time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have back with us live in the studios once again room grouped up a room gupta is co founder of the independent indie with i n d y pendent and the occupied wall street journal and we're going to be actually covering a wide variety of such subjects this morning kind of with the theme of democracy and more are in thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thanks for having me back mike so what  ski who's the author of the occupiers and he'll be doing a reading from the book really just a wonderful book probably the best book written about the occupy wall street movement and i'll also be giving a short talk talking about  really understanding what occupy wall street was about and its political legacy that i argue is still very relevant today that we see in things from like black lives matter to the fight for fifteen low wage campaign to schama so want bernie sanders to the climate justice movement then i think you know as as we'll get into in a way not so much as a result but it's linked to what's even going on in paris  l turned out now with these horrific attacks everything is connected you were also here just a couple weeks ago covering on our local elections yes yes i was here on election night looking swanson campaign you know is was of a national international significance as the only socialist serving in a major city in the united states and whether or not she can could get reelected when you against basically nothing candidate pamela banks who had no credentials and no base but managed to get huge amounts of support all the establishment support from major media you know  just kind of a completely ridiculous step i think just showing how corrupt local politics are everywhere how corrupted they are by the corporate state the fact that six of the nine city council members indorsed pamela banks you know when against some want someone who whatever criticisms you want to make of her she's shown that she can deliver the goods so do you see that as laying the groundwork for further city oriented local  candidates who have a socialist leaning winning elsewhere in the country i think it would be great if it would happen it's hard you know there have been a few instances in recent years chevron they were able to beat the chevron there's a massive oil refinery there and this richmond progressive alliance organized for many years and was able to when the mayor ship and i think the majority on the city council  last year and they were outspent like something like seventy to one by chevron and then jackson mississippi and the malcolm x grassroots movement that was able to like  party that is also elected a number of folks to the state legislature so there are these bright spots and i think i've been someone for a long time who's been very critical dismissive of trying to get into  electoral politics at least at the national level but i think given these examples and that you can start to make a real difference and you can do types of move been building i think clearly through electoral politics i think there are other forms of movement building that are also very important i also a covered the seattle teachers strike you know and that's been following on on various other kind  of left efforts within workers movements you know there was the chicago teachers strike back in two thousand and twelve there was almost a strike last year in portland where the portland teachers were able to really organize the leadership of the union there i think in the l a unified district so there are a lot of positive developments in terms of you know i think the principal left forces winning either in the workplace sort of the electoral level and i it would be great to see more efforts in terms of electoral politics but it's certainly not easy you know it's you can run a candidate and that's hard enough but to be able to run a campaign that actually has a serious shot of winning takes a lot of resources takes a lot of discipline takes a lot of you have to have a really good organization and strategy and leadership and really think things through because a like toral politics are it's a unique beast and terms of politically how you have to respond through the media how you have to stay on your talking points and frankly you also need sharp charisma attic candidates whatever your politics and that's the thing about the  incredibly quick on her feet and she's very prismatic she has genuine personal appeal so speaking of the national electoral politics what's your take on the bernie sanders campaign bernie sanders is you know just won clearly comes out of wall street that's where she first came to prominence and also the whole you know a lot of people don't know this even in seattle she was the one who first raised the fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage issue when she ran for state legislature the state legislature back in two thousand and twelve before the low wage workers movement publicly began bernie sanders is also completely he would have never have gotten this far without the occupy wall street he's clearly building on that energy the way that occupy shifted the debate for economic austerity to economic inequality  you know i think he says a lot of really great things on a lot of domestic issues but the fact that he's running in the democratic party it's like look we have one party in this country wall street would two wings that the democratic party is as completely implicated in the financial crash completely implicated in the american led project of capitalists globalization right you know nafta passed under possible passed and yet he never exerted anywhere you know not even like a shred of this energy or political capital for say unions who right you know it in terms of what their agenda was so it really shows who is calling the shots wall street and the national security state so when bernie sanders says he'll support whoever is quote the eventual nominee we know who that's going to be hillary