By Annalyn Censky @CNNMoney January 4, 2012
It only takes $34,000 a year, after taxes, per person, to be among the richest 1% in the world….
Sunday Dec 11 10:20pm“Truth can reach the public in other ways. In fact, you can even shame the press into reporting it. Actually, cartoonists do that.” —Noam Chomsky
This is beautiful and the best explanation yet for the Occupy movement
Occupation/Explanation
(Why an Occupation?)
It’s a different question than why Occupy? It has been coming up along with the hand wringing over hygiene and the dangers of camping. Many people are sympathetic to the complaints of Occupy, but are squeamish about the methods and slightly woozy from the cognitive dissonance of seeing police officers sadistically abusing peaceful protestors like it was Birmingham in 1963. I keep reading well meaning, middle-of-the-road liberals stumbling over themselves as they attempt to explain away the pepper spray and riot gear. The underlying sentiment seems to be that Occupy deserves what they get because they’ve just been protesting way too long, as though the first amendment turns into a pumpkin at midnight.
So, why an Occupation? Why upset these tweed clad, NPR listeners by exacerbating their already itchy, liberal guilt? The obvious answer that must be acknowledged is that many occupiers occupy because they are part of the human crater that was created when the top-heavy bloat in our economy collapsed on the unwashed masses three years ago. Wall Street lay squealing and wriggling on top of us, insisting that it was too big to pick itself back up and that it would only crush more of us if we didn’t hoist it back up onto its narrow pedestal. Since then Wall Street has been carefully buttressing its gilded temple to Mammon with foreclosed homes and federal loans. As a result, many occupiers don’t have to be at work on Monday and their tents might actually be their best housing option.
There is a kind of Bonus Army romance to leaving the explanation at that, but to do so would deny the power of an idea whose time has come. Occupy Wall Street was conceived of as an occupation from the outset. The graphic that ran in Adbusters over the summer called participants to “bring tent.” It wasn’t a protest that evolved into an occupation, it was meant to be a permanent fixture from day one, and herein lies the power of Occupy.
Occupy must be an occupation because only as an occupation does it reflect the bizarre distortions of the system it confronts. In every way Occupy is a genuine grassroots expression of those inalienable human rights that Wall Street has co-opted and abused. Occupy is an occupation because Wall Street itself is an occupation of our consciousness, our public spaces and resources, and our democracy.
Occupy is first and foremost an occupation because human memories are strengthened through repeated exposure, like tiny threads woven into a heavy rope. This is why Wall Street pours so much of its wealth into making advertisements and repeating them over and over and over again. It is how they make sure that we recognize their brands, that we look for them when we buy, and hold any unfamiliar logo with deep suspicion.
Occupy is an occupation for the same reason that we drive by the same billboards every day and see the same commercials on television day in and day out. It is an advertisement, and like all advertisements it points out something about ourselves that we didn’t realize was wrong until we’ve been told a hundred times. Like all advertisements it invites us to make a change in our lives for the better, but the change we are called to is not a new brand of toothpaste or a phone that is the next incremental iteration of the phone we already have. Instead we are called to change our awareness, to become more than our next purchase. We are called to change the way we see the world and how we live in it. The occupation is a daily reminder that the way we are living is not only stupid, unsustainable, morally and spiritually bankrupt, but also has dramatic human consequences.
There are dramatic ecological consequences as well. In this the occupation offers a beautiful reflection of Wall Street’s tragic abuse of the commons. It is a perfect irony that Occupy has occupied this tiny square in New York, this odd little public/private space that was offered up by a city developer in exchange for the right to further block the sun with ever taller buildings. They’ve taken this space which has been designated for public use and made it into a forum for a public discussion of how we use public resources. They have also slept, cooked, read books, danced, made music and done many of the other things that humans do when they are together.
Meanwhile, just around the corner it’s oil-spills, fracking, mountain-top removal, clear-cutting, over-fishing, sweat-shops, gun-running, and every other possible whole-sale exploitation of the shared resources of the entire planet.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stated reason for evicting Occupy from Liberty Square last month put as fine a point on this contrast as I could hope for:
“I have become increasingly concerned - as had the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties - that the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protesters and to the surrounding community.”
