cial institutions, which means if they default on their debts the US financial sector could face a col-lapse far worse than what hap-pened in 2008. The stakes are high for the US and the now grow-ing populist movement, Occupy Wall Street. The greatest opportu-nity for structural change and eco-nomic justice is when the people “lose it” and take to the streets. The Euro Crisis is no matter to ig-nore, and when it becomes an ac-tual collapse, the vacuum of power is open for the people to take back what had been taken from them for decades.

EUROPE


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My eyes dart from student to stu-dent. Electric tethers issue from my heart, tacked onto them and buzz-ing with signals. I won’t let them out of my sight. We pass Bilal’s house, round a corner, and head out of the village. It’s open here. Loose stones flank the street in steep slopes on both sides. The Israeli settlement of Halamish is perched on a nearby hilltop. A high fence circles the white, freshly constructed homes. We round a bend, and there they are: a large, olive-colored convoy of military vehicles blocks the way out of the village. Soldiers fill out the line, toting automatics. The precession shudders to a halt. There’s a disturbance behind me. Some women from the village fall to their knees in the street, sob-bing. I crane my neck, trying to discern the source of concern. Ben puts a hand on my shoul-der and guides me away. “That’s where Mustafa died, come on.” “Oh.” I step away. Last weekend a 28-year-old man from the village, Mustafa Tamimi, was murdered while peacefully protesting the Occupa-tion here. An Israeli soldier fired a tear gas canister directly at him, from less than 10 meters away. The projectile smashed into his face, instantly blinding him. He bled from his eyes in the street, and in less than 24 hours, he died. “You, killed, Mustafa!” blares from the megaphones. The crowd repeats. And suddenly it begins. Without visible provocation, the army blasts a round of tear gas canisters into the sky. They sound like fireworks. Don’t just turn and run. Ghali’s voice is in my mind, from our con-versation yesterday. Follow the trail of smoke in the sky, to see where they will land, and get out of the way. Like a pack of ponies, the dem-onstrators spook and disperse. I resist the urge to turn tail and run blindly back up the street. I look up. About six canisters fly, trailing gas in a high arch towards the rocks on my left. I approximate their trajectory. I sprint away.

The students scramble along with me, down the street and then up the rocks of the embankment. My ankle almost turns on the stones. Once we’ve reached a safe dis-tance, I turn back towards the army. Some folks are still on the road—a brave five or six sit facing the sol-diers. Gas—thick, white and toxic—issues from half a dozen points on the road and in the shoulder. I tie my grandmother’s scarf around my neck and pull it over my nose. I breathe slowly. S a r a h ’ s o n m y r i g h t . “Headcount?” she says. I scan the rocks. “There’s Noor. There’s Bahir.” I look behind me. About ten meters away, Talib stands, hands on hips, a black bandana cov-ering the bottom half of his face. “I think we’re okay.” And before I can catch my breath, more rounds. It’s a dazzling display: twelve up, then another ten; six here, four there. They are fired in every direction. “What the fuck.” I look at Sarah. She snaps photos. Our breath is heavy from running. The barrage continues, mind-lessly, unprovoked, leaving ribbons of gas in the sky and small clouds of it on the ground. “I can use your camera?” Noor asks. I give it to him without a word and he begins to film. As quickly as it started, the firing ends. I hazard moving a dozen me-ters forward, trying to get a better view of the soldiers. The crowd tim-idly picks its way back together to-wards the road. “Free, free Palestine!” A chant rises in English. I am barely back on the road be-fore another barrage. More canisters fly. And then, something else: for no discernable reason, everyone around me flies into a sprint. Shit. Panic grips me and I run. Talib’s just ahead of me. “Shoo?” I call to him. “What is it?” He doesn’t respond but I don’t wait to find out. I cover 400 meters, scrambling over rocks and road. I run past a pack of Palestinians. “Mai, mai!” They say. Water. I stop at a remote spot off of the road, panting, hands on my knees. Talib’s beside me. I can’t see the soldiers or their tanks from here; however, the up-

