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Saturday, October 29, 2011

Occupy Participation




Occupy Participation

#SomeThingsAreBiggerThanAnyOfUs

by Mickey Z.

"There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
- Anais Nin

As the eloquent Ms. Nin explains above, there is such a thing as a pain threshold. In the struggle for social change, this may be the point at which inaction become more agonizing than the fear we all harbor about stepping up and challenging this destructive culture.

I've often wondered when we will collectively decide that we're less afraid of the State than of living on a planet without trees, without drinkable water, without arable land, without a hint of justice. Thanks to Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and all related efforts, this moment is getting closer with each passing day and in that spirit, I'll say ssssshhhhhhh

Silence your cell phones, your TVs, silence the noise in your head...and just listen. Listen carefully. Can you hear it? It's a cry from the future, a mournful plea begging us to capture this moment. Can you hear it? Will you hear it? Or have you gotten so accustomed to losing that you choose instead to cover your ears, bury your head—finding endless excuses and myriad methods to ignore and/or discredit the effort?

Listen again. Listen closer. This is probably our last, best chance...it's nothing less than the call to global revolution. How will you answer?

Some perspective for the 98%...
Up till now, perhaps only 1% of the 99% have even heard the call and I'll get to them in a minute. This is for the other 98%:

There was a time when human slavery was believed too deeply entrenched in American culture to ever be abolished. But the movement to end this "peculiar institution" was made up of individuals willing to recognize that some things in life are bigger than any of us.

Whether they literally risked their lives by rescuing slaves and running the Underground Railroad or played a role by sewing clothes or blankets for escaped slaves or lending financial support or handing out pamphlets or even writing books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the effort needed every single one of these brave humans doing their part—small or large.

What seems impossible and irreversible today can be addressed if we're willing to wake up and do the hard work. If we’re willing to stop making excuses for the reprehensible leaders (sic)—both political and corporate—who profit from our complacency.

So, the next time you’re about zone out to a Will & Gracere-run, why not do some deep contemplation instead? Take a good, long look into your heart and an even longer look at the choices you make all day, every day—not from place of guilt and shame but with a sense of revelation. Accept the challenge to be better a human being, a more responsible earthling.

Nothing will change until we change our minds but it takes courage to perform self-examination. It takes courage to accept everything you know just might be wrong. For the record, it takes far more courage to do this than to willingly enlist to be paid to wage illegal and immoral wars.

It's not the volunteer mercenaries in places like Afghanistan who are fighting for our freedom. It's OWS.

Some perspective for the other 1%...
Maybe 1% of the 1% who have heard the call are opting—for a variety of reasons—to discount its urgency for reasons ranging from isolated incidents of sexism-racism-classism to word usage to (possibly) being bitter and jealous that their hard work never captured the public's attention as OWS has. There are even some activists expending energy hating on the drum circles.#huh?

You spend much of your life contemplating social change but when the revolution makes an unannounced appearance, you choose to downplay it? Perhaps the noise of displaying superior vision is drowning out the desperate call for help. If so, I suggest:

De-occupy the grad school dissertations, reject the fascism of semantics, kick the habit of cynicism disguised as cleverness, scrap the resentment and the rivalries, ditch the dated doctrines, risk imperfection, and simply—for at least a little while—choose feeling over thinking.

Get quiet and listen to your allies in Egypt, when they pronounce:

"We stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow."

Experiment with the new…

Of course, OWS is not perfect and some occupants act like assholes and mistakes have been made (and will continue to be made). I'm not suggesting anyone march in lockstep but jesus-occupied-christ, how about a little more patience and cohesion on the Left?

The future doesn't send text messages
We can’t be as indifferent or leisurely as those who came before us. They didn’t think urgently enough about future generations so now we have to work twice as hard. It sucks, I know, but this not an issue of fairness. It’s about survival.

Returning to Anais Nin and the opening quote: It's time to blossom. Even with all the fear, pain, dread, and uncertainty we may (or may not) experience while blossoming, remaining tight in the bud is no longer an option…for us or for the planet.

So, please ask yourself: What unique gifts do I possess that I can share—as soon as possible—with the growing OWS movement? The call has been made so surrender your list of preconditions and just leap. Who knows, a net may even appear.

Listen again to our compatriots in Cairo:

"Our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never give them up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing."

On that note of solidarity, I beseech you to rise above your urge to critique, your need to be right, your fear of the unknown…and just listen. It's not about purity. It's not about who did what or said what first. It's not about following a predetermined game plan. It's not about waiting for the ideal time to jump on board. It's a fuckin' revolution—in the name of all life on earth—so shrug off the excuses and get involved.
The anti-slavery movement recognized that some things in life are bigger than any of us. Today, the entire planet is enslaved…to profit-seeking, landbase-consuming corporations and the corrupt politicians they own (yes, including the vaunted Pope of Hope). Thankfully, this generation’s abolitionists are choosing to take a stand and create change. Not ask for change, create change. And they need your support. They need you.

Silence the sirens of archaic archetypes, open your minds to new configurations, and heed the call of the future. I promise it'll be a lot more fun that you ever imagined.

