Occupy unbound

Posted on November 23, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Zuccotti Park, home for Occupy Wall Street for two months, is completely irrelevant to the future of the Occupy movement.  Now that the activists have been cleared out, we’re watching to see what the most important place will be.

In addition to Occupations across the United States, Occupy activists have been busy bringing their concerns about inequality to all sorts of other places.

Last week, in the wake of the Zuccotti Park eviction, Occupy activists staged demonstrations across the country, including a contingent that tried to reestablish the Zuccotti encampment (at right). The could use pass the barricades and use the park, but without tents or tarps or anything that might make staying possible.  But more significantly, there were marches and protests in many other places, including banks, bridges, and buildings, sometimes leading to confrontations with the police, and generating more than 200 arrests.  Keeping the little park clear effectively encouraged activists to find other places to make claims, and this will help the movement.

But it’s not just the Day of Action protests.  In the Republican primaries, Occupy activists have theatrically confronted Representative Michele Bachmann and Representative Ron Paul, starting their chants with a call and response, “mic check.”  Rep. Bachmann left the stage, while Rep. Paul waited them out.  Occupy protesters also confronted President Obama at a speech in New Hampshire, where they asked him to condemn police brutality.  The President sympathized with their frustration, and turned to the economy.  Just the threat of an Occupy protest led Herman Cain to cancel a campaign appearance in Iowa.

And college and university students protesting against the tuition hikes that are taking place at virtually every public institution, are framing their protests as Occupy efforts.  In New York, City University students clashed with police at Baruch College, supported by a group called “Occupy Student Debt.”  Some students claimed allegiance with the broader Occupy movement.  California State University students protested outside a meeting where the Board of Trustees voted to raise tuition another 9 percent.   Cal state students staged events at every one of the university’s 23 campuses.

And it’s happening on campuses across the United States.  At the University of California, where tuition has increased dramatically over the past five years, student groups have established Occupy campaigns.  At Berkeley, they tried to establish an Occupation, which police shut down with force and arrests.  At Davis, campus police pepper sprayed students engaged in a sit-in.  When some students refused to move from the sidewalk they were blocking, others took videos of the police.  It’s hard to keep secrets anymore.  The video below shows four views of the campus protest and the police reaction.

It’s obvious that the students don’t want to move, but it’s equally obvious that they aren’t resisting the police, nor posing any threat to the officers.  The pepper spray came out early, and it’s hard to find anyone justifying its use—beyond Fox News.  The incident has led to calls for Chancellor Linda Katehi who has, belatedly, announced that she told the police not to use force.

Rallying around the incident in Davis, Occupy protesters have called for a University of California general strike on Monday, protesting increased fees and austerity budgets.  The administration and trustees can explain that state support of the University has declined dramatically, leaving spending cuts and tuition hikes as their only options.  The Occupy response is that the trustees are wealthy and represent large corporate interests.  (As they talk past each other, state legislators, who actually appropriate budgets and levy taxes, wipe their brows and sigh with relief.)

And that’s not all:

Occupy activists are urging Black Friday shoppers to patronize local businesses as they commence Christmas shopping, and are likely to stage flash mobs at selected malls or chain stores like Walmart.

And Occupiers who marched from New York to Washington, DC, have planned a day of action for Wednesday.

At this point, Occupy shows no signs of going away.  Rather, activists are taking elements of the message, wrapping it around their own issues, and trying to develop new tactics and approaches to advancing the movement.

By shutting down the Zuccotti Park Occupation, authorities have unleashed a broader, more diverse, and more creative movement. (Is it like attacking The Blob, and unleashing a hundred smaller Blobs?)  Unconstrained by the boundaries of the park, unburdened by the exigencies of tents, tarps, and toilets, and unencumbered by consensus, Occupy is emerging as a set of local and national campaigns.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Occupation trap in history

Posted on November 16, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Occupation isn’t a new tactic.  Protesters have established permanent encampments to make political claims and support activism many times in the past.  (See our Veterans Day discussion of the Bonus Army.)

