Censorship or editorial judgment?

Occupy Together has posted on Facebook a controversial TED talk given by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. Hanauer says it's a mistake to claim that increasing taxes on the rich will interfere with job creation. He calls this "an article of faith for Republicans" that is "seldom challenged by Democrats."

Jobs are not created by rich people or by capitalists, Hanauer argues, but by a "circle-of-life" type of "feedback loop" between consumers and businesses. If ordinary consumers don't have the resources to make purchases, no jobs are created. Capitalists such as himself only hire more workers as a last resort after demand has increased so much that more workers are absolutely necessary. If tax policies adopted in the US since 1980 that favor the rich really worked, "we would be drowning in jobs."

TED originally failed to post Hanauer's talk, as reported by Ezra Klein and GeekWire. A National Journal post said that TED decided Hanauer's lecture was "too partisan." TED curator Chris Anderson insisted that this was not a matter of censorship, but of editorial judgment, then released the Hanauer video so that viewers could judge for themselves.

I thought that Hanauer gave a vivid description of a fairly standard progressive argument about what causes prosperity or unemployment. What do you think?

Occupying the Left

Katha Pollit at thenation.com tells it like it is.

Robin Morgan on feminists occupying Occupy

Hat tip to Elaine Barton for the link to this fascinating post by Robin Morgan on the Women's Media Center blog. Here's just a sampling of Morgan's analysis:

Having caught the world’s imagination with an admirable energy, seemingly spontaneous and seemingly grassroots, the Occupy movement is now poised at a crossroads. It has enormous potential—but lasting change will require consciousness that doesn’t ignore the majority of humanity. It needs to break free of being “a guy thing” or risk drowning in its own rhetorical generalities.

It’s not as if certain models aren’t there. The women of England’s Greenham Common “occupied” turf decades before OWS—they endured, and won. Irish women barred doors to keep men from storming out of Northern Ireland peace talks. Women in Liberia sat singing for months in a soccer field to birth a revolution. Market women in Ghana brought down a government. Gandhi acknowledged copying the concept of satyagraha—nonviolent resistance—from India’s 19th century women’s suffrage movement. These are different—and long-lasting—techniques of protest, by which at first it seemed the Occupy movement was influenced. (At the risk of offending anarchists, I’ll paraphrase two of the Women’s Media Center slogans: “You have to name it to change it,” and “You have to see it to be it.” As a woman who once agreed “Level everything, then we’ll talk politics,” I recommend examples and clearly articulated demands as pretty good stuff.)

What Morgan is calling for is necessary, but not sufficient. Making the movement less of a guy thing--and less of a white thing--is a very good starting place, however. Do yourself a favor and read her entire post.

Occupy OKC to march for change in OKC politics November 17

This just in from Occupy OKC:

Occupy Wall Street announced a National Day of Action for November 17th and plans for the NYC protestors to occupy the New York Stock Exchange before the bell rings and NYC subways throughout the morning, and are calling for thousands to converge on Foley Square and proceed to Occupy the Bridges to shut down NYC’s business district for a day to protest financial corruption. http://occupywallst.org/action/november-17th/.

In solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, Occupy OKC supporters will begin gathering at
2pm at Kerr Park (now renamed Poet’s Park) to march to City Hall this Thursday at 3pm
and conduct a protest rally against Maps III to highlight local corruption and protest the undue amount of big corporate money influencing local campaigns, to demand raises for police, firefighters, and teachers and show support for Oklahoma City municipal workers.

This link should provide more information about the November 17 protest: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=266340980079556.

 

Wall Street Re-Occupied?

It's almost seven o'clock at night. I have schoolwork to do, and a novel to write. I'm taking a few minutes away from everything to write a brief blog post about Occupy Wall Street trying to reoccupy LibertyZucotti Park. A USTREAM video of events at the park right now, on the evening of November 15, can be found right here.




Rachel Signer has an excellent post at thenation.com about how the New York City movement is reacting to the a New York state supreme court justice's refusal to extend an order that would have allowed the occupier to retake the park.

A young man named Tim Weldon, who has been active in running a daily debate group in Zuccotti Park called Think Tank, said that he’d heard that Mayor Bloomberg had said, at a press conference that morning, that the protesters would now have to occupy the park only with their ideas. “What have we been doing all along?” said Weldon. “We’ve been here, discussing ideas about how to make the world a better place. Where has Mayor Bloomberg been?” He said that Think Tank would find a way to go on, even if they couldn’t hold it in the park.

