Next Steps for OWS
The leaderless Occupy Movement should quietly thank Mayor Bloomberg for ending the encampment in Zuccotti Park. As Ad Busters, the culture jamming magazine which first proposed Occupy Wall Street, suggested yesterday that there are two routes forward.
STRATEGY #1: We summon our strength, grit our teeth and hang in there through winter … heroically we sleep in the snow … we impress the world with our determination and guts … and when the cops come, we put our bodies on the line and resist them nonviolently with everything we’ve got.
STRATEGY #2: We declare “victory” and throw a party … a festival … a potlatch … a jubilee … a grand gesture to celebrate, commemorate, rejoice in how far we’ve come, the comrades we’ve made, the glorious days ahead. Imagine, on a Saturday yet to be announced, perhaps our movement’s three month anniversary on December 17, in every #OCCUPY in the world, we reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.
We dance like we’ve never danced before and invite the world to join us.
Then we clean up, scale back and most of us go indoors while the die-hards hold the camps. We use the winter to brainstorm, network, build momentum so that we may emerge rejuvenated with fresh tactics, philosophies, and a myriad projects ready to rumble next Spring.
Strategy #2 is the way to go. I don’t even think you need the “die-hards” to hold geography, because the movement is not about territory, but about ideas. What is needed over the winter months is a series of Teach-Ins like the epic events that made the Anti-Vietnam War Movement coalesce in the winter and spring of 1965. Now is the time on college and high school campuses to educate the wider public on the issues of economic inequality. The movement has a powerful meme–”We are the 99%”–which was in danger of being diffused by the inevitable crime and sanitation problems that come from putting a small cities in public parks all over the country. Out of these teach-ins should come some specific proposals that OWS would push during the 2012 election. Here are four suggested pillars:
- A surtax on incomes over $1 million
- A Tobin Tax on Stock Trading
- End the corrupting influence of money in politics
- Bring the troops home
One last thought. In the last few weeks I have often thought “What would Martin Luther King do in this moment?” Ultimately the great social justice movements in America like women’s suffrage, ending child labor or the civil rights movement have come about out of a strict adhesion to the loving principles of non-violence. Dr. King, who I marched with in Boston in April of 1965, consistently held up a vision of a better world that we would make through non-violence. His most famous speech was “I have a dream” not “I have a nightmare”. I know that there is a small group of angry young anarchists trying to influence the OWS movement. Those of us with grey in our beards have been here before, watching the Weathermen subvert a non-violent peace movement. What we ended up with was Richard Nixon (running on a law and order platform) as our President.
We should not make that mistake again.
The horror, I say the horror, is that people who actually work for a living and go about creating the real wealth of nations and are busily trying to resurrect their corners of The Economy (The Hedonomy?) by working their butts off, were taught that “banks” were safe, generally honorable institutions, secured since the Depression by The Government (meaning all of us, in one of those “caring for each other is wise policy for all” exercises like Social Security — none for you, Worgon, you cad), and that “investment” was all about putting some of your disposable, actually earned (as opposed to “made”) money into the hands of “capitalists” to build cars and refrigerators and Cabbage Patch Kids. All based on a fundamentally false econofraud, that Growth Will Persist Infinitely and Float All Boats Forever, and that Consumption was no longer the sin of Gluttony, but a Positive Good, especially in the December Retail Season. So “Investment Banks” are Goodness Squared, right? Many people STILL resonate to that discordant minor… Screw it.
Seems to me that while there may be a lot of “jargon” out there, CDOs and CDSs and those “ize” words, the whole casino has been allowed to hide behind the curtain of credulity that Traditional Value Teaching has rung down. Because 300 million or 7 billion humans are the quintessential definition of Stupid In A Box.
And yes, there’s been people who “earn” their money the old-fashioned way, they COUNTERFEIT it, which at bottom is all that derivatives are, and which bond bubbles and railroad stock bubbles and all the rest are puny exemplars of from our Sainted Past, “earning” that way for years, centuries. Remember Popala’s Paragon Of Free Market Reputation Virtue, the “Scottish Banks” of the early Industrialization thing? Not what he imaged it to be, on shallow acquaintance. A Bespoke Suit and Calvinist Collar and Membership in the Proper Club do not an honorable man make.
And yes, I hope the Occupiers can actually do something other than Puck the ‘Astards, out of the momentum and angst and whatever else is powering what I will always (until persuaded otherwise) think of as a Revulsion Reaction. As with those emetic mixtures that delicate souls used to consume, to get rid of nasty shit they had been unwise enough to swallow.
