Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now

Published on Friday, October 7, 2011 by The Occupied Wall Street Journal

Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now

by Naomi Klein

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a k a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

I love you.

And I didn’t just say that so that hundreds of you would shout “I love you” back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.

Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.

If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”

That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began.

“Why are they protesting?” ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: “What took you so long?” “We’ve been wondering when you were going to show up.” And most of all: “Welcome.”

Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called “the movement of movements.”

But there are important differences too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature, they only last a week. That made us transient too. We’d appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It’s because they don’t have roots. And they don’t have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.

Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen.

Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to non-violence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality. Which we saw more of just last night. Meanwhile, support for this movement grows and grows. More wisdom.

But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. Unemployment was low, stock portfolios were bulging. The media was drunk on easy money. Back then it was all about start-ups, not shutdowns.

We pointed out that the deregulation behind the frenzy came at a price. It was damaging to labor standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.

What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I’m not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that’s important.

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.

That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and proving health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says, “I care about you.” In a culture that trains people to avoid each other’s gaze, to say, “Let them die,” that is a deeply radical statement.

A few final thoughts. In this great struggle, here are some things that don’t matter.

§ What we wear.

§ Whether we shake our fists or make peace signs.

§ Whether we can fit our dreams for a better world into a media soundbite.

And here are a few things that do matter.

§ Our courage.

§ Our moral compass.

§ How we treat each other.

We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets—like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that’s easier to win.

Don’t give in to the temptation. I’m not saying don’t call each other on shit. But this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.

Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.

Copyright © 2011 Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, now out in paperback. Her earlier books include the international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (which has just been re-published in a special 10th Anniversary Edition); and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). To read all her latest writing visit www.naomiklein.org. You can follow her on Twitter: @NaomiAKlein.

ECONOMY

AlterNet / By John Schmitt

Occupy Wall Street Gets What the 'Very Serious People' Have Missed for 30 Years

The occupiers have as much chance as any organization in the last three decades to catalyze a national progressive movement.

October 6, 2011 |

For all their alleged naivete, the thousands of people who have participated in Occupy Wall Street (OWS) have managed to put their finger on something that has completely evaded the "Very Serious People" for more than three decades. While the talking-heads have insisted that reforming Wall Street has little or nothing to do with getting the economy back on track, the occupiers have correctly diagnosed that the problems we now face flow almost entirely from our out-of-control financial sector.

Even so, the question progressives are asking is whether the Occupy Wall Street movement can succeed? Well, first let's consider that those of us who haven't yet made an appearance at Zuccotti Park in New York or at the many other Occupy actions around the country have not exactly succeeded after decades following our preferred tactics.

Progressive academics, journalists, and writers (a group where I count myself) have been documenting the growing gap between rich and poor ever since inequality began to rise at the end of the 1970s. Yet, inequality has grown, even when Democrats control most or all of the apparatus of government.

Union activists have organized workers, led strikes, and won contracts. Legions of community organizers have fought for more jobs, better housing, and a stronger safety net. But, despite many hard-won victories, we know that, overall, the poor are still getting clobbered and a much smaller share of the US workforce is in a union today than thirty years ago.

So, if a small, fluid, group of people want to try something different, who can blame them? They face an enormous uphill battle and they may not succeed. But, I think they have as much or more chance than any organization I've seen in the last three decades to catalyze a national progressive movement.

As is almost always the case with underdogs, if they prevail it will ultimately be because they turned what appeared initially to be a weakness into a strength. So far, critics have focused on three seeming weaknesses of the movement: it has no leaders; it has no clear list of demands; and its tactics turn off the middle ground of American politics. Each of these purported defects, in the end, may stand out as a key strength.

That the group has no leaders may frustrate the mainstream media and the political elite, but the Tea Party has proven that in a highly networked world, a well-defined leadership is no longer a requirement. In fact, the lack of easily identified leaders reduces the chance that the movement is discredited by a personal scandal or that the steam is let out by a few well-targeted concessions that are more acceptable to individuals in the leadership than they are to the base.

That the group has, of yet, no clear list of demands is also a tremendous asset. The US economy has profound problems (jobs, health care, climate change, and more). For the moment, OWS appears to be channeling anger toward the principal cause of --and impediment to solving-- those problems: Wall Street. Naming the problem --the financial sector-- in no uncertain terms is a huge step forward. Once a consensus forms around this dangerous idea, there will be plenty of time to choose among the many sensible ways forward (a financial speculation tax, breaking up the big banks, a maximum-wage for CEOs, and scores of other ideas). In the meantime, keeping everything on the table helps to attract the maximum number of adherents, while keeping the financial sector and its allies in the media and in Washington nervous and guessing.

