Category Archives: Occupy Movement

How the Pepper Spray Cop could change the trajectory of Occupy Wall Street

Megan Garber writes: This weekend, a series of photographs — images of a riot-gear-wearing cop shooting a group of students in the face with pepper spray — made their transition from journalistic documents to sources of outrage to, soon enough, Official Internet Meme. Perhaps the most iconic image (taken by UC Davis student Brian Nguyen, and shown above) isn’t explicitly political; instead, it captures a moment of violence and resistance in almost allegoric dimensions: the solidarity of the students versus the singularity of the cop in question, Lt. Pike; their steely resolve versus his sauntering nonchalance; the panic of the observers, gathered chorus-like and open-mouthed at the edges of the frame. The human figures here are layered, classified, distant from each other: cops, protestors, observers, each occupying distinct spaces — physical, psychical, moral — within the image’s landscape.

As James Fallows put it, “You don’t have to idealize everything about them or the Occupy movement to recognize this as a moral drama that the protestors clearly won.”

Exactly. The image — and its subsequent meme-ification — marked the moment when the Occupy movement expanded its purview: It moved beyond its concern with economic justice to espouse, simply, justice. It became as much about inequality as a kind of Platonic concern as it is about income inequality as a practical one. It became, in other words, something more than a political movement.

The image itself, I think — as a singular artifact that took different shapes — contributed to that transition, in large part because the photo’s narrative is built into its imagery. It depicts not just a scene, but a story. It requires of viewers very little background knowledge; even more significantly, it requires of them very few political convictions, save for the blanket assumption that justice, somehow, means fairness. The human drama the photo lays bare — the powerless being exploited by the powerful — has a universality that makes its particularities (geographical location, political context) all but irrelevant.

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Lobbyists plan to defend Wall Street and attack the Occupy movement

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MSNBC reports: A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.”

The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association.

CLGC’s memo [PDF] proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead.

According to the memo, if Democrats embrace OWS, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street. … It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.”

Here’s an extract from the memo:

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UC Davis: The power of silence

After the UC Davis pepper spraying, a string of lies and vacuous declarations:

“The students had encircled the officers,” UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza said. “They needed to exit. They were looking to leave but were unable to get out.”

As the video above shows, police officers were able with perfect ease to step over the peacefully sitting demonstrators whenever they chose to do so.

“I spoke with students this weekend, and I feel their outrage. I have also heard from an overwhelming number of students, faculty, staff and alumni from around the country. I am deeply saddened that this happened on our campus, and as chancellor, I take full responsibility for the incident,” Linda P.B. Katehi.

I take full responsibility has been turned into a phrase whose meaning extends no further than its utterance.

There was a day these words would preface a tangible demonstration of their meaning: “I take full responsibility and have therefore tendered my resignation.”

Then comes Katehi’s boss’s declaration of deep concern:

“I am appalled by images of University of California students being doused with pepper spray and jabbed with police batons on our campuses.

“I intend to do everything in my power as president of this university to protect the rights of our students, faculty and staff to engage in non-violent protest.

“Chancellors at the UC Davis and UC Berkeley campuses already have initiated reviews of incidents that occurred on their campuses. I applaud this rapid response and eagerly await the results,” said University of California President Mark G. Yudof today.

Nothing is more predictable in the practice of damage control than the promise of an inquiry — bury the story in the mud of time and deadening bureaucratic detail.

“I will be asking the chancellors to forward to me at once all relevant protocols and policies already in place on their individual campuses, as well as those that apply to the engagement of non-campus police agencies through mutual aid agreements.

“Further, I already have taken steps to assemble experts and stakeholders to conduct a thorough, far-reaching and urgent assessment of campus police procedures involving use of force, including post-incident review processes.

“My intention is not to micromanage our campus police forces. The sworn officers who serve on our campuses are professionals dedicated to the protection of the UC community.

“Nor do I wish to micromanage the chancellors. They are the leaders of our campuses and they have my full trust and confidence.”

Yudof might trust Katehi but the students in her university do not.

