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How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests
Much more than a movement against big banks, they're a rejection of what our society has become.
I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.
The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.
That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."
The protesters, chirped Supreme Reichskank Ann Coulter, needed three things: "showers, jobs and a point." Her colleague Charles Krauthammer went so far as to label the protesters hypocrites for having iPhones. OWS, he said, is "Starbucks-sipping, Levi's-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters [denouncing] corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over." Apparently, because Goldman and Citibank are corporations, no protester can ever consume a corporate product – not jeans, not cellphones and definitely not coffee – if he also wants to complain about tax money going to pay off some billionaire banker's bets against his own crappy mortgages.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don't give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego.
What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.
We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.
If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.
That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.
But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.
We're a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays even the palest federalism is swiftly crushed. If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state – like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar – the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO. Even if 40 million Californians vote tomorrow to allow themselves to smoke a joint, the federal government will never permit it. And the economy is run almost entirely by an unaccountable oligarchy in Lower Manhattan that absolutely will not sanction any innovations in banking or debt forgiveness or anything else that might lessen its predatory influence.
And here's one more thing I was wrong about: I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.
But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.
This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.
It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.
People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.
82 Comments so far
Show AllIt is sort-of satisfying to see one of the few in the corporate media punditocracy that somewhat gets the point of Occupy Wall Street's asymetrical media and political warfare strategy Not surprising at all as Matt Taibbi is one of the few who gets camera time on the corporate airwaves whom has consistently called out the Banksters for the crooks that they are. As his 'skin in the game' is not tied to Goldman Sachs' quarterly results, his vision is not clouded by self-interest in this instance...thus understanding comes about. Seeing the vast majority of media fellows flail impotently about while trying to do their voodoo on OWS is still amusing with a strong element of schadenfreude. When OWS takes the next step, expect the right-wing media douches to get even more scared than they are now, as their jobs will be on the line due to their 'messaging' not getting through like it used to. I, and I suspect Taibbi, will have a laugh as they head down the road of irrelevance.
Taibbi understands that the "list of demands" the media keeps admonishing OWS to produce would include so many atrocities (that have resulted from corporate control of governments around the world) that producing a list of what OWS is NOT demanding would be very short and much easier to produce.
Taibbi humorously, but accurately says, "People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something."
This comports precisely with Morris Berman in his fantastic new, "Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline" where he critiques the perversion of any 'commonwealth' American Dream by the lust of 'hustlers' and 'grifters'.
NateW, Occupy Wall Street does not seem to me to have much of an "asymetrical media and political warfare strategy", since Occupy has not yet articulated that the only workable strategy is to Occupy Empire, and by doing so expose and dis-empower Empire with the one thing it can't address: it's own Empireness.
What's happening in Europe today is the leading edge of the global Empire disciplining the functioning social democracies of Europe --- which all have a much more fair and egalitarian income equality than the US and the third world imperial oil 'territories' like; Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Sudan, and the entire "GAP" region which is in the cross hairs of "The Pentagon's New Map" [Thomas Barnett, Naval War College].
So, the global Empire, which has already fully 'captured' and controls our former country by hiding behind the facade of its Two-Party 'Vichy' sham of faux-democratic and illegitimate government, is now in the process of asserting, expanding, and cementing the power of the global Empire over all areas of the world.
In the 'Heart of Empire' or the "Heart of Darkness" [Conrad], which is America, the Empire has been able through guile, propaganda, and distraction to achieve a high level of 'privatization' of wealth and its Wall Street looting scheme, to increase the GINI Coefficient of Income Inequality to the same oppressive level as in the 3rd world oil territories and dictatorships --- about 0.50 GINI.
But the still partially functional social democracies of Europe and Japan remain much more socially responsive to representing and protecting their citizens' demands for responsive political representation and reasonable income equality -- [GINI low/egalitarian levels of 0.25 to 0.35].
Now the fast evolving and crushing global Empire in the 21st century is committed and carrying out crisis "Shock Doctrines" to push the levels of GINI Income Inequality of Europe (and soon, likely Japan) from true democratic levels of equality to the oppressive levels of the dictatorships in the 3rd world 'territories' and the deceived masses in the Empire's nominal HQ of America.
