Occupy Wall Street Shutdown

Apparently there was some kind of co-ordinated effort to shut down a occupations at a number of different cities, at least if this report that is making the rounds is to be believed http://capitoilette.com/2011/11/15/oakland-mayor-jean-quan-admits-cities-coordinated-crackdown-on-occupy-movement/

I’ve heard in addition to NYC, Calgary, Phoenix and Toronto.

As near as I can tell, the NYPD and Bloomberg continuously violated a court order this morning. They’re probably in court now.

David in NY: They are in court right now, @CityHallNews is livetweeting the hearing.

Thanks Trey, here’s a more convenient link:

http://twitter.com/#!/cityhallnews

Jim H,

Calls for OWS to become a conventional political movement, complete with a list of demands, have been around just about 24 fewer hours that OWS itself. In an era when there have been very few (no?) other successful popular efforts to call attention to the fading prospects of non-plutocrats, why would you insist that the one successful effort become more like the failures? Why, also, insist on the quixotic, narrow goal of removing single politician (non-negotiable, no less) when the OWS crowd seems, to the extent we can tell, not to have any narrow political goals?

I can think of a few historical incidences where authorities of the state destroyed libraries. But, the destruction of libraries I am familiar with took place at the hands of a self identified socialist regime. So that is probably not what Henry was thinking about. However, despite the myths still maintained about the USSR by left wing academics they did destroy libraries. So the political statement of such actions can be a left wing one. So no the destruction of books is not that particular as a political statement. The Soviet Union physically liquidated a number of libraries of deported peoples such as the Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, and Chechens. In 1945 the Soviet authorities actually burned a number of Crimean Tatar language textbooks. The Central Library of the Volga German ASSR was dissolved after their deportation and many of its books dispersed across various libraries in the USSR. The rest of the collection the Soviet government consigned to poor storage conditions resulting in their destruction. So it was not just the Nazis who destroyed inconvienent books.

I think the books were just collateral damage. Basically they wanted to destroy all the stuff that the occupiers had to make it harder for them to regroup. Vandalism pure and simple.

J. Otto @ 12 – It appears that you’re making Henry’s point for him, as I’m sure neither he nor anyone else on this site is inclined to offer mealy-mouthed apologetics for the crimes of Stalin.

My husband was in the city yesterday and met up with our daughter (who lives and works in other parts of the city) at Zucotti/Liberty Park. Someone took a great picture of them by a sign proclaiming “Student Loan Justice,” with tent upon tent stretching into the background. My daughter told me later that the occupation was so much bigger than when she’d last been there just a couple of weeks ago. Maybe that’s what was worrying Bloomberg and the NYPD, that this encampment wasn’t going to go away come with the cold weather.

And what does it say about this country’s media that the best coverage of these events is by a British newspaper?

Jim Harrison has an excellent idea.

Further to 19:
During WW1, the Germans burned the library in Louvain (which was destroyed again, iirc, during WW2, though perhaps less intentionally).

And what does it say about this country’s media that the best coverage of these events is by a British newspaper?

I am sure that the famous American journalist, Chelsea Clinton, will soon be providing excellent coverage, based on her intimate knowledge of Wall Street personnel.

It’s particularly difficult for me to read the usual CT argument about book-burning throughout history right now.

There has been a concerted crackdown. Particular encampments have gone, the movement has not. Anyone really interested in helping or participating should join their local Occupy group; there should be one within reach at most places near where academics who communicate in English congregate.

boingboing has a nice blog devoted to the raid, with some good pictures:

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/15/occupy-wall-street-nypd-raid.html

Rumor has it that Patti Smith funded the support structure for the library.

Find a group near you:

http://www.occupytogether.org/actions/

…fantastic. According to OccupySeattle‘s website, I can place orders with Great Northwest Soup Company and they’ll deliver hot soup. They’ve also got a beautifully clear list of other needs (and things they don’t need). On it.

j otto pohl–some questions: in what world do you live; what year is it there; & why is it that you seem to believe, on a wide variety of topics, that the most crucial intervention is to chide American academics for their unreconstructed Stalinism?

Please let’s not derail this thread. Also I’ve not been as regular a reader of CT recently as I have in the past but J. Otto Pohl has never struck me as being a troll. On the contrary I can recall any number of thoughtful and insightful comments he’s left on a variety of threads here. If you click on his name and look at his blog you’ll see what he studies academically and that this may be what has colored his comments here. But really, that should be the last of this part of the discussion.

Photo evidence of the continued existence of the OWS library. OTOH – not all good news. It is in the hands of The Man now, and He’ll be data-mining all sorts of information (for oppression enhancment) out of the scribbled notes in the margins.

Well, if their library is diminished or destroyed, it just means we’ll need to get back to work. Send a new round of books. (Or order some new ones for them from St. Marks Bookstore, just rescued from a Cooper Union’s attempt at absurd rent hike).

Remember, Bloomberg’s the man who got the law changed so he could go for a third term as mayor. That’s like super ALPHA DOG behavior. He may not even think of himself as a dog like the rest of us. He probably thinks he’s a monkey.

Well, I was going to respond to the dumbest thing I’ve read all day, but it appears that j otto pohl’s ass is already the most used piece of equipment in the gym, so I’ll pass without comment.

perhaps if OWS had incorporated their 1st amendmnet rights would have been taken more seriously.

On a more serious note, and echoing some of the sentiments already stated, I find it very troubling that the mayor chose self-help. Although I do not agree with the decisoin to remove the protesters, as is evident from today’s ruling, the city has sound legal arguments for being entitled to do so. The Mayor cheapened the rule-of-law by acting first. (And no, I don’t need to be reminded that the rule-of-law is kind of a joke in this day and age.)

Barry Freed 11.15.11 at 9:10 pm

” Please let’s not derail this thread. Also I’ve not been as regular a reader of CT recently as I have in the past but J. Otto Pohl has never struck me as being a troll. On the contrary I can recall any number of thoughtful and insightful comments he’s left on a variety of threads here. If you click on his name and look at his blog you’ll see what he studies academically and that this may be what has colored his comments here. But really, that should be the last of this part of the discussion.”

Yes – he studies the history of Stalinism, which is not excuse, and he feels that US academia screwed him over (which boat I believe that he shares with ‘scholars’ of right-wing think tanks all over DC and Manhattan).

I don’t know him, so I judge him by his comments here.

@Barry 11.15.11 at 11:04 pm

Fair enough. Like I said, it’s been a while since I was regularly reading and commenting on CT threads (and I’m increasingly reminded of why I’d stopped), I just don’t want to see yet another stupid diversion from the matter at hand and I really don’t care much who started it (insert relevant xkcd comic here).

Ditto on your following post.

They have a US office, genius.

@25 The inference seemed to be … doing the same thing ideologically links them some how with Fascism.

It most certainly does link them ideologically with fascism. This type of authoritarianism is a common point of fascism and Soviet communism.

I’m tempted to say unspeakable things about the book-trashing. It’s not just that I’m a scholar. Isn’t our fundamental opposition to people who do this kind of thing an essential part of the American myth–of who we think we are here? Don’t Americans fight Nazis? Isn’t that what my grandfather enlisted to do? Or the Inquisition, or whatever? (And if Voltaire falls in there too, so be it… it’s not like the fascists were strangers to rationalism.) The NYPD have basically said out loud and in public that they are the Other. The NYPD officers who ordered this, their bosses, their defenders, have abdicated any right to call themselves part of a civilized, democratic society. They are out. They have checked themselves out. The gig is up. The goose is cooked. This is an ex-parrot.

There’s not even an attempt to sustain the myth that this is about protecting our freedom. Of course the people who said that never believed in anyone’s freedom but their own (and maybe that of other well-to-do white Judeo-Christian men), of course the government never completely respected civil liberties, but the myth meant something. There have to be consequences for abandoning it.

I’m glad that people here are outraged, but I fear it will hardly be enough. The Occupy movement was doomed from exactly that moment in which the first snitch was allowed to stay in a camp. If you can’t trust people not to inform on you to the police, you certainly can’t trust them to have your back when the riot cops come in swinging their truncheons.

Protesting income inequality: excellent.

Less good is: 200 people camping out for months in a park, thereby denying the use of that park to others, harming local businesses in the area, costing the city significant additional dollars to police (to say nothing of the continuing inconvenience caused to local residents).

Sorry, as a New Yorker I’m happy that they’re drawing attention to income inequality, but have long since grown tired of the way they’re doing it. Find a way to protest without harming local residents and businesses, and without removing a public space from use by the general public for months, and I’ll be more in favor.

That said, reasonable people can certainly differ on this.

Find a way to protest that doesn’t make any noise or take up any space and I’ll be heartily in favour…

I’m not sure if this was an exact quote, but it came from (CBS evening news) that a judge had ruled “that there was a right to assemble, but no right to a camp out.”

Mubarak and others probably wonder why they didn’t come up with such a clever response.

Find a way to vacate the park without harming the local protestors by breaking the ribs or bruising the organs of individuals who committed no act of physical violence, and without abandoning the law’s rules for non-excessive use of force by the police within seconds of engagement, and I’ll be more in favor.

A strongly worded letter has been dispatched with extreme prejudice.

I’m very tired, so I’ll try to be brief.

The books aren’t burned. As the photo above shows, the police have them somewhere. Believing atrocity stories like this before they’re confirmed isn’t good; it’s cheap propaganda for the police to show a picture of books in a warehouse and then everything’s OK. In any case I’m more concerned about the people arrested and injured than the books, none of which were rare.

The right-wingers here are just sad. If they actually believed in any core American political values like freedom of speech or assembly, they’d be angry about what happened. But they believe in being against hippies, and that’s all.

The main three immediate problems the movement is facing right now are: police, cold, consensus. The third is especially important both as a source of strength and as a problem. Advice however well-meaning or well-informed doesn’t do any good without being embedded in a group of people who can carry it out. Join and then advise.

I though “Do Not Disturb”was a notice for hotel doors, but apparently Andrew F has one hanging on his life.

Way to Go!

re engels @52: I do think there’re some rather revealing connections to be drawn between the State’s responses to homelessness (in the US) in the last few decades and its responses to the Occupy sites. This Ehrenreich piece is quite good on some aspects of this:

http://www.thenation.com/article/164138/why-homelessness-becoming-occupy-wall-street-issue

bert @52: me at 51 was being mostly lighthearted; sorry if it came off otherwise.

I was in New York and passed most of an afternoon in an around Zucotti Park. IMO, it’s more than time to move from what looked like a permanent installation of performance art to a real politics. In fact, the one cop and 3 cosntruction workers I chatted to said pretty much the same thing.

By real politics I mean a cogent platform of independent actions aimed at changing the structures that have led to the current situation. To accomplish anything, however, the movement needs the help and support of cops, construction workers and people who have been schlepping into lower Manhattan by subway for their entire working lives.

I’m certainly willing and able to get behind a genuine alternative to the two party system. The occupation served its purpose – time to organize and challenge the existing politics.

The sacking of the library — barbarianism in action — is what leapt out at me this morning. That is just so wrong and so symbolic of the problem authority has in understanding what is happening. I agree with one of the early comments, make Bloomberg the face of the 1%.

@kidneystones

Ahem:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/13/undercover-policeman-admits-spying-danish-activists?INTCMP=SRCH

I’m sure ‘all’ of anything is not the work of the police. You will notice, however, that in point of fact the police are not above a little of this from time to time.

Henry will get his books read when OWS starts policing their own.

I blame Trig!

kidneystones, the voices in your head are not an important audience for political movements to persuade.

81: Watch Samaras in Greece

It’ll get worse, and then the right will get into power, and then it will get really really awful. The social democrats and liberals at best don’t have a freaking clue, and haven’t learned a damn thing since Weber cheered the war and they killed Karl and Rosa.

Kaveh, the number of tents, and the state of the park, was such that the rest of the public couldn’t use it. In Manhattan there are quite a number of public parks, but nonetheless a very limited number; and so the literal occupation of one, for two months straight, is both unfair and irritating to residents and workers. The damage done to local businesses, moreover, shouldn’t be lightly dismissed.

This is a city more liberal than much of America, and whose residents are likely more sympathetic to the emphasis of OWS than most. But OWS didn’t really occupy Wall Street. It occupied a public park.

Protests of course often need to be loud, and they always need to draw attention. That’s fine. But it’s worthwhile, imho, to take the thoughts, feelings, and welfare of the residents and local businesses into better account when you’ll be setting up camp for two months.

Re freedom of speech – this is subject to what are referred to as reasonable time, place and manner restrictions. Regulations that are content-neutral (are not aimed at a particular viewpoint), are narrowly tailored to the achievement of an important public purpose, and leave open ample alternative avenues of expression are held to be consistent with freedom of speech. This is how, for example, a government may lawfully ban trucks with blaring loudspeakers from roaming residential neighborhoods at night. It’s also how a government may enforce regulations long since passed into effect to keep public parks safe, clean, and accessible to everyone.

KidneyStones: Factor in the evil Koch brothers’ Secret Plan to End Life in the Universe and it all makes so much sense!! The rapes, ODs, lice, TB, drunks, and “free-loaders”

Senile Dementia is such a sad condition, and so undignified too.

I read it got between him and his walk in the park. It is not healthy when another opinion cannot even be put out there without attracting snark attacks. It is in this case also totally unnecessary. I mean: a walk in the park?

It depends. When the option is put out there by a boring troll like Andrew F, people tend not to take it very seriously. I blame… well to be honest I blame Andrew. Nobody made him be a troll.

Or did they. You know when we consider the permissive culture that has arisen since the 60s, is it no wonder that Andrew gets his jollies from writing crap and derrailing comment threads. No it isn’t. If only liberals hadn’t burnt their bras, none of this would have happened.

You damn liberals. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Joke seen on twitter:
“The police have occupied Zuccotti Park. But what are their demands?”

Donuts probably.

Natilo Paennim 11.16.11 at 1:16 am

” I’m glad that people here are outraged, but I fear it will hardly be enough. The Occupy movement was doomed from exactly that moment in which the first snitch was allowed to stay in a camp. ”

Assertion with no proof. In addition, there will be informants in any movement; the movement must be able to survive this.

One of the frustrations of this site- and the reason I am a rare visitor these days, is the tendancy to abuse, dismiss as “trolls” or occassionally censor dissenting voices.

Repetitive accusations that supporters of OWS have conspired to cover up rapes and ringworm outbreaks isn’t dissent. Honestly, sometimes it feels like kidneystones is trying to get banned.

Add that to the fact that we’re being accused of being unreasonable because police had a legal right to clear the park, even though what we’re denouncing is actually the illegal use of unauthorized force (cracking the ribs of protestors who did not engage in any act more violent than taping themselves to a tree) and illegal destruction of material property confiscated in the course of investigation (books aren’t an illegal substance).

Check Andrew at 86 for an example comment that seems to take it for granted we’re outraged that the police made an effort to clear the park in any way shape or form, when the core concern here is the way and shape and form of their method of clearing.

I have an idea for what the OWS protestors should do. They should hand each and every policeman in the park a donut. It probably wouldn’t defuse thing, though it might help. It would however be funny, would change the coverage and would confuse the hell out of the authorities.

A final word which is sure to cause more consternation from those demanding participants adhere to group-think ground rules. My initial post on this topic addressed the reasoning behind the clearing of the park and the positive role model for dissent set by the tea party. I see no particular point, generally speaking, to garden variety ad homs. Hence, I bypassed Walt’s empty insult and cian’s rather sad little post. Not his/her best by a long shot. But consistently trying to paint a lipstick on the current OWS pig clearly takes a toll. Adrian and one other, I forget, brought up the Koch brothers astroturf meme, which happens to be one of more suspect excuses employed to defame the tea party. The tea party’s own homegrown loopy economic views require no outside fertilization or funding. And many of their grievances are exactly like those of the better class of occupy protester.