After a news conference on Saturday she was presented with an instant report on the conduct of her administration. The text was scornful silence — a message from hundreds of students who sat and watched as Katehi retreated to her car..

“Corporate America is using our own police departments as hired thugs, and that’s a disgrace,” says Retired Captain Ray Lewis from the Philadelphia PD.

And if we need any further reminders that the police in the US have indeed become hired thugs, here’s another view of their assault on peaceful protesters in Berkeley.

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The roots of the UC-Davis pepper-spraying

Glenn Greenwald writes: The now-viral video of police officers in their Robocop costumes sadistically pepper-spraying peaceful, sitting protesters at UC-Davis (details here) shows a police state in its pure form. It’s easy to be outraged by this incident as though it’s some sort of shocking aberration, but that is exactly what it is not. The Atlantic‘s Garance Franke-Ruta adeptly demonstrates with an assemblage of video how common such excessive police force has been in response to the Occupy protests. Along those lines, there are several points to note about this incident and what it reflects:

(1) Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time. As Franke-Ruta put it, “America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century.” Digby yesterday recounted a similar though even worse incident aimed at environmental protesters.

The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed — or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet — many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That’s a natural response, and it’s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.

The genius of this approach is how insidious its effects are: because the rights continue to be offered on paper, the citizenry continues to believe it is free. They believe that they are free to do everything they choose to do, because they have been “persuaded” — through fear and intimidation — to passively accept the status quo. As Rosa Luxemburg so perfectly put it: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” Someone who sits at home and never protests or effectively challenges power factions will not realize that their rights of speech and assembly have been effectively eroded because they never seek to exercise those rights; it’s only when we see steadfast, courageous resistance from the likes of these UC-Davis students is this erosion of rights manifest.

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Open letter to the chancellor of UC Davis

18 November 2011

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

Linda P.B. Katehi,

I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.

You are not.

I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:

1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today

2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality

3) to demand your immediate resignation

Today you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday—a rally that I organized, and which was endorsed by the Davis Faculty Association. These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons, hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.

What happened next?

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

You are responsible for it because this is what happens when UC Chancellors order police onto our campuses to disperse peaceful protesters through the use of force: students get hurt. Faculty get hurt. One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.

One week after this happened at UC Berkeley, you ordered police to clear tents from the quad at UC Davis. When students responded in the same way—linking arms and holding their ground—police also responded in the same way: with violent force. The fact is: the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses, and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly. Many people know this. Many more people are learning it very quickly.

You are responsible for the police violence directed against students on the UC Davis quad on November 18, 2011. As I said, I am writing to hold you responsible and to demand your immediate resignation on these grounds.

On Wednesday November 16, you issued a letter by email to the campus community. In this letter, you discussed a hate crime which occurred at UC Davis on Sunday November 13. In this letter, you express concern about the safety of our students. You write, “it is particularly disturbing that such an act of intolerance should occur at a time when the campus community is working to create a safe and inviting space for all our students.” You write, “while these are turbulent economic times, as a campus community, we must all be committed to a safe, welcoming environment that advances our efforts to diversity and excellence at UC Davis.”

I will leave it to my colleagues and every reader of this letter to decide what poses a greater threat to “a safe and inviting space for all our students” or “a safe, welcoming environment” at UC Davis: 1) Setting up tents on the quad in solidarity with faculty and students brutalized by police at UC Berkeley? or 2) Sending in riot police to disperse students with batons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas guns, while those students sit peacefully on the ground with their arms linked? Is this what you have in mind when you refer to creating “a safe and inviting space?” Is this what you have in mind when you express commitment to “a safe, welcoming environment?”

I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.

Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students. Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students. And I want you to know that this is clear. It is clear to anyone who reads your campus emails concerning our “Principles of Community” and who also takes the time to inform themselves about your actions. You should bear in mind that when you send emails to the UC Davis community, you address a body of faculty and students who are well trained to see through rhetoric that evinces care for students while implicitly threatening them. I see through your rhetoric very clearly. You also write to a campus community that knows how to speak truth to power. That is what I am doing.

