New radio product
Freshly posted to my radio archives, ending a three-week fundraising hiatus:
October 28, 2011 sociologist Alex Vitale on cops and protest • journalist Sarah Jaffe on OWS, mostly
OWS: rising to discursive hegemony!
Well, maybe not exactly. But here’s the cover of the October 24 New Yorker:
Yeah, it’s funny. Caricatured elites protesting to defend privilege. But Occupying Wall Street is setting the agenda. Bourgeois organs have to respond, if only ironically. Bush’s speechwriter Matthew Dowd used to say that if you oppose us while still using our language, we’re winning. Looks like someone different is winning, at least for now.
Civil disobedience against NYPD’s stop & frisk
It looks like OWS is giving the movement against the NYPD’s stop & frisk policies—under which literally hundreds of thousands of young males are patted down by cops—a shot in the arm. This press release just in:
For Immediate Release
Activists to shut down 73rd Precinct in Brownsville
Stop ‘Stop and Frisk’ Comes to Brooklyn
New York, NY, Oct. 28, 2011 – Nonviolent civil disobedience is on the agenda as local activists, community members and religious leaders gear up to challenge the NYPD’s controversial ‘stop and frisk’ practices at the 73rd Police Precinct in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The 73rd Precinct has the highest rate of stops-and-frisks in New York City.
The Stop Mass Incarceration Network, on Nov. 1 at 4 PM, will stage the second of a series of similar events in neighborhoods around New York City targeting to stop the repressive NYPD practice of Stop and Frisk – a policy the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New York Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups have challenged as illegal. On Friday, October 21, a group of more than 200 demonstrators marched on the 28th Precinct in Harlem where 34 community members, activists, and allies from Occupy Wall Street, were arrested for blocking the entrance to the police station. Among those arrested were Dr. Cornel West, Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Debra Sweet of World Can’t Wait, Rev. Stephen Phelps of Riverside Church, and comedian/activist Randy Credico.
During 2010 NYPD recorded more than 600,000 warrant-less stops — the vast majority Back and Latino youths — and are on pace to top 700,000 in 2011. This is up from 86,000 just ten years ago. The stop and frisk exchange, the humiliating is first step into the pipeline of mass incarceration and criminalization of minority young people. It is often a young man’s first introduction to the police in his neighborhood. It leaves an indelible stain on a young man’s self-awareness, and antagonizes and terrorizes community members. A handful of police officers have stepped forward to oppose the policy — documented by the Village Voice, and by WABC-TV News — which has been loudly supported by Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Recent news reports of police involvement in gun smuggling, traffic ticket fixing, and the routine planting of illegal drugs on innocent persons have further added spotlight to illegal activities associated with the NYPD.
According to Dix, “mass resistance” is needed because the NYPD is “harassing and humiliating a lot of innocent people. And then we’ve also seen cases where these stops escalate to beat downs, arrests, and even people being killed….it is a burning injustice and we want to tap into what we feel is a supportive mood around resisting it, and to link in with people who are trying to deal with it on other levels, whether that’s through the courts, political, the electoral arena.”
On August 3, 2011 a Federal Judge rejected an effort by the City of New York to thwart a lawsuit filed by The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) that challenges the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy and practices. In a statement issued earlier this year CCR said that “for many children being stopped by the police on their way home from school has become a normal after school activity and that is a tragedy.”
Wednesday, October 19, 2011, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and State Senator Eric Adams called for a federal probe of the policy, saying that it is “emblematic of a police culture that disregarded the civil rights of young black and Hispanic men.”
Media outlets such as the New York Times, NY1, New York Daily News, Salon, Democracy Now and the Guardian have covered the campaign to Stop “Stop and Frisk” here in New York.
Carl Dix, Rev. Phelps and other Oct. 21st arrestees are available for interviews.
-30-
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Media Liaison Team
“Stop Mass Incarceration: We’re Better Than That!” Networkc/o P.O. Box 941 Knickerbocker StationNew York City, New York 10002-0900Phone: 973-756-7666 or 866-841-9139 x2670 * Email: stopmassincarceration@ymail.com
The “Stop Mass Incarceration: We’re Better Than That!” Network is a project of the Alliance for Global Justice, a 501c3 tax-exempt organization. Tax-deductible contributions accepted, and checks should be made payable to the “Alliance for Global Justice, with “Mass Incarceration Network” in the memo line. Other forms of contributions also accepted.
