Occupy Seattle: Octogenarian activist Dorli Rainey on being pepper-sprayed by Seattle police, importance of activism
Category Archives: Occupy Movement
Was the New York Times embedded with the NYPD prior to the #OWS raid?
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism writes: A longstanding NC reader and lower Manhattan resident e-mailed me:
I was curious about the first couple of pictures in this set from the NY Times. How were they able to get pictures of the NYPD gathering by South Street Seaport, before the raid?
I was following the events closely on Twitter last night. the first notice of the pending love came from a tweet by the muscian Questo, who announced he had just driven by thousands of police in riot gear by South Street.
Various tweets among #OWS folks debated the significance of this and then the NYPD was spotted moving, the emergency #OWS tweet went out and I also got an email on it. At that point, no press were anywhere near Zuccotti Park nor were any covering it on Twitter. After the #OWS emergency notice, all sorts of people rushed to the scene, including the press.
Seems strange, then, that the NY Times photographer knew to be at this secret location.
Also strange, this article by the NY Times on the chain of events leading up to the raid includes a number of factual details that don’t appear to come from any quotes or press conferences, such as the secret planning that only the top brass knew about. This article has details about where the NYPD gathered pre-raid and details about the status of the park as the raid was beginning. How did the report get this information? Was he or she there? Were they tipped off before any of the other press?
If so, what does this say about the relationship between the NY Times and the Bloomberg administration, as well as the independence of the NY Times reporting?
In the photo series, the high resolution image from South Street Seaport is indeed a bit sus, unless the NYPD has started memorializing its operations for the benefit of posterity and favored media outlets. And in the background story on the raid, I was troubled by how fawning it was, a classic example of stenography masquerading as reporting. The brilliant tactical execution by New York’s finest! And the only people who were manhandled clearly deserved it! This characterization of a raid deliberately staged well out of public view, where there have been reports of the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and unnecessary roughing up, was indirectly confirmed by the punching of a woman on camera today whose offense seemed to be demanding access to the park loudly and having court papers to back her stance.
‘The days of apathy are over’: Robert Reich’s Mario Savio Memorial Lecture
When government no longer prizes liberty, no one is safe
After 84-year-old Occupy Seattle participant Dorli Rainey was pepper sprayed by Seattle Police yesterday, she wrote: 'This is what democracy looks like. It certainly left an impression on the people who rode the No. 1 bus home with me. In the women's movement there were signs which said: Screw us and we multiply.'
When officials from 40 cities across America participated in conference calls on tackling the Occupy protests, they said their goal was to make the camps safe.
It sounds like the infamous attack on Ben Tre in the Vietnam War: “We had to destroy the village to save it.”
On a National Police Radio news bulletin yesterday afternoon, New York correspondent Robert Smith, reporting on the ongoing legal fight to reconstruct the camp at Ziccotti Park, said of the dispute: one person’s trash is another person’s free speech — overlooking the fact that what he referred to as “trash” were the personal belongings of others.
Likewise, when NPR reports on the destruction of camps, they happily parrot the police by using the term “dismantle” — as though officers take pains to find matching bags into which they can slip neatly folded sleeping bags, all the while making sure every item gets carefully tagged so later it can safely be returned to its owner.
In truth the camps have been dismantled in much the same way that Israeli soldiers “dismantle” Bedouin villages that the authorities deem illegal.
In many ways, the real clash is between those who cling to the anti-democratic powers that the state grabbed after 9/11, and those who dare to declare that we should no longer be governed by fear.
Tellingly, the authorities in New York planned the assault on Occupy Wall Street like a counterterrorism operation.
“From the beginning, I have said that the city had two principal goals: guaranteeing public health and safety, and guaranteeing the protesters’ first amendment rights. But when those two goals clash, the health and safety of the public and our first responders must be the priority,” Mayor Bloomberg said, asserting that “safety” is more important than liberty.
The New York Times reported:
[T]he police operation to clear Zuccotti Park of protesters unfolded after two weeks of planning and training. Officials had prepared by watching how occupations in other cities played out. A major disaster drill was held on Randalls Island, with an eye toward Zuccotti. Officials increased so-called disorder training — counterterrorism measures that involve moving large numbers of police officers quickly — to focus on Lower Manhattan.
The last training session was on Monday night, on the Manhattan side of the East River. The orders to move into the park came down at the “last minute,” said someone familiar with the orders, which referred to the assignment only as “an exercise.”
