Some Occupy Stuff

Nathan Schneider has been flogging his book, "Thank You, Anarchy" since September. He was on Democracy Now!



and did a Book Salon at FDL today:

http://fdlbooksalon.com/2013/12/15/fdl-book-salon-welcomes-nathan-schneider/

and has written a number of Occupy themed articles and posts for a range of publications including Waging Nonviolence, and his own blog, The Rowboat.

I certainly had my differences with him during the Occupy heyday, but he seems to have come around to a much more positivist view than he had then. It's difficult to describe, but these days, as he talks and writes about how Occupy developed and evolved, he seems to recognize just how deeply rooted in community this Movement has become, and how evolution has strengthened it.

Also, as an aside, but it may be an important one, Nathan seems to be a genuinely nice person, something increasingly rare in today's media landscape.

More on S17 2nd Anniversary Events

Much more information has been coming into my email about 2nd Anniversary events in and around New York and Wall Street:

New York S17 Lit

S15 Teach-in Schedule

S17 Quarter Page Promo Flyer

S17 Rally Wholesheet Flyer

S17 Constitution Poster

TPP Actions on S17/ Teach-ins After S17

S17 Call to Action – US

For Those Who Thought Occupy Was Dead

Occupy Network

We're coming up on the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street -- really? Only that long ago? Wow. -- and for some time now, I've been hearing the chatter that "Occupy is dead." or "it was a tragic failure" or what have you.

The fact is Occupy doesn't get a lot of mainstream media attention these days, and it doesn't get very much alternative media attention either. So it may seem to have disappeared, but that is hardly the case.

My email inbox now has many thousands of messages from and about various and ongoing Occupy endeavors all over the country. Recently, there was the Second Occupy National Gathering in Michigan. There is an almost unlimited number of Occupy related activities in dozens of cities nearly every day.

I'm amazed, really, that after the brutality of the Occupy suppression during the fall and winter of 2011-2012 and the absurd level of public animosity toward anarchists and the Black Bloc led by Chris Hedges following the J28 actions in Oakland, anything of the movement survived.

But it did.

On the Anniversary of Teh Revolution(!)

Haven't had time to get caught up with the News of the Day this morning; don't even have the radio on -- somewhat unusual for me.

I spent a few minutes watching Nate's streams from New York last night before going to sleep, and it was a fairly dismal recapitulation of NYPD's usual thuggishness toward OWS or anything that might resemble OWS or might be construed as OWSish or hint at support for OWS -- or, most horribly, show a pup tent. Nate was clearly distressed at what he was witnessing and documenting. The videos were titled "March against OWS" -- which I thought was odd, but after opening one of them the full title was revealed, "March Against OWS Suppression." Ah, of course. Naturally, suppression had to occur.

From what little I saw, the suppression consisted of the now time honored police tactic of "snatch-and-grab," literally pulling people out of the march at random and arresting them. NYPD did this hundreds if not thousands of times during the later stages of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and it was clear then, as it is now, that it is a terror tactic designed and intended to suppress protest and dissent. "Snatch-and-Grab," along with mass arrests, infiltration, non-stop surveillance, intense police violence and brutality, public torture, and other methods were used successfully to shut down the encampments and prevent the emergence of a unified and coordinated revolutionary force.

These efforts to shut down OWS in New York were mirrored by (sometimes led by) similar efforts on the part of police departments throughout the country. It's striking that there is still debate over whether the federal government coordinated the crackdown against Occupy. Of course they did. It was obvious. Tactics of suppression were tried out in various cities (including my own fair city); "what works" and "lessons learned" were shared widely -- and quite openly -- through federal channels, and the the information was archived and no doubt studied intensely -- by DHS and the many other agencies that support the National Security State.

We live in a Police State.

And yet it is still debated -- because it's not as "bad" as the rest of them.

Of course the whole "(non)violence" debate served the purposes of that State nicely. By essentially claiming that the presence of people wearing black or bandanas or shouting at the police (or on very rare occasions breaking windows or committing other acts of vandalism) was "justification" for the police crackdowns or at least lost the Movement the Moral High Ground, the self-proclaimed "nonviolence" advocates actively split the Movement everywhere they could and in as many ways as they could, performing their role to ensure that the Occupy Movement did not become an effective Revolutionary Movement.

Old-line Socialists and a very diverse community of anarchists collided from the very beginning of the OWS efforts in New York and many other places, with the Socialists insisting that the anarchists were "doing it wrong," and the anarchists insisting that if the Socialists were an effective revolutionary force, we wouldn't be in this mess now. Many mutual anathemas ensued.

And yet the Movement inspired a raft of experiments in Future Living, something that we haven't seen in this country for decades. The Future, after all, was cancelled by the Reaganites back in the day, and there have been few public efforts to revive the concept of a Future. Now that Occupy provided a framework for the coalescence of Futurist visions and efforts -- yes, even the Zeitgeist and Venus Project people -- the most valuable and ultimately useful outcome of the initial phase of the Movement-Becoming-Revolution is the idea that there can be a Future, and that it will be better than today -- if we want it.

Another World Is Possible.

People all over the world are making it happen.

There is a march going on in New York right now highlighting the environmental degradation caused by fracking and the many other resource extraction and transport activities, including pipelines (Spectra in New York). Environmental issues have been at the top of the list of Occupy interests, along with civil liberties, democracy, ending wars, preserving and enhancing communities, preventing the systemic abuse of everyone who isn't part of the "1%", and so on.

I encapsulated the values of Occupy -- some growing out of the values expressed during the Arab Spring uprisings -- as:

• Dignity


• Justice


• Community


• Peace

 Seems those are still the guiding values.

Still working on the implementation phase...

We are unstoppable, another world is possible.

[Back to the packing for the big move for me... my friend may have been right. This is harder than I thought and I can't do what I used to be able to... old age is a bother..]

Still the Most Dangerous Object In Amercia

I was watching a bit of Nate's coverage of the Occupy National Gathering in Philadelphia yesterday, and sure enough, there were a series of extraordinarily ridiculous confrontations -- violent on the part of the police --over the erection of pup tents in the park being used for assembly by what looked like a couple of thousand Occupy enthusiasts and participants.

This was proof, if any was needed, that the Occupy tent remains the most dangerous object in America. You would think, after all the violent police raids on tents and tent encampments last year and into this one, all the tens of thousands of arrests, all the police violence against dissent, all the violation of basic rights, the authorities would be a little more circumspect in Philadelphia during Independence Week. But no.

Here we go again. The sight of a tent -- even if only symbolic -- enrages the authorities still, and scrums between clearly befuddled police and Occupy  National Gathering people occurred again and again, resulting in a few violent arrests (the universal tactic seems to be to throw the target to the ground, pile several officers on top of the nonresisting suspect -- who quite likely is a random member of the crowd -- wrench his or her arms, while screaming at the suspect to "stop resisting!", and truss him/her up like a roasting chicken).

This is not to say that the Occupy participants were filled with grace, or that their assembly in the park was particularly well organized or that Nate's live stream connection was adequate to the scenes before him.  It was quite a mess, really. But the point -- so far as I could tell -- was that there was no harm being done by the Occupy participants, and the tents were erected as symbols of The Resistance, perhaps provocative to be sure, but hardly threats to the Republic. Maybe threats to the nascent Empire, but that's another topic altogether.

How Authority responds to such things is an indication of how seriously the Powers That Be regard the "threat" before them. The violent response in Philadelphia, against unarmed, rather disorganized, and clearly nonviolent resistance, tents, and protest tells us pretty much all we need to know. Given that there are calls for violent insurrection by armed and demonstrably dangerous rightists (some assembling at the Independence Mall under the TeaBag banner) over the ACA (and the nigra in the White House)  which apparently the police pay no attention to, the confrontations in Philadelphia yesterday take on quite a sinister aspect.

Fascist in a word.

(And can someone teach the "Anticapitalista" chant, please? When I heard the pathetic rendering of it at the Philadelphia gathering, I was initially convinced it was the work of a provocateur. Oh wait. Maybe it was...)