And of course, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrwsUur6SfE&feature=related
Please forgive if I tromple any Intellectual Propertyisms by dropping these links, delete if appropriate — new learning for the day is that you don’t apparently need even the little smattering of html skill that I lack, to do this stuff anymore… Progress? Or just an addition to the noise?
Amplification, baybee. Make it work FOR you.
Sent to Mayor Bloomberg and to NY Times OpEd:
Dear Mayor Bloomberg,
I am a former resident of New York City and a frequent visitor. I am gravely disturbed about the recent violence against students and protestors at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. Growing up in the Civil Rights Era South, I witnessed many similar examples of terrible violence against regular people marching or sitting in for their rights. New Yorkers traditionally embrace and greatly value human rights and the dignity of every human being.
Those Protestors were doing nothing dangerous, threatening or terribly disruptive. Why are the police allowed to get so violent? What do you and the police fear from unarmed citizens standing and sitting in protest against economic and social problems in our nation? Your police force brutalized those kids. No matter what distorted justification your advisors come up with, you are simply wrong in allowing this to happen. This kind of behavior is psychopathic. Certainly you know the meaning of our Constitution’s First Amendment: “… the right of the people peaceably to assemble. …”
As Mayor of New York you clearly hold some of the blame for fomenting violence against peaceful protests all over our nation. You allowed the violence against the people in Zuccotti Park. The Mayor of Oakland and the Berkeley Police and the UC Davis Police took your cue for violence against protestors. Because of your part in the violence and for the good of the nation and the City of New York you should resign immediately as Mayor. The voices for social justice need to be heard.
We are America. We must hold the highest standard for Democracy.
Martin Pitts
Los Angeles, California
len, ‘al Bari is a wonderful exercise, a nice anodyne to stuff like Popola’s reductio, ‘al Absurdam, of the faux “science” of fricanomics. But you gotta love people who have a simple answer for everything, and a power of disdain for anyone else who does not toe their definitionally prescribed line.
Maybe you remember Arthur C. Clark’s little gem, “The Nine Billion Names of God”? Let’s see, IBM helped the Nazis become more efficient at their formalism, any number of busly little coders and technocompanies are helping Homeland Security get a handle on OWS et al (and on the other side, doing the equivalent of “duck and cover”), and in Clarke’s picoworld, a couple of geeks from what, Silicon Valley, helped a bunch of Tibetan lamas finish their homework quicker, extinguishing the universe by satisfying the infinitely proud Satya of the Creator by recording all His/Her/Its names. So it is written, so it shall be… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrwsUur6SfE&feature=related Maybe 99 names, like 72 virgins, is kind of a metaphor?
BOOM!
Or whatever noise a star makes, when it just “goes out…”
Mr. Pitts, like Amber says, “amplify.”
a) Thanks. al Bari is an exercise in the composition of the dumb hum plus a walking masmoudi (sp). A little messy but I like that sort of thing.
b) I know. I was one of them when I worked for Intergraph Public Safety. We began to think about the issue 30 minutes after the first plane hit the WTC. The problem was lumpen terrorists (homegrowners). Once it was shown just how well ultra-large data collection systems helped isolate disturbance sources and that communications among entities that can coordinate and share resources work, competitors got very busy hooking the responder’s resource allocators (say dispatch and records manage) together. I worked the standard for that. Lo siento.
Right now you want them to do exactly what they are doing so people will understand what they are doing. As we’ve discussed, we need a change of values and that is not going to happen as a result of cost-benefit analysis. That is what I’m trying to get Papola to understand: values change is almost always an emotional reaction to emotional events. The politics of the heart.
Maybe our problem is that we have too many neo-liberals and neo-conservatives, and not enough of the other mythical Neos trotted out serially to cathartize and bemuse us and leave us feeling that the Hero will find his Truth, and save us from our nightmare.
Plaudits for your persistence in trying to persuade Papola of anything. He’s a PersuadER, not a PersuadEE, and has seemingly got a personally gratifying and satisfying worldview and explanation for Everything Important, which has to do, as far as I can tell, with the goodies one can amass via “voluntary association” and the kind of sucking up of the nutrients that working people have to struggle to actually hunt, gather and earn before they can eat them, via the wondrous absorptive and generative capacity of tapeworms and such-like, who get to lie up in comfortable warmth and ideal physical conditions.
Maybe Occupy might act like a dose of antihelmintic?