clinton you know no matter how much you may have hopes that bernie sanders is going to win hillary clinton the game is rigged i mean the democrats are they're not going to let the bocher see exist in the in their party it's completely rigged with the superdel s the vast majority of which are the majority of which hillary clinton already has a locked up she has the resources to run a fifty state campaign whereas bernie sanders is going to run into the brick wall african american and conservative white voters who will favor the clintons and you know when hillary is running it's not just her running of course she will unleash bill at some point and he's going to hurt huge amounts of  politicians on the landscape so they did decades very much as stacked against bernie sanders but i think there's also a deeper problem and this was i think one of the really just big weaknesses of occupy wall street this kind of blinkered focus on domestic policies you know the economic crash was a global economic crash sorts of other countries were affected you know especially throughout europe latin america africa asia by wall street taking down the economy but occupy unfortunately had this kind of obsessive focus on the domestic front which is understandable you know because the you know the crash just  spread just tremendous pain and suffering in the american social landscape the foreclosures the unemployment people losing their health care the huge increases in debt that's been going on and is accelerated since occupy wall street but you know i use the term which some intellectuals do that it's the american led pro project of capitalist globalization that you know when we talk about finance and economics we can talk about this ship a bit of the united states being apart from everything else where where the leader and where also completely and interconnected with the global economy and part of this blinkered focus you know this narrow focus the problem with it is also just the complete a of foreign policy that we you know it's like we don't talk about foreign policy and so like i've heard many people many bernie sanders supporter heard or seen them say like oh well you know if you point out that bernie sanders has really terrible foreign policy records he supports drones he supported kosovo bombing he is one hundred percent backer of israel he calls for you know continuing the war against isis which means continuing the war against terror people be like well ok you know but that's a side issue and it's just like really ninety four percent of humanity is a side issue you can and you can't separate the imperial state from the capitalist state and you know we see this i think most tragically with what is going on in paris you know before the arab spring the previous incarnations of isis you know we first was al qaeda in iraq than al peninsula had affectively been isolated by a number of factors one of which is they took root because of the u s they they were created as a result of the u s invasion of that got them from that's what really led to the decline in the insurgency in two thousand and starting in two thousand and seven and so al qaeda in iraq was really isolated but they got a base again because of the syrian civil and you know the syrian civil war there were multiple causes but certainly one of the biggest factors was the arab spring and it started just a couple of months after really weeks after mubarak was toppled in january  of two thousand and eleven and so that's where it was able to really get the base of operations and it spread and i think you know for the west that they prefer these they vastly prefer these like savages medieval fundamentalist movements than they prefer secular democratic popular movements you know we've seen this time and again the muslim brotherhood was back by british intelligence and the cia for decades as to undermine the secular left in the middle east you know we should remember that historically the left the communist left social stuff was incredibly powerful throughout the arab world for most of the twentieth century but the u s wanted to undermine it and they turned to religious fundamentalists israel had direct hand in the rise of hamas because they wanted that as a counterweight to the p l o palestine liberation organization which was a secular nationalist left movement and so you know what we've seen with the arab spring you know particularly what happened in egypt what horrible suffering on the people in conjunction with the horrible suffering the bombing and the wars we inflict upon them and i think you know these pairs attacks certainly play into the west's hands it's two sides of the same coin and you know what's what's really tragic is we know the script completely about what's going to happen france is already like you know this means war there's going to be massive increase in racial profiling don't be surprised if in the next few days or weeks you see attacked on muslims in france mobs individuals attacking muslims don't be surprised if trigger happy security forces kill brown people we need to protect people and i'm not downplaying what happened in france but you know this is happening all the time in the middle east and to the point that we don't even notice it anymore there were suicide bombings in beirut this just happened a couple of days ago that killed scores before that there was an isis took claim for the downing or it's believed it's behind the downing of the russian airliner that took off from sharm el sheikh in egypt  that killed twice as many people but you know it's like oh well you know it's the russians it's the arabs so who cares somehow we only care if it happens to other like wealthy white westerners and yes that is a tragic tragedy it's horrific no one deserves to die the way that people died in france but i think one of the important lessons you know and we can i think say coming out of occupy wall street is sympathize with the people not the nation france is  just as brutal colonial power that is