In between all the other things I'm trying to get done while in New Mexico this trip, I'm reading "The Peril of Fascism," by A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, International Publishers, 1938. It is horrifyingly evocative, regardless of the fact that it is straightforward AntiFa agitprop from the CPUSA. The insights of the authors are spot on, something the mainstream media at the time -- much of which was openly enamoured of fascism and even Nazi-ism -- simply couldn't accept. Fascism was on the march, it had nearly complete control of Europe, and it was coming to America. Truthfully, it was already here.

Occupy is not strictly speaking ideological, unlike CPUSA or the 'Baggers for that matter. But it is forthrightly and often quite eloquently anti-fascist. It is not necessarily anti-capitalist, despite the mangled chants. But it is very definitely anti-fascist. (At one of the Occupy meetings I attended in the spring, a debate arose over whether "fascists" should be allowed to participate; many, of course, said "NO!" but there was a large contingent who insisted that Occupy's open door accommodated everyone, even "fascists", and it was a simple enough thing to counter their ideas, so why not let them participate if they wanted to? Maybe they'd be convinced to change their evil ways. The matter was tabled for lack of consensus. But I thought it was interesting...)

Magil and Stevens argue that among all its other faults, fascism is forthrightly anti-democratic, and it is that aspect, perhaps most of all, that constituted the "peril" of which they spoke. Fascists act to silence the People's democratic voice. This has nothing to do with CPUSA practice and policy; it has to do with what the fascists do, and why they do it.

Silencing the democratic voice of the People -- or rather, making it irrelevant -- has been the priority of both Government and its witting and unwitting handmaidens in this country at least since the 2000 Judicial Coup. Sometimes it's done with finesse, by pretending that some obnoxious policy is the "real" voice of the People, but often it is done brutally and violently with the intention of frightening and intimidating open dissent against obnoxious policies.

Fascism, though, isn't exactly the correct description for the radical global reorganization, destruction and reconstruction that's been going on since the demise of the Soviet Union and the International Communist Conspiracy. The Neo-Liberal economics, the Neo-Conservative ideology, and the Neo-Colonial foreign policy all resemble classic fascism, especially in the union of Government and Corporate interests and the dismissal of the public interest. But it's something else, something in some ways worse, as if we could wrap our minds around something worse than fascism.

The fight is engaged. The Revolution is under way. But in fact, there are two Revolutions occurring simultaneously, and the Neo-Fascist Revolution is winning easily at this point (much as the fascists were rolling roughshod over Europe prior to WWII and initially after starting the War.)

There's no Communist counterweight this time. There is only the People themselves.

And their tents.

And What of the Class Struggle?

I was getting caught up on Occupy Caravan events last night on the archived livestreams, pondering some of the history of Occupy and the DIY media collective that has arisen therefrom -- perhaps the most pronounced legacy of Occupy to date -- and as I was watching Nate's video from Okemah, OK (Woody Guthrie's birthplace), I saw the Caravan vehicles for the first time: a BMW, two new Toyota minivans, and a new Chevy Suburban. There was a bus as well, but it broke down in Flagstaff. The transmission went out. Oh. I can imagine. Apparently they were running it without transmission fluid (do tell), and so by the time it got up the hill in Flagstaff (it's a long and steep climb, folks; I've done it many times) the bus couldn't go any farther. They were trying to raise money to fix it.

I got to thinking about class issues vis a vis Occupy, teh Revolution, and Everything. The emblems of the Occupy Caravan, after all -- that is, its vehicles -- couldn't be more starkly upper middle class. These are not the cars of the Struggling Masses. But then, how many Occupiers are Proletarian? Perhaps close to zero.

Not zero, no. But close.

Back when I was quite active in the local Occupy, there was much union involvement and support, but it seemed to rather quickly devolve into animosity. I got into some truly bizarre situations with union members -- as I recall, SEIU members were some of the strangest -- when they actively set out to oppose Occupy's continued presence and sought to prevent the city from relenting on arrests and prosecutions of Occupy participants who disobeyed authority. Support evaporated. In fact, it turned into something of a joke. The problem mostly seemed to be communications, but there was something else underlying it; union and Occupy organization is simply not that poor.

At the very outset, Socialists came to the meetings and pretty much denounced the whole thing because it wasn't organized "right," and it couldn't possibly get anywhere, as has long been known and proved by anyone familiar with Revolutionary theory. Of course when it did get somewhere, the Socialists continued to crab.

Meanwhile, many of those who were -- and continue to be -- involved with Occupy are of a higher social status (or like to think of themselves as of a higher social status) than the Working Class. They are educated, after all, and they work as professionals. They live comfortably, send their kids to private school, etc. They are not struggling financially (or so they think) and are generous with their contributions.

On the other hand, Occupy has long had a social service contingent housing, feeding, and clothing the indigent, the homeless, and the ne'er do wells of society. A goodly number of Occupy's activist are from that social stratum, and to the surprise of some observers, they've proved themselves very capable.

But they're not really working class, either.

To see the Caravan accommodated so luxuriously on the road is somewhat disconcerting, but then I ask why they shouldn't have decent transportation for such a long trip -- from Los Angeles on one route, San Francisco on the other, to Philadelphia. Should they be driving Dust Bowl jalopies? Where would they even get them?

My understanding is that the vehicles -- except for the BMW -- are rented in any case. Which explains why they're new and relatively luxurious.

As for the bus, I know nothing except that it is still apparently broken down in Flagstaff. But again, on a long cross-country trip, one would need a decent vehicle.

The trouble is that these somewhat deluxe vehicles driving across county in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Woody Guthrie's birth seems oxymoronic on the one hand, and it could well be a turn off to working people the Caravan encounters. Maybe Dust Bowl jalopies would be too difficult to wrangle and would probably be called melodramatic as well. But there are all kinds of potentially more appropriate vehicles, such as cars from the 1950's and 1960's. One would think. Or maybe they should have a horse and wagon. (I'm not really criticizing the choices made by the caravaners. What I'm considering is the optics of those choices and how those optics may relate to the Class Struggle.)

It seems that more people are innately understanding the class nature of the struggle given the way so many millions of Americans have been forced into poverty during this Endless Recession and the relentlessness of the extractions demanded of everybody else by the tiny class of Masters Who Rule Us.

But the effort seems to be focused on finding something other than "class struggle" to define what's going on.

Whatever that is has yet to be discovered.

Lessons From St. Francis?

Cimabue's portrait of the Saint above is said to be a fair likeness of his appearance, largely because it was painted within a few decades of his death in Assisi, apparently with the advice of some of the brothers who knew Francesco in life.

There's something deeply sad and other worldly about it. The full-length portrait, in the Lower Church of the Basilica of St. Francis:

shows him with the Stigmata which he acquired toward the end of his life, well after the founding of the Franciscan Orders, and well after the time when the administration of those Orders had been taken from Francesco and put in the hands of Brother Elias, one of his first and most ardent followers -- and conveniently an administrative and architectural genius, though not necessarily a political one, as Elias himself would be removed from his position of authority over the Franciscan Orders in turn.

Cimabue's version of St. Francis is quite different than the more famous versions of Giotto in the same church; most of Giotto's versions show Francesco in a kind of mystical ecstacy, for the man had visions and heard voices after all. Today, of course, we'd call that a "condition" and label it schizophrenia, especially if its onset comes during the patient's early 20's, as was the case with the young Francesco. Medication and treatment would be advised, though a cure remains elusive.

But in Francesco's day, such a condition was considered either of God or the Devil, and appropriate tests and ordeals could be administered to determine which. In Francesco's case, he managed to charm the Bishop of Assisi right off the bat, so the tests weren't necessary, and from that point, the issue of whether he was possessed of demons or was a child of God simply wasn't an issue any more. With the Bishop's imprimatur, Francesco was pretty much left alone to develop his mission and calling as he and Divine Wisdom considered fit and proper and to gather about him such followers as he might.