Michael Bloomberg, as Keith Olberman and others have pointed out, makes a wonderful villain in the tale of our current struggle to reclaim democracy, but much more powerful in than one oligarch pretending at democracy is Occupy itself and its general assemblies, which are in fact a model for a working democracy. In all the feigned bafflement of reporters and pundits over what Occupy wants, few have thought to take the time to watch what Occupy does. Occupy gathers to make decisions as a group. They listen to one another and give everyone a chance to speak. They don’t leave anyone out and don’t favor anyone over anyone else. They are practicing a form of democracy and modeling it to the rest of us, and if they stop, I won’t know where to find democracy in this country anymore.
This is the reason for the occupation, and the reason it can never end. It can only grow because it is the rising tide of democracy in the United States. In the end we all must “Join or Die.” In the end we all must Occupy.
Occupy Boston was given orders to clear out tonight or else. On the one hand it may be a good thing since winter is coming and it’s unclear how well the protest would handle cold weather safely. There’s a new effort to help people in foreclosed homes that could use help too. Still it pisses me off that the police will once again be well-armored and armed and march in to forcibly prevent people from their constitutional right to assemble. Some of you may disagree with the encampments but I think they were genius. In the 50s & 60s and earlier, mass protests and marches were very effective at influencing opinion and bringing about positive social change. In my lifetime however there are countless marches on Washington (almost weekly events) that just seem to be par for the course, easily ignored by politicians and the news media (unless organized by a media figure like Glenn Beck or Jon Stewart). In 2004 I walked around Boston during the Democratic National Convention and was horrified that demonstrators were contained in a “free-speech zone” which was a pen under an elevated railway and surrounded by a 12-foot chainlink fence, completely invisible to the delegates and news media. How then can anyone assemble peacefully for protest when the powers that be have made it so easy to contain and sweep under the rug? The Occupy movement’s genius is bringing the protests to the doorsteps of corporations who have gained an unfair level of power in our nation’s government. The camps were not just a one day “March on [Insert Corporation Here]” that could be easily contained and ignored. You’ll remember that Occupy Wall Street was in place for more than two weeks before the mainstream media gave it any attention at all. And they were able to get their message out. For the first time in my life, topics that were verboten in political discourse in the US were being discussed widely - wealth inequality, corporate personhood, corporate welfare, workers’ rights and holding to the true ideals of democracy among them. And no, they did not come preaching solutions to all the problems but worked instead to allow many voices to be heard and discuss the options. In a way OWS may have already succeeded by getting the message out and with the public discourse reoriented I feel more optimistic about the political state of our nation than I have in years. Still, the fascistic responses of police armed like soldiers coming down to brutalize peaceful demonstrators terrifies me and makes me fear for the future as well.
Thursday Dec 8 01:22pm
Tuesday Dec 6 11:19pmA 99 percent crowdfunded ad ran in the SF Chronicle today. New media movement meets old-style print.
nonplussedbyreligion: Myths, Misinformation And Falsehoods About The Occupy Movement
Tuesday Dec 6 11:18pm
1. The Occupy Movement blames everything on Wall Street. This is false for many reasons. First, there are many culprits in the economic crisis and corporate takeover of government, including the government itself. We understand that. Wall Street is a symbol of the excess and corporate dominance in our daily lives, not the only cause. Wall Street is a good rallying point, but if journalists and talking heads would look beyond the surface, they would find more. How about looking at the signs online while in your warm offices and you will see signs at Occupy Rallies and elsewhere about many different issues.
2. “They have no agenda.” Josh Barro, a “research scholar” at the right-wing think tank the Manhattan Institute has derided Occupy Wall Street (obviously doing little “research”) for not having an agenda.
