On behalf of Occupy Wall Street

For me, Occupy Wall Street represents the most significant and widespread protest movement since the 1960s movement against the Vietnam War. The oft-heard criticism that OWS doesn’t have “a clear focus” misses the mark. The anti-war movement of the 60s also opened its arms to embrace the civil rights movement, from Huey Newton and the Black Panthers to Martin Luther King to Malcolm X, including Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam, among other causes.

To shake a nation from its torpor of oppression, and to get crowds, thousands, millions onto the streets of a country as large and diverse as ours, takes a movement that has both a singular focus, in OWS’s case the financial industry’s universal theft of our country’s assets, leaving the 99% of Americans with the gristle of leftovers and the 1% of Americans with the filet mignon of life. But Occupy Wall Street also opens its arms widely to embrace the lack of proper health insurance for millions of people, advising “health not wealth.” It also exposes our present police state as was done in the 60s so often by protestors from Kent State to Columbia University, from Berkeley to Chicago. And it is appropriately involved with many other issues.

But most of all, Occupy Wall Street has given new meaning and impetus to the First Amendment for Free Speech and Freedom to assemble to protest. There has been this vast silencing of protest since the late Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin went to court and Judge Julius Hoffmann scolded them and The Chicago Seven for creating too much political noise—particularly after Senator Eugene McCarthy went into the Democratic national convention as the for-peace frontrunner for the presidential nomination, yet doughboy Hubert Humphrey (LBJ’s VP) came out the winner. This brought on the Grant Park police riots as protestors fought them to a bloody finish. The mere prospect of change (let alone with violence) turned America backwards in fear of chaos to Richard Nixon and the Republican Party. Then came the true chaos.

Nixon’s big campaign’s idea was that the “Silent Majority” was behind him. This notion succeeded in condoning, even praising silence against the ongoing offenses of the Vietnam War, the violations of civil liberties and huge military expenditures. Fortunately, the curtain came down on Nixon’s head with the revelations and improprieties of Watergate, ending with Nixon’s resignation and pardoning by his former VP, Gerald Ford, who became president. The Silent Majority was traumatized by that loss. Where was the man to praise them for their docility as the Republicans poured fear on the fire that activist marchers might run right over them? The Silent Majority quietly became the paradigm of disengagement. Read your Reader’s Digest, watch TV and most of all, mind your own business.

They got their chance for revenge, dumping the Democratic Jimmy Carter, for Ronald Reagan at the start of the 80s, when labor raised its head to challenge him and Reagan fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers on August 5, 1981, in essence saying, “Now, shuddup alla ya, I told you, or the whole country will get fired.” This as Reagan knowingly planned to disembowel the middle and working classes by inflicting ongoing tax hikes, while at the same time cutting taxes for the rich. But the Reagan era became the holy grail of capitalist finagling. It came to power making an illegal and secret arms for hostages deal with the Iranians to hold off releasing the US Embassy hostages so that Carter would lose the election for not showing enough strength. To further embarrass Carter, the Iranians released the hostages on Reagan’s inauguration day.

As Wiki tells us . . . “The Iran–Contra affair . . . or Iran-Contra-Gate, was a political scandal in the United States that came to light in November 1986. During the Reagan administration, senior Reagan administration officials and President Reagan secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, the subject of an arms embargo. Some U.S. officials also hoped that the arms sales would secure the release of hostages and allow U.S. intelligence agencies to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress.

“The scandal began as an operation to free American hostages being held by terrorist groups with Iranian ties. It was planned that Israel would ship weapons to Iran, and then the U.S. would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment. The Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of six U.S. hostages, who were being held by the Lebanese Shia Islamist group Hezbollah, who in turn were connected to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. The plan deteriorated into an arms-for-hostages scheme, in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages. Large modifications to the plan were devised by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council in late 1985, in which a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, or Contras, in Nicaragua.”

Today, Occupy Wall Street is in a position to take back the political “noise factor” on behalf of truth, beauty and the American Way, including that avenue that leads to the White House. Literally hundreds of Occupy Movements have bloomed all over America, from D.C. to Denver, Los Angeles to Chicago to New York, even across the pond to Europe. These people are more than willing to speak out loudly and challenge power with the truth of its corruption.

Just as OWS has come down hard on the financial industry for destroying American’s wealth with criminal tactics like toxic mortgages (marketing them as well as Credit Default Obligations) and kicking up speculation, market manipulation, the casino use of derivatives, so, too, the 60s “flower children” hit the defense industry hard for feeding at the blood-soaked trough of the Vietnam War, despoiling that tortured nation (who had fought with us in WWII against the Japanese), and destroying its environment with napalm, Asian Orange, and massive bombings that had deadly effects on the land as on our own troops as well as the Vietnamese.