“The few cops that I know that were called into this thing, they were not told it was for going into Zuccotti Park,” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The only people who were aware of them going into Zuccotti Park were at the very highest levels of the department.”
Once the operation began, the area around the park was declared a “frozen zone”.
What gets frozen in a frozen zone? The U.S. Constitution — no more freedom of assembly, free speech, or free press.
The Associated Press reports on the spontaneously coordinated assault on Occupy camps across America:
As concerns over safety and sanitation grew at the encampments over the last month, officials from nearly 40 cities turned to each other on conference calls, sharing what worked and what hasn’t as they grappled with the leaderless movement.
In one case, the calls became group therapy sessions.
While riot police sweeping through tent cities in Portland, Ore., Oakland, Calif. and New York City over the last several days may suggest a coordinated effort, authorities and a group that organized the calls say they were a coincidence.
“It was completely spontaneous,” said Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group that organized calls on Oct. 11 and Nov. 4. Among the issues discussed: safety, traffic and the fierceness of demonstrations in each city.
“This was an attempt to get insight on what other departments were doing,” he said.
From Atlanta to Washington, D.C., officials talked about how authorities could make camps safe for protesters and the community.
Has the United States really become a country where we are supposed to be afraid of freedom and nervous about democracy?
A Raid on the First Amendment: New York’s assault on press freedom
John Nichols writes: The dark-of-night raid on New York City’s Zuccotti Park was not merely an assault on the Occupy Wall Street movement. It was an assault on the underpinnings of the First Amendment to the Constitution, an amendment that was outlined and approved by the First Congress of the United States at No. 26 Wall Street in 1789.
That amendment, which was written to empower citizens to challenge and prevent the rise of a totalitarian state, recognized basic freedoms that were essential to the defense of liberty. Among these are, of course, the right to speak freely and to embrace the religious ideals of one’s choice.
But from a standpoint of pushing back against power, however, the rights to assemble and to petition for the redress of grievances are fundamental. And those rights were clearly assaulted early Tuesday morning.
So, too, was another right: the right to a free press.
Why does the right to a free press matter so much? Because, as the founders knew, no experiment in democracy could ever be anything more than that—an experiment—if the people don’t know what is being done in their name by those in positions of authority. “A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it,” observed James Madison, “is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.”
We have created the political space for radical change
Meg Wade writes: Through our direct actions, our occupations, we have changed the international conversation. Two months ago, the country was talking about the need for austerity, not accountability on Wall Street. Now, because of Occupy Wall Street, walking down the street you will hear people talking about the ethics of bailouts, economic inequality, the crisis of deregulation, social justice and direct democracy.
What’s more, in every circle, these conversations are moving forward and taking on a life of their own. They are not limited to the space of Liberty Square, and by no means do they rely on it.
Just as the direct action and nonviolent resistance of the 1960s focused the national conversation on the immorality of segregation, and created the political space for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, so, too, has Occupy Wall Street focused the conversation on the rogue thievery of Wall Street. We have created the political space for radical change.
We’ve also had more tangible successes. In solidarity with the Move Your Money campaign, more than a half a million people moved at least $4.5bn out of the big casino banks and into responsible local credit unions, leading up to 5 November Bank Transfer Day.
Occupiers working with grassroots groups have forged incredible victories, unimaginable less than two months earlier. Just a few days ago, Occupy Cleveland mobilised in cooperation with Ohio labor unions to overturn Bill 5’s attack on collective bargaining rights. In Boulder, Colorado and Missoula, Montana, occupiers worked with Move to Amend to pass local resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United and eliminate corporate personhood and corporate constitutional rights.
Which leads me to one of our biggest successes: modeling radically inclusive, democratic alternatives to our current system of governance. Nearly every Occupy has found itself plunged into discussions of what it means to speak as “the 99%”, and how to address issues of unchecked sexism, racism and class privilege, some of the longest-running issues Americans face.
Reporting from inside the “frozen zone”
Josh Harkinson describes what he witnessed at Zuccotti Part in the early hours this morning: Nobody bothered to stop me as I strode up to the park’s northern entrance and stopped against a wall, a few yards from where police in helmets surrounded the the remaining occupiers.
