The Watchdog and wife are off on their first cruise, an eight day sojourn on the Nieuw Amsterdam from Fort Lauderdale and back by way of various Caribbean islands. The enticement was the annual group sponsored by The Nation magazine. (The Watchdog only half jokingly referred to The Nation as a liberal screed.) Below is a summary from the Watchdog’s imperfect notes of a panel discussion on the Occupy Movement:
John Nichols
1) Occupy Wall Street was a good choice of name: “Occupy” answers what you do. “Wall Street” is the symbolic target.
2) “We are the 99%.” A brilliant calculus n
3) OWS remained generalized. Did not allow itself to come with a set of priorities and goals. Thus created a movement that every body in the nation who had grievances could tap into it.
Jodie Evans of Code Pink:
In the face of power, Occupy exposed the elephant in the room. Abuse of power. Insanity going on in DC from politics to the Pentagon. Someone standing up.
Also Occupy is about being local. That is where activism must occur.
New methods. Signs behind speakers such as “greed.” Audience chants.
Activism is saying what most agree with but are afraid to speak about.
Power of non-violent direct action. When Americans saw pepper spray of non-violent women, the were incensed. That was the emotional moment exposing the police state in which we live. It was a very courageous stand.
Pick targets. Currently occupying courts in LA. Must have surprises. Activism is about making people a little uncomfortable.
Van Jones
We are seeing what we are seeing because people are hurting.
Young people graduate each year to” fall off a cliff’. Can’t find jobs and wind up on the coach playing video games. War veterans have very little hope. Receive little help. Can’t cope. Very high suicide rate, one every 80 minutes.
Pain threshold throughout the country. Only getting better for a few people. Washington DC stuck on nonsense over the summer.
Prior there had been many movements including “Move on” and the Seattle protests against free trade.
We older leaders thought we understood how to do protests. (Laughter) We told them “You got to this, you got to that, you got to listen.” We thought they were nice children, a bit nuts, and someday they would come to our workshop. (More laughter)
Turns out that, when you have a 24 hour news cycle it, is good to have a 24 hour tactic.
The courage and audacity is to go to the scene of the’ crime’ (Wall Street, banks, courts, capitals) against their freedom and say we aren’t leaving… we aren’t going to do a single day protest. We are serious. Not a thousand coming for three hours on a day. Rather, we are going to have a hundred people and we are staying to show we are serious.
We now have protest energy and we must figure out how to convert it to political power. Changing the conversation is very tough. Changing the conditions under which people are living is much tougher.
Occupy knows this. They are now coming up with new tactics to occupy homes and we will see even more evolution and more surprises in the winter and spring.
This next step is to take the themes they have raised into the election and oppose those favoring the status quo.
Jessica Valenti: From Boston Occupy movement.
Very male and very white movement still the situation. Women and people of color experience injustice in a seriously disproportionate manner.
Not sure if Occupy Movement is working. Face is white and male. But this isn’t the case in the street.
How do we center marginalized voices? How do we learn the perspectives of others?
William Greider: (Veteran liberal journalist)
The populist Occupy movement is a return to the past history of the country.
Agrarian revolt of late 19th century was very similar structure of power. Farmers from across the south and Midwest had no illusions. Government, credit system, railroads were all arraigned against them. They had to build the movement themselves. They assumed they could do this which is the soul of democratic faith. They developed cooperative and other institutions. They created their own communication system because media was against them. The movement generated 40,000 lecturers, many of whom had not been beyond grade school. But they had a message.
They had 2,000 to 3,000 newspapers, some simply newsletters, circulating across the country.
Occupied movement is an animal being born. We have to convince not only ourselves that it has reality but also people out there.
Larry ?
Where is the movement? Wherever people are in conversation with themselves and acting. It is already born in Wisconsin and in scattered locations across the country. Hardest part is reaching people in their own hearts.
Movement will be subject to a series of seductions from friendly and hostile people in government. That is a way of stifling the creativity we have within us.
Our task is not re-electing Barack Obama, although we hope he will be re-elected. Our task it to get the political system to do what they have been tasked to accomplish.
Hopes movement lasts 10 to 20 years. We need to re-event democratic relationship in the country and to simultaneously combine to work for the future of the country. Start with debt and debtors. The contest is as old as the Bible: People trying to live in an equitable, progressive society.
What do we do about this system that tells young people that you aren’t going anyplace in life until you have a college degree and really and master and doctors degree? They end up debt slaves with no job or a job that doesn’t come close to the proposition sold to them.
We can ask people in their localities “What can we do for ourselves to break up debt slavery and to do new things?” We can occupy houses and then protest to the banks and the sheriffs about the legal process that take away the houses and then allows them to remain empty and rot. This is crazy.
Victor Navasky – Publisher
Strength of Occupy is that it doesn’t have leaders or an agenda but has expressed the anger that causes the need for action.
Jodie Evanson
Need to keep in face of power including the political conventions. Must not get too close to Democratic Party. Bad things happened under the Democratic Party when in power.
Participatory democracy, rather than the electorate process, has brought us everything that we value. We spend a crazy amount of money on politics. Expose that insanity.
We must not get caught up in the 2012 electoral politics. Rather we must change circumstances locally. They will become the future leaders of the nation.