Also, the war created a huge amount of drug addiction given the availability of Southeast Asian heroin, marijuana, hashish and other drugs, thanks to Air America and the CIA, destroying many lives still to be lived, or that became unlivable, unbearable when veterans returned home to the same old, same old: silence. Drugs have now become a major source of income for cartels, local and foreign, their profits laundered by the major, too-big-to-fail banks. Where else? But today some military folks are speaking out loud and clear via Occupy Wall Street.

Remember the outrage of that shocked marine sergeant Sheemar Thomas at Occupy Times Square, upbraiding and backing off 30 police officers for their brutal treatment of protestors, caught on a YouTube that went viral. See it linked. It was and is amazing.

Moreover, Sergeant Thomas’s fiery rage was formed in the cauldron of Iraq, where he must not only have witnessed numerous killings, but was expected to participate in the carnage of innocents and enemies. Like the Nam, the citizens and the fighters of the Mid-East were and are often one, difficult to parse in the few seconds a soldier has to decide who lives and dies, including himself. Both wars plus the Afghanistan and Pakistan wars have daily battalions of ghosts who could be benign or fatal, as did Vietnam. They were and are one big trick or treat.

It has a sense of moral outrage that once the photo of a Vietnamese pleading for his life to a pistol-holding Vietnamese who shot him dead did. Or of the image of the young Buddhist monk who became a worldwide icon as he set himself on fire in protest against the war.

Today, there is the image, too, of the young soldier fresh home from Iraq, shot in the head recently with a “projectile” in the Occupy Oakland violence. Now he lays in an Oakland hospital with a fractured skull and in critical condition. These are images that burn in the memory forever. There will be more unless we speak up, and fight back. Violence is to be avoided when possible. Unfortunately, the violence started that night in Oakland after the main events of the day when some protestors tried to occupy an empty basement to stay in and the police attempted to eject them. On the other end are the police’s own agent provocateurs. At Zuccotti Park, police have been said to be inviting the homeless and drug addicts in for free meals. Not a good idea.

Technologically, television brought the brutality of Vietnam into the living rooms of America. Today, the Internet does the same and gives Occupy Wall Street the power of Social Networks as well as a fearless independent media the ability to organize and expose violence and corruption via camcorder, texting from blackberries for instant showing on laptops or desktops.

From a troop standpoint, Vietnam differs from today’s wars in that it had a draft, which acted as catalyst to buck the war, because your butt could be sitting in a foxhole in Nam whether you liked it or not. It stimulated many American young people of draft age to duck out to Canada, to claim they were gay, or play crazy. Today, we have the Army of the Empire as the major employer of young people between the ages of 19 to 29. Most of these young people are looking for jobs, some kind of training for life, a possibility of a career, that is, if they survive the job. They are being supplanted more and more with mercenaries from Halliburton, XE, and Blackwater, another huge depletion of government monies which could be used more constructively. Here is a list of mercenary forces that have been used around the world.

Both in Vietnam and in today’s wars, the defense industry received tremendous financial gains and ever-increasing military money clout from the Pentagon. Eisenhower’s bad dream of a Military-Industrial Complex became reality and continues to expand to this day. The cost of running the military for a world-wide Empire involves trillions of dollars, both in the budget and events covered by black-ops funds, not to mention monies siphoned from peaceful purposes, education, Infrastructure, Healthcare, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. We are engaged in a political battle that spells life or death for our people of and the planet.

In that regard, the Celebration of Earth Day and the necessity for a sane ecology and consciousness of nature began in the mid-sixties. The “flower children” waved their daisies in the face of rifles, seemingly fearless, just as young people of Occupy Wall Street talk truth to power, to bloated police forces just dying to kill or maim, sick as it is. I remember hearing the actor Paul Newman in the mid-60s, infusing huge crowds with concern at a rally for Earth Day in Union Square Park—a former bastion of labor battles in New York City. It was a great revelation.

Of course, Occupy Wall Street has met up with the same stupid resentments of mainstream media as the protestors and protesting veterans of Vietnam did. The mainstream media specializes now as then in mistaking intelligence for neatness, or missing brilliant criticism because it came from the mouths of the unkempt. It is so easy to be dismissive when you’ve got nothing to say but a Sassoon haircut and a pound of makeup, mouthing inanities on the most important issues in the world. We saw it in the 60s; we see it today, the endless line of talking bobbing heads. At least in the days of Nam, we had a Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, or Daniel Ellsberg (who released the notorious Pentagon Papers).

