Inside Occupy Wall Street

By Danny Schechter

An NYPD officer looks with scrutiny at the photographer taking his picture during the Occupy Wall Street protests, 09/24/11. (photo: Peter Harris)

Before you read on, watch this: a video from the base camp of the #OccupyWallStreet protest that is now in its seventh day. It’s called “Nobody Can Predict the Moment of Revolution.” (The video was produced by Martyna Starosta and her friend Iva.) 

These are the faces of a wannabe revolution, more than a protest but not yet quite a major Movement. The spirit is infectious, perhaps because of the sincerity of the participants and their obvious commitment to their ideals.  Occupy Wall Street is more than a protest; it is as much an exercise in building a leaderless, bottom-up resistance community with a more democratic approach to challenging the system where everyone is encouraged to have a say.

But saying that also leads to a conflict between my emotional identification with the kids that have rallied in this small park/public space on Liberty Street to exercise some liberty, with a despairing analysis that wishes this enterprise well but harbors deep doubts about its staying power and impact.

This privately-owned park, devastated by debris on 9/11 and then rebuilt by a real estate magnate who named it after himself, is also a place that is under 24-hour surveillance from a hostile New York City Police Department which has put up a fence on one side of the park, brought down a spy tower from Times Square to track the participants from on high, and sprinkled infiltrators into the crowd.

By the time I left, late on Saturday afternoon, the police had arrested 70 people who had joined a march that went from Wall Street to Union Square, New York’s traditional gathering place for political rallies for nearly l00 years.

You can watch it all on a live stream.

In many ways this is a 2011-style protest modeled after Tahrir Square in Cairo. It is non-violent, organized around what’s called a “General Assembly” where the community meets daily to debate its political direction and discuss how it sees itself. There are no formal leaders or spokespeople, no written-down political agenda and no shared demands. They focus on using social media. Twitter is their megaphone.

They have no sound system. When participants want to make an announcement, they yell “Mic Check,” which is repeated by the whole crowd. They also repeat the announcement a few words at a time so everyone can hear it.

This bottom-up anarchist sensibility and ideology conflicts with the mass mobilizations of old where an organization issues a call and a coalition of groups carries it out.

I ran into some of yesterday’s movement leaders: Leslie Cagan, who ran United for Peace and Justice and organized the massive anti-Iraq War protests and marches in New York and Washington before and after. She was as intrigued as I was about this gathering of the committed. She found the focus a bit vague, but seemed willing to give it a chance to grow and learn by making its own mistakes.

Other 60s activists like Aron Kay, known as the “pie man” for all the famous and infamous people he pied in the face to protest their crimes and misdemeanors — including Andy Warhol for dining with the Shah of Iran — was also showing his solidarity by turning up and squatting in the park.

Lower Manhattan on a Saturday is usually a Mosque-less Mecca for tourists visiting Ground Zero, a crime scene if there ever was one. It is a symbol of a national failure to defend this country as well.

It’s also the place where the 911 Truth Movement shares its findings weekly with visitors about what “really happened.”

Just a few blocks away is another crime scene: Wall Street, which symbolizes an ongoing economic failure. In this past week, access has been limited, and in this free country of ours protestors could not parade in front of the NY Stock Exchange, another privately-run financial institution. That led Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog to opine, “I’m beginning to wonder whether the right to assemble is effectively dead in the US.”

Many banks like Chase doubled their security forces and put up fences to protect themselves from the people the NY media hve labeled “kids and ageing hippies.”

The panic in the exchange is mirrored in the insecurity in the streets where surveillance cameras, private police forces and NY cops defend the bastions of privilege.

The police went on the offensive Saturday with mass arrests of activists. Scott Galindez filed this report on Reader Supported News, “While the live feeds were up I witnessed a very powerful arrest of a law student whose parents were recently evicted from their home. He dropped to his knees and gave an impassioned plea for the American people to wake up! There are reports of police kettling protesters with a big orange net, at least five maced, and police using tasers.”

There were also reports of the use of mace, tear gas and pepper spray which hit two old women. We are so used to these storm-trooper tactics that most expect them. There had been fewer arrests last week, although the police seem to now have identified key organizers and are singling them out.

On Saturday, police gave out a notice saying that it is now illegal to sleep in the park. They then put up a sign on a park wall. I watched a member of the police command, a “white shirt” named Timoney, march into the park and gruffly order the communications team that spends most of its time tweeting out the latest news to take down some large umbrellas the activists were using to protect their computers from rain.

The police consider these “structures” and prohibit them. Earlier in the week, they arrested people for using tarps to protect their gear. (They don’t see the irony in that term given the way the TARP law bailed out the banksters.)

Many of the people in the park believe the end may be coming with the police eager to end what they see as a Woodstock on Wall Street, complete with topless teens and long-haired militants. This assemblage clearly affects their macho Identity as upholders of law and order as they define it. They probably agree with the right-wing Red State website that calls the protesters a “menagerie.”

I wouldn’t rule out mass arrests once a provocation, theirs or the protesters’, provides the pretext.

Will the Occupy Wall Street collectives be able to continue to occupy a zone that has been occupied for years by the greedsters of the finance world?

More importantly, will the issues they are trying to draw attention to, however symbolically, be taken up by others?