The fact is that Bloomberg has done the Occupy movement an enormous favor. The movement is clearly unable, in its current incarnation, to either enforce any level of difference or even articulate a clear agenda. The good news is that the movement enjoys the support of some extremely bright and committed people. Not cian, I’m afraid. Yves Smith has been banging the income inequality drum for a long time and that message, as John and others have observed, is finally entering the national conversation thanks to some slick messaging and timely advice from Yves and others.

Bloomberg has relived organizers of the burden of trying to police itself. Blame Bloomberg all you want. The fact is that OWS has been forced to separate itself from its most unruly and suspect branches. There can be no more stories of empty tents in the Daily Mail if the tents have been removed.

The tea party owes its success to legitimate grievances. Their politics, however, are the politics of pure self-interest, combined with anti-government dogma. Their resentment at having to pay the mortgages of those who bought too much house and the salaries of the executives who profited off such shabby practices is legitimate, but narrow and clearly inspired by self-interest. The OWS message of “end income inequality” is not yet competing with the tea party message of “end all debt now.” The sooner the camps are cleared and disinfected and the errors acknowledged, the more salient and sale-able the OWS message is likely to become. The movement cannot, imho, survive too many more weeks of ringworm outbreak stories etc. Without Bloomberg, public opinion would almost certainly have eventually turned on the OWS movement, which now gets to reform itself. Whether it will, of course, is another question.

Three cheers for Bloomberg!

> would you prefer to ignore the ringworm outbreak, the lice, the tb, the rapes, the ODs, or the threats of violence?

The beauty of the way society’s mindfucking works on people like you is that they can feed you little details – details to you, clues to others – knowing you will just start spouting off without the slightest effort to put the big picture together. Let me try:

1) Occupy whatever provided food, shelter, medical equipment
2) This attracted a lot of people at the bottom of economic ladder, surpise
3) Thus physical manifestations like lice and mental conditions just, as Chrissy Hyde said, eventually “come with the scenery”.

Why does it not bother you that, in the richest spot of the richest country of the world, one that just had an extra ridiculous transfer of weath, should the provision of substandard food and shelter attract so many? WTF is up with that should be your question.

Now, sorry about feeding the troll.

My feeling is that the thuggishness is not as sure to help as maybe we could hope. In hindsight (and this can still be done), I think a better visual would have been if the Occupies had set their own time limit right up front, and left with dignity. *But* with a firm date and, I think, place (make it a moveable event) to reassemble.

That changes it from a unwieldy protest to a real movement. “Coming to your town in March” works a lot better than “we’re going to stay here until things stop sucking” when everybody knows that things can suck longer than you can keep the lid on the activities happily quoted by people like kidneystones to prove, well I don’t know what he/she thinks they prove, but whatever.

Occupy London is still up and running, and the Daily Mail is still on its case.
The protesters are lucky to be at the mercy of the Church of England. If there’s an issue on which the Church of England doesn’t split like a cheap binbag, I don’t know what it is.

Incidentally, I’ve not seen mentioned here that Occupy Zurich was shut down at the same time as OWS. I’m no conspiracist, but that does make me think about who was in the room besides Bloomberg when the decision was made.

I think when the cops occupied the park yesterday, as goes the oft-RT’d joke also made here, their sole demand was “no more living in the park.”

Last night, the protestors met their demand. And I think they could benefit from such clarity of message, resolve, and unity of leadership.

Interesting to hear from you, Rich. Reading between the lines, I take it that consensus (the priority you mention upthread) is proving tough to come by. That fair?

103: “the positive role model for dissent set by the tea party”
Funnily enough, I agree with this. If the left started bringing guns to every protest there’d be a hell of a lot less tear-gassing and pepper-spraying going on. I certainly don’t advocate the direct threats to public officials that the Teabaggers have made, but it was effective. And stomping that woman who tried to counter-protest? That’s definitely an efficient means of keeping the other side at bay.

If the left started bringing guns to every protest there’d be a hell of a lot less tear-gassing and pepper-spraying going on.

and more bullets. Great. Come to a protest, get show.

I certainly don’t advocate the direct threats to public officials that the Teabaggers have made, but it was effective.

Or it could it be that they weren’t seen as a threat in the same way by the authorities. White, aging, middle class people with the strong backing of the Republican party. Hmm.

Is this true naivety, or simply a refusal to see the facts in front of your face.

bert @107 Incidentally, I’ve not seen mentioned here that Occupy Zurich was shut down at the same time as OWS. I’m no conspiracist, but that does make me think about who was in the room besides Bloomberg when the decision was made.

I don’t think the word “conspiracy” is helpful. All politics is conspiracies. If the question is whether the idea is overly speculative, it shouldn’t even have taken this much evidence to seriously consider it, given the mayors all know who each other are, but here we are:

“I was recently on a conference call of 18 cities across the country who had the same situation where what had started as a political movement and political encampment ended up being an encampment of the people who started them,” said Oakland mayor, Jean Quan.

http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/11/15/368928/are-mayors-coordinating-uproot-occupations/

What prompted the thought is Zurich’s function as a world financial hub. So the other people in the room (and in Bloomberg’s network) aren’t mayors. They work in quite a different part of the economy.

115: Come to a protest, get sho[t]

I’m not saying it would be more fun, forchrissakes. I don’t even like to go to protests where there’s intentional Civil Disobedience resulting in arrests. I’m saying that heightening the contradictions, as it were, is a lot more effective than just chanting and holding a sign.

I read that many mainstream liberals find themselves in sympathy with the Occupy protests, feel that the protesters are making good points, etc. etc. And yet…those same liberals seem completely unwilling to back up their yap. Verbal expressions of solidarity are totally worth the paper they’re printed on. Yeah, go ahead, order some protesters a pizza. That’s great and all, but it doesn’t protect anyone from getting hit by a beanbag round, does it?

Even today, when it should be exceedingly obvious to any reasonable observer that the police are NOT in sympathy with the protests, do NOT consider themselves part of “the 99%”, and will NOT disobey illegal orders; even today there are still liberals at OWS trying to be all lovey-dovey with the cops. That doesn’t sound like any effective protest I’ve ever heard of. If you want to get the cops to refuse to do their jobs, praising them for doing their jobs seems like an awfully funny way to go about it.

I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.

After all, it was an austerity fest, and their probably getting nervous about the public appetite for such. Austerity for you, austerity for me, we have plenty of austerity for everybody! Ok, not everybody- it’s a means tested program.

I’ll note that the best coverage of Occupy Oakland, IMHO, is on the Guardian’s website and on the BBC.

Meanwhile, the Oakland Tribune has stopped publishing on Monday’s. At a time when Oakland’s in the public eye more than it has been for a decade.

I’m a freelance librarian myself, but… here’s an extended quote from a post that Bill Benzon linked to above:

“Campers across the park quickly climbed out of their tents screaming, “WAKE UP THE POLICE ARE HERE!” I ran into the library and let the handful of people sleeping in there know what was happening, then unlocked and pulled the OWS POETRY ANTHOLOGY from the shelves and strapped them to my body, then climbed atop a table in the park and read poems from the anthology. Immediately, the people of Liberty Plaza launched into action, a group of about a hundred protesters took to the kitchen and U-Locked/tied themselves down. After reading the third poem, the cops began to enter the park and I realized that I would most likely lose all of my possessions so I quickly grabbed a bag of my personal stuff, ran into the library and dumped a bunch of boxes of books onto the floor to make the cleaning up more difficult for the cops then ran my personal stuff and a few amazing books to a friends house around the corner. ”

Not to after-the-fact hindsight this person, but I suggest that if you really want to preserve a library, dumping boxes of books onto the floor to make the cleaning up more difficult for the cops — as if they are going to carefully clean the place up — is not the right idea. But, as Henry writes above, it’s not like the place was organized around the library. People can certainly feel most attached to that part of it, but there’s something about that attachment that is not really about what the movement is about. Zuccotti Park was providing a lot of services to the homeless people that the likes of kidneystones above thinks never had health problems before they gathered there. But it wasn’t a homeless shelter, and the people who are most attached to the idea that the police shut down a charity aren’t getting it either. Some people made some pretty good art. But when that art was broken or destroyed, that was certainly not a good thing, but it wasn’t that the police were trashing an art gallery.

The social mechanisms by which acts of mass civil disobediance work to change political cultures are:
1.) to prevent business-as-usual on the terms or within the structures, which the protesters mean to change;
2.) to provoke conspicuous violence by established authorities, who are seeking to maintain those established terms and structures of social cooperation.

It seems to me that OWS pretty much failed to do either, well — at least so far.

Liberals want to credit OWS with changing the terms of the national political debate, though liberals still want to talk politely about the “inequality”, not about predation. Popular concerns about elite failure narrowed to Joe Paterno pretty rapidly; not a white woman lost in the black caribbean of nightmare, but pretty close.

@133

Well, that settles it, all we need is lots of soap and good hygiene to accomplish meaningful political reform. The Hippies were dirty, and thus they failed. We must never put morality above personal cleanliness.

The men who fire Hellfire missiles from drones are wearing neatly pressed uniforms, and as they guide a warhead into a group of ragged suspected terrorists, their deoderent prevents even a drop of sweat from forming on their well-toned bodies. Yes indeed, order and cleanliness are the defining traits of the superior being and the higher civilization!

Since “an adult” points to #75 as what should be talked about, I’ll point to it as exactly what shouldn’t be talked about.

“By real politics I mean a cogent platform of independent actions aimed at changing the structures that have led to the current situation. To accomplish anything, however, the movement needs the help and support of cops, construction workers and people who have been schlepping into lower Manhattan by subway for their entire working lives.”

OK, Wilfred. Go ahead and organize a cogent platform of independent actions. Oh, wait, you mean that you need more people than just yourself to do that? Hmm, that is a problem.

Maybe you’d like to organize a left vanguard party, complete with the discipline that you think will be necessary? Or maybe that would scare off those construction workers.

“I’m certainly willing and able to get behind a genuine alternative to the two party system. The occupation served its purpose – time to organize and challenge the existing politics.”

Yep, we’re all waiting for Wilfred to show us a genuine alternative to the two party system… go ahead and organize us. Not as we actually came together, but how you’d like us to have done things. We have naively done the initial work that your sophisticated intelligence can build on.

“an adult” might consider what protestors from “Egypt to Chile to Colombia to Bahrain ” have actually gotten in response to their concrete demands. Eygpt got rid of a dictator and got a military junta. I’d bet that if we had a dictator, we could do that too. In fact, we have a quite different political system that we’re starting with — one in which about half the people are motivated by eliminationist fantasies about cleansing society of hippie corruption, not by whatever ideals Wilfred has.

@Rich Puchalsky

I really don’t see what you’re trying to get at or where you’re going. The strawman argumentation doesn’t help either.

OWS’s objectives can only be met by the political authorities. There are various ways of achieving that but I don’t understand how denouncing the concept of political organisation helps.

The Tea Party found its answer in parasitising an existing political block. The sorry succession of anti-Romneys that have each flickered so briefly onto the national stage has been the outcome, but they have achieved some of their objectives.

OWS must either form its own party, take over an existing one or pressure one to accept its views. The first option isn’t entirely unrealistic at least in city or state politics, but I’m sure you’re aware how long it’s been since there was a genuine three horse race in a national US election of any sort — not since Teddy Roosevelt’s time IIRC. The only exceptions have been the hari kiri candidacies of the likes of Strom Thurmond and Barry Goldwater designed specifically to damage a friendly party that was regarded as drifting too far from the ideals of fringe elements.

Political forces compromise their values precisely because of the advantages organisations confer. That’s fairly fundamental to the concept of politics. OWS will need to address this fact regardless of what is chosen. My advice is that winning elections with the intention of establishing a utopia is a noble aim but a utopian organisation will never win elections in a less than perfect political system, which covers just about everywhere.

OWS must

Unless you’re actually going to General Assemblies, you really shouldn’t be saying these words.

The question is, what must *you* do, concretely, to help build a movement that can take over the Democrats (if that’s what you see as the way forward)?

OWS’s objectives can only be met by the political authorities.

Sometimes mass-movements do have objectives (e.g. an agrarian reform), but sometimes they don’t. When people don’t believe they can get a fair shake, they might come out and protest, and/or refuse to obey the rules, refuse to be governed. This seems to be what’s going on out there at the moment.

And then it’s up to the political authorities to find a way to appease them, or to kill them, or whatever.

Barry @96:

Sorry, yes, I understood your original post perfectly—have relied on the Guardian myself for 10+ years. I was simply making a bad joke that seems to have radically misfired.

More importantly, Bruce @132, you don’t think the more or more violent responses we’re seeing right now (Berkeley, Oakland, etc.) are significant? I’m not at all unsympathetic to your point, but it does seem to me like the authorities’ responses are getting more explicitly violent, , and while this is obviously a very bad thing for a host of reasons, it may also be important for the sort of reason you mention.

The Tea Party found its answer in parasitising an existing political block.

You think the tea party were calling the shots? For real?

I think everyone who’s arguing for electoral solutions needs to read “Winner Takes All Politics” and thing long and hard about the message. The solution is not voting. The solution will require voting for Democrats, but unless people can find ways to place consistent pressure on Democrats, and indeed Republicans, nothing will happen. That’s only a part of the solution, and its the least important part.

What the left needs are organisations, just like the right has organisations. Organisations that day in, day out, can persuade people to contact their congress man. That can keep hammering away in Washington. That can inform its members how the issues affect them. Unions used to play part of that role, but while unions are important they aren’t coming back. We need to think about new forms of organisation, just as the right did in the 60s and 70s. Think Grover Norquist. Think the Business Coalitions. That’s what we need to fight. That requires organisation – real ones, rather than stuff like MoveOn.org

Maybe we need to think post-union. I dunno.

It’s a counterfactual, isn’t it, Kaveh.
Obama’s original idea was that he could detach people like Olympia Snowe.
She was subject to all kind of countervailing pressures.
And in the only world we’ll ever know, the eventual balance of pressures led her to vote with the crazies.

People who don’t think like you do evidently aren’t just wrong, they’re logically impossible.

Doesn’t it seem that many of the most popular political ideologies are founded on precisely that premise? Inevitable, I suppose, but it does make me nervous when their adherents arm themselves in an attempt to make reality conform to their rather impoverished notions of it.

@Cian

You think the tea party were calling the shots? For real?

Well it depends on how you define “Tea Party”. It has many components: sympathetic congressional elements, opportunistic non-ideological members of congress, genuine individual activists and spontaneous local groups as well as entryist and astroturf elements and media outlets who, if Ron Paul’s 2008 candidacy is any guide would happily use the Tea Party for a little mid-term merriment but would ditch them once the stakes get serious. These elements have cooperated to an extent, however they’re also aware that their minimum objectives aren’t all shared by all the others. They did all find it convenient to collude in hijacking the Rebublican party in 2008.

Should have read “…hijacking the Rebublican party in 2010.”

The ref to Paul’s run for the nomination did refer to 2008, natch.

This was always OWS’s endgame. They couldn’t stay forever; they couldn’t stay until the board of Citibank was indicted; the end was going to be a confrontation with municipal authorities — but in NYC that meant Michael Bloomberg, a fine representative of the Wall Street establishment. Jean Quan and Tom Menino aren’t like that, which is a [further] reason that the manifestations elsewhere should be regarded as supportive of the main event in NYC.

The impression I have is that they acted professionally and within the bounds of the law.

Andrew also believes that Angels are watching over each and everyone of us, and that Santa rewards all good girls and boys. That’s because Andrew is special. Special Andrew.

Or alternatively he’s trolling. Either way, move on folks, nothing to see there.

So let me get this straight: knowing this was going to happen, Occupy Wall Street did nothing to protect the books in the library like removing them to safe spaces?