But the Internet reporters of today take up the slack for a delinquent whorish mainstream media, more interested in misguiding for personal gain than telling the truth for everyone’s gain. Russia Today, RT.Com TV, in my estimation, is the only genuine international news station worth watching.

One thing that is markedly different about OWS is that the hardhats are on our side today, because the movement largely represents the issues of working people, labor, not the bankbooks of the Richie Riches, which are constantly being enriched “through errors in accounting” (stealing). Witness John Corzine, ex-senator, ex-Goldman Chief, ex-New Jersey Governor. Regulators said more than $609 million in client money is still missing from MF Global (his new company), money apparently moved out of client accounts within days as the company’s cash dried up, likely due to over-ambitious investment in European debt.

The FBI is examining whether the firm’s actions amounted to a crime [what then?], two people familiar with the situation told The Associated Press this week. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The New York Post reported that U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in New York City is also investigating. Of course, as Preet investigates, Corzine has hired a topflight criminal attorney—just another page in the diary of corruption.

Though we of the 60s certainly had nothing against labor, I think the tension then between hardhats and protestors was ideological and that labor was misguidedly patriotic. That, too, is a quality that lingers to this day, flag-waving, or tongue-waving like the Fox News Crowd and their empty-headed followers who are the government’s lackeys.

Amazingly, as we tighten the noose on the poor and working classes, back in the 60s, Lyndon Johnson created his War on Poverty, along with bringing to life the dream of JFK for Medicare and Medicaid (probably LBJ’s guilt for participating in the assassination). Today, these venerable institutions face extinction or serious mauling. Yet, President Johnson who pushed the troops north immediately after JFK’s assassination remains a hero for helping the poor and aged of his own nation, as FDR did, creating the original safety net of Social Security.

Of course, these splendid programs became a thorn in the Democrats side from the get-go because the Republicans were germinating, reformulating themselves to be the new elites, reaching their goal in the Reagan Era. Reagan instituted numerous tax cuts for the rich and numerous tax hikes for the working and middle classes. Reagan was the beginning of the end of political compassion in this country despite the 60-foot statue of him newly erected at Reagan Airport in Washington, D.C. Hopefully the statue will start to shrink one day like his addled brain, once the masses of people realize what a dupe he was.

Lastly or firstly, both the Wall Street Movement and the anti-Vietnam war basically were/are made up of young people, backed by some of the most brilliant older Americans we had: Back then it was Howard Zinn, Daniel Ellsberg, Dr. Spock, Dr. King, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, the Berrigan Brothers, and so many others who gave a thrust of energy, direction and backbone to the young. Today, I happily see many older people of conscience at the Occupy Wall Street meetings and marches. Their names are still to surface but they’re there as mentors.

The truth is, in both eras, the majority of the so-called “adults” (as well-dressed as they could possibly be) had so badly bungled and corrupted the affairs of the world that the young people had to take over and take care of business. It’s like seeing your parents aging into senility and you have to take them down to the local E.R. or Nursing Home one day to protect them from destroying themselves and even you. It’s another reason that the anti-war Movement spread over Europe, as Occupy Wall Street is spreading over a Europe close to financial destruction, still being destroyed by entrenched crooked leaders and bankers.

Also, both eras were characterized by a thrust of racial, sexual and gender liberation, including the Woman’s Movement. Acceptance to more kinds of mores, behaviors and people characterize the 60s and the Occupy movement. Then as now there is a disregard for the conventional, which is what irritates the well-suited, over-coiffed, talking heads of the mainstream media. But it is good to look for new solutions to unsolved and worsening problems unresolved by those in power. It is essential that someone takes down the Bull by the Horns, sinking in the sword of regulation into its greedy heart as it rips apart the economy. If we won’t do it, who will; if not now, then when?

We are at the point of a revolution here, hopefully one that involves a peaceful takeover of power and not a French Revolution, involving the guillotine, roaming gangs of Jacobins slicing heads and having other heads, including ours, sliced randomly.

Bottom line: to the pooh-bahs and cynics I say, wake up and smell the grit, the reality of true change, and join the march or it will march over you, police or no police. The Occupy Wall Streeters are decent if not heroic people, worthy of your attention, your respect, and contributions to their causes. Put one hand on your heart and the other in your pocket to give them a hand. The good you put out will be returned with interest, real interest that will make this a better, stronger America.

Here is a list of previous labor movements, from cultural politics.net, that made a historical difference, so you won’t feel lost in this Brave New World. The changes described helped build America. What happened when the protest stopped and silence started is what made Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs, and today’s profligate financial market along with the chaotic, violent world we currently inhabit. I say hats off to the chanting crowds of Occupy Wall Street—your new government—whether you know it or not.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock” is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on American and world politics as an Associate Editor of Online Journal.