The global Empire has successfully used a combination of military oppression "abroad" in its 3rd world territories, and tyranny and media propaganda "at home" to oppress the 90+% of uninformed, intimidated, and scared general population --- but these techniques of Empire are not working well on Europeans, who have long been leery of Empire, since they suffered under Empire WWI and WWII.
Americans have basically been asleep at the switch, while the 'big switch-a-roo' from democratic Republic to Empire has been pulled on us over the last three to five decades. But now with the Occupy movement, a small percentage of Americans are waking up to the seminal causal cancer of the camouflaged global Empire hiding in the burning kitchen our our own nearly moribund democracy. Occupy currently is merely using the tactic of physically 'occupying' some geographical and symbolic locations like Wall Street, Washington, Boston, etc, as modeled on the Tunisia, Egypt, Libya model in the territories. But this brave model in the dictatorial territories of the global Empire is only 'necessary but not sufficient' in the 'heart of the Empire'.
Soon Occupy will have to turn up the strategy from these initial tactics and articulate what they are committed to 'occupying', and will clearly define an "Occupy Empire" singular and clearly understandable message "Against Empire" --- which all true Americans will then rally around, just as the American colonists quickly rallied around once they understood that the unresponsive British Empire's royalist governors were oppressing their political life, the royally chartered British Empire's East India Corporation was oppressing their economic lives, the British Empire's Red-coated military was oppressing their physical lives, and the British Empire's legal monopoly was oppressing their freedoms as independent people.
So in summary, the global Empire is real and has already oppressed the people of the 3rd world territories 'abroad', along with oppressing by guile and propaganda the population 'at home'.
But the people of former nationalist Empires in Europe and Japan are wise to the terrible error of allowing national Empires to rule their lives, slaughter their sons in needless world wars of Empire, and thus are now revolting against the increasing economic, social, and tyrannical oppressions of a new global Empire.
It will be up to the awakened and 'ordinary people of America' to be responsible for the Empire HQ in our midst. The 'ordinary German' people were faced with the same challenge more than half a century ago, against the nationalist Nazi Empire then. But today there is no Plan B, there is no alternative to the fast metastasizing cancer of this modernized fascist global Empire except 'ordinary Americans'.
We 'ordinary Americans' must Occupy Empire in our midst, Expose the Empire to our friends and country-men, then Confront Empire non-violently, and finally Excise Empire from our world.
As Hannah Arendt famously warned of the Nazi Empire and its 'Vichy' facade occupying France, "Empire abroad entails tyranny at home"
Best luck and love to Occupy
Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality
over
violent/Vichy
empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
The beauty of any sort asymetrical warfare is that when successful, it completely befuddles it's opponents and observers. In fact, the main thrust of Occupy Wall Street, that large corporate control of American life must end, has been elucidated again and again. Another part of the genius is not to use the forms and language with which their opponents are familiar, thus fulfilling another basic rule of warfare...choosing the battlefield. For OWS to rail specifically as you call for against 'The Empire' (which has happened individually at Occupy's all over by peace-minded veterans, like the two seriously injured by the Oakland PD) is play in the 1%'s sandbox before being ready to do so. The 'Empire' is quite strong, and the only way to possibly defeat it is to keep it off balance...and OWS is doing that. While 'The Empire' is part of the problem, is not the whole thing, and to concentrate on solely one facet would be a fatal error.
NateW, I am genuinely hopeful that, as you say, others in Occupy will "rail specifically, as I call for, against The Empire", and am concerned if this happening at Occupy movements by peaceful veterans, has led to their injuries.
Are you trying to warn me that premature calling-out of the global corporate/financial/militarist Empire, as I do, might lead to violence against me --- because I am "playing in the 1%'s sandbox" before recess?
Other than Kevin Zeese, who has likewise made strong, repeated, and pointed calling-out of 'the Empire', I can find little reference to Empire in OWS profiles, except this one odd goal, "Committed to exposing and confronting the camouflaged global corporate/financial/militarist Empire cancer at the heart of all our 'symptom problems' like; foreign wars, vast economic inequality, Wall Street looting, domestic spying and lying, global environmental destruction", from an odd duck calling himself 'amacd' on Sept 28, and I'm sure he hasn't been seriously injured by any PD.
So anyway, I'll probably continue to play in this sandbox, even if it is judged to be too early, or my being not ready for recess, and even if some veiled threat comes my way, simply because I strongly believe that repeatedly calling-out the alarm of Empire at the center of this conflict is as necessary as another odd duck's early calling-out against the British Empire was necessary to understand what the deadly opposing force to democracy really is.
