Looking Back—Occupy Wall Street Found its Voice

Note:  What a difference a year makes.  Last October Occupy Wall Street was gathering steam and finding its voice.  After a slow start, similar protests and actions were spreading across the country.  The dismissive press was beginning to take notice.  A year later the big battles over turf are mostly over.  The movement has gone into a new phase, but has hardly gone away despite the studied attempts of the press to dismiss it as “yesterday’s news” while focusing on the more familiar drama of a presidential election.  But the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.  People have learned not to shut up, to take it to the streets when they must, and organize in new and creative ways to confront exploitation and oppression.  The influence of the Occupy movement is everywhere, and is especially felt in the Labor movement—the Chicago Teachers Strike being a prime example.

But let’s look back for a moment of those early days.  The following post is offered again un-edited by hind sight as it appeared a year ago.

On Friday, the day before New York City Police busted more than 700 marchers on the Brooklyn Bridge apparently just to show that they remembered how, the General Assembly of the Occupy Wall Street protesters issued their Declaration of the Occupation of New York City to explain themselves.

For three weeks the media, when it was not totally ignoring a growing social revolution under their noses, mocked those twice a day Assemblies where the rag tag protestors without visible leaders, command structure and ideology gathered to hash out plans for immediate action, logistic concerns, police relations, and, oh yeah, the purpose of the whole damn thing. 

High profile members of the professional left, used to demonstrations of vast coalitions, huge steering committees, leaders certified by the press as being important, bullet points demands, and pre-printed signage tut-tutted and wrung their hands.

Admittedly, the process as observed through shaky hand held video cam clips posted on YouTube and protest sites, made them look a tad ridiculous.  Denied the use of a public address system or even bull horns by police the participants quickly improvised a system where by comments of speakers were relayed to the whole crowd by repeating short phrases in chorus.  At first it looks like a crowd of zombies blindly parroting anything said to them. 

And because the discussions were open to participation by everyone, not every speaker was succinct or even rational.  Wackos and old lefties with ideological axes to grind got their say.  But so did hundreds, in the end maybe thousands, of ordinary and here-to-fore voiceless citizens.

Formal motions and votes were noticeable by their absence.  As the conversations continued the crowds drifted toward consensus.  It was clear to participants when that consensus was achieved. 

Yet despite everything the Assemblies and their odd processes worked.  Day by Day, week by week the protests in New York grew until they could no longer be ignored.  The young people, tech savvy and knowledgeably in the new ways of social media, found ways to spread the word and build support.  The protest spread to dozens of cities around the country and even attracted international support.

Still, they kept being asked—Where are your demands? What are you doing here? Show us your manifesto so we can shove you into a box and pin a label on you.  So the Assembly went at the work of explaining themselves.

Anyone who has ever tried to draft a document in a committee knows what an irksome, almost impossible task it is.  People argue endlessly not just about the Big Picture but about wording nuance and the placement of semi-colons.  The results usually come out looking like they were constructed by a committee—filled with a mix of buzz words, in group jargon, whereases and wherefores and stilted legalese.  The alternative is to swallow some ringing manifesto composed by a charismatic leader, an act which instantly converts a popular movement to a quickly ossifying ism.

The folks at the Occupy Wall Street Assemblies worked some magic.  I’m not sure just how they did it.  I would have liked to watch the presses in action.  In the end they came out with a clear and concise document that would not paint them into an expected corner.  And they did so with rhetorical grace.

This is what they want to say to the world right now.  Pass it on.

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

Class War Comes Home to Roost

Note:  Portions of this post appeared just a year ago.  The message seems timelier than ever, so I have adapted it for the current moment.

Class War, it’s nothing new.  In fact part of the power of the phrase comes because it conjures up images of bloody revolution.  Depending on which side you are on, you envision the Paris Mob dragging their betters to the guillotine and grim Bolshevik hoards or American militia attacking a camp of sleeping striking miners with machine guns.  My old outfit, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a product of those times, put it unflinchingly in their famous Preamble, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common…”

But we haven’t heard much about Class War in America for the last several decades until fairly recently.  That’s because the Depression era reforms of the New Deal effectively called a truce.  American workers were granted certain protections—child labor laws, the 40 hour work week, the right to unionize, unemployment insurance, Social Security—in exchange for refraining from trying to carry the heads of Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and assorted other malefactors of great wealth around the streets on pikes.

The bargain seemed to work out well for just about everyone concerned.  The reforms, combined with the industrial explosion fueled by World War II production, post-war technological innovation, and the unchallenged dominance of the American economy in the world lifted millions out of what Jack London had called The Abyss into the comfortable middle class.  The bosses made out pretty well, too.  Not only did they find an enormous new markets for their consumer goods and millions of new investors—via pension plans and individual enthusiasm—in their companies, but they could sleep soundly at night without a pistol under the pillow.

In the last decade or so the phrase has been making a comeback, however.  Not on the lips of the working class, mind you, but in the fevered visions of a resurgent right wing.  You started to hear it in Congress every time a Democrat stood up to propose a new program for the poor, or more recently, whenever one would challenge the latest attempts to repeal the New Deal.  Every time any hapless mope would suggest not dropping trousers on command for a good fucking by the rich, wails of “Class War! Class War!” would erupt.  