Next to me, an officer was telling an important-looking guy named Eddie about “the intel we’ve had over the past couple of months” about “the severely mentally retarded, the ones that are real fucked up in the head, and have been violent in the past.” He went on: “They are a little off kilter. They’re off their meds. They haven’t had meds in 30 days.”
“I’m only 24 hours off mine,” Eddie joked.
“It’s good for you, Eddie,” the cop said. “You’ve got to come clean every once in a while.”
As the two men talked, a sweaty-faced man wearing a neon vest over a business suit walked up and started tearing protest signs off the wall.”I couldn’t wait,” he said. “Destroying things never felt so good.”
“Really,” someone said, almost inflecting the word as a question.
“They’re fucking assholes,” the guy in the suit shot back.
Another guy came up to Eddie. “How are we about hooking up the fire hydrants?” he asked. “We talkin’ to somebody?”
“Do it. Do it,” Eddie said over the roar of a garbage truck.
A few yards away, the last occupiers took turns waving a large American flag. Huddled inside the park’s makeshift kitchen, they seemed as diverse as Occupy Wall Street: There was a shaggy punk in a spiky leather jacket. A young girl in a red sweatshirt that read “Unity.” Clean-shaven guys wearing glasses. A shirtless occupier named Ted Hall, who has led an effort to hone the movement’s “visions and goals.” All of them surrounded a smaller group of occupiers who’d chained their necks to a pole.
A white-shirted officer moved in with a bullhorn. “If you don’t leave the park you are subject to arrest. Now is your opportunity to leave the park.”
Nobody budged. As a lone drum pounded, I climbed up on the wall to get a better view.
“Can I help you?” an burly officer asked me, his helpfulness belied by his scowl.
“I’m a reporter,” I told him.
“This is a frozen zone, all right?” he said, using a term I’d never heard before. “Just like them, you have to leave the area. If you do not, you will be subject to arrest.”
By then, riot police were moving in, indiscriminately dousing the peaceful protesters with what looked like pepper spray or some sort of gas. As people yelled and screamed and cried, I tried to stay calm.
“I promise to leave once the arrests are done,” I replied.
“No, you are going to leave now.”
He grabbed my arm and began dragging me off. My shoes skidded across the park’s slimy granite floor. All around me, zip-cuffed occupiers writhed on the ground beneath a fog of chemicals.
“I just want to witness what is going on here,” I yelped.
“You can witness it with the rest of the press,” he said. Which, of course, meant not witnessing it.
“Why are you excluding the press from observing this?” I asked.
“Because this is a frozen zone.”
Labor stands in solidarity with the Occupy movement
AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka circulated this email today: They can take away the tarps and the tents. But they can’t slow down the Occupy Wall Street movement.
There have been police raids on Occupy Wall Street in Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Denver; Albany, N.Y.; Burlington, Vt.; and Chapel Hill, N.C. — and now, last night in New York’s Zuccotti Park — orchestrated by politicians acting on behalf of the 1%.
But the 99% is undaunted. Occupy Wall Street’s message already has created a new day. This movement has created a seismic shift in our national debate — from austerity and cuts to jobs, inequality and our broken economic system.
Show your solidarity by attending a Nov. 17 bridge action near you.
And send a message of solidarity to the Occupy Wall Street protesters — which will be delivered by Working America this week.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has been committed to peaceful, nonviolent action from its inception. And it will keep spreading no matter what elected officials tell police to do. But that doesn’t mean these raids are acceptable. In fact, they are inexcusable.
As former Secretary of State Colin Powell put it, these protests are “as American as apple pie.” Americans must be allowed to speak out against pervasive inequality, even if the truth discomfits the 1%…
We are the 99%.
In Solidarity,
Richard L. Trumka
President, AFL-CIO
The Occupy movements are the realists, not the ruling elites
John Gray writes: The Occupy movements have been attacked for being impractical visionaries. In fact it is the established political classes of the west that are wedded to utopian thinking, while the protesters are recalling us to the actualities of human experience. Based on economic theories that left out human beings, the global free market was supposed to be self-regulating. Now a process of disintegration is under way, in which the structures set up in the post-cold-war period are visibly breaking up.
Anyone with a smattering of history could see that the hubristic capitalism of the past 20 years was programmed to self-destruct. The notion that the world’s disparate societies could be corralled into a worldwide free market was always a dangerous fantasy. Opening up economies throughout the world meant ordinary people were more directly exposed to the gyrations of market forces than they had been for generations. As it overthrew existing patterns of life and robbed large numbers of people of any security they might have achieved, global capitalism was bound to trigger a powerful blowback.