#OccupyImperfection. #OccupyUrgency. #OccupyParticipation.


Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.

Friday, October 28, 2011

Occupy Wall Street and the Redistribution of Anxiety

AlterNet.org


The savvy economist and co-founder of the Move Your Money campaign celebrates the courage of young protesters leading the way to change.

Photo Credit: Nick Turse

It's my home -- last night I dreamt that I grew wings
I found a place where they could hear me when I sing
--"Wings" by Josh Ritter

Occupy Wall Street is about anxiety, and the courage of young people to fly into conflict on Gandhi's wings. This is the noble legacy of civil disobedience on display at Zuccotti Park. We are seeing that anxiety channeled by courage can transform a society.

What does anxiety look like? You can see this drama played out as the demonstrators meditate surrounded by police whose anxiety is palpable, perhaps because the police cannot figure out which side they should really be on. You see it and hear it and feel it from all of the media pundits who are trying to "figure out," discredit, or dismiss OWS. You see it in the angry denunciations emanating from Wall Street financiers who beat their breasts and cling to the image of their legitimacy because they work so hard that they deserve their top 0.1% style mega incomes. (Doctors and tool and die makers work long and hard too, but their skill and hard work and education, often far beyond that of a financier, do not produce 7 and 8 figure incomes). You feel it in the desperate rhetoric of George Will, as he tries to discredit Elisabeth Warren's assertion of the obvious, namely that the very successful are highly dependent on society and did not create their wealth and achievements in a vacuum. You sense it in the desperate smearing by David Brooks, whose efforts to behead this movement lie in planting the seeds that this protest is about anti Semitism rather than an unjust society.

The Wind Cries Change

From the corners of power, people who like to see themselves as adults act like spoiled children demanding that the citizens protesting create concrete plans and policies to alleviate the anxieties of pundits – the same ones who have been berating or ignoring the plight of far too many for far too long. They deny that right now the world looks a lot more like the urban desperation of David Simon's brilliant "The Wire" than the lifestyles of the rich and famous on display in the newspapers. Media enablers of denial may insist that the protesters "become constructive." But they have little leverage in making their scolding request given the destructive role they have played in masking our deteriorating reality. The savvy young protesters will likely sigh and laugh at these pathetic gestures from those outed for their complicity in making the mess our society has become.

Change, we are all finding, is very stressful. Even inevitable and healthy change.

We have reached a turning point. There is no more convincing people to play along in the "heads I win, tails you lose" game. We now plainly see that Atlas is strip mining our nation rather than carrying us on his shoulders of enterprise. The hero image of the business leader-provider is crumbling along with the core fabric of our society. Polls show that NYC citizens, Democrats and Republicans, and even Tea Party participants are all largely supportive of the protests. In Europe, many are ecstatic that America is finally objecting to the corruption at home that has been sliming the world for a long, long time. Etta James's "At Last" is being sung in the salons of Berlin and Paris.

Our secular religion of individualist economics is disintegrating in the face of a nightmarish experience. As the brilliant BBC Documentary film series by Adam Curtis entitled "The Trap: What Happened to Our Idea of Freedom" illuminates, the every-man-for-himself concept of society and freedom creates a horrible void. The Horatio Alger myth has been refuted and shattered by reality. That old myth was attractive emotionally-- promising to resolve anxiety by teaching that if you put your head down and worked hard you could control your own fate. But that lie was exposed when Wall Street blew itself up and millions lost their jobs, their homes, and their pensions through no fault of their own. The reckless financiers took us all down with them, and there was no way to insulate ourselves from their casino games and their manipulation of government. And the games just go on. The menace of high frequency trading is only the latest example of a system rigged against us. But we have begun to question a perverted notion of freedom, where the only thing we protect is the rights of the powerful to plunder the commons. We see that this "freedom" is so destructive that it is threatening the very integrity of our much-hallowed capital markets. What an irony! Compulsive greed cannot resist consuming its own monuments.

Nothing to Eat at the Establishment Café

Rather than serving as the trusted nerve center, the discipline, and the arbiters of monetary value, our leading financiers tear apart our productive base and blow themselves up. Then they yank the chain of their portfolio of "owned" Senators and Congressmen to bail themselves out. The elected officials, in turn, pay the media companies for election advertisements with their campaign war chest garnered from Wall Street, and we are all told that our constructive outlet as citizens is through the electoral process. Is that some kind of joke? Have you ever gone to a restaurant found nothing on the menu you wanted to order? Only those who pass the plutocratic primary ever make it on the ballot on election day. That is where we are as a nation. For the rest of us, watching this corrupt logic unfold gives new meaning to Ronald Reagan's adage that government is the problem not the solution. The critiques of the Democratic left and the Republican right are strikingly similar. Our leadership and institutions are unresponsive to the concerns of the people.

But the young protesters at Zuccotti Park and encampments across the nation have simply gotten up from the table. They have walked out of the restaurant and are making their own meals now. That is what OWS is. Home cooking when everything is broken at the establishment café.