That OWS has adopted a style and a substance that may alienate the “moderates” or “independents” or “undecideds” of American politics may well be the movement's greatest strength. The culturally and socially confrontational tactics will undoubtedly turn off some Americans, but this same approach conveys, even if imperfectly, a passion that will inspire many others.

But, seeing the OWS tactics as simply part of some kind of culture war misses the real issue. What gives the OWS real power, and what is increasingly striking fear in the hearts of our financial overlords and their political allies, is that the OWS tactics aim at disrupting business as usual. OWS is not content, as most of the social movements since the 1960s have been, to speak their mind and then head home to wait for a response. This is a movement that aims to make life miserable for the financial sector until the financial sector stops making life miserable for the rest of us. Like the suffragettes at the turn of the last century, the sit-down strikers of the 1930s, the civil rights marchers of the 1950s and 1960s, and, most recently, the people of Wisconsin, OWS is prepared to shed decorum, break rules, and raise hell until they get an answer.

This is not a movement that seeks influence through favorable coverage in the New York Times. This is not a movement that wants to raise moral questions by carefully choreographed symbolic acts of civil disobedience. This is a movement that rejects the polite conventions that for three decades have produced far more setbacks than victories. OWS will succeed to the extent that the various national occupation actions are able to distract, bog down, inconvenience, and annoy the financial sector, the political elite, and the media.

We are long-past the point in American politics where appealing to the shared values of the rich and powerful have any effect. One definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again expecting the results to be different. By that definition, who are the crazy people?

John Schmitt is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He tweets as @jschmittwdc.

My father grew up on the far east side of Cleveland, Ohio, in a town called Fairport Harbor. After high school he got a job at the local Diamond Alkali plant and during the 1950s earned an average of $10,000 per year which was a damn good wage for that time. He was a Union worker and I remember the strikes that got him his fair wages. The average price of a car was $2000, a house $5000, gasoline was 19 cents a gallon and there were constant gas wars driving the price to 9 cents a gallon. A candy bar was 5 cents and a soda was not more than 10 cents. Those were the good old days we'll likely never see again. ~Bear

A War Worth Fighting

by E.R. Bills / October 6th, 2011

My father grew up on Gordon Avenue on the South Side of Fort Worth. After high school at Trimble Tech, he apprenticed in the construction industry and became a journeyman electrician. In the 1970s he earned an average of $40,000 a year.

It was a fair wage, a good wage. The average price for a new home was $50,000. The average price of new car was $4,500. Gas was 57 cents a gallon. A bottle of soda pop ran 35 cents, and you could get 5 or 10 cents back if you returned the bottle. Being as an electrician was a great way to make a living.

Today, the average journeyman electrician still makes approximately $40,000 a year, but the average price for a new home is $100,000 and the typical price for a new car is $20,000. Gas is about $3 a gallon and soda pop is $1.75 a bottle. Working as an electrician is no longer a great way to make a living.

The wages for many of the blue-collar, middle-class jobs in construction, manufacturing, and the service industries haven’t changed much in the last 40 years, but the prices for what they build, produce and service have tripled and quadrupled.

Why does everything cost so much more even though the folks who are doing most of the actual work don’t make any more than they did 40 years ago?

Well, it’s obviously complicated. The price of the materials has risen along with cost of the fuel required to transport goods. Then there are higher insurance costs and, in some cases, pension plans. But a significant percentage of the increase of the costs of products, goods and services in general can be traced to folks who do very little if any of the actual work. I call them the CEO or MBA class.

While wages for so many of us have remained stagnant, theirs have increased by a thousand or even more. Where they used to earn 10 times what the average man or woman on the line or in the field used to earn, many of the fat cats now make hundreds of times what that worker earns. And their salaries continue to increase as they break up unions or ship our jobs overseas.

The well-heeled apologists for these new robber barons would have us believe that middle-class unions and blue-collar collective bargaining rights are the reason the price of everything except our wages has gone up—but the real reason is the class they serve. Corporations have to pay our executioners—I mean their executives—well. Their steely lack of conscience is invaluable. They keep boards of directors happy and don’t let common decency or antiquated notions of loyalty, shared struggle, or fair play get in the way of the bottom line.

It no longer pays to be a craftsman; it’s more important to be crafty. Pride in your work isn’t profitable; quantity trumps quality. Every Wal-Mart in America is a testament to middle-class expendability. Where there were once millions of mom-and-pop shops where the employees knew your name, there are now thousands of big-box shops where Mom and Pop earn minimum wage as “greeters.” The individual items we buy there are cheaper but our collective quality of life is also greatly cheapened.