Will it take more cracked heads, or even a police killing, to move New Yorkers to support a campaign to rein in Wall Street?

Where are the unions and New York’s progressive democrats and organizations? Why aren’t they in the streets?

Why don’t they realize that economic justice issues are essential to transforming this oligarch-driven country?

I have been calling for years for more protests on Wall Street to put the issues of Wall Street crime on the agenda. But with media barely covering this “occupation,” with the activists being denigrated for their youth and inexperience, will this one have the impact I was hoping for?

It seems unlikely.

DANNY SCHECHTER is a veteran activist, blogger and media person. 

Cross-posted from Reader Supported News

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The Sound and the Fury: A Critique of Occupy Wall Street

Posted by  on 9/25/11 
Annals of the Revolution manqué
The lack of a disciplined, politically mature, clear-sighted anticapitalist vanguard party is more painfully evident than ever.  And not only here, in the Belly of the Beast, but literally everywhere. —Eds.

AMBER FROST and RYAN BRILES

So, if you’ve been reading any alternative news outlet this week, you know about the Occupy Wall Street protest. In a nutshell, the protest is taking the form of an occupation nearby Zuccotti Park (since the police knew about the Facebook group they blocked off Wall Street) as well as various marches around the Financial District. It began on September 17th and the organizers plan on an indefinite stay. But, what is really going on down there? What are the demands? What are the guiding principles? And most importantly, is all of this sound and fury going to signify anything? 

Well, let’s examine this, pro and con style.

Pro: The organizers want to develop demands in a democratic manner, via a general assembly. Con: It’s really hard to have a protest that doesn’t have a clear goal in mind. A general assembly of whoever happens to drift by is an unwieldy beast. Not to mention that the working class doesn’t have the time or resources to hang around in Lower Manhattan and dedicate their lives to assemblies. Saul Alinsky wrote that “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” They know what they are against, but they can’t decide on what they’re for. Something simple like the reinstatement of the millionaire’s tax or Glass-Steagall, or something bigger like the nationalization of the banks would work.

Pro: They seem to have an idea of the intersectionality of the economic issues facing America. Here’s a working draft of their manifesto.  Con: Pretty vague manifesto, huh? Also, adding every conceivable cause (environmentalism, anti-capital punishment, anti-war signs were all present) to an economic protest can easily distract from the main point if you don’t do it right. This is a common problem on the Left and can be fixed with one simple phrase: “Yes, that’s a really important issue, but we’re not talking about that now.”  Because they’re not making a clear connection between these related issues, the multiplicity of them makes Occupy Wall Street look like a confusing sounding board for every sort of complaint about America. Yes, we know that marijuana legalization is related to capitalism, but to the casual observer it’s left field.

Pro: They seem really interested in fostering a social relationship between the protestors. This is great because comrades aren’t comrades without camaraderie. Con: Assuming there is a universal activist culture is alienating. Look, some people might really like Bob Marley sing-a-longs, drum circles, and group yoga, but to some of us, those things make you look like a privileged, white, upper middle class hippie going through an “activist” phase. For some of us, this struggle is our lives. We literally live it every single day and find this treatment of it to be trivializing.

Pro: They’re not afraid to get arrested. On September 24th, almost ninety of them were carted off by the police and some of them were beaten, tasered, and pepper sprayed. Case in point: Here.  Con: They don’t know how to get arrested effectively. Initially, most people had no idea that the cops were looking to arrest them, or what kinds of actions were likely to lead to arrest. They also haven’t decided on a policy regarding interactions with the police. Some people goad them (shouting “fuck the pigs” and whatnot) and some ignore them. They have a table with legal information on it now, but there’s still no real consensus on how to interact with the law.

Pro: They’re willing to do something new and radical.   Con: They think that they’re doing something new and radical. As we well know, there is nothing new under the sun, including democratic general assemblies. They appear to be falling headlong into pitfalls that labor activists and ‘60s and ‘70s radicals know well. A conversation with these seasoned veterans could have helped to avoid them. There is an element of newness to what is going on, but they aren’t reinventing the wheel here. The old cliché about being doomed to repeat history applies to this. The Left needs to use its resources. One of those resources is the wealth of experience.

So, once again, is this going anywhere? We’re not sure. If they can get some demands together (which some protestors are actively opposing), several big unions will pledge support. An increase in age and class diversity would do them well. In addition, the media blackout has swept the actions under the rug, but Saturday’s blatant police brutality has made headlines. There are some really committed people there and hopefully they can get some organization going. Right now they have the sound and the fury; they just need something to signify. We’ll be back out there with them, but probably not until next weekend. After all, we have to work.

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IF YOU THINK THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA ARE A DISGRACE AND A HUGE OBSTACLE
to real change in America why haven’t you sent at least a few dollars to The Greanville Post (or a similar anti-corporate citizen’s media?). Think about it.  Without educating and organizing our ranks our cause is DOA. That’s why our new citizens’ media need your support. Send your badly needed check to “TGP, P.O. Box 1028, Brewster, NY 10509-1028.” Make checks out to “P. Greanville/ TGP”.  (A contribution of any amount can also be made via Paypal and MC or VISA.)

THANK YOU.
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