For as long as it was able to engineer an illusion of increasing prosperity, free-market globalisation was politically invulnerable. When the bubble burst, the actual condition of the majority was laid bare. In the US a plantation-style economy has come into being, with debt-servitude for the many coexisting with extremes of volatile wealth for the few. In Europe the muddled dream of a single currency has resulted in social devastation in Greece, mass unemployment in Spain and other countries, and even, for some, reversion to a life based on barter: sucking society into a vortex of debt deflation, austerity policies are driving a kind of reverse economic development. In many countries a settled bourgeois existence – supposedly the basis of popular capitalism – has become an impossible aspiration. Large numbers are edging closer to poverty and a life without hope.
History tells us how perilous this process can be. It has been taken for granted that a sudden collapse of the kind that occurred in the former Soviet Union and more recently Egypt cannot happen in advanced market economies. That assumption may be tested severely in coming years. While totalitarian mass movements of the sort seen in the 30s are not going to return, Europe’s demons have not gone away. Blaming minorities and immigrants is a perennially popular response to economic dislocation, and ethnic nationalism can be hideously destructive. In the US the continuing demise of the middle class could engender a style of politics even more rancorous and unhinged than that prevailing today. A figure such as Father Coughlin, the Depression-era radio demagogue, shows what can be expected as the economy continues its slide. With the rise of trigger-happy politicians like Mitt Romney and the need for Obama to act tough, it would be unwise to rule out the prospect of another major war.
How the NYPD shut down freedom of the press
Read Ben Doernberg’s Storify report for more details on journalists being arrested, attacked and in every way possible, prevented from reporting on the operation to evict Occupy Wall Street.
A call to occupy
After being evicted from Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street released this statement: We are a global movement that is reclaiming our humanity and our future. We have stepped into a revitalizing civic process, realizing that we cannot fix our crises isolated from one another. We need collective action, and we need civic space. We are creating that civic space.
To occupy is to embody the spirit of liberation that we wish to manifest in our society. It is to exercise our freedom to assemble. We are creating space for community, values, ideas, and a level of meaningful dialogue that is absent in the present discourse.
Liberated space is breaking free of isolation, breaking down the walls that literally and figuratively separate us from one another. It is a new focus on community, trust, love and hope. We occupy to create a vision of equality, liberty and social justice onto the blank paving stones of public parks, in the silent hallways of abandoned schools, banks, and beyond. Public space plays a crucial role in this civic process and encourages open, transparent organizing in our movement. As we have seen in Liberty Square, outdoor space invites people to listen, speak, share, learn, and act.
Last night, billionaire Michael Bloomberg sent a massive police force to evict members of the public from Liberty Square—home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months. People who were part of a dynamic civic process were beaten and pepper-sprayed, their personal property destroyed.
Supporters of this rapidly growing movement were mobilized in the middle of the night, making phone calls, taking the streets en masse, and planning next steps. Americans and people around the world are appalled at Bloomberg’s treatment of people who peacefully assemble. We are appalled, but not deterred. Liberty Square was dispersed, but its spirit not defeated. Today we are stronger than we were yesterday. Tomorrow we will be stronger still. We are breaking free of the fear that constricts and confines us. We occupy to liberate.
We move forward in the grand tradition of the transformative social movements that have defined American history. We stand on the shoulders of those who have struggled before us, and we pick up where others have left off. We are creating a better society for us all.
Occupy Wall Street has renewed a sense of hope. It has revived a belief in community and awakened a revolutionary spirit too long silenced. Join us as we liberate space and build a movement. 9 a.m. Tuesday morning at Sixth Avenue and Canal we continue.
Occupy the high ground!
Tactical Briefing #18 from Adbusters: Hey you creatives, artists, environmentalists, workers, moms, dads, students, malcontents, do-gooders and aspiring martyrs in the snow:
The last four months have been hard fought, inspiring and delightfully revolutionary. We brought tents, hunkered down, held our assemblies, and lobbed a meme-bomb that continues to explode the world’s imagination. Many of us have never felt so alive. We have fertilized the future with our revolutionary spirit … and a thousand flowers will surely bloom in the coming Spring.