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/tapeworm/DS00659/DSECTION=treatments-and-drugs
I’d almost forgotten how tapeworms can screw their way into all of our organs, not just the intestines… Really hard to purge them, once they get a good beachhead. But I did not forget that back in the early part of the last century, an enterprising Free Market Business Type, Free of Regulation, sold a patent-medicine capsule that was guaranteed to make you lose weight. each and every one contained some chalk and a couple of tapeworm cysts. Worked “as advertised,” of course… And gee, the guy’s successors are still at it — look how there’s nothing new under the sun: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDWFXWiIq0Y
Don’t forget, after worming, to always wash one’s hands after defecating. The Cysts, like the Poor, we will always have with us… http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-poor-we-shall-always-have-with-us/857202/ lying up waiting to secretly be ingested with some nominally and seemingly healthy bit of broccoli by some less medically and nutritionally privileged “host.”
Here’s a question: I just finished the day’s newspaper, killed some time puzzling over CNBC (the corpses of seconds, minutes and hours make charnel windrows around my post, like the piles of Human Wave Chinks beyond the wire on Porkchop Hill and other peaks of heroic futility), listened to as much as I could take of NPR’s morning casuistry, and given the quantum of Mean and Evil and Careless and Stupid in the Cuisinart, how much Hope and Love and Decency does it take to uncurdle the sour blood pudding? Maybe that’s just a question of local effects and personal weirdness and hypersensitivity… Participants in the Great Game know that wonderful secret, that It Doesn’t Matter, ‘cuz it’s all about Me and Mine, in My Time…
That opportunistic Strange Attractor is fully deployed in the MIC, as I’m sure len knows — millions of people chasing the trillions of dollars, putting all that amoral brain power into developing Autonomous Battle Robots and Networking the whole shitpile of “smartness” into a seamless Battlespace and ginning up grinning horrors like nanoweapons and all the rest, figuring out how to actually do away with the Troops so that Enemy Targets can be Engaged and Destroyed by phallic Projections of Power, in aid of exactly what set of notions, again? As detached from the warm, breathing body that feeds the monster (other than by an umbilicus pumping that lifeblood called Real Wealth into the exponentially growing tumor, and accepting willy-nilly and struggling to detoxify the waste products and little metastatic cells, just like the whole “financial industry” thing…
Boy is that ever right. The internet didn’t work well for command and control for the original scenario, but scale it down and add a lot of forward sensors cheap to build, fly and replace, and it works like rats a fighting and bees a swarming. As predicted.
Hard question. Is there a multiplier anywhere in the chain? That’s what the folk groups did last time: they were the signal and the media was the amplifier/multiplier. We got a dose of that when Arlo, Pete, et al went to Zucotti. It is still a question of cultural semiotics. Trouble is there is no money in it for the same people who want that ISP fee Jon talks about. Maybe there is a deal in there for he and his if he thinks about it that way but I’m not sure who he makes that deal with. Right now it is iTunes et al and market driven. They will have to co-opt the people the OWSers do look up to and let them write the kinds of material I was aiming for with al Bari (first rate, of course) and balance that against the kind of thing I was doing with Occupy The World, IOW, the rave them up and calm them down in the right mixture.
What will not work is a “go away and forget this idea” approach. CNN and Fox have already tried that with humiliating them and it only made them mad. And that’s a critical insight for the cultural programmers: even cancer cells learn and though you can knock them back, they come back smarter every time and then it’s a race between the cure killing the patient or the disease.
BTW: next chemo round starts Dec 19. So the same caution: I will get stupider than usual into next spring. Patience pleaded.
Yar.hamu-ka-Llâh.
Jazakallah Khair.
@Alex Bowles
Simple. Get rid of “lender of last resort” and eliminate limited liability for banks. You’ll a healthier banking system.
@John Papola
Sure, and if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Still John has a point. The banks took on more and more risk based on bogus instruments and when they predictably failed were bailed out only to hoard the cash and put the economy into a bigger tailspin. The corporations sitting on huge cash reserves waiting to see how the election goes or in some cases trying to force Obama out of office are no better. The frustration of the OWSers is a near universal american frustration with the well-heeled thus the posters dotting FB saying “yes, this is a class war”. No one really wants to talk about it but it is what it is. One can kibitz the economic theories and technical instruments, but no one wants to face up to the fact that the people getting a real change in their system are camped out in Tahir. Here a cop can pepper spray a line of kids sitting on the ground and our media reacts with a determined yawn and we have a pang of sympathy but no one utters the real description: police state. Just as Egyptians are winning their freedoms, we’re losing ours.