These young people have repudiated a system that has little to offer them. They are rising up against environmental degradation. They are challenging the devastating breakdown in financial regulation. They are saying "no thanks" to legislation protecting health care monopolies marketed as great reforms. They are condemning a toxic food industry that sabotages our health as the colors and chemicals tantalize and poison us. And they are refusing to swallow a military juggernaut that consumes lives and hundreds of billion dollars while we close schools. These young people have decided not to accept letting our society be crushed by an epidemic of mortgage overhangs and 30 percent credit card interest rates. They have opted not stand by as our elected representatives work with their campaign donors, pretending that the Wall Street bonuses are earned and banks are sound and business as usual can continue.

This inhuman economic and power logic impacts us all, and the protesters serve to heighten our awareness that the social contract has broken down. The truth has been revealed. That our large American-based multinational enterprises do not need healthy or well-educated Americans to profit. That CEOs do not want to pay taxes from their mega salaries when they can afford their own private security, private education and private transportation to escape the rubble that they have let the country become under their leadership. That all the while, the executives ransack their companies, aided and abetted by Wall Street collaborators who peddle off balance sheet schemes, complex derivatives, and stock buy backs, and then act as though it is a mystery that the pace of innovation is dwindling.

The Redistribution of Anxiety

As money poisons the veins of our political organism, as courts rule that money is speech and only millions in your pocket will give you a voice, is it any wonder that our jobless, debt-ensnared young people see this foul scene and understand that the greater danger to their future lies in not protesting the world we are putting on their shoulders? They have shrugged off Atlas. The protestors see something our leaders do not: Without protest, the future looks like a Brazilian favela for many. To alleviate the anxiety of that vision is to bear the anxiety of change. The protesters know they must face police brutality and the ridicule from those who drove us in the ditch. Resistance to change is organic and these brave and clever and peaceful young people are bearing their anxious birthright and redistributing the burden of anxiety to those who have left the nation in tatters.

When Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech on the immorality of the Vietnam war at New York's Riverside Church, "A Time to Break the Silence," he set off a rash of criticism from every establishment institution, black or white, in our entire nation. His legacy reminds us that anxiety is the sister of change. Anxiety is not always a mark of something wrong. It can be signal something that is overdue and needed. But can that anxiety of conflict be any more troubling than for our young people to believe they have to abide this discredited American political economic model indefinitely into the future? It is in the tilting balance of those anxieties that we can see now that "A Change is Gonna Come." The road will be painful and perhaps bloody. But the journey is now irreversibly underway. Though they may never acknowledge it, even the one percent should be grateful for that. These peaceful protesters may insure that anxiety does not erupt into a violence from which the wealthy and powerful themselves could not escape.

Instead, we are all gratefully riding on the intuitive wisdom of these young people, who, like Dr. King, chose to fly on the ghost of Gandhi's wings.

Along with Arianna Huffington and filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, Robert Johnson is the founder of the Move Your Money campaign, recently reinvigorated by the Occupy Wall Street protests. He is also the Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). Johnson served as Chief Economist of the US Senate Banking Committee under the leadership of Chairman William Proxmire (D. Wisconsin). Before this, he was Senior Economist of the US Senate Budget Committee under the leadership of Chairman Pete Domenici (R. New Mexico).

Soft Regime Change in America Will #OCCUPY Spark a Wildcat General Strike?



Soft Regime Change in America

Will #OCCUPY Spark a Wildcat General Strike?

Soft Regime Change in America
How I feel, as a United States Marine, about what occurred in Oakland. (Reddit)

The #OCCUPY movement is entering an ominous new phase.

Police attacked #OCCUPYOAKLAND on Tuesday with tear gas, rubber bullets and flash grenades. Scott Olsen, a two time Iraq war veteran, was critically wounded in the assault. Graphic pictures of an unconscious Olsen, his skull fractured, being carried by fellow protestors to safety have reverberated from Zuccotti to Cairo and escalated the movement. On Wednesday, three thousand protestors reclaimed the square, reestablished their encampment and held a general assembly that called for a General Strike.

"We as fellow occupiers of Oscar Grant Plaza propose that on Wednesday November 2, 2011, we liberate Oakland and shut down the 1%... All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them."

There are signs of occupations in other cities taking up Oakland's call. A tantalizing possibility hangs in the air: Could a wildcat general strike spread across the nation? Are we witnessing the first clues of how a soft regime change might begin in America?

occupywallstreet.org / occupytogether.org / Twitter / Facebook

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Hey G20, here comes #ROBINHOOD...

Adbusters Blog

Hey G20, Here Comes #ROBINHOOD

Adbusters Tactical Briefing #16
Adbusters , 26 Oct 2011

Tactical Briefing #16: Hey G20, here comes #ROBINHOOD...

Alright you rebels, redeemers and believers out there,

At the height of the global uprisings in 1968, protesters confidently heralded "The Beginning of a New Epoch." To this bravado, Zbigniew Brzezinski, then the national security advisor to the president of the United States, retorted that the protests were nothing but "the death rattle of the historical irrelevants." And indeed the first global revolution the world had ever seen suddenly fizzled out. To this day no one quite knows why.

