This Changes Everything
Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement
Sarah van Gelder (ed.)
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, California (USA), 2011 (2011)
84 pages
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If there is something that never stops amazing me is the American ability
to completely ignore whatever is going on in the rest of the world and
consistently see themselves as the center of everything. This is what
in Spain we call adanism (i.e., the idea that everything starts with
and in ourselves). Yet, it should surprise no one. After all, it is a
perfectly normal attitude for those who live in the metropolis of any
historically known empire,
and the United States
are no exception. If anything, what I find amusing is the fact that even
progressive people easily fall into that trap. Take, for example, the
following paragraph from this short volume:
Months before the occupiers descended on Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, before the news trucks arrived and the unions
endorsed, before Michael Bloomberg and Michael Moore and Kanye West
made appearances, a group of artists, activists, writers, students, and
organizers gathered on the fourth floor of 16 Beaver Street, an artists'
space near Wall Street, to talk about changing the world. There were New
Yorkers in the room, but also Egyptians, Spaniards, Japanese, and Greeks.
Some had played a part in the Arab Spring uprising; others had been involved in the protests catching
fire across Europe. But no one involved at 16 Beaver knew they were about to
light the fuse on a protest movement that would sweep the United Stated and
fuel similar uprisings around the world.
(Andy Kroll: How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started, from Sarah van
Gelder (ed.), This Changes Everything, p. 16)
In other words, months before the Occupy Wall Street protests even started,
there was a meeting that included people who had participated in the protests
in the Arab world and in Europe... and yet, somehow, these protests in New
York that had not happen yet at this point would somehow "light the fuse" on
a movement that would sweep both the US and the world (?!). Wouldn't it
make more sense to think that it's precisely the opposite what happened? It
seems clear to me that the protests started in the Arab world, then spread to
some European countries and, finally, reached the US. Well, no, it cannot
be like that, of course! Anything new that happens in the world has to be
invented here! After all, we are the center of the empire. We are the
center of the world. Strange things that one reads.
From the introduction, written by Sarah van Gelder:
The Occupy Wall
Street movement is not just demanding change. It is also transforming
how we, the 99%, see ourselves. The shame many of us felt when we couldn't
find a job, pay down our debts, or keep our home is being replaced by a
political awakening. Millions now recognize that we are not to blame for
a weak economy, fir a subprime mortgage meltdown, or for a tax system that
favors the wealthy but bankrupts the government. The 99% are coming to see
that we are collateral damage in an all-out effort by the super-rich to get
even richer.
Now that we see the issue clearly —and now that we see how many
others are in the same boat— we can envision a new role for ourselves.
We will no longer be isolated and powerless. We can hold vigils