But as winter approaches an ominous mood could set in … hope thwarted is in danger of turning sour, patience exhausted becoming anger, militant nonviolence losing its allure. It isn’t just the mainstream media that says things could get ugly. What shall we do to keep the magic alive?
Here are a couple of emerging ideas:
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.
Whatever we do, let’s keep our revolutionary spirit alive … let’s never stop living without dead time.
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ
Court order allows Occupy Wall St. protesters back with tents
The Associated Press reports: Hundreds of police officers in riot gear raided Zuccotti Park early Tuesday, evicting dozens of Occupy Wall Street protesters from what has become the epicenter of the worldwide movement protesting corporate greed and economic inequality.
Hours later, the National Lawyers Guild obtained a court order allowing Occupy Wall Street protesters to return with tents to the park. The guild said the injunction prevents the city from enforcing park rules on Occupy Wall Street protesters.
At a morning news conference at City Hall, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city knew about the court order but had not seen it and would go to court to fight it. He said the city wants to protect people’s rights, but if a choice must be made, it will protect public safety.
About 70 people were arrested overnight, including some who chained themselves together, while officers cleared the park so that sanitation crews could clean it.
By 9 a.m., the park was power-washed clean. Police in riot gear still ringed the public space, waiting for orders to reopen it.
The city told protesters at the two-month-old encampment they could come back after the cleaning, but under new tougher rules, including no tents, sleeping bags or tarps, which would effectively put an end to the encampment if enforced.
NYPD raid Occupy Wall Street
Michael Moore: Dozens of Occupys across US raided this weekend-& now NYC- Planned & coordinated by the Dept. of Homeland Security? Did O give green light?
@C0d3Fr0sty: Guy on local New York TV station “This is not about #occupywallstreet to me, I’m a capitalist. This is about freedom now.”
Occupy Wall Street: Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park), home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months and birthplace of the 99% movement that has spread across the country and around the world, is presently being evicted by a large police force in full riot gear.
We will reoccupy!
Updates3:36 a.m. Kitchen tent reported teargassed. Police moving in with zip cuffs.
3:33 a.m. Bulldozers moving in
3:16 a.m. Occupiers linking arms around riot police
3:15 a.m. NYPD destroying personal items. Occupiers prevented from leaving with their possessions.
3:13 a.m. NYPD deploying sound cannon
3:08 a.m. heard on livestream: “they’re bringing in the hoses.”
3:05 a.m. NYPD cutting down trees in Liberty Square
2:55 a.m. NYC council-member Ydanis Rodríguez arrested and bleeding from head.
2:44 a.m. Defiant occupiers barricaded Liberty Square kitchen
2:44 a.m. NYPD destroys OWS Library. 5,000 donated books in dumpster.
2:42 a.m. Brooklyn Bridge confirmed closed
2:38 a.m. 400-500 marching north to Foley Square
2:32 a.m. All subways but R shut down
2:29 a.m. Press helicopters evicted from airspace. NYTimes reporter arrested.
2:22 a.m. Frontpage coverage from New York Times
2:15 a.m. Occupiers who have been dispersed are regrouping at Foley Square
2:10 a.m. Press barred from entering Liberty Square
2:07 a.m. Pepper spray deployed — reports of at least one reporter sprayed
2:03 a.m. Massive Police Presence at Canal and Broadway
1:43 a.m. Helicopters overhead.
1:38 a.m. Unconfirmed reports of snipers on rooftops.
1:34 a.m. CBS News Helicopter Livestream
1:27 a.m. Unconfirmed reports that police are planning to sweep everyone.
1:20 a.m. Subway stops are closed.
1:20 a.m. Brooklyn bridge is closed.
1:20 a.m. Occupiers chanting “This is what a police state looks like.”
1:20 a.m. Police are in riot gear.
1:20 a.m. Police are bringing in bulldozers.Phone
Call 311 if you’re in the NYC area.
NYPD 1st Precinct: 212.334.0611
NYPD Central Booking: 718.875.6303
NYPD Internal Affairs: 212.487.7350
City Hall: 212.788.3058
Capitalism is the crisis
Poster by Favianna Rodriguez: “As a woman of color, and as a Latina working predominantly in spaces that affect la Raza, the current moment offers me the opportunity to talk about how Wall Street has affected our families. In case you didn’t see it, Pew Research center recently released a report on how Latino Household Wealth fell by 66% from 2005 to 2009. That means we lost 2/3 of our community’s assets! Now that’s an important reason why Latinos should care about the Occupy movement.”