ward curve of the shit water arches in spectacular relief against the sky. It has incredible range. What a ridiculous, wasteful stunt. Thousands of gallons of wa-ter, mixed with a mess of chemi-cals, pour onto the mountain. I’m not sure what kind of protest this was designed for; I imagine the six seated demonstrators and cringe. The protest dissipates over the next twenty minutes as more tear gas flies and stinking water flows. The Israeli convoy inches up the road, firing scores of canisters as they go. One drops down beside me, smoking like an alien pine-cone. I streak away towards the village, pulling my scarf tight. The group reconvenes in a hasty blob. I avoided the gas, but Sarah staggers to join us. Her face is flushed and she coughs. Noor has also inhaled the gas. He chokes and splutters, pawing at his face. A medic comes to his aid, dabbing beneath his eyes with a cotton ball. There is a temporary lull in ac-tivity. I sit beside a small olive grove near Bilal’s house. Noor joins me. “This is a new thing for me,” he says. “This gas, wow, it feels…” he shakes his head and sniffs. “Noor,” I say. He looks to me through large green eyes, wet from the gas. “I am sorry, for my coun-try.” He smiles. “It’s not your prob-lem,” he says gently. “I will tell your stories, there, when I get back. I will organize something.” Guilt and anger water my eyes. When it’s clear that the army will roll straight into the village, we decide to leave. We’ve seen enough. Ben, Sarah, Ghalib and the students pile into a taxi for Jenin, and I grab a second one for Ramallah. On my way out of the town, I spy a collection of protestors, bound on their knees near a jeep. Arrested. “They’ve made a mistake,” I said to Talib when we stood on the rocks. “The violence is that way.” I gesture to the Israeli settlement. Talib nods. “Yes,” he says. “It is a pretty fucking stupid situation.” I couldn’t agree more.

TEARS


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Dear Occupy, I'm a firm supporter of Occupy Wall Street. I agree with everything they stand for, and recognize the severe need for change in this country. My friends, co-workers, and neighbors, however, are pre-dominantly very conservative. Most of them don't seem like the type of people who would ap-prove of Occupy. As such, I often refrain from sharing my stance with them because I don't want them to lose respect for me (or think I'm some lunatic radical). How should I go about opening up to them with-out alienating myself? - Occupying the Closet Dear OtC, Hmmm. The cheesy cliché "Those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind" is the obvious response. Though, in this case, that mindset could be too extreme. I hope, for your sake, you have friendships that are able to withstand a little disagreement. That being said, I'd like to ad-dress the fact that the Occupy movement is not intended to be a single-partisan endeavor. The goals of Occupy Baton Rouge—protecting the Constitution, fighting for better public transportation, and reducing the power that money has on politics— have everyone's best interests at heart. The 15 points of unity we work towards at OBR are based on common sense and the collective good. If you feel comfortable, show your friends the OBR website where the 15 points of unity can be found. Or, even better, bring them to a General Assembly! Just remember, your friends don't have to agree with everything you believe, and there is nothing crazy or shameful about trying to "be the change you wish to see in the world." Solidarity, Occupy Baton Rouge

Ask Occupy

FLAWS Continued from page 2 Human children exposed prena-tally to PAHs have statistically sig-nificant increases in DNA aberra-tions in specific chromosomes, low birth weight, and intrauterine growth restriction. 4. Failure to include a cancer risk assessment for napthelene. Despite the fact that naphtha-lene poses a health risk due to both carcinogenic and noncarcino-genic health effects, the FDA es-tablished the Levels of Concern in Gulf seafood solely based on non-cancerous effects. Naphthalene was one of the most frequently detected PAHs in Gulf seafood tested after the spill, and was the most prevalent PAH in the oil itself. By omitting naphtha-lene from its cancer risk assess-ment, the FDA ignored the poten-tial cumulative effect of exposures to multiple carcinogens. 5. Short exposure duration. And: 6. High cancer risk bench-mark. The FDA Levels of Concern incorporated a duration of expo-

sure of only five years and an ac-ceptable rate of cancer of 1 cancer in 100,000 people. FDA risk assessments conducted for prior oil spills, such as the Exxon Valdez, utilized more conservative and health protective values for these parameters, a 10 year expo-sure duration and 1 in a million ac-ceptable cancer risk level. Based on prior experience from oil spills, PAHs are detectable in shellfish for up to thirteen years after oil contamination. Taken together, these flaws illus-trate a failure to incorporate the sub-stantial body of evidence on the in-creased vulnerability of sub-populations to contaminants, such as PAHs, in seafood. As such, the FDA’s conclusions about risk from Gulf Coast seafood should be interpreted with caution in coastal populations with higher rates of seafood consumption and in vul-nerable populations such as children, small adults, and pregnant women.

To read the article, entitled “Seafood Contamination After the BP Gulf Oil Spill and Risks to Vulnerable Populations: A Critique of the FDA Risk Assessment”, go to <http://bit.ly/gulfspillseafood>.