As a general rule, we don’t have any responsibility to do a thing. We’re not in charge, and we stand no chance of taking charge. All we’re doing is disconcerting the elites enough to prompt them to take action. It’s their job to fix this to our satisfaction. They have failed us. We’re a loose group of people volunteering to pester the elites until they decide it’s easier to their job well enough to sate us than it is to be pestered by us.

Yes. That’s exactly right.

Salient, where are the reports of police brutality in the clearing of the OWS camp at Zucotti Park?

Seriously? Dude, have you even, like, checked #ows on twitter, like, at all? Are you asking me to google “Zucotti Park violence” or “Zucotti injuries” for you? Seriously? FFS.

…wait, #ows is down on twitter. Crap, ok. Well, let’s see. I guess I can summarize a few things off the top of my head.

There was the woman who was forcibly knocked out of her wheelchair, left face-down on the ground for quite a long period of time, and then arrested.

The police frozen-zoned the park, which is an extremely ambiguous implicit assertion that the occupiers reasonably pose a lethal resistance threat (normally reserved for hostage and terror type situations). This allowing them to SWAT-swarm the eviction, immediately arrest people without cause or a statement of what crime had been committed, and immediately begin bulldozing tents.

Specifically, the frozen-zone designation immediately pre-escalated authorized use of force to sublethal hard contact, which more or less means broken ribs from batons are ok but no tasers or gunshots — if I understood correctly the police technically received authorization to forcibly disable people who occupied the park at time of eviction completely regardless of those people’s behavior, though thankfully it didn’t get that bad, and there’s probably a mix-up in the communication I’m receiving somewhere, like, there’s just no effing way they’d do that, right?).

The police doused various crowds at various times, including people literally running away from them (how much more compliant with an order to leave can one get?), with tear gas and pepper spray. For some reason people who haven’t been exposed to these things tend to completely misunderstand how violent they are. Just because it’s in gas form doesn’t mean it’s nonviolent.

LRADs (sometimes called ‘sound guns’ in the same way that tasers could be called ‘nip of static shock devices’) were deployed and there are reports that they were used (the frustrating part is that there’s no way to document the use of these things, so you can use them to hurt people with impunity).

There’s one confirmed instance of a person peacefully offering themselves up for arrest, getting batoned in the head until they collapsed and only arrested after the officers felt satisfied with the head injuries they had inflicted. Oh, but they let him lie there long enough that witnesses started screaming in alarm, before making the arrest.

Oh, and one reason that instance is especially well-documented — that person was an NYC councilman. (No less an authority than the Council of the City of New York condemned the eviction procedure, FWIW.)

But the biggest reason we don’t have audiovisual documentation of the dozens of injuries inflicted on nonviolent protestors fleeing from cops: the “frozen zone” designation also allowed the police to categorically refuse media the right to access or bear witness to the event (including declaring the airspace above the park and surrounding area off-limits — a restriction normally reserved for hostage/terrorist type stuff). Police confiscated audiovisual equipment within a three block radius of the park, turning back journalists by shoving them down, and taking their stuff.

Police received pre-authorization to use sublethal hard force on any journalist who attempted to document the event from a public space. And so they did. For example, one journalist got headlock-choked into submission, several got pushed by riot shield and told that doing anything other than walking away could result in use of hard force. (Maybe the cops were bluffin, but I can’t really blame the journalists for not putting that to the test.)

Let’s see, what else. People with laptop computers were chased away from them by police in riot gear with batons, and then the laptops were kicked and batoned into nonfunctionality. (I hear you can get your possibly-smashed laptop returned to you, unless it was one of the laptops that got thrown out as trash.)

Quite a lot of intact property was destroyed and then trashed, which sure as hell is violence (I gather that ‘cleaning’ may legally entail not giving you enough time to lift and carry your stuff, busting it up even as you’re trying to remove it and comply with the just-issued eviction order, and then trashing the stuff and telling you you’re lucky they don’t arrest you for littering it).

Anyone entering the park is still automatically subject to search and seizure (as part of an ongoing terror investigation or something — I haven’t been able to verify if the park is still frozen-zone or if they’re just doing whatever they feel like at the moment). I also haven’t been able to verify whether or not audiovisual equipment is subject to immediate seizure, like it was for the 3.5 hours following the eviction notice.

Oh and not that you actually give a shit about anything I’ve been saying, but the local medical facility was literally overrun with patients with injuries, to the point where emergency services were temporarily restricted to “life-or-death situations.” But I suppose all those injured people, like, hurt themselves or threw themselves onto the batons or something, right?

sheesh, whatever, we had video of people getting beaten by cops and you said you wanted “more context.” I’m halfway tempted to delete this whole comment, and really the only reason I’m not is ’cause I figure others might find specific stuff in it they want to google.

where are the reports of police brutality in the clearing of the OWS camp at Zucotti Park?

There should be some internet proposition, along the lines of Godwin’s Law, such that “For every instance where a conservative sees an assertion they dislike, they will call for proof in direct proportion to the number of links proving the assertion that may be found with a simple search.”

Seriously. There’s been a huge amount of police brutality documented against left-wing demonstrators for as long as there’s been documentation and left-wing demonstrators. What we’re seeing with the Occupy crackdown is just par for the course, and those of us who have been in the activist scene for awhile were expecting every bit of it. The only people taken by surprise are the naive liberals who still think the police are their best buddies, little matters like Oscar Grant notwithstanding.

@170:

You don’t have to be a great chef to have an appreciation for good food, or an opinion about what you like to eat. You don’t have to be a great director or a skilled writer or actor to appreciate and enjoy what you evaluate as a good play or movie. Still, people read restaurant reviews and movie reviews, and respond on cue to publicity promoting movies and restaurants.

Consumerism is part of the rot of late capitalism. Flattering to the consumers, just as regular feedings are, no doubt, comforting to the pigs.

If the elites prosper by feeding you crap debt and decaying public goods and predatory state policy, merely pestering the elites is not going to persuade them to feed you quality debt, even if there were such a thing. It is going to persuade them, perhaps, to hire more critics and reviewers to tell you that crap debt is quality debt, and that decaying public infrastructure is saving you lots in taxes. Oh yeah, and manly self-reliance is so much better than consumer protection, unions, socialized medicine or social security, . . . but I digress.

Political change needs a business model. It is something you do, collectively and individually, but the doing is the thing, in the end, that gets done. It is not politics as a theatre review, or a thrown tomato.

Hi Henry,

Understood. I’ll close with this. I’ve been active online since 2006. CT is one of the very few sites on the left that tolerates any dissent in comments. The rush to brand dissent as trolling occurs more slowly here than most and you can take that observation as a compliment, or with a large dump truck of salt.

There never has there been less opportunity to offer ideas that question existing memes than now. Never. I stand by all my remarks made on this thread. I’ll leave it others to determine whether I’ve gone out of my way to throw the first punch or the first drink at anyone in the CT community including you.

Free speech isn’t the only right promised American citizens in the first. We get the, or more precisely the state can’t stop us from, assembling and demanding redress of grievances. How, one wonders, does forbidding an assemble designed to demand redress not violate the right to, you know, assemble and demand redress.

If all you wanted to know was what to do, the Krugman/DeLong/Yglesias/Bernstein/Galbraith/Baker axis might suffice. These are smart guys — among the smartest we’ve got — and they know their stuff.

If only their stuff were enough…. If you want to know how to do what needs to be done, they can’t help you very much. Neither can the ghost of Jefferson or Marx, or the living monument to things-that-might-have-been, Barack Obama. Something more is demanded of us now, not as individuals, but collectively. I suggest that we all tear off a piece for ourselves and go gnaw on it for a while. It almost doesn’t matter which piece. If we’re doing it right, we’ll have company by and by.

Two reasons I support OWS:
The people involved are NOT collectively proposing or advocating specific policies (although some groups in their midst are free to do so, and often do). Rather, they are calling attention to fundamental problems shared by the vast majority of people in this country. (Everyone, really, if you believe as I do that the 1% would also be” better off,” in a meaningful sense of that phrase, if they lived in a more equitable and just and loving society.) Until more people acknowledge these problems, there can be no productive public debate or imaginative engagement in how to solve them.
The people who actually do the day-to-day occupying enact and bear witness to many of the fundamental needs and desires that bring people together in community. (And people like me on the sidelines try to help.) Providing one another with food, clothing, shelter, sanitation. With friendship, affection, or at least respect. Stimulation and exercise of the intellect and the imagination. Trying to balance conflicting needs and desires, trying to handle bad or evil actions in a constructive way. Simple stuff. Hard stuff. The stuff “Wall Street” needs reminding is what it’s all about. And truth be told, we all need reminding.

@179 I suddenly feel the need to clarify my remark at 55, when I said the book-trashing (which apparently did happen after all) ought to be exploited as a PR victory for OWS, I didn’t mean that OWS as some kind of organized entity should do this, but that I think it’s a good stick to beat Bloomburg and the NYPD with, whoever wants to do that. I’m an internet denizen speaking to other internet denizens who (I presume) sympathize with OWS and may either go out and attend meetings or join a camp, or write about it on the internet, or talk to friends, or whatever, I don’t know.

Yes I get that OWS is not an organized partisan political movement, does not have an ideology, is more about creating the energy, the venue needed for discussions to be had, for people to meet others and get motivated to organize, or just come up with altogether new ideas. To connect. And I’m sure it’s a good idea to remind people once in a while that kibbitzing OWS on what their next move should be is just talking to the wind, but I don’t see anything wrong with people who are not directly involved in OWS, but who have a similar agenda, discussing the relative merits of occupations and political organizing, using this as a way to primary bad Democrats, &c.

@Rich Puchalsky

While throughout history religious movements have persecuted heathens they have always reserved the most creative and demonstrative sadism for heretics.

The reason is simple. A heathen starts out from alien premises and unsurprisingly arrives at alien conclusions. A heretic, starting out from the same premises, arrives at different conclusions. Precisely because they have something in common, the heretic starts out inside the true believer’s mind and if the issue is as emotionally loaded as heaven and hell that presence may prove too corrosive to be endured. It works the same whether it’s catholics and protestants or trotskyites and stalinists.

Now when someone is as smug about his convictions as I am let me tell you that no heretic will worry him. You on the other hand don’t, as might be expected, ignore the “irrelevant” “old tymey leftists” you’ve decided are against you, appearing instead driven to do battle with their irrelevance.

You denounce those not at the meetings as pointless failures, yet those “old-tymey leftists” who satisfied this demand and turned up are denounced for “interminable advice-giving” and “tr[ying] to control the movement”. Who then really wants to “control the movement”, and exhibits most stridency and intolerance to that end?

In denouncing the organizational advice others have offered, you’re implicitly endorsing… another form of organisation. You then make this explicit when you endorse the spokes council concept. Again, who insists on control? Is it not the case that rather than rejecting organisation as such you’re instead insisting on a preferred form, one neither spontaneous nor organic to OWS but rather inherited from anti-globalisation protests of the past?

I find it completely impossible to believe that a single movement can be radical enough to demand a thorough redrafting of the US constitution and simultaneously represent 99% of the population. To suggest it can be both these things and furthermore embody “advanced concepts … that frankly the people here aren’t ready for” is wholly unbelievable.

A given political movement can represent a fringe and embody (someone’s idea of) advanced concepts, like Tea Party elements or those vanguardists you seem to assume everyone else here is, or it can reflect the minimum amount the bulk of the electorate have in common politically which it’s safe to say would preclude the radical redrafting of the constitution your earlier summation of the US electoral system would demand.

To convert even the simplest ‘advanced concepts’ into politics even 15 or 20 percent of people might accept is the work of decades as Marx and Von Hayek — who have no peers in this endeavour — understood. Political opinions are notoriously hard to shift. Generally, people prefer to process ideas within their existing framework but political frameworks evolve precisely in ways that insulate believers from alien and disturbing ideas. This is the exact reason people tend to identify with named political groupings having memberships whose opinions are basically interchangable. They serve as components of individual identity as well as ideological movements; members react to alien ideas as they would to rejection of their personae.

If an organisation is to represent 40% of the population, let alone 99, it had better boil down its programme to easily digestible mush in the way centrist political parties do.

If on the other hand it wants to advance an agenda anything like as radical as your blog suggests you want OWS to then there’s simply no escaping all that “interminable advice giving”. That’s the only way a block can be both radical and ideologically cohesive enough to endure. I can’t think of a single example in history where a movement that was both broad-based and enduring arose both rapidly and spontaneously.

Ambiguity about objectives can prevent a split only so long as decisions can be deferred, and a fractious split in a moment of crisis is not just as bad as a negotiated parting of the ways beforehand; it is much worse.

Too many people here write as if they are elite technocrats designing political strategy.

Yep. And, on the whole, technocratic wisdom isn’t looking too good these days, as we’ve seen in the financial sector and in Fukushima. Not to mention No Child Left Behind.

A more interesting mode of advice-giving is what journalist Naomi Wolf’s been doing on Facebook and on the ground at Zuccotti Park. Her concern is press relations, so she went to Zuccotto Park yesterday and talked with people, giving practical advice on how to deal with the press, how to get yourself booked onto TV shows.

Naomi Wolf FB:

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=tn_tnmn#!/naomi.wolf.author

Naomi Wolf Media 101:

http://naomiwolf.org/2011/11/media-101-in-zuccotti-park-november-16-2011/

We’re in a new world folks, and that means we’ve got to make a lot of stuff up.

I’d also add, that those people giving these guys technocratic advice. Whatever their faults, this has been the most creative campaigning force in a long while. While I’d agree with those who’d argue that the park occupation was probably taking focus away from the important things – I’d also cheerfully admit that I’ve been wrong on almost everything on OWS so far, as have most armchair commentators. I get why people are cynical after years of failures and defeats – but at some point people have to recognise that the cynicism has just become a default response, rather than a realistic assessment of the situation.

Nothing speeds present-day change more than pro-capitalist niche-Trot nerds pointing out how much more amazing things were 100 years ago, eh, Watson?

belle, the question Occupy Wall Street raises isn’t one of change. It’s going to degenerate into elect Obama. Here in Chicago Occupy Chicago is dead in the water. This was what I was predicting would happen, and what the optimists didn’t realize would happen. What we need to do is remember what change was. Present-day change is happening without OWS being involved, or any segment of the Left.

belle le triste

What is a “pro-capitalist niche-Trot nerd?” It sounds like some sort of implausible hybrid like a platypus, part bird and part mammal.

“Now when someone is as smug about his convictions as I am let me tell you that no heretic will worry him.”

Um — well, if that’s the self-description that you want, fine.

But when I’m talking about attempted control, I’m really talking about two stages. Here’s stage one, at the inception, from an interview of David Graeber by Ezra Klein:

“July 2nd. That was the first actual meeting. What happened was AdBusters put out this call for these protests. We had heard there was supposed to be a general assembly on July 2nd. So I just showed up. But it was a rally, not an assembly. Some Marxist groups had set up stages and megaphones and was making speeches and were planning a march. So we said we don’t need to do this. We pulled a small group together and decided to have a real assembly.”

Luckily, the initial organization failed, or we never would have had a movement to argue about. Then there’s the second stage, the one we’re in now. You do realize that you have exactly as much control over the movement as I do, don’t you? Your head is full of this heretics and heathens stuff, but you have just as much ability to go in front of some GA and propose something as anyone else. So when people give advice — and yes, you may describe your speaking-from-smugness as something else, but that’s what you’re doing — just go to GA and give it to them already. Don’t give it to people here, who are trying to have a somewhat more informed conversation about this movement and about what’s actually happened recently.