When the faux populists of the Tea Party, obediently carrying out the orders of the ultra-rich ideologues that funded them, arrived in Congress not only did they capture the Republican Party, but they ratchet up talk of Class War.

And not only in Congress.  A wave of Tea Party governors and state legislatures unencumbered with effective Democratic opposition, enacted wave upon wave of draconian assaults on working people in the name of  budgetary responsibility and “getting government off our backs.”  When the people of Wisconsin rose up en-mass for a sustained series of demonstrations, occupation of the state capital, and recall elections, panic on the right rose to new levels.  Class War! Class War! Class!

But it has become more and more apparent that Class War is what is being waged by a class of plutocrats and oligarchs and their petty hirelings, the alternately snarling and simpering talking heads of a bought and paid for media, and the barely disguised puppets of their own private political party.

With Mitt Romney, despite the fact that he was never trusted by Tea Party mob it created,  the oligarchy finally had one of their very own poised to usurp the last tattered shreds of liberal power.  The utter destruction of Barack Obama  all he stood for seemed at hand.

But Romney and his cronies were too smug.  A secret tape from a deep pocket Florida fundraiser  surfaced with Romney’s forthright admission that he was fighting an intransigent “47% of voters”  who allegedly “paid no taxes” and were so dependent on government handouts that they would never vote for him.  Virtuous producers and wealth makers were not enough to win the election, so Romney begged his donors for money to swamp the undecided 10% into voting for him. 

The uproar upon release was predictable.  The language used insulted half of America, including many folks who traditionally vote Republican—older voters, veterans, the remnants of the blue collar white working class resentful of completion from minorities.  With his campaign in chaos and Republicans and conservative pundits turning on him, not for his meanings, but for being foolish enough to be caught stating plainly what is usually coached in code, Romney said only that he had spoken “inelegantly” but refused to back down on the sentiments.  He, in the popular political buzz phrase of the day,  “doubled down”  and reiterated his position in an op-ed piece and today in a public appearance in Florida.

Predictably, faced with this open declaration of Class War, Romney’s poll numbers, already sinking after the parade of snarlers, bigots, and zealots the Republican Nation Convention have began a free fall.

For his part, as is his want, the President took the reasonable high ground declaring simply that it was his job to be President of “100% of America” and to chat pleasantly with David Letterman.

Yet while contrasting himself to Romney, he did not reject all his opponent has come to mean.  He still spoke of reasonable compromise.  And he did not even plead for the election of a friendly Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress in order to enact a “progressive” agenda now blocked.

Last year after cries of Class War erupted over his jobs bill and plans to modestly raise taxes on the wealthy Obama said, “It’s not Class War, it’s math.”  Clever line, but wrong.  There is a Class War.  It is being wage ruthlessly and effectively—by the wealthy and the new class of their ideological political servants.

Just how far this vision of Class War has come from political maneuvering and posturing was pointed up in a speech to acolytes at that time by right wing Blogger and hero Andrew Breitbard with the bloody scalp of Rep. Andrew Weiner dangling from his belt.  He called for real war—with guns blazing—on Liberals, the enemy in the Class War.  And he made it abundantly clear that he was not speaking metaphorically or in jest.  He meant every word of it, to wit:

I always think to myself, “Fire the first shot.” Bring it on. Because I know who’s on our side. They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns. [audience laughter] I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with. And I have people who come up to me in the military, major named people in the military, who grab me and they go, “Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.”

Now this kind of rhetoric has not been uncommon on the fringe of the fringe, those web sites where Tea Party crazies fade seamlessly into neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, skin heads, Klansmen, and militia types.  Michelle Bachmann  made hints in this direction by referring to possible “Second Amendment options” if electoral politics are not sufficient to create a revolution.  But that was the first time a big name on the right, one who is taken with deadly seriousness by the national media, has come out in advocacy of such violence. 

It would not be the last.  Similar language is popping up from Virginia Republican newsletters to off the cuff speeches by lawmakers and officials in Texas, Arizona, Florida and elsewhere.  None of which is slapped down or denounced by the supposedly respectable elements of the GOP and conservative movement.

The background chatter for class war and revolution is ratcheting up across the cesspool that is the right wing blog-o-sphere.

This rhetoric just plays to the rich fantasy lives of many of followers who cast themselves as the heroes of the epic movies in their heads, dealing death and vengeance with righteousness.  These folks sometimes do not take a lot of prodding, or wink-and-nod approval to cross the line from fantasy to the headlines of the next “crazed lone gunman” story.

In the face off all of this rising spleen, working people, whose lives and incomes have come under tireless assault, have been strangely, until Wisconsin, silent.  But a year of the Occupy Movement has opened up new possibilities of resistance—even of boldly taking an offensive position in a new acknowledged class war.  The mass take-it-to-the-streets energy of the Chicago Teachers’ Strike astounded the pundits who routinely vilify teacher and their unions when parents and the general public flocked to the support of the teachers.

As for me, I am glad for signs that our side of the Class War—here-to-fore the losing side—is beginning to fight back.  Yes, we will fight back in the voting booth.  That is our first defense against a total takeover by the ruthless oligarchy.  But it is in the streets, in the neighborhood, on the job that we will go on the offensive.  We won’t slack our thirst for justice on what trickles down or be grateful for the crumbs brushed for our betters’ tables.  We will demand and take what is by rights our own.

 Class war? Count me as one geezer ready to re-enlist.  Who’s with me?