I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.

Sincerely,

Nathan Brown
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Program in Critical Theory
University of California at Davis

A petition can be signed here.

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Demonstrations in Britain ‘to be banned during Olympics’

The Independent reports: Ministers are planning legal action to restrict public protests during the Olympics, amid fears that Britain could be disrupted by lengthy and high-profile demonstrations.

The Home Office is so concerned about the impact of the stalemate over the Occupy London (OLSX) encampment outside St Paul’s Cathedral that officials have been ordered to produce plans for avoiding a similar conflict during the Games next summer.

Ministers’ plans, based on the measures put in place to remove long-term protesters from outside Parliament, includes identifying “exclusion zones” around key locations, and fast-tracking the removal of protests that do not have the blessing of the authorities. It would permit police to move in and disperse encampments quickly, in line with last week’s clearance of the Occupy Wall Street camp in New York.

Protesters and legal experts condemned the moves as an assault on the right to peaceful protest. An OLSX spokeswoman, Naomi Colvin, said: “If the Government wants to do something that will restrict the right of peaceful protest, it will be in serious trouble. The coalition appears to be abandoning any attempt to behave like a democratic government.”

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Vilifying rival, Wall St. rallies for Senate ally

The New York Times reports: The warning has ricocheted around the financial world in recent weeks, in conversations at Midtown restaurants and Washington fund-raisers, carrying urgent appeals for money from financial executives around the Northeast: The battle to re-elect Senator Scott P. Brown, the Republican from Massachusetts, just got a little more interesting.

“Senator Brown is a free-market advocate who believes that our strength as a nation comes from the ingenuity and hard work of its people,” read an invitation to a fund-raiser at a New Canaan, Conn., country club last week, that circulated among hedge fund and private equity executives. His Democratic opponent, the invitation noted, was all but certain to be the financial industry’s most prominent foe: “big government liberal Elizabeth Warren.”

Mr. Brown, a freshman who harnessed populist Tea Party anger to win the seat once held by Edward M. Kennedy, has taken more money from the financial industry than almost any other senator: all told, more than $1 million during the last two years, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Of the 20 companies that accounted for the most campaign donations to Mr. Brown, about half were prominent investment or securities firms like Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments and Bain Capital. His donors include such blue-chip names as Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, and the hedge fund kings John Paulson and Kenneth Griffin.

Mr. Brown, in turn, has been an important ally at critical moments, using his swing vote in the Senate to wring significant concessions out of Democrats on last year’s financial regulation bill, including helping strip out a proposed $19 billion bank tax and weakening a proposal to stop commercial banks from holding large interests in hedge funds and private equity funds.

But the intensity of his relationship with Wall Street was altered in September, when Mr. Brown got a new opponent: Ms. Warren, a law professor and consumer advocate who has described herself as an intellectual godmother of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Ms. Warren’s relentless manner and withering attacks on predatory lenders have won her enemies from Wall Street to Washington, where as a member of an oversight panel she helped usher in the largest expansion in decades of federal oversight of the financial industry. Now Mr. Brown’s support for the industry — and Ms. Warren’s battles with it — are becoming a defining issue in one of the most hotly contested Senate races and a magnet for special interest money.

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Rep. Deutch introduces OCCUPIED constitutional amendment to ban corporate money in politics

Zaid Jilani reports: In one of the greatest signs yet that the 99 Percenters are having an impact, Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, today introduced an amendment that would ban corporate money in politics and end corporate personhood once and for all.

Deutch’s amendment, called the Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy (OCCUPIED) [PDF] Amendment, would overturn the Citizens United decision, re-establishing the right of Congress and the states to regulate campaign finance laws, and to effectively outlaw the ability of for-profit corporations to contribute to campaign spending.