And a few words to many other commenters who’ve said that OWS is better off for being evicted, because this removes whatever liability the encampment was supposed to represent; I’ve never met anyone participating in OWS who believes this. If we take it seriously, it’s the same kind of argument that sparked the derisive “11 dimensional chess” meme about Obama — that anything that seems to be going badly is really part of a clever plan by which things will actually go well. It’s take a representative case as Mr Punch at 161:

“This was always OWS’s endgame. They couldn’t stay forever; they couldn’t stay until the board of Citibank was indicted; the end was going to be a confrontation with municipal authorities […]”

No, it wasn’t the endgame, because OWS hasn’t ended. And the goal of the movement was never defined as “we keep protesting until the board of Citibank is indicted.”

Really, what it seems to be is a way for people who vaguely feel like they should be sympathetic to Occupy but who have never bothered to become part of it can express relief that the messy parts of the movement — those uncontrollable horizontal democracies and homeless lumpenproles and the people lounging around a park — are gone. That leaves the movement free to reorganize along lines that they’re more comfortable with, with leaders, an apparat, people to listen to them, and so on. But by doing so, they’re really buying into the same propaganda cycle that kidneystones and Andrew have been here to encourage, the one about lice and TB and criminals and how it’s better off that the movement is all clean now.

belle le triste 11.17.11 at 1:04 pm

Spot on. I came back to this thread without reading the intervening posts and I knew immediately to whom belle was referring.

Also understand: the elites don’t take OWS seriously. Voters don’t take OWS seriously.

Before you ask me to “understand” these propositions, you need to establish that they’re true. I think both are obviously false. Their have been many signs- including the concerted crackdown- that the elites are worried about OWS, and polls show- and the changing discourse of politicians reflects- that it has significantly influenced voters.

As to what will happen next, I’ll leave figuring that out to the OWS people, who obviously know a lot more about organizing than I do (which admittedly isn’t a high standard.)

Where’d they get their degrees in Professional Revolutionary Studies?

Actually it was an MBA at Princeton.

cian 11.17.11 at 1:35 pm

Waston Ladd: ” cian, let’s not forget that the professional revolutionaries took over Russia in 1917. Compared to that, OWS is nothing.”

cian: ” Jesus, Watson, I wasn’t expecting someone to actually prove my point about cynicism in the very next post. Watson, you more than anyone on this thread typify the tired, redundant, Marxist left. Which is what makes your posturing about a “new left”, or whatever, so amusing.”

No, he’s not left, he’s right. He just likes to concern troll.

Andrew F: “Also understand: the elites don’t take OWS seriously. Voters don’t take OWS seriously.”

Steve LaBonne : ” Before you ask me to “understand” these propositions, you need to establish that they’re true. I think both are obviously false. Their have been many signs- including the concerted crackdown- that the elites are worried about OWS, and polls show- and the changing discourse of politicians reflects- that it has significantly influenced voters.”

Seconding this. I’m not sure if Andrew F has *ever* posted a true statement; in all of the financial/economic discussions, he’s be a pure BS artist.

And adding on to your great point – it’s amazing how many right-wingers and allegedly liberal concern trolls are all so concerned about something which, by their statements, doesn’t amount to much.

Rich, you’re absolutely right that those nuances should be mentioned, and the NYPD might have gotten off on that technicality, except now they apparently did it again.

And people understand the power of a symbol. Dorly Rainey, the 84-year-old woman who was pepper-sprayed in Seattle, brought up Goebbels WRT the Stop Internet Piracy Act: “I remember Goebbels. I remember–I grew up over there.” in an interview with Olbermann. Not in reference to the library, but part of the same larger picture.

No, he’s not left, he’s right. He just likes to concern troll.

Oh Barry, if he wants to be the leader of the Tooting Popular Front, where’s the harm.

Meanwhile, from today’s Times, why Occupy is threatening:

Linda Gerstman, 40, who lives near the stock exchange — “the barricaded world,” she called her neighborhood — said she was grateful for the city’s action because she had grown concerned about health conditions in the area. “We’re touching the same doorknobs,” she said.

They are not supposed to be in the same social space as us. It’s like some old caste prohibition.

Eleanor @213 Third, in New York especially, OWS was/is creating an alternative society with housing, food, medical care, a library. It was/is a society that works by concensus, and it welcomed everyone, even the homeless. This strikes me as hugely important. A new world in the shill of the old. This is why the camps matter, and this may be why the camps are being destroyed.

I agree, and I disagree that their destruction is a good thing. Yes there is fuel for propaganda in that, and more attention, but the camps already had attention.

One thing to remember is that homelessness, unemployement, hardship are going to continue getting worse – at least they certainly are here in Britain and I guess the same is thought to be the case in the US. Having a visible, committed and somewhat civilly disobedient movement in existence is useful in that context.

The general issue of class has been raised and is being kept live via a drip feed of news coverage.

(BTW, in that useful news coverage I think I’d include the familiar style of propaganda about lice, etc. At the very least, reciting lists of visceral aversive stimuli as kidneystones does makes you look like a serious wrong ‘un to a lot of people, many of whom can recognise a scurrilous, deeply manipulative smear job when they see one. I’d guess (with a strong dash of hope) that most of those who actually enjoy indulging in kidneystones-style games are confirmed and self-conscious right-wing partisans. There’s an element of the playground taunt there – you’ve got fleas, you smell. But of course it’s a deadly earnest propaganda campaign, not a playground, so the childish aspect only makes the whole thing more sinister.)

Just that continued presence is a good thing, I’d have said, for a number of reasons.

1. Most simply and obviously, it helps to prevent the whole issue from disappearing from the media and political discourse, which is of course pretty well a precondition of anything else getting done.

2. People have in many cases a new lens through which to look at unfolding events phenomena as they are evicted, sacked, or whatever.

3. As the screws turn, there is already an examplar and potential centre of gravity for discontents to work with.

(I see the point about visceral propaganda has been made since I started sporadically tapping this out)

Briefly watched TV news in between work and childcare (my spouse has bronchitis, so I’m not going to any protests today). The announcers were voice-overing live footage of a crowd slowly tearing down barricades around the park. One of them quoted some right-blogger about how people were seeing the face of the left, and it wasn’t pretty. Then he started asking whether this really contributed to a discussion of income inequality, whether we were really talking about that or whether we were talking about the protest. It was completely laughable. Where was the discussion of income inequality before the protests started? Were people supposed to have them and then stop as soon as it was discussed?

There never is going to be a protest “safe” and “clean” enough so that it won’t be pooh-poohed by the Andrews of the world. Nor will anyone ever talk about things like income inequality without protest. So this is really crunch time for the moderates who have been observing from the sidelines, not for us. Are people going to join in on how what we’re doing is just too dangerous, too wild, too undisciplined, even too static in people’s strange attachment to the place where their community came together? Or is the time to finally say that its a big movement and it’s time to join it?

““We’re touching the same doorknobs,” she said. ”

The NYT had lots of stuff to use (they didn’t just interview one person); they have very deliberately chosen ‘filth’ as their theme.

@Rich Puchalsky

The point about heretics and psychological security seems not to have registered. Having been summarily burned at the metaphorical stake already, I feel entitled to labour the point.

I don’t feel the need to pour contempt on affiliated political elements to reinforce my own psychological security. Egomania consists of self importance or exaggerated self belief. Narcissism by contrast is characterised by a desperate need to demean others in order to nurture an idealised identity that is in reality fragile and fearful.

When I see so much commentary devoted to denouncing the failures of affiliated political groups, combined with self congratulation that is — and I encourage refutation here — out of all proportion to any achievements that might be attributed to what remains a young movement, it leads me to believe I’m observing a form of political narcissism. Narcissism is always self-defeating in the end.

You seem to have little idea of what OWS is — which might be fine on its own depending on the programme(s) it is pursuing — but a very clear and derogatory idea of what it is not. The logical contradiction in this doesn’t require the mind of a koan master to figure out.

You have made no effort to address the last six paragraphs of my previous post. You don’t have to answer to me, but answers will need to be found.

You have made no effort to address the last six paragraphs of my previous post. You don’t have to answer to me, but answers will need to be found.

Those would be the paragraphs that contained this:
I find it completely impossible to believe that a single movement can be radical enough to demand a thorough redrafting of the US constitution and simultaneously represent 99% of the population.

To be honest I almost stopped reading at that point, because you seem to be having an argument with somebody in your own head. I read your post a couple of times, and I’m still not sure what your criticism is, except that you don’t like the OWS movement. Its possible that your complaint is that they’re not campaigning for Democrats, or maybe it isn’t. I really don’t know, and I’m not sure you do. Maybe it would help if you did.

There is nothing terribly constructive about the criticism you’ve offered. Some of it has been ill-informed, some of it has been Armchair quarterbacking and some of it has been simply odd. That’s fine, I’m not hugely proud of the criticisms I’ve made. I’ve mostly been wrong. However, there’s nothing constructive about the criticisms you’re offering. You just seem to be trying to do down the OWS movement, which is why ultimately Rich is getting pissed off I suspect. If there is any narcissism here it’s yours.

You’re right OWS might fail. You seem to hope it will, though no doubt you’ll deny that. But nothing you can do will affect that. Its a movement driven ultimately by the people involved – and guess what, you’re not involved. That’s a choice you made, and one result of the choice is that your opinion doesn’t count. You want it to count, get involved. I don’t really think it could be simpler. That has in fact been Rich’s point all along. If you think its the wrong movement, then start your own one. Just stop your BLUDDY MOANING. Honestly, like an old woman you are.

Recommended reading for a bunch of people in this thread: Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, by Barbara Ehrenreich (link to Powell’s). As always with Ehrenreich on this kind of subject, there’s a lot of really solid history, a lot of cultural study, and a fair amount of engaging speculation. Part of her argument is that some strata of the modern West have embedded a genuine pathology in their dislike and fear of groups gathered to share strong emotions and their glorification of the solitary spectator, often depressed, as the most insightful member of the community. She provides some historical, social, and scientific context for a bunch of the answers I see Rich giving and some others not wanting to accept, about how and why ongoing gatherings matter, about ways in which occasional or scheduled meetings wouldn’t do the same job, about how and why the scale matters, and a bunch else.

“That’s a choice you made, and one result of the choice is that your opinion doesn’t count. You want it to count, get involved. I don’t really think it could be simpler. That has in fact been Rich’s point all along. ”

Yes, that’s it. Other than the minor addition of pointing out the difference between being “summarily burned at the metaphorical stake” and being “mocked for self-important writing”, that seems like a pretty good response to Adrian.

One addition: I certainly don’t think that the movement represents 99% of the population. “We are the 99%” is a slogan, not a poll result. In fact I think I’ve mentioned above that nearly half of the population is pretty much guaranteed to dislike the movement, no matter what we do, because hating hippies is what drives them and there is no possible way in which we can not appear as hippies in their propaganda.

@Rich

You started the abuse and strawman argumentation before I was ever involved.

https://crookedtimber.org/2011/11/15/occupy-wall-street-shutdown/comment-page-5/#comment-387578

Yeah but Adrian you’re not really saying anything very profound. If you have something profound to say say it. But so far you haven’t really said anything that you couldn’t read in an editorial of the NYT. With all that entails.

And this just makes you sound pretentious:
If someone devotes his life to wheels, studies wheels assiduously and tries to perfect an understanding of wheels then it’s wise to pay attention to his or her opinions of round objects used for the reduction of friction via axial motion.

So you’re the guy on social movements, eh? Good to know.

@Cian

The CNT/FAI lost in spite of integrity and sacrifices of an order that bear no comparison with what OWS has had a chance to display as of yet. Many devoted and erudite people were on their side. George Orwell took a bullet in the throat for them, and still they ended up with Franco.

Orwell, as well as Stephen Spender and others who’d fought in Spain, found themselves vilified by their former allies once they returned to Britain. Spender was expelled from the Moscow-dominated communist party.

So here’s my question to you. How would you do things differently from the likes of Orwell, who was brilliant, shrewd, dedicated and someone of immense integrity. How would you prevent the tragedy from reaching its inevitable end?

Is it suggested that the achievements of OWS are greater now than those of the International Brigades which had been activists their whole lives?

If anyone had made an effort to address these questions, even obliquely, I would not have made any of my remarks. But when I see self-congratulation of the sort this thread has witnessed then my blood boils at the dishonour that is done to the memory of those who went before.

Oh, poor, sad Adrian! We’re dishonoring Orwell and all the International Brigades! That is certainly what’s causing his blood to boil, not that he’s showing himself to be a rather vain buffoon.

What tendency do you represent, Adrian? I’d like to pick out which historical martyr that you evidently think that you can do better than by the fact of your political existence. I’d also like to see the quote about how people here were claiming great accomplishments for OWS, much greater than those of the International Brigades. Surely you wouldn’t have made that up out of whole cloth…. right?

@Rich Puchalsky

There’s a difference between ignoring history, though that would be bad enough, and actively excluding it from consideration as you have done. Once again you prefer to address the point you want your adversary to make instead of the point he actually has made.

Your analysis of OWS is 100% reflexive, hence the reference to re-inventing the wheel.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/historians-politely-remind-nation-to-check-whats-h,26183/

@cian

CNT/FAI was an anarchist movement organised along non-hierarchical lines that promoted the abolition of power be it political or economic. It enjoyed the support of some wonderful and dedicated people such as Orwell.

I don’t think it’s stretching credulity to claim it might have some relevance to OWS.

I have seen some very bad historical analogies, but the OWS movement as the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and presumably the NYC cops as Franco’s army is particularly bad. Who plays the Condor Legion? There is very little in common with Spain in the 1930s and the US today. The fact that Spanish is widely spoken in the US today may be the closest similarity. But, what do I know, apparently I am just a troll. Not that anybody on the Internet ever took me seriously before I was labelled as such.

In a vague attempt to return to reality, are there any numbers on the demonstration in Wall Street today? Or a good place to find out what’s going on. All I’ve seen has been a bit chaotic, which of course may just reflect events on the ground.

Otto – perhaps not a troll, but you did also rather go off on a tangent earlier in this thread :-)

@J Otto Pohl

“I have seen some very bad historical analogies, but the OWS movement as the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and presumably the NYC cops as Franco’s army is particularly bad.” (Emphasis added)

As a professional historian you should be able to do better than to present a caricature of what’s written.

Live stream @OWS, currently at Union Square (4:04 PM Eastern Time) heading toward Foley Square:

https://crookedtimber.org/2011/11/15/occupy-wall-street-shutdown/comment-page-5/#comment-387710

cian, I’m not being cynical. I’m being realistic. Adrian is also raising the point that OWS does not yet represent history on the scale of even the defeats of the left. To change this I think some acknowledgement that there has been no left for a generation would go a long way towards letting Occupy really confront the realities of its situation. J. Otto Pohl also seems to be raising that question of history and possibility.

Right now what we have is something akin to the 1999 Seattle moment. The result was shilling for the democrats: the disruption of the WTO conference did nothing, but create an activist milieu tied to the democratic party. The possibility for an independent left is even dimmer then it was in 1999, in part because the anti-war movement spend its existence arguing for the democrats and dissolving into it once Obama was elected and the wars continued.

OWS is not a product of those in it. It also is constrained by the political possibilities today. What would Occupy have looked like in 1933 when the Stalinized US left was at its strongest? What about in 1968, when the New Left was about to collapse? What about 1973 with the workerist turn in full swing? I would be happy to be wrong with my assessment: maybe it does make a US left. But that’s unlikely.

Who knows, maybe it’s not about ‘the Left’.

I don’t know enough about OWS to raise any question of possibilities or to make any good historical analogies. But, I think Benzon is right to suggest that the term ‘the Left’ might not be the best one to use here. I personally think it is outdated as a descriptor of 21st century social movements. Whatever OWS is it is not a Leninist Vanguard Party such as dominated both the Old and New Left movements in the US. I do not think it is comparable with anarchist movements in Spain or Ukraine either. Unlike Makhno’s followers they have not taken to raping and killing Mennonites on a large scale. I am not sure if any of the alleged rapes were of Mennonites, but I doubt it. The problem is not ignoring history it is the attempt to apply the history of European countries to the US. It does not work very well.

