Tag: Occupy Wall Street
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#OccupyWallStreet: Perfectly Coherent
General Assembly in Iowa CityMuch has been made by some news outlets and pundits about the supposed “incoherence” of the Occupy Wall Street protests. “The protesters” don’t have a coherent message, we are told. They can’t even agree on any solutions. What the heck are they proposing?
This angle is wrong-headed. The strongest and most successful social movements in history have always tapped into multiple concerns that are important to different swaths of society, and often articulated in different ways. It’s not typically the responsibility of a broad movement to propose specific policy solutions — at least not at this stage in the process. It’s on us to create pressure to move society in a direction. When we do that successfully, windows will open to fight for this or that specific change. The bigger a movement we grow, the more pressure we create, the more substantial and meaningful those windows for measurable gains become.
And historical perspective is not all that’s wrong with the “incoherence” frame. There’s a pretty damn clear coherence to Americans’ anger at Wall Street right now. If it doesn’t upset you that the top 1% is still making record-high profits and paying record-low taxes while the rest of us struggle just to survive, then I don’t know that I’ll be able to explain it to you. But I think most people feel it in their gut. That’s why us being here is resonating with so many people. That’s why this movement is drawing so much attention, and why I think it’s going to continue to gain momentum over time.
The momentum is really starting to spread beyond the “usual suspects”. It’s important to emphasize and encourage this. For example, while coastal occupation actions have drawn the most media attention so far, actions are also happening all across “Middle America”, from Ashland, Kentucky to Dallas, Texas to Ketchum, Idaho.
I just heard a first hand report about four hundred Iowans marching in Des Moines, Iowa today as part of the October 15 international day of action. I’m working on the press team here at Occupy Wall Street, and I just got the chance to talk on the phone with Judy Lonning a 69-year-old retired public school teacher who participated in the Des Moines action today. Here’s what she had to say:
People are suffering here in Iowa. Family farmers are struggling, students face mounting debt and fewer good jobs, and household incomes are plummeting. We’re not willing to keep suffering for Wall Street’s sins. People here are waking up and realizing that we can’t just go to the ballot box. We’re building a movement to make our leaders listen.
Cheers to that.
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What a day at #OccupyWallStreet!
Hundreds participate in Occupy Wall Street General AssemblyWhat a morning! Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to frame Occupy Wall Street participants as dirty and unsanitary and to use the slander as a ruse to evict us from Liberty Plaza failed miserably. Not only that, in classic political jujitsu, organizers used the ploy to catalyze even broader popular and political support.
With the threat of eviction, yesterday local and national organizations put out the call to come to Liberty Plaza this morning and to call the Mayor. By 6am this morning the crowd had swelled into the thousands. By 6:30am the Deputy Mayor had announced that the “cleanup” was off — at least for today. And the prospect of trying something similar anytime soon probably doesn’t look very appealing either to Bloomberg or to Brookfield Office Properties, the owner of the park (the park’s usage is public). Brookfield’s involvement in the subprime market is starting to generate some attention since their decision to mess with the anti-Wall Street occupation.
This is the perfect build-up for tomorrow’s actions in NYC and the international day of action. This thing is really building, and who knows how far it will go. Time Magazine just conducted a poll that found “54 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of the protests, while just 23 percent have a negative impression.”
That’s certainly better than the Tea Party has ever performed.
I keep having these “wow this is really happening” moments. I took the train down to NYC on Wednesday morning and plugged into the press team here. I’ve been swamped with that and too busy to write much here, but I’ll be tweeting (follow me here) when I can, and I hope to write more soon. I’ll be here for at least the next week or so.
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Radicals, Liberals & #OccupyWallStreet: This is What a Populist Alignment Looks Like
Glenn Greenwald asked yesterday whether Occupy Wall Street “can be turned into a Democratic Party movement?”. He discusses how the tone of establishment Democrats has quickly shifted and how many in the Party—including the White House—are now clamoring to figure out how to ride the anti-Wall Street populist wave.
Judd Legum of the Center for American Progress even told the New York Times that “Democrats are already looking for ways to mobilize protesters in get-out-the-vote drives for 2012.”
After detailing the hypocrisy of a Party that is deeply in the pocket of Wall Street, Greenwald concludes:
So best of luck to CAP and the DCCC in their efforts to exploit these protests into some re-branded Obama 2012 crusade and to convince the protesters to engage in civil disobedience and get arrested all to make themselves the 2012 street version of OFA. I think they’re going to need it.
Greenwald is right, I think. Very few of the committed folks who are sacrificing time, safety and comfort to make these occupations happen are going to switch uncritically into re-elect Obama mode.
However, the fact that establishment Dems are clamoring to figure out how to co-opt this energy is a serious victory for genuine progressives and Left radicals. This is what political leverage looks like. Radicals haven’t had it in this country for a very long time, and now we’re getting a taste of it.
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Occupy Wall Street Is You.
A week into the Occupy Wall Street actions in New York, I wrote a short article with perhaps an overly harsh title, Occupy Wall Street: Convergence of a Radical Fringe. I have to admit that I was not very hopeful about the prospects of this mobilization. The rhetoric of the initial call to action seemed out of touch (except for reaching radicals). As inspired by the Arab Spring as I have been this year, I didn’t think—and still don’t think—you can neatly transplant a tactic from one context to a radically different context. Indeed, history is littered with tragically failed attempts to do so. More to the point though, it looked to me like the brave radicals who kicked this thing off were doing the usual thing of putting their counter-cultural foot forward first, and dooming the action to be locked onto that lonely path, where so many Americans who agree with our populist sentiments are inoculated against us as the messengers.
But grassroots movements for change are more often than not rife with all kinds of clumsy missteps. And thankfully the factors that I pointed to have not been enough to stop the growth of this audacious and persistent movement.
This weekend House Majority Leader Eric Cantor decried the “growing mob” of Wall Street protesters, while House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi expressed her support, and the New York Times also endorsed the protest. Overnight, a political force is being born; one that has the potential to frame the national debate and finally create real populist pressure, a counter force to the formidable power of conservatives and big money.
This thing has, no doubt, gone big. It needs to go bigger. And it needs all of us who are sympathetic to help it to go bigger. If you’re waiting to join the perfect action, where you have no critique of any of the visible actors, you will wait forever. History will pass you by. Social change is a messy enterprise. Now is the time to dive into the wonderful mess. Bring your skills, your time, your money — even your critiques.
Most importantly, bring the people you know — not just the “activists” you know. These issues resonate with most Americans. So let’s challenge ourselves to have uncomfortable, unpredictable conversations with the people we know, from our workplaces, our families, our places of worship, our neighborhoods — not just the self-selectors who we meet in explicitly “activist” spaces.
It’s up to us to make sure Occupy Wall Street’s growth trajectory continues. See you in the streets.
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Occupy Wall Street: Small Convergence of a Radical Fringe
Why haven’t the protests on Wall Street sparked a prairie fire of populist rebellion across the country? Why, when Adbusters called for “reinforcements” did these not magically arrive? Why, if the protesters represent the feelings of “99% of Americans” have so very, very few of those represented bothered to support the initiative in any way at all?
Isn’t just about everyone furious with Wall Street right now?
Yes, but turning latent sentiment into coordinated collective action is never as simple as a mere call to action.
But it’s easy to see how a contingent of radicals could come to believe the delusion that the right call to action at the right moment is how mass rebellions are ignited. This formula for instantaneous revolution ignores quite a few essentials, including context, organizing, and leadership.
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 