The camps, dramatic demonstrations of commitment, provide an ongoing reminder of an important issue, and can kick start all kinds of other activism.  At the same time, occupiers often become consumed with the day to day exigencies of maintaining themselves and the camp, thinking more about tents, trash, and toilets than taxes.   Sometimes, as in the Wall Street Occupation in Zuccotti Park, authorities clear them out, more or less ruthlessly.  Often, however, they putter on, shift through different foci, generating less and less attention and becoming politically irrelevant.

As the Depression set in, people without any place else to go established encampments, often in empty areas on the outskirts of cities or near freight yards.  Derisively termed Hoovervilles, they weren’t explicitly political, but their very existence was an indictment of government’s response to the Depression.  Local authorities often tolerated the shanty towns, and their own concerns about crime and sanitation, because they didn’t have any other place to put the homeless.  Occupants left when they could find jobs or homes, and as World War II started, local authorities began clearing out the encampments.

In the 1980s, NATO’s efforts to place intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe generated massive public opposition.  Activists protested at the polls, in massive demonstrations in virtually every large city, and at the planned sites for deployment.  Some activists established more or less permanent encampments at the military bases scheduled to host new weapons.  The crowds would swell for large planned demonstrations or civil disobedience efforts, but a few people (or a few dozen or more, depending upon the time) remained between those campaigns, living in tents and sometimes staging small scale efforts to trespass on the bases.

The challenges and the the character of the camps depended upon the place and who organized them.  Greenham Common became the site of an explicitly feminist women’s

A trailer home at the Moleworth peace camp, 1985

camp; activists saw the campaign against ground launched cruise missiles as part of a much larger feminist agenda.  At Faslane, near the deployment of Trident nuclear submarines in Scottland, activists embraced an economic agenda as well as peace concerns.  At the Comiso camp in Sicily activists had to face not only the state, but also the mafia, which orchestrated the murder of one of the organizers.  (This is not a complete list of peace camps.  There were many encampments, some lasting only a few weeks, others continuing for years.)

Inspired by the European encampments, American feminists established the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment, in Romulus, New York, near both the site of the historic conference establishing an international women’s movement (1848) and an Army Depot.

The missile sites were far from urban centers, but activists nonetheless had to negotiate spaces to stage protests.  Sometimes, this meant camping on land owned by supporters of the cause rather than public spaces, and hiking to stage an assault on the military base.

Once committed individuals had devoted so much effort to establishing and defending these sites, they were loathe to take them down, even after the end of the cold war.  Greenham Common lasted until the year 2000, when the camp was replaced by plans to establish a commemorative site.  The Seneca Falls encampment continued in some form through 2006. (Here’s a neat oral history site featuring interviews with the activists.)  Apparently the Faslane peace camp is still in operation in some way, staging actions and maintaining a presence on facebook and myspace.  (Myspace!)  The point: a few people continued to maintain the camps long after most others stopped paying attention.

At around the same time, university-based activists opposed to apartheid in South Africa used the construction of shantytowns on their campuses as part of their campaigns to get their universities to divest themselves of holdings in companies that did business in South Africa.  Hampshire College (my alma mater) was the first school to divest in 1977–before I got there.  Schools with larger portfolios took longer, and campus-based organizing grew in the middle 1980s.  Activists at Cornell University constructed the first shantytown in the middle of their campus in 1985; within 18months, shantytowns had spread to dozens of elite college campuses.  Some students slept outside, but classrooms, libraries, and dorms were nearby.   (Sarah Soule is my expert on the divestment movement and the spread of the shantytowns.)  Although the shantys were controversial on campuses, there was much more activism going on off-campus, including large protests, a global boycott of South Africa by artists and athletes, divestment campaigns targeted at companies and local governments, and massive public education campaigns.  Artists United against Apartheid produced a song and video I still find powerful:

The point: the encampment was one tactic in a much larger and more diverse campaign.

In 2005, Cindy Sheehan set up camp outside President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.  She wanted a meeting with the president to discuss the justification of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (where her son, Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed in 2004).  President Bush refused to meet with her, so she camped outside by the road on public lands.  She was soon joined by other antiwar activists and relocated to land owned by a supporter of their cause.

The vigil in the hot Texas summer was big news in August.  President Bush cleared brush, bicycled, and golfed while the activists protested.  But the president cut his vacation short, returned to Washington, and the activists stayed, for a while, sort of, for another two years, getting progressively less attention.  Cindy Sheehan herself traveled around the country, continuing to speak out against the wars.