tormented africa for well over one hundred years just engaging in all these horrific wars you know that bordered on quasi genocide at a time killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people and so the state is not at all blameless the state deserves none of our sympathy and all these you know comments about this is attack on our common humanity well you know who gaza you know who is saying that when the nato war by their own admission the british foreign office admitted killed something like twenty thousand civilians you know we supposedly went in to protect civilians and then we kill many thousands of civilians in the name of protecting the civilians and you know we can go on and on and on afghanistan and pakistan what's going on in yemen right now is horrifying the coup we backed in bahrain you know we certainly didn't cause the civil war in syria but we have stoked it every step of the way yeah and i understand there's six million muslims in france that are potentially going to be taking the brunt of what happened yesterday yeah i mean you know i think just one of the grotesque phenomena when these attacks happened as you know muslims rush to condemn the attacks and west's terrorism state terrorism you know i think it's very important to make that distinction as well we get we certainly what happened in paris is terrorism in terms of trying to terrify an entire people but it just pales in comparison to state led terrorism and as a response to this kind of like retail terrorism you know we'll see wholesale terrorism visit upon the middle east and will also see a kind of  terror and climate of fear visited upon muslim and arab people and friends in france and north african people and with the paris climate talks just like two weeks away boy that's go yeah and you know i think i was really thinking about this like one of the interesting things again about wall street is the idea that the center no longer holds you know like if  we see bernie sanders as an outgrowth of wall street you know i think in a way donald trump is the flip side of that coin that the people who are spawning to him are responding to the same kind of like and so you know when the center doesn't hold the extremes get more extreme and we know that is very much the operating mechanism of climate change that the it's not that the planet just suddenly all heats up in one direction no the extremes get more extreme you're seeing more extreme winters in the northeast and you know i'm not a resident of the pacific northwest but the rain's hair been here for like a couple weeks and the rains here a you know this seems like kind of highly unusual and i know that the region was going through a drought up through the summer and so as the climate gets more extreme it's also the political landscape is getting more extreme as as well and they kind of march in lockstep and i really feel like one of the victims of the paris bombings and again i think the kind of the capitalist states in the west are going to be clearly happy about this of the climate talks you know there were plans for very large demonstrations and protests and you know i know people who were like talking there might have been like big civil disobedience that is going to be very extremely hard to pull  off now it's going to be you know we're going to hear it's too soon that you know people have to have respect you know especially a lot of people are coming from around the world and you know this isn't their city they can't do this and so the capitalist state will be using the attacks to suppress these popular movements democratic movements and yet did the reality is the only way to address what is happening in the middle east in terms of  invaded started with israel and swept all the way through saudi arabia and occupied like about eight countries and spend hundreds of billions of dollars reconstructing their economies and societies over decades you know maybe that might solve the issue but that ain't going to happen and and in any case we'd be killing many millions of people and the only thing that i think the only path we can take is the path of diplomacy the path of peace the path of development the path of income and wealth redistribution and these are all things that i think a lot of people in the climate justice  you cannot address climate change without addressing the huge gulf of inequality you know you can't talk about like you know why is it that so many ecosystems are being wiped out some of these species are being wiped out why do we have this kind of like destructive fossil fuel led development it's because of a very highly unequal capitalist system of class power of class warfare and we need to have real redistribution which i think a lot of people would be saying on the streets of  paris that you're not going to really fundamentally address the problems of climate change maybe we can cut back the carbon but you're not going to address the ecological crises without it dressing the development in human and social crises but that is going to be pushed off the table because it goes against the capitalist and middle and security state agenda so you had just recently written an article for tell shoots the occupy movement was black lives matter and while you were just speaking it also reminded me that the climate justice movement seems like a similar parallel movement yes i mean the climate justice movement clearly precedes it i think one of the most so occupy wall street a really shifted the national debate right before that it was all about austerity cutting the the the federal debt the annual budget deficit then it became no the real issue here is protest we need to remember occupy wall street happened both physically in the shadow of september eleventh there was just a couple of blocks away from the september eleventh attacks in downtown manhattan and it also happened began days after the tenth anniversary i live in new york and you know to go through that i mean it was just a really ugly build up that whole summer