“Mayor Bloomberg has been saying that we could stay here. But then he gave into his authoritarian temptations and kicked us out,” said Bill Dobbs, who has been involved with the Occupy Wall Street public relations working group, and has been at the park nearly every day over the past seven weeks.

“It’s too early to tell what will happen. This is a setback but we will regroup, continue organizing, and be stronger than ever,” Dobbs continued, as protesters swarmed around him, yelling, “Whose park? Our park?”

The Nation's John Nichol's has a moving editorial on how the raid on the park in the dark of the night also represented a direct attack on the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma City the Occupy OKC Official Facebook Page has a link to a new Web page for the group at okcupy.com. The other Web site for the group, at http://www.occupyokc.com/, is also still up.

I've heard that city governments across the nation are simultaneously evicting Occupy movements from their camping places, but I really have to get back to my school work and don't have time to research that.

Occupying the super committee

When I turned on the radio this morning, I heard news that Occupy Wall Street is marching on Washington D.C. to support the end of Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest US citizens. When I checked out their Web site, I saw this this is so.

According to OWS, "On November 23rd, the Congressional Deficit Reduction Super-Committee will meet to decide on whether or not to keep Obama's extension to the Bush tax-cuts - which only benefit the richest 1% of Americans in any kind of significant way." This is actually the deadline for the committee to complete its work--so this is the day on which it would be voting on its entire plan for deficit reduction.

The OWS march will leave today, November 9, and march 20 miles every day:

A major draw for this march is to encourage more people in rural communities to get involved as well as bring spreading the word along the highway. We are hoping people will join the march along the way; whether for an hour, a day, or the full two weeks, we feel its imperative for OWS to be involved in the historical significance of long distance marches to support, promote, and encourage economic and social equality. We will be walking from 9am to to 5pm (banker hours) and will hold nightly GA's and/or discussions at 7pm in each town where we camp. We will be spending two days off at Occupy Philly and Occupy Baltimore. We are hoping a few people from these occupations will join us in the march to the White House and Occupy DC!.

This raises the question, what is the super committee and what is it doing? The committee was created by the August congressional compromise that ended the standoff over raising the national debt. The Economist has a good summary of that standoff and what the super committee does.

The deal, hammered out just days before that deadline, promises $917 billion in spending cuts over the next decade in return for a two-stage increase in the debt ceiling of $900 billion. After that, a 12-member congressional committee, equally composed of Republicans and Democrats, is to find $1.5 trillion in further deficit reductions that Congress must approve by December 23rd, in return for a similar-sized increase in the debt ceiling. If the committee fails to reach agreement or its proposal is rejected, $1.2 trillion in spending cuts will be triggered, drawn equally from domestic spending and defence.

The House and the Senate will both vote on the super committee agreement, if one is reached, but it will be a straight up-or-down vote with no amendments allowed.

In my opinion, the federal deficit and federal debt are much less of a problem than you might believe, based on mainstream news accounts. (Simply explained, the if the government spends more than it takes in any year, this creates a deficit. Deficits accumulating for a number of years create the national debt.) See this analysis, which I posted in May.

Trying to reduce the deficit at this point--that is, reducing the amount of government spending--could prove devastating to our economy as we struggle with chronic high unemployment and increasing poverty.

Over the past 30 years, taxes have been slashed for the wealthiest US citizens and we have wasted money on numerous unnecessary military adventures, such as the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. During this period of time, when we were mostly governed by right-wing Republicans, the national debt has increased.

Now, conservatives argue for slashing much-needed social programs in order to reduce the deficit and debt. They even insist on attacking Social Security, which has not contributed to the deficit in any way. Conservatives insist on keeping the Bush era tax increases and even want to cut tax rates further--although they express willingness to raise revenue by closing tax loopholes.

Meanwhile, Democrats on the committee seem determined to sell out ordinary people in an attempt to reach a compromise with the Republicans, according to The Nation.

Representative Maxine Waters of California has introduced a bill to repeal the supercommittee, and the $1.2 trillion in cuts it’s mandated to make. She believes the committee is “illegitimate” and “borders on unconstitutional.”

At a breakfast meeting with progressive reporters and bloggers today (October 27), Waters said she knows her bill probably doesn’t have the support to pass right now, but she wants it on the table if the supercommittee deadlocks. “Of course its’s a long shot. But right now people are getting more and more agitated, frustrated and concerned about this supercommittee and not happy that there are those who are saying, including the president, they want even bigger cuts,” Waters said. “So it may fall apart. If it falls apart my bill is there to say ‘kill it.’ ” She added that she’s spoken to several Republicans who are equally unhappy with the supercommittee’s power.