It really is about that 1%
Wow, that top 1% is doing really, really well, you’ll not be surprised to hear. Everyone else, not so well.
The Congressional Budget Office is out with some new stats on Trends in the Distribution of Income over the last three decades. Between 1979 and 2007, here’s how various slices of the population did in real (inflation-adjusted) income growth after federal taxes:
- top 1%: +275%
- next 19%: +65%
- middle 60%: +40%
- bottom 20%: +18%
Or, in graphic form:
The stairstep pattern—the higher you go up the income ladder, the stronger the growth—is remarkable.
As a result of this vastly unequal growth, the share of after tax income by population slice grew vastly more unequal:
- top 1%: 8% in 1979 to 17% in 2007, more than doubling
- next 19%: 35% in 1979, 36% in 2007, barely changed
- middle 60%: 50% in 1979, 43% in 2007, down 7 points
- poorest 20%: down 2 points, from 7% to 5%
Or, in a picture:
As of 2005, the share going to the top 20% surpassed the share going to the bottom 80%—though as the breakdown shows, most of this shift came from the very top. In 1979, the top 1% claimed about the same share as the bottom 20%; as of 2007, the top 1% hogged as much as the bottom 40%.
It really, really is 99 vs. 1.
Lower limits of income groups, after federal taxes and transfers (table A-1 in the full report):
lowest 20% $ 0 second 20% 18,979 middle 20% 29,759 fourth 20% 42,202 81st percentile 60,557 91st percentile 81,135 96th percentile 109,006 99th percentile 252,607
Keynes on bizmen as “domestic animals”
This is from a February 1938 letter by John Maynard Keynes to Franklin Roosevelt, expressing his alarm at the return to slump in 1937–38, and offering suggestions on how to reverse it. I’ve cleaned up a few marks and jacked up the contrast to make it more legible. The whole letter is really worth reading; it’s full of sentences like “The handling of the housing problem has been really wicked.” The bourgeoisie doesn’t make them like these two anymore. (Click on the graphic to enlarge it.)
Thanks for the pointer, Mike Konczal.
Creeps busting brooms, stealing trashbags at OWS
A startling bit of news from last night’s OWS Demands Working Group meeting. Someone from the Sanitation Committee at Zuccotti reported that they’re in desperate need of brooms, dustpans, and garbage bags. Someone—cops? freelance thugs (as opposed to the professional uniformed thugs)? pranksters?—has been sneaking in at night and breaking the broom handles and stealing the dustpans and trashbags. Since keeping the park clean is Mayor Bloomberg’s preferred excuse for a clampdown, this is ominous.
If you’d like to donate some of these goodies, please drop them by the park. The THE YIPPIE MUSEUM (9 Bleecker St) and Lucky Cheng’s (1st Ave and 1st St) are also taking donations.
The OWS Demands group meets
Last night, I went to the meeting of the OWS Demands Working Group, held in historic Tompkins Square Park, scene of many a riot and other kind of uprising in its 161-year history. There were about 75 people there, to discuss what to do with the draft set of demands that the group had passed past week.
On Friday, I wrongly reported that the OWS General Assembly had rejected the draft and disavowed the working group. In fact, the GA hasn’t even discussed the issue. According to people at last night’s meeting, whoever controls the website issued the statement of disavowal and deleted the accounts of some participants, making it impossible for them to participate in online discussions of the issue. The “whoever” is accurate: no one seems to know the identity of the website’s controllers, who nonetheless purport to speak for the organization. With such a freewheeling organization, if that’s the right word, lines of responsibility and accountability are very murky.