If you know of other occupations, please let us know.  In the meantime, it seems that the historical record suggests that the encampment is a political tactic that can work in generating attention–sometimes, and that it’s most likely to be effective when accompanied by a much larger and more diversified movement.

Eviction from Zuccotti Park could turn out to be the event that sets the Occupy movement loose to create a bigger and more effective political movement.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Occupy without the Occupation

Posted on November 15, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The police in Oakland and New York City have cleared out their local Occupy encampments.  Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, who claims to be a supporter of Occupy efforts, saw the downtown encampment as unsustainable–and dangerous.  The shooting death of one Occupier, perhaps executed by another one, gives some credence to this claim.

New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has expressed support for the right of free speech, but no sympathy for the substance of the Wall Street Occupiers’ claims.  Mayor Bloomberg announced that the situation in Zuccotti Park had become intolerable, and that people were coming to the encampment to commit crimes rather than political speech.  The concrete park would be available for speech, the Mayor announced, but not sleeping bags or tents or overnight residence.

Both mayors learned from previous efforts to clear their parks about the advantages of surprise and overwhelming force.  Using trained and armed police, both should be able to keep the protesters out of their choice spots.

Although Occupy encampments continue in hundreds of locations around the country, police actions have underscored how important it is for the Occupiers to think of ways to innovate and develop their movement.  (For more than a month, I’ve been arguing that Occupy needs to develop an “exit strategy.”)   To some extent, this is already happening:

Some activists are escalating, taking visible protest and civil disobedience out of the encampments to other targets.  Occupy Los Angeles staged an Occupy effort inside a Bank of America branch (right).

Others have urged Americans to take it to the banks through the market, moving their accounts out of the large national banks to smaller credit unions.  On November 5, thousands of people participated in Bank Transfer Day, voting with their money.  Although this sort of action may seem more moderate than the encampments, it may ultimately engage more people and be more disruptive to business.  (The Christian Science Monitor says no.)  And politicians will try to cultivate Occupy support as well.

Meantime, the evicted activists are trying to regroup and plan next steps.  In New York, this has meant marches at City Hall, vigils by the barricades at Zuccotti Park, and legal pleadings for the right to camp downtown (momentarily successful, then overruled: a state supreme court judge has ruled that free speech rights don’t include tents and encampments).

Over the next few days, expect all of these efforts (litigation, protest, and vigils) to continue.  Occupiers in New York and Oakland are also likely to try to stake out other sites for encampments.  As activists disperse into a broad range of activities, look for the strong consensus norm to evaporate; actions will be initiated by coalitions of the willing.  For innovation and activism, this is a good thing.

But remember: when mainstream media, politicians, and people milling at the water cooler are talking about political and economic inequality, the Occupiers are winning.  When they’re talking about police, reasonable time and place restrictions on speech, or the sanitation of downtown parks, well, not so much….

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Veterans Day, Occupy, and the Bonus March

Posted on November 11, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Occupation isn’t a tactic that started this fall.

In 1932 US military veterans of the Great War (now World War I), facing a job market even worse than today, demanded that the Federal government pay them their promised bonuses–no more than $1,000–early.  A bill providing for an early payment of the service bonus was stalled in Congress.   Veterans looked for a way to push the issue.

Across the country, groups of veterans started separate marches to Washington, D.C. to make their claim, staging parades along the way.  Other vets joined them in Washington, riding freight trains, hitchhiking, and organizing car caravans.  Ultimately more than twenty thousand veterans would converge on the Capitol.

The first three hundred marchers reaching Washington by the end of May 1932, followed by thousands more.  President Herbert Hoover and District of Columbia Police Superintendent Pelham Glassford welcomed them with a warning against associating with Socialists and Communists. Superintendant Glassford, a veteran of the war, met frequently with the protesters, and arranged for a safe campground in Anacostia, across the Potomac River. He also helped the marchers set up their camps and raise money from local merchants to feed the marchers. The Bonus Marchers asked him to serve as their “secretary-treasurer,” and he agreed, even as he secured tear gas for the police–to protect the Capitol from the veterans.