Waters’s frustration is shared by many Democrats in the House, who feel not only shut out from the process by colleagues in the Senate—Baucus is reportedly acting with guidance from Senate majority leader Harry Reid, leaving House minority leader Nancy Pelosi on the sidelines—but are also shocked at the level of cuts to Medicare and Social Security being proposed.

Representative Henry Waxman told Politico today that he has “no stake” in the committee and called it an “outrageous process” that is “not open and transparent.” He said the “things put forward by Democrats…I would never vote for.”

Democrats would like to portray themselves as the party of the 99 percent. There are indeed strong progressive Democrats who are fighting to protect the interests of ordinary working people and the poor.

The Democratic leadership, including President Obama, often seems more interested in making nice with the one percent than in protecting the rest of us. Let's hope that the march of the 99 percent on the nation's capital will encourage them to re-evaluate their position.

Update 11-10-11:  This morning's Progressive Breakfast reports that super committee Democrats continue to lessen their support for maintaining crucial social programs in hopes of reaching a compromise with Republicans.

Occupying my library studies school work

This weekend I stayed away from political and social activities and completed three assignments for my Libraries and Popular Culture class. It's a great class, and I'm learning a lot, and it's definitely worth the work. One of my assignments was to write a review of a documentary dealing with popular culture. I picked the movie Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Mass Media.

I watched the movie and wrote the review, I was struck by exactly how applicable Chomsky's ideas were to the current Occupy movement. So I'm posting my review here in the hopes that it will contribute to discussions of ideas and strategy in our quest to rein in the corporatocracy our nation has become. (If you would like to watch the film, you can do so here. If you can't devote three hours in one sitting to this, you could check out the film from the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System.)

My review follows below:

Introduction

            On November 4 I watched the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. I’ve read some of Chomsky’s political analyses, and I’ve wanted to watch this movie for years. Recently I checked it out from the public library because it seemed very relevant to our class discussions on corporate hegemony in creating mass culture. Manufacturing Consent also seemed an appropriate choice for our class documentary project.

Summary

            This 168-minute film is partly an analysis of Chomsky’s political ideas, partly a biography of Chomsky, and partly an examination of some of his opponents and detractors. Chomsky, a self-described anarcho-syndicalist, says that coercion in human society should take place only for clearly justified reasons. He argues that concentrated private control of economic resources allows the owners of these resources unjustified control over society. In a totalitarian society, elites retain power by using obvious overwhelming force. In a democracy, such as the United States, elites maintain power by “manufacturing consent.”

            Chomsky says that the elites who own and control mass media believe that ordinary people must be diverted and controlled for their own good. This is not done by direct censorship. Major newspapers and major television stations control the political agenda through such strategies as selecting topics, framing issues, filtering information, and setting the boundaries of acceptable debate. 

As an example of this process, Chomsky compares US media coverage of genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s with coverage of atrocities committed by US-backed Indonesian forces against the people of East Timor in the same time period. He argues that abuses committed by US enemies were exaggerated while abuses committed by US allies were ignored.

Additional Sources

            Making a balanced selection of additional sources related to this movie was challenging because Chomsky’s opponents often use such extreme language in attacking him that they undermine the credibility of their own case. My own sympathy with Chomsky’s views undoubtedly made it more difficult for me to be neutral. Nevertheless, I hope this resource list would be useful to library patrons who had a variety of responses to the film.

1. The IMDB Web page on Manufacturing Consent (Internet Movie Database n.d.) contains reviews from both viewers and critics. While most of these reviews are positive, there are cogent dissenting points of view, as well as links to message boards for further discussion. There is also a link that allows a viewer to watch the movie for free.
2. Z Magazine was one of the sources of information that Chomsky suggested in the film. This website by the publishers of the magazine (Z Communications n.d.) contains links to much news and analysis from a libertarian socialist point of view, as well as a link to an online version of the magazine. Viewers who found the movie convincing would particularly like this site, and Chomsky himself has a blog here.
3. This page (Wvong 2001) by Canadian computer programmer Russil Wvong offers a critical assessment of Chomsky’s work. While agreeing with Chomsky in part, Wvong also presents evidence that Chomsky advances his claims in intellectually dishonest ways. Wvong also argues that Chomsky is willing to accept human rights abuses when perpetrated by regimes he supports.
4. The book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Herman and Chomsky 1988) offer a clearer and more comprehensive explanation of Chomsky’s “propaganda model” than the movie does.