His approach varied considerably depending on his state of mind. Francesco appears to have both bipolar and schizophrenic such that he was continually beset with contrasting states of utter joy and crippling depression. Add on top of this mental/emotional chaos his frequent physical illnesses and his penchant for mortification of the flesh and we have a picture of a man who must have had a very difficult time functioning at all, something that Cimabue seems to have captured in the portrait above. There is a definite "WTF?" impression about it.

Whatever his personal woes, Francesco's legacy is as vibrant today as his life's work was in his own time, though changes have been made to accommodate the Franciscan Orders to the needs and requirements of the Church. For their part, Franciscans have a mixed legacy through history, though apparently in Francesco's own time, there was no doubt about his and his followers' holiness.

Part of the Franciscans' mixed legacy has to do with their service to the Church and especially to the Spanish Crown in the New World -- which led to such unspeakable horrors against the Indians that even now the mind and heart recoils at what was done and why. The Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico resulted in the execution of 21 Franciscan priests (The Martyrs) who'd been sent to the Natives to save their souls, but wound up tormenting, exploiting and oppressing them -- on the orders of the Church and the Crown, of course -- sometimes quite as viciously as anything Francesco did to himself, if not more so.

Old Cross of the Martyrs in Santa Fe. Erected in 1920 in honor of the 21 Franciscan priests put to death during the first days of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680.

The issue for the Indians was not so much of an issue for the Spanish or their Franciscan missionaries, whose dismissal of Native interests and concerns was notorious throughout their era of conquest. I can't help but think that Francesco himself would not have approved of the highhanded and destructive behavior of the conquerors of the New World -- not that anybody who mattered would listen to him.

There was no real conception of a New World when Francesco lived -- except in the sense of that which could be acquired through Crusades against the Muslims, the Fourth of which got under way during Francesco's lifetime. That led to a remarkable encounter -- or perhaps a series of them -- between the Sultan of Egypt and Francesco at the Sultan's camp in the Nile Delta while a cease-fire between the Crusaders and the Sultan's forces was in effect. Francesco sought to convert the Sultan who had other ideas, but who saw the little monk (Francesco was said to be about 5'4") as a more appealing avatar of the infidel Christians, and with whom he apparently enjoyed parlaying. The Sultan was not converted, but he seems to have become enough of an admirer of Francesco that once the Holy City of Jerusalem was retaken from the Crusaders, the Franciscans were the only Christians allowed back in to care for the Christian holy sites, said to be due to the fact that St. Francis himself had provided the model of consideration and respect for the interests and views of Muslims, a characteristic that later Franciscans would have some trouble applying to the Indians of the New World.

Yes, I know, what happened wasn't entirely their fault, but it's much like the continuing problem of abusive police and military forces in our own day. Abuses become institutionalized far more easily than care and consideration, and failure to oppose or intervene in cases of abuse becomes just as institutionalized. Once that's the case, it is very hard -- almost impossible -- to change the dynamic without completely overturning the status quo. Franciscans may not have wanted to be, but they were participants in the abuses by their secular compatriots, and on some occasions might well have led the abuse.

Early on, though, Francesco and his followers had profound insights into the human condition -- both spiritually and temporally -- as it was in Italy at the turn of the 13th Century. They sought and put into practice another way of living, creating a Utopian spiritual and temporal world of their own in the midst of the crumbling mess being made of Umbria and Italy by The Powers That Be. Their Utopia was based on Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience (to God). They lived simply, served their fellow sufferers and nature, and expressed a joyfulness in life and creation that was practically unheard-of in connection with either the Church or secular powers at the time. The contrast between the simplicity of their lives and their joy in living compared to the misery that even the highest of the mighty seemed to suffer from was instrumental in building up the early membership in the Franciscan Orders, and that success inspired others to found Orders of their own; in Assisi, that meant the Poor Clares, founded by St. Clare, an admirer (and some claim a lover, but I think not) of St. Francis.

St. Clare of Assisi, the Patron Saint of Television, from a fresco by Simone Martini in the Lower Church of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi

The key, of course, for both the Franciscans and the Poor Clares was the simplicity and material poverty of their lives; they found it was possible to live well without striving in the material world. There was plenty enough for the well-being of all. They lived well enough on the surplus of the land and the gifts of their admirers that their communities became magnets for others would do likewise. And in their time, they were very successful.

A great deal of the material presence of St. Francis, St. Clare, and their followers has been preserved in Assisi and round about Umbria and Italy, so it is possible today to not only retrace their steps but to get a remarkably full picture of what their lives and their Utopia was like. And at least some of that picture was translated to the New World through the Franciscan missions that were established in California and New Mexico among other places.

It's actually remarkable to see how closely those missions followed the pattern set in Assisi and Umbria centuries beforehand. Each of the Missions was intended to be an expression of the Franciscan ideal. To an extent, they worked, at least for a time.

They worked to the extent they were joyful, let's say. And when their joy was interrupted, as it always would be, much as happened to St. Francis himself, they could quickly turn into miserable sites of suffering and death.

Yet there is something about the Franciscan mission wherever it has been extended that those who experience it don't want to lose. Much to the disgust of some, for example, Franciscans are notorious for singing and dancing and putting on shows, somewhat like the Mormons, but without the breeding. They have always sought to serve the least advantaged among populations, to lift up the weakest, to gently chastise the proud and the strong. St. Francis and St. Clare were notorious in their own time for feeding and caring for the lepers of Assisi, as many Franciscans today feed and care for those our current societies fear, denounce and despise. Their vows of poverty have meant they never lack for what they really need, and the community and companionship they find with one another and with those they serve has long been a model for intentional communities far and wide.

The ideal of a Franciscan community is to be as self-sufficient as possible, but as a mendicant order, Franciscans rely on the generosity of adherents and admirers as well as what the friars can do for themselves. In other words, they can produce for their own needs to a certain extent, but they can also benefit from the material surplus of the wider society. That surplus is ever-present.

Francesco himself demonstrated that repeatedly, but perhaps best known is the church of San Damiano outside of Assisi where he had gone to pray. The church was falling to ruin, and as he prayed, he heard a voice telling him to rebuild the church. He took it quite literally; accomplishing the task, however, seemed to him to require money for stone and building materials, which he got through the sale of cloth and his mule. But the priest at San Damiano refused the money, which he thought was ill-gotten, as the cloth he had sold belonged to Francesco's father. Francesco threw the money on the window-sill, so the story goes, and retreated to the church basement, where he stayed as a hermit for a month or so trying to understand what was wanted of him. Finally, he went back to Assisi to face his father's wrath, leading ultimately to the famous scene of Francesco's renunciation of his father and all his material things before the Bishop of Assisi, and his return to San Damiano as a mendicant and penitent. Shortly, followers came with stone and building materials, and the church of San Damiano was rebuilt from the generosity of those who had witnessed the scene in Assisi's plaza and had heard Francesco's call.

San Damiano became the initial convent for the Poor Clares, and Francesco moved on to repair and rehabilitate other rural churches and chapels in the Assisi region.

In doing so, the Franciscans often simply "occupied" vacant, abandoned, neglected, and run down buildings or took over land that was otherwise going unused. They didn't ask permission, they just did it. And from time to time, that got them into trouble with the authorities, both with the Church and secular authorities, leading to conflicts and struggles that would not be unfamiliar to observers today given the travails and attempts at repressing the Occupy movement.

Of course it helped somewhat that Francesco himself was a favorite of Bishops and the Pope in Rome and that the Franciscan Order had the imprimatur of the Pope; only two years after Francesco's death, he was proclaimed a Saint by Papal decree. Despite the political turmoil of the times, having such high level patronage was of immense assistance in establishing and legitimizing the Franciscans. So far as I can tell, Occupy has no such patronage from On High.

But the "occupation" strategy was very definitely -- and often successfully -- utilized by Francesco and the Franciscans as their movement grew.

