Occupy is an unprotected trademark

Posted on May 14, 2013 by

Sarah Maslin Nir produced a nice piece in the New York Times that identified–and poked at–the ever-increasing diversity of people and groups claiming to be Occupy.

After Hurricane Superstorm Sandy hit New York, Occupy activists focused their efforts on helping those most hurt by the storm.  Occupiers raised money, cleared debris, and helped people navigate social services.  By all accounts, they were extremely effective.

Nir asks whether this turn embodies the Occupy ethos or represents a move away from meaningful advocacy.  Activists disagree.  Nir reports:

“We’re helping poor people; before we were fighting rich people,” said Goldi Guerra…..  “It’s still the same equation. But it’s much more glass half full, optimistic, giving and… ‘legal.’”

But other Occupiers see the cooperation with police and other authorities, fundraising from large corporations, and the redirection to service, as diversions from challenging and changing a fundamentally unjust social structure.

Figuring out what Occupy is all about is no easy matter.  In the early phase a broad collection of challenges to economic and political inequality were united around a tactic, the Occupation.  When the Occupations were cleared out, in accord with the base democratic ethos of the movement, activists spun out and launched an extraordinarily broad range of Occupy campaigns.

Occupiers focused on student debt, foreclosures, the Keystone Pipeline, electoral politics, and even the National Rifle Association.

This is just a sliver of the Occupy activism out there.  I wouldn’t dare to estimate the number of Facebook groups and local campaigns claiming Occupy as an identity.  Occupy groups are organized by community–or by issue area.

The upside: There’s a broad diversity of activity on the broad range of issues that intersect with inequality, and there’s a huge amount of democratic control.  People work on what they most care about!

But it becomes harder and harder to sustain a national profile or a meaningful message when Occupy has been attached to such a broad range of issues.

And no one can say no.

If I put on mouse ears and claim that Mickey endorses my views at the University of California, I’m reasonably confident that I would receive a timely ceases and decease letter from the amusement park up the street.  But any organized group can claim to Occupy, and to be Occupy.

Problem?

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Auditing the Tea Party: One style of American repression

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

Another example of the old joke: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you:

The revelation that the Internal Revenue Service targeted groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names for strict scrutiny tells us absolutely nothing good about either the Tea Party movement or the government its adherents distrust so much.  Expect more to come out, but right now we know that at least 75 groups with suspicious names (as above) were flagged by IRS employees for investigation.  Their applications for tax-exempt status [501(c)4] were delayed, and the applicants were subject to unusually intrusive questions about donors and intent that violated IRS policy–and maybe the law.

This is not to say that current policies about tax-exemption are wise or serve democracy well (see Matthew Yglesias), particularly in the brief post-Citizens United era.  But the whole notion of liberal [yes, liberal] democracy is equivalent treatment for groups and citizens regardless of their views; government isn’t supposed to pick sides.  Establishing a special category for Tea Party groups, allegedly instigated by low level employees, was apparently known about up the chain of command for at least two years.  This should be disturbing–but not necessarily surprising.  There is, as we know, a long historical record of our Federal government going after groups and individuals that someone in power thought were dangerous and unAmerican.  The list is sure to include at least some that you despise, for example (a very partial list): the Communist Party, Daniel Ellsberg, the Black Panthers, the Ku Klux Klan, pacifists during wartime, journalists of all sorts, Martin Luther King, and Clark Kerr.  But the democratic ideal is always for more debate and more sunlight.

Well, we live in a fallen world.

The IRS has apologized, promising a full investigation–and even if they don’t deliver, be sure that the Congress will.  Whatever additional information surfaces, it will be amplified and promoted by activists and elected officials interested in discrediting the Obama administration–and government in general.  Politically, it’s worlds better than repealing health insurance reform (again) or producing an honest budget.

The IRS harassment of Tea Party groups that we know about so far, however inexcusable, is mild compared to what many many other activists have suffered. This doesn’t mean, however, that it doesn’t matter or wasn’t damaging.