What do we want! New watchamacallems!

Now THAT should be the OWS demand.

cian,
I think it really is one of the OWS demands, ayna?

@J O P

Wilfred made some innocuous points and was met with contempt instead of engagement, refutation or even obliviousness. He hasn’t been back, you’ll notice, and why would he be?

If the Makhnovists aren’t held to be relevant then the Youth International Party surely must be, and by 1980 Jerry Rubin was doing motivational speaking for corporations and endorsing Reagan.

A tin ear for history is needed not to hear the echoes of 1968 in the intemperate and instinctive denunciation of dissenting voices as a first resort. Where’s the sense in telling people “your opinion doesn’t count” or that unstated “advanced concepts … that frankly the people here aren’t ready for” will solve all problems? Left unchallenged, such thinking will guarantee a repeat of bitter experience.

I said earlier that I can’t think of a single example in history where a movement that was both broad-based and enduring arose both rapidly and spontaneously. Organisation might offer a route out of that, but maybe as a historian you can think of examples I’m not aware of?

In terms of both broad based and enduring, how about some definitions of either term. Blickle’s notion of communalism would seem to fit. The animating principles of the “simple folk” during the Peace of God movement. Let’s see, Albigensians and Bequines were broad-based and spontaneous and organized and things ended badly for both, although less violently for B’s than the A’s.

The problem here is that the past is, at best, a rough guide to what works or doesn’t because of the contingent nature of historical causation. It helps to know what happened but it’s important to realize that lots of the stuff that worked was something of a surprise and without any real precedent.

@Tom Bach

I wouldn’t mark the Albigensians down as a failure (or the Hussites, who would maybe be a better parallel as AFAIK they were very progressive by the standards of the day). They were isolated amid a sea of catholicism, and went down only after a titanic struggle. The fortresses built to contain them were still in use in the 1800s, six hundred years later.

I suppose it was spontaneous, but it certainly was organised; one feature distinguishing them from other heretical movements was that a big chunk of the nobility joined in. They were basically lopped off of the existing social order.

I’m not familiar with the Bequines at all, I’m afraid, or with the other movements mentioned. I stand ready to be enlightened if they offer useful precedents.

As regards definitions, “broad based” would mean a minimum of 55% of the electorate to achieve a majority sufficient to effect constitutional change in the USA, but in practice much more than that if the less than well regulated militia are to acknowledge its legitimacy.

As regards “enduring”, I could probably do better but for starters I’ll hold up the French revolution and the February revolution in Russia as cautionary tales. The window of relative pluralism after the Bastille is little remembered outside of France. Scope existed to avoid the terror however the emergent institutions were not up to the task.

Likewise, even if Kerensky’s policies were inadequate, the possibility of something infinitely better than what finally emerged was real. IIRC the Socialist Revolutionaries were the most popular block. Any number of imaginable coalitions could have prevented either the return of the reactionary right or the triumph of the Leninists. The infamous Order Number 1 of the Petrograd Soviet wasn’t as utopian as it looked. It represented a cynical and conscious destruction of a possible alternative to the bolshevik power base.

Optimism about human nature is a fine thing. I don’t think it’s impossible at all for spontaneous movements to be both non-hierarchical and meaningful. For them to stand up to manipulation, however, they must substitute distributed grassroots control for the centralised control other political movements, however democratic, employ. This suggests it’s possible to create a stable non-hierarchical organisation from a hierarchical precursor but that there’s a serious obstacle to creating one spontaneously.

Its not just the complaints about cleanliness – its the implicit complaint about homeless people contained in this stuff. “Oh these guys aren’t real protestors, some of them are just homeless!” because you know, homeless people don’t matter.

Yeah, OWS is really bringing out the ‘these people aren’t people’ assumption from its righty opponents in all its ugly glory. liked Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s quip summarizing of the other side of this coin — “conservatives think some people are better than others just because.” Maybe the synthesis is “conservatives think some people are better than others because they’re less likely to be smelly.”

They came in here and they trashed the place, and it’s not their place!

J.O.P. @258
Whatever OWS is it is not a Leninist Vanguard Party such as dominated both the Old and New Left movements in the US.

Maybe you should stick to pronouncing on subjects you know something about. The New Left in the U.S. would not appear to be one of them.

@ A Kelleher – Excuse me for being blunt, but I really fail to see what the Cathars and the Albigensian crusades have to do with anything. (or the Hussites for that matter)

@LFC

I didn’t introduce them to the exchange.

yes. My mistake.

There was a persistent pattern in the colonial conflicts of the 20th century of civil war following hard on the heels of independence. Movements that proved extraordinarily tenacious and cohesive under foreign oppression paradoxically fell apart once relieved of their greatest problem.

One reason was that often the only thing that united them was what they were against:their shared enemy. Difficult negotiations about the future could be put off while hostilities lasted, but as soon as they moved in to the governor’s mansion they found out that the things they were for were all different.

Another reason followed from the nature of negotiation itself. There was a status quo power (the colonist) and a party trying to change things and each was constrained in the kind of deal it could offer by the demands of its power base.

The status quo power will want to offer the minumum necessary, but needs the agreement of its enemy if a deal is to be secured. It has one ace card, however: it is the one holding the very thing that is in dispute. It can negotiate until the cows come home.

Ultimately, a deal is struck but there will always be elements on the insurgent side for whom only total victory will suffice. The only questions were how many and whether the status quo negotiators had sufficient vision to offer enough to ensure the other side could make the deal a reality without a new civil war proving as indecisive as the last. This pattern was in evidence on any number of occasions from Ireland in 1922 to East Timor in 2006.

Suppose the US government were shaken by serious unrest. It would have to deal with the demands not only of the left but also of the right, to whom concessions would be anathema. If it wanted to offer more than the minimum the other side might accept, it would already have enacted those provisions. Ideally, it wants to offer nothing.

Like the colonial powers, it can afford to negotiate forever. Sooner or later, the opposition may break off negotiations but they’ll lose a few moderates if they do so. Even if the government offers a generous deal, there’ll be a few who regard it as a betrayal. The most dangerous possibility is that the government might cynically calibrate its offer so as to split the opposition evenly, in order to ensure a lengthy and indecisive conflict on the other side. The locus of conflict would then move from between the protestors and the government to between two factions of the protest movement — a neat and economical trick for their adversaries.

It’s possible for a political movement to stand up under such strains, and its even possible for a non-hierarchical movement to do so. At a minimum, a clear and agreed programme is needed even for negotiations to start, however.

Agreeing the programme may itself split the movement, but in that case the factions will not be under stress and there’s a chance of a velvet divorce. The newly independent factions would then be free to continue parallel struggles precisely as before. If the movement splits at the very moment at which a deal is at hand, however, its implications for its credibility with the electorate will be devastating.

@straightwood

Believe me, I endorse neither Marx nor Von Hayek. It’s simply foolhardy to ignore the two though, IMO.

cian, that is exactly what happened. Maybe not the hard anarchist core, but those who were brought into politics via Seattle certainly did. Today’s green movement or anti-globalization movement The World Can’t Wait campaign was a front for the US RCP and spent its energy calling for driving out Bush, as though that would be the end of the wars. Michael Moore’s conservative critique of the current moment was enthusiastically adopted by the anti-war movement and again by #Occupy and the anti-cuts rhetoric. Maybe they wrap this up in faux radicalism, but the fundamental message is “back to the welfare state” even for the anarchists.

So what’s your narrative? The constant concessions, the celebration of defeats as victories as due to an implacable force of reaction that brings along the innocent leftists for the ride even as they seek to master history?

straightwood, not everyone at OWS does everything. But those who do things are not accountable to those who do others. There is far more voice in banding together to support a common goal then each saying the same thing independently. “I am Raphel and I speak for the trees” vs each sapling creaking out its message.

@Tom Bach

Here’s what I wrote originally:

“If an organisation is to represent 40% of the population, let alone 99, it had better boil down its programme to easily digestible mush in the way centrist political parties do.

If on the other hand it wants to advance an agenda anything like as radical as [Rich Puchalsky’s] blog suggests [he wants] OWS to then there’s simply no escaping all that “interminable advice giving”. That’s the only way a block can be both radical and ideologically cohesive enough to endure. I can’t think of a single example in history where a movement that was both broad-based and enduring arose both rapidly and spontaneously.”

Here’s the rider I added later in case the first version wasn’t clear enough (to J Otto Pohl):

“I said earlier that I can’t think of a single example in history where a movement that was both broad-based and enduring arose both rapidly and spontaneously. Organisation might offer a route out of that, but maybe as a historian you can think of examples I’m not aware of?

Now I know nothing about most of the groups you mention, but I’d guess there was a lot of discussion before large numbers of people seized on a whole new theology. It seems unlikely that they all lighted on a single theological construct individually and only realised afterwards they’d all hit on the same one without a lot of “interminable advice giving” going on somewhere.

Theological formulations in Christianity have always been narrow because appropriate beliefs are a prerequisite for salvation. I can’t think of anything more “ideologically cohesive” than a given Christian church.

If you can tell me of a group as described that retained its cohesion through stresses in spite of no organisational effort of any sort, then I’d still be very interested. That’s why I asked the question.

I don’t see how it’s fair or reasonable to characterise a statement about my own knowledge as a superficial reading of history. You have yourself made no attempt to create a historical context for the movement.

Salient, you claimed that “the local medical facility was literally overrun with patients with injuries, to the point where emergency services were temporarily restricted to “life-or-death situations.”” I did infer that to mean a hospital, where emergency services are provided and where those with serious injuries are referred. You say now “Well, yes, most med facilities (whether insta-care or small/free clinic) don’t have the resources that a hospital does.”

Okay, so you mean a “small/free clinic” that ordinarily provides emergency services, which became so overwhelmed that it could only provide emergency services for “life and death” situations. Which clinic is this?

– You say that the police had declared the area a “frozen zone.” That seems likely to be true; I didn’t contradict it because I agree with that claim. It is worth noting that declaring an area to be a frozen zone has nothing to do with the level of force an officer may use against someone who attempts to trespass into that zone. A frozen zone simply designates that persons cannot enter it.

– I noted the careful preparation, and the interests of the NYPD in avoiding excessive force cases here, to make clear why I’m unwilling at this point (without more evidence) to believe some of the more extreme allegations, e.g. “a person peacefully offering themselves up for arrest, getting batoned in the head until they collapsed and only arrested after the officers felt satisfied with the head injuries they had inflicted.”

– You refer to the use of less than lethal force, especially batons, “hard” hands, and pepper spray. I agree that it is likely that all three were used. I don’t agree – at this point – that police were pre-authorized to strike anyone not leaving with a baton (and especially not in the head).

– The protesters were given ample time to leave the park, and many did so. Those who stayed did so deliberately (rightly or wrongly).

– Councilman Rodriguez says that he sustained minor injuries to left temple when he was pushed to the ground and arrested – not that he was beaten about the head until officers were “satisfied” with his head injuries, as you put it.

I’m sure that those who claim excessive force will be filing suits, and perhaps we’ll see more evidence at that point. At this point it’s just not there.

Andrew F: I think that everyone gets that you’re a fascist, an admirer of the jackboot and so forth. Is it really necessary to prove it on each and every thread at interminable length. Don’t you have, I dunno, fellow fascist friends? A dog that needs attention? Maybe your flag needs ironing – or I heard there’s a trouser press that can get the perfect crease.

God knows, anything must be better than endlessly spouting shite on the internet.

The basic tendency – not always, but generally – of arguments from history or demands for a historical perspective is conservative: that the future will conform, in one way or another, to what has happened in the past, and that nothing new is ever possible. And I speak as a historian who believes fervently in the power of history to help us make sense of our situation.

Otherwise, just to say that I have found this discussion frequently enthralling and enlightening, and only wish there was a ‘Like’ or ‘Recommend’ button for particular posts…

I did infer that to mean a hospital, where emergency services are provided and where those with serious injuries are referred.

Well, gee, you did infer that and I did tell you you were wrong.

Which clinic is this?

Are you serious? Really? Please tell me you’re just being an asshole to me for the sake of being an asshole, I can’t take dealing with the possibility that you are literally incapable of figuring out that the OCCUPY WALL STREET 24 HOUR CLINIC is Occupy Wall Street’s local medical facility. Did you think the Occupy Wall Street 24 Hour Clinic was serving Maine? I mean, I know you already knew the Occupy Wall Street 24 Hour Clinic existed, because I still have enough respect for you–though it’s rapidly diminishing–I still have enough respect for you to believe you would have typed “occupy wall street clinic” into google before making an ass of yourself. So you’re being a jerk for the sake of nettling me, is the most charitable interpretation I can muster. And it’s working. I just can’t take it anymore. I can’t take it.

Councilman Rodriguez says that he sustained minor injuries to left temple when he was pushed to the ground and arrested — not that he was beaten about the head until officers were “satisfied” with his head injuries, as you put it.

Are you saying the officers were unsatisfied with the head injuries they inflicted by beating his head into the ground? Surely you’re not trying to suggest Rodriquez has said his head wasn’t beaten into the ground, but just in case, I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here:

“Immediately, a group of police officers started using their batons to push me back, I didn’t have a choice,” he said. “I never raised my hands, I just told them I wanted to go to the park.”

The next thing he knew, he was knocked to the ground by a cop, who allegedly proceeded to assault him.

“A crime was committed here, but it was not committed by Councilman Rodriguez,” Rodriguez’s lawyer Andrew Stoll said Wednesday. “It was committed by the police officer who chose to falsely arrest Mr. Rodriguez and grind his face into the ground.”

I dunno, is your issue that “grinding” someone’s face is materially different from “beating” someone’s face? I don’t have enough faith in you left to believe that, because you’d have said something more like “Salient, I dispute the description of Rodriguez’ experience as beating; his lawyer speaking on his behalf called it a grinding, which to me is different.”

Not only that, but Rodriquez (the living breathing Rodriquez, not the parody in your head) offers substantiating evidence on my behalf (of the more general claim of widespread injury):

And while he [Rodriquez] was incarcerated and run through the system, he says he saw firsthand the horrific results of police violence at Zuccotti under the cover of dark early Tuesday morning. He knows it happened, he says, because his cellmates bore the injuries that resulted from the NYPD’s overzealous response.

“It was bad. People were bleeding, people were hit in the stomach,” Rodriguez said.

…ok, what else…

The following is an extended quote from Josh Harkinson. I lack the patience to go through and put every damn paragraph in italics marks, so normal comment-vs-quote designations are reversed in this comment. The original source text is here.

He grabbed my arm and began dragging me off. My shoes skidded across the park’s slimy granite floor. All around me, zip-cuffed occupiers writhed on the ground beneath a fog of chemicals.

“I just want to witness what is going on here,” I yelped.

“You can witness it with the rest of the press,” he said. Which, of course, meant not witnessing it.

“Why are you excluding the press from observing this?” I asked.

“Because this is a frozen zone. It’s a police action going on. You could be injured.”

His meaning was clear. I let myself be hustled across the street to the press pen.

“What’s your name?”

His reply came as fast as he could turn away: “Watch your back.”

The NYPD has discredited itself:

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/17/the_nypd_has_discredited_itself/

Yeah, but unless Andrew is able to actually witness the assaults himself, how can he really trust that it happened. I mean be reasonable.

I remain less persuaded

Yes, Andrew, nobody can make you say that you are wrong. This is the fortress of argumentative invulnerability into which you retreat after being bloodied in your CT thread forays. We look forward to your next amusing assault on reason and common sense.

there’s no need to continue the conversation

‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

I’ll let the contrast stand for itself.

