Inspiration across borders: Brazil and Turkey

Posted on June 18, 2013 by

Will a clever name, like Arab Spring or Occupy, link the protests erupting in disparate parts of the globe?  Will 2013 become a sign uniting all of them in memory, just like 1848, 1968, and 1989?

The spread of wildly different movements in very different places makes us wonder about why and how.  People live with grievances and disappointments all the time, only occasionally taking to the streets in dramatic action to try to get what they want.  What makes the protest switch flick on?

Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them young, have taken to the streets of all of Brazil’s major cities in recent days.  The protests started in Sao Paolo, explicitly focused on a relatively small hike in transit fares, but clearly demonstrators saw much more at stake.  Protesters are mad about the poor quality of public facilities, mad about corruption, and mad about massive spending on soccer stadiums to prepare to host the World Cup.  They were angry that President Dilma Rousseff seems to retain sufficient popularity to win reelection next year, in spite of their frustrations–and that there are no apparent channels to influence government that seem meaningful. And once the demonstrations started, the vast majority of them peaceful, they were angry about aggressive policing that included tear gas and rubber bullets.

More than a few demonstrators said they took inspiration from the Turkish demonstrators in Istanbul’s Taksim Square (“standing man” at left), who have been challenging the government of long-standing prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

On the surface, the demands and the contexts seem very different. Demonstrators in Turkey are worried about protecting the secular identity of their Muslim democracy.  Among the litany of complaints in Brazil, incipient theocracy is not one.

But people take inspiration from the very existence of others trying to take action to make their governments more responsive and to better their lives.  Remember, the Occupy demonstrators in Zuccotti Park cited the Egyptian crowds in Tahrir Square as inspiration, even as none of the Occupiers was waiting for the military to take sides and escort a president out of office.  A protest song is a sing-a-long.  And even though the lyrics may be quite different, the tune feels the same, even a little familiar.

By the way, some demonstrators wore the Guy Fawkes mask popularized by Anonymous and Occupy.  When people pick up such symbols of revolt, they invest them with new meanings, their meanings.

When the sufficient tinder is dry, any spark can start a fire.

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Just another Moral Monday

Posted on June 17, 2013 by

Democrats and liberals have been losing in North Carolina.  Democrats lost control of both houses of the legislature in 2010, but Republican legislative efforts were slowed by Democratic Governor Bev Perdue.  In 2012, Republican Pat McCrory soundly defeated Perdue’s lieutenant governor–and Barack Obama lost the state as well.

Once the Republicans had full control of North Carolina’s government, they sought about doing all the things they believed in.  According to state senator Thom Goolsbee (Republican), “Once ensconced in power, the pro-growth, commonsense Republicans went to work like the business people they were.”

This meant cutting unemployment benefits, funding for schools and preschools, implementing Voter ID laws, reducing early voting, and relaxing environmental regulations to encourage fracking.  It meant rejecting federal money to expand Medicaid.  And it means restructuring the state tax code by cutting property and income taxes and relying more on sales taxes.

Having lost at the polls, opponents of this agenda took to the streets, or more accurately, the lawn of the state capitol in Raleigh.  Organized by Rev. Dr. William Barber, president of the NAACP’s state conference, the first protest took place on April 27, including a rally and ending with 17 arrests.  Each week, more people have turned out at the rallies and more people have been arrested.  More than 400 people have been arrested to date.

A large share of the original protesters were clergy or religiously-motivated (see Rev. Barber’s description of the agenda, replete with quotations from Scripture), but as the protests have gone on, the crowd has grown and diversified, and so have the grievances.  The advocates for the poor have been joined by environmentalists, educators, death penalty opponents, and organized labor; they share a common opponent.

The demonstrations are sending a message which starts with “Stop.”  But who’s listening?

With more or less vitriol, Gov. McCrory and the Republican state legislators say that they already know what the protesters think; the governor has refused to meet with them.  Less graciously, some say they are “outside agitators” (note: 98 percent of the arrests have been of North Carolinians) or just “old hippies.”  It’s unlikely that Republican legislative stalwarts will trim their sails because of new information about the issues or the passions of their opponents.

But,

Governor McCrory, who had to be elected by a broader electorate than any of the legislators might–and it doesn’t have to be visible.  In backroom negotiations, he can shape the bills that come to his desk.

Even more significantly, allies and potential allies who are now quiet or less visible can see the amount of support they might be able to mobilize for something else, likely related, in the future.  People who will demonstrate or get arrested are likely to also be people who will work in campaigns, organize communities, sign petitions, or even donate money.

And, in an era where advocates of the poor are just as frustrated as national conservatives are, the protests in Raleigh send out a message that something else is possible.  If Rev. Barber is successful, you’ll see imitations elsewhere–in places even he probably doesn’t expect.

Protests matter, just not always and not by themselves.  They matter when they engage a broad audience and get them to do things in addition to protesting.  Rev. Barber clearly knows this, he says:

The protests are only one part of our four-part strategy. We have a voter registration and voter education strategy, a social media strategy, and we have a legal strategy, because many of these things, not just the voting rules, are going to be challenged in the courts using our state and federal constitutions.

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Can the IRS resurrect the Tea Party?

Posted on May 24, 2013 by

By allowing mid-level bureaucrats to dump on local Tea Party groups, the Internal Revenue Series provided the movement a chance to regroup and re-emerge on the public stage.