Discussion Topic

            Noam Chomsky, a linguist by training, is most emphatically not part of the culture-and-civilization tradition. His work on universal grammar—which he believes is hard-wired into the human brain—has convinced him that ordinary people are creative geniuses. He doesn’t believe that ordinary people are dupes, but simply that they lack resources to gain complete information.

            In the 1992 movie, Chomsky advanced a specific model for how corporate elites create and maintain what Antonio Gramsci calls “hegemony” over popular culture. Chomsky argued that most news media outlets are owned by giant corporations that share the interests of the rest of the ruling elite. This allows them to control the terms of popular debate and crowd out dissenting ideas.

            Do you think Chomsky’s argument was accurate in 1992? This movie was released before widespread public use of the Internet. How has the existence of the Internet affected the accuracy of Chomsky’s position? Does greater availability of the means to publish mean that corporate control is much less of a problem than it was?

References

Achbar, Mark and Peter Wintonick (directors). 1992. Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. Necessary Illusions/National Film Board of Canada. Zeitgeist Films, 2002, DVD. Includes Chomsky’s 2002 reflections on the film, extended excerpts of 1969 Firing     Line debate with William F. Buckley, Jr., and a 1971 discussion with Michel Foucault.

Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of  the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.

Internet Movie Database. n.d. “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.”             http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104810/. Accessed November 5, 2011.

Wvong, Russil. 2001. “Noam Chomsky: A Critical Review.” http://www.russilwvong.com/future/chomsky.html.  Accessed November 5, 2011.

Z Communications. n.d. “Z Net: A Community of People Committed to Social Change.”           http://www.zcommunications.org/znet. Accessed November 5, 2011.

Occupied our state capitol

On Saturday afternoon Oct.29, Occupy OKC conducted a rally at the Oklahoma State Capitol as part of a nationwide Occupy Your State Capitol event. A variety of speakers and marchers supported clean, publicly financed elections, public schools, public libraries, unions, jobs for all, and an end to corporate dominance of the US political and economic system. I estimated that more than 100 people were in attendance when I arrived at about 1:30 p.m. A friend told me that more people had been present earlier, and one participant estimated peak participation at 200 people. The next Occupy OKC event is a candlelight vigil tomorrow night (Sunday, Oct. 30) in Kerr Park in downtown Oklahoma City. Kerr Park is located on Robert S. Kerr Avenue between Robinson and Broadway.

Occupy Wall Street and feminism

Okay, I've got to quit blogging and get back to my school work, but I just discovered something that I liked a lot, a post by Judith Levine on the Web site of the Vermont weekly Seven Days. She says that the Occupy movement is more like the feminist movement of the seventies and the women's peace camp movement of the eighties than it is like the sixties anti-war movement:

The closest ancestor of Occupy Wall Street was the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Berkshire, England. The encampment started in 1981, after some Welsh feminists called Women for Life on Earth marched from Cardiff to the RAF military base in Berkshire, asking to debate the siting of 96 U.S. cruise nuclear missiles there. Ignored, the women pitched their tents outside the fence. They were told to take their tents down. They slept under tarps or in the open. Over the years, thousands camped out, with as many as 70,000 showing up to link hands and encircle — or, as they put it, “embrace” — the base.

Journalists arrived from everywhere. Other camps sprang up across Europe. The women conducted thousands of acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to slow the war machine. They were repeatedly evicted and arrested. But they stayed — for 10 years, until the missiles left, and nine years more, until a monument to their struggle was erected.

Forget comparisons to the ’60s. What the current Occupy movement is emphatically not like is the old (pre feminist, male) New Left. The Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York’s Zuccotti Park (renamed Liberty Square) is a feminist phenomenon in both deep and quotidian ways — not just in the ubiquity of women protestors but in its group process, nonviolent ethos, aesthetic feel and emotional tenor.

Now, I don't look at things in quite the same way that Judith Levine does. First, I'm a bit puzzled that she didn't mention the U.S. women's peace camps. There were at least two, one at Seneca Falls in New York, and at Puget Sound in Washington State.

Second, having spent some time at the OKC Occupation at Kerr Park, I am pleased and impressed with the movement (and consider myself part of it). But I wouldn't go so far as to call it feminist. Women are active in this movement, and not just at a token level, but it still seems male dominated to me.