Yet the minute Francesco was elevated to sainthood, what was left of the innocence of the Franciscan movement was lost. The Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi is a gorgeous pilgrimage site that contrasts starkly with the humble places where St. Francis actually lived and did his spiritual and temporal work. When parts of the Basilica's ceiling fell during an aftershock of the 1997 Umbrian Earthquake, killing four -- two Franciscans and two engineers checking for damage -- it was shocking (the video is still terrifying -- and seems to presage other events). The ceiling collapsed over the entrance and the altar -- ie: at opposite ends of the church. Repairs were undertaken quickly, and restoration was beautifully done, but the frescoes were lost from those areas of the ceiling that collapsed, and many other frescoes were damaged. In a sense, it was perhaps a reminder that Francesco would never have approved a church like that to honor his memory. It's too fine, too beautiful and far too decorative. Yet as someone from Assisi pointed out to him when he was railing against the fine accommodations the city had built for pilgrims who were already coming to Assisi in his lifetime, "This wasn't built for you. It was built by and for the Assisi Commune."

If there is a lesson from St. Francis for the modern era, apart from the spiritual, it is in the determination and persistence of Francesco to throw off the shackles of his past and adopt a new and simpler way of life, based on his profoundest beliefs in what was right and moral, and to hold on to his beliefs and practices through thick and thin.

Pax et bonum.

Today In New York

Video streaming by Ustream

That was Tim Pool's video of the arrest of this 16 year old:

whose name is Messiah, according to posts I've read about her. She's been an activist with OWS for some time, and I saw her interviewed on one of the livestreams from Union Square last night.

You see in the picture that some of her comrades are trying to "de-arrest" her, but they are not successful. In the video, though we don't see the arrest itself, and we only see part of the aftermath, we can pretty much figure how it went down. When the crowd started going back into the street, police targeted this young woman for arrest, and they made a very ostentatious show of seizing her, throwing her to the ground, trussing her up and then hauling her bodily down the middle of the street to an awaiting vehicle.

It was a very deliberate show.

Meant to intimidate. And for the most part, it worked. Despite the catcalling and insults from the crowd, they returned to the sidewalks and they didn't persist in trying to de-arrest her. That was sufficient for the NYPD to declare "victory" -- at least in their own eyes.

The march was called "Let Freedom Spring" against police brutality and calling for the immediate resignation of NY Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

This is a picture of her that was posted by Timothy Krause at dKos:


Here is another video of her being carried down the middle of the street:



From The Local East Village Vimeo Channel. Here's their story of the events:

Videographer Paul Davis, who witnessed the arrest of Mesiah Hameed on Mott Street below Prince Street around 2:50 p.m., said the teenager was obstructing police movement before she was detained. “She was blocking the scooters from going,” he said. “Civil disobedience. Somebody grabbed her, one of the deputy inspectors.”

Jared Malsin

Mr. Davis said Ms. Hameed, who has participated in multiple demonstrations and was present at the clearing of Zuccotti Park, was ordered to disperse and was arrested five to ten seconds later.

As The Local’s cameras rolled, four officers, one wearing a riot helmet, carried the young woman to a waiting police van as protesters yelled, “She’s just 16!” Her hands were cuffed behind her back and her shirt was pulled up to reveal her bra, causing one demonstrator to yell, “You are a child molester!” Others shouted, “Let her go!”

FURTHERMORE: I found the following statement by Mesiah Hameed in a post by Eve Ensler at HuffPo that is dated 10/20/11 (the post includes stories from many OWS participants, and approaching what's going on at that early date through story rather than "message" strikes me as just right.)

Excerpt:

I have read newspapers and watched videos on this revolution. Many of them share false and fabricated information regarding our purpose. What the media does not know is that the purpose is much to big to be titled. i have met everyone from in debt students to homeless grandmas. We all fight together. Personally i am here to represent the youth. It is an issue when you are not born knowing about the corruption of our systems worldwide. it should not take several years to come to reality that we are being cheated of our freedom! I was raised in such a way that even if it does not affect me i am aware and do all i can because it could very well affect me anytime or moment. I am very passionate about this movement. I wake up at Zucotti Park with such drive, an open heart, and wide ears to listen to all. I know that my passion for this sparks passion within others! This is so important for the world. We must get our youth to the protest and tell them what is happening. ALL AGES NEED TO BE APART OF THIS. we need to stop having authority over the young and let them find their own understanding of life. That is why i am here. I will stay until we see change.

----------------------



Other video of Mesiah showing her blocking a ScooterCop -- referred to in some of the news reports but not shown in Tim Pool's video above.

The question has been raised whether she was "targeted" for arrest or not. I believe she was arrested during the M17 raid and fracas at Zuccotti/Liberty, though I could be wrong about the date.

Knowing how NYPD does target what they think of as movement "leaders" for arrest -- quite arbitrarily in most cases -- it wouldn't be at all surprising.

Her actions in briefly blocking the progress of the ScooterCop might or might not subject her to arrest; but if she was targeted, arrest would be certain, and more than likely she would know it before she engaged in disobedience.

On the Incidents in New York and at Union Square Yesterday

I've been dealing with other things most of the day, so I haven't checked on the continuing Crisis of Authority in New York since fairly early this morning. Some of what I post now may therefore be out of date.

But...

There was a huge rally at Union Square in New York City yesterday called "The Million Hoodie March" in honor of Trayvon Martin who was killed last week in Sanford, Florida -- for walking while black.

Unfortunately, this is still (partially) the United States of America where such demonstrations are necessary. I say "partially", because we've come a long way from where we were when I was his age, but progress on race issues has come at a tremendous cost. That cost has been the criminalization of entire cohorts of young men of color, and the assumption by public guardians -- whether they be the man who shot Trayvon Martin or established police forces -- that if a male is black or brown and within a certain age group he is likely a criminal, and that shooting or imprisoning him is of little or no social consequence.

What is the meaning of "equality" in such a context?

At any rate, there were thousands gathered at Union Square to honor the memory of Trayvon and hear from his mother, and to consider how widespread the condition of oppression is in this country. And how vulnerable young black men, especially, but not just them, are to arbitrary impositions of authority than can and do turn deadly too often.

After the rally, the people took to the streets, marching in solidarity to a destination that wasn't entirely clear... well, that's how these things go. From what I saw, there was a spontaneous decision to march to Washington Square and then return to Union Square. From what I can recall of my times in New York, that seemed quite reasonable given that the locations aren't that far from one another. Their symbolic nature is what seemed most important at the time and now.

So, off they went, accompanied by police who were flummoxed by the size of the crowd, its energy, its determination, and its spontaneity. Their attempts to control the march and confine the marchers to the sidewalks failed. And that, in case anyone was wondering, is the essence of the Crisis of Authority in New York.

It is not that no one pays any attention to the NYPD -- they are, after all, a violent group of gangsters and thugs -- but their authority is being eroded every day in almost too many ways to count. What happened yesterday was instructive.

Mass media -- and even New Media (talkin' 'bout you, Tim Pool) -- was at pains to diminish the size of the crowd that assembled and marched. From what I could see of Tim's coverage -- which was mostly very good, though the 4G service he uses for livestreaming was spotty at best -- the crowd filled the open space in Union Square completely and was spilling out onto the streets round about. My estimate of the crowd size, based on what I could see of it from Tim's video vantage point on what appeared to be a light post, was around ten thousand. Tim was saying... "hundreds." Sometimes "thousands." Sometimes "huge crowd." He seemed to settle on "about 2,000" after talking to numerous other people who estimated crowd size.

This is the open space in Union Square as imaged by Google:

It is quite large. It was packed solid:


And that's only about half the crowd, from Union Square E to just west of the statue of George Washington. The crowd continued at that density all the way to Broadway, and as you can see from the picture above, they spilled onto and actually were standing across 14th Street. It was a huge crowd, that was reported in some cases as "dozens". I kid you not.




When the march began, they headed west on 14th Street, decided eventually to go to Washington Square and then return to Union Square, a circuit of a little over two miles I would guess. The crowd, however, was so large, it split into three and thus the marches didn't seem quite so spectacular. All along the route, the police were futilely trying to wrangle and manage the marchers, who insisted on taking to the streets no matter how many times they were told to get back on the sidewalks or were herded by scooter cops.