That statement of disavowal claimed that the Demands group does not work by consensus. From what I saw, it certainly does. Everything was extensively processed, and with hand signals as complex as those that used to prevail in the (now largely deserted) trading pits of the major futures exchanges. Perhaps the controllers of the website are scandalized that the Demands group works by “modified” consensus, meaning a 75% vote is necessary for something to pass (though as Michael Pollak reports below, they’re not alone in this). But what in this life—even the beauty of a clear blue sky on a crisp October day—could get 100% approval?
I must admit that I am not cut out for these sorts of meetings. When it started, at 6 PM, there was a discussion of whether to go to midnight, when the park closes, or try to cut it off at 9. The thought of standing outside for three hours filled me with fear, and so I left at 7:30. But my good friend Michael Pollak had the—well you can’t call it Sitzfleisch, so, Stehenfleisch maybe?—to stick it out. I admire people like that, and wish I could be more like them. Here’s Michael’s report:
There seems to be some misconception that the Demands Group is a bunch of outsiders. It is not. This is a argument within the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The Demands Group is a working group just like any other working group. Yesterday evening I spent three hours in the park taking part in their meeting, and I can attest, it was run scrupulously according to consensus procedures under experienced facilitators. And frankly it was one of the most satisfying consensus meetings I’ve taken part in. There were (a changing average of) 60 people, there were heated disagreements, and the proposals and counterproposals were modified so that they visibly came closer together while retaining what emerged as their respective most crucial points. And while each individual proposal was defeated or unable to get off the ground by itself, the final joint/modified proposal passed by a modified consensus, i.e., 75%. And it was a consensus in the real sense of the term. It was strongly supported. The opposed sides had come together. The final product was only possible because both sides had convinced each other that they would carry out their side of the bargain in good faith. And you could feel that everyone involved was palpably chuffed at the end. Tired, wired and cold, but chuffed.
The basic upshot is that there will be tons of liasing in the next few days with other occupation working groups and with community groups; there will also be teach-ins at Zuccotti Park and canvassing there; we will encourage representatives of all these groups to join us for our meeting on Thursday with their proposed amendments or concerns or questions (or support for the proposal at it stands — also an option); everyone present at the Thursday meeting will vote on amendments to the proposal that grow out of this liasing; and we will present the amended proposal to the general assembly on Sunday at 7pm, where it will be argued at length, amended as the GA sees fit, and voted on, according to consensus rules. (Important aside: switching to modified consensus when you can’t attain full consensus, and having this identified as three quarters approval—and not a person less—seems to be already SOP in many OWS working groups. It is not a new innovation invented by the Demands Group.)
The OWS General Assembly has never been made up simply of people who sleep in the park. The General Assembly has always explicitly been made out of whoever shows up for the meeting that day. This is part of its anarchist nature, and part of the whole idea of a prefigurative experience: anyone is free to take part and be transformed through transforming. (And it is just as much a part of working groups. In the Demands Group tonight, three quarters of the people there hadn’t been to prior meetings, but everyone had full talking, blocking and voting rights.) The Demands Group meeting today contained a spectrum of people from 24/7 occupiers; though people who sleep at home but participate daily; up through people who were energized to participate for the first time tonight precisely because the ideas of demands in general or these particular demands excited them.
So this isn’t an outsider group operating by principles foreign to OWS. This is the occupation operating by its own principles. It is a discussion and argument within the occupation.
And BTW, if anyone feels like a visit to OWS anytime soon, Sunday at 7pm would be a great time.
Background info for anyone wanting to get involved in the Demands Group:
The Demands Group has a listserv on Yahoo Groups: OWS Demands Working Group. (If you don’t already have a Yahoo account, you need to open one to join. You can, however, adjust it to send the messages to your normal email. It looks like there is option to do it without that step by logging in using Google or Facebook, but that is just a cruel trick. It has an acknowledged bug that leads to an endless loop. But that’s the way Yahoo works.)
The Demands Group has been meeting bi-weekly on Tue at 7 at Sun at 6 at Tompkins Square Park. Both those meetings have been changed for this week to meet the demands of liasing and presenting. The Tuesday meeting will be on Thursday this week, and it will be at 60 Wall Street, an indoor Atrium where many working groups meet. It is a similar private/public space to Zuccotti, except this one closes at 10pm, so the meeting has to end then. (This BTW, can be a great help to consensus. The meeting last night had an agreed ending time of 3hrs after starting too, and it really focussed minds at the end and helped in forging consensus.)