Nevertheless, I think that Judith Levine is a hundred percent right in the way she describes the movement's philosophy and organization. She has absolutely described the thing that keeps bringing me back down to Kerr Park.

Now if you'll excuse me, I really do need to catch up on my reading for my classes.

What's going on in Oakland?

This morning the radio news brought word of an intense ongoing clash between police and Occupy movement members in Oakland California. Once I was awake I got online to find more information. I wasn't sure about what I was going to find. I support the Occupy movement, and consider myself a part of it. I also remember demonstrations back in Eugene, Oregon, where macho-male anarchists seemed to crave confrontations with the police. And yes, the police generally overreacted, but the story was ususally more complicated than a simple one of brutal police squashing peaceful protests. While I still can't be sure what happened in Oakland, what I've seen and read leads me to believe that the protesters were mostly peaceful and the police went off the wall.

So here's what I found. The Los Angeles Times reported that Oakland Police admitted using tear gas and bean-bag rounds against protesters, but said this was necessary to defend themselves against bottles, rocks, and paintballs that protesters were throwing at them. According to the Times, protesters accused the police of also using flash grenades and rubber bullets, and claimed that some paintballs were directed at police, but only after police charged the crowd.

I found this analysis from Colorlines to be really useful and interesting. For one thing, it pointed out that the Oakland police department has a history of deadly unlawful violence and racial profiling -- a history made more complicated by the recent election of an Asian-American woman mayor who appointed an African-American man as police chief:

Miller’s questions to Taylor about the role of race in the policing of Occupy Oakjland points to what is and will continue to be the larger question in Oakland and other U.S. cities where former “minorities” are becoming majorities: What does it mean when those charged with defending elite interests against multi-racial and increasingly non-white activists are themselves multiracial and non-white? The ongoing protests, mayor recall, phone calls, emails and other pressure and pushback of Occupy Oakland are no longer aimed at cigar-smoking white men. They are aimed at a power structure in Oakland whose public face looks more like Miller and other non-white protesters.

Miller and others are calling for the recall of Jean Quan, who made history as Oakland’s first Asian-American mayor (full disclosure: Quan’s daughter is my Facebook friend); and they are complaining about the use of excessive police violence authorized by Interim Chief Howard Jordan, an African American. Such conflicts between former minorities are becoming the norm in what more conservative commentators call the “post-racial” era ushered in by the election of Obama.

Quan and Jordan are in the throes of dealing with a police department plagued by officer-involved shootings and killings, corruption and other crimes—crimes that have forced a federal consent decree to reform the department, after officers were convicted of planting evidence and beating suspects in West Oakland. Taking her cue from the Obama campaign of 2008, Quan announced Jordan’s appointment at a public safety forum titled “Creating Hope in the Community.”

Finally, the folks at Democracy Now! had an excellent segment on the Oakland situation this morning:



It appears that police departments nationwide are trying to create unfavorable stereotypes about the Occupy movement in order to limit free speech rights and peaceful protest.

Remembering Anita Hill

Like many women I know, I've been very interested lately in keeping up with the Occupy movement that started on Wall Street and has spread all over the United States and even the world. I keep running into my feminist friends down at Kerr Park in downtown Oklahoma City--and not the same ones, either.

Feminism as I know it is a movement about complete transformation of an oppressive world. Feminist analysis generally starts with an examination of gender, but it's not about keeping the same rotten system except with equal opportunity for women to be oppressors. Even though the Occupy movement has very little explicit feminist analysis, it has the feel of it of something that means to get to the roots of oppression and dig them out.

I was looking through my inbox looking for material for my latest blog post about Occupy OKC when I came across this reminder of events from 20 years ago that brought the nation face to face with the pervasive reality of sexual harassment in the workplace. As Emily Douglas of The Nation writes:

After the hearings in which Anita Hill testified about the harassment she’d been subjected to as an employee working under Clarence Thomas at the Department of Education and EEOC, and after Thomas had been confirmed to the Supreme Court, polls suggested that 70 percent of Americans felt Hill had been treated fairly by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It would take years before Hill would be vindicated in the view of the broader public—but, in the words of Catharine MacKinnon, the hearings served as a “massive consciousness-changing session” for the entire country. Even those who didn’t believe her were forced to admit that if what she said was true, Thomas should not have been confirmed to the Supreme Court—implicitly acknowledging that sexual harassment, long considered “just life,” was wrong, and women shouldn’t have to put up with it.