When they returned to Union Square, the crowd had diminished in size somewhat, but it was still impressive. The failure of the police to wrangle them successfully was symbolized by the fact that barricades set up by the police were overturned:



As more and more police assembled, the crowd defied them with chants of "Whose streets? Our streets!"

Finally, around midnight, hundreds and hundreds of NYPD officers -- estimates were up to 500, the most on one operation since the eviction from Zuccotti/Liberty Park on November 15 -- were assembled at Union Square to control what by that time was no more than a couple of hundred demonstrators, and the sight was absurd. Which, by this time, even the police seemed to recognize. The smallish crowd did some spontaneous actions, including marching around the park -- accompanied by police who couldn't keep up when they ran, and then dispersed.

The police were left there, all dolled up with nothing to do.

This was a nearly textbook example of how authority is delegitimized. One of the things that demonstrators in New York especially, but throughout the Occupy Movement internationally as well, have made clear is that they are not afraid of the police. The demonstrators will comply when it suits them, they will defy when it suits them. They are setting the ground rules of confrontations, and that is partly what is causing discomfort among more traditionally oriented activists. The rules, as they understand them, are set by authority, not the other way around.

The practice of delegitimazation doesn't always work, and the methods are not always comprehended by those involved, but as the "American Spring" gets fully underway, we're likely to see more and more of these tactics employed.

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FURTHERMORE: I didn't know they'd gone to Wall Street and desecrated the Bull: (Oh. My! Not only that, they de-arrested one of their comrades who had mounted the Bull. Things fall apart...)

"There's No Way To Put The Genie Back In the Bottle..."

If mainstream media in this country weren't all about corporate and corporate/government propaganda, this brief news segment might have been made by American journalists. Instead, it was made by Aljazeera.



I've spent a good part of the morning reviewing video of the overnight eviction from Union Square in New York. Several times, the situation turned ugly, though at no time did I see the crowd turn violent. Instead, there were more incidents of police rioting.

The initial eviction was essentially unopposed; police announced the closure of the park at midnight -- witnesses said it was the first time in their lifetime that that portion of Union Square had ever been closed. Members of the crowd argued with the police, but generally, the situation was calm -- at least compared to the situation at Zuccotti/Liberty Park on Saturday.

The police massed and moved the Occupy-ers out of the park -- that is to say, they moved them down onto the broad sidewalk on the 14th Street side -- without, so far as I could tell from the videos, using any form of violence. Then they erected iconic NYPD barricades which the police stood behind the way they do. There looked to be a thousand or more Occupy-ers on the sidewalk. There was some verbal back and forth with the police and some of the Occupy-ers, and there was one incident in which an officer blocked the lens of an AP photographer's camera which touched off a minor to-do, but for the most part, for the next several hours, there was a relatively calm stand off.

Sanitation crews cleaned up the debris in the park and were cheered by the crowd.

There was a "speak out" assembly during which some really inspiring speeches were given by Occupy-ers.



Video streaming by Ustream

Then around 3:00am or so, the police moved from the park and onto the sidewalk. They were ordering people not to sit or lie down or they would be arrested, they were pushing the much smaller crowd into a confined area near the subway entrance, and they were blocking access to the rest of the sidewalk on the 14th Street side of the park. Then they started confiscating personal property reportedly including parts of the small library which the Occupy-ers had set up at the park. The police moved into the crowd en masse, grabbing and throwing people to the ground or out of the area. It was a melee, yet another police riot in New York City. One medic was thrown to the ground by the police and hit her head hard on the pavement, apparently knocking her unconscious. People pushed back on the police, insisting that they stop their violence and get out of the way while other medics treated the injured woman. Most of the police backed off, though a couple of uniformed officers stayed in the immediate vicinity of the injured woman while medics comforted her.

An ambulance was called, whether by the police or not, I couldn't say. It arrived within a few minutes of the incident, unlike the Cecily McMillan case on Saturday/Sunday at Zuccotti/Liberty where she was having seizures and hyperventilating and falling unconscious repeatedly for up to 20 minutes before Emergency Services arrived, while hundreds of police stood around gawping and preventing trained and licensed medics from reaching her.

As Emergency Services was about to put the woman injured by police at Union Square onto a stretcher, the police inexplicably charged into the crowd again, and started throwing people around, some of whom landed on the woman who was previously injured. Other people were injured in this assault as well. This action enraged the crowd, but they did not respond with violence of their own, they responded with utter contempt for the police.

The injured woman was eventually transported, and the police were eventually removed from harassment duty -- maybe an hour after the aktion started. By that time, there were only a few dozen Occupy-ers still there in any case.



Video streaming by Ustream

Luke Rudkowski, who is recording the video above and is describing what is going on, is completely dumbfounded by the behavior of the police, as he had been on Saturday/Sunday as Cecily McMillen writhed in seizures at Zuccotti/Liberty Park while police did nothing except prevent qualified paramedical personnel from attending to her. He seemed to think it was incompetence.

I would say, based on what little I know about these sorts of things, that the actions that were witnessed and recorded were quite intentional and strategic.

Part of the police strategy for controlling the Occupy phenomenon is fright. They are trying to scare people from joining the movement, from being anywhere near it, in fact. And among the tactics they use: demonstrating their violence toward and their indifference to the suffering of Occupy-ers. These are time honored tactics, often employed, particularly in confined situations such as we see with the Occupys (and in jails and prisons, too.)

They want the public to see and react to their violence and their indifference to suffering. That is what scares people, perhaps more than most anything else they could be doing apart from firing live ammunition into crowds.

Last night, they also had some representative from the anti-terrorism squad parading around attempting to intimidate the crowd with his presence. The police have other tactics as well. But it's not "incompetence" that makes them behave this way. It is planning and strategy.

It works to some extent, but only partially. The crowds turn out nevertheless for Occupy events, which are happening practically every day now, but now the crowds are mostly made up of the braver and angrier people. They fight back in a certain way, though they haven't quite figured out how to do it effectively. They're learning. Last night a number of people commented that the police were trying to provoke violence by the crowd, and of course they didn't succeed. If that's their plan, and it seems to be the case, they will be disappointed. What they don't seem to realize is that an organic and evolutionary movement is by its nature going to thwart them.

The American Spring is going to be very interesting indeed.

And I've heard two people now insisting that "at least 100,000 will have to die before this is over..."

I don't believe that, but some do.

Whatever the case, there is no way to put the genie of Occupy back in the bottle.

Strategery

As for Occupy affairs...

I've been involved in something called "Occupy Strategy National Dialogue" through InterOccupy for over a month now -- practically a whole era in Occupy Time -- that started as a national Occupy dialogue on the issue of "nonviolence vs diversity of tactics" that was triggered by Chris Hedges infamous polemic: "Black Bloc: The Cancer on Occupy."

I'm not going to rehash all that, partly because it is deeply hurtful to many people who have dedicated much more than I have to the Movement/Revolution, but also because it's an irresolvable and basically false issue. Nonviolence IS part of the diversity of tactics that are used throughout Occupy, so the notion that there is any "versus" at all is stupid. The question, to the extent there is one, is whether a nonviolent strategy a la Gandhi and King (or my man, Cesar Chavez) is the right one for Occupy. That question is still open. Many Occupy activists are certain that it is not just the right one, it is the only one that has a chance of success. I -- and many others -- are not so sure. In fact, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the Gandhi/King nonviolent strategy is bound to fail, and those who advocate it as the "only way" forward are wittingly or unwittingly trying to ensure that failure is the only option.

I categorize most of them as the same people or the same sorts of people who from the outset have been trying to corral Occupy into a standard format of some kind, preferably a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a 501(c)(4) political wing. This is what people are used to and comfortable with; I'm used to it and comfortable with it, having worked in that environment on one side of it or the other all my adult life. It is the means by which and through which "the people" in groups -- that is to say the organizational boards and staffs -- interact with government agencies and officials.