of islamophobia just really ugly right wing protests so occupy really helped i think push us a lot of ways past september eleventh and certainly it's the wars are not over this llama phobia is not over and now we're obviously going to see a resurgence of it but after that you know we've seen more militant protests like with the climate justice movement we've seen these strikes by teachers the dreamers the immigration rights activists have been engaging in this militant peaceful protest d technology also very uncompromising in a lot of ways you know that there's you know it's like just as occupy wall street many people are saying capitalism is the problem and you can reform it away a once again for community forum and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning susan susan obl how is a human rights activist and frequent political commentator she is the founder and president of playgrounds for palestine a children's organization dedicated to upholding the right to play for palestinian children her essays and political commentaries have appeared in numerous print and international news media and she is a contributing author of two anthologies shattered illusions and searching janine and author of several books including my voice sought the wind mornings in janine and she is here to talk about her new book the blue between sky and the early in the forty's before the establishment of israel and kind of goes follows this family through the nakba which is the catastrophe the dispossession of palestinians from their ancest lands and they go into a refugee camp in gaza and it goes it goes through successive generations in that single family through various against a backdrop of historic events that have happened that some people might be familiar with but it's primarily a women's story and that the principal characters are women again in the same family is is the the sort and with her grandfather who's knows me as a brother and she grows up in the foster care system and eventually finds her way back to gaza so they're parallel stories and knows me as a daughter of her own and then she has a daughter the things of living just ordinary ordinary women set against an extraordinary historic and political backdrop and how much of your own experience has been woven into your book your characters norwood i grew up in for a time in foster care in north carolina so i drew a lot on my experience in the foster care system to to for nora's life and i put her in in a lot of the the realities and experiences that i that i went through so for example she she ends up in a home called mel's home it's a baptist it's a southern baptist children's home in thomas one north carolina and that's where i lived so i did you know all those those those years that seemed you know difficult were actually kind of a treasure for me of experiences that i get to draw on for these characters and you know the the cultural context of the palestinian context is of course part of my own background it's my own family my own experience prior to coming to the u s so of course i draw on that and i also did all of a lot of research i always do a lot of research for for everything i write even when it's fiction and i've been to gaza multiple times a lot of people there that were dear friends people i love so i think you know i always put a lot of myself not necessarily my own precise life experiences but my own sense of  course of the world that it's that i perceive i think you know writers you write what you know in your gut so yeah my heart is in it of course  the media reviews of your book so far and all your previous book talk about you know strong women characters and we're just talking before we're alive but it's a strong women redundant  yeah yeah i always kind of cringe at that term i mean i know what people mean what they're trying to say when they when they talk about strong women but sometimes it almost feels like a qualifier that you know otherwise women saying women alone would do no weakness you know we never say you know it's a story of strong men but we always feel the need to say to qualify women a strong i think it is redundant i think women particularly women and also societies carrie society in many ways but particularly in situations of conflict and violence and deprivation  and in fact don't they really leave the indigenous resistance exactly but they never get credit of course and i think that's true and in a lot of cultures in palestinian society like even in the first intifada you know which started with protests and people taking to the streets it actually was before the men came out and started taking to the streets it was women protesting and women in their kids and going to checkpoints and and and gathering in these marches and protests but of course it's when the men chris her step on the scene that it becomes it becomes a movement and so yeah you're absolutely right women are almost often always at the forefront and but rarely is that even acknowledged it's certainly true in palestinian contacts it was during the civil rights movement it was it's true in a lot of in the genesis uprisings throughout south america and in africa and so forth does that in itself we've into your motivation in writing is to kind of correct this error in history no i wasn't i wasn't trying to correct history with  you know when i write fiction i don't my only real loyalty is to the characters and to their lives i don't really i don't think about correcting history i don't think about what the reader is going to think i don't think about what my publisher is going to think in these are these are intentional conscious decisions that i make and i i really just try to get to know the characters to love them and to to tell their story with author authenticity and honesty and that's really that's my only  and when i'm writing fiction so no i don't despite what despite what it seems because it is a it is it's anything palestinian ultimately it's going to be political just by by its existence regardless