Of course, feminists had been talking about sexual harassment for years and organizing to end it. But it the grace and courage of University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill forced the nation to deal with this issue as never before.

With Hill's example to inspire them, women in Washington state shared with the press their stories of having been harassed and physically molested by Democratic Senator Brock Adams. Adams was driven from office by the allegations in 1992.

Oregon Republican Bob Packwood was the next to go. He had been narrowly re-elected to the Senate before the reports surfaced that he had a long history of sexually harassing female employees. Packwood finally resigned in 1995, after the Senate Ethics Committee unanimously recommended that he should be thrown out of the Senate.

As Emily Houston's Nation post reported, on Oct. 15 there was a conference honoring Hill at Hunter College in New York. I remember listening to the coverage of Hill's testimony 20 years ago and being filled with awe at her courage and filled with rage at the story that she told. Today, the fight against sexual harassment is not over, but it is less likely to be treated as a joke.

So here's a big thank you to Anita Hill, and a thank you to the feminist movements that have worked so hard to stop harassment. This serves as a reminder that when you move against injustice, people may treat you with disdain. Persistence is our only hope of success.

October 15 OKC rally

About 100 people gathered in Kerr Park in downtown Oklahoma City on Saturday, Oct. 15 as part of a global day of action in support of Occupy Wall Street. I counted 80 people listening to speakers and another saw about another 20 in the plaza where the food tables and working areas were located. I also saw nine tents in the camping area. Here are some pictures:

More people were on the steps behind this area.

This is what the Occupy movement is all about.

The daily schedule for the OKC Occupiers.

Some of the tents in the camping area.

The kitchen feeds anyone who needs food.

What about the one percent?

Thanks to Truthout for reposting  this excellent analysis by Mike Konczal of New Deal 2.0. What Konczal shows is the way that income has been redistributed over the past 30 years in a way that favors executives, managers, and stock traders.

     There’s a reason the protests ended up on Wall Street: The top 1% and top 0.1% comprises all the senior bosses and the financial sector.

      One of the best things about Occupy Wall Street is that there is no chatter about Obama or Perry or whatever is the electoral political issue of the day. There are a lot of people rethinking things, discussing, learning, and conceptualizing the kinds of world they want to create. Since so much about inequality is a function of the legal structure known as a “corporation,” I’d encourage you to check out Alex Gourevitch on how the corporate is structured in our laws.

      The paper notes that stock market returns drive much of the manager’s income. This is related to a process of financialization, something JW Mason has done a fantastic job outlining here. The “dominant ethos among managers today is that a business exists only to enrich its shareholders, including, of course, senior managers themselves,” and this is done by paying out more in dividends that is earned in profits. Think of it as our-real-economy-as-ATM-machine, cashing out wealth during the good times and then leaving workers and the rest of the real economy to deal with the aftermath.

In other words, the reason for increasing inequality in our society is not because some people have worked harder or smarter than the rest of us. It's because the very few people with the most wealth also have accumulated the political power to rip off the rest of us.

The advantages of "disunity"

Donnie is smiling because we're taking our
future back.

It's been a busy week for me with work and grad school, and besides that, I went to hear a presentation by Indian feminist activist Pramada Menon at OU on Wednesday night. Given that, I haven't had chance to get back down to the OKC occupation since Tuesday night. According to the Occupy OKC Web site, there was a march on Chase Bank yesterday afternoon and a rally today at noon. I writing this quickly before I head off to that demonstration.

Tuesday night my girlfriend and I went downtown to check out the occupation. As had been true on Monday night, there were about 50 people present, but although there was some overlap, it wasn't the same 50 people. My sense is that this movement is made up of ordinary people with lots of other responsibilities, folks who mostly aren't able to devote all their time to the movement, but who show up when they can. It would be great if the OKC occupiers developed greater coherence and a more focused strategy. For instance, the Occupy OKC Official Facebook page had no clear announcement that there is indeed a rally at Kerr Park today at noon up until an hour or two before the rally. But the fact that this movement is being put on by overworked ordinary people instead of PR professionals helps to explain that.

The other thing that helps to explain some of the lack of a focused message--both in OKC and in the wider Occupy movement--is that it is indeed a movement of the 99 percent of the population that has been increasingly excluded from the nation's prosperity over the past 30 years. And the truth is, the 99 percent don't have complete agreement amongst ourselves about many important issues.