Fair ‘nough. A dude offers himself up for arrest, peacefully, clarifies the reason he is there, ensures it is clear that he has no intention of being violent. He gets pushed with batons (read: this is copspeak for jabbed, a use of the baton that is two escalation steps beneath lethal force) and then he gets outright hit by an officer. He collapses to the ground. (It’s not clear whether he was pushed to the ground or just went down in pain from the jabs/blows he sustained thus far, so I separated those into two distinct sentences.) Then the officer ground his face into the ground. Eventually–it’s not at all clear when or why, and I thought “once satisfied” was a reasonable assessment–the officer makes the arrest and carts the person off. People around at that time were crying out “shame. shame. shame.” I suppose it’s not clear whether that was in specific reference to the arrest of the councilman or whether it was in reference to the other jabbings and forceful arrests of peaceful harmless individuals happening all around him (he was not alone, he was part of a small group).

Ok, so what was freaking people out was not continued beating, it was an escalation to grinding a person’s face against the ground. Well hell no wonder people got freaked out. My first thought after reading that was holycrapthat’ssomuchworsethanIthought, but your mileage (and by ‘mileage’ I specifically intend ‘sympathy for the suffering of a peaceful human being subjected to assault’ here) may vary. How is that conceivably not excessive? I am willing to accept the continued beating escalating to face-grinding correction and admit I was mistaken about that (only so much you can gather from tweets in real time, but you’re free to hold it against me if you feel that’s fair).

you say now that you’re referring to the OWS medical tent. The one inside Zucotti Park. And again, I’ll let that stand for itself.

I suppose maybe you’re nettled by the word ‘facility’ but I wasn’t sure what to call it (calling it a ‘tent’ is inappropriate because at the time the injuries were coming in the medical ‘facility’ or whatever-you-call-it had already moved and wasn’t in a tent anymore). It’s not just a tent with band-aids, dude. It has its own medical staff, nurses, a couple volunteering medical doctors, and plenty of professional-grade supplies. Sure, they relocated their medical supplies and themselves, but it’s not like they disbanded into oblivion. Sure, it’s not a hospital, but it is an actual operational clinic, and it really is the only ‘local medical facility’ to speak of, so I’m not sure what you could have possibly confused it with.

Regarding frozen zones, they have nothing to do with media blackouts.

Don’t be an arse and cite something indicating that, then. I gave what sources I could find.

An area around the ceremonies at the Ground Zero site was designated a frozen zone, for example; did you think those ceremonies lacked for media coverage?

Okay, the police said that ‘frozen zone’ in this case meant media with police press passes had to leave or faced arrest. I can’t for the life of me find any statement of precisely what portion of the ceremony grounds were ‘frozen zone’ or any clarification of what that meant beyond what I have provided. I gave you evidence that the police were blacking out media access and that their given justification was ‘frozen zone’ — are you saying the police were in error when kicking journalists with police press passes out of the zone, because ‘frozen zone’ should not have meant media blackout? ‘Cause, uh, then we agree that media blackout was a huge problem here (possibly a larger and more disturbing problem than the patently obvious excessive uses of force).

Feel free to point to a single place where all the implications of ‘frozen zone’ status are explicitly laid out. It would be a public service; nowhere and no one else I’ve consulted had the slightest idea.

In any event, since you seem convinced that I’m arguing in bad faith, and I have no interest in conversing with someone who’s going to be insulting, there’s no need to continue the conversation.

Take heart, Andrew. You can always console yourself that the folks at the NY Daily News are with you:

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=NY_DN

Get it? “Bloody nuisance”? LOL, right?

Yes, all of the relevant organs seem to have been constantly bewildered by OWS and how to deal with it. It’s one of the things that’s made this such a wonderful thing to behold these last two months.

BTW, I’d thought the cops were at least being media savvy enough to know that head wounds bleed an awful lot which was why there’ve been so many reports of people being jabbed in the chest and stomach with batons.

You have made no effort to address the last six paragraphs of my previous post.

Meme-worthy indeed. It does bring to mind the classic “aware of all internet traditions.”

I think OWS has been a success. It has succeeded in changing the conversation from the destructive supposed necessity of spending cuts to reduce the national deficit to the problems of structural income inequality. I think it’s laid bare the hollowness of much of the plutocratic rhetoric and at least high-lighted if not exactly heightened the contradictions.

@Neville Morley

I agree completely, and the further back you go the more naturally conservative the perspectives become. Donald Kagan is wonderful on the Thucydides and dire on the present day.

One of the first taunts thrown at OWS was that it was ’68 all over again, but OWS supporters come across as practical, realistic and moderate in interviews. They appear to represent a cross section of society.

It’s still a fairly practical matter for an organisation to look at similar ones in the past and to analyse their strengths and weaknesses.

There are a number of persistent factors that obscure the significance of history, and some are more prevalent now than ever. The modern world cultivates a sense of superiority over the past in a variety of ways.

Things that seemed once seemed like permanent additions to the edifice of progress are often revealed later to be mere fads. Looking back they seem quaint, but we forget that the present day is also full of fads which time has not yet exposed.

Central characters in historical fiction are like missionaries from the present, sent back by us to explain their faults to the ignorant pasties. They seldom exhibit the extreme sexism or racism that characterised many eras because that would pull focus from the heroic story. Historic fiction focused on social or political issues then defines the past precisely through our perceived superiority.

We’re pandered to in innumerable ways in the media and advertising and told we’re living faster, more energetic, more complex lives than ever before.

A year zero mentality can be exhilarating, catapulting people by a leap of imagination into a heroic roles where they are at the forefront of something new. Milan Kundera vividly describes such feelings about the commnunist takeover in Czechoslovakia. Such thrilling experiences sadly often cause true believers to grow extremely hostile to ideas that threaten the idyll either practically or ideologically, and shattered dreams have often resulted.

Few of the ’68 leaders both retained relevance and remained anyway true to their ideals. Daniel Cohn Bendit and Joschka Fischer come to mind. Ironically, another is the current incumbent at the Elysée Palace who actually marched against the protestors. Imagine him chanting “Vive la guerre en Indochine!” as he went and it imparts a lurid emotional impression of how the succeeding years must have felt for Fischer and Cohn Bendit.

Democracy Now:

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/17/paramilitary_policing_of_occupy_wall_street

… New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, who worked as a legal observer Tuesday morning in New York after the police raided the Occupy Wall Street encampment. “I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested… As I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, ‘I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.’ And he said, ‘Move on, lady.’ And they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head,” says Smith. “I walk over, and I say, ‘Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.’ And he said, ‘Lady, do you want to get arrested?’ And I said, ‘Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.’ He said, ‘You want to get arrested?’ And he pushed me up against the wall.”

@Rich Puchalsky

I’ve prepared a response to the other issues, but want to isolate von Hayek and Marx as agents of political change.

Generally, you cannot evolve from one political ideology to something radically different — such a change requires a clean break from the past. You cannot evolve to communism from liberal capitalism because all the fundamental premises would need to be changed at once, so conversions might occur individually but never enough at once to alter the power balance within the relevant faction.

A move from Keynsian interventionism to Hayek’s version of radical individualism was likewise a paradigm shift. And a paradigm shift cannot be achieved in weeks or months — such an event has never happened in history.

Hayek understood this and, in a series of conferences held in Switzerland the 1940s, discouraged his acolytes from involving themselves in politics. He told them not to waste their energies on elections they couldn’t win and to focus instead on an intellectual offensive on the right wing political orthodoxy of the era.

His followers founded so-called think tanks, which not coincidentally behaved much like the professional revolutionary cadres that Lenin espoused.

By the time Reagan and Thatcher rolled around much of the right was still deeply suspicious of the alien ideology. Neither Nixon nor Heath subscribed to “supply side” reforms and George H Bush famously labelled it “voodoo economics” when contesting the nomination for the 1980 election against Reagan. The oil shocks and stagflation opened a window for the new conservatism, though, and the movement at last tasted electoral victory with Thatchers 1979 ascent to power — more than 30 years after Hayek’s Swiss conferences.

Stating that “holding up Marx and Hayek as examples of people whose ideas worked is pretty risible” is misrepresentation. Hayek was successful in getting his ideas put into practice. I never endorsed those ideas in any way.

Stating that “Hayek never got to be more than a tool of the right wing” is just backwards. If anything, the right wing was a tool of Hayek.

When Margaret Thatcher learned the new breed of conservatism it was from the Institute of Economic affairs which was founded by a Hayek acolyte. Likewise, Reagan inherited a ready-made programme from the American Enterprise Institute which, as the American Enterprise Association had been taken over by Hayek’s followers in the 1950s. Reagan could have had them mail his manifesto to him in 1960, let alone 1980.

Hayek is the reason the 1% have so much more power and money today than in the 1970s. Nobody played a greater role in the conservative takeover.

The movement’s ultimate success could only be achieved because, like the Bolsheviks, it held together through those long decades in the wilderness and it could only do that because, again like the Bolsheviks, it was rigidly uniform ideologically.

These were only possible because new adherents understood the precise ideological framework they were signing up to.

Oh dear. I never endorsed any of those people.

Hayek had all the rationality of a cuckoo clock. Nobody takes his economics seriously and he felt that offering a free prenatal checkup to expectant mothers or eye tests to school children lead inevitably to totalitarian dictatorship.

But his movement was a model “flat organisation”. There were no org charts or leaders — at least until his adherents started taking over established political parties.

However I did make some points:

1) In a democracy, a group must choose between broad-based popularity and the pursuit of radical change. Both objectives cannot be pursued initially.

2) Radical change, meaning between two political systems with few fundamental precepts in common, cannot occur by evolution. This is one of the reasons 1 is true. Transforming an existing faction is extremely difficult. Best to choose the wilderness in the interests of cohesion.

3) If a protest group is founded on minimalist redistributive aims (“We are the 99%”), attempts to transform the movement to effect more dramatic change later will cause mass desertions or outright power struggles, possibly defeating both aims at once. If radical political objectives are the aim, either new members must be clear on those objectives from the outset or the radicals must leave the movement because otherwise they’ll destroy it.

Adrian Kelleher @320

It seems to me that ideas interact with interests reflexively, and that this reflexive relationship explains some things about ideology, radicalism, incrementalism and popularity.

There are profound differences between a political program, which favors the interests of the few and rich, and a political program that favors the many and the poor, beginning with the well-known proposition that the few and the rich possess the advantage of a superior capacity to organize. Hayek favored a political program, which offered advantages to the few and the rich, not least of which was an enhanced ability to exploit and oppress the many and the poor. The essential nature of the program excluded the possibility of it being popular (though, it might become “popular” should sufficient, unopposed propaganda resources be devoted to its promotion). It isn’t the “radicalism”, per se, of his program that made it unpopular, but its substance.

OWS is a movement in search of a popular program, that is a program, which is popular because it is, substantively in the broad, general interest. Almost by definition, any substantively popular program is going to be radical, in the sense that it will deprive the rich and the few of wealth and income they derive from predation against the poor and the many, by modifying established institutional arrangements, which aid the rich in predation.

I think treating OWS as a single organisation misses the point. My feeling is that you’ll see different organisations (in the loosest sense) emerging, with different aims and purposes. Some will have short term tactical strategies, others will be focused on the long term. Some will be single issue obsessives, others will be broader. Some will have less support, some will have more – and so forth. OWS isn’t the organisation – its not even the movement. Its simply the starting point – and as a starting point its a nutrient rich environment in which lots and lots of people have met, networked, educated, learnt, discussed and planned. Its also an environment that people have found inspiring. A different way of living and being. Perhaps utopian, perhaps temporary – but people need dreams.

Its those networks, those ideas (and hopefully the continuing spread and intermingling of these) which will be where new things will emerge from.

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/18/the-irony-of-what-bloomberg.html

“clueless elites”

It is the clueful elites I worry about.

The “clueless elites” are real enough, including the professional neoliberals, who play [serious] George Burns to the [libertarian] Gracie Allen.

A popular radicalism requires a lot of mass education, and it has to overcome the emotionally defensive assumption of the powerless that the powerful are not dangerously hostile. OWS, with the courage to be pepper-sprayed is at least beginning the process of drawing attention to the police state that the clueful elites have been building.

There’s an innocence, though, in choosing carefully neutral, including almost antiseptic references to “income inequality”, when the powerful global elites are busy crashing the world economy for fun and profit.

It is good to be king. It is ugly to not be king. And, when it is time to kill the king, better to do the deed than talk too much about it.

For folks who would, y’know, like further evidence of police excessive use of force: via ABL at John Cole’s place, videotaped police brutality and excessive use of force. And the protesters’ aggregate reaction, in the latter half of the video especially, was so inspired and perfect that it’s the kind of thing you’ll want to bookmark the video for later reference as a model of nonviolent resistance.

Lieutenant John Pike walks up to a line of protesters sitting on a sidewalk, steps over them without incident (0:07 — this part’s not a problem, I’m just narrating), and holds a can of pepper spray up triumphantly (0:08-0:09). He then proceeds to spray them in the face with the pepper spray, walking up and down their line for (0:11 – 0:23 — this part’s a problem). It is slow, careful, deliberate brutality. For those blessed enough to never have encountered this sort of scenario, I’ll note that Officer Pike is using an empowered spray device that’s designed to be sprayed into crowds from behind a riot shield. Most of the protesters are sprayed a second time in the second pass.

…

There’s really no need to say any more, but let’s go ahead and utilize the fact that there is minutes of “context” for us to look at (camera-phone video of what happened before is available elsewhere searching for “police” + “UC Davis” on Youtube and elsewhere, I’m heartily sick of catering to Andrew at this point, but here’s a summary: a couple other officers walked up to the protesters sitting there, informed them they were going to get arrested, and told them to lie down [face down on the concrete] so that they could be handcuffed; the students just sat there and refused to comply with the instruction — this is as charitable-to-the-police a summary as I could bring myself to write, and I’ll note again I’m just narrating this).

Officer Pike then walks toward the videotaping person, spraying the person in a read coat sitting nearest the recorder (0:24) and, it seems, attempting to spray the camera or cameraperson (who pulls away in self-defense a second before when the canister is raised in their general direction).

The camera keeps rolling. There is some audio of other protesters responding with a “shame on you” chant as the cameraperson circles around the crowd, trying to get a better view (0:34-1:30 or so). Not much happens until the 4-minute mark; we get a brief view of the protesters getting arrested face down on the ground, but not for long enough to really see what’s happening.

Around 2:04, an officer (Officer Nohelmet) tries to wave cameras away even though they’re a reasonable distance away from the arrests. (Don’t miss Officer Who Looks Like Robocop at 2:10-2:25, carrying a gun in his hands.) Nohelmet steps in between the cameras and the arrests, continuing to shoo away cameras, cracking a grin (2:52) when the cameraperson complains they can’t see the arrests from behind the police line where they’re being told to go. I mention this mostly just to indicate it was basically impossible for cameras to witness and document the entire arrest.

The “shame on you” chant intensifies again at 3:15 as the officers form two outward-facing rows of helmeted cops with guns (rubber pellet I think, which I’ll note is lethal at such a short range, but they might be gas guns or sound guns — does anyone recognize them?)

As the police withdraw (~3:50 – 4:30) , the protesters close the cap on the far end from where the police have withdrawn, forming a U shape. Around 6:15, a handful of protesters start to move in between the police crowd and their destination, just standing there. But then the crowd as a whole starts chanting “we give you a brief moment” (6:25) and “take your weapons take your friends and go please do not return” the people take a hint and clear themselves out of the way.

The police respond by raising their guns (6:30) and shaking up cans of pepper spray (6:36).

The chant switches to “We give you a moment of peace. You can go. You can go.” (6:45). The police stop moving, despite the unobstructed path to their destination. Around 7:05, they do the right thing and respond to the “you can go” chant by withdrawing.

