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Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it
Douglas Rushkoff, CNN
Like the spokesmen for Arab dictators feigning bewilderment over protesters’ demands, mainstream television news reporters finally training their attention on the growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement seem determined to cast it as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. They couldn’t be more wrong and, as time will tell, may eventually be forced to accept the inevitability of their own obsolescence.
… the reason why some mainstream news journalists and many of the audiences they serve see the Occupy Wall Street protests as incoherent is because the press and the public are themselves. It is difficult to comprehend a 21st century movement from the perspective of the 20th century politics, media, and economics in which we are still steeped.
In fact, we are witnessing America’s first true Internet-era movement, which — unlike civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign — does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals and understand itself as having a particular endpoint.
… Are they ready to articulate exactly what that problem is and how to address it? No, not yet. But neither are Congress or the president who, in thrall to corporate America and Wall Street, respectively, have consistently failed to engage in anything resembling a conversation as cogent as the many I witnessed as I strolled by Occupy Wall Street’s many teach-ins this morning. There were young people teaching one another about, among other things, how the economy works, about the disconnection of investment banking from the economy of goods and services, the history of centralized interest-bearing currency, the creation and growth of the derivatives industry, and about the Obama administration deciding to settle with, rather than investigate and prosecute the investment banking industry for housing fraud.
… Occupy Wall Street is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion, creates as many questions as it answers, aims to force a reconsideration of the way the nation does business and offers hope to those of us who previously felt alone in our belief that the current economic system is broken.
But unlike a traditional protest, which identifies the enemy and fights for a particular solution, Occupy Wall Street just sits there talking with itself, debating its own worth, recognizing its internal inconsistencies and then continuing on as if this were some sort of new normal. It models a new collectivism, picking up on the sustainable protest village of the movement’s Egyptian counterparts, with food, first aid, and a library.
Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist and the author of “Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age” and “Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back.”
(5 October 2011)
Recommended by Amanda Kovattana who writes: “This writer has figured out why this movement is working so well and at the same time offering a model of how we might all govern ourselves. And from CNN now less. Now we might all get it..”
-BA
What I Saw at the Revolution
Will Bunch, Smirking Chimp
I attended my first revolution this week. I have to confess I was a little nervous as I walked closer to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the epicenter for this once unimaginable American Autumn.
… Ah, yes, the question that my editors — and anyone who’s ever worn a tie for longer than the duration of a funeral — is dying to know. What’s the agenda, Kenneth? All these people camping out in a concrete park in soggy sleeping bags, and now checking off the box for “Have you ever been arrested?” on those job applications that no one was actually reading, anyway. For who? For what?
If you come here to actually listen and not to heap scorn, you will get it. Sure, there’s broad consensus for ending corporate personhood and getting their buckets of dollars out of the U.S. political system, and for throwing the worst of the banksters in jail, but Occupy Wall Street — and the sister movements springing up all across America — is about something much more existential than one or two political issues. They are The Other 99 Percent who’ve been stripped bare of any real influence in a supposed democracy where both parties compete for the cash of the 1 Percenters, and so taking back their country starts with the simplest of steps — re-occupying America, physically. I know this will sound weird, maybe trite to some, but I am reminded of the salvation of the little people of Whoville in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who, so desperate just to prove their existence that they chant at the top of their lungs: “We are here! We are here! We are here! We are here!”
And what’s so amazing is the way they’ve made “here” in Zuccotti Park into a real and thriving community in less than three weeks, not just with an orderly cafeteria line of free food — yes, pizza is king, but salad has a presence — backed by donations from coast to coast, but also a library of donated books to read during downtime and a media center that gets electricity from… God knows where.
And their mini-America grows in population and diversity every day — disgruntled Iraq and Afghanistan vets, college students who see their debt clock ticking even as they’re told it could be years before the economy creates jobs for them, retired union guys and weekending farmers, and people who started out with one issue, like legalizing pot or ending the war, and now see a much bigger picture coming into focus. They are the vanguard of the millions who felt certain during the low moments in the 2000s that the electoral system was the American exceptional way to cleanse the sins of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, only to learn that it was not hope, change and a ballot box waiting behind the curtain on November 3, 2008, but a permanent government of hedge-fund traders and CEOs.
The Tea Party movement — which I spent considerable time traveling among, for a book called The Backlash — is a narrow group of mostly white, mostly middle class and mostly older Americans, angry that one party led by a man who didn’t look like them won an election, commandeered and steered top-down by oil billionaires and the hucksters of right-wing meda to help the other party win back control. Occupy Wall Street is a diverse bottom-up movement fueled by a loss of faith in both parties, and it is steered by no one, steaming into politically uncharted waters. Which is what makes it all so thrilling.
