OWS May Be Working, if...

MSNBC's Chris Hayes released a memo from a Wall Street consulting group this week expressing concern about political sentiment should Democrats exploit the anti-bank Occupy Wall Street movement as the Republicans have the Tea Party. See Hayes report below. The Tea Party connection has created all sorts of complexities for Republican lawmakers. Does the future include the same sort of extreme policy politics on the Democratic side should OWS-supported candidates be elected? And would that move any legislation?

 

Best Zuccotti Insight Yet

NYC Police Ignore Court Order

NYC Police provided the best ammunition the Occupy Wall Street movement could possibly hope to receive in their bull-headed determination to ignore a court order that would allow Zuccotti Park protesters back into the park with their camping gear. Watch the clip below. 

 

This video is excellent in all kinds of ways, depicting: New York City police officials who are determined in their violation of a legal order and come off like thugs; police using willful destruction of personal property to undermine the protesters; youthful protesters whose stake in the movement seems more about being a part of what is going on than anything specific about what OWS is trying to be; and the vulnerable, possibly mentally ill and homeless, who have gravitated to the OWS encampments because it is a place where they can go and rest in relative security.

The disconnect between who the OWS protesters are and what it is they are protesting is staggering. These are not, it seems, the people who have been the victims of the derivative and credit swap schemes that have been at the heart of the housing debacle and attendant credit catastrophes.

The faces that need to be seen as associated with the OWS movement should include the almost 30 percent of mortgage holders in the U.S. who are "underwater" on their home investments, owing far more money than their properties are worth; properties whose values were grossly inflated as part of a package that put unqualified buyers into mortgages on the promise that their adjustable rate mortgages could be renegotiated once they had signed on the dotted line. They were convinced to accept unsustainable payment burdens on the promise that they were temporary, just a way to "get into the game", and then it could all be fixed. Accept that the fix was in because all of this baloney created a housing bubble that burst on everyone. Those who took the gamble and signed up for a mortgage could just write it off as an unfortunate loss if they weren't then doubly-troubled by being the only parties in these transactions to get left out in the cold. The financial institutions all got bailed out on the backs of each and every American taxpayer, but all the underwater mortgage holders got was evicted.

There is a world of stuff to work with in that narrative line, but what continues to be missing from the OWS movement are the voices and the faces of leaders to run with that storyline, because the movement has wanted to be a horizontal structure - and anyone who has ever worked in an organization that commits itself to this flat-earth model has found it to be artificial. Decision-making processes are inherently vertical. There is no such thing as a forward-lateral movement, nor is there a north star to guide by in a horizontal model as that type of useful 3D imagery is nullified by the approach.

Navigating political waters is not different than navigating on the open sea or through a dense forest. If you just look around and survey the horizon, you are not likely to have a great sense of directional orientation. You need to establish a fixed pivot to steer by and to gauge your progress. In the case of a political or social movement, you need a guiding policy directive coupled to objectives.

Sans a well-executed communications strategy fixed to a plan of action with clearly defined goals, the OWS movement, and particularly the Zuccotti Park flagship group, looks a lot like people pretending at something, literally role playing as policy makers and strategists without any real output. This may be only a perception, which is possible given that this movement is only two months old, but it is one that the OWS leaders, whoever they are, had better get a handle on right now or the moment will be lost to the diminution of us all. - RAR

 

NYC Police Clear Zuccotti

"You are required to immediately remove all property, including tents, sleeping bags and tarps from Zuccotti Park. That means you must remove the property now. You will be allowed to return to the park in several hours, when this work is complete. If you decide to return, you will not be permitted to bring your tents, sleeping bags, tarps and similar materials with you."  

 

Zuccotti Park protesters were without camping supplies this morning, after NYC Police launched a surprise 1 a.m. eviction of occupants of the park. Protesters were given the option of leaving or being arrested, but either way the message was that the encampment is finished. This mirrors a number of other high profile police activities regarding OWS sites in Oakland, Boston, Chicago and elsewhere. What this will mean for the OWS movement remains to be seen, but a group committed to a horizontal management structure will likely have trouble determining and executing next steps. Stay tuned... - RAR (11/15/11)

 

 

Hunkering Down for Winter

 

Denver Police Make OWS Arrests

 

 

Police Remove OWS Oakland Camp

   10/25/11

NYC's White Shirts

So what brand of thuggery is this?

Photograph by Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

The images that surfaced at the Occupy Wall Street protests last week, of "White Shirt" Police Officers roughing up protesters and pepper-spraying corralled demonstrators, were more than a little unsettling to viewers who had been watching the disciplined restraint of the "Blue Shirt" Police with some admiration. Depending upon your politics, it was either a clear demonstration that "Dad is home" or that the NYC Police force exists on at least two levels of behavioral and ethical justice. The New York Times quoted one Commander - and that's who the White Shirts are, i.e., guys higher up the chain of Police command - as saying: "There are those of us who wear white shirts, who, I won’t say are afraid of the street, but who never really put their hands on anyone, but took tests and got promoted. Then there are those of us who were good cops to begin with and then got promoted, and we are not afraid to put our hands on people when we have to.”

Wow, dialogue right out of the 10 p.m. network TV police-procedural time slot.

On the other hand, viewers may have watched the chaos unfold, when the White Shirts arrived, and thought about previous events of the so-called "Arab Spring", where authority groups divided into squads of passive control and aggressive disbursement.

To Americans, this double-edged sword of law enforcement and government control carried the odd symbol of class distinction in the form of these blue collar cops and their white collar commanders. Is that not what the Occupy Wall Street protests are at heart all about, the daily control of working class people to the benefit of a select group of white collar thugs? That may not be a precise description of the malfeasances executed by the big banks of Wall Street, but it most certainly captures the feeling of those camped out in the park.

The other symbolic problem is that the most prominent model in recent history that Americans have for white people oppressing other white people is Nazi Germany, where the "White Shirts" could just as easily have been the Gestapo. They had special uniforms, too.

This revelation about the NYC Police, which is no doubt mirrored in every other major police force in the U.S., contributes to the Occupy Wall Street story as another layer of societal facade being peeled away to reveal something that seems against the grain of America's inner myth, and makes it harder for the underlying structure to survive.

The underlying structure in this story is the belief than Americans have traditionally had in their country; that if you just work hard and pay your taxes that you will eventually be rewarded with a middle class life. When the economics of the country have become so badly out of skew and tilted away from basic fairness, the government so divided and beholding to the narrow band of wealthy interests, and the street-level layer of authority so willing to do violence against its own people, what belief is left on which to hold?

This may be a developing storyline in the Occupy Wall Street story, as demonstrators meet daily in workshops and policy groups to try to imagine something better to replace the social-political-economic disaster that literally has them in the streets. - RAR

_______________________