For the moment, #OCCUPY has the magic and the ear of the world, and anything seems possible. We could see a soft regime change in America and a resurgence of the political left worldwide.

As winter approaches, many occupiers will dig in for the long haul. Others will decamp until spring and channel their energy into myriad projects. Many of the big ideas for rejuvenating and reenchanting the world that have been swirling around the left for the last 20 years will pick up steam. From revoking corporate personhood to de-commercializing the cultural commons, to separating money from politics, to the birth of a True Cost Party of America … we are entering a sustained period of boots-on-the-ground transformation.

And every now and again we will have a worldwide blast reminiscent of the global march against the Iraq war eight years ago. The next of these blasts could happen as early as this Saturday when #ROBINHOOD strikes the G20. Imagine a few million people rising up and sending a message to the G20 leaders meeting November 3/4 in France: "This austerity vs. stimulus debate you've foisted on us doesn't mean a damn thing… It's obvious you have no idea how to get us out of this economic mess you put us in. So now we are telling you what we want: a radical transformation of casino capitalism… we want you to slow down fast money with a 1% #ROBINHOOD tax on all financial transactions and currency trades."

#ROBINHOOD marches have already been announced in over a dozen cities. Bring it up at your general assembly … then create some edgy Robin Hood graphics for the world to digest and let's march out there millions strong this Saturday … Let's leverage the G20!

This could be the first great upheaval of the financial regime … and the first delicious fruit of our movement.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

There are #ROBINHOOD actions currently planned in San Antonio, Las Vegas, Montreal, Durango, Calgary, Washington DC, Santa Fe, Denver, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Sydney, Amarillo, Edmonton, Salt Lake City, Berlin and more…

occupywallstreet.org / 29october.net / occupytogether.org / Twitter / Facebook

P.S. On Tuesday, the nonviolent protestors at #OCCUPYOAKLAND were assaulted with tear gas, rubber bullets and flash grenades. Disturbing footage of police violence is now emerging. That same day, #OCCUPYATLANTA was foreclosed and over 50 protestors arrested. The counter-revolution of money has begun but our commitment to nonviolence will win.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

OWS Has Learned What Many Progressives and the Left Will Not Acknowledge

AlterNet.org


ACTIVISM & VISION
It is precisely the mystical utopian energy that most professional progressives so smugly dismiss that has aroused a salient, mass political consciousness on economic issues.

Photo Credit: Canadian Veggie via Flickr

Progressives and mainstream Democratic pundits disagree with each other about many issues at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street protests, but with few exceptions they are joined in their contempt for drum circles, free hugs, and other behavior in Zuccotti Park that smacks of hippie culture.

In a post for the Daily Beast Michelle Goldberg lamented, “Drum circles and clusters of earnest incense-burning meditators ensure that stereotypes about the hippie left remain alive.” AtEsquire, Charles Pierce worried that few could “see past all the dreadlocks and hear…over the drum circles.” Michael Smerconish asked on the MSNBC show Hardball if middle Americans “in their Barcalounger” could relate to drum circles. The New Republic’s Alex Klein chimed in, “In the course of my Friday afternoon occupation, I saw two drum circles, four dogs, two saxophones, three babies....Wall Street survived.” And the host of MSNBC’s Up, Chris Hayes (editor at large of the Nation), recently reassured his guests Naomi Klein and Van Jones that although he supported the political agenda of the protest he wasn’t going to “beat the drum” or “give you a free hug,” to knowing laughter.

Yet it is precisely the mystical utopian energy that most professional progressives so smugly dismiss that has aroused a salient, mass political consciousness on economic issues—something that had eluded even the most lucid progressives in the Obama era.

Since the mythology of the 1960s hangs over so much of the analysis of the Wall Street protests, it’s worth reviewing what actually happened then. Media legend lumps sixties radicals and hippies together, but from the very beginning most leaders on the left looked at the hippie culture as, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a saboteur of pragmatic progressive politics. Hippies saw most radicals as delusional and often dangerously angry control freaks. Bad vibes.

Not that there is anything magic about the word “hippie.” Over the years it has been distorted by parody, propaganda, self-hatred, and, from its earliest stirrings, commercialism. In some contemporary contexts it is used merely to refer to people living in the past and/or those who are very stoned.

The hippie idea, as used here, does not refer to colloquialisms like “far out” or products sold by dope dealers. At their core, the counterculture types who briefly called themselves hippies were a spiritual movement. In part they offered an alternative to organized religions that too often seemed preoccupied with rules and conformity, especially on sexual matters. (One reason Eastern religious traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism resonated with hippies was because they carried no American or family baggage.) But most powerfully, the hippie idea was an uprising against the secular religion of America in the 1950s, morbid “Mad Men” materialism, and Ayn Rand’s social Darwinism.