On June 7, the Bonus Army, comprised of veterans of diverse backgrounds, including the decorated and the disabled, marched.  They emphasized their service, their patriotism, and their discipline, winning some support from Congress and the press. Implicitly, they also emphasized their desperation: men with jobs could not spend months traveling to the Capitol and camp out on lawns to demand a relatively small cash payment. They also lobbied Congress.

On June 17 the Bonus Army gathered outside the Capitol while the Senate overwhelmingly (62-18) rejected the Bonus Bill.  The veterans marched back to their encampment peacefully, but refused to leave the city, and more veterans continued to arrive.  At Camp Anacostia, they welcomed some families into their camps, advertising the presence of women and children within their ranks. Some organizers traveled to other cities on the East Coast to raise money to feed the marchers.

As with Occupy, the long encampment produced tensions among the demonstrators and with the police.  By the end of July, as Congress prepared to adjourn its legislative session, authorities grew more determined to clear the veterans out of the city. Local and national officials issued eviction orders to the encamped veterans.  On July 28 the US Army, led by General Douglas MacArthur, overran the camps, using tear gas and burning the protesters’ shacks.  A few of the veterans fought back by throwing rocks, and MacArthur suggested that Communists had hijacked the veterans’ campaign–and that some of the men weren’t even veterans.  (These charges turned out to be false.)  Using fire, bayonets, and tear gas, he routed the marchers from the Capitol.

In November 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated President Hoover in a landslide.

Veterans at Occupy Wall Street

Bonus Marchers reappeared just after he took office, in early 1933.  President Roosevelt arranged for lodging, food, and bathrooms at an army post in Virginia,  and met with a delegation of Bonus Marchers in the White House.  Roosevelt initially resisted paying the bonus, but offered the veterans priority for employment in the newly established Civilian Conservation Corps; by 1936,  he agreed to pay the bonus as well.

A few brief notes:

Occupation isn’t new.  It’s provocative, potentially effective, and authorities have a hard time finding a balance between reaction and overreaction.

The Bonus Marchers had a very clear–and limited–demand.  Although they didn’t get it right away, their impact was larger than that demand.

Protest politics works in concert, if not coordination, with regular institutional politics.

This account is drawn from my book, The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America.  I learned most of this from Lucy G. Barber’s wonderful book, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition (University of California Press, 2004).

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Occupy is not an island (I)

Posted on November 9, 2011 by David S. Meyer

How does sleeping out in an urban park do anything about income inequality?  I get this question at least a few times a week, often from one of my kids.

One answer is that social movements work when dramatic action inspires others to be

Occupy Boston and labor march together

bolder in their rhetoric and actions–even if they don’t protest, commit civil disobedience, or even camp out.  To be effective, Occupy has to extend well beyond actual occupations.

So, today’s New York Times features a piece about just what organized labor is learning from Occupy. Steven Greenhouse observes that large unions, initially wary about Occupy Wall Street, have supported the movement, publicizing its actions and sending mattresses and food, and, more importantly, have imitated Occupy’s rhetoric and tactics:

“The Occupy movement has changed unions,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “You’re seeing a lot more unions wanting to be aggressive in their messaging and their activity. You’ll see more unions on the street, wanting to tap into the energy of Occupy Wall Street.”

From Occupy, the AFL-CIO has taken the idea of working for the 99 percent, and articulating its message in exactly that way.  From Occupy, unions are learning (relearning, of course; labor has been bold in the past) the virtues of dramatic action.  And from Occupy, unions are reminded about the potential power of social media.

Of course, the unions already have better defined demands as well as serious organizational infrastructures and resources that can put into practice these lessons.  Although organized labor doesn’t present the decentralized consensus-based model of democracy that some of the Occupiers embrace, any campaign that really means to speak for the 99 percent has to deal with unions.

And in yesterday’s elections, the possibility of a labor-led pushback seemed more promising than it has in a very long time.  Ohio voters resoundingly rejected a law that would strip public sector unions, including those representing teachers, firefighters, and police, of collective bargaining rights,  61%-39%, handing Governor John Kasich and the Republican controlled legislature a sobering defeat, surely one that legislators and organizers in Wisconsin and Indiana will study.

Organized labor was fully invested in the effort, raising more than $24 million, and outspending business and other conservative interests substantially.