It's an OK model if the system is working, but the system isn't working in our country at this time, nor has the system functioned on behalf of the People more than haltingly and occasionally for many years. I argue that we are well past the point where we can replicate the efforts of the past and expect reasonably similar results. It's not going to work. Our Rulers are way, way ahead of us on that plane.

If they can easily thwart and subvert the NPO/advocacy group model -- and they can and do -- they can easily do the same to the nonviolent resistance strategies of Gandhi and King (and Chavez), which they have been doing for many a long year, though it doesn't dawn on many people that the reason why their NPOs and advocacy groups don't seem to be getting any where but have bogged down in permanent wheel spinning mode is because the Overclass has been strategizing the thwartage and subversion of these efforts for decades. They know how to do it.

Gandhian/King-like nonviolent efforts don't work any more. I realize that I've been flogging the UC Berkeley/Davis issue for quite a while, and if it's become boring, oh well! But the thing is that UC and other students have been using the Gandhi/King nonviolent resistance tactics for decades, and here we are. Those tactics have not "worked" for positive change at the University since about 1969, and the People's Park imbroglio. Nevertheless, they keep getting done, as was the case at Cal on November 9, and at Davis on November 18 last year.

And in both cases, the students and their faculty allies wound up on the losing end of the stick -- at Berkeley, the literal end of the nightstick, at Davis, the figurative "stick" of pepper spray, though they won the moral high ground.

But there's more to it than that. The students and their faculty allies at both Cal and Davis (and elsewhere in the system, these are the two closest UC campuses to me, but there have been tiny revolutions throughout the entire higher education system in California for years and years) gave up their moral advantage almost as soon as they had won the high ground. I witnessed this happening at Davis especially and my jaw dropped to the ground.

Almost immediately after the Chancellor's Walk of Shame at Davis, she called a "town hall" with students and administrators to discuss the matter. There was a subsequent one between her administration and the Davis faculty. At both of them, the moral victors in the struggle gave up their advantage almost too willingly, and wound up expressing their gratitude toward and trust in the administrators who had been fucking them over and fucking them up for years. Initially, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was a brilliant move on the part of the oppressors. I'm not sure the oppressed understand what happened to this day -- as we await release of the sanitized and long-delayed report on the pepper spray incident.

This is not how you do nonviolent resistance, people! Not if you want to... win. But then it occurred to me, maybe that's not what they want... I'll get to that anon.

The way these things used to be done, once you gain a moral victory, you consolidate it immediately and press your demands/interests even harder; you do not back down. But that's what happened at the UC get-togethers. [Added thought: The victors backed away from their victory.] And I've seen it happen in other Occupy contexts as well.

The more I talked to people about it and paid attention to what was going, the more I realized that many people actually do think that's how a nonviolent resistance campaign is supposed to go. If you "win" in a confrontation such as that at Cal and at Davis, you're supposed to "yield," or at least re-evaluate, and not press your advantage -- because apparently they believe that's what King and Gandhi would have done so as to show good will toward the oppressors. But good will is a separate issue. Ideally, it's something you are showing all the time -- while simultaneously pressing your advantage. But they didn't do that. They gave up.

That was an example (to me at any rate) of how very easy it is for the Overclass to subvert and thwart old-fashioned kinds of nonviolent resistance; they have been strategizing how to do this for decades, and they've go it down. The People are almost powerless against it.

Now in the strategy sessions I've been attending through InterOccupy, the Gene Sharp strategy of nonviolent revolutionary "change" is being heavily promoted as the right one for Occupy to adopt, and I question it.

The Gene Sharp strategy is found in "From Dictatorship to Democracy" which is an exploration of how to do a nonviolent revolution such as we saw in Eastern Europe, the Philippines, China, and parts of Latin America in the 80's and 90's. That model has been adapted and adopted in Arab states and Iran, with varying -- in many cases, tragic -- results.

Having had some time to evaluate the results of the Arab Spring and the ongoing revolts against various entrenched powers in the Arab world and Iran, we'd do well to understand the Gene Sharp model doesn't work any more, either.

The Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions -- which were patterned on Gene Sharp's revolutionary model -- were so exciting, but the let down after "victory" has been severe; the result is nothing like what the People had in mind, and in Egypt, especially, there is a feeling that they may have to do it all over again.

The results in Bahrain, the Yemen, Libya and Syria are simply appalling. Gawd Awful horrors that just don't stop. In Iran, the Green Revolution was rather quickly subverted and shut down -- with relatively little bloodshed but with much repression. Gene Sharp's model was adopted in those places as well, and the result was monstrous destruction and bloodshed, civil war, and/or worse repression. Wait. That's not how this model is supposed to work. Only that's how it works now because the Arab and Iranian Overclasses have learned how to thwart the masses when they rise. It's messy but they manage somehow to do it.

Meanwhile, in the United States the nonviolent course that Sharp lays out has never been tried, but the idea that it would work here or in Europe or in any more-or-less "civil democracy" society (no matter how managed the "democracy" might be) has no evidence to support it. It doesn't mean that it can't, it means there's no evidence to show that it does -- primarily, I would say, because in a "civil democracy," it is always theoretically possible to achieve significant social and political change through legal channels and elections. It may not be practically possible, but in theory it is.

So using the Sharp template in "civil democracies" doesn't strike me as particularly useful, and the horrifying results in parts of the Arab world and Iran should be a caution. The fact that it isn't being used as a template in Europe or much of anywhere else should be recognized as well.

Occupy provides its own strategic template, as balky and faulty as it is, an from my way of looking at it, this is the one the Movement needs to stick with. It's not going to be easy, in part because there are so many efforts to undermine and subvert it from every direction, internally and externally.

Occupations are themselves (sometimes) strategic. The actions of Occupy have a surprisingly strategic resonance -- they are mostly intended to shake the foundations of a rotting "civil democracy" system. As I've put it in other posts, the overall strategy is to accomplish fundamental systemic change by de-legitimizing the authority of current establishments, and by demonstrating alternatives to current establishments and institutions and showing how they can and do work.

Some of those involved with Occupy are getting into a long-term frame of mind, on the premise that this struggle will have to go on for many years, and once again they are pressing to institutionalize Occupy and standardize and regularize it.

Back in October of last year, Malcolm Harris had some tactical/strategic advice for Occupy Wall Street, some of which might have been heard in the interim, I don't know. But he was looking at the encampment at Liberty/Zuccotti Park from the perspective of effectiveness, and he, I think, got that part wrong. No, the encampment wasn't accomplishing what he thought it should, but then what does? It's hard to say. These were his parting thoughts, though, and we're still hearing echoes...

- The GA/consensus model doesn’t exactly encourage creativity and is particularly susceptible to police co-optation. In one of the most heavily policed places in the world, where the NYPD is bragging about its ability to shoot down planes, we should assume they have a Che t-shirt and a Chrome messenger bag in a prop room somewhere. If anyone can lead the group, that means anyone can lead the group. A switch to a model based on smaller bands of people (5-10) who know and trust each other and have found common ground and operate in (naturally) overlapping ways would have the dual benefits of enabling creative rather than agreeable actions and reducing the risk of police infiltration, without forfeiting the benefits of a large group. The technical term for these crews is “affinity groups,” but I prefer “friends.”

- If the population of the park can grow past its boundaries and start threatening the normal functioning of Wall Street, then it could open up space for smaller groups to operate without too much police attention and change the balance of power in the park. I heard unconfirmed reports that Radiohead is planning a concert at the occupation this week, which if true could make it uncontrollable and attract more folks to a relatively uninhabited part of the city. I’m disinclined to believe the rumors, but you never know, and it’s not like they can’t afford to bail themselves out of jail. Maybe they could be cajoled over Twitter to show up and play a few acoustic songs. Either way, it doesn’t make sense to me to try and protect the occupation from this kind of influx of people, even if that would make it untenable in its current form.