(6 October 2011)
The Anti-Politics of #OccupyWallStreet
Matt Stoller, Naked Capitalism
What do the people at #OccupyWallStreet actually want? What are their demands? For many people, this is THE question.
So let me answer it. What they want… is to do exactly what they are doing. They want to occupy Wall Street. They have built a campsite full of life, where power is exercised according to their voices. It’s a small space, it’s a relatively modest group of people at any one time, and the resources they command are few. But they are practicing the politics of place, the politics of building a truly public space. They are explicitly rejecting the politics of narrow media, the politics of the shopping mall. To understand #OccupyWallStreet, you have to get that it is not a media object or a march. It is first and foremost, a church of dissent, a space made sacred by a community. But like Medieval churches, it is also now the physical center of that community. It has become many things. Public square. Carnival. Place to get news. Daycare center. Health care center. Concert venue. Library. Performance space. School.
Few people, though an increasing number daily, have actually taken the time to go through a general assembly, to listen to what the people at #OccupyWallStreet actually want. General assemblies are the consensus-oriented group conversations at the heart of the occupations, where endlessly repeating the speaking of others is the painstaking and frustrating way that the group comes to make decisions. I spoke with a very experienced older DC hand who told me that he hasn’t been because he doesn’t have the patience of the young. This is as different a way of doing politics as distributed computing was to the old world of mainframes. So it isn’t surprising that the traditionalists are reacting as perplexed and dismissive of this new style of politics as the big iron types were with the rise of PCs.
I have been through a few general assemblies now, and they are remarkable because the point of the assembly is to truly put listening at the heart of decision-making. There’s no electronic amplification allowed in Zuccotti Square. So the organizers have figured out an organic microphone system. A speaker says a half a sentence, everyone in earshot repeats, until the whole park can hear that half a sentence. Then the speaker says another half a sentence. People use hand signals to indicate approval, disapproval, get a move on, or various forms of objections and clarifications. During these speeches, speakers often explicitly ask for more gender and racial diversity, which is known as “progressive stacking”.
At first it’s extremely… annoying. And time-consuming. But after a few hours, it’s oddly refreshing. I felt completely included as part of a community forum even though I had not been a speaker. But what I realized is that the act of listening, embedded in the active reflecting of what the speaker was saying, created a far richer conversational space. Actually reflecting back to one another what someone just said is a technique used by therapists, and by pandering politicians. There is nothing so euphoric in a community sense as truly feeling heard. That’s what the general assembly was about, not a democracy in the sense of voting, but a democracy in the sense of truly respecting the humanity of everyone in the forum. It took work. It took patience. But it created a communal sense of power.
Matt Stoller is former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.
(6 October 2011)
Protests Offer Obama Opportunity to Gain, and Room for Pitfalls
Mark Landler, New York Times
Anti-Wall Street protesters marched past the gates of the White House on Thursday, bringing their message of economic injustice to the capital and posing an opportunity, but also a threat, to President Obama, who presents himself as a fervent defender of the middle class.
Brandishing placards that said “No More Wall Street White House” and chanting “Shame! Shame!” the crowd took aim at the president, even if it saved most of its vitriol for the nearby headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — or as one banner labeled it, “Chamber of Corporate Horrors.”
To hear some Democratic analysts tell it, the mushrooming protests could be the start of a populist movement on the left that counterbalances the surge of the Tea Party on the right, and closes what some Democrats fear is an “enthusiasm gap” between their party and Republicans in the 2012 election.
But that assumes the president is able to win the support of these insurgents, rather than be shunned by them.
Mr. Obama, in a series of recent hard-edged speeches around the country, has channeled many of the grievances of the movement known as Occupy Wall Street: deepening economic inequity, a tax code that gives breaks to the wealthy and corporate interests and banks that profit from hidden consumer fees.
Yet the president also oversaw a bailout of those banks, appointed a Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, who is viewed by the protesters as a shill for Wall Street and pushed a reform of the financial industry that many in the movement condemn as shamefully inadequate in curbing its excesses.
“There’s a lot of discontent with Obama’s policies,” said Kevin Zeese, an organizer of the protest, which drew about 500 people. “Obama is out of touch. He’s busy going around the country raising $1 billion to run for re-election.”
(7 October 2011)
Blogging OccupyUSA for Friday
Greg Mitchell, The Nation
Here’s another day of new blog on #OccupyWallStreet as it catches fire around the country. Items added at top.
(7 October 2011)
Probably the best source of links on OWS. -BA
