In Memoriam: Stéphane Hessel

The late Stéphane Hessel, October 6, 2012, Russell Tribunal on Palestine. Photo by me.

         The great humanitarian and fighter against fascism and oppression, Stéphane Hessel died Tuesday at the age of 95. Here is a link to the NY Times obituary. Hessel was born in Berlin and became a naturalized French citizen in 1938 while still a student. He escaped to London to join DeGaulle after the Nazi occupation of France, then returned to fight in the Résistance, where he was capture three times in toward the end of the war, but managed to escape each time. Here’s a link to the  Times obituary:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/world/europe/stephane-hessel-author-and-activist-dies-at-95.html?_r=0

         Among the things that this obituary leaves out are Hessel’s struggles with the creators of the United Nations to strengthen its commitment to human rights. He notes, for example, that Dag Hamarskjold was chosen as Secretary-General because he was considered a rather anodyne economist and wouldn’t stir things up. He turned out to be a very activist occupier of that office, whose death in a plane crash remains suspicious.

         Hessel worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and became France’s first ambassador to the United Nations. He continued to struggle his whole life for justice, as he documents, among other things, in his impassioned autobiography Danse avec le siècle. He was also very involved in the art world, through Pierre Roché, his mother’s lover and father’s close friend, who was an art dealer, and famously the author of Jules et Jim. That 1953 novel and 1959 film by François Truffaut fictionalizes the love triangle—and and takes revenge on Hessel’s mother, Helen (Catherine in the novel and Truffaut film), by having her character drive off a bridge with her children and husband. In reality, she dumped him when she found out he had had a child in secret with another woman. But she had died 12 years before the novel came out.

         I saw Hessel speak at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, this past October, where he was as impassioned as ever. I wasn’t sure who he was, but I was impressed with his message and duly photographed him and added him to my Apostles of Justice collection (www.joelsimpsonart.com). The chairman of the conference held up his pamphlet Indignez-vous (A Time for Outrage) and stressed its role in inspiring the Occupy movement. All the official photographs of Hessel depict him as a benevolently smiling old man. But I saw him in the throes of his outrage as he addressed us (see photo, above), that same outrage which probably enabled him to survive Nazi torture and imprisonment, and which fueled his personal fight for human rights thereafter, to the world's enormous benefit.

North Dakota Oil Convergence

Theodore Roosevelt's Cabin, South Unit, Theodore Roosevelt Memorial National Park

Interior of Theodore Roosevelt's Cabin

"Cannonball" formations, badlands of Theodore Roosevelt Memorial National Park, North Unit, near Watford City, a North Dakota oil drilling center.

The March issues of both National Geographic and Harper’s feature cover stories on the same subject: oil exploration through hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the Bakken shale in North Dakota. In reporting this exceptional boom, which has driven North Dakota’s unemployment rate to 3%, the lowest in the nation, neither article exudes optimism. The articles supplement each other. The one in National Geographic anchors itself in the perspective of a 39-year-old woman, a risk-taker—fiction writer, painter, filmmaker, and lead singer in a rock band in her earlier life—to leave the desperate financial straits she, her husband, and two daughers were in in southwestern Montana, to travel alone to North Dakota, where she learned to drive an 18-wheeler, and then plunked herself down amidst the “testosterone cloud” of nearly all male workers, where her superior trucking skills found her work that very quickly solved her families financial problems back home. Truckers in this land of fraying two-lane roads, make six-figure incomes, as do many of the other workers in this oil-boom region, which in the past two years has surpassed California and Alaska in its oil output, behind only Texas now. The boom, like any boom, has strained the local roads, hospitals, schools and other municipal services, attracted vice and guns, and quintupled housing prices, forcing many long-time residents to leave. While workers are well-paid, most are from out of state, and the profits enrich company owners in Texas and Oklahoma. The state, which has legislated that the drilling poses no environmental risk to the fragile prairie, receives an 11.% on oil sales, which has led to a $1.6 billion budget surplus during this time of cutbacks. The National Geographic article provides excellent cutaway illustrations of how the drilling works to extract the elusive oil. It voices concerns about the toxic effects of the chemicals used in fracking, but couches them in the fears of others, not the author of the article.

         The Harper’s article by Richard Manning roots its perspective in the experiece of Theodore Roosevelt, who in his twenties and reeling from the deaths of his mother and young wife on the same Valentine’s day in 1884, bought a ranch he named Elkhorn, and where he rusticated for two years, minutely recording his experience of his natural environment, but saying nothing about his mourning process. (His cabin is preserved near the Visitor Center of the South Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial National Park, near Medora, N.D. that features magnificent badlands, and which I visited this past summer—along with the North Unit, which has its own distinctive badlands, equally beautiful.) When Roosevelt returned to public life, he founded the conservation movement and was determined to preserve the American wilderness against business and especially oil monopolists, like John D. Rockefeller, whom he called “the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth” (turned into his more famous “malefactors of great wealth” in a speech in 1907).