The hippies were heirs to a long line of bohemians that includes William Blake, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Hesse, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley, utopian movements like the Rosicrucians and the Theosophists, and most directly the Beatniks. Hippies emerged from a society that had produced birth-control pills, a counterproductive war in Vietnam, the liberation and idealism of the civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights, FM radio, mass-produced LSD, a strong economy, and a huge quantity of baby-boom teenagers. These elements allowed the hippies to have a mainstream impact that dwarfed that of the Beats and earlier avant-garde cultures.

In the mid-sixties rock and roll’s mass appeal fused with certain elements of hip culture, especially in San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company (as well as Seattle’s Jimi Hendrix). That mood was absorbed and expanded by much of the popular music world, including the already popular Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. John Lennon’s songs “Instant Karma,” “Give Peace A Chance,” “Across The Universe,” “Revolution” (“But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out”), and “Imagine” are probably as close to a hippie manifesto as existed, and the Woodstock festival as close to a mass manifestation of the idea as would survive the hype.

It is easy to cherry pick a few idiotic phrases from stoners in the 1970 documentaryWoodstock, but what made the event and its legacy meaningful to its fans—aside from the music—was the example of people in the hip community taking care of each other, as shown in the Wavy Gravy documentary Saint Misbehavin’. No two hippies had the same notion of what the movement was all about, but there were some values they all shared. As Time put it in 1967, “Hippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy and nonviolence.”

Like any spiritual movement (or religion) hippies attracted pretenders, ranging from undercover cops to predators such as Charles Manson, who used their external trappings for very different agendas. By October of 1967, following the so-called “Summer of Love” (during which more than a hundred thousand long-haired teenagers overloaded and permanently changed the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco), exploitation of the word “hippie” had become sufficiently prevalent that a group of counterculture pioneers in the Bay Area held a “Death of the Hippie” mock funeral. A flier announcing the ceremony warned young seekers against the existential perils of hype.

Media created the hippie with your hungry consent. Careers are to be had for the enterprising hippie. The media casts nets, create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in. Your face on TV. Your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the [San Francisco] Chronicle. NBC says you exist, ergo I am. Narcissism, plebian vanity.

The pure of heart were exhorted to “Exorcize Haight-Ashbury. Do not be bought by a picture or phrase. Do not be captured in words. You are free, we are free. Believe only in your own incarnate spirit.” Woodstock shows that by 1969 even the long-haired masses had taken to calling themselves “freaks.”


A YEAR ago, shortly before the 2010 mid-year election, a left-wing blogger on a conference call with President Obama’s adviser David Axelrod complained that dismissive comments by the administration about its left-wing base amounted to “hippie punching.” The phrase was used to emphasize the contempt that the administration had shown for the progressive base, but it was also a reminder of the disdain that most of the Left has for the word “hippie,” as if to complain, “You think that we are as irrelevant as hippies!” Like those who ostentatiously distanced themselves from the Wall Street drum circles, the bloggers wanted to distinguish the modern Left from actual hippies (or who they thought hippies were).

The anti-hippie ethos on the left runs deep. Many 1960s radicals claimed that the hippies had squandered a chance to mainstream left-wing political ideas. In Black Panther leader Bobby Seale’s book Seize the Time he quotes white radical Jerry Rubin as saying that he and others had formed the “Yippies” because hippies had not “necessarily become political yet. They mostly prefer to be stoned.” In the real world, the Yippies never got a mass following, but the Grateful Dead did.

Early in 1967 writers for the Haight-Asbury psychedelic paper the Oracle, along with local poets, musicians, and mystics, organized the first Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. They were chastised by a group of Berkley radicals, including Rubin, for rejecting their proposal that the gathering should have “demands,” a suggestion that the amused hippie conveners saw as a contradiction of the whole idea. (There are echoes of this argument in criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street protesters as insufficiently specific in their demands—as if the interests of 99 percent are not a clear enough litmus test for any proposed laws or regulations.)

Bill Zimmerman, an antiwar activist of the Vietnam era, summarized the radical attitude toward hippies in his excellent memoir Troublemaker:

Not believing they could alter the juggernaut of American capitalism through politics, the hippies tried culture instead—starting with [Timothy] Leary’s slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out”....While we [“the political people in the antiwar movement”] all accepted a subsistence lifestyle without expensive clothes, cars or other luxuries, they were about enjoyment, friendship, shared experiences, and whatever transcendence could be achieved through mind-altering drugs, music, and sex.

This both exaggerates the political viability of the non-hippie radicals of the day and underestimates the social conscience and commitment of many of those who chose to develop communes and new age spiritual communities. One example is the SEVA Foundation, founded by Wavy Gravy and Ram Dass in the early 1970s. Over the course of thirty years, the nonprofit organization has raised enough money from rock benefits to pay for over three million eye operations in third-world countries to rescue people from blindness. And of course the modern environmental movement owes as much to a mystical belief in the sanctity of the earth as it does to science.

Some on the left maintained that hippies scared off socially conservative liberals who otherwise would have been more sympathetic to the antiwar movement. In There but for Fortune, a wonderful documentary about radical singer-songwriter Phil Ochs, the artist can be heard complaining that freakish looking protesters undermined the credibility of antiwar demonstrations with middle Americans. In a piece for the Nationin 1967, Ochs’s friend Jack Newfield complained, “Bananas, incense, and pointing love rays to the Pentagon have nothing to do with redeeming America.”

