The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (49 page)

Eve’s moving essay “Congo Cancer” begins, “Some people may think that being diagnosed with uterine cancer, followed by extensive surgery that led to a month of debilitating infections, rounded off by months of chemotherapy, might get a girl down. But, in truth, this has not been my poison.” The poison, she went on, was the epidemic of rape, torture, and violence against women and girls in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Eve wrote
The Vagina Monologues
in 1996 as a celebration of women’s bodies and women’s empowerment. “When I did the play initially,” she told me, “everywhere I went on the planet, women would literally line up after the show . . . 90 to 95 percent of the women were lining up to tell me how they had been raped or battered or incested or abused. . . . I had no idea that one out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime. Suddenly this door opened for me.”

Eve began producing the play to raise funds for rape crisis hot lines and women’s organizations across the U.S. “We came up with this idea of V-Day,” she told me, “which was Ending Violence Day, Vagina Day—reclaiming Valentine’s Day as a day of kindness and good will to women. . . . We are now in 130 countries. Last year, there were 5,000 events in 1,500 or 1,600 places. It’s raised close to $80 million, that has all gone into local communities.”

The V-Day movement brought Eve to some of the most desperate places on earth—Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and post-Katrina New Orleans. She spent a year with women in New Orleans, compiling their descriptions of their lives and the impact of Hurricane Katrina into a series of monologues. It’s called “Swimming Upstream.” Unbelievably, in the middle of her chemotherapy, Eve is directing two special performances in mid-September, in New Orleans and at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

Eastern Congo, a war-ravaged region of the world’s most impoverished country, is where Eve and V-Day have been devoting most of their recent efforts. Since 1996, hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, victims of what V-Day calls femicide. Last month, Rwandan and Congolese rebels took over villages in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and gang-raped almost 200 women and five young boys. The rapes occurred between July 30 and August 3 within miles of a U.N. peacekeeping base, and went unreported for three weeks.

These rapes are brutal, leaving the victims with deep wounds and fistulae that require surgery. V-Day has been working with Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, the only facility in the region where the women can receive adequate treatment. V-Day is also building a woman-controlled safe zone attached to the hospital called “The City of Joy.”

Eve said the women themselves developed the plans for the City of Joy, “a place where they could heal, where they could be trained, where they could become leaders, where they had time and a respite to rebuild themselves and redirect their energies towards their communities.” If all goes well with her own treatment, she will be joining them to open the City of Joy in February.

The work, Eve told me, defines what she calls a “kind of three-way V between Haiti, the Congo, and New Orleans.”

With a scarf on her head, having lost her hair during cancer treatments, she was days away from starting her fourth round of chemotherapy. I asked her how she does it.

“The women of Congo saved my life,” she said. “Every day I get up, and I think to myself, I can keep going. If a woman in Congo gets up this morning after she’s had her insides eviscerated, what problem do I really have? And I think of how they dance. Every time I go to the Congo, they dance and they sing and they keep going, in spite of being forgotten and forsaken by the world. And I think to myself, I have to get better. I have to live to see the day when the women of Congo are free, because if those women are free, women throughout the world will be free and will get to continue.”

November 24, 2010

The Health Insurance Industry’s Vendetta Against Michael Moore

Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, makes great movies but they are not generally considered “cliff-hangers.” All that might change since a whistle-blower on the
Democracy Now!
news hour revealed that health insurance executives thought they may have to implement a plan “to push Moore off a cliff.” The whistle-blower: Wendell Potter, the former chief spokesman for health insurance giant CIGNA. He was quoting from an industry strategy session on how to respond to Moore’s 2007 documentary
Sicko
, a film critical of the U.S. health insurance industry. Potter told me that he is not sure how serious the threat was but he added, ominously, “These companies play to win.”

Moore won an Oscar in 2002 for his film about gun violence,
Bowling for Columbine
. He followed that with
Fahrenheit 9/11
, a documentary on the presidency of George W. Bush that became the top-grossing documentary film in U.S. history. So when Moore told a reporter that his next film would be about the U.S. health care system, the insurance industry took notice.

AHIP (America’s Health Insurance Plans), the major lobbying group of the for-profit health insurance corporations, secretly sent someone to the world premiere of
Sicko
at the Cannes Film Festival in France. Its agent rushed from the screening to a conference call with industry executives, including Potter. “We were very scared,” Potter said, “and we knew that we would have to develop a very sophisticated and expensive campaign to turn people away from the idea of universal care. . . . We were told by our pollsters [that] a majority of people were in favor of much greater government involvement in our health care system.”

AHIP hired a public-relations firm, APCO Worldwide, founded by the powerful law firm Arnold & Porter, to coordinate the response. APCO formed the fake grassroots consumer group “Health Care America” to counter the expected popularity of Moore’s
Sicko
and to promote fear of “government run health care.”

Potter writes in his new book,
Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans
, that he “found the film very moving and very effective in its condemnation of the practices of private health insurance companies. There were many times when I had to fight to hold back tears. Moore had gotten it right.”