         Though National Geographic, with its social and technological emphasis, is careful not to take position on the environmental impact of the massive drilling the Harper’s article offers many facts on the subject that speak for themselves: that there were 1100 oil spills in North Dakota in 2011, that a berm designed to prevent the runoff of toxic water from a reserve-pit was breached resulting in a massive fish kill, that drainages has permanently killed all vegetation in their paths, that a drilling rig located close to an eagles’ nest resulted in the death of all the birds, one of them by gunshot, arriving at the summary conclusion, “Gunplay, the roads, the rigs, the noise, the trucks, the off-duty oil workers on all terrain vehicles (ATVs), the general disregard for anything living that is the consequence of industrializing a once-wild landscape”—all of these killed the eagles. And Manning notes that the 8000+ wells, involved more in a “plumbing” operation than an exploratory one in the Bakken shale of North Dakota has never entered the national political discussion around climate and environmental issues. Yet it's so big that the natural gas burnoff fires (as he shows with a photograph) rival the metropolis of Minneapolis-St. Paul from the air at night—except that they're red. He adds a significant note on the Keystone XL pipeline that has provoked so much protest, saying that it’s “designed to relieve a bottleneck caused, in part, by a glut created by increased Bakken production,” adding that such pipelines are cheaper, safer and less carbon-producing than the massive amount of trucking now used to transport oil.        

         So the logic seems to be clear: as long as our dependence on oil is not questioned, and especially as long as the “externalities” (meaning the human and environmental costs resulting from a commercial operation such as oil drilling which the the companies don’t have to take responsibility for) are excluded, the virtually unregulated oil drilling in the Bakken and the Keystone XL pipeline are no-brainers. The problem is that they are killing the environment, and may end up killing us.

In the wake of the tragic Sandy Hook shooting and the choruses of "When Will They Ever Learn," as Michael Moore points out that there have been 61 mass shooting since Columbine, perhaps it's time to rename the gun lobby the "Death Lobby," taking a page from the Heritage Foundations dubbing of the inheritance tax the "death tax."

So now we can target Congress members who accept money from the "Death Lobby," as in, "How much money did you receive from the Death Lobby this year, Senator?" That should get them scampering.

The Coming Romney Implosion

Although, like so many others, I've been very disappointed in President Obama's performance, especially in the policing of the banking industry, the drone war in the Middle East (and the Presidential power to murder anyone anywhere in the world deemed a "terrorist"), and his signature health-care bill that enshrines the profits of insurance companies; I can't help enjoying what appears to be the unraveling of the Romney campaign these days, over his prevarications regarding his control of Bain Capital after 1999 (when it became a job exporter & destroyer), and his refusal to make his tax returns public. An aura of  slickness and dishonesty is forming around him, and the more he tries to "clarify" things by splitting hairs in business-speak, the more he begins to sound like Clinton trying to fend off accusations of sexual impropriety by implying that oral sex is not true sex, without mentioning the former (remember, "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is"?) Both Charles Blow and Gail Collins offered revealing columns on this subject in Saturday's New York Times (July 14).

So the Republican Presidential campaign is beginning to implode, and the Democrats are gleefully nudging it along, as they should. By the time we get to the national convention at the end of August Romney's stink might be so great the would be GOP kingmakers may actually betray their distaste while praising him on the podium, and the gut-based voters back home may get the subliminal message. How long can Boehner and others insist that the election is not about who Romney is or what is leadership would be like, but only about getting rid of that usurper in the White House and replacing him by anybody (even a Bush retread??)? Can non-racists, non-Obama haters (who think he's both the devil and a socialist) actually swallow this?

The problem is that any Republican nominee would have the same problem. Since they're all really working for the big corporations and giant banks and don't give a whit about the poor (whom they try to prevent from voting—and soon, eating, judging by their recent attempt to defund food stamps while preserving big agribusiness "farm" subsidies) corporate malfeasance, the environment, infrastructure, education, etc. etc., the GOP election strategy is perforce to crap on the opponent and stay as mum as possible about the character and background of their nominee. Fortunately, we still have some investigative journalism left, and the Boston Globe has been doing the digging around Romney, requiring him to make 5 network TV appearances to split those hairs over his disssociation with Bain (despite a 6-figure salary) after he accepted the unpaid position as Salt Lake City Olympics chair in 1999.

This season is going to be fun.