It's the Empire.
Best luck and love to Occupy
Liberty, democracy, equality, and justice
over
violent/Vichy
empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Occupy Empire, Expose Empire, Confront Empire, then Excise Empire
I have one principal quarrel with your otherwise excellent comment. We have not been an Empire for the past five decades, we have been one for the past five centuries.
The Europeans arrived here in 1492 and started the killing and enslaving on their first visit. The fact that they weren't yet technically "American" is beside the point. When the Founding Robbers got together and signed their piece of paper they had already been genocidal for centuries and the only reason we had to wait until the murder of a quarter of a million Filipinos before we called it an empire is because up until then it was all done on one contiguous piece of land. (We evidently forgot that the Romans could just as easily have walked around the Mediterranean instead of taking a short cut across it. The British Isles were their Philippines, geographically.)
Otherwise, good article, especially the part about the European attitude of "No thanks, we recognise this neighborhood and we didn't like it the first time".
That's a pretty broad statement that could be argued for hours, if not days of examination of world history. Slaughter of local human populations and the of territories they occupy by other, invading populations does not an empire make. The US has evolved into a new form of empire, which did not exist when a number of English colonies on the East Coast of North America broke away from the English crown. All world empires prior to this new, strange one invariably had an emperor (and sometimes two or three). Who is the emperor of this new one?
What I learned about the 1%: http://goo.gl/f4pXo
Great article and fresh analysis. Thanks, Matt.
Matt puts the cops in an objective context...they attack the low hanging fruit (innocents and perhaps a few misdemeanors) to protect the uber felons holed up in their gated communities, private islands and Washington DC.
Today the mainstream media tells us that cops for years protected pedophile coach Sandusky going back to the era when the parents and grandparents of today's cops were busting the heads of those of us protesting for civil rights and against the Viet Nam occupation.
Keep up the good work, Matt, it is appreciated.
I was struck while reading this that "the system," by rendering so many people redundant, out of work and out of homes, has sown the seeds for OWS. Those of us still working are scraping by, and perhaps supporting OWS in spirit, or making a contribution here and there, but how many of us can make such a full-time commitment? By their presence alone, the Occupy protesters indict the corporate system. No demands necessary.
I also loved Matt's reference to the "beloved community" that the Civit Rights Movement desired to create, and the rich tradition of such utopian thoughts in American history, in contrast to the sordid money-grubbing of our mainstream culture.
My fear, however, is that "the 99%" that OWS speaks and acts in the name of, is still divided on real solutions to our problems. At some point, unless the movement is able to move beyond camping out, the conservative narrative may yet carry the day, and we will be left to rue another missed opportunity.
The night is dark, the road is long, and winter is coming. Can we hold out until spring arrives?
Your "fear that many members of the 99% is still divided" is well founded, Brad. Based on my experiences in the US and abroad confirms that this division will not end.
When I lived in Germany in 1976-78 I was SURPRISED how many Germans' (three decades after Hitler's demise) only qualm with Hitler was that he didn't win the war.
The American equivalent is how many Americans believe that the only thing that is wrong is that they haven't yet broken in to the ranks of the 1%.
Today I am NOT SURPRISED how many acquaintences (who are part of the 99%) contiinue to view the current economic conditions as a recession wherein everything will be OK when it blows over. My conclusion is that even if OWS is a resounding success in creating a new paradigm, it will do so with barely more than half of the 99% believing that there is even a need foir a new paradigm.
Raygun, Rubin, Rove, Rahm and others created and refined the greatest propaganda machine the world has ever seen and many Americans will continue to be deluded by it for the rest of their lives.
BigBrother, while the "propaganda machine is indeed the greatest ever seen" (as you say), it is really just a modernized version of the first generation "Vichy" phony government, fronting for the Nazi Empire occupying France c. 1940 --- except that this modernized and Rel. 2.0 propaganda machine has implemented a 'two-party' Vichy sham in the homeland rather than a crude single party Vichy in another captured country.
I can almost envision Joseph Goebbels turning over in his grave and apologizing to Hitler, "Mein Fuhrer, I have failed you. If we had implemented a TWO-Party Vichy facade in the fatherland, as these American elite have done, you would still be ruling the world with a thousand year 'Reich' [German for 'Empire'].