Republicans leaders including Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan eagerly used cartoon versions of hippies as part of their successful attempt to break up the New Deal coalition. “A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah,” quipped then California Governor Reagan in 1969. Jefferson R. Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive theorizes that America’s rightward trend began when Nixon lured working-class whites into Republican arms by contrasting the hippie myth of Woodstock with country singer Merle Haggard’s anti-hippie anthem “Okie from Muskogee.”

One was southern, gritty, masculine, working class, white, and soaked in the reality of putting food on the table; the other was northern, eastern, radical, effete, leisurely, affluent, multi-cultural, and full of pipe dreams. One was real, the other surreal; one worked, the other played; one did the labor, the other did the criticism; one drank whiskey, the other smoked dope; one built, the other destroyed; one was for survival, the other was for revolution; one died in wars, the other protested wars; and one was for Richard Nixon, the other for George McGovern.

Cowie’s book is terrific, but this is nonsense. The lion’s share of the decline in Democratic votes for President occurred between 1964 (61 percent) and 1968 (43 percent), when Hubert Humphrey was the nominee. Most of those formerly Democratic votes went to the racist Alabama Governor George Wallace, who garnered 13 percent of the vote on a third-party ticket—an explicit reaction against civil rights legislation. The demonstrations outside of the Democratic Convention in 1968 in which many Americans sympathized with cops more than protesters had nothing to do with hippies; they were orchestrated by radical non-hippies like Rubin. (Hippie icon Allen Ginsberg argued in vain against the Chicago protests, because he presciently feared violence).

Four years later, there were no hippies involved with the McGovern campaign’s mistakes, like the ill-advised selection of Thomas Eagleton as the vice-presidential nominee and the breakdown of the relationship between the campaign and organized labor. Those mistakes were made by well-intentioned but inept liberal political consultants, many of whom would self-righteously characterize themselves as “pragmatists” in future years.

It is possible that some non-racist, older, white Democrats switched sides because they were offended by aspects of hippie culture, but it seems likely that more of their children and grandchildren rejected conservative orthodoxy because of their attraction to that very culture. The Allman Brothers and other southern rock bands developed a following that dwarfed that of Haggard, and ended up being a source of funding for Jimmy Carter’s primary campaign in 1976.

Modern heirs to the hippie idea include millions of “New Age” believers, inspired by the likes of Baba Ram Dass, Joseph Campbell, Deepak Chopra, and in some cases Oprah Winfrey, whose non-hierarchal spirituality exists outside the confines of traditional churches and synagogues. Although very few neo-hippie groups have explicit political agendas, many in the progressive public interest world benefit from their largess.


WHAT POSSIBLE relevance does any of this have to American politics in 2011? For one thing, many of those young people who like to beat on drums and who devised some of the subtle infrastructure of Occupy Wall Street are clearly tuned into an energy that exists outside of the parameters of political science.

Spiritual movements do not adhere to “party lines,” which is one reason why conventional political activists find them so maddening. Martin Scorsese’s recent documentary on the life of George Harrison reminded us not only of the Beatle’s passionate embrace of Hinduism and the funds he raised for Bangladesh but also of his perverse anger at paying his taxes. Nonetheless, it doesn’t take a poll or a focus group to know that people who identify with the hippie idea are unlikely to vote Republican. (Ron Paul’s people are trying. They give out fliers at Occupy Wall Street while, as of this writing, Democrats still fear to do so.)

Conservatives have effectively peddled the notion that all politics are corrupt. The resulting apathy, and opposition to government, conveniently leaves big business more in charge than ever. The price that Democrats and progressives pay for belittling or ignoring contemporary devotees of the hippie idea, who share the opinion that politics are corrupt, is to reinforce the impulse to “drop out” in a cohort that would otherwise be, for the most part, natural allies.

Spiritual values can expand the reach of political action, especially at a time when progressives struggle to connect to mass consciousness. Their causes have been mired in phrases like “single-payer” and “cap-and-trade.” For all of their virtues, policy wonks didn’t come up with “We are the 99 percent.” People with drum circles did.

The Right understands the subtle connections between ideology and practical politics. Few Republican leaders distance themselves from right-wing Christians or demagogues like Glenn Beck. And Ayn Rand’s doctrine of selfishness, despite elements that conservative politicians would be afraid to avow, is celebrated by right-wing oligarchs and wanna-bes. Alan Greenspan, the long-time head of the Federal Reserve, was a personal disciple of Rand, and Congressman Paul Ryan, who drafted the Republican budget that would’ve eliminated Medicare, cites Rand as his intellectual hero.

Any bohemian movement will attract goofballs. Drum circles may inspire and unify a crowd in one situation, but simply drown out conversation in another. It is one thing for a polite protester to offer “free hugs,” and quite another for a sweaty inebriate to impose them. The way to deal with this is to rebuke individual jerks, not to dismiss a vibrant section of mass culture.