This was not an Occupy campaign, but talk of the 99 percent and economic inequality was everywhere.  Harder to trace, but certainly present, was a sense of urgency and possibility that Occupy has cultivated.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Elizabeth Warren: Occupy’s Michele Bachmann?

Posted on November 7, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Take a minute before you get offended.   Of course, there are differences–more below.

Elizabeth Warren, candidate for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate from Massachusetts, is the closest thing to an institutional face of a movement that has, thus far, been resolutely anti-institutional.

This clip is ricocheting around the internet, with Warren giving full voice to the notion of tax justice and the economic obligations of the wealthy.

As Rep. Michele Bachmann did with the Tea Party, Elizabeth Warren was quick to endorse what she sees as the spirit of Occupy Wall Street.  And, like Rep. Bachmann, it hasn’t taken a lot of shifting or agonizing.  Just as Bachmann had established a long activist profile crusading against government oversight of schools, Elizabeth Warren has spent decades in a scholarly legal career pushing for more thorough government oversight of banks.  The vulnerability of middle class families to bankruptcy has been a central focus of her work long before this recession–and even the one before that–and the one before that.

Her academic trajectory, from an undergraduate degree in speech pathology at the University of Houston, to a law degree from Rutgers University-Newark to a professorship at Harvard University Law school, is extremely unusual.  (Law school deans are every bit as status and pedigree conscious as every other academic administrator, perhaps even moreso.)  Along the way, she developed stump skills that are hardly common among academics.  Warren’s second viral video shows her responding to a heckler at a speech in Brockton.  She expresses sympathy for the heckler’s joblessness, then quickly pivots to deplore the Senate’s inability to pass a jobs bill.

Can Warren do for Occupy what Bachmann did for the Tea Party?  Do Occupy activists want her to?

Representative Bachmann tirelessly promoted the Tea Party, raising millions of dollars for conservative candidates for office, and working to elect them as well.  She started the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, arranging for a few high profile classes for Congress on the Constitution, including a lecture by Antonin Scalia.  In the process, she defined a set of Tea Party demands that were somewhat different from many of the initial Tea Partiers.  The Tea Party emerged with a libertarian voice, enlivened by some Ron Paul loyalists, and as a whole pushed social issues to the back of an agenda fronted by antipathy to big business and big government.  Representative Bachmann rescued the social agenda, placing Christian conservative ethics at the center of her version of the Tea Party, and helping to crowd the libertarians out of the center of Republican discourse.  Rep. Bachmann’s Tea Party is deeply concerned with same sex marriage, abortion, and the place of religion in American life, and this Tea Party, not Ron Paul’s libertarians, is exercising influence in Congress.

Given both their very different politics and their very different pathways into electoral politics, we’d expect some significant differences.  Michele Bachmann was a committed evangelical conservative long before she pursued electoral office, starting her career supporting Jimmy Carter’s campaign for the presidency.  She took her law degree at Oral Roberts University, and started politics at the grassroots level, in defense of community-based Christian schools.  She’s learned to trust the wisdom (and information) of regular people who agree with her, and to articulate their concerns without routinely subjecting them to any kind of fact-checking.  This approach has proven problematic in the spotlight of her presidential campaign, and virtually every mainstream media outlet has published at least one piece on her routine misrepresentation of facts.  (Here’s non-partisan Politifact’s overview.)

Elizabeth Warren is a law professor who has produced more than 100 academic articles, a half-dozen books, working in a profession where getting the facts wrong is fatal.  She’s unlikely to frustrate Occupy activists by promoting comforting or provocative stories that aren’t true while playing to friendly crowds.

There is, however, another potential problem for the people camping in the parks.  Unlike many of the Occupiers who’ve been able to get their views in mainstream media, Elizabeth Warren believes in government and in regulation.  Her vision of reform isn’t based in building consensus-based communities, but in empowering government to ameliorate gross inequality, to spend on building infrastructure for a large and complicated economy, and to exercise strict oversight over the banking and finance industries.   Although some conservative critics disagree, she’s not out to destroy global capitalism. Hers is a far more developed–and far less utopian–vision than what activists have been able to articulate in the General Assemblies across the nation.