Best luck and love to Occupy
Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality
over
violent/Vichy
empire,
Alan MacDonald
Occupy Empire, Expose Empire, Confront Empire, and then non-violently Excise Empire
"I can almost envision Joseph Goebbels turning over in his grave ..."
OMG, 'amacd', you are so-o-o right. The "two-party" system of keeping the ruling party in control is working perfectly.
Very true. The colonists were about equally divided into thirds; Patriots (pro-sovereignty), Tories(pro-colonials/royalists-of-empire), and a third who were indifferent to the issue. Those proportions probably still hold. It's clear the "tories/royalists" are still with us, and NEVER went away, despite the revolution. They just went covert, ESPECIALLY after the civil war.
Before there can be solutions, we first need to accurately perceive the problem. This is difficult to do under ordinary circumstances.
OWS has backed down the police state and created a cooperative and non-coercive area so that people are free to examine the reality about our situation and discuss that. As people become more clear about the problem, consensus will be reached and solutions will become more apparent and there will also be consensus on that.
As CD member Stone so often says "trust the process." I would add, trust yourself and trust the OWS people.
OWS is the opportunity, it is not leading to the opportunity.
I love this new warcry of the disaffected. It is so simple and to the point that it's poetic in its universality. FUCK THIS SHIT, indeed!
Yes. T-shirts emblazoned with the letters FTS!
We are moving on from WTF? to FTS!
I was given a sticker at Occupy Los Angeles which now is afixed to my guitar case:
Unfuck the World
Amen!
"People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line."
That's what Burning Man has been doing every year for two weeks at a time, not just 5 minutes. I think Burning Man is the seed of OWS. I bet a lot of the OWS protesters have been to Burning Man at least once.
24/7/365 burning man in thousands of venues around the globe could be the formula for a new paradigm !
Yes. Imagine Burning Man anti-malls, where people could go after a hard day's work to "not-shop", to enjoy giving stuff away, to create new things of their own and to see great works of local and spontaneous art.
Yes, sigovesos9, yes!
Some like to define Utopianism as that which can never be. The brilliant Gene Youngblood points out the other definition: That which is not permitted.
Check out Hakim Bey - the Temporary Autonamous Zone.
My thought exactly- Burning Man, or even any of the fabulous Barter Faires around the country. One big problem is addiction, though. We (myself included) are all very much addicted to the growth culture and the various entertainments and toys we get from it. We have to be willing to put away the cell phones and the electronic gadgets, and unplug literally and metaphorically from the whole stinking growth economy. Great article- and very inspiring!
This does a great job of gathering in the strands of OWS. The only thing missing is how maddening such a diffuse movement is to the fascist right. With no figureheads to buy off/threaten/intimidate, OWS totally nullifies their feudal advantages.
And 'Supreme Reichskank' is the term of abuse I've been searching for. Matt needs to be press secretary in the Alan Grayson administration.
Agreed. If Grayson appoints Nomi Prins Treasury Secretary, Ralph Nader Attorney General he will have a winning team !
Insightful perspctive by Mr. Taibbi, but I believe there is an even deeper level to the message of the OWS movement than the one Taibbi identifies as striking against the culture. That deeper message is that a large part of the problems of our society stems directly from the fact that a small fraction of the population owns or controls the majority of the productive resources of the country and has an undue influence on our political system. This message is reflected in the slogan "we are the 99%." This insight into the power dynamiocs of society is the diagnosis that OWS is teaching.
But in fact the OWS movement also teaches the cure or solution to this power disparity: participatory direct democracy, instead of the corrupt political system we have with a class of professional politicians, industry and vested interest lobbyists, the politicization of issues, etc., and instead of the state-capitalist model of corporate dominance of our economy. This solution is embodied in the direct consensus-based self-governing, leaderless structures implemented at OWS.
Thanks Matt!
To the Corporate Media, politicians and, above all, the rank and file republicans and democrats:
IT'S THE CORPORATION STUPID!
The 99% is crying "enough is enough"... it's the moment to start brain storming for realistic solutions that are for the common good and take action!
The one thing that the 99% need to be fully cognizant of is that this is barely an awakening to what the majority of humanity, in all its diversity has been crying out about since the inception of colonization.