- This is a marathon, not a sprint or a hamster wheel. The next year is going to be explosive: the two Parties will spend a billion each reminding Americans how terrible everything is, and hoping they can get away with blaming each other for a permanent unemployment crisis. The social ills that brought people out aren’t getting better any time soon. Occupy Wall Street is part of a sequence, not the sequence itself, and we should be thinking about its role in a revolutionary campaign of a longer but bound duration.

- If corporations are people, what would it mean to wrap our hands around one’s neck and choke it to death?

These are admittedly preliminary thoughts, and I want to discuss what to do with other folks, but I don’t want to address an assembly, and not just for security reasons. When I’ve found people and groups of people at the occupation who are ready to move beyond its current bounds, it’s on the edges of the large circles. Maybe it’s time the whole thing got edgier. That is, sharper.

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FURTHERMORE: (I see I inadvertently truncated the post because I was futilely trying to multitask.)

The problem with trying to overthink and overstrategize the Occupy Movement, or with trying to apply a pre-existing template to it at this point, is that Occupy is itself its own strategy and provides its own template. Activists instinctively respond to or recoil from it. Those who want it to be something different, more like Gene Sharp's recipe for nonviolent revolution, for example, actually want a different movement than this one. The way I look at it, that's OK, but Occupy isn't the vehicle for that kind of movement. Occupy is doing something else, pioneering in many ways, and if it's not your preferred form of activism, then Occupy is probably not where you should be.

The fact that there is no Gene Sharp style revolutionary movement (not even Occupy) in the United States is telling us something. The fact that Occupy is doing as well as it is, despite more and more violent repression, is also telling us something.

Harris's criticisms came very early, and we're still hearing the same ones as well as many others that were voiced even before there was an Occupy Wall Street. From a serious strategic and tactical standpoint, Occupy shouldn't be working at all. But strangely it does. Its very looseness and ad hoc-ness, its seemingly incomprehensible (or in some cases, nonexistent!) strategic planning, even its stark failures and its odd obsessions with process, as well as the constant carping and complaining about it(!), all seem to have some sort of value to the Movement.

I have no idea how this works -- except that it is organic and evolutionary and it is working.

Let it be.

Reflections on Occupy "Hopelessness" From Take The Square

"Fight Week" in Barcelona.

"Take the Square" was a very early central hub of information and insight for the Global Occupy Movement with particular but not exclusive emphasis on Europe. Many of the practices that have become so customary and even iconic in American Occupations were adapted directly from the M15 Puerta del Sol occupation in Madrid in May of 2011, and the Puerta del Sol "Quick Guide" became very nearly the organizational bible for Occupy in the beginning.

In the following essay posted at Take the Square, Timothy Davis Frank reflects on the problem of "hopelessness." Occupy has engaged in four months of constant global protest and agitation and sometimes all we have to show for it are hundreds of injuries, thousands of arrests, and the destruction of hundreds of encampments around the world. Also, too, there is the constant carping of those on the sidelines who insist Occupy is "doing it wrong."

An extended excerpt:

While David wishes for the end of the suspense and the wake-up call of social orecological collapse, some other people around the world are attempting to find other ways of moving our society forward. These people have suffered the chills of winter and sacrificed their own individual space in order to engage with a wider community and speak up against environmental destruction, corporate greed and corrupt political systems. They have raised a voice and built communities around the belief that “another world is possible”. Now after multiple evictions, arrests, public condemnation and defamation, many of these active citizens are feeling disheartened and increasingly pessimistic. Why is it that football teams who continuously lose matches retain their fans? Why can a politician say “The evidence that led to us invade that country was not correct” and still have their achievements lauded? Why is it not enough to celebrate critical analysis and self-sacrifice for a more ethical world?

It seems that there is a strong push from people to utilise the ‘hopeless defence’. “We are never going to be able to change the world. It is too difficult.” A resident of the Finsbury Square Occupy camp explained to me this morning. This defence seems to protect us all from having to engage in our political system and participate more than we might consider comfortable. This position means that we can blame ‘human nature’ and throw our hands in the air. It is such an attractive fail-safe that when people rudely suggest that it is not all hopeless and we should not just leave the fate of the planet in the hands of those who profit from its destruction, we get really upset.

I suggest that the joy with which people shout, “See? They achieved nothing!!!” says more about our own fears of empowerment than illustrate any specific failure of a movement.

But read the whole thing. And if you've never visited Take the Square, this might be a good opportunity to get to know some of our international comrades...

[Adaptation of Oakland Commune slogan removed upon further reflection. This is not to slam or denounce the Oakland Commune or Occupy Oakland. The issue is "combating hopelessness" and in Oakland, that includes actions and statements that may not apply throughout the Occupy firmament. Occupy situations vary widely, for example. The relationship between OO and the OPD is tense and often hostile, and this is paralleled in many other cities, but where I am, it is not. The relationship between the local Occupy and the local police is actually surprisingly positive (despite some incidents and individual officer behavior). There are no FTP marches here, and for the most part there is no necessity for them. That could change of course. What happened at the Capitol on March 5 did not involve the SPD until after the state troopers, RoboCops and horse police were withdrawn. And so far as I know, there were no hostile incidents between demonstrators at the Capitol and SPD officers. So for the purposes of this reflection, I decided that adapting Occupy Oakland's slogan as a quasi-universal thing was inappropriate. Occupy is not at that point. Not yet!]

Mario Savio Explains It All For You

Thanks to Michael Cavlan RN over at FDL for posting this full version of Mario Savio's December 2, 1964 "Gears of the Machine" speech that he gave on the steps of Sproul Hall just before several thousand hundred students occupied the building thus catalyzing the student (and counterculture) rebellions of the 1960's.

I've posted many times that this was a radicalizing event in my life -- I was 16 at the time and in high school. Three years later, I would be involved in this:



Here's Todd Gitlin's narrative of those events:

Here, protestors wait to close down the Oakland Induction Center where young draftees arrive for their physicals and are taken into the Army. They hold wooden shields and wear helmets. It is an October Friday in 1967 and no one anticipates a peaceful outcome.

At some point in that year anti-war activists across the country agreed to turn protest into resistance. Fred Halstead says in Out Now!, his detailed history of the anti-war movement, “it was a time to move opposition to the war and the draft from moral protest to a show of power.” The draft of young men into the armed forces was a particularly odious feature of the Vietnam conflict. Beginning with the war’s expansion in 1965, President Johnson doubled the number of young men to be drafted each month from 17,000 to 35,000. Because college students still held draft deferments, the vast majority of hapless draftees were lower class males and much more likely to be black, Mexican-American or Puerto Rican. In 1965 there were 25,000 soldiers in Vietnam. By the end of 1967 there were more than 480,000 soldiers in Vietnam. And 15,000 of them had been killed.

In May of 1965 some 40 Berkeley students staged the first public burning of draft cards in front of the local draft board, at the time a handy half-block from the UC campus. A “liberal” Democratic Congress responded to the burning of draft cards by making the act a felony punishable by five years in prison. Draft card burnings continued, though, and by 1967 a group called The Resistance was organizing ever-larger protests against the draft. Leaders decided to mount a weeklong protest October 16-21 that would end with a march on the Pentagon. Ground zero for draft resistance was the Oakland Armed Forces Examining Station, aka, the Oakland Induction Center.

[snip]

What followed on Bloody Tuesday was a riot. Direct action collided with police brutality and the result was an hour of mayhem as members of the Resistance, who had expected to block Center entrances and be arrested, were instead beaten bloody. Organizers held a rally Thursday on the Berkeley campus and vowed to return to Oakland on Friday. “We’re going to give the cops one hell of a run for their money,” shouted Stop the Draft Week organizer Morgan Spector. And they did. More than 10,000 protestors showed up early Friday morning, prepared with shields and helmets to engage the police. As cops poured out again into the streets, activists ran a virtual Chinese fire drill around the city’s central core, occupying intersections until police arrived, then vanishing down alleys to return to the Center where they blocked entrances until police returned. Battles ensued as police officers fought hand-to-hand to arrest protestors who, aided by comrades that attacked police from behind, would break free and run. Barricades were built from parked cars, rolled into intersections and tipped over. A bus was seized, emptied of cheering passengers, and rolled into the street to block access by police.