As Martin Luther King pursued his strategy of nonviolent protest, the NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, who oversaw most of the legal strategy for the civil rights movement, mocked him by asking, “How many laws have you changed?” King replied, “I don’t know, but we’ve changed a lot of hearts.” Obviously, the civil rights movement needed both spiritual and legal efforts to achieve its goals. So do modern progressives. As Nick Lowe asked in the song made famous by Elvis Costello, “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?”

Danny Goldberg is the author of the books "How the Left Lost Teen Spirit" and "Bumping Into Geniuses."

The Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street

On the Commons

The Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street

Finally, a truly populist uprising

By David Morris

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Occupy Wall Street: The Primary the President Never Had?

AlterNet.org


The growing movement will force political leaders to chose between Big Money and popular legitimacy.


It's been a little over a month since this bolt of political lightning known as Occupy Wall Street jolted through the political establishment. It's time to assess just what Occupy Wall Street has gotten done. That it has accomplished a great deal is beyond dispute. Franklin Foer in the New Republic and John Nichols in the Nation have both noted that Occupy Wall Street profoundly challenged President Obama and the Republicans. But what an odd challenge. A few thousand people camped out in parks around the country? Really?

Yet this challenge has completely changed the dominant theme in Washington. Less than a year ago, JP Morgan's Bill Daley was the glad-handling centrist du jour, praised by everyone from Howard Dean to Bob Reich. The "austerity class," as Ari Berman so nicely put it, was in control of the debate, with the Tea Party waiting in the wings ready to slash and burn.

Fast forward to October 2011. Obama is increasingly taking on a populist tone and using executive orders to attempt stimulating the economy, with Democrats smacking around Mitt Romney for encouraging foreclosures as a way to clear the market (a policy Obama administration officials like HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan agree with. The centrists are losing, perhaps not power, but certainly the debate. Third Way, the political brain behind this centrist White House and Senate, is one of the few groups warning Democrats away from Occupy Wall Street, but few are listening.

There's a reason; the themes put out by the protesters are overwhelmingly popular. The poll numbers are out. If Occupy Wall Street were a national candidate for president, it would be blowing away every other candidate on the stage, including Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Fifty-four percent of Americans agree with the protesters, versus 44 percent who think President Obama is doing a good job. Seventy-three percent of Americans want prosecutions for Wall Street executives for the crisis. Seventy-nine percent think the gap between rich and poor is too large. Eighty-six percent say Wall Street and its lobbyists have too much power in Washington. Sixty-eight percent think the rich should pay more in taxes. Twenty-five percent of the public considers itself upset, 45 percent is concerned about the country and 25 percent is downright angry.

That these themes are dominating establishment debates now is somewhat bizarre. It's not as if people didn't hate banks in 2008, 2009 or 2010. And when you think about it, camping out in various cities isn't a particularly radical act, in and of itself. Occupy Wall Street can't project political power, at least not in any traditional sense. It can't make decisions about how to relate to the police, or politicians. It is ideologically incoherent. It can't even stop drum circles from drumming at night, because drummers don't recognize the legitimacy of the general assemblies that try to cut deals with the neighborhood. There are increasing reports of medical and safety problems in parks around the country. One person at the protests told me the World War I disease called trenchfoot is making an appearance due to damp conditions. The protests are a ball of raw energy, with one basic message: The 1 percent on Wall Street have taken advantage of the 99 percent of the rest of us.

Yet this message is resonating, deeply. What the occupiers have done, perhaps unwittingly, is force political elites to choose, at least publicly, between their funding stream and their popular legitimacy. Wall Street lobbyists are absolutely furious at Obama for embracing the protests, but protesters aren't particularly enthused to have establishment praise. Barney Frank goes to raise money from Wall Street, while lamenting how the protesters didn't vote in 2010. The occupiers as a group are split on voting; some think participation in politics is essential while others think participation in this system is immoral. One thing that's clear is that occupiers do not see Obama's reelection as a particularly significant goal, at least not now.

This movement has heightened the contradictions of both parties, the Wall Street funding of the Democratic Party and its associated institutions, as well as the faux populism of the Tea Party-infused Republican. The main message of the occupiers is that the government and Wall Street are one tangled corrupt mess screwing everyone else. Centrists, many of whom live in the Democratic Party, at the Fed, in banks, and in law firms and think tanks, are the key linchpin of this system. They make the trains run on time, shuffling between the various institutions of national power. And they have a long history of dancing in between popular legitimacy and corrupt financial elites. An example is the Democratic embrace of Fannie Mae as an institution that broadens access to housing. This company was corrupt to the core, and the people profiting from it have gone on to senior administration positions in the White House -- Tom Donolan in National Security, Rahm Emanuel, Bill Daley, Peter Orszag, etc. These are the people who are centrally implicated by Occupy Wall Street.

Centrists dealing with the occupiers are suffering because they must now choose between their funding stream and their popular legitimacy. Michael Bloomberg, the centrist mayor of New York, is perceived of as weak by his friends, but he is also increasingly unpopular in the city. Rahm Emanuel, Chicago mayor, must now openly arrest the people he used to badmouth and bully while in the White House.