Tomorrow, you and I will be earning the same or less while the CEO/MBA class steals more. Their kids will coast through the finest private schools and expensive universities while ours will be lucky to graduate from intentionally understaffed public schools and even luckier to struggle through the only colleges we can afford.

How long will the sparsely privileged meekly accept the world according to the agents of their own disfranchisement? How much longer can we afford to elect these upper-class lackeys? What’s it going to take to stop us from kissing the hands that slap us?

The Republicans of late have taken to accusing President Obama of class warfare. Can they not see that the middle class has been suffering in the trenches of class warfare for years?

Any CEO who makes hundreds of times more than the man or woman doing the real work has middle-class blood on his or her hands. Any CEO who allows manufacturing jobs to be shipped overseas is spilling blue-collar entrails. And every big-box store that monopolizes Middle America digs a thousand blue-collar graves.

Class warfare has been waged against the middle class for years. It’s time our assailants faced the consequences.

E.R. Bills is a writer from Ft Worth, Texas. His recent works appear in Fort Worth Weekly, South Texas Nation, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Fort Worth Magazine, etc. He can be reached at: erbillsthinks@gmail.com. Read other articles by E.R..

This article was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2011 at 8:01am and is filed under Classism, General, Labor.

AlterNet.org


ACTIVISM & VISION

AlterNet / By Yotam Marom

How the Occupy Wall Street Protesters Can Defeat the Corporate Elite

An Occupy Wall Street organizer explains the strategy behind the movement, how far it has come and where it's headed.

October 4, 2011 |

The occupation of Wall Street is now in its third week. Thousands of people have worked and fought for it, have given it their time, their bodies, their ideas, their blood. People have used their bodies as shields, sent letters of solidarity, marched, slept out, donated, tweeted, and more. There are still thousands more who have not been with us, whether because of geographical reasons or because they are busy struggling elsewhere.

I have been involved, in some way, with the occupation on Wall Street since the first planning meeting a number of months ago, and I have been out there almost every day since the occupation actually began, though mostly keeping quiet and working on the sidelines, often critically. I have participated in assemblies and working groups, done outreach to community organizations, pushed demands, been to dozens of meetings, gone hoarse from chanting about the banks, been bruised by metal police batons while marching for Troy Davis, and had about a million incredible conversations, at the occupation at Liberty Plaza itself, in other political contexts around New York, and even in jail with the 87 friends I made during the mass arrests of September 24. I am not an authority, and others have struggled and sacrificed much more than I, but I have learned a lot; enough, I think, to begin sharing some of it.

The struggle is still very much underway. Those of us who can, who have that privilege, should be out in the streets, so now might not be the time for the most thorough analysis. It is, however, important for occupiers to be writing in our own words; to reach out to the many around the world who want to be a part of this in some way, to offer our own analyses (infinitely more powerful than those provided by pundits from far away), and to counter the media blackout we are experiencing.

Though the press is now somewhat intrigued by us, and alarmed by police brutality, it still has very little to say about the actual content and processes of this occupation: The spontaneous working groups that emerge to deal with any issue that comes up, the remarkable de-centralization, the actions we have carried out in solidarity with labor struggles around the city, the public education taking place at the occupation, or the incredible display of direct democracy practiced in the camp.

Maybe it's because they don't care, or maybe it's because we are a threat to their sponsors (and we are). But, honestly, maybe it is because we speak a new language, one we have to translate for them.

What We Have Already Won

I have to admit, I was skeptical. I saw too many young white college kids and not enough grassroots organizers from New York, not enough of those communities hardest hit by neoliberalism and austerity. I was pushed away by some of the cultural norms being adopted and found myself at odds with the lack of demands, not to mention the sometimes overemphasis on process. Having helped organize Bloombergville (a two-week occupation against the budget cuts in NYC) only a few months earlier, I found it hard to believe this would be significantly larger or be able to mobilize the kind of mass support it needed in order to make an impact. I didn't see how this would aid in the overarching aim of building a movement, beyond a single uprising. But I was wrong about some of those assumptions, and -- though we are still far from being a huge, unified movement with clear goals, led by the most oppressed layers of society, with the capacity for long-term struggle -- things have steadily improved.

First of all, the occupation has lasted more than two weeks and it's growing every day. Many tens of thousands of people have participated in this occupation in some way or another, from the thousands who have slept out or marched or stopped by, to the thousands of pizzas ordered for us, the thousands of dollars sent our way, and the thousands watching the livestream and emailing and calling and tweeting. Add this to occupations being planned in more than 100 cities in the US alone, not to mention those in other countries (both those in solidarity with us, and those that were our inspiration). Labor, student and community groups from around the city are joining, and they bring with them serious organizers and community members from the most oppressed and marginalized communities in New York. They also bring their own concrete demands, which are easy to support because they are obvious, as they have always been.