The Plan B meeting point for Thursday (if we can’t get the Atrium) will be Washington Square Park, not Tompkins. I’m not sure under what conditions we’d need to go to Plan B.
Washington Square Park may possibly replace Tompkins in the future.
The Sunday meeting this week that would normally happen on Oct 30 will be replaced by showing up to the General Asssembly.
For the record, a delegation from the Demands Committee will be meeting with the Facilitation Committee on Tuesday about getting on the Agenda for the General Assembly for Sunday (just in case you see that referred to in the listserv.)
Taking the measure of OWS
Pollster Doug Schoen, who’s worked for Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg, sent a researcher into Zuccotti Park on October 10 and 11 to take the measure of the Occupiers. Schoen wrote up his conclusions from this effort in a now-discredited op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:
Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence.
As several writers have pointed out, notably Azi Paybarah, Schoen misrepresented—to put it kindly—his own research. They’re not the radicals of his phantasmic summary.
A better overview was developed, using Schoen’s data, by John Nienstedt of Competitive Edge Research in San Diego, who posted it to the listserv of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), of which I’m a member. AAPOR etiquette requires members to ask permission of authors before reporting on their posts, and I’ve gotten that. Nienstedt asked me to point out that he’s totally nonpartisan and independent, which I’m happy to do, because he is.
Here’s Nienstedt’s taxonomy of the protesters:
8% Radical
4% Radical redistribution of wealth
4% Dissolution of our representative democracy/capitalist system53% Liberal
35% Influence the Democratic Party the way the Tea Party has influenced the GOP
9% Engage & mobilize Progressives
4% Single payer health care
4% Pull out of Afghanistan immediately5% Conservative
5% Overhaul of tax system: replace income tax with flat tax
27% Process-oriented (don’t neatly fit in my continuum)
11% Break the two-party duopoly
9% Promote a national conversation
7% Direct Democracy8% Not sure
In other words, more than half are liberal, Democrats even, and less than one in ten are radicals—the same share who aren’t sure of what they are.
Though it’s all we have now, we don’t really know how accurate Schoen’s polling was. But if it’s anywhere near the truth, it really makes you wonder about the governance structure of OWS. By its own representation, the gathering is run by consensus and its official statements are supposed to be approved by a general assembly. But the GA’s decisions—like purging the Demands Working Group—may not be as democratic as they claim. More on this after I visit the Demands group’s meeting tonight.
In another post to the AAPOR listserv, Mike Mokrzycki—who also asked me to emphasize that he’s totally nonpartisan, so nothing he says should be construed as taking a political position—noted that OWS may be more popular than the Tea Party. As he points out, CNN/Opinion Research apparently stopped asking people if they were “active members” of the TP because they couldn’t get more than 2% of respondents to identify themselves as such. 2%! The TP does draw the sympathy of about 25% of the population. But most surveys show that a larger share of the public has a positive view of OWS than of the Tea Party. Of course, OWS doesn’t have billionaires funding its agenda.
Those demands? Forget about them!
The OWS General Assembly disavows the Demands working group, saying, in a grandiose and narcissistic fashion, “We are our demands”: Demands Working Group.
Is fame going to someone’s head?
OWS: it never stops!
Edited version of my October 22 radio commentary.
Sorry for repeating myself on Occupy Wall Street, but it seems pretty important. An acquaintance in Australia posted this to a discussion group the other day:
This is I truly hope the very beginning of the reconstruction and the rediscovery of an American Left. I keep banging on about this, but American comrades must understand how this is galvanising the world. If the Left in America re-emerges as an historical agent, then a lot will become possible.
All this, from what started as a small encampment in a small park at the narrow southern tip of an island off the coast of America, as Spalding Gray once called Manhattan.
A major controversy of the moment is whether to make demands, and if so, of what kind. The demands working group has come up with a list I find quite admirable, perhaps because it bears a lot of resemblance to things I’ve been saying all along. I’ve already posted the text here. That draft must go to the OWS general assembly for approval—approval that may be in considerable doubt.