The insurance industry declared its campaign against
Sicko
a resounding success. Potter wrote, “AHIP and APCO Worldwide had succeeded in getting their talking points into most of the stories about the movie, and not a single reporter had done enough investigative work to find out that insurers had provided the lion’s share of funding to set up Health Care America.” Indeed, everyone from CNN to
USA Today
cited Health Care America as if it were a legitimate group.

Moore concedes, “Their smear campaign was effective and did create the dent they were hoping for—single payer and the public option never even made it into the real discussion on the floor of Congress.”

Moore has called Potter the “Daniel Ellsberg of corporate America,” invoking the famous Pentagon whistle-blower whose revelations helped end the Vietnam War. Potter’s courageous stand made an impact on the debate, but the insurance industry, the hospitals, and the American Medical Association prevailed in blunting the elements of the plan that threatened their profits.

A recent Harvard Medical School study found that nearly 45,000 Americans die each year—one every twelve minutes—largely because they lack health insurance. But for the insurance lobby, the only tragedy is the prospect of true health care reform. In 2009, the nation’s largest health insurance corporations funneled more than $86 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to oppose health care reform. This year, the nation’s five largest insurers contributed three times as much money to Republican candidates as to Democrats, in an effort to further roll back insurance industry reform. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., an advocate of single-payer health care, declared in Congress that “the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry.” Potter agrees, saying the Republican Party has “been almost bought and paid for.”

The health insurance industry is getting its money’s worth. Moore said that the industry was willing to attack his film because it was afraid it “could trigger a populist uprising against a sick system that will allow companies to profit off of us when we fall ill.” Now that is truly sick.

October 13, 2010

John le Carré: Calling Out the Traitors

John le Carré, the former British spy turned spy novelist, has some grave words for Tony Blair. More than seven years after the invasion of Iraq, the former British prime minister, now out of office and touring the world pushing his political memoir, is encountering serious protests at his book signings.

“I can’t understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin,” le Carré told me when I sat down with him recently in London. “We’ve caused irreparable damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time.”

We sat in a television studio across the River Thames overlooking two of his former places of employment: MI5, the domestic security service, and MI6, the secret intelligence service, which operates internationally (the equivalents of the U.S.’s FBI and CIA). John le Carré is the pen name of David Cornwell, who was a spy from the late 1950s into the early 1960s. He began to write novels and had to assume a pen name due to his work as a spy. He was stationed in Germany when, in 1961, he saw the Berlin Wall go up, motivating him to write his third novel,
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
.

The novel came out as another British spy novelist, Ian Fleming, was enjoying success with his series about the notorious fictional British spy James Bond. Unlike the flamboyant characters and endless action of the Bond books and films, the subjects of le Carré’s novels were bleak characters engaged in unsavory acts of deception and calculated violence. With the world focused on the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis, le Carré captured a global audience, depicting the raw reality of the spy on the front lines of the Cold War.

As the Cold War ended, le Carré continued his prolific writing, shifting focus, increasingly, to the inequities of globalization, unchecked multinational corporate power, and the frequent confluence of corporate interests and the activities of national spy services.

Perhaps best known among his later novels is
The Constant Gardener
, about a pharmaceutical company using unwitting people in Kenya for dangerous, sometimes fatal, tests of an experimental drug. He explained, “The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done—dare I say it—in the name of God.” Like many of his novels,
The Constant Gardener
was made into a popular feature film, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz.

Le Carré has written often of Africa: “It’s where I have seen globalization at work on the ground. It’s a pretty ugly sight. It’s a boardroom fantasy. What it actually means is the exploitation of very cheap labor, very often the ecological disaster that comes with it, the creation of mega-cities, the depletion of agrarian cultures and tribal cultures.”

His latest book (his twenty-second), just out this week, is called
Our Kind of Traitor
. It targets a fictional array of London bankers and their protectors in Parliament, who collude with Russian Mafiosi to prop up the collapsed world economy by laundering hundreds of billions of dollars in criminal profits.

Back in 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, le Carré marched against the war with, by many estimates, more than 1 million people: “We were all wedged together and looking into Downing Street, where the prime minister’s residency is . . . a kind of feral roar of popular will rose. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Blair sitting inside that building and hearing that sound. . . . I think it will always be remembered of him that he took us to war on the strength of lies.”

He said he wouldn’t buy Blair’s book, but he does have some questions for him: “Have you ever seen what happens when a grenade goes off in a school? Do you really know what you’re doing when you order ‘shock and awe’? Are you prepared to kneel beside a dying soldier and tell him why he went to Iraq, or why he went to any war?”

Le Carré summed up what he sees as a central problem for global powers, especially Britain and the U.S.: “Victims never forget, and the winners do. And they forget very quickly.” Because of that, John le Carré continues writing, into his eightieth year, engaging people as he seeks what he calls “the big truth.”

January 26, 2011

Sundance and the Art of Democracy

PARK CITY, Utah—This small, alpine mountain town is transformed every winter during the Sundance Film Festival into a buzzing hive of the movie industry. While much of the attention is focused on the celebrities, Sundance has actually become a key intersection of art, film, politics, and dissent. It is where many of the most powerful documentaries premiere, films about genuine grassroots struggles, covering the sweep of social justice history and the burning issues of today. They educate and inspire a growing audience about the true nature, and cost, of direct democracy.