As Michele Bachmann was able to supersede the libertarians in defining the Tea Party, Warren’s success would dramatically overshadow the anarchists in the tent cities, pushing an Occupy that would look like an invigorated progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

This is one way movements become institutionalized…and effect influence.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Occupy, sexual assault, and internal control

Posted on November 3, 2011 by David S. Meyer

An ABC News reporter called me yesterday to ask about the spate of sex crimes taking place in the Occupations (here’s Alyssa Newcomb’s story).  I didn’t know anything, but a moment of online searching generated plenty of stories.

A lot of the reporting was on conservative websites, including the Daily Caller, Big Government, Townhall.com, the Blaze, and Gateway Pundit.  None of these sites has any residual sympathy for the emergent Occupy campaign, and many have played fast and loose with facts in the past.  The most tendentious coverage emphasizes that crime and sexual assault are part and parcel of a generally disreputable campaign filled with irresponsible and self-indulgent people.  More mainstream conservative outlets like Fox News and a Wall Street Journal blog have echoed the stories.   Like Herman Cain and his allies dismissing news reports of prior sexual harrasment complaints, sympathizers could dismiss these reports as a conspiracy to undermine the Occupy campaign.

But:

New York City Police arrested a 26 year old man at Occupy Wall Street, charging him with two counts of sexual assault that involved unwanted and forceful advances inside the tents in the cold of night.  In Dallas, police arrested a 24 year old man who had sex with a 14 year old runaway who, allegedly, claimed to be older.  (Not all of the charges stuck: Police investigated a widely reported account of a sexual assault in Baltimore and judged it unfounded.)

The stories, as well as the rumors and reality they represent, are a problem for the Occupy movement, and its one endemic to social movements, particularly a campaign so dedicated to grassroots democracy.

At the most basic level, the 99 percent contains some ill-informed, scuzzy, and even criminal people.  Organizers of any event struggle with finding unobtrusive ways to reign in their crazies; they know that their opponents will try to tack a picture of the sleaziest or stupidest person in their midst and label the whole movement with him.  This is a chore at a large demonstration that may last for 4-5 hours.  It’s somewhat more difficult at a all-day every day occupation that could stretch on for months, particularly one that welcomes all comers.

Having an inarticulate or ill-intentioned person give an interview to a media outlet describing your goals is a problem.  Having violent action directed at targets that didn’t get the hard-fought consensual endorsement of the entire Occupy community, as in Oakland, is a bigger one.  Sheltering violent criminals within your encampment is another one.

There’s no one working the doors in most social movements, filtering out the undesirables or enforcing discipline.  People who come to join are assumed to be well-intentioned and helpful, and it takes a while to shake that assumption.  And, particularly in popular media, social movements own their own crazies.

There are plenty of examples: Anti-abortion activists who see their efforts as part of a campaign to end violence are tarred by the few murderers of doctors that they inspire.  Pacifist antiwar campaigners must grapple with the marchers on the periphery who sign on with the other side.

Internal control is a serious challenge for those mounting the Occupy campaigns.  For those who want to spur political reform, reports of crime can discredit your efforts, invite repression, and warn off people who might otherwise join you.  Activists may need to enlist the help of police and prosecutors they would prefer to ignore, and suffer prosecution or evacuation for failing to do so.  (Mayor Bloomberg, no fan of Occupy Wall Street, has announced that the Occupiers have a moral and legal duty to report crime within their midst. Unsaid, at the moment, is that he could use their failure to do so as justification for clearing out the encampment altogether.)

And for people who believe that they are building a new world from the ground up, the problem may be even more difficult.  Rejecting the authority of the state or police in general, they are confronted with the reality of bad actions–or bad actors, who must be confined, disciplined, or banished.  Does this mean setting up new police and judicial systems within the encampments?  trusting the democratic mob?  hoping that the good will of the vast majority of those present will somehow establish new norms that infect people who have spent their lives in a much larger world?