Next, we have taken steps to define ourselves, to write documents to that affect, and to move toward a collective consciousness that is bold and uncompromising. Those documents that define us take forever to write, because we all participate in their writing (yes, it's a bit of a drag, but revolutions aren't so easy when we are fighting for the type of liberation that demands self-management). Now, to be clear, I have always been a strong proponent of clear demands. They help define our struggle, point the way to actions we want to take, give us tools for measurement, communicate with people outside of the occupation, and represent those busy struggling elsewhere. However, I do want to point out that we have been able to continue to grow and bring new communities in despite a lack of demands, and that those people and groups will bring their own. I also think our demands really aren't as mysterious as some people are letting on; I think our critics are playing dumb.

We wouldn't be on Wall Street if we didn't already have an implicitly unifying message: We hold the banks, the millionaires, and the political elite they control, responsible for the exploitation and oppression we face -- from capitalism, racism and authoritarianism to imperialism, patriarchy and environmental degradation. We have a diversity of grievances, complaints, demands, principles, and visions, but it is clear that we have planted ourselves in the financial capital of the world because we see it as one of the most deeply entrenched roots of the various systems of oppression we face every day. The clue is in the title: Occupy Wall Street.

Every day, the occupiers see themselves more and more connected to a movement -- a movement around the country and the world, but also a movement through time, stretching from the giants who came before us to the future giants we will be. Every day more people from different communities join, and in their attempt to represent themselves, they bring their people, their demands, their languages, their struggles. Every day more grassroots organizations -- struggling around housing or health care, for adjunct professors or postal workers -- join the fight, bringing with them the clear message that this movement must be grounded in the hard organizing work that took place before this occupation and will continue after it. This deepening of consciousness and realization of the connection between the different struggles we wage will be among the most important things to come out of this.

We have already taken back some space -- space for new forms of democratic participation, for the type of initiative and creativity discouraged by the status quo, for autonomy within solidarity, for experiments of self-management and equity and solidarity, for a type of rebellion that rejects permits, pens and sidewalks, one that demands streets and bridges instead, and someday also buildings and governments. It will be hard, I hope, for us to go back to the pens in the future, having tasted what it's like to stand among thousands in the pouring rain on the Brooklyn Bridge, and that's quite a liberating step forward.

These are enormous victories not only in the consciousness of a new generation of fighters, but also in the creation of a new narrative, one that refuses to accept the myth that Americans don't struggle, that we can be bought off with TVs and iPhones, that things really aren't so bad and that we're willing to let injustice happen because we get a bigger piece of the bounty our military and capitalists extract from others.

No, we are rewriting the story, telling it ourselves, tweeting and tagging it, filming and singing it, writing it with our arrests and the bruises we get from the terrified and bewildered police who will eventually have to either join us or get the hell out of the way. And the story will be an important force not only in this struggle, but in the many to come. We will tell the story while we are at work and at school, on the picket lines, in marches, at our next occupations and sit-ins, in jail when the bosses get frightened enough to tell their henchmen to arrest us in the hundreds as they did on October 1, and the story will help us remember and imagine our boundless potential while we fight on.

Battles to Come

Occupations are an incredibly important mode of resistance, an expression of a dual power strategy. On one hand, they give us the space and time with which to create an alternative, to practice, to learn, to create new relations, to become better revolutionaries, and to experience community. At the same time, they serve as a base camp from which to wage a struggle against the institutions that oppress us, to knock down the oppressors, to protect that alternative, to liberate more space. Both are important. And yes, we face challenges in each realm.

Internally, we have to make sure we are modifying our structures to meet the needs of the people participating in them as we change and grow. We have to make sure that the de-centralization we are fostering actually empowers those who aren't already conditioned by this society to speak a lot and lead and give directions. We have to find and create new and diverse ways for people to participate, especially those too busy or too threatened by the daily brutalities they already face to be able to join us in occupations or marches. We have to continue to work to formulate a message together -- not only because it will attract and represent others or clarify our multitude of voices for the outside world, but also because the process will be educational for us and it will ground us in the real struggles we have inherited from being part of a movement together.

Above all, perhaps, we must continue to educate ourselves and each other, about everything from the systems of oppression we face, to the history of various peoples and struggles, to strategies for winning and practical skills to carry them out.

And perhaps even more important than learning about the ways we are kept down, is learning and exploring the world we might want instead, one without capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism -- an economic, political and social model that is solidaristic, equitable, self-managing, ecologically sustainable, liberating, intimate, warm and creative. We have to spend some of this precious time developing the values of the society we are fighting for, so that we can imagine the institutions we will need to build in order to live them out.