Download this poster here [PDF].
Occupy with aloha
“We Are the Many”
Ye come here, gather ’round the stage
The time has come for us to voice our rage
Against the ones who’ve trapped us in a cage
To steal from us the value of our wage
From underneath the vestiture of law
The lobbyists at Washington do gnaw
At liberty, the bureaucrats guffaw
And until they are purged, we won’t withdraw
We’ll occupy the streets
We’ll occupy the courts
We’ll occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few
Continue reading
The new progressive movement
Jeffrey Sachs writes: Twice before in American history, powerful corporate interests dominated Washington and brought America to a state of unacceptable inequality, instability and corruption. Both times a social and political movement arose to restore democracy and shared prosperity.
The first age of inequality was the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, an era quite like today, when both political parties served the interests of the corporate robber barons. The progressive movement arose after the financial crisis of 1893. In the following decades Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson came to power, and the movement pushed through a remarkable era of reform: trust busting, federal income taxation, fair labor standards, the direct election of senators and women’s suffrage.
The second gilded age was the Roaring Twenties. The pro-business administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover once again opened up the floodgates of corruption and financial excess, this time culminating in the Great Depression. And once again the pendulum swung. F.D.R.’s New Deal marked the start of several decades of reduced income inequality, strong trade unions, steep top tax rates and strict financial regulation. After 1981, Reagan began to dismantle each of these core features of the New Deal.
Following our recent financial calamity, a third progressive era is likely to be in the making. This one should aim for three things. The first is a revival of crucial public services, especially education, training, public investment and environmental protection. The second is the end of a climate of impunity that encouraged nearly every Wall Street firm to commit financial fraud. The third is to re-establish the supremacy of people votes over dollar votes in Washington.
None of this will be easy. Vested interests are deeply entrenched, even as Wall Street titans are jailed and their firms pay megafines for fraud. The progressive era took 20 years to correct abuses of the Gilded Age. The New Deal struggled for a decade to overcome the Great Depression, and the expansion of economic justice lasted through the 1960s. The new wave of reform is but a few months old.
The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.
The new movement also needs to build a public policy platform. The American people have it absolutely right on the three main points of a new agenda. To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.
Finally, the new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption. And the candidates that turn down large campaign checks, political action committees, Super PACs and bundlers will be well positioned to call out their opponents who are on the corporate take.
Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.
Why aren’t the jobless flocking to Zuccotti Park?
Louis Uchitelle reports: Occupy Wall Street and its numerous iterations across the country could take on a second life, one that spurs the unemployed to finally speak out forcefully on their own behalf. Already there have been isolated outbursts. But for such incidents to spread and take hold, more confidence is required that speaking out would produce results—and confidence is lacking, says Richard Curtin, director of the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, a monthly national poll of 500 people.
“People are discouraged,” Curtin says. “They believe that the administration and Congress tried to do a lot to get the economy restarted and nothing happened. So they are gradually embracing the notion that government is incapable of creating jobs.”
The government has, arguably, invited this response by talking about creating jobs without yet doing so—echoing a similar reluctance in the past. Twice since World War II Congress has watered down bills that would have mandated full employment—once in 1946, although the Depression was still fresh in people’s minds, and again in the mid-’70s, in the midst of a severe recession. The bills became law—the second one, finally enacted in 1978, is famously known as the Humphrey-Hawkins Act—but without the provisions that would have required the government to either hire directly or subsidize hiring whenever the unemployment rate rose above a specified level. The laws, in sum, were toothless.
With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the rise of supply-side economics, the dynamics shifted drastically. Unemployment was no longer seen as a failure of the nation’s employers to generate enough demand for workers. That was and still is the reason, but it faded as an explanation and as a prod to action. Instead, the unemployed are persistently blamed for their own unemployment, which eases pressure on government to help them. If only they acquired enough education and skill, the argument goes—and it is endlessly repeated—they would be hired. Corporate executives, politicians and many prominent economists push this view, and the unemployed, encouraged to blame themselves, keep silent. Or as Richard Sennett, a New York University sociologist, puts it: “People don’t cooperate with each other. They’ve lost the desire to do so and the skill that cooperation requires, so when things fall apart, they react as if it were their individual failure and are passive about it.”