Liberty turned 125 years last week. The Statue of Liberty, that is. The celebrations of the anniversary of the iconic statue symbolizing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, we should all take at least a moment to reflect on the state of citizenship and freedom -and unfreedom-in the United States.
In a word, freedom is in grave danger because of the most powerful Tyrant of our time: Corporations. There is no greater symbol of the destruction of freedom than Wall Street, which profits from all that has defined tyrants of previous eras: war, poverty, control of government, the lack of free speech, surveillance, the denial of basic human and civil rights and even the the possible destruction of the planet itself.
The good news is that we are also witnessing an unprecedented global movement that's trying to define freedom in the age of corporate tyranny. Movements like Occupy Wall Street, Spain's "Indignados", the Arab Spring and other movements are directly confronting the corporate control of everything from the culture, land, sea, air we inhabit to our genetic code and the food we eat. Occupy Wall Street is nothing if not a reflection of the threat to freedom posed by the ways in which corporations dominate the Congress, the electoral system, the economy and the Presidency itself.
The duplicity and threat of corporate-controlled freedom can be found on the Statue of Liberty itself. Much is being made in the media about the "live web cams" that are part of the high-tech makeover of the Statue. Less (or not) reported are the dozens of infrared surveillance cameras, vibration sensors, experimental facial recognition monitors, and other now ubiquitous electronic surveillance devices that capture the image of visitors and send them to databases of national security agencies. The profits from this kind of multi-million dollar makeover of Liberty go to corporations invested in redefining freedom.
The same will to profit from the decimation of Liberty can be found in today's naturalization ceremony being presided over by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. While Salazar is leading the naturalization ceremony of a small group of citizens at the foot of the statue, the Obama Administration is feeding the multi-billion dollar industry that persecutes and jails, surveills and deports more than a million immigrants since Salazar and the Obama Administration took the reigns of executive power. Such a situation has in essence has rendered meaningless the "New Colossus," the poem by Emma Lazarus engraved on a bronze plaque and mounted inside the monument in 1903. The anniversary of "Lady Liberty" should give us pause to reflect on these words in the Obama era:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
The golden door has become an iron cage; the masses are being huddled into private prisons whose stocks and profits now light the lamp of Liberty brighter with each new immigrant prisoner; The language of the "wretched refuse" on the "teeming shore has morphed an "anchor baby" that corporate-sponsored Republicans and even Democrats decry.
Such a situation points to how non-citizens, especially undocumented immigrants, are being used to divert from and disguise and the sad fact about citizenship in our age: corporate citizenship has humiliated and practically destroyed human citizenship. The buying of politicians by corporations has become synonymous with "democracy" in this New Gilded Age. But, instead of putting responsibility for the death of citizenship on the Corporate Colossus, there is a huge industry invested in blaming the "huddled masses" described in the New Colossus poem.
In the New Gilded Age, freedom and citizenship have become commodities that can be bought and sold.Freedom has become synonymous with "Free Trade"; "Freedom of the press", to quote the great journalist AJ Liebling, "is guaranteed only to those who own one." Religious freedom is centered at the altar of quick profits in a society forced to worship Wall Street.
If we are to alter this humiliation of Liberty, we have no choice to look not at the technofied torch and eyes of Liberty, which are monitoring us even as the torch shines forth the false image of "freedom", but at the invisible chains that shackle the feet of Liberty. At the moment, the movements the Occupy Wall Street movement hold the key to breaking us all free form the shackles of corporate tyranny.
May we still yearn to be free.