At minimum, it doesn’t make sense to allow your political opponents to enjoy a monopoly on reporting your problems.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The politics of deflection; Occupy and local politics

Posted on November 2, 2011 by David S. Meyer

While most of the physical confrontation of the nearly two months of Occupy protests has been between demonstrators and local governments, particularly police, the conflicts aren’t very well connected to the substance of the grievances.  It’s not clear that mayors and city councilors can do much more than allow the demonstrations to continue.  And many local authorities say they support the broad claims about inequality.  Maybe the blame lies elsewhere.  After all, Congress has stalled a bill that would have helped local governments keep teachers and police on the job, even as states and cities endure ongoing budget crises.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has dismissed the Occupy Wall Street effort as misdirected, arguing that the activists should blame Congress for pushing lenders to expand home ownership by granting mortgages to people with poor prospects for paying them off.  Even after you dismiss Mayor Bloomberg’s analysis of the financial meltdown (see Mike Konczal for help with this), it’s hard to argue that regulation isn’t a better remedy for corporate greed than moral suasion directed at Wall Street.  The federal government has a much greater capacity to respond to concerns about inequality and injustice than the City Halls in New York, Irvine, or …Oakland.

So Occupy Oakland and Mayor Jean Quan may be taking each other off the hook in cooperating on today’s general strike.  Mayor Quan made allowances for city employees to take time off and participate, and announced, “I am working with the police chief to make sure that the pro-99 percent activists — whose cause I support — will have the freedom to get their message across without the conflict that marred last week’s events.”

As Mayor Quan has tried to align herself with the protesters, allowing the Occupy protest to return to Ogawa Plaza, the police think they’ve been hung out to dry.  On the eve of the strike, the Oakland Police Officer’s Association issued an open letter:

…We, too, are the 99% fighting for better working conditions, fair treatment and the ability to provide a living for our children and families….

As your police officers, we are confused.

On Tuesday, October 25th, we were ordered by Mayor Quan to clear out the encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and to keep protesters out of the Plaza. We performed the job that the Mayor’s Administration asked us to do, being fully aware that past protests in Oakland have resulted in rioting, violence and destruction of property.

Then, on Wednesday, October 26th, the Mayor allowed protesters back in – to camp out at the very place they were evacuated from the day before.

To add to the confusion, the Administration issued a memo on Friday, October 28th to all City workers in support of the “Stop Work” strike scheduled for Wednesday, giving all employees, except for police officers, permission to take the day off.

That’s hundreds of City workers encouraged to take off work to participate in the protest against “the establishment.” But aren’t the Mayor and her Administration part of the establishment they are paying City employees to protest? Is it the City’s intention to have City employees on both sides of a skirmish line?…

Meanwhile, a message has been sent to all police officers: Everyone, including those who have the day off, must show up for work on Wednesday. This is also being paid for by Oakland taxpayers. Last week’s events alone cost Oakland taxpayers over $1 million.

The Mayor and her Administration are beefing up police presence for Wednesday’s work strike they are encouraging and even “staffing,” spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars for additional police presence – at a time when the Mayor is also asking Oakland residents to vote on an $80 parcel tax to bail out the City’s failing finances.

If Mayor Quan has lost the police, it’s doubtful that it’s helped her gain the support of the Occupiers, who will remember last week’s bloody evacuation.

There are a lot of problems here.  The most obvious one is that the officials who are responding to the Occupy campaigns around the country, with more and less sympathy and skill, can do very little to address the issues the animate the protests.  Local activists work hard to get control of city governments, and then find that their hands are tied in all sorts of ways.

The federal design of American governments produces numerous units of governance to rail against and to absorb the wrath of citizens, but gives them precious little capacity to respond in meaningful ways.  Activists face a shell game, looking under government seals for levers actually connected to power.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Violence, democracy, and a general strike

Posted on October 29, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The efforts to clear out Occupiers in Atlanta, Oakland, and San Diego emphasize the difficult stalemate between local governments and the emergent Occupy movement.

Although local officials may be mostly sympathetic to the concerns of the Occupiers, they’re also responsible for maintaining public safety,  public facilities, and managing already strained local budgets.

But the awful violence in Oakland stands as a cautionary tale to mayors and city councils, who really don’t have a good sense of what they can expect, and certainly don’t want to set into motion a similar chain of events.

In addition to the pictures, the injuries, and the political fallout, the Occupiers are back, with tents restaked in Frank Ogawa Plaza.  Mayor Jean Quan has apologized for the violent police action and the injuries, and certainly sees her hands tied in terms of responding to whatever happens next.