Protest had become insurrection.

Yes, well. The rest, as they say, is history. And to clarify, this insurrection in Oakland lasted all week, and there were Stop the Draft events held all over the nation that week as well, culminating in the Levitation of the Pentagon on October 21, 1967.

In Oakland, the history of insurrection has a long and noble lineage, so every time I run into someone who wants to mindlessly denounce the current insurrection in Oakland -- which continues apace, despite all the hoo-and-haw over various tactical and strategic errors (to put it gently) -- even if it is Todd Gitlin -- my generally tolerant demeanor tends to get bent out of shape and I tend to respond with a bit of bite.

The point is not that I favor violent insurrection and resistance because I don't. The only ones who would actually engage in such a thing in this country are the rightists and fascists in any case. They've been doing so on a limited scale for decades. For some odd reason, though, the "anarchists" and what's pitifully left of the Left are blamed for whatever insurrectionist tendencies there are and are strictly advised by their Elders (of which I am now one, thankyouverymuch) to declare adherence and strictly follow passive nonviolence principles as outlined by "Gahndi" and King. Now isn't that interesting? It should be. It should be interesting and instructive about the true nature of Power and Control in this country.

What I find interesting is that the nonviolence advocate who had the greatest influence on me is never mentioned: Cesar Chavez. It's the strangest thing. It's as if he and the United Farm Workers he led never existed, and their struggle never happened at all. He and his work have been all but erased from the historical record, and I truly wonder why.

Every now and again, I get together with some of the abuelos from the farmworker huelga days, and they shake their heads sadly at how far we have come yet how very far there still is to go. The struggle continues, yet it has become so highly ritualized and enervated that measurable progress is almost impossible to find, while there is plenty of backsliding to be found in the fields everywhere throughout The Other California, where those many farm fields still are (well, at least the ones that haven't been buried under suburban sprawl.)

One of the ways the Overclass got a handle on the farmworkers' movement and made it much less effective was to essentially buy off some of its leaders and younger workers by providing them with a way out of the fields and a comfortable living if they wanted it. Many farm labor activists wound up teaching on college campuses, others became civil servants, ironically in some cases charged with enforcing farm labor law but without the tools to do so. The less they felt trapped in the fields, the less the farmworkers felt they had little hope for improvement besides the UFW. The Overclass used many other tactics, including murder, to get their way, but from the public's perception, the farmworkers were the ones who got their way, not the growers. Little do they know.

Similar tactics were used to disarm and ultimately disable the anti-war movements of my day. As with the farmworkers, Power did concede the minimum it had to -- such as, for example, instituting a draft lottery, then ending the draft, then removing troops from the ground in Vietnam, and finally withdrawing from Indochina altogether. Many of those firebrands and movement leaders -- those who weren't murdered -- wound up teaching on college campuses where some of them still are. Others found civil servant positions which by now they have retired comfortably from, and we all know what happened with Jerry Rubin: he became a capitalist pig.

Mario Savio himself taught physics and philosophy at Sonoma State until his untimely death in 1996.

Who am I to talk, I went into The Theater and ultimately into government service myself.

What I began to understand about all this is that what appears to be radical and insurrectionary at any given time probably isn't. Mario's speech on the steps of Sproul Hall still resonates -- at least it does to me, but then I can (vaguely!) remember what he's going on about. Yes, the issues were critically important in those days, and yes, the insurrection at UC Berkeley in the fall and winter of 1964-65 made a huge difference and catalyzed movements and rebellions all over the country and parts of the world some of which were brutally and bloodily suppressed.

But underlying it all was a demand for dignity and respect, justice and community. And most of all for Peace.

While the issues Occupy is wrestling with are different, and the Occupy rebellion/revolution itself is very different -- the underlying demands aren't. We once again have an out of touch and wildly out of control power structure that ignores or dismisses the Public Interest in pursuit of private interest goals. Mario is complaining because the University is being run like a corporation and to serve corporate needs, not the Public Interest at all, and in his view and that of many students at Cal and elsewhere, that was simply wrong on principle. That was not what the University was for and that was not the purpose of higher education in California, but there it was: Cal served its government and corporate "sponsors" not the People.

And so it is today, even worse than it was in 1964. And now it is wildly more expensive for students at Cal and in the rest of the public higher education system in California than it was almost 50 years ago.

The abuses are far greater and the costs are far heavier. And sometimes the solutions seem farther away than ever.

Values, Vision, Goals, Strategies and Tactics

On the flannel board... a hierarchical representation of Values, Vision, Goals, Strategies and Tactics

Over the years, I've been involved in many organizational start up and strategic planning efforts, and I've found that there are practically as many ways to do it as there are consultants to tell you how to do it. The basic format, though, stays pretty much the same.

Start with a set of Values. Expand Values into a Vision (in an organization, the Vision may be indistinguishable from a Mission or they may be quite separate). The Vision tells you where you are heading. The Mission tells you the purpose of heading there.

Set measurable Goals on the path toward fulfilling your Vision/Mission. (Objectives are interim steps toward organizational Goals and can help clarify what you need to do along the way, but setting Goals and Objectives for particular actions is a separate matter.)

Develop Strategies for reaching Goals: Strategies are the means employed to reach Goals, for example, my Strategy for getting to San Francisco tomorrow may be by riding the Capitol Corridor train.

Utilize Tactics to fulfill the Strategy: Tactics are the methods employed to fulfill Strategies, for example, if my Strategy for getting to San Francisco tomorrow is by riding the Capitol Corridor, then my Tactics might include purchasing a ticket online, checking the schedule, getting to the station at some ungodly hour, and so on.

As I've traveled around to various Occupys -- virtually by means of
the internet and through various discussion groups, and on the ground in
person -- and as I've tried to pay attention to what's going on in the
global context and witnessed and participated in numerous goal
setting, strategy and tactics discussions, four Values keep
percolating to the surface:

• Dignity
• Justice
• Community
• Peace

From these Values an overarching Goal emerges:

• To change the economic, political and social Systems -- to make them fairer, more equitable and just, and to ensure sustainability for life on Earth -- including our species
  

A range of Strategies are employed to accomplish this Goal, but
they typically resolve to two:

• by delegitimizing present authority and
• by demonstrating how a better world is not only possible but can,
does and will work

Tactics vary widely depending on the circumstances, locations,
objectives, and the people involved. Taken as a whole, however:

the Occupy Movement is by definition an organic, evolutionary,
international Nonviolent Resistance Campaign -- one that
occasional incidents of vandalism and/or throwing things does not and
cannot change.

As a corollary, I've found a wide-spread recognition that the
Movement creates its own Narrative and does not depend on major mass
media for definition or accuracy in reporting (See: "delegitimizing
present authority" above).

There is no sign anywhere that the Occupy Movement is becoming or
likely to become a Violent Resistance Campaign involving armed
insurrection or the threat or use of deadly force; it's just not part
of the organic and evolutionary nature of Occupy.

During a Occupy Strategy forum I attended last weekend, however, a
question was raised regarding what might happen if governments in the
United States choose to employ lethal force against the Occupy
Movement. Would that change its nature?

From my perspective, the answer is "No." Hundreds and hundreds have
already been injured, some nearly fatally. Thousands upon thousands
have been arrested, many of whom have been held under torturous
conditions. If anything, the essential nature of the Occupy Movement
has been strengthened by these events. Ratcheting up the level of
force used against the Movement has been occurring from the beginning,
and there is no sign that continuing to ratchet up the force levels
will change the nature of the Movement.

By recognizing and maintaining values of Dignity, Justice, Community,
and Peace, keeping our focus on the goal of changing the economic,
social and political systems to make them fairer, more equitable and
just, and to ensure sustainability for life on Earth and our species,
by a simultaneous strategy of delegitimizing present authority and
building up and demonstrating alternatives, utilizing creative and
nonviolent resistance tactics, the Occupy Movement is truly revolutionary and unstoppable.

Just some thoughts to throw into the ever-bubbling cauldron.