We have to do this because that's what it will take to defeat the age-old mantra that there is no alternative. We have to do it because imagining that alternative will give us hope and strength to struggle, because it will define the different ways we can fight and the different institutions we need to build for ourselves now, because it will give us the foundation on which to build a movement beyond one or even a hundred occupations. We must do it because dreaming is part of what gives us the strength to actually create those institutions we want to live in, as we fight to knock the rotten ones down.

Externally, then, it is simple. We have to draw clear lines from the oppression heaped on this society to the agents responsible for it. If Chase Bank is foreclosing on homes, we need to foreclose on Chase Bank. If the city government is cutting schools and homeless shelters, we need to shut it down. They want quiet streets, un-interrupted work days, pristine bank branches, functional government institutions, productive workplaces, docile schools, and lines of unflinching shoppers. They want business as usual, and that's what we have to take from them. Liberty Plaza is not the struggle; it is the home for the creation of the alternative, and the staging ground for the fight that takes us out into the streets, to make business as usual truly untenable.

We win when we build diverse movements led by the most oppressed people in society, capable of proposing an alternative, laying the seeds for it, and taking the power necessary to transform it from the alternative to the norm. We win when we raise social costs to the point that those hopeless few elites find themselves left with no carrots to wave before us and no sticks big enough to do us any harm. We win when we show no signs of weakening, when we refuse to go home. We win when the movement grows and grows and grows with no sign of letting up. We win when losing is not an option, when winning is the only way to really be human.

Yotam Marom is an organizer, educator, musician, and writer. He is a member of the Organization for a Free Society, and can be reached at Yotam.marom@gmail.com.

Dems endorse Occupy Wall Street in droves

Dems endorse Occupy Wall Street in droves

By Stephen C. Webster
Thursday, October 6, 2011

Topics: raul grijalva ♦ russ feingold ♦ sen russ feingold

As labor unions flocked to their side Wednesday for a massive demonstration in New York City, Occupy Wall Street picked up some fresh political capital with prominent Democrats, and they’re not ashamed to say it.

Speaking to The National Memo this week, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (D) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) made supportive comments. They were joined by Reps. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Keith Ellison (D-MN) and fourth-ranking House Democrat John Larson, who issued similar statements of support.

So too did Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former Democratic governor of New York whose aggressive stance toward the banking sector was a hallmark of his political record. Former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), similarly, tossed his hat in with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying it will “make the tea party look like a tea party.”

And naturally, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the only declared socialist in Congress, has been out in front of the movement since just after it began. His sentiments have also been echoed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who insisted the protests are “making a difference.”

Even a few Republicans made positive remarks: Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, called the demonstrations “a legitimate effort;” Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer, who’s also running for president, told protesters, “Please know that I stand by you.”

“I think it has become a vehicle for people to vent their frustration with the economy,” Gillibrand told The National Memo. “Everywhere I travel across New York State I meet with every day families and small businesses, and they are deeply worried about the economy. I share the frustration at how broken Washington has become in forging solutions.”

Dean, similarly, commented to reporter Matt Taylor that he has been “waiting for something like this to happen.”

“Wall Street is an institution that is not serving the country well,” he said. “Because of their financial practices, money’s not getting invested in the long-term creation of jobs. They basically have turned Wall Street into a gambling casino. Credit default swaps, about 95 percent of that is speculation. So I’m glad to see all these young people on Wall Street.”

“We share the anger and frustration of so many Americans who have seen the enormous toll that an unchecked Wall Street has taken on the overwhelming majority of Americans while benefiting the super-wealthy,” Grijalva and Ellison said, in their prepared statement.

Larson added: “The silent masses aren’t so silent anymore. They are fighting to give voice to the struggles that everyday Americans are going through.”

“This is organic,” Spitzer explained. “It is genuine. It is amassing more and more support day by day. It has touched a nerve and I think this could really begin to say to the Obama administration, ‘Hey you don’t understand what we, the public, are saying to you.’ He’s off there — he has been so flat on this issue of Wall Street and the economy. Maybe this will push the president to speak with a new more aggressive, dynamic voice.”

Their voices were also joined yesterday by one of the most influential figures of the modern American labor movement: AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who leads the nation’s largest federation of labor unions.

Up until Wednesday’s march, he had not voiced support for the three-week-old demonstration that has now swept the country, with events taking place in 447 cities nation-wide so far, according to organizers.

“Occupy Wall Street has captured the imagination and passion of millions of Americans who have lost hope that our nation’s policymakers are speaking for them,” Trumka said. “We support the protesters in their determination to hold Wall Street accountable and create good jobs.”