of whether it touches on politics or not it becomes political but that's not my aim fiction is is about human stories it's about emotion and hearts and love and i mean that's and to me that's what the story is it's a love story ultimately even though it's set against a lot of destruction and loss and heartache and politics and of course the characters go through many of the key issues that are so disturbing for people to witness in palestine and one of your characters the son is a political prisoner and there are numerous how many political prisoners yet so there's the male characters in this book are are the thrown in israeli jails forever for so you know was a life sentence and and that's you know that's part of the reality that palestinians live with no no palestinian life is untouched by by prisons or by death or or harassment i mean it is it's comprehensive israeli occupation even for those of us who live in exile we are were profoundly touched and affected and violated by by israeli occupation and the violence of not being able to essentially sort of you know being told by the world even by by the government the united states government that you are not human enough or not the right kind of human are not worthy enough to inherit your own heritage to inherit the your homeland too to be able to live in a place where you have a familial history that spans many centuries of documented roots not just sort of you know religious roots or  historic stories that that you may or may not be connected to or the religious history that we're all connected to these are definitive indigenous cultural genetic  roots that palestinians have and to be told that no your your white american jewish neighbor is more worthy of that history than you are is  is deeply hurtful deeply humiliating and it's it's it's a collective wound that we all live with and try to contend with and we it's you know it's the source of of our struggle it's a source of our pain and it's also the source of our identity and our power you recently attempted to go back into palestine which you'd been to prior in just the end of july of this year and i thought it was just a great  what you were put to train your writing to talk about yeah so again i mean as a so as a u s citizen ostensibly i am afforded the ability to enter my homeland as a tourist and it's really all we have to go back and to to be in the places where you know all of our ancestors are buried where you know my parents have told me stories about you know growing up and grandparents and and to see homes that you know my family owned an orchard that my grandfather had planted and so all we have is that that stupid little tourist resort and and to get in usually we have to go through or at least i do i mean i've never been able to get in without  going through at least six hours of interrogations and searching and searches and you know often strip searches but usually i end up getting in this last time in july  to i was going to build playgrounds we had seven playgrounds that play on for palestine was building in in the west bank and i was going they had already started the building and i was going to help jewish american woman and that's when they realize she was with me at first they were going to let her in but then they made her wait as well i had six different interrogators they all asked the same questions i answered all the questions but of course you know they bring up the google everybody and me it's clear that i'm very critical of israel and very outspoken so they knew that and after seven and a half hours of waiting and being interrogated they told me that i was not allowed to but i was denied entry basically and they allowed stephany to go through  the the other board member and now it's not unusual this happens to a lot of people not just palestinian americans or arab americans but  any americans or europeans who seem sympathetic to palestinians or people who they think are going to do something beneficial for palestinians noam chomsky for example was he's one of the you know the more you know where the personalities who was tonight i also there were i knew of a couple of american and european t experts who were going to teach courses on software development or something for students and for palestinian students they had never been and they really had no political affiliations i really kind of didn't know much about the situation and they were all some merrily denied entry do you know because they're going to teach courses and software development so you know this is this is par for the course and unfortunately are the state department does nothing about it in fact the state department has on their website that you know sort of a warning that americans of palestinian heritage are not going to be treated as american citizens or be treated as palestinians think this is perfectly ok and this is ok with with the state department and for a country that receives so much aid so handouts it's not even aid i mean it's a developed economy in that they have you know taxpayer handouts in the billions and there's there's no protests there's nothing from the state department and it's quite infuriating actually those handouts are oftentimes in the form of u s military weapons that are being used directly in these conflicts that yeah they're not conflicts i mean that's yeah  that's not even the right word i know everybody it's hard to find the right words but it's this this is a situation of of supremacy of entitlement of set colonialism it's ethnic cleansing it's just the it's the destruction of an entire indigenous population that's what's happening the goal of sinus them has always been to erase palestine and establish in that an exclusively jewish population i mean that's been the goal of zionism and that's what's happening and it's been happening since  the turn of the century and the twenty fourteen invasion attack by israel images were just i mean i've been following this for some time but some parts of the city of gaza yeah and i