Van Jones:
Agrees with Jodie. Only difference: Past 36 months we have gone from hope to heartbreak and are just starting to come back. We tend to chase a mania. Obama is going to fix it! First hoping with Obama. Then moping about Obama. We were absent from the big fight in the middle. Democracy is harder work than that. You don’t just win on one day. You have to have a movement that can win on every day.
More complicated. The movement for hope and change did not start with Obama. It started in 2003 in Seattle and Jodie was one of them. Good folks saying we aren’t going to put up with this.
MoveOn.org was a great break through at the time. Code Pink – Jodie – was much more radical . Those were the two forces behind Seattle.
Then came the Obama moment in 2008. It was decentralized and it won against Hillary Clinton centralized approach. Later Obama tried to centralize. Obama was knocked down by the decentralized approach of the Tea party in 2010. But then the Tea Party also was taken over.
There is an absolute curve of power going to the most decentralized. We must keep as far away from political process as possible.
Secondary challenge is for the rest of society to mirror the discourse s the occupiers are doing. To ask others where they come down on issues.
Victor Navasky:
Obama is learning over the last three years to whom he must respond. Many disappointed in what he did.
Obama made a speech last week comparable to FDR’s famous Green Bay speech four years into FDR’s presidency speech heralding a change of course. Could be a repeat; perhaps not.
Politician must come to our movement; not the movement to politicians
John Nichols:
2011. Year of biggest successes:
65% of voters in Ohio since Ohio restored collective bargaining rights over Republican legislation.
60% of voters in Maine reversed end of registration at the polls.
Arizona recalled and removed right wing president of the senate from office.
55% of voters in Mississippi supported a women’s right to choose.
None of the above started with a candidate or a party. All started by individuals with a petition on a street corner.
Richard Kim:
All recent victories were defending issues won in the past.
John Nichols:
What we have seen is an attempt to preserve progressive policies of the last century since they are the building blocks for moving forward. Moments like this occur rapidly. This is a populous moment. In the 19th century the populists led to local offices and a few years later the locals move up to higher positions. We must place our candidates in local battles.
Jessica Velenti:
It is frustrating to have to fight just to preserve the status quo. Banning “morning after pill” for young people was still another blow. Need to forge ahead. Need to center on equality of women, especially women of color. It is easy to just fight for status quo.
Richard Kim:
“Stop and frisk law” in New York attacked by minorities marching up to legislature. Need and expect more such actions in reaction to abuses.
Jessica Velenti:
Occupy movement must be allowed to grow organically and not be usurped by power structure. OWS turned down an offer of a million dollar contribution. Occupiers said what would we do with it?
Want people running for office because it is for justice, equality and values. These people should come from the Occupy movement, not those groomed to be politicians.
Twittering has been very important. Get to see what message resonates immediately. Creative e-matting. Example: Message shown as pepper spraying George Washington and others. Two thousands turned up a few days after a Facebook posting for Slut Walk March where women wore sexually provocative clothing.
William Greider:
Some have voiced concern about anarchist side of Occupy movement. “There is nothing new under the sun.” Keep that in mind about politics. What we seek has been fought over for the 500 years since the Enlightenment.
Van Jones:
Occupy as but a subset of 99% movement.
We need to learn how to govern from bottom up rather than from top down for this new century.
Electoral process may not give you everything you want but you can lose everything you got. We need to put the people’s needs first.
Jessica Valenti:
She wants to live in a democracy, not to get everyone to believe as she does. Her job is to be an engaged citizen, sharing, learning, teaching.
Occupy participants on the line are courageous and they don’t give a damn about the political parties. They are hurting. It is real to them. Not a story they have been told. And it is real for 20 million people.
Willilam Greider:
Concerning the plight of the loss of manufacturing in US economy, working people have understood this from experiencing life before those with higher educations. Industrial capitalism is inconsistent with democratic, humane society. This is deeper than Carl Marx. Workers should have a sense of ownership of their own work. Working people have been disenfranchised from their work place. There are ways to allow people to have ownership, influence, and decision making power within the work plac
Reading these commentaries on the Occupy movement really opens one’s eyes to the situation that is quite simply this: The generalization of the movement has given it no real direction with no clear cut goals and has leant itself to contradictory positions at the hands of others who seek to define the Occupy movement for themselves.
This is no more plainly stated than in this article wherein one commentator states the movement seeks an Obama presidential victory while the other states the movement “doesn’t give a damn” about politics. These two positions are not mutually exclusive in today’s political arena. The result: while the movement has not been a failure, the movement has not done enough to reach out to the general public at large. Perhaps maybe it was never intended to do so……….
EDITOR: Perhaps my notes mislead on this point. Every speaker prefered that Barack Obama be re-elected. However, they see the Democrat Party and the Reupblican Party as serving the same 1%, addicted to campagin funding.
My sense is that many of those in attendance, including this writer, would welcome a responsible new party. I say “new” rather than “third” because many of us see the Democrats and Republicans as basically one party, an autocracy, at this time.
Of course the heart of the problem is the unrestricted campaign funding which can no longer be reigned in due to the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court other than by a Constitutional Convention…risky but perhaps our last hope.
Really good advice.
KZ