BIDDER 70: documentary about Tim DeChristopher

Bidder 70--the documentary about Tim DeChristopher, who disrupted the illegal land auction for drilling rights in Utah, hastily called at the end of the Bush Administration.

This was the first subject I wrote on in this blog, and now there's a moving documentary on the subject. It was featured yesterday as part of the Human Rights Watch film series at Lincoln Center. I hope it goes into general distribution.

 Tim DeChristopher was bidder #70 at the auction he intentionally disrupted, and "70" became a symbol of the environmental movement that coalesced around him in Salt Lake City, being stenciled on signs carried throughout demonstrations.

This is a very moving film, not only because it addresses the critical issues of climate change and the possible destruction of some of the most sublime land on earth, but because it squarely faces the moral issue of what we are willing to endure to support our convictions. It begins with a Martin Luther King quote to the effect that you must be willing to suffer at the hands of the authorities you oppose. Of course, King not only went to jail, he got himself killed. And so did Gandhi

De Christopher very seriously faces going to prison (the film offers a brief excursion into prison scenes, and communicates how oppressive and demoralizing it is), and his supporters derive courage from this and cheerfully get themselves arrested—twice.  It also reveals the utter corruption of our political system, wherein the Obama Administration, whose Secretary of Commerce, Ken Salazar, invalidated the auction that DeChristopher disrupted, still refuses to stop the trial, where the judge, one Dee Benson (a man) an appointee of President George H.W. Bush and Brigham Young U. graduate (also chief of staff for Sen. Orrin Hatch from 1984–88, and co-author of the minority report on the Iran-Contra scandal, with Dick Cheney—so his far-right credentials are impeccable), refuses to let the defense speak of the environmental issues that motivated DeChristopher, and a host of other legal points, assuring that DeChristopher be convicted on the narrowest possible grounds. Then he's really mean to him after the trail, not letting him get his affairs in order before reporting to prison—as if he were a violent criminal or flight risk.

So we live in a country where an idealist who acts out of conviction to save unique land and slow the progress of climate change is sent to Federal prison (in California, far from his family in Colorado, though there is a prison close to them in Colorado), while the Administration refuses to prosecute BP for its repeated violations that led to the devastating oil spill in 2010, nor, for that matter, the CEOs of the financial institutions whose documented law-breaking led to the great Crash of 2008, wreaking catastrophic economic havoc around the world.

The film does mention in passing that an oil company executive has bragged that his industry controlled the White House.

Why Occupy Wall Street Makes No Concrete Demands

Commentators on the right and the left have criticized the Occupy Wall Street Movement for not presenting concrete demands. My own Republican representative Leonard Lance made the point two days ago in a telephone "town meeting" in answer to my question. Yet John Nichols defends them for this and says they have it exactly right, in the current Nation magazine.

An even more thoroughgoing explanation for this position, however, comes from Thomas Frank's brilliant and disturbing book, The Wrecking Crew (Henry Holt, 2008), where he describes the right's deliberate campaign to dismantle and privatize government, with disastrous results all around, except for the "privateers" (my term).

Here are two illuminating quotes:

“The needs of business stand like a rock; all other else is convenience, opportunism, a bit of bushwah generated by some focus group session and forgotten the instant it is no longer convincing. Fundamentally amoral, capitalism is loyal to no people, no region, no heroes, really, once they have exhausted their usefulness—not even to the
nation whose flag the wingers pretend to worship.
“Hence the eternal frustration of the conservative rank and file with their leaders. Unless you are solely interested in the welfare of business, Washington
conservatives will all turn out to be ‘imposters’ to you, always ready to
compromise on family values or their adherence to the Founders’ ‘original
intent.’ Every ally is an ally of convenience for them, every ironclad
principle subject to revocation without notice, every noble ideal advanced merely to shore up popular support. Although there is no central command barking out the talking points, the movement nevertheless seems almost naturally to behave like an agitprop
bureau.” p. 100

“It is a basic principle of conservatism—an axiom, a cornerstone, an immutable law of human nature, world history and all the planets and stars—that turning over government operations to private businesses is the most efficient way to get things done. In reality, the conservatives’ outsourcing system has been a
ripoff of such massive proportions that it deserves a Grace Commission all its
own. In each of the Bush administrations’s great initiatives—anti-terrorism,
the recovery from Hurricane Katrina, and the administration of Iraq—privatized
government has played a starring role and has proven itself a gold-plated
botch. Again and again, and despite a veritable river of dollars, it has failed
to deliver what it promised. The Department of Defense and Homeland
Security routinely accept contracts so ill-crafted they seem to have been designed more as a way to sluice billions in to the contractors’ pockets than as a device for getting something done. And, being private, the contractors are largely shielded from
oversight and accountability. Indeed, a favorite conservative tactic has been
to shut down offices that supervise the outsourced operations—in 2006, the
General Services Administration actually to contract out the job of supervising
contractors—allowing the market to perform its miracles without any scrutiny
from government at all.” pp. 138-39