“No matter how long protesters camp out across America, big banks will continue to pour money into shadow groups promoting candidates more likely to slash Medicaid for poor children than help families facing foreclosure,” said Deutch in a statement provided to ThinkProgress. “No matter how strongly Ohio families fight for basic fairness for workers, the Koch Brothers will continue to pour millions into campaigns aimed at protecting the wealthiest 1%. No matter how fed up seniors in South Florida are with an agenda that puts oil subsidies ahead of Social Security and Medicare, corporations will continue to fund massive publicity campaigns and malicious attack ads against the public interest. Americans of all stripes agree that for far too long, corporations have occupied Washington and drowned out the voices of the people. I introduced the OCCUPIED Amendment because the days of corporate control of our democracy. It is time to return the nation’s capital and our democracy to the people.”

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The democratization of drones

Spencer Ackerman writes: In the video above, protesters in Warsaw got a drone’s eye view of a phalanx of police in riot gear during a heated Saturday demonstration. The drone — spotted by Wired editor-in-chief and drone-builder Chris Anderson — was a tiny Polish RoboKopter equipped with a videocamera.

As Chris observes, no more do citizens need to wait for news choppers to get aerial footage of a major event. With drones, they can shoot their own overhead video. But the implications run deeper than that.

The Occupy events around the country gained initial notoriety by filming and uploading incidents of apparent police brutality. Anyone with a cellphone camera and a YouTube account could become a videographer, focusing attention on behavior that cops or banks might not want broadcasted or that the media might not transmit. When the New York Police Department cleared out Zuccotti Park on Tuesday, out came the cellphones to document it.

Getting an aerial view is the next step in compelling DIY citizen video.

The developer and operator of the RoboKopter is Artur Książek and whether his aim was to gather intelligence for the protesters or to market his invention is unclear. The video below shows how the aircraft operates.

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Tested on Palestinians, perfected on #OWS protesters: Introducing the LRAD Sound Cannon

Max Blumenthal writes: Yesterday, the New York Police Department deployed a strange new weapon against the tens of thousands of demonstrators who converged downtown for the largest protest in Occupy Wall Street’s two month history: the LRAD sound cannon. NYPD officers reportedly blasted Occupy protesters with rays from the LRAD cannon while they sang the American national anthem near Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park (photos here), establishing an atmosphere of fear and intimidation that lasted throughout the evening.

Designed and manufactured by the San Diego-based LRAD Corporation, which was formerly known as the American Technology Corporation, the Long Range Acoustic Device sound weapon is the latest innovation in crowd suppression technology. It is portable and powerful, capable of transmitting a focused ray of 140 decibels of sound at a crowd of people, generating painful cranial vibrations so profound ear plugs become useless. According to LRAD promotional material, the sonic weapon “provides military personnel with a powerful, penetrating warning tone that can be followed by clear voice broadcasts in host nation languages to warn and shape the behavior of potential threats.”

In June, LRAD sold $293,000 worth of its 100X and 500X sound canon systems to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The contract was part of Israeli Army Commander Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi’s investment in $35 million in suppression systems in anticipation of widespread unrest in the occupied West Bank that would supposedly be prompted by the Palestinian Authority’s statehood bid at the United Nations.

The Israeli Army has refined the use of LRAD systems on the civilian population of Palestinian villages engaged in the unarmed popular struggle against Israel’s illegal military occupation. Demonstrators in the village of Beit Ummar have been repeatedly assaulted by Israeli forces armed with LRAD systems, including on October 7, when the Israeli army used the LRAD to attack unarmed demonstrators protesting against the abuse and isolation of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

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Time to unplug the human microphone

As the Balinese Monkey Chant beautifully demonstrates, timing is everything.

Without timing, we not only lose the ability to dance and make music, but we even impair our ability to speak.

The human microphone had its moment — but it was brief.

Once it passed from being an ingenious adaptation to a prohibition on the use of bullhorns in Ziccotti Park and then became an inflexible emblem of collectivity, it had outlived its usefulness.

Two days ago, Arundhati Roy addressed the People’s University at Judson Memorial Church in New York. The hall was electrically illuminated and, as one would expect in any church, had its own built-in sound system. The podium at which Roy stood had positions for electrically-powered microphones. Even so, in honor of what has quickly become a seemingly sacrosanct form, Roy had to conform to the dictates of the movement and slice her speech into the bite size portions that the human microphone requires.