think that and i think what you see is really a very tiny fraction of what actually happened i mean that's those are just the parts where somebody happened to have a camera and was able to film things and i think that's you know it's one thing that's making and this has been happening for you know course for decades but now this is the thing that's making the israeli project  more difficult is because people are actually able to see for themselves what israel is doing and so technology has made obsolete or nearly obsolete the traditional gatekeepers of of thought and knowledge you know c n n i'm a sim b c fox news of course they all still spin it so they spin it has really and they still try to make it look like it's self defense which is incredible it's breathtaking the way that they that they do that that this this enormous military power that's armed with the most technological death machines that reigns death on a b c largely a civilian population with no army no air force no no real organized military that that that they're actually defending defending themselves when they you know when they decimate nearly all electrical plants all water treatment systems all sewage all schools mosques hospitals and and our media our corporate media continues to try to couch these huge this kind of cruelty in terms of self defense it's mind boggling but there are more and more citizens around the world who are who are waking up to the absurdity of of corporate media spin and and their thinking for themselves which is a beautiful thing and that's one that's one of the great equalizing aspects of the internet and of technology it's giving people direct access to one another and it is really tearing down the the the traditional gatekeepers of that manipulate the way people think of of conflicts war of oppression so do you see that as meaningfully growing be the social media i know use of facebook and twitter amongst other tools is that really getting significant traction with people who wouldn't know otherwise and who will act that's always a key yeah you know social media i mean as as we've seen all over the world actually has been a tremendous tool for activists  organize to share information to to link up to learn from each other i you know that's actually the principle thing that i used for i don't really post what i eat or i washed my hair today or for the new nail polish color i don't i don't tend to do that i mean i get a lot of really great articles and analyses from all over the world and that's what i love about social media i'm not terribly tech savvy but i have managed to figure out twitter and facebook and i it's great yeah i mean you get articles that i wouldn't otherwise think to read you know from europe from various african nations from from south america from asia and and you see you get to see and read how other like activists people on the ground are are dealing with their own realities rather than sort of waiting allies something for you which i you know i'm glad more and more people are getting away from that but unfortunately there's still a huge segment of the population that still kind of waits for these thought gatekeepers  allies world events and tell people what to think and it seems like there is somewhat of a response from those social media entities like let's say facebook for example in responding to the the positive use or let's say getting out stories that you or i might be interested in by ratcheting down the number of items our friends might be sending out and we can actually see so unless you manually go in and search through i were to go to your page i could see everything you post where i'm just in general looking ahead things i'm only seeing one or two of your posts go by on a given day or yeah yeah well that's why you know there's also other forms of social media like twitter and you know that the hash tag revolution this kind of really helps you narrow things down and so i nonetheless i mean that technology has really revolutionized leftist radical socialist movements around the world movements for social justice and no socialist socialism survey carries a negative connotation in this country unfortunately people really recognize the inherent justice in that system but i'll just say social justice movements and also the rise of key websites to get out information for instance electronic intifada there's room website for permission are there others that you regularly oh yeah don't do support yeah but you know electronic intifada specifically deals with you know palestinian news items and it's really been wonderful it's been a wonderful resource for people to go to to get to get news about palestine that otherwise would never be covered in the mainstream media in the u s there's there are a lot of equally wonderful websites or in the media news outlets like the palestine chronicle middle east i there's counterpunch  yeah i mean they're just trying to go through like some of the articles i was reading this morning so there's a lot of good websites in translation out of france sometimes the b b c is not that well in addition to the online resources nothing still compares with meeting people face to face and that is what people here in locally will be able to do with you you have two different book events coming up yes we should let people know about we're just about out of time we're talking with susan and she is the author of the new book the blue between sky and water and you're going to be speaking at two different venues today th company yes so two different opportunities to hear you talk and interact i want to actually one of the characters in the book is is named after rachel cor yeah she's you know when when rachel corrie was killed in gaza you know she she became a palestinian hero to all of us and girls that were born that year were named rachel but the american press and of rachel eludes arabic speakers so it would come out either as rochelle arabized or people who are trying to you know pay attention to that just sound it was