Photo: Flickr user riterzbloc.

Stephen C. Webster

Stephen C. Webster is the senior editor of Raw Story, and is based out of Austin, Texas. He previously worked as the associate editor of The Lone Star Iconoclast in Crawford, Texas, where he covered state politics and the peace movement’s resurgence at the start of the Iraq war. Webster has also contributed to publications such as True/Slant, Austin Monthly, The Dallas Business Journal, The Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Weekly, The News Connection and others. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenCWebster.

This Is Only Getting Bigger: 20,000 Rally in New York to Support Occupy Wall Street

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Sarah Jaffe

This Is Only Getting Bigger: 20,000 Rally in New York to Support Occupy Wall Street

Despite another clash with police, the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to gain support as unions and community groups march in solidarity.

October 5, 2011 |

Photo Credit: Sarah Jaffe

It's 10 PM in Liberty Plaza and the jubilant 20,000-plus crowd from the day's solidarity march has dwindled, now, to the faithful, the regulars, having debated and decided by consensus against another attempt at marching.

The police have dropped barricades around the entire plaza, but rumors that they are coming in are so far unfounded. The medical team has calmed down and are eating pizza from the boxes being carried throughout the plaza. A giant projection on the wall of a building across Trinity Street reminds the protesters "The Whole World is Watching #OccupyWallStreet."

A large group of people are holding signs and singing "This Little Light of Mine" down at the base of the plaza, almost to Trinity Street, where Ed Schultz of MSNBC is broadcasting his show live on the other side of the police barricade. An officer tells me the barricades aren't shutting us in, I'm welcome to leave at the corners of the plaza.

Despite an earlier clash with police (28 arrests reported, a far cry from Saturday's 700-plus) as a breakaway march from the permitted, union-supported solidarity rally headed down Wall Street proper, the plaza is mostly quiet.

Chris from the medical team, a firefighter from New Jersey, tells me that he treated one marcher who made it back to the plaza after having been pepper-sprayed. Videos and photographs are starting to circulate online of the clash with police, which include two Fox 5 reporters hit with batons and pepper spray.

Phillip Anderson, a local blogger and activist, was on the march to Wall Street and told me this story:

"We saw a ton of people crossing Broadway and decided to see what was happening. Easily 1000 people headed toward Wall Street; the cops made sure we didn't go straight there, so we took a circuitous route. When we got to Wall and William St., there was a barricade along the west side of William, along Cipriani, and people on the balcony above with glasses of champagne.

"It was obvious the cops weren't going to let the crowd go right so they went east down Wall, and then I don't know what happened but they came back loud and moving fast, drums banging. Instantly the cops moved the barricade to the east side, there were cops on horses, cops on scooters, they barricaded themselves in the middle and the crowd got to the edge of the barricade and then everyone just shut up. Dead quiet. I'm going to give those cops a lot of credit, they opened a corner and let the crowd walk out and the scooter cops escorted them almost all the way back."

The chant from the crowd, he said, was "Cops are the 99%!"

*******

Earlier in the day, over 20,000 people packed Foley Square near New York’s City Hall and marched to Liberty Plaza to support the occupiers, who are on day 19 of their protest. Colorful union signs dotted the crowd as well as the handmade kind, showing delegations from the United Auto Workers, Amalgamated Transit Union, Teamsters, City University of New York faculty, and many, many more. And all of the protesters that I spoke to knew exactly why they were there.

"When someone's looking for a job, they're not visible," Jesse LaGreca, a blogger at Daily Kos who recently became an Internet celebrity for his smackdown of Fox News in an interview that leaked to the Web, told me. The occupation, and the massive march in support, made those problems visible. LaGreca's takedown of Griff Jenkins, who he called "one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Tea Party movement," resonated with activists tired of not being taken seriously. He pointed out "The last thing they want is someone who can clearly state why we're here. It's called Occupy Wall Street, not big bake sale, for God's sake."

“Naturally we would join,” said Lisanne McTerran, a New York City teacher wearing her United Federation of Teachers hat. She pointed out that the unions have been in this fight for a while, noting that UFT had marched down Wall Street back in May to protest continued banker power. McTerran is an art teacher by trade, but has been working as a substitute since New York’s school budget cuts.

“Arts are the first thing they cut,” she said, handing out a flyer that points out that budget cuts have led directly to the loss of over 100,000 jobs. “Bloomberg wants to bust the teachers’ union,” she said.

The official, permitted rally began at 4 PM and it seemed strange to hear the sound of a loudspeaker broadcasting speeches as we approached in a crowd from Liberty Plaza. The crowd of occupiers still communicated on the move using the “people’s mic,” repeating each other’s words back, and it did seem that the union leaders who spoke took a page from the activists in the square, keeping their words brief and powerful, stoking the crowd's excitement at the popular support they were receiving. The organizers at Occupy Wall Street have been reaching out to labor from the beginning, and their efforts were paying off.