We don't agree about feminism, abortion rights, gay rights, unions, or the environment. We don't agree about whether the XL pipeline is something we should oppose because of its disastrous environmental consequences, or something we should support because it will provide living-wage union jobs, at least for a short period of time. We don't agree about whether we should eliminate the Federal Reserve.

I believe that disagreement is important, and ought to be treated with the greatest respect. Many people are understandably distressed about the polarization and name-calling that has come to dominate political conversation in the US.

One way to change this is the way that the mainstream Democratic party has chosen--the method of defining an arbitrary "middle ground," and telling everyone else to shut up for the sake of "unity." The other way is for ordinary people to actually start talking to each other across the boundaries of our different beliefs, to reach consensus about what we can, to learn to disagree respectfully when we can't.

I believe that this "other way"is what is starting to happen on the streets of the United States under the auspices of the Occupy movement. And I think that's a good thing.

Wall Street occupation not evicted for now

Last night my inbox was flooded with messages from progressive groups warning that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was about to evict Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park, under the pretext that it needed to be cleaned. Nation.com blogger Allison Kilkenny reports that the occupiers have won the showdown, at least temporarily:

This was the first protest I’ve ever covered where the activists won – if only a battle, and not the war, and if only temporarily. And the victory is definitely temporary. Major problems have not been resolved and large questions remain: Will the protesters be able to bring their sleeping bags back into Liberty Park? Will they be able to sleep on the ground? Fourteen hours ago, Mayor Bloomberg declared protesters wouldn’t be able to return their gear to the park, and now the decree came down to postpone the cleaning entirely. Why the change of tune?

Many were braced for a disastrous clash with the police and were instead handed not a truce, but ongoing purgatory followed by a run-in with the authorities at a second location. After the cries of victory went up, a group of about a hundred protesters marched up the middle of Broadway. This caused quite a stir at Liberty. Many thought it was bad strategy, abandoning the camp when it was still so vulnerable, but some of the protesters seemed to have gotten a taste of victory and wanted to go on a celebration lap. At the gates of City Hall, protesters clashed with police armed with riot gear, and as of this report, six individuals have been arrested thus far.

Rawstory.com has this link to a live video stream provided by Occupy Wall Street to what is happening right now. (Hat tip to commondreams.org for posting its Twitter feed on its Occupy Wall Street page--that's how I found this link.)

Occupy OKC rally scheduled for Saturday noon

There are several posts about the Occupy movement that are in my head waiting to be written. For now, the only thing I have time for is a note that a rally to support Occupy OKC is scheduled for this Saturday at noon at the Kerr Park amphitheater, located on Robert S. Kerr Avenue between Broadway and Robinson.

The protest rally this Saturday will be a family friendly event designed to show solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy groups in our country and around the world, and to demand ACCOUNTABILITY from our Government & Wall Street! Occupy OKC fully supports the principles set forth in the Declaration adopted and published by the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street at Zuccoti Park in New York City, NY.,

The text of this declaration can be read here.

Occupy OKC has also adopted "Open Fair Organizational Practices" and a new structure for this group. I'll try to blog more about this later. You might also check out the Occupy OKC Official Facebook Page, the Occupy OKC Web site, and their online forums.

OKC occupation continues

The occupation continues at Kerr Park in Downtown Oklahoma City, and a march (maybe two) took place on Tuesday afternoon. I hope to provide more details later, but at this moment it's my bedtime.

How it felt to go the OKC General Assembly

The General Assembly of Occupy OKC met Friday evening in Kerr Park in downtown Oklahoma City, and probably agreed to begin its occupation of Kerr Park on the afternoon of Columbus Day. I say "probably," because when you get 300 people trying to do consensus decision making without much prior experience, you get a few rough edges.

You get the tension between wanting to have a coherent strategy and consensus about goals, and wanting to take action while energy is high. You get the tension between wanting to have unified positions, and honoring diversity of experience and belief. You get a meeting that goes on that it probably should have, with people getting a bit cranky because they probably need a nap and a snack. You get all of the complications of communicating via "human microphone" to avoid breaking of laws requiring a police permit to use amplified sound.

This is not paint-by-numbers. This is not the packaged cake mix that is fast to fix, but oh-so-bland and unsatisfying. This is going to be the real homemade work of art, the thing that produces broken eggs and broken crayons and probably a few broken hearts in the process of creating a new world.


I sat there scribbling notes, but now I can't seem to find words for what I feel. Maybe it's irrational hope. For the past thirty years the patriarchs, the capitalists, the race-baiters, the gay-haters, the generals, the right-wing t.v. preachers have made the United States into a meaner, greedier place, a place where 99 percent of us are sinking fast. I feel that I have done what I've known how to do to change it, but that hasn't seemed like much. And now, maybe here is a chance for something to be better.