Photo by CHRISTINE BANIEWICZ Protestors in Nabi Saleh scatter as tear gas canisters rain from the sky. Villagers are consistently attacked with tear gas and the aptly named “shit water” as they protest the ongoing occupation of Palestine. Christine Baniewicz is an Associate Artist with ImaginAction, a travelling theatre arts company with a focus on social justice issues. She has been working in Jenin, Palestine, which is, and has been, under military occupa-tion for decades.

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Occupy Baton Rouge is a lead-erless, non-violent resistance movement. We see that money, not voting, shapes public policy, that the extremely rich are bailed out while the lower and middle classes are forced to bear the brunt of a failing economy, and that the needs of society are placed behind the profiteering of corpora-tions. In the simplest of terms, we want to end corporate bribery of our elected politicians and return our democracy back to the people.

To learn more, you can find our officially approved points of unity on the About section of our website at OccupyBR.com.

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @Occupy_BR @Occupy_BRLive

Facebook: on.fb.me/OccupyBR

Google+: bit.ly/occupygoogle

Phone: (225) 242-9901

Occupy Baton Rouge needs your help to continue to grow. There are plenty of ways to do your part. We paint banners. We need people to help organize and plan events. We need passionate people to join us in direct actions. We need personable people to outreach to the community. Essen-tially, there is a way for anyone and everyone to become involved.

Working Groups are where the real brunt of the work for Occupy Baton Rouge gets done. If you want to contribute to the move-ment, join a Working Group through the appropriate section on our website.

State Capitol Park

Saturdays @ 12

Wednesdays @ 6

Everyone is encouraged to attend and have their opinions heard.

The idea that private wealth should have no place in public electoral processes is not quite an easy or obvious one. For a middle class person, giving a small donation to support a candi-date of choice seems okay, even a positive expression of democratic involvement. Obviously no quid pro quo is expected. One does not ex-pect one’s donation to alter the be-havior of the politician. Rather it is an expression of genuine enthusi-asm–nothing like the corporate do-nation, given in anticipation of spe-cial privilege. Can we keep the small private donor in the money loop to politi-cians, while banning the ultra-wealthy or corporate donor? Should we? In my view, keeping the small donor in the game greatly compli-cates the legislative goal of keeping the big donor out of the game–it’s very hard to draw those lines. I’m also doubtful about the legitimacy of even small donations in the elec-toral arena. Why should a politician who speaks to your middle-class interests and aspirations be entitled to more campaign resources than a

politician who speaks to the interests of the very poorest citizens? Perhaps we need to move away from regarding financial campaign contributions as a legitimate expres-sion of support, and instead give our time and energy to our candidate’s campaign. That way a system of cam-paign regulation could be instituted in which each politician (meeting certain criteria for popular support) receives an equal sum of public money to use to communicate with the electorate. Clearly we need a public debate about the best way to regulate cam-paign funding. The problem is that in the current constitutional era such a debate is impossible. Any time a serious debate is pro-posed, opponents shut down the con-versation by pointing out that giving money to political campaigns is con-stitutionally protected “speech.” This idea is absurd. Free speech is the basic and vital right to speak even unpopular (non-libelous) opinions without fear of retribution. We need freedom of speech to make sure our society benefits from a full range of public policy options. But MY right to speak my mind does not guarantee me an audience to have my voice heard. How then can YOUR free speech rights include the right to am-plify my voice with your money?

Yet, this is exactly how freedom of speech has been interpreted to lend legal and moral legitimacy to a practice that diverts the politician’s obligation from service in the public interest to service of private inter-ests. In order to eventually end corpo-rate control of government and re-turn government to the people we need to be able to regulate private giving to politicians, and we need to protect the public space of our po-litical discourse from the huge infu-sions of private capital that have overwhelmed our ability to hold civil public discussion of public policy. The first step has to be to clarify that OUR constitution does not equate the right of free speech with the right to pay politicians. Only when we’ve rescued our constitu-tion from such misinterpretation can we begin the real dialogue that leads to the end of corporate domi-nation of government. To that end, I have created a pe-tition for a proposed constitutional amendment. The petition is avail-able online at: <bit.ly/moneyaintspeech>. I urge you to give consideration to supporting this petition and rec-ommending it to others in the Oc-cupy movement and beyond.

CHANGE


Documents

The People's [Censored], Issue 1