Roy: Thank you Judson Church, and thank you all for being here.
Audience: Thank you Judson Church, and thank you all for being here.

Roy: Yesterday morning the police cleared Zuccotti Park, but —
Audience: Yesterday morning the police cleared Zuccotti Park…

Roy: but today the people are back.
Audience: but today the people are back.

Roy: The police should know that this protest…
Audience: The police should know that this protest…

Roy: is not a battle for territory.
Audience: is not a battle for territory.

Roy: We are not fighting for the right to occupy a park here or there.
Audience: We are not fighting for the right to occupy a park here or there.

Roy: We are fighting for justice.
Audience: We are fighting for justice.

Roy: Justice, not just for the people of the United States, but —
Audience: Justice, not just for the people of the United States…

Roy: but for everybody.
Audience: but for everybody.

Roy: What you have achieved since September 17…
Audience: What you have achieved since September 17…

Roy: when the Occupy movement began in the U.S…
Audience: when the Occupy movement began in the U.S…

Roy: is to introduce a new imagination…
Audience: is to introduce a new imagination…

Roy: a new political language…
Audience: a new political language…

Roy: into the heart of empire.
Audience: into the heart of empire.

Roy: You have reintroduced…
Audience: You have reintroduced…

Roy: the right to dream…
Audience: the right to dream…

Roy: in a system that tried to turn everybody into zombies…
Audience: in a system that tried to turn everybody into zombies…

Roy: mesmerised into equating mindless consumerism…
Audience: mesmerised into equating mindless consumerism…

Roy: with happiness and fulfilment.
Audience: with happiness and fulfilment.

Roy: As a writer, let me tell you…
Audience: As a writer, let me tell you…

Roy: this is an immense achievement.
Audience: this is an immense achievement.

Roy: And I cannot thank you enough.
Audience: And I cannot thank you enough.

And that was just the introduction.

Just imagine if 48 years ago Martin Luther King Jr had found himself in front of a human microphone stretching down the National Mall in Washington DC. He could have been amplified through the voices of 200,000 people.

But in such repetition, where would the musicality, the cadence, the passion and the perfect timing have been, as his words got squeezed through the mangle of the human microphone?

We each have our own voice and what we utter are much more than strings of words. Our words have rhythm, pitch, and volume as with our tongue and breath we fashion time and express feeling. A carefully chosen pause, a deeply drawn breath, a rising voice — these are not mere embellishments to our words but the very things that make our language human.

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Liberty Park can be anywhere

At Open Democracy, Todd Gitlin writes: Since Sept. 17, there have been so many moving parts in the evolving ensemble known as Occupy, each rubbing against the others in a whole ecology of protest, that predictions are foolhardy. But there’s a good chance that the great sprawling hard-to-pin-down Occupy movement is well along in the learning process and that it can gain more than it loses by leaving the Zuccotti/Liberty campground.

The urban planner Peter Marcuse, a strong supporter of the movement, has cautioned against “fetishizing” Zuccotti Park. He usefully distinguishes among seven functions of the movement:

  1. A confrontation function: “taking the struggle to the enemy’s territory, confronting, potentially disrupting, [its] operations.” That means the Wall Street area, for which Zuccotti Park was and remains, obviously, a convenient launch-pad.
  2. A symbolic function as a visible testimonial to a line of argument and a way of looking at the world.
  3. An educational function, promoting debate and clarification, toward the end of clarifying what the 1 percent and the 99 percent mean, and how that infernal cleavage developed.
  4. A glue function, “creating a community of trust and commitment to the pursuit of common goals.”
  5. An umbrella function, “creating a space … in which quite disparate groups can work together in pursuit of ultimately consistent and mutually reinforcing goals — … a political umbrella, an organizing base for an on-going alliance, not just a temporary coalition, of the deprived and discontented.”
  6. An activation function, “inspiring others to greater militancy and sharper focus on common goals and specific demands … providing space for … cross discussions among supporting groups and interests, organizing … events in support of … reforms that point [toward] Occupy’s own ultimate goals of change.”
  7. A model function, “showing, by its internal organization and methods of proceeding, that an alternative form of democracy is possible.”