It’s important to remember how such harassment works.  Minimally, it raises the costs of political engagement for people someone in government doesn’t like.  In this case, Tea Partiers are forced to spend more time and money doing something that the IRS effectively made easier for people with different political views.  Time that could have been spent developing coherent analyses, political strategies, or reaching out to potential supporters is spent, instead, talking with a lawyer or accountant (generally on the clock) about filling out forms and requests for information.  At a moment when the Tea Party was still effectively mobilizing, partisans were distracted by something else.

It can be worse.  Fooling around with the IRS is no fun for anyone, and such experiences can dissuade many people from future politics altogether.  The intent of such harassment is to separate the committed hard core from the marginally engaged who might sometimes join them.  It’s the latter group that matters most, most of the time.

Activists on the left, unsympathetic to Tea Party causes, should be particularly sensitive to such harassment.  They should remember that a bureaucracy that gets away with going after foolish or unpopular causes can easily turn on them next.

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Gitmo and the hunger strikes

Posted on May 8, 2013 by

What happens when you run strap a prisoner down and run a tube through his nose to feed him?  What if it’s twice a day?  What if it’s one hundred people every day?

This is what’s happening at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

It’s hard to make the argument that the internment of suspected “enemy combatants” in a prison at Guantanamo Bay is a good thing.  It’s expensive, difficult, bad press, and violates basic conventions of the rules of war–and, of course, US law.  Candidate Barack Obama said all this in 2008, promising to close the prison camp within his first year in the Oval Office.

It was only one of the issues that encountered difficult resistance from  Capitol Hill, and it’s one that he didn’t fight–at least not much.  Four years later, Gitmo still open, with all the deficits he identified before becoming president, the issue of an off-shore prison camp barely registered in the campaign.  After all, one of the attractions of interning prisoners in Cuba is their relative lack of visibility back in the US.

In America some activists keep trying to put Guantanamo back on the political agenda, organizing protests, staging hunger strikes, and generally doing anything they can to get attention.  Successes have been fleeting, and the issue has often fallen to the back of the agendas of even most peace groups.

The prisoners themselves have created the latest blip in a history of neglect that stretches more than a decade.  When a new rotation of guards allegedly mistreated Korans (I’m sure there’s more to this), the prisoners staged a new round of hunger strikes.

The hunger strike is inherently coercive, and it depends upon eliciting a reaction from others who recognize the humanity of the striker.  These strikes began in February, and by most reports, now include most of the 166 prisoners at Guantanamo.  The United States has been force-feeding the strikers–with tubes through their noses.  It’s awful, and it’s hardly good press for the prison or, more generally, the US and its humanitarian goals.  Still, it’s preferable to a series of deaths.

President Obama said as much when he announced that he would re-engage the issue of closing the prison camp.  But this was days ago, and he’s been having a hard time with Congress on other issues that most of the public cares far more about, like immigration, guns, and jobs.

Activists would be wise in not expecting follow through from President Obama without significantly more pressure.  Some groups are trying, again.  Witness against Torture is promoting sympathy hunger strikes.  Code Pink is doing the same.  Twenty-four human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union have signed an open letter calling for the prison to be shut down.  (This too has happened before).  Organized groups are also trying to stage demonstrations to put the issue higher on the national (and Obama’s) agenda.  (Here’s International Answer, which is organizing for May 18th.)

The point: the mass hunger strike gives activists and politicians the opportunity to raise the issue again.  Making change, however, requires a sustained commitment from those outside the prison’s walls.

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Remembering the shootings at Kent State

Posted on May 4, 2013 by

It’s the anniversary of the killing of four college students at Kent State University.  Young National Guardsmen opened fire on students protesting the war on May 4, discharging more than 60 rounds in roughly 13 seconds.  They killed four students: Allison Krause, 19, and Jeffrey Miller, 20, were part of a nonviolent protest that university authorities promised to ban; Sandy Scheuer, 20, and William Schroeder, 19, were walking to class.  The National Guardsmen also wounded nine other students, some severely.

The protests at Kent State were part of a wave of protests that swept across American college campuses on May 1, a Friday, the day after President Richard Nixon announced that he had already ordered American air forces to expand their bombing to Cambodia.  (Roughly a week earlier, after operations had already commenced, Secretary of State William P. Rogers testified before Congress, explicitly denying any intention of expanding the war to Cambodia.)

In Kent, protest and disruption spread into the town that night, with bonfires set in the streets and altercations with police.  The mayor declared a state of emergency, ordered the bars closed, and asked the governor for help in getting everything back under control; the National Guard arrived at the University on Saturday. Students planned a demonstration for Monday to protest the presence of the Guard on campus.  University officials tried to cancel the demonstration, but students assembled anyway. The Guardsmen ordered the students to disperse, then used tear gas before opening fire.

It was terrible, and there is still a great deal we don’t know about: why the National Guard was on campus in the first place?  why the order to fire on unarmed students hundreds of feet away?  Who gave the order?  or was an order even given?  There’s a lot of writing, and a lot of controversy, still.  A good start is a summary, including an annotated bibliography, by two emeritus professors at Kent State, Jerry M. Lewis and Thomas R. Hensley, of Sociology and Political Science, respectively.

The shooting of unarmed students on a public college campus fostered a sense that the country was coming apart.  It was followed by a police shooting of student protesters at Jackson State in Mississippi, where Philip Gibbs, 21, and James Green, 17, were killed, and 12 other students were wounded.

President Nixon established a commission, chaired by William Scranton (formerly governor of Pennsylvania), to report on campus unrest.  commissioned a report on campus unrest.  Published in September, the Scranton Commission answered few of the pressing questions about Kent State or Jackson State, but observed that campus unrest seemed to decline when the war in Vietnam seemed like it was winding down, and escalated after the bombing in Cambodia started.

The war and the demonstrations continued for a while, tapering off when the draft ended the next year.  Authorities developed ways to control dissent, on campus and elsewhere, without using live ammunition against protesters involved in large demonstrations.  Demonstrations generally became less threatening, less disruptive, and less dangerous.

The Kent State and Jackson State killings remain tragic exceptions to more routine protest politics.  It’s a good sign that they stand out in our memories.

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May Day 2013

Posted on May 3, 2013 by

Mayfly

Wednesday’s May Day events remind us about how the people who participate in an event define it for their own purposes.  Initially a celebration of Spring, organized around May poles (and May flies?),  for more than 100 years, May 1 has been a day for celebrating  working people around the world (but not in the United States).

The May Day event was originally intended to commemorate the massacre of labor marchers at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886.  Organized labor poured its efforts into May Day, and still does, but no one owns the calendar, or even the day.

By looking at May Day events, we can see how a range of activists are trying to define their own efforts–and the interests of working people.

As it did last year, Occupy Wall Street tried to use the occasion to showcase the broad range of activities Occupiers have undertaken since the encampments were cleared more than a year ago.  They put together a full schedule and spoke out on many issues, but turnout and attention were down from last year.

In Greece the largest unions used the occasion to continue their protests against harsh austerity policies, supporting a 24 hour general strike.  But turnout (an estimated 15,000), disruption, and attention were all diminished from similar events over the past few months.

In Los Angeles, organized labor and May Day are all about rights for immigrants. Supported by local unions, the turnout estimated in the thousands was reported to be largely Latino, and the demands were focused on immigration reform.  An impressive display and a clear message, to be sure, but less dramatic and much smaller than immigration rallies in the same place over the past few months.

May Day has become an available holder for activists to try to fill with their own concerns.  This year local concerns and local organizers overshadowed any national or international message–beyond a general concern for working people.

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Immigration politics inside and outside the Capitol

Posted on April 11, 2013 by

The immigration rights activists returned to demonstrate outside the Capitol yesterday, as reports of a Senate compromise on an immigration reform continue to seep into media reports.

Most reports put the turnout in the tens of thousands–and noted sympathy rallies in at least 18 states.  Some substantial chunk was turned out by labor unions.  But there were lots of others.  Latino groups were well-represented, and Benjamin Jealous of the NAACP got the most prominent speaking slot.  The Washington Blade trumpeted the participation of gay and lesbian groups at the rally.  Not demonstrating outside, but very much on the minds of members of Congress, was the strong support for reform coming from business interests (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has founded and funded his own pro-immigration group.)

Do the demonstrations outside the Capitol affect the negotiations going on inside?  Sure, but it’s not a simple cause and effect (>200,000 and the waiting period for citizenship drops from 10 years to 8?  Unlikely.).  Rather, Wednesday’s demonstrations are part of a much larger set of campaigns that have pushed immigration reform to the fore, while the results of the last election gave Republicans in particular strong motivation to stand up to the organized and active anti-immigration movement.  Each discrete action is far less important than the much larger effort.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a visible player in the Senate negotiations, was well-aware of the political deficits of his party’s posture on immigration and the potential benefits of doing something on the issue.  These demonstrations are a reminder for all concerned.

The activists promise that they’ll be coming back to Washington until substantial reform is passed.  They’ll have to.

Although virtually everyone agrees about the sorry state of the current set of policies, negotiating the details of reform is no easy matter.  Inside the Capitol, legislators are arguing about guest workers, paths to citizenship, and border security.  The demonstrations and the citizen lobbying are efforts to stiffen the spine of would-be allies in negotiations, and big visible demonstrations are likely to yield almost invisible, but still significant, changes around the margins.

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Recovery for Occupy Wall Street’s library

Posted on April 10, 2013 by

In the weeks that Occupy Wall Street created a protest village in lower Manhattan, activists put together a lending library of more than 5,000 volumes.  When the police cleared the demonstrators out of Zuccotti Park, contractors hauled all of the stuff that remained away, including the library.

The books weren’t burned, but the the haulers treated the volumes like trash.  Of course, there were also computers and cameras, tents and blankets, and bicycle generators, but the pictures of the library in pieces in a dumpster provided some of the more disturbing images from the eviction.

Occupy’s librarians sued the City of New York for damages, and yesterday the City settled, making a payment of $375,000.  (Read the settlement agreement here.)

Not quite an apology, the City issued a statement:

Defendants acknowledge and believe it is unfortunate that, during the course of clearing Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011, books were damaged so as to render them unusable, and additional books are unaccounted for. Defendants further acknowledge and believe it unfortunate that certain library furnishings and equipment likewise were damaged so as to render them unusable, and other library furnishings and equipment may be unaccounted for. Plaintiffs and Defendants recognize that when a person’s property is removed from the city it is important that the City exercise due care and adhere to established procedures in order to protect legal rights of the property owners.

The City will make payments to several groups of Occupiers for damage to their property, but just about half of the total will go to the lawyers who filed the case.

There’s got to be some point there.

For New York City, $375,00 is a relatively small price to pay for ending the litigation.

For the rest of us, this is a good chance to consider the paradox of political openness in America.  Demonstrators camped out in a tiny private park in the middle of the City, and then were summarily evicted, their property destroyed within minutes.  Yet the evicted were able to hold the City responsible for the property destruction, once they were able to enlist lawyers on their behalf.  More than a year after the eviction, Occupy Wall Street is once again in the news.

I haven’t been able to find a source on how the non-lawyers will use their settlement money.  Presumably, they’ll put it back into the cause in some way.  Although even half of $375,000 seems like a lot of money to most of us, we need to remember that this is in the context of a politics where a billionaire casino magnate can contribute $100,000,000 to candidates for office.

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