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Bloomberg vs Occupy
John Robb, Global Guerrillas
Mayor Bloomberg is moving to shut down Occupy Wall Street at Liberty Square tomorrow at 7 AM.
The ruse he is using: the need to clean the “park.” He has promised that Liberty Square will be reopened after the cleaning but nobody will be allowed to set up anything in park, nor will sleeping bags be allowed (click the sheet to the left for larger version).
This is going to get interesting. Will be working up some ideas for how this could play out. Let’s start off with an assumption. This is Bloomberg vs. Occupy. One mind vs. many minds. The goal is to coerce him into changing his mind. Dissuade him. Get inside his OODA loop.
Go straight for him. Maximize the eviction’s taint on Bloomberg’s personal brand. Personalize the protest/eviction by attaching the blame to him personally. Pierce his shield of bureaucratic impersonality. Brand the eviction with the name: Bloomberg. This is/will be a global stage, use it.
Confuse him. Lots and lots of Flash Mobs. Shut down bridges and major streets. Overwhelm with volume/speed. Non-violent disruption. As soon as police arrive in force, disperse and reassemble at new location. Bikes + Kids. Disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. More flashmobs = more disruption. As long as the square is under attack, keep the city tied in knots. NOTE: If they lock down the area, flashmobs are the best way to participate (and get some exercise).
Connect with more people than him. Best way to do this: Eyes in the sky. Get a camera/cameras above Liberty Square. Stream the feed. The better the quality the more impact it will have. It will play across the world.
Think about how important AJs video feed over Tahrir was when things got hot. Better yet, get AJ to cover it and stream it.
If you have additional ideas, add them below. Good training in tactical thinking.
I’m John Robb, an author, an entrepreneur, and a former USAF pilot in special operations. … I wrote a book called Brave New War, which was published in April 2007 by Wiley. Remarkably, it became a top 25 book on Amazon (only 23 behind a fresh Harry Potter novel). You can purchase it here. In it, I create / detail a new form of warfare/terrorism called “open source warfare,” that appears to be where 21st Century conflict is headed.
(13 October 2011)
My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters: Hit Bankers Where It Hurts
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
I’ve been down to “Occupy Wall Street” twice now, and I love it. The protests building at Liberty Square and spreading over Lower Manhattan are a great thing, the logical answer to the Tea Party and a long-overdue middle finger to the financial elite. The protesters picked the right target and, through their refusal to disband after just one day, the right tactic, showing the public at large that the movement against Wall Street has stamina, resolve and growing popular appeal.
Protesters with the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement demonstrate in New York. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
But… there’s a but. And for me this is a deeply personal thing, because this issue of how to combat Wall Street corruption has consumed my life for years now, and it’s hard for me not to see where Occupy Wall Street could be better and more dangerous. I’m guessing, for instance, that the banks were secretly thrilled in the early going of the protests, sure they’d won round one of the messaging war.
Why? Because after a decade of unparalleled thievery and corruption, with tens of millions entering the ranks of the hungry thanks to artificially inflated commodity prices, and millions more displaced from their homes by corruption in the mortgage markets, the headline from the first week of protests against the financial-services sector was an old cop macing a quartet of college girls.
That, to me, speaks volumes about the primary challenge of opposing the 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption, which is that it’s extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility
… But the time is rapidly approaching when the movement is going to have to offer concrete solutions to the problems posed by Wall Street. To do that, it will need a short but powerful list of demands. There are thousands one could make, but I’d suggest focusing on five:
1. Break up the monopolies. …
2. Pay for your own bailouts. …
3. No public money for private lobbying. …
4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. …
5. Change the way bankers get paid. …
(13 October 2011)
Did politics just change?
Dave Winer, Scripting
Did politics just change?
By Dave Winer on Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 9:09 AM.
Going back to before Dean For America, I was hoping that, with the advent of the Internet, the economics of elections would change. I got close to the Dean people, but they either didn’t see the possibility, or felt it was too early, or felt they couldn’t afford to be an experimental campaign.
But with Occupy Wall Street, it would be wholly inconsistent to use their presence on the Internet to raise money to buy ads on television. If they did that, we would need to start an OOWS to occupy them.
Look at all the attention this leaderless movement has managed to draw to itself, without any kind of a media budget. And I have a feeling this is just beginning. Hopefully we will build decentralized communication networks that allow ideas to be distributed instantaneously without being controlled by Time-Warner, News Corp, Comcast, or even Google, Twitter or Facebook. Of course we already have the technology, it’s just what the Internet already does. But we have to build a critical mass outside the corporate silos to have the independence we’ll need, imho.