So it looked like most of the people in the crowd were in their twenties or thirties. The crowd was not entirely white, but there were few people of color there. I felt much more comfortable in this crowd than I'd expected to feel--this was even before I found a few trusty Herland dyke friends to sit with--but much more than half of the people in the crowd were male. But half or more of the moderators and team leaders seemed to be women. And this was a crowd that despite its differences seemed to be united in its egalitarianism.

For instance, when Brittany, the representative of the Action Team, spoke in favor of beginning the occupation on Monday, a large part of her reasoning had to do with the fact that Columbus Day symbolizes the fact that "this land was taken from indigenous people"--and that we have a responsibility to counteract that injustice.

And when one speaker insisted on the importance of having a clear list of demands, one young man standing in the back row said something like, "We all agree that we need the one percent to stop acting like dicks."

Exactly, sir, And I appreciate your dedication to the cause of ending patriarchy.

More on Occupy Wall Street

If you missed it, my first post is here.

Betsy Reed at The Nation has an interesting analysis of the march and its supposed lack of demands:

t’s not that the demands being suggested by OWS’s volunteer policy advisors in the blogosphere are not worthy ideas. At a time when we desperately need to rein in financial speculation and change the incentives on Wall Street, a financial transactions tax is a terrific policy proposal. Dean Baker has been talking about it for years. The thing is, we on the left don’t have a scarcity of policy ideas. We are positively bursting with them. Create a housing trust fund! A national infrastructure bank! And, yes, sure, eliminate the carried interest loophole so fat cats don’t get a bigger tax break than working people. (Some even have more radical ideas, which are quite sensible too.) But at best, we get a polite hearing for these ideas, which then fade away or are hopelessly watered down. We simply lack the power to put them into practice.

And in the recent past, even the most smoothly organized, expertly messaged mass demonstrations have not made a whit of difference in this regard. Consider the last big march on Wall Street this past May 12. The coalition behind it was admirably diverse, including unions like the teachers and SEIU’s 1199, as well as local community organizations such as Citizen Action NY, Coalition for the Homeless and Community Voices Heard. The “May 12 Coalition,” which turned out thousands of protesters on the appointed day, presented the Bloomberg administration with a proposal that exhibited great thoughtfulness in its rigor and detail, asking banks like JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley to take a 20 percent cut in their contracts to handle functions like child support disbursements or income tax remittances for the city. This would have saved $120 million, part of $1.5 billion that could have been extracted from the banking sector to prevent the city from having to slash education and social services, according to the coalition.

I would also like to nominate this song by Bonnie Lockhart as the movement's unofficial anthem:

Occupied

A few weeks ago I started receiving e-mails from organizations who were sponsoring a protest to occupy Wall Street. I deleted these e-mails without paying much attention to them. Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of the stock market or the financial speculation industry that seems to have eaten the US economy, and I remember how they helped to crash our economy. But I didn't think these protests sounded as if they'd been planned very well, and I couldn't imagine them being effective.

I seem to have been very wrong.

Now, the mainstream and alternative news (and my inbox) seem to be full of news of a movement that has spread across the US in the past two or three weeks. Busy grad student that I am, I am still trying to sort through all of this stuff and make sense of it.

Here is what I've figured out so far.

First, the feminist peace group Code Pink is leading an effort to make sure the demonstrations are inclusive and have a feminist perspective. See this great post on AlterNet by Melanie Butler:

If Week I of Occupy Wall Street was about surviving, Week II has been about finding our voices. This protest is about the 99 percent of people in America who have been on the short end of the economic stick, but it appears the media believes it's 90 percent made up of men. Some of the organizing and facilitation processes we've developed to make our movement inclusive and participatory have proven not to be enough, and we are constantly adapting and regrouping to ensure that everyone's voice in this broad and vibrant coalition is heard.

Via an e-mail from Code Pink, I also found out about Occupy Together. Their Web site says that they're "an unofficial hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.," and they also have a Facebook page.

Thanks to a link shared by a friend on Facebook, I found out that there is a local Occupy OKC group, which as a Facebook page and a Web site. Their next "general assembly" is scheduled for tomorrow, Friday Oct. 7, at 7 p.m. at Kerr Park in downtown OKC. I'm not sure I'll be able to make this, but it looks interesting.