But as I wrote in a response to this nonsense in his National Review article,
“You talk to one representative and now you are an expert? Have you been to an encampment or event? There are several clear goals that the Occupy Groups have, and if you had bothered to do research and looked at the various declarations of these groups (online, so you don’t even have to visit a camp to learn) you would find goals such as:
Protect homes from unlawful foreclosures
Repeal Citizens United
Single payer health care
Forgive and reduce student debt obligations
Make college more affordable for families
End foreign wars and bring our troops home
Reinvest in education and infrastructure
End indefinite detentions
Repeal the patriot act
End corporate personhood
and so on.Perhaps the reason you don’t know of these goals is that you are too lazy to look them up and main stream reporters such as yourself refuse to report on them.
If you want to refute what I say, why not have me debate you and your ignorance.”
Perhaps I am being unfair to him and should forgive his inability to understand a movement that doesn’t fit into his “liberal versus conservative paradigm”, a leaderless movement full of capable people, and a movement that has many goals and objectives but isn’t as narrowly focused as Republican Senators are on bringing down Obama and nothing else.
3. They are all unemployed hippies who are aimless but at the same time violent anarchists, and other demographic falsehoods. The population of the Occupy encampments changes from day-to-day and city to city. I have seen different surveys of the group, but the highest unemployment stat on the movement I have seen is 30%. We are employed, part-time workers, unemployed, retired, homeless, rental unit owners, entrepreneurs, students, vets, and so on.
The actual number of hippies in the movement is quite low, and what’s wrong with hippies anyway? Do hippies make right-wingers uncomfortable or jealous that these reporters and pundits chose a life defending the 1% while hippies are free of such nonsense and don’t have to lie and misrepresent facts for living? I know it’s hard for people in the media to understand that there is not one type of person involved with the Occupy movement, and it makes the movement hard to stereotype. But they keep trying.
4. The Occupy Movement is disorganized. This is false. With few resources and no corporate or political party backing, Occupiers have daily and weekly general assembly meetings. We have declarations, clean camps, feed people, make the media contacts available to us (somehow, the Today Show hasn’t called Occupy Tucson), and so forth. We have no central committee, and I know that is hard to understand for inflexible minds reporting news for the 1%.
Yes, we don’t fit the standard non-profit organization, or the Tea Party (paid for by Koch), but if you go to the camps and talk to the organizers, there is a lot of order for an underfunded, non-aligned, independent organization. People say we are disorganized because they don’t understand our organization and want to marginalize us.
5. Occupy Movements caused their own troubles and the violence. Little of the violence was instigated by the protesters, and at least in LA, much of the violence has occurred to Occupiers after they were in custody. To blame movement activists for being violent when they are attacked is like blaming a rape victim for injuring their assailant, something Republicans and many others have done. Don’t buy it when someone tells you that being hit by batons, or being pepper sprayed or being hit by rubber bullets is the fault of the occupiers. If the police would let us occupy or surrender in peace, there would be little to no violence.
6. We’re Anti-captilist. Not true. While some may hold this view, it is more accurate to say that we are all against the rigged system. We are against a system that gives more tax cuts and affords tax loopholes to billionaires and millionaires and increases fees on the lower classes. We are against a system that passes laws to deregulate industries and gives corporate welfare in free rent, under-market prices for mining rights, military projects we don’t need to help contractors profit off of our tax dollars while they target cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, education and other social programs that help the vast majority of the people. We are against the selling off of valuable assets that only benefit the 1% such as the Rosemont Copper mine in Arizona and we are against the selling of our education system for profit while damaging that system.
Many of us own businesses, promote local enterprises and are for responsible capitalism that doesn’t damage the environment.
Can we ever really ever truly understand a movement that is in progess? Only by being at an Occupy rally or meeting can you have the slightest understanding of the full implications and people in the movement. We must work for the benefit of the 99% forever, whatever the falsehoods told about the Occupy Movement.
Peace,
Tex Shelters
I don’t get the first one but the other three are interesting images.
The artwork of Occupy.
This is a 99% I can get behind.
Thursday Dec 1 09:39amIsn’t it … interesting … how images of protest signs like these rarely seem to make it into the mainstream media coverage? I have seen dozens if not hundreds of images of articulate, witty, powerful handmade signs. Instead, the mainstream media seems hell-bent on selecting poorly-written signage in order, apparently, to continue portraying the #occupy protests in a negative light.