And the protesters want to find a way to escalate.  On Thursday night, after roundly booing the mayor, Occupy Oakland’s General Assembly met and endorsed a general strike:

We as fellow occupiers of Oscar Grant Plaza propose that on Wednesday November 2, 2011, we liberate Oakland and shut down the 1%.

We propose a city wide general strike and we propose we invite all students to walk out of school. Instead of workers going to work and students going to school, the people will converge on downtown Oakland to shut down the city.

All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them.

While we are calling for a general strike, we are also calling for much more. People who organize out of their neighborhoods, schools, community organizations, affinity groups, workplaces and families are encouraged to self organize in a way that allows them to participate in shutting down the city in whatever manner they are comfortable with and capable of.

The whole world is watching Oakland. Let’s show them what is possible.

Anyone who shows up can participate in the General Assembly meetings, and the group has adopted a modified consensus rule, which allows decisions to be taken with 90 percent support.  The general strike had much stronger support: 1,484 of 1,607 present voted for the action on November 2; allowing for abstentions, this amounted to nearly 97 percent support.

One of my cautions about consensus and this kind of participatory democracy is that it’s very hard for activists to innovate, and can generally reach consensus only on what’s already happening–continuing the occupation, for example.  Well, Oakland is out to prove I’m wrong.

Another worry is the nature of debate.  Anyone who shows up can vote.  With the injuries and violence still fresh in everyone’s mind, we have to wonder about coercion and intimidation when 97 percent of any group for vote something.

Beyond this, there’s a larger question about whether this group can actually deliver on the very ambitious project of shutting the city down.  Some share of the demonstrators will surely stay home–or rather, in Frank Ogawa Plaza, on Wednesday, but it will take far more than that to make an impact on a city of nearly 400,000.

It’s not clear that the General Assembly has anything beyond an effort at moral suasion to get unions and unorganized workers to stay out of work.  In taking their decision, the participants didn’t really have to consider whether they had the capacity to deliver.

I’m dubious, but we’ll all be watching.

It’s a volatile time, and policing has a politicized and contested history in Oakland.  All kinds of things are possible.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Irvine City Council adopts Occupation

Posted on October 27, 2011 by David S. Meyer

City governments have options in dealing with dissent, including the Occupy campaigns.  In Irvine, the heart of Orange County where I live, the City Council unanimously endorsed an agreement that will allow an Occupation in front of City Hall indefinitely.

The vote (5-0) followed a Council meeting in which the Occupiers offered testimony about their goals; the Councilors emphasized how impressed they were with the seriousness of the protest effort.

The activists were happy (see below):

Recall that Orange County politics generally veers heavily to the right when considering what this means.  A few notes:

1.  Irvine’s City Council, although chosen in nonpartisan elections, has been consistently comprised of 2 conservative and 3 vaguely liberal members.

2.  In a reasonably small city like Irvine, the Councilors can view the demonstrators as neighbors, not simply as constituents.  This should generate more civility, mutual respect, and tolerance.

3.  In a planned suburban community, the actual disruption (and attention) a small tent city in front of City Hall can generate is far more limited than in a dense urban environment.

All this said, what does the endorsement mean for the politics of the Occupy movement?  While the City Council vote made local news –and will probably circulate nationally for a while as a contrast to the forceful efforts to close Occupations in Oakland and Atlanta, it’s now up to the local Occupiers to generate attention and make meaningful politics.  This is no easy matter.

Long ago, social theorists considered whether tolerance could have repressive effects.  The basic argument was that democratic countries could treat dissidents like toddlers who need to cry themselves out: let them do so, release the pressure, and they’ll go away.

Although the concept of “repressive tolerance” has generally disappeared in academic social science, US governments have developed numerous ways to allow protest without disruption and, generally, to minimize the effects of protest events.  Cities have elaborate permitting systems for demonstrators; police departments generally negotiate with organizers before highly choreographed demonstrations so that only people who plan to get arrested will get arrested and demonstrations will start and end on time without too much hassle; and localities, including college campuses, can designate “free speech zones,” where advocates can advocate safely–and passersby can pass by.

The Occupy demonstrations have challenged the norms of ritualized protest, and local governments are exploring ways to manage the politics and the disruption.  It’s hard to think many mayors will look to Atlanta or Oakland as helpful models.  Is Irvine a viable alternative?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment