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Nation Waiting For Protesters To Clearly Articulate Demands Before Ignoring Them
The Onion
NEW YORK—As the Occupy Wall Street protest expands and grows into a nationwide movement, Americans are eagerly awaiting a list of demands from the group so they can then systematically disregard them and continue going about their business, polls showed this week. “The protesters need to unify around a shared agenda with precise policy goals so I can begin paying no attention to them whatsoever,” said Tulsa, OK poll respondent Kaye Petrachonis, echoing the thoughts of millions across the country. “If they don’t have a clear power structure organized around specific demands first, then I’ll never be able to completely tune them out due to a political conflict of interest or an inability to comprehend complex, detailed economic concepts. These people really need to get their act together.”
(12 October 2011)
Occupy Protests’ Seismic Effect
Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast
Occupy Wall Street is a direct confrontation with capitalism and other powerful forces in American life—and marks the left’s decoupling from Obama and the Democratic Party
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This past weekend, in 900 cities across the world, tens of thousands demonstrated against unregulated capitalism. Something fascinating is growing, and by the time it ends, I suspect, politics will be different in the United States and a lot of other places as well.
In a great many countries, especially in the West, the political grass is dry. Huge numbers of young people are unemployed, governments are launching harsh and unpopular austerity programs, and the financial elites responsible for the global economic meltdown have almost entirely escaped justice. Millions of articulate, educated, tech-savvy people are enraged and desperate. And they have time on their hands.
To understand this movement’s potential, it’s worth comparing it with the other spasms of global leftist activism in the past half-century. The last time we saw anything on this scale was the late 1960s, when anti-government protests broke out from Berkeley to Paris to Mexico City to Prague.
… Today’s Wall Street protests represent the left’s decoupling from Obama and the Democratic Party, something that the global nature of the movement will only reinforce. That doesn’t mean the movement has a clear critique of unregulated capitalism yet, let alone a concrete agenda for reform, but it means that the left finally is forcing those questions onto the public agenda. By confronting Wall Street, it is creating the populist energy that Obama himself has not.
What we are witnessing in Zuccotti Park actually represents an improvement over the Obama campaign. That campaign was largely about faith in one man. The Occupy Wall Street movement, by contrast, represents a direct reckoning with the most powerful forces in American life, forces that are not voted in and out of office every two or four years. And it represents a belief that young Americans must force that reckoning by themselves. No politician will do it for them. Those instincts are exactly right, and we’ve never needed them more.
(17 October 2011)
Greece on the Brink of Emergency: A Matter of Days
Aris Leonas, Parallhlografos
In Greece a number of factors stand out, suggesting that Greece is on the verge of some major changes. The disruption of basic operations of the state in conjunction with the wide spread certainty that the Greek debt cannot be controlled (constant rumours for default in the coming period) compose the picture of political instability and crisis which seems to be the precursor of a more generalized political crisis to be spread in the rest of the south European regimes first and possibly to the heart of the Eurozone …
… Rumours, which may or may not be true, are circulating regarding possible deployment of the EU EuroGendFor (Euro Gendamerie Force) military personell being called to Greece in the days ahead. …
On the one hand, there has been an incredible level of political activity and mobilization from very broad layers of society. This has continued to intensify, bringing in ever greater numbers and becoming more and more continuous as the crisis has deepened much further since 2009.
… the last step in this series of resistances is expressed through occupations of public spaces, and strikes in key industries such as transport or railways.
On the other hand, this high level of mobilization has not stopped or even slowed down the pace of austerity measures, nor the mass privatizations, and repression has been growing. Protests have been met with extreme police violence, and increasingly strikes are being declared illegal.
Despite high levels of organizing, people report a profound sense of despair, and no clear sense of alternatives being built by people. There is widespread panic and a general sense of economic, political and mainly social collapse. Increasingly the reproduction of massive parts of the society is becoming more and more difficult, as society’s functioning grinds to a halt. Nothing is working, neither public services nor private deals.
… People are under huge pressure. Increasing sections of the population are unable to pay taxes, pay back loans or even ensure the satisfaction of their basic subsistence needs, such as electricity, health services, housing etc.
Unemployment is increasing fast, and is expected to reach an average of 25% in the first semester of 2012. High taxes are being imposed through electricity bills, and the economy has contracted fast, and fear, or even panic, reigns among large parts of the active population.
(18 October 2011)
Going Apeshit
James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation
… In this early stage of the convulsion rocking the western world, especially here in the USA, a peaceful ambience rules. That is because a game is being played. We played the game in 1968. It goes like this. You get people to turn out in the streets. The idea is to promote the right of public assembly as much as to make any particular point. (In fact, banners advocating all sorts of gripes appear.) Eventually, you get a lot of people in the streets. Feelings of happy anarchy sweep the crowd, a feeling that something special is underway, that the usual rules of everyday conduct have been suspended, in a good way. The crowd basks in the sunny glow of its own mass, happy solidarity. Everybody is behaving splendidly – more to feel good about.
After a while that gets boring, especially for young males with a lot of testosterone surging from loin to brain. They want to do more than bask in the radiance of their own righteous wonderfulness. They want to engage their large muscles, even if in the service of an idea, for instance the idea that they have been swindled. It is at first a vague idea, but large. But pretty soon it coheres emergently: swindled out of our future! Yes, it is so. Thousands of demon-like beings upstairs in the curtain-wall towers around Zuccotti Park, people wearing neckties and cultured pearls in warm offices with cappuccino machines down the hall, are at this very moment setting loose trading algorithms that will swindle us out of our future! You can see them up there at their evil, glowing screens!
That’s when the yoga acrobatics and the hat crocheting are put aside and the street people – their ranks swollen into a horde-like meta-organism – start to express things beyond the right of public assembly. Something unseen goes through them, perhaps like the pheromone that transforms a field full of grasshoppers into a ravening swarm of locusts. Being people, they cannot take wing. But they can press forward and up against things, and they can surely break the glass in those sleek curtain-wall buildings (so much for “transparency”) beyond which the bankers sit cringing in their expensive clothing.
(17 October 2011)
Here’s What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About…
Henry Blodger, Business Insider
… So, what are the protesters so upset about, really?
Do they have legitimate gripes?
To answer the latter question first, yes, they have very legitimate gripes.
And if America cannot figure out a way to address these gripes, the country will likely become increasingly “de-stabilized,” as sociologists might say. And in that scenario, the current protests will likely be only the beginning.
The problem in a nutshell is this: Inequality in this country has hit a level that has been seen only once in the nation’s history, and unemployment has reached a level that has been seen only once since the Great Depression. And, at the same time, corporate profits are at a record high.
In other words, in the never-ending tug-of-war between “labor” and “capital,” there has rarely—if ever—been a time when “capital” was so clearly winning.
[Several charts follow at the original article]
(11 October 2011)
Suggested by EB reader J/M who writes:
“The backstory here is of course a deliberate, well-executed & massive wealth transfer from the 99% to the 1%, combined with hitting limits to growth ala Richard Heinberg. As you scroll through the charts, try to
understand the various mechanisms used to accomplish this transfer – including impressive voter ignorance and preoccupation with ‘social’ issues.
I suggest sending this link to as many people as you can to inform discussions during coming election cycles. “
The Occupiers’ dream: an easy revolution?
Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
… To keep together all under one tent, as it were, the protesters are in danger of standing still. So where will they go next? There will sooner or later be another step to take that’s not so easy. Will corporate news media offices and government buildings be forcibly Occupied, using nonviolent civil disobedience? Great numbers would be required. The scene could turn ugly and violent instantly, most likely because of police or agents de provocateur tactics.
If people are unemployed, it’s a good reason to hang out in a park as Occupiers. Exchanging views and being visible to the world are wonderful developments. However, the follow-up has to be just as strong or else the movement dies.
So they have to move forward before they are subverted. At this very moment the powers that be must be striving to undermine the Occupy movement. And many an average citizen may resent his or her world being rocked by protesters. As nonsensical as “Get a job!” may be when hurled against someone ready and willing to work but cannot find a job, critics of protest are ready to support fascistic measures to keep crowds from taking over whole cities.
To maintain the initiative and not be sitting ducks, protesters must make a clear demand that resonates widely, something overdue that is insisted upon until the fight is won.
Freedom and justice cannot be gained easily; they must be taken by force — without undue harm to innocents or even “enemies.”
If people knew there had to be a revision of recognized rights, such as replacing the Constitution with something more like the Articles of Confederation, there would be greater promise. Restoring the states’ rights would mean breaking apart the empire in part by having no standing army. And doing away with corporate personhood is another basic reform to minimize the excesses of Western Civilization.
But a limited focus of the Occupy movement on Wall Street, banks and corporations can fall short of meaningful change if sops of reform take hold: a sham or co-optation is erected. It is naïve to believe corporations can be made accountable, because they will grow and dominate if they can — and we’d be back to Square One.
In contrast, boycotting oil would be deeper than a demand, but rather a lifestyle change that upends the corporate economy. Moreover, such a change allows people to live life to the fullest, closer to nature and more self-reliant, and it expands their consciousness toward unity. Yet, if separation as consumers — whether middle-class or low-end — persists, the Occupy movement will be easily overtaken (or even forgotten) by a huge crisis such as a food riot.
Occupy Santa Cruz
The Santa Cruz newspaper Sentinel, a Republican sheet owned by the San Jose Mercury News, said on Oct. 16 that “dozens” of protesters marched the day before, but there were about 1,500. At any rate, most cars going by honked supportively, and one might have counted one of them at any time.
Organizers tried to get all people off the road at march’s end to please the police. (I sat in the road a while.) The police finally walked up to ask the one remaining sitter to leave, apparently after protesters asked the police to ask him. He complied, and any “unpredictable chaos” receded. So the “easy revolution” eased on. I also videotaped this scene with one hand, the other hand holding my trusty tambourine.
(16 October 2011)