Hey, whoever said that organizing movements is simple or mindless?

Marcuse goes on to say that only the confrontation function required Zuccotti Park as such, and even that is far from clear. There do need to be meeting places, sites where people of different dispositions brush up against each other and stay in touch. Zuccotti offered advantages — Wall Street proximity, for one — but at a cost: very limited sunlight, leading one prominent supporter I know to publicly call it “hell’s half-acre.” There are other public places, even ones with symbolic resonance. (By some accounts, after all, on Sept. 17, when the occupation began, Zuccotti Park wasn’t the first choice — it was Plan B.) As Peter Marcuse writes, “the defense of the permanent and round-the-clock occupancy of a specific space can lead to a fetishization of space that make the defense of that space the overwhelming goal of the movement, at the expense of actions furthering the broader goals that that space is occupied to advance.”

As for the model function, the utopian, communitarian spirit, it can thrive in many spaces. Now that the symbolism has been established in the public mind, some token encampment through the winter probably makes sense, but Liberty Square can be movable; Zuccotti has no patent on liberty. Anyway, it would be foolhardy to think that the tent-city way of life Zuccotti has promoted is a way of life that the 99 percent cottons to. It’s that 99 percent that needs, continually, to be assured that the movement speaks to and for them.

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A world in protest

At Open Democracy, Paul Rogers writes: The authorities are undertaking a legal and judicial counter-offensive against the “occupy” camps that have sprung up in central locations in New York and London. But scores of camps remain across north America and western Europe, part of a diffuse and dispersed phenomenon that has acquired a life of its own within a few short weeks.

These protests echo others earlier in 2011, including the turbulent actions in Greece and the extensive mobilisations in Spain (see “A time of riot: England and the world”, 11 August 2011). They also connect with developments elsewhere: the mass student demonstrations in Chile that moved from opposition to a failing education system to a much wider campaign against marginalisation, and the protests by middle-class Israelis against their more restricted life-chances (albeit such conditions are still far outranked by the great poverty in the nearby occupied territories, notably Gaza).

This upsurge of demonstrations is largely a response to the renewed economic crisis and to the enduring spectacle of financial institutions paying huge salaries and even larger bonuses to their elites while the majority of populations bear the brunt of government-imposed cuts. More broadly it recalls the large-scale anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s, not least around the Seattle (1999) and Genoa (2001) summits. This movement receded after 9/11 and the launch of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – but it has now returned, albeit in a different guise, as a result of the accumulating economic crises of 2007-11.

These protests, demonstrations and movements may well be sustained or they may (at least in the short term) recede. Yet in a global perspective they reflect two processes that lend them deep importance. [Continue reading…]

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The Occupy movement now has its iconic image of martyrdom

Occupy activist Dorli Rainey, 84, after being hit with pepper spray during a protest in Seattle. Photograph: Joshua Trujillo - AP

Jonathan Jones writes: Every nascent political movement needs martyrs. Even the sensible British labour movement, whose history is mostly peaceful and overwhelmingly parliamentary, has its memories of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Peterloo massacre. Revolutionary traditions fervently venerate their political saints: Irish republicanism has an especially rich pantheon from Pearse and Connolly to Bobby Sands. The Egyptian revolution, less than a year old, already has martyrs including the artist Ahmed Basiony who was shot dead by security forces on 28 January, and whose life and work have since been commemorated at the Venice Biennale.

This week the Seattle police provided the Occupy movement a powerful image of martyrdom. Dorli Rainey was not killed – let’s not overdo any analogies between economic protests in western democracies and the desperate struggle for freedom in Egypt or Syria. She was “only” pepper-sprayed. But she happens to be 84, and photographer Joshua Trujillo happened to be on hand to take a haunting photograph of her reddened eyes and shellshocked expression that subtly and strongly portrays Rainey as a modern martyr.