Day 21: The Occupy Wall Street Protests Gain a Foothold in the Public Imagination

On Friday, October 7, WBAI’s Jordan Journal with Howard Jordan, featured New School economics professor Rick Wolff on the Occupy Wall Street movement and protests. Wolff has become the unofficial guide to this historical phenomenon, and he’s the perfect person to do it, with his grasp of history, solid grounding in both mainstream and Marxist economic theory, his personal acquaintaince with many of the players on the economic scene today, including Ben Bernanke and many corporate bank officials, and his talent for explaining complex things simply and clearly. Yesterday he was quoting Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest was of little significance.

To the contrary, he said. Knowing Bernanke as he does, the Fed Chairman is truly worried, as are the Wall Street (criminal) bankers. They don’t know how this is going to end. They had dismissed the Tea Party movement, which attacks them, as no-nothings, though necessarily tolerated by the Republican establishment, since they have such an extensive following. But they weren’t expecting a challenge from the left to gain traction. After all, the mainstream media had managed to either ignore, dismiss or quarantine them in the form of the large anti-war demonstrations of the past decade—whose truth counted for little or nothing in the media marketplace.

But these young protesters are different. Even though relatively small in number, they’re persisting into their third week of a very prominent occupation. They’ve had run-ins with the police and come out on top, garnering world attention and much public sympathy. They understand the crimes of the banks all too well, much better than the Tea Partyers. And now the mainstream media are coming around, with detailed reports in the Times and warmly sympathetic opinion pieces by commentators like Paul Krugman (in Friday, Oct. 6's Times). Moreover, they’re expressing the feelings of millions of people—the new Silent Majority—who are furious at the banks for bringing down the economy, causing so much pain, and escaping any real punishment. Theirs is the fear of the guilty. Wolff pointed out that the politically less active are waiting to see if the movement will persist before signing on, and now with mainstream media attention and endorsement, it seems to be snowballing into an established challenge from the left—the hitherto moribund left, which the conventional wisdom had been accustomed to dealing with in obituary mode.

But now, even NYC Police Chief Ray Kelly says he won’t bother the protesters as long as they don’t block traffic and stay within police barricades during their marches. He knows he risks another black eye if he tries to harrass them. I suspect Mayor Bloomberg is feeling some Schadenfreude towards his “friends in the (criminal) banking industry that a “rag-tag” group of young (desperate, jobless, victimized) protesters is giving voice to truths that not even the New York Times permitted itself to utter, and that this is resonating across the country and throughout the world. The People are becoming more aware of what really happened, and they’re supporting those who affirm these truths by sleeping on cardboard in the open, under plastic tarps in a public (private) park—the only one in the city, incidentally, where it’s permitted to stay overnight. No responsible spokesperson, from the President on down, can afford to dismiss them any more. They’ve established a beachhead in the public imagination.

Meanwhile, the reactionary media, Fox “noise” (—Keith Olberman’s pun) commentators Bill O’Reilley and Ann Coulter are angrily twisting around with their worn-out clichés in a pathetic attempt to discredit the protesters. For example, O’Reilley called Prof. Frances Fox Piven, who spoke to the OWS encampment this week, a “Communist sympathizer, who was outed by Glenn Beck.” Can anyone take this seriously? What Communists are left to sympathize with, the Albanians? And Beck! He lost his job at Fox after his ratings plummetted 15% in about a week, after he got the Tahrir Square protests exactly wrong, calling them a rabble. Of course, now he’s pimping for Netanyahu. (Remember this is a Mormon, who, like us Jews, are an economically highly successful group who dote on their history of persecution as validating a conveniently permanent victimhood). Coulter has ominously warned her listeners that these dangerous occupiers are similar to those who started the French and Russian Revolutions—those horrendous turns of History that threw out an old order she so dearly loves.

So the relatively simple act of sleeping in the re-dubbed Liberty Square is apparently enough to deflate the Murdoch Empire! Listen to the children! The Emperor has been naked for years, and the 80-year-old Murdoch is no pin-up.

I feel incredibly honored that my photograph of artist Dinorah Delfin from last April, holding Adbusters’ corporate US flag against a background of the scuttled ships along the Arthur Kill waterway in Staten Island, was used as their page-poster in the September-October issue (reprinted in the following issue as well) to exhort us to Occupy Wall Street.