Stuart Appelbaum, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) New York City local RWDSU, told the crowd that he had a message for Mayor Bloomberg. “If your police department overreacts again like it did last Saturday, stifling dissent and limiting free speech, New Yorkers will not stand for it!”

Héctor Figueroa of SEIU’s 32BJ, the building service workers’ union, made the connection between the occupiers in Liberty Plaza and the international protests that have echoed around the world in recent months, declaring, “Nosotros somos los indignados del Nueva York, los indignadoes del Estados Unidos, los indignados del mundo!”

It was a sentiment heard at my first visit to the occupation, when I met Spanish activist Monica Lopez, who had been part of Spain’s “Indignados” movement. Lopez has been back to Spain and is now back again at the Liberty Plaza occupation, taking photos and working the media table.

“It’s the right thing at the right time after so many mistakes,” Thomas Blewitt, told me when I asked why he was involved in this movement. Blewitt, a former member of ACT UP in a trim shirt and tie, was one of the many defying the popular image of the protesters as all young hippies. He explained that he’d cared for his mother until her death and between Medicare and the AARP--”That system works,” he said. Everyone, he pointed out, deserves the same access to health care.

Health care was also on the minds of the National Nurses United, who came out in force with their professionally printed signs declaring support for Occupy Wall Street on one side--and calling for a financial transactions tax on the other, as the union have been for months. “It’s catching on like wildfire,” Pam Merriman, a nurse from the University of Chicago, told me.

“The hardest pill to swallow,” her colleague Talisa Hardin said, “is America is hurting, and when you look at how well corporations are doing, it doesn’t seem fair.”

The nurses’ president, Karen Higgins, spoke at the rally as well. “We’re sick of the greed!” she told the crowd. “As nurses, we can fix that.”

And Merriman reiterated: “The nurses will not be moved.”

Lindsay Personett, a recent graduate in dance performance from Oklahoma City University, was handing out flyers that read “I Owe SallieMae,” and offering a marker to fellow grads who’ve found themselves in debt to the loan giant. “Kids are told to get this expensive degree and you’ll get a job,” she said. “You end up owing too much and owning nothing.”

As the march moved off slowly through the financial district, I ducked into a cafe and struck up a conversation with Joel Wise, a tall, burly member of Operating Engineers Local 68 from New Jersey. Wise noted that his union had yet to express an opinion on the occupation, but told me “I’m here as an American, proud to be a union member.” He told me that the sign he’d been carrying earlier, which he’d given away on the street, had read “The Tea Party is Owned By Big Business.”

Wise’s friend commented, “If they keep monetizing debt, it’s gonna be ugly,” and Wise continued “Most people are outraged that white-collar criminals weren’t prosecuted. If you steal a loaf of bread, or a kid sells some weed, they go to jail for five years, but these guys stole millions.”

******

As I leave Liberty Plaza at 10:30, a lawyer hands me his card, telling me "I used to be a prosecutor here, I know what they're capable of." The man, whose card declares him to be Musa Ali, a proud supporter of the LGBT community, then joins the legal team in a small huddle.

I am struck once again at the ease with which the organization here falls back into its duties. The medics treat the injured or sick, the food team hands out pizza, rumors are quashed with a quick "mic check" and the legal team works to keep people out of jail--or get them out quickly if they do wind up there.

I walk out past the barricades, a girl passes me with her dog, and police vans move down the street. An officer tells me that I'm probably better off picking up a train to the north rather than the south, and I take his advice, hearing a round of cheers erupt behind me from something going on in the plaza.

And so the uneasy truce at Liberty Plaza holds, but the protesters inside remember the feeling of elation, of support from the huge crowds earlier. It's not just rhetoric; they know that they are the 99%.

This is only getting bigger.

Sarah Jaffe is an associate editor at AlterNet, a rabblerouser and frequent Twitterer. You can follow her at @seasonothebitch.

#OccupyWallSt, Then #OccupyKSt, Then #OccupyMainSt, Then #OccupyWallSt Again

October 5, 2011 at 09:39:39

#OccupyWallSt, Then #OccupyKSt, Then #OccupyMainSt

By Lawrence Lessig (about the author)

from the Huffington Post

It is way too early, and perhaps even a bit crazy, to see an American Spring in the growing protests on Wall Street. Yet. But there is no doubt that if there is one place in America that these protests should begin, it is there, and it is now.