And around 8:25, “Join our strike. Join our strike. Join our strike.”

Not one of them said “Bloomberg did us a favor”. Do you know why?>

Because they’re not fortune tellers? How on earth could they know? How on earth could anyone know at this point.

And actually I do know somebody who lost their land in similar circumstances. And to be honest the developer did do them a favour. He didn’t do it to be nice, obviously – but they’d have lost it eventually, and at least this way they ended up with some capital.

The police hosing down, and beating, protestors in the South in the 60s weren’t dong them a “favour” – but of course in the long run that’s exactly what they did.

@Rich Puchalsky

On the central point…

I made no assumptions about OWS. I agitated neither for moderate nor radical aims — I just pointed out that radical aims are not achievable with a movement founded as OWS has been.

It seems reasonably representative of society at large, and most members will have pre-existing political frameworks, frameworks that in a statistical sense will have been reflected in stump speeches and op eds and so on for years. It’s membership may be safely assumed to represent some amalgam of centre-left or centrist opinion.

Now I must get into ideological territory for the first time, but it is necessary to explain why such a movement cannot halt the erosion of social democracy.

Social democracy isn’t suffering ideological defeat; global economic circumstances make it impossible for reasons that have been discussed here before. Social democracy is suffering a one-step-forward-two-steps-back slow death. Even where voters want it, whoever is in charge ends up saying that sadly circumstances don’t permit it right now.

No existing political party or ideological movement tackles Rodrik’s trilemma because tackling it in isolation in a single nation state that is a WTO member involves costs too great to be contemplated.

Halting this decline of social democracy in a globalised economy involves challenges so immense that it’s safe to say it cannot be achieved via incremental evolution from some existing mainstream political movement. Neither can a mass movement coalescing around minimalist redistributive aims attain this goal.

To try is to row against the tide of history. Gains may be made in the short term only to vanish in short order. A consistent trend of rightwards drift has taken place not just in the USA but in a progressively greater number of countries world wide, and has been sustained over decades. It is safe to say that this is not because of the persistently greater genius of conservative politicians. Those (one time) left wingers such as Clinton or Blair or Schroeder that have attained office have not only failed to halt the slide, they have in certain ways propelled it.

None of this has occurred by accident. In a globalized economy, corporations may shop around for not just the lowest labour costs but also the lowest environmental standards, overheads, taxes, and financial controls. The financial markets are moreover global. Capital controls are forbidden in normal circumstances nearly all developed nations due to WTO commitments. But there is no political or democratic analogue to the global financial system or to the global markets generally.

In this context, the markets inflict severe punishment on any country that threatens to drift to the left — cash flows out, interest rates go up, the stock market tumbles and so on. No presidential candidate or congressional party has promised the expansion of the state in the US in decades, but an examination of the markets in the run up to the 1992 election in the UK will demonstrate the pattern. I’ve only read the abstract of this paper however, in summary Labour’s manifesto promised new public programmes funded by specific tax rises, the markets varied in inverse proportion to Labour’s poll ratings and this was news regularly during the final days of the campaign.

So powerful is this mechanism that it works almost invisibly. The commentariat and the political professionals won’t even countenance the candidacy of left wingers because they know that the campaign will be hamstrung by the markets holding a lit torch next to voters’ retirement savings. It is one of the pillars upon which the new power of the very wealthy has been constructed and works the same basically everywhere, and it was a power that wasn’t there in the 1960s when the possibility of controls to curb capital flight existed.

The freedom of governments to reflect democratic will is simply proving increasingly illusory. The only meaningful choice is between participation and non-participation in globalization. The EU or USA might imaginably withdraw though at immense cost, but for smaller economies the effects would be so devastating the freedom to do so is not meaningful.

In seeking electoral success politicians of whatever persuasion need to convince voters their policies are as close to ideal as is practicable. In the context of globalisation, this consists of convincing the electorate that further motion to the right is (for the left:sadly) necessary. Thus it isn’t just the legal and regulatory framework itself that drifts rightwards — where ever you go — but the political centre itself. The language of necessity has come to dominate politics: the idea that there is no alternative. There is no alternative to radical budget cuts, there is no alternative to “liberalising reforms”, there is no alternative to fossil fuel use or whatever.

There is no alternative because countries are geographically limited and the markets are not. Political leaders have over decades come to convince people that these necessary measures are like axioms of politics, which is why if you poll them you’ll find that the centre- and centre-left voters of OWS support many propositions that not just Hubert Humphrey but also Richard Nixon would find very surprising. Globalisation has rigged the game in favour of the right for so long that the electorate have internalised many of its claims. Ideas contingent on globalisation have solidified into immutable facts in voters’ minds.

To halt the erosion of social democracy requires either a new internationalist movement or for a country to withdraw from the global economic system with all the vast costs that entails. I wouldn’t at this stage rule out the latter personally, but my firm opinion is that it will never be achievable electorally. Moreover, if a great many countries were to do so, the pool of shared interest between those countries — an internationalising force in itself — would be removed, arguably a dangerous development.

Somehow freezing globalisation in place would contribute to arresting recent trends but no legal mechanism exists to achieve this. Such a proposal would be inequitable in any case as it amounts to placing the lowest quintile of workers at a permanent disadvantage.

The only alternative remaining is to create the minimal standards at a global level and on a democratic basis. The argument gets involved from that point on, but obviously such a transformation is not envisaged by any political force of significance at the present time. No obvious route to the goal exists.

Whichever solution is preferred, it is radical. But for the purposes of OWS in its current incarnation, the option selected doesn’t matter because a broad based movement the membership of which joined up on the basis of minimalist redistributive aims cannot be converted to radicalism once the membership is in place.

It’s certainly imaginable that in a purely US context OWS could restore balance to the tax system. What is impossible to imagine in the present context is halting on a permanent basis the decline of the state because of the summary judgement that the markets would mete out. If you look at the budget plans anywhere in the developed world, you’ll discover they are far more radical than anything Reagan or Thatcher tried to effect. Whether it’s Obama or Cameron or Sarkozy or whoever, the language is of regrettable necessity. This implies any such victory could only be illusory.

Ideology is nothing more than a practical political philosophy. It is needed to unify values and policies. The left is particularly vulnerable to the erosion of ideology because when policies are evaluated singly on an ad-hoc basis in the current context, the outcome in aggregate must be right wing. This process is so pervasive that the Clinton/Blair tendency that started it has lost sight of the fact that the context shaping its choices, globalisation, is not a fact of life but a human construct open to change.

Anyone wary of leaders should value ideology as an alternative to coalescence around a unifying personality. People haven’t grown meaner. The spirit that made the Beveridge report or the Tennessee Valley Authority possible still exists. It simply needs to be realised that agreeing to play against a stacked deck as the previous generation of leftists did will guarantee failure. A new game must instead be invented, one where rather than a race to the bottom, globalisation enables the rights gained by workers in the developed countries to be extended around the world.

A new philosophy must be created adapting to the new circumstances those universal and timeless values that enabled social democracy to transform the lives of hundreds of millions in the postwar period.

Adrian, what about the old philosophy of international socialism? That seems to me to be the only way out from the dilemma you pose. Forget minimal gains: the abolition of capital and a single democratic world society must be our goals.

Salient, I believe Mr F has ceased to troll this thread, but I’m finding the round-up of reports very helpful, too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/kristof-occupy-the-agenda.html

“A reporter for Politico found that use of the words “income inequality” quintupled in a news database after the Occupy protests began. That’s a significant achievement, for this is an issue that goes to our country’s values and our opportunities for growth — and yet we in the news business have rarely given it the attention it deserves.”

Steve Bell’s If… strip from Apr 8 1992 introduced a pin-striped financier warning of the dangers of a Labour victory. The next day, Apr 9 1992 was election day. That day’s strip featured the “offshore” threat that had become a major feature of the campaign.

Labour leader was a very mild social democrat by the earlier standards of his party yet no election since in any developed democracy has featured a realistic leadership candidate even nearly as left wing as him.

A non-violent movement cannot have a violent adjunct. That is just a less violent movement, not a non-violent one.

Whaaaaaaaat. So because a lone shooter attempted to assassinate Antichrist Obama in the name of evangelism, can I now accuse all Christian evangelists across the world of belonging to a violent movement? Nah, c’mon.

There’s probably some base issue with calling entire movements violent, instead of groups of people. S’ok and true to say there’s a group of people want to divert OWS into violence and destruction of property and such, but to call OWS ‘violent’ is unfair to the much larger group of people OWS contains.

I think as a general rule of thumb if less than 10% of a group feel supportive or lukewarm about a violent faction, then it’s only fair to identify the faction more specifically when assessing who’s being violent.

I’d say the same about e.g. the tea party: the proportionally small group of people who carried firearms into town hall meetings were aggressive; most tea party folks I met were assuredly not.

Salient, the issue is solidarity. The violent are demanding that the non-violent support them at least to the extent of not cooperating with the police against them. If some evangelical church attempted to shield the attempted Obama assassin from the authorities, it would be entirely fair to group them with him. And, as I said, condemnation of violence failed to get consensus at Oakland. That means that more than 10%, at least at that particular meeting, would not condemn the acts. Furthermore, a movement has to do what it can to create its own image, and if it wants the public to distinguish between the violent and non-violent, it has to do this itself, by, as I said, having the two factions be clearly separate entities. You cannot expect the public to make this distinction if the entities do not do so clearly.

PPS: I think we are seeing this already in the drug violence in Mexico, where the cartels have essentially become governments in themselves. This is what you can expect when your government is small enough to be drowned in a bathtub. Businesses will be compelled to provide their own instruments of force which, without the resources of a nation state, they will be unable to project.

It’s possible for someone to have quite conventional political views and yet act quite differently within a social situation that is different.

Bingo!

When that failure happens, people in OWS will have friends that they can trust, people who they’ve worked with at a very elemental level.

Bingo! Bingo!

Let my invoke Marley’s Theorem, named after my old buddy Jason Marely: “If you want to know what it’s like to drive a car, you’ve got to sit in the driver’s set and drive the car.” Sitting in the passenger’s seat watching the driver won’t do it, nor will sitting in the back seat, and certainly not sitting at home in your den imagining what driving a car is like. You’ve got to be IN the car, making decisions about traffic, the road, and pedestrians. It’s that elemental.

Adrian, I’ve heard this argument before many times and I find it increasingly unconvincing.

First of all, neither Blair nor Clinton were ever on the left (Blair’s ideological travellers would include many of Cameron’s cabinet at the moment). So I don’t see that as an argument for anything very much – except the ways that as Hacker and Pierson point out, political power has been captured by a small wealthy elite.

Secondly, international markets have much of their power because countries let them have it, or deliberately gave it to them. Deliberate policy decisions were made, and in some places (Europe), those are looking likely to be reversed to some degree. Certainly recent destabilising effects have changed the narrative there. And we may well be moving again to an era of capital controls of some kind, which would destroy much of their power (as it has in SE Asia).

Thirdly, the affect of markets on countries tends to be greatly exaggerated. Short term perhaps, but its hard to say what causes any short term market movement, save when its really obvious (recent events in Europe – the crash of 2007). Long term, markets move on economic fundamentals.

I’m also skeptical of the ever increasing globalisation story. Globalisation has happened before, and was killed in circumstances much like the ones we’re living through. Energy costs, plus rising labour costs, make it harder and harder to produce stuff economically offshore (as the US furniture industry discovered to its cost) – plus globalisation as an approach for corporations has been far less successful than claimed. Much of it has been driven by fashion, rather than economics.

Globally at a political and treaty level it’s been driven and maintained in current forms by the US, whose dominance is fading very quickly, and who may not be replaced by anybody else.

We’re also moving into an era where protectionist forces are going to become much stronger again. I suspect historians will look back at the early 000s and see that as the high point of the second great wave of globalisations.

Maybe a return to social democracies is not possible. But the era we’re in is ending, and with astonishing rapidity. The recent past is unlikely to be a good guide.

The future is up for grabs. The old ideologies are dead, or dying. The right has nothing – they are literally bereft of ideas and are bankrupt. That doesn’t mean they’ve lost, but it means its going to be very hard for them to offer up alternatives, just as it was in the 1970s for the left to offer up ideas. And apparently you, and whatever political ideology you represent, are equally bankrupt.

I’d add that Adrian’s analysis of the 1992 election is dubious.

1) Kinnock was just not popular with the public, and that played a big part in the election
2) There was a big swing from one party to the other in British terms.
3) I don’t actually remember the market reaction playing a big part in the election. It was mentioned, sure, but then it was mentioned in the last election as well.

Major also had an an advantage going in that he had only been primeminister for two years, and so was able to partially detox the Thatcherite brand.

Maybe markets move elections elsewhere, but I’m not seeing it in the 1992 election.

@cian

All analyses of the 1992 campaign describe Labour as constraining its options to satisfy the city. It planned for no increase in public borrowing, presented well-researched figures showing that its tax plans would benefit most families even apart from the extra government services its alteration of the tax structure would provide for etc. It had already moved very far to the right from the Michael Foot era.

The career of Gerald Kaufman illustrates the trend. He famously described Foot’s 1982 manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. By Kinnock’s time he was on the front bench. After 1992, he was no longer right wing enough and was returned to the back benches where he was a left-wing critic of Blair’s ‘New Labour’ in goverment.

Here’s an analysis of media portrayals of financial market reactions to poll figures during the campaign:

Glasgow Media Group Reader: Industry, economy, war and politics
Eldridge, J.E.T & Philo, G.
Routledge 1995

Ch 10, Political advertising and popular belief
Greg Philo

“On ITN, when Labour took the lead in opinion polls the City sounded near collapse:

NEWSCASTER: Billions of pounds were wiped off the value of shares this morning, as the City, which traditionally favours Conservative governments, took fright asthe clear Labour lead in opinion polls.

INDUSTRIAL CORRESPONDENT: It was headlines like these [refers to headline in the Times] showing Labour pulling into the lead which helped to turn City dealing room screens red. At the start of trading this morning billions of pounds were wiped off shares

(ITN, 12:30, 1 April 1992)

The BBC told a similar story, reporting that “In the City, worries about a Labour victory pushed share values down sharply’ (BBC 1, 18:00, 1 April 1992)” – p 192

“…the Guardian (26 March 1992) reported on its front page about the movement of millions of pounds out of the country: ‘Millions of pounds are leaving Britain with every opinion poll that puts the Opposition ahead, winging out via electronic transfer systems to all points of the compass.’ The article pointed out that £870 billion, or half of the total personal wealth (excluding houses) was controlled by just 5 per cent of the population and that: ‘By freighting a large proportion of this mobile capital abroad, the rich are reducing further the spending power in the economy.’ A large transfer of captial into other currencies would also mean a run on the pound with an incoming Labour government pushed into putting up interest rates.” – p 193

“The [Centre-Left] Guardian not of course draw the same political conclusions from this as the right wing press. But this analysis is not so different from the front-page ‘warnings’ in papers such as the Daily Mail (7 April 1992) ‘WARNING: A Labour government will lead to higher mortgage payments. There is no doubt about it. Interest rates will rise within days of Kinnock entering Number Ten.’ This was also the sense of the Sun’s message on its election day front page: ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.’ (9 April 1992) We can find other versions of such warnings on television news, in this case from a City expert speaking on ITN: ‘If Labour were to win, I think people would be worried about public spending, public borrowing and what might happen to the exchange rate’ (ITN, 12:30, 1 April 1992). It is no surprise that opinion poll research after the election showed serious worries among some voters about Labour’s economic competence.” – p 193

In understanding this reportage, it should be noted that the interest rate fears (at least) would not have applied in the 1960s when capital controls were in place in the UK.

Ironically, within 6 months of the Conservative victory, with interest rates hitting 12%, the pound was dumped out of ERM on Black Wednesday as the Bank of England lost billions of public funds in a failed effort to defend sterling.