The gravitational pull of the occupiers is remarkable to behold. Tea Partiers are angry at the stolen thunder. Wall Street tycoon Larry Fink (who is on the investor, not the banks side) offered praise for the protests. Liberal Democratic groups like Moveon and Democracy for America have a new language and group to organize around, instead of defending the White House. Labor now has another horse to back, a motley energetic group calling itself the 99 percent, rather than a mild center-right Democratic elite class. Big-dollar liberal donors are excited to find a way to tap into this "energy." The occupiers are considered a new pole in the political system, "Krugman's army," perhaps.

Like a major national primary against a sitting-though-unpopular president, this movement is sending a signal to the existing elites. Change and deliver on a new social contract, or else. It isn't clear what "or else" means. Perhaps this is signifying a collapse of older institutional arrangements, or a breakdown in belief in existing authority structures. Perhaps this is the first of many large-scale civil disturbances, and a spark that will lead the establishment to solidify its authoritarian impulses. Maybe the training of tens of thousands of people around the world in nonviolent non-electoral means of challenging power, the legitimization of protest, the introduction of new areas of contention like the role of the Federal Reserve, and the re-mainstreaming of figures like Noam Chomsky and the promotion of people like Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges are signifying a larger shift in our political culture. It's too early to know.

But something big is afoot. "Culture-jammers" from the site Adbusters, a motley group of anarchists from a makeshift shantytown known as Bloombergville, imported tactics from Spain and Egypt, and yes, social media, have set the political establishment back on its heels.

Matt Stoller is the former senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He blogs frequently for Naked Capitalism. Follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Monday, October 24, 2011

A Movement to Make Our Leaders Listen


yes!



A Movement to Make Our Leaders Listen

When old ladies in Iowa share the same concerns as kids on the street in Manhattan, it’s time those in power took note.

by

we are one chalk by Joe Schueller

Photo by Joe Schueller

Much has been made by some news outlets and pundits about the supposed "incoherence" of the Occupy Wall Street protests. "The protesters" don't have a coherent message, we are told. They can't even agree on any solutions. What the heck are they proposing?

This angle is wrong-headed. The strongest and most successful social movements in history have always tapped into multiple concerns that are important to different swaths of society, and often articulated in different ways. It's not typically the responsibility of a broad movement to propose specific policy solutions—at least not at this stage in the process. It's on us to create pressure to move society in a direction. When we do that successfully, windows will open to fight for this or that specific change. The bigger a movement we grow, the more pressure we create, the more substantial and meaningful those windows for measurable gains become.

The strongest and most successful social movements in history have always tapped into multiple concerns that are important to different swaths of society.

And historical perspective is not all that's wrong with the "incoherence" frame. There's a pretty damn clear coherence to Americans' anger at Wall Street right now. If it doesn't upset you that the top 1% is still making record-high profits and paying record-low taxes while the rest of us struggle just to survive, then I don't know that I'll be able to explain it to you. But I think most people feel it in their gut. That's why us being here is resonating with so many people. That's why this movement is drawing so much attention, and why I think it's going to continue to gain momentum over time.

The momentum is really starting to spread beyond the "usual suspects." It's important to emphasize and encourage this. For example, while coastal occupation actions have drawn the most media attention so far, actions are also happening all across "Middle America," from Ashland, Kentucky to Dallas, Texas to Ketchum, Idaho.

I just heard a first hand report about four hundred Iowans marching in Des Moines, Iowa as part of the October 15 international day of action. I'm working on the press team here at Occupy Wall Street, and I just got the chance to talk on the phone with Judy Lonning, a 69-year-old retired public school teacher who participated in the Des Moines action today. Here's what she had to say:

People are suffering here in Iowa. Family farmers are struggling, students face mounting debt and fewer good jobs, and household incomes are plummeting. We're not willing to keep suffering for Wall Street's sins. People here are waking up and realizing that we can't just go to the ballot box. We're building a movement to make our leaders listen.

Cheers to that.


Jonathan Matthew Smucker wrote this article for Beyond The Choir, a forum for grassroots mobilization.

Interested?


Occupying the Rust Belt

Salon Home

Topic

Occupy Wall Street

Monday, Oct 24, 2011 8:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Occupying the Rust Belt

In three deindustrialized cities, protesters find friendly cops, determination and despair

An abandoned building in Youngstown, Ohio

An abandoned building in Youngstown, Ohio

The surefire method to find occupations in small cities is to head for the center of town. After leaving Philadelphia on our Occupy America tour, we drive an hour north to Allentown. Pennsylvania’s third-largest city at 118,000 residents, Allentown has been weathered by years of deindustrialization in the steel, cement and textile industries that once made it an economic powerhouse.

Along MacArthur Boulevard, one of Allentown’s main drags, tidy but weary brick row homes line outlying neighborhoods. Close to Center Square, site of the requisite Civil War monument, the neighborhoods are heavily Latino and buildings exhibit signs of disrepair.