I am not suggesting this lightly. The martyrdom in Seattle conforms, in Trujillo’s photograph, to the deep religious roots of the idea of suffering for a cause. Rainey resembles a humiliated Christ in this picture. She is supported by two men, one on either side, who both lower their faces – one has his eyes closed in self-protection, the other wears defensive goggles – in what may be a sensible precaution to avoid getting sprayed themselves, but which also looks like a gesture of compassion, of quiet rage and dignified sorrow. It is at once a real moment – the men shielding their eyes while showing her hurt to the camera – and an image straight out of a Christian Renaissance painting.

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The threat of solidarity — when power becomes afraid of the people

Martin Luther King Jr leading civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965

The 99% shut down Wall Street, November 17, 2011

Students lock arms before police assault, University of California at Berkeley, November 9, 2011

After a police assault (shown in the video above) on non-violent student protesters — whose only arms were the ones they interlocked — Robert Birgeneau, the chancellor at Berkeley, issued a statement saying:

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

What Birgeneau objects to is resistance in any form and interlocking arms in defiance of an advancing line of police is indeed an act of resistance.

But more than that, it is an act of solidarity and nothing threatens institutional power more than unity among ordinary people.

When burly police officers thrust night sticks into the chests of young students, this is not simply what is euphemistically called a “show of force,” but instead seems to be a display of “forward panic.”

In the kind of police violence that sociologist Randall Collins has dubbed forward panic, a cauldron of pent up tension suddenly erupts. Among Collins’ insights is that because people (including police and soldiers) universally have high-threshold inhibitions that restrain them from becoming violent, when those inhibitions suddenly fall away, the targets of violence will most often be those who are perceived as weak, unwilling or incapable of hitting back. Fear targets the easiest opponent.

This is the micro-social context in which the police lash out, but at the same time there is a broader context that fuels the fear of those who have been invested with the power of the state.

In the face of mass resistance, the primary line of defense for the police is not their weapons or shields — it is an idea already under challenge: that the state is more powerful than the people. And once the fault-lines in that idea have been exposed, the power equation is in jeopardy of suddenly being reversed.

Over the last twelves months, in the Middle East, in Europe, and now in the United States, the seeds have already been planted which could grow into the most dangerous idea that ever swept the world: that we have a greater interest in uniting than we do in being set apart; that what we might gain together will far exceed what we can achieve alone.

Human solidarity — this is what now threatens governments, corporations and every concentration of power.

* * *

Protesters in New York today were joined by one former police officer who sees that it his duty to stand with the people: Retired Police Captain Raymond Lewis from Philadelphia.

This afternoon, Captain Lewis was marched away in cuffs after being arrested by the NYPD.

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America’s new robber barons

Jeff Madrick writes: With early Tuesday’s abrupt evacuation of Zuccotti Park, the City of New York has managed—for the moment—to dislodge protesters from Wall Street. But it will be much harder to turn attention away from the financial excesses of the very rich—the problems that have given Occupy Wall Street such traction. Data on who is in the top 1 percent of earners further reinforces their point. Here’s why.

Though the situation is often described as a problem of inequality, this is not quite the real concern. The issue is runaway incomes at the very top—people earning a million and a half dollars or more according to the most recent data. And much of that runaway income comes from financial investments, stock options, and other special financial benefits available to the exceptionally rich—much of which is taxed at very low capital gains rates. Meanwhile, there has been something closer to stagnation for almost everyone else—including even for many people in the top 20 percent of earners.

This may seem counterintuitive at first. After all, analysts have long painted a picture of growing inequality over the past few decades in which the top quintile’s share of the national income has risen while the share of the other 80 percent has fallen. But almost all the gains for the top 20 percent was for the top 1 percent. And half of that is accounted for by a tiny group within the top percent—those earners in the top 0.1 percent. Meanwhile, for the four quintiles below the 80 percent level, the share of total income fell significantly. For those from the 80th to the 99th percentile, the share rose only slightly (a little more rapidly as you go higher up).

In other words, Occupy Wall Street’s claim that “We are the 99 percent” is dead on right.

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