Until the indigenous peoples are recognized as the some of the most valuable allies in the struggle who need to be supported,, 99% of the minds will be subject to the advertising industry erasure of this indispensable gift of the creator.
OWS needs to name, stand by and carry placards for our indigenous brothers and sisters in reciprocity for doing so for the 99% for over 500 years! If you think the occupation - for example - of the construction site in the Amazon to save the Xingu river from the behemoth Belo Monte dam is a separate concern too distant to care about, the web is not being used as it could.
How that happens is one person at a time feeling that heart thread reaching all around the world through the likes of Amnesty International, Cultural Survival, International Working group for Indigenous Affairs, the Intercontinental Cry, Upside Down World, and all the rest - existing to serve your exploration and joining in alliance in economic and environmental justice and human rights.
yes, it's not about me, nor is it about us somewhat privileged folk who can afford computers, or who have somewhat secure lives. It is not solely about the inequality in the industrialized Euro-North American world. It is about all of us, across many places and cultures, the poorest and most dispossessed as well as those of us higher on the big hierarchy of needs.
And yes, if we forget the indigenous peoples and their acquired wisdom, we will continue to be lost.
Old goat, here is the Liberty Square Document which most prefer over a list of Demands.
http://freenetworkmovement.org/commons/index.php?title=Liberty_Square_Blueprint
"Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance."
I guess Matt Taibbi finally sees that the arm of the people is as hard as a rock. I hope he never forgets.
Good article by Matt. This seems an appropriate place to mention that Derrick Jensen will be speaking at Occupy Oakland then Occupy San Francisco this Saturday. Then on Sunday he will be joined by others like Chris Hedges and Arundhati Roy for an all day event at Berkeley called Earth At Risk. Both days of talks will be live-streamed through Derricks website, derrickjensen.org. Click on appearences for links.
Thank you! I was literally wondering what Derrick Jensen was thinking and how I could find out. The site even says he has a monthly radio appearance I didn't know about. Why do I never get the memo? Oh look - on his web site I can sign up for the memo! :)
Ha! Check this out, take a look at what OWS did without government intervention or a central plan. They managed to rediscover the process of spontaneous order while protesting that spontaneous order is a fallacy. To my knowledge there was no EPA, FDA, DOE, etc… involvement and things look pretty good!
Now if only they learned from their actions!!!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/in-mcpherson-square-occupy-dc-creates-a-vibrant-brand-of-urbanism/2011/11/09/gIQAPBNa6M_story.html
What's truly outstanding is how Matt starts by saying he updated his mind given new on-the-ground information.
In case you don't know, this piece comes right after "Welcome to the Occupation, The inside story how a bunch of anarchists and radicals inspired by the Arab Spring took Wall Street with nothing by sleeping bags and launched a nationwide movement they never expected would succeed" in the November 24th Rolling Stone.
Wail on Tabbi!
Refreshing, isn't it?
He had made assumptions, then he looked further, as a result he changed his mind, and now he publicly acknowledges that.
I'm not sure if they were assumptions or conclusions based upon previous information but in any case his mind was open enough to accept new information that changed his mind and publicly acknowledges that. Given the current state of changing affairs, I think we need more of that.
I got onto Taibbi during the 2008 election and subscribed to Rolling Stone so I could read what he wrote and see the really great artwork goes along with it.
As always - great journalism by Matt - in a writing style I thoroughly enjoy.
Not often anyone of note admits they were wrong about anything these days - shows a lot of character IMHO.
I have to wonder if Matt will have a change of heart on what 9/11 was all about one day...
i've "gotten" it from the beginning... as soon as i started reading about it, i instantly understood where the protestors were coming from because it's exactly the same place i've been coming from for a very long time and have been despairing that i would ever see like-minded people stepping forward...
i've spent the vast majority of my 64 years waiting and hoping for a sea change... while i share matt's fears about co-opting, police repression, the fury of the elites and the future of the movement itself, i'm nonetheless delighted to see it...
thanks matt for having the courage and humility to step off your pedestal and change your mind...
http://takeitpersonally.blogspot.com/
I must also confess. The very first time I heard about OWS, I jumped up and shouted with joy, pumping my fists in the air, screaming yeah, somebody finally had the cajones, and common sense to strike back! Now little more than six weeks later, I sit back with tears of joy, and thank those brave souls who dared take on the Finacial Oiligarchy, and their jack booted thugs. They've managed to do what no one in my lifetime has done, change the dialogue.