Particularly at the grassroots, the Tea Party has mostly severely diminished, divided, and dissolute.  National groups disagree on major candidates, tactics, and issues–like immigration, social values, and foreign policy.  Public support has collapsed in the process, and the Tea Party is less popular than ever.   Tea Partiers remain active in the Washington Beltway, and some visible Republicans claim it as an identity, but they don’t always get along with each other or defining just what the Tea Party means.  Meanwhile, local activists have, uh, moved on…

Ah, but TAXES.  No dispute within the TP on that one.  But the Tax Day rallies staged this year were a shadow of the Tea Party’s heyday.

But then….

The initial revelation of the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups made for new energy and a restored unity.  Local groups staged protests this week outside IRS offices in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and across the United States.  The larger rallies generated crowds in the dozens, save for Cincinnati (the site of the key IRS office in the targeting), where activists turned out 250 Tea Partiers.

This may turn out to be a blip, and a little one at that, or it may be the provocation that allows the movement to reunite and reemerge from the church basements, community centers, and kitchen tables where it’s been sequestered.  Focusing on the IRS is the best bet for the movement–and for the national Republican Party–to rekindle the outrage and energy that animated the huge electoral gains in 2010.  For this reason, we expect Congressional Republicans to hold repeated hearings on the IRS–in between sessions of voting to repeal health care reform–again and again.

There’s a bigger movement lesson here: Social movements filled with relatively advantaged people–like peace activists, environmentalists, and Tea Partiers–respond to trouble, provocation, and bad news.  Common outrages paper over differences and give citizens a reason to be more engaged, active, and cooperative with others they don’t necessarily agree with on much of anything else.

Unfavorable policy provides the fertilizer for the grassroots, the grain of sand that produces the pearl, the pebble that makes someone take off his shoe and curse….

Folk Uke (Cathy Guthrie and Amy Nelson) provides additional insight on the general principle:

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Immigration divides the Tea Party

Posted on May 21, 2013 by

Or not?  Conventional wisdom among Republican regulars was that the Party’s harsh “self-deportation” posture was costly in the last election.  Party establishment figures pushed for quick action on immigration reform to put the issue behind them so that they might compete a little more effectively for Latino voters (pulling even 35% would be a huge improvement).

But Republicans held control of the House of Representatives, drawn into districts in which supporting reform could be toxic.

So, there’s a split within the Party, between business conservatives, who support access to labor, and populists at the grassroots who can capitalize on the fears of White voters about the impending loss of….jobs? culture?

The Tea Party holds the same debate.  Most of national Tea Party groups, most notably FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, like business conservatives and libertarians, support access to immigrant labor–and a less than skeletal welfare state to support them.  [Tea Party Nation, smaller and somewhat marginal, is the notable exception.]

At the grassroots, however, immigration is a hot button issue that gets people to go to meetings, hold signs at demonstrations, contribute money to candidates, and wear silly  colorful outfits.

During the Tea Party’s heyday, 2009-2010, the powerful national groups tried to keep the immigration issue from emerging and dividing.  They weren’t quite successful.

Now Senator Marco Rubio (Florida), who enjoyed extensive and enthusiastic Tea Party support, has tried to front the Republican effort for building a compromise that will lead to an immigration bill.  It’s worth remembering that Senator Rubio’s provenance extends well back before the emergence of the Tea Party.  He had served as Speaker of the House in the Florida’s House of Representatives.  He was always conservative, to be sure, but he was also a pragmatic politician who could count votes and make deals.

In the past few weeks, Senator Rubio and others have tried to build Tea Party support for immigration reform.  At least they wanted to neutralize opposition.  Regardless of what happens to the current immigration reform effort, the percentage of Latinos among the voting universe is going to increase, and  there’s always been at least a racist tinge among the immigration opponents.  The recovered public policy dissertation of Jason Richwine, coauthor of Heritage’s polemical study, is  a recent–and relatively mild–example.

So, leaders from Tea Party Express and other national groups met with Sen. Rubio to discuss issues and chart strategy.  It was always going to be an uphill struggle.  Now, however, it seems like an even steeper hill to manage.

Leaders of other Tea Party groups, most notably Tea Party Patriots, which sought to maintain a grassroots orientation, have issued a letter decrying the immigration bill Sen. Rubio has spent months negotiating, while other conservative leaders are urging/demanding Republican senators walk away from the compromise.

So, Tea Party groups are active on both sides of the most contentious national issue of the moment, and they battle exclusively within the Republican Party.  Establishment Republicans fear they will pay a price, again, for scuttling reform, while grassroots opponents are prepared to hold elected officials responsible for any small steps toward recognizing eleven million immigrants with anything more than a fence and E-Verify.

At the moment, it seems like a no-win issue for the Tea Party or for the Republican Party.  Their best outcome, to have the issue disappear quickly, seems unlikely; immigration rights activists won’t let that happen.

Alternatively, they can try to find a way to blame Democrats for the failure to reform, pointing to President Obama’s generic leadership deficits, or the efforts of Senator Patrick Leahy to include immigration opportunities for same sex spouses and partners of American citizens.

It might work–for a while–but just as most of the eleven million are not going to go away, neither is the immigration issue, and it sits across a fundamental schism in the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party more generally.

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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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