… If politics has changed, it’s now in the domain of tech, completely. You won’t use the web to raise money to buy television ads. Instead, money raised on the Internet will stay in the Internet, helping to build the communication systems we need not just to get candidates elected, but also to govern. Obama could have figured this out, but he didn’t.
Dave Winer, 56, is a visiting scholar at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies.
(12 October 2011)
Wall Street occupation ignites mass movement
Pham Bihn, Green Left
… This is a mass, grassroots movement, one that does not have leaders or leadership in the conventional sense. The people leading this movement are the people taking part in it. It is direct democracy, unmediated by unions, non-governmental organisations or political parties.
… At Liberty Plaza, OWS can only be described as a self-organised mass of humanity — a combination Woodstock, the Berkeley Free Speech movement from the 1960s, and anarchist commune all rolled into one.
… After work hours, the number of people at the encampment grows into the thousands. When you approach the area, you hear the low hum of thousands of unending conversations, some political, some not, as drummer groups pound away, their rhythms echoing off of office buildings containing the 1%.
… OWS’s working groups deal with food, sanitation, medical, security, media, outreach to other activist groups, transparency, facilitating meetings, and meeting a variety of other needs of the hundreds-strong collective (last week they had a makeshift barbershop and gave people free haircuts).
Many of the working groups are divided into subgroups due to the complex nature of their tasks. All working groups report to the general assembly (GA), an open mass meeting that uses modified consensus, meaning almost everyone must agree for decisions to be made.
Problems brewing
Although the Occupy movement is going from strength to strength, there are problems brewing beneath the surface.
There is an intense level of frustration among occupiers with the GA process and the dysfunctional nature of some working groups. This has led to talk of creating a spokescouncil, a body composed of the working groups that could more efficiently deal with mundane, practical matters — allowing the GA to be more focused and productive.
Some people in working groups skip the GA altogether because they feel it is a waste of time. One woman in the sanitation working group spends 20 hours a day cleaning the plaza and has no time or energy left to take part in the political process.
Bobby, a self-described anarchist who is part of three different working groups, complained at a discussion about the proposed spokescouncil that the GA was often held hostage by the “tyranny of the minority”.
(A minority can block decisions from being passed in a system based on consensus; conversely, the pressure to agree unanimously to get something done led to ugly racial tensions after people of colour repeatedly blocked the GA from incorporating the absurd claim that racial divisions no longer existed in the text of OWS’s first official declaration.)
Bobby also complained that decisions passed by the GA were often impractical, such as the GA’s approval of the sanitation working group’s request to buy trash bins to help clean Liberty Plaza. The GA’s approval came with conditions: they had to be “fair trade” trash bins and the sanitation group had to look on Craigslist first for the best price.
This made meeting a vital need of the occupiers very difficult.
The simple, horizontal structure originally created around a GA using modified consensus has become a barrier to practical and political work by the occupiers and those involved through working groups.
What was once an asset has now become an impediment.
There is even more tension surrounding the issue of money. At least US$40,000 has been donated to OWS, mostly via the internet. OWS has yet to figure how to account for and control spending.
… The biggest challenge facing OWS is not the lack of formal demands. As someone in the OWS media group put it, “we’ll settle on those once the movement stops growing”.
Not having demands allows the movement’s message to be shaped by rank-and-file participants; this all-inclusive openness, combined with the heroic determination to march on Wall Street no matter what, is the key to the Occupy uprising’s fast and furious growth.
Demands are not decisive. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott was declared before a formal list of demands was adopted at a mass meeting.
The boycott led to the complete end of segregation on the bus lines, a far more radical outcome than the boycott’s modest demand that seated blacks not be forced to give up their seats for standing whites on segregated buses.
Historical experience shows that the fate of movements are not determined by lists of demands but by mass action.
Challenge
The biggest challenge facing OWS is sustaining the movement for the long haul, because the dramatic regulatory, economic, and political changes we want are not on the cards in the near future.
… Creating a sustainable movement also means building or modifying our infrastructure of protest and organisation to be more responsive to our needs, more democratic, and more open to mass participation beyond the core of people who can “all day, all week, occupy Wall Street”.
Properly staffed and well-run working groups would take the burden off of the very committed occupiers, who are members of multiple groups and are working so hard they do not or cannot take part in the time-consuming decision-making process.
OWS is the vanguard of the Occupy movement, and what happens at Liberty Plaza will play a disproportionate role in shaping the future of the biggest rebellion to rock this country since the 1960s.
OWS has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations thus far, and we need to be clear and honest about what can be done better if we hope to build on this success and reign in the most greedy, powerful and ruthless 1% the world has ever known.
[All of Pham Binh’s writings on Occupy Wall Street and other topics can be found at www.planetanarchy.net.]
(14 October 2011)