Writers by the dozen have lamented the influence that Wall Street exercised over Washington throughout the 1990s, leading up to the great collapse of 2008. A multi-billion dollar lobbying campaign, tied to hundreds of millions in campaign contributions, got Washington to erase its regulations and withdraw its regulators. One statistic summarizes it all: in 1980, close to 100 percent of the financial instruments traded in the market were subject to New Deal exchange-based regulations; by 2008, 90 percent were exempted from those regulations, effectively free of any regulatory oversight.

But there is nothing at all surprising in that story. The spirit of the times was deregulation. The ideology of Democrats and Republicans alike was regulatory retreat. No one should be surprised, however much we should lament, that politicians did what the zeitgeist said: go home -- especially when they were given first class tickets for the ride.

What is surprising -- indeed, terrifying, given what it says about this democracy -- is what happened after the collapse. That even after the worst financial crises in 80 years, and even after the lions share of responsibility for that crisis had been linked to finance laissez faire, and even after the dean of finance laissez faire, the great Alan Greenspan, expressly confessed that it was wrong, and that he "made a mistake," nothing changed. A president elected with the spirit of Louis Brandeis ("[We have to stop] Wall Street from taking enormous risks with 'other people's money'"), who promised to "take up that fight" "to change the way Washington works," ("for far too long, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, Washington has allowed Wall Street to use lobbyists and campaign contributions to rig the system and get its way, no matter what it costs ordinary Americans"), and who was handed a crisis (read: opportunity) and a supermajority in Congress to make real change, did nothing about this root to our financial collapse. The "financial reform bill" is the reason the English language invented the scare quote: As every financial analyst not dependent upon the corruption that is Wall Street has screamed since the bill was passed, financial reform changed nothing. We are more at risk of a major financial collapse today than we were a decade ago. And the absolutely obscene bonuses of an industry that pays twice its pretax profits in salaries are even more secure today.

How could this possibly be? Never in the history of this nation have the agents of financial collapse so effectively avoided a regulatory response to that collapse. How is it that now they have not only avoided reform, but have effectively cemented their Ponzi scheme into the core of American law?

The protesters #occupy(ing)WallSt are looking for answers to that question. They should look no further than the dollar bills that they are taping to their mouths. The root to this pathology is not hard to see. The cure is not hard to imagine. The difficult task -- and at times, it seems, impossibly difficult task -- is to imagine how that cure might be brought about.

The arrest of hundreds of tired and unwashed kids, denied the freedom of a bullhorn, and the right to protest on public streets, may well be the first real green-shoots of this, the American spring. And if nurtured right, it could well begin real change.

In my book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It-- published today by Twelve, I spend hundreds of pages trying to make clear what should be obvious to every single protester shivering in a Wall Street doorway. But the whole point of the book could be captured in the single quote that I stole from Thoreau right at a start: "there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil, to one who is striking at the root."

These protesters should see that they are that one striking at the root. They should understand that our system has been corrupted by money -- even if the Supreme Court refuses to call it "corruption," and even if political scientists are unsure about whether their regressions can show it. And they should recognize that until this root is hacked, the weeds of this corruption will continue to destroy this democracy, and this nation.

Now conservatives are eager to insist that our framers didn't give us a "democracy." They gave us, they say, "a Republic." And so they did. A Republic -- by which the framers meant, as Federalist 10 makes clear, a "representative democracy." By which the framers expected, as Federalist 52 makes clear, a Congress "dependent upon the People alone."

But ours is not a Congress "dependent upon the People alone" -- or even mainly. It has instead allowed a different dependency to grow within its midst: a dependency upon the Funders of its campaigns. And so great is that different and conflicting dependency that even the worst financial crisis in three generations can't break their obsession with the fix. Neither party dares to cross Wall Street, since both parties know they could not win control of Congress or the White House without Wall Street's money. So they feed the addiction, and ignore the real work that they should be doing.

#OccupyWallSt needs to teach America this lesson. It needs to speak to the wide range of citizens who believe it. You don't have to be a Marxist to rally against the corruption that is our Congress. You don't have to be Dr. Pangloss to believe that people who don't share common ends might nonetheless have a common enemy.

This corruption is our common enemy. So let this protest first #OccupyWallSt, and then #OccupyKSt. And then let the anger and outrage that it has made clear lead many more Americans to #OccupyMainSt, and reclaim this republic.

For if done right, this movement just may have that potential. What the protesters are saying is true: Wall Street's money has corrupted this democracy. What they are demanding is right: An end to that corruption. And as Flickr feeds and tweets awaken a slumbering giant, the People, the justice in this, yet another American revolution, could well become overwhelming, and finally have an effect.

flickr image By david_shankbone

Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Co-founder of Change Congress

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