There are objections on specifics. No mention of the prison–industrial complex. (Mass incarceration is a horror, but the role of prison labor is wildly exaggerated.) No mention of, as one critic put it, the racialized nature of poverty. I think there’s a great virtue to simplicity, instead of getting into the usual laundry list. And should by some miracle something like this be enacted, there’s no doubt that it would disproportionately benefit people of color, even as it also benefitted many people of no color.
But there are objections to the very notion of demands. Some think that “demands” are for terrorists, not peaceful assemblies. It’s a good thing that the labor movement never thought that way in its heyday. A lot of anarchists believe that demanding remedies of the state legitimizes the state. I wonder who else could mobilize the resources to meet the challenges of deprivation and environmental destruction. They also believe that jobs suck, and demanding more of them would only make things worse. I doubt that that would resonate with the 25 million un- and under-employed. To this camp, making demands are an opening to being co-opted. They might also be the way to win adherents and win something good.
The twinklers have come up with their own manifesto, the Liberty Square Blueprint . It’s remarkably vague, invoking a rambling set of principles, which they weirdly refer to as “bullet point visions.” (There’s a strange New Age Corporate cast to a lot of their language—a mix of cybertopianism and orgo-localism.) They want to “empower marginalized people to express themselves, build community, and engage systemic/cultural discrimination”? Who are the “we” that grant “them” this power? And how?
The economic planks include:
“Create an economy in harmony with nature…based on sound ethical assumptions and observed individual and market behavior through behavioral economics and econometrics.” I have no idea what that would mean in practice. Could you generate electricity that way? And econometrics? Vector autorregressions will set us free.
Also, “Implementing and improving community currencies, barter, sharing, and trade systems.” Barter is a major waste of time, and as David Graeber has been arguing, hasn’t really existed in a major way in any society known to anthropology. Community currencies are fine for haircuts, but scissors? Steel? It seems they haven’t thought through the role of economic scale at all. Perhaps their devotion to open-source software has obscured the institutional complexity required to produce the computers and networks it runs on.
And “eliminating financial/resource speculation that supports the current economy at the expense of future generations.” Who exactly would do this, if not a state?
This is hard stuff. I do worry about this movement being hijacked by Democrats for electoral purposes. I think that working for candidates would be a disastrous compromise. We don’t want to lose long-term utopian desire in the course of devising shorter-term concrete demands. The key is to pressure the powers that be without becoming their pawn—to make practical demands that are not death to passion or the imagination.
Full employment is no small demand to make. The bourgeoisie hates it, because it would strengthen the bargaining power of the working class. It, plus the other planks of an expanded welfare state mentioned in the Demands draft, would give people the confidence and freedom to think about a better world. This isn’t fictional: it happened in the 1970s, as the transformation of consciousness among middle-class college students spread into the working class. Quality of work life—in a real, not a GM sense—became a central concern in organized labor, at least among the rank and file. It was one of the things that alarmed elites, leading to the crackdown of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Spontaneous gatherings will not replace the state any time soon, and if we want a better world, we need a better state. To use the jargon, this is extra-parlimentary pressure on the parliament. Relying on the state involves trusting an institution that has demonstrated itself to be often violent, corrupt, and oppressive. But I see no alternative to the state.
This is a very important discussion to have, and one of the great things about OWS is that we’re having it.
OWS demands working group: Jobs for All!
The anarchists are not happy about this, and are trying to block its adoption by the General Assembly. If you like it, please attend, agitate, comment, circulate, whatever. If you don’t like it, please reflect on the size of the potential constituency for this agenda compared with that for your own.
TEACH-IN: DEMANDS WORKING GROUP PANEL
Saturday 3:00-5:00 PM
66 W 12th St Rm 407
Part of Day-long Teach-in sponsored by the New School Senate
What’s the story about the proposed
Jobs for All Demand?