Integration of capital markets has dramatically increased since 1992.

All analyses of the 1992 campaign describe Labour as constraining its options to satisfy the city. It planned for no increase in public borrowing, presented well-researched figures showing that its tax plans would benefit most families even apart from the extra government services its alteration of the tax structure would provide for etc. It had already moved very far to the right from the Michael Foot era.

Yes it did. None of these facts mean that they were forced to do so by the city, and a number of analyses since then have shown that they could have completely ignored the city and still won handsomely. The analysis was wrong – in part because the results of the analysis suited Blair and Mandelson, both of whom were very right wing.

Kinnock was very unpopular. People did not like him, they did not want to vote for him. Major was still (just) in his honeymoon period. And still the Tories barely won the election. Your analysis is based upon a popular myth, well more propoganda really, but one it isn’t true.

And seriously, the “Daily Mail”. “The Sun”. Its clear that you don’t live in the UK, or you wouldn’t realise how ludicrous citing their front pages actually is in this instance. That this ludicrous threats were made is certainly true; demonstrating that they were effective is something entirely different.

As for the 1997 election. Labour really would have struggled to have lost that election – there was nothing the city could have done to change things. And there was huge overwhelming public support for far higher taxation and spending than was planned.

Incidentally I read Rodrik’s piece at the time (and subsequent pieces by him would seem to back this up) that further globalisation is unlikely, and the tendency will probably be reversed. I think the move to non-democracy in the EU is peversely demonstrating this – I just don’t see it being sustainable, and when it breaks there will be a huge backlash against further globalisation which will probably reverse the trend. This being how politics typically works in practice.

@cian

Classic goalpost moving.

What you wrote was “I don’t actually remember the market reaction playing a big part in the election. It was mentioned, sure, but then it was mentioned in the last election as well.”

Well, as was shown, it was front page news and TV segments were devoted to precisely this topic throughout the campaign. Note that the instances cited were representative, not exhaustive. Now you demand it be demonstrated that it dominated all other feature of the election, which was never claimed in the first instance.

Already by 1992 Labour had moved far to the right from 1987, let alone 1982. John Smith spent considerable energy on a tour of city banks trying to win confidence and support prior to the campaign.

You seem to posit growing oligarchic power as the mechanism driving the move to the right in Labour, but have provided no analysis, data or argumentation of any sort in support of this claim. It requires an oddly simultaneous upsurge in such power across many countries at once. Rodrik’s framework makes sense of this trend, highlighting the diminishing freedom of leftist politicians due to globalisation pressures that place countries acting individually at a severe disadvantage.

Your understanding of EU politics is nil. Current choices involve some sort of fiscal union (which hypothetically might provide for the political means to counter the race to the bottom but is not projected to be democratic in any way) or the collapse of the eurozone which would leave the EU dead in the water politically as a free trade zone where capital controls are banned in all circumstances by treaty.

The latter option aggravates precisely those circumstances that have caused swings, sometimes dramatic, to the right in virtually every member country in recent decades. The former blunders yet further down the road that has stripped the EU of popular legitimacy over the years.

The Politics of Inflation Management
Matthew Watson
Political Quarterly, 74(3), 2003, 285-297

Emphasis added in all instances.

“…it is necessary to look back at the strategy deployed by the Labour Party in its efforts to win the 1997 General Election. In particular, we must revisit the extent to which it sought to capture for itself a reputation for governing ‘competence’ – which, in economic terms, it understood solely as a reputation for counterinflationary credibility.

“Labour acted as if the stock market were the primary arbiter of the Party’s reputation in this respect. Any evidence of falling share prices on the expectation of a Labour victory was assumed to signify market concern about the strength of the Party’s counter-inflationary commitments. Or, as proved to be the case, rapid increases in the value of the stock market in the immediate pre-election period, coupled with the general feeling that Labour would win, were taken to indicate that the markets were now unconcerned about the likely inflation performance of a Labour Government. Low inflation and governing ‘competence’ were thus elided, with the stock market cast as judge of whether the prevailing inflation rate constituted evidence of a competent government.

“Moreover, this understanding of the relationship between stock markets and governments, which vested all sense of power in the former, was by no means confined to the British Labour Party. It had also become commonplace within the academic literature to argue that markets had acquired a virtual veto over government policy. It was assumed that the veto was enacted at those moments where coordinated selling expressed the markets’ disapproval with governments who prioritised other policy goals over that of containing inflation.”

[…]

“The constraints on feasible policies are thought to be particularly pronounced whenever governments, or even prospective governments, reveal progressive political aspirations in their proposals for the economy. Set in such a context, an obvious contrast is to be made between the reactions of the financial markets to the possibility of Labour victories in the General Elections of 1992 and 1997. During the four weeks of the 1992 campaign, for instance, the headline FTSE-100 index of leading shares recorded a points loss equivalent to 7% of the market’s value. The most substantial losses in that period came in the immediate aftermath of opinion polls that showed a strong Labour lead. By contrast, no similar cluster of ‘vulnerable’ shares emerged during the course of Labour’s surge to victory five years later. […] Labour’s erstwhile progressive political aspirations did not cause concern amongst the financial markets in 1997 as they had in 1992, because the Party’s leaders had used the intervening period to extricate themselves from such aspirations.”

[…]

“The construction of a binary opposition between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Labour by the Party’s managers served to highlight the latter’s acceptance that the range of feasible policy options was heavily constrained in an era of heightened capital mobility and speculative asset pricing. More specifically, ‘New’ Labour presented its policy preferences in a way that mirrored its perception of the inflation preferences of the financial markets.”

It should be noted that Watson in no way endorsed the New Labour assumptions about competence in economic management. On the contrary, he highlighted what he referred to as the “profound economic and political pathologies” — specifically rampant credit expansion creating the illusion of growth — that resulted from assuming low interest rates should be the sole objective of economic management.

However the key issue for the purposes of this argument is not the merit of New Labour’s policies but perceptions of them, in particular that such perceptions were shared by New Labour and the capital markets.

It was Rich Puchalsky who pointed to oligarchic power. It seemed reasonable to assume you endorsed this claim given your consistent support for him.

On the general and simultaneous surge to the right, you cite reasons as follows:

Decline of communist parties, declines of unions. In the UK the change of the ideological climate by Thatcherism. The strong links that many of the new generation of Labour leaders had to various US orgs/think tanks. The fact that many of the new generation of leaders had connections either to the city, or management consulting; rather than the unions as older generations mostly had. None of these seem vaguely significant?

Of course they’re significant. What you don’t explain is why these things should occur at once. Rodrik provides the unifying element.

The suggestion that democratic opposition (without elaboration) can turn it around is oblivious to the key feature of the whole argument however — the enormous costs such an action would entail, precisely the constraining factor Watson identifies.

Stalin was able to pursue “socialism in one country” because the USSR was isolated economically already. “Globalisation in one country” is not a meaningful concept. Should countries turn against globalisation they’ll do so individually, each in accordance with its own electoral cycle. However each will suffer severe punishment from the markets as it does so, each vulnerable in isolation, like an army choosing to charge the enemy guns one at a time.

The alternative is to secure the agreement of all other WTO signatories at once while making credible promises not to act unilaterally. This requires belief that literally all signatories can be converted in the teeth of what is certain to be ferocious opposition from multinational businesses of all sorts.

I never assumed current global trends would proceed ad-infinitum. On the contrary, such leads directly to a scenario similar to the one Greg outlined above and which I’ve argued elsewhere, i.e. the evaporation of the power of democratic politics.

Neither does Rodrik assume a benign outcome — quite the opposite.

In this regard, it is correct that no feasible option in the EU is attractive. Death of the euro implies acrimony and political deadlock — i.e. a freezing in place of the very market mechanisms lacking a political counterweight that have driven the march to the right. On the other hand, the political counterweight actually proposed is notable for lacking any democratic component.

No political force of significance at the present time proposes alternatives. What I have set out to achieve is to point out that alternatives do exist, and the broad argument applies equally to the EU and to the WTO.

It seemed reasonable to assume you endorsed this claim given your consistent support for him.

You have a strange definition of reasonable. And why you’d extend that to assume I’d think it about the UK I have absolutely no idea.

I never said that Labour didn’t believe it (though why they believed it is a separate matter). I said that I don’t believe that the markets do have that power. Which Watson doesn’t argue either, at least in the bit you’ve quoted. He merely argues that they believed it to be true.

Of course they’re significant. What you don’t explain is why these things should occur at once. Rodrik provides the unifying element.

Huh? I’m completely losing the plot here. Are you saying that communism fell, and Thatcher held power and the unions collapsed because of liberalised international markets? Because that would be an extraordinary claim. One that in the fact of it would seem to ignore a number of other facts.

The suggestion that democratic opposition (without elaboration) can turn it around is oblivious to the key feature of the whole argument however—the enormous costs such an action would entail, precisely the constraining factor Watson identifies.

Well he mostly states that the stock market fell. Which is of no great economic significance. And short term market movements tend not to be very good predictors of long term movements. I’d also note that he seems to ignore the other significant change between 1992 and 1997 – the completely disastrous and unnecessary recession, plus Black Wednesday. Prior to that Labour had the reputation for economic incompetence, after it the Tories gained the repuation. Cause and effect is not as simple as you’re making it out to be be. The 1997 Tory party was utterly utterly discredited, even among its natural friends.

The suggestion that democratic opposition (without elaboration) can turn it around is oblivious to the key feature of the whole argument however—the enormous costs such an action would entail, precisely the constraining factor Watson identifies.

yeah here’s the thing. In a global recession/depression, or fiancial crisis – not so much. I don’t know how many more times I can say SE Asia.

However each will suffer severe punishment from the markets as it does so, each vulnerable in isolation, like an army choosing to charge the enemy guns one at a time.

So SE Asia are vulnerable then?

The alternative is to secure the agreement of all other WTO signatories at once while making credible promises not to act unilaterally.

Or that the WTO can hold in a global crisis. Which is equally utopian, though I guess I’m not going to get you to realise this.

Neither does Rodrik assume a benign outcome

Whereas I am? What is it with you and Watson? The 1930s weren’t benign – however they were not business as usual. He’s arguing that a breakup of the EU. Which I thought I was arguing was likely also. Though you’ll probably tell me that I was actually arguing for a Social Democrat paradise.

I don’t see a situation where the EU breaks up, the US and Europe fall into recession/depression (along probably with China) and continual financial crisis as being one where globalisation is sustainable. Any more than it would be if there was an outbreak of global war. Its a project that requires stability and a certain amount of unity among governments.

Death of the euro implies acrimony and political deadlock—i.e. a freezing in place of the very market mechanisms lacking a political counterweight that have driven the march to the right. On the other hand, the political counterweight actually proposed is notable for lacking any democratic component.

I have absolutely no idea what this paragraph means.

What I have set out to achieve is to point out that alternatives do exist, and the broad argument applies equally to the EU and to the WTO.

Good god you have? where? I’m not being sarky, I’m just absolutely baffled by this statement. You said something vague about a democratic globalisation movement and that was about it.

I thought it was clear enough, but anyway…

In this regard, it is correct that no feasible option in the EU is attractive. Death of the euro implies acrimony and political deadlock—i.e. a freezing in place of the very market mechanisms…

Meaning EU treaties guaranteeing the freedom of movement of goods and capital.

lacking a political counterweight

I.e. EU-level decision making bodies are not empowered to issue directives sufficient to ensure fair competition while halting the race to the bottom in public services that has accelerated to a sprint across the EU in recent years.

Simply, no government exists to regulate that single market in goods and financial services. Government restrictions on capital flows are illegal.

that have driven the march to the right.

By the mechanisms Rodrik identifies.

On the other hand, the political counterweight actually proposed

I.e. fiscal union as proposed by Merkel, combined with business as usual at the ECB.

is notable for lacking any democratic component.

It’s being devised by the so-called Frankfurt group, almost all of whom have no mandate. Neither does the proposal itself have any political, let alone democratic, component.

No its not adult. What I’m doing is no different to what I and lots of other people did in the early 90s on usenet. Or still do today on mailing lists.

I have no idea why you think I’m mocking him. But mockery isn’t fisking [1] either.

[1] A word I hate.

Martin Bento @ 363: They burned a car producing flames 15 feet high

I can’t find this by googling — burning barricades, yes, but not a burning car. Do you have a link?

Would you prefer the gish gallop?

Here you stated: “I don’t actually remember the market reaction playing a big part in the election. It was mentioned, sure, but then it was mentioned in the last election as well.”

So I provided direct quotes from newspaper headlines and news reports.

You responded:”And seriously, the “Daily Mail”. “The Sun”. Its clear that you don’t live in the UK, or you wouldn’t realise how ludicrous citing their front pages actually is in this instance. That this ludicrous threats were made is certainly true; demonstrating that they were effective is something entirely different.”

So I produced the Watson paper — and you’ll notice I’m all of the heavy lifting, conducting actual research in response to your ever-widening list of demands.

According to Watson “…an obvious contrast is to be made between the reactions of the financial markets to the possibility of Labour victories in the General Elections of 1992 and 1997. During the four weeks of the 1992 campaign, for instance, the headline FTSE-100 index of leading shares recorded a points loss equivalent to 7% of the market’s value. The most substantial losses in that period came in the immediate aftermath of opinion polls that showed a strong Labour lead…”

Your memories were then miraculously amended:”You’re arguing that the election was decided by the markets. Your “proof” for this was that some people in the markets made threats, as did right wing newspapers. Well yeah, they did.I remember, I was there.”

Only I never argued that “the election was decided by the markets”, only that it presents progressive politics with a hill to climb — a hill that didn’t exist in the 1960s when capital wasn’t mobile and only a very small proportion of voters owned shares.

Neither did I refer to “proof” of something I’d neither proven nor set out to prove — if you’re going to quote someone, best to restrict it to things people actually said or wrote.

What I actually wrote was:

“…the markets inflict severe punishment on any country that threatens to drift to the left—cash flows out, interest rates go up, the stock market tumbles and so on. No presidential candidate or congressional party has promised the expansion of the state in the US in decades, but an examination of the markets in the run up to the 1992 election in the UK will demonstrate the pattern. I’ve only read the abstract of this paper however, in summary Labour’s manifesto promised new public programmes funded by specific tax rises, the markets varied in inverse proportion to Labour’s poll ratings and this was news regularly during the final days of the campaign.

So powerful is this mechanism that it works almost invisibly. The commentariat and the political professionals won’t even countenance the candidacy of left wingers because they know that the campaign will be hamstrung by the markets holding a lit torch next to voters’ retirement savings.”

All points supported by reference to Watson and Philo.

And to add to Rich’s wish there, demands for the impossible should be mocked. It’s like asking why the world’s good Christians haven’t put a stop to the activities of people like Fred Phelps, James Dobson, and the Pope. It’s because they can’t. Likewise, it is genuinely impossible for any social movement to rigorously purge itself of every disruptive jackass trying to exploit it as a better stage for their antics. It can’t be done. If it could be done, we wouldn’t need something like OWS because we could go fix all the existing institutions. But…no. It cannot happen.

Anyone saying “you folks must do X” really should feel a burden to show it’s possible, with examples. It might be nice to do the impossible, but it can’t be the prerequisite for anything else. It would be much better to say something like “I’m simply not prepared to accept the validity of what you’re doing” and be up front about it.

Martin, links for your various claims please? I’m not aware of any vehicle burnings at OWS, and the usual sources for looking these things up are failing me (mostly because there was a widely reported vehicle burning at Occupy Rome that’s overwhelming search results). I’ve read enough other stuff written by you to know I shouldn’t dismiss what you’re saying and should take the time to follow up. Thanks in advance (if you have the time to share, I know it’s holiday-time and this thread might close too soon for replies).