Being 57, poor, unemplyoyed, living in my 20' motorhome, equipped only with a GED, I figured out a long time ago, that the system was rigged. There's no program to help the likes of me, or billions of others around the planet. Hell there hadn't even been a discussion about what we could do until OWS happened.
Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben both paid omage to OWS in regards to the recent victory (even if it isn't permanent) in the Keystone Pipeline. Both said they would not have been able to accomplish what they have were it not for the abrupt change of dialogue.
I cannot even begin to explain to you, the inner turmoil I experience every day, regarding my plight versus the environment. If I turn off my moral compass there are good jobs waiting for me in North Dakota, if only I don't mind spoiling someone else's life. I can afford to buy a new larger motorhome, hell maybe even a piece of property to put it on. Perhaps I could even get health insurance and those knee and hip operations I've been putting off for years, or get my hiatal hernai treated, or at least have someone check out my bad heart valve. Alas though, I just can't do it, can't bring myself to destroy the earth, to make a few bucks.
OWS is now the lithmus test for me. If I ask someone what they think about OWS, I can determine an awfull lot about their though process. If they outright disagree with the movement, I know they are stuck in a very linear, from the top down sort of thought process. If they don't get it, but don't outright condemn it, I see that as a spark of hope, that perhaps their belief system is being challenged, and they are at least re-evaluating their beliefs. If they're totally in support of OWS, then they get it, that our system is rigged, irrelevant, and that no meaningful change can come from within the system. Change must come from without the system.
One of the things I appreciate most about OWS is their horizontal structure. I can't tell you how sickened I am working with most non-profits, with traditional from the top down leadership. I chewed one woman out, who introduced me as one of her volunteers. I let it be know, that I was NOT one of her volunteers, that there was no sort of ownership there, that I did not take marching orders from her, or anyone else.
I am tired of the same ole shit. The constant mass merchandising of every bit of essential life. I am tired of YOGA BOOT CAMPS, and glorification of our military life. I am really sick and tired of someone trying to sell me something everywhere I turn. I am sick of watching MSNBC, and the talking heads, who keep telling me Dems good, Repugs bad. I am tired of being unable to walk across the grocery parking lot, because some redneck in a big ass pickup truck, won't stop for me. I'm tired of passing strangers, talking on their cellphones, or texting, ignoring life around them. I'm tired of life as it is defined in our corporatacracy. Thank You, OWS, for changing our dialogue.
Thanks for this post. Best commentary on OWS here yet. Made my evening.
I hear you WhiteTrashInWasilla, I hear you LOUD AND CLEAR, and I understand every word you say and from down here in Hollywood, California, I shake your hand.
...on sleeping bags and anarchists (on Donner and Blitzen)... the "A" word .... the new "F" word .... in your face Anarchism - the elites' worst nightmare - that anarchism should take root in the minds of the people and the people should dump the bosses off our backs. this is what they fear and this is what we fear the fear of freedom itself and the ... for the non-anarchists ... fear of loss of freedom - the freedom to oppress or jail your enemies behind walls of concrete, steel, electronics and social exclusion.
What is the Occupy Movement about. I submit it is a strong reaction to a world corporate based culture that through greed and domination is destroying itself- life itself. The path we are on is unsustainable. The vast inequity in global society, the endless wars of domination, the utter disrespect for the land, air and water, all of these things are understood by the movement at a visceral level. The young and young of heart, see through the lies. If their heart is not too scarred by hate, they recognize their individual and collective responsibility for this mess. If nothing else it is Occupy Heart. The details of policies to undermine, radicalize, transform our way of life- they are almost boundless- but at the core is community, non-violence and love
The movement is here to remind us of ourselves and save what is left of our humanity.
WOW! Matt hits it out of the friggin park!! He's so right, #OWS is just that a place outside the sickening Corporatist paradigm we all now are forced to live in. There is NO escape form it anymore. The Big Corps. and the BIG Gov't they own at all levels have basically closed off the exits and barred the doors just as effectively as any Totalitarian State has ever done. In fact what they've created here is like the world in the "Truman Show "movie of the late 90's. That's not the real moon up there folks its a Paper one and if you look real close you'll see its owned by Mobil-Exxon and it was made in CHINA.