The Demands Working Group of Occupy Wall Street unanimously endorsed and is circulating for discussion the following demand, which will be submitted to the General Assembly of OWS:
“Jobs for ALL – A Massive Public Works and Public Service Program
We demand a massive public works and public service program with direct government employment at prevailing (union) wages, paid for by taxing the rich and corporations, by immediately ending all of America’s wars, and by ending all aid to authoritarian regimes to create 25 million new jobs to:
-Expand education: cut class sizes and provide free university for all;
-Expand healthcare and provide free healthcare for all (single payer system);
-Build housing, guarantee decent housing for all;
-Expand mass transit, provided for free;
-Rebuild the infrastructure—bridges, flood control, roads;
-Research and implement clean energy alternatives; and
-Clean up the environment.
These jobs are to be open to all, regardless of documentation/immigration status or criminal record.”
Come to this open teach-in to learn about this demand, its history, and implications for the Occupations movement. We urge all to join in the discussion and to prepare their comments and proposed amendments (friendly and unfriendly!) for the General Assembly.
AND:
Demands Working Group Meeting
Sunday, 6:00 PM
Tompkins Square Park
(center, circular area right off E. 7th St., between Ave B and C)
1st Ave on L train or 2ndAve on F train
This is the working group for those who want OWS to put forward demands. All who want to help us plan for a broad-based discussion and eventual adoption of the “Jobs for All” Demand are invited!
Plug from Caleb Crain!
The Book Bench: Why I Signed the Occupy Writers Petition : The New Yorker
My Keynesian hunch about the current economic troubles is that when wealth is too much concentrated in the hands of people who don’t need to spend it, it stops circulating. I suspect that America spent its way out of the structurally similar Great Depression of the nineteen-thirties through a campaign of wealth redistribution that lasted decades—the government hired soldiers, gave college educations to veterans, granted pensions to senior citizens, and went to war on poverty—and that the transfer laid the groundwork for the longest period of uninterrupted prosperity in American history. Unfortunately, it’s become difficult to talk about hunches and suspicions like these outside the pages of, say, Doug Henwood’s Left Business Observer. A politician who tries is likely to be attacked as a partisan of class warfare.
Video of great #OWS debate now up
Video of the great Jacobin debate on #OWS politics & strategy now up. Below the link, some of moderator Seth Ackerman’s comments:
#OWS, a debate on left politics and strategy
Held on Friday Oct. 14, 2011 at Bluestockings bookshop on Allen St. in New York City.
From anarchism to demands, from the consensus process to “what next?” we covered the gamut of topics. When the discussion was over, Doug Henwood, who was on the panel, commented that it had been the most contentious left-wing gathering he’d ever participated in (and Doug’s participated in a lot). One audience member who spends a lot of time at Zuccotti Park made an insightful observation: he said that the mood of agitation was due to the fact that the issues discussed had lingered in the air so long without ever being fully aired.
From our point of view, that means this event was a success. And yet, in the process of airing disagreements that had previously been glossed over, we also felt the discussion revealed a disturbing lack of politicization and political sophistication within the movement. What that portends, and what should be done about it, are topics for future debate
THE PANEL:
Jodi Dean is a political and media theorist working in Geneva, NY. Her most recent books are “Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies” and “Blog Theory.” She is currently finishing the book, “The Communist Horizon,” forthcoming from Verso.
Doug Henwood is the editor of Left Business Observer, host of Behind The News, contributing editor at The Nation, and author of “Wall Street” and “After The New Economy.”
Malcolm Harris is the managing editor of The New Inquiry, a contributing editor at Sharable.net, and blogs for Jacobin. He edited the collection “Share or Die: Youth in Recession,” forthcoming from New Society Publishers in the spring. He has been active in OWS since the first planning meetings.
Natasha Lennard was formerly on staff at Salon.com and Politico. She currently freelances for The New York Times. She has covered OWS since before Sept. 17.
Chris Maisano is a public librarian in Brooklyn, rank-and-file activist in DC37 Local 1482, and chair of the NYC local of Democratic Socialists of America. He is a contributing writer for Jacobin.
Moderator: Seth Ackerman is an editor at large with Jacobin and a doctoral candidate in History at Cornell. He has written for Harper’s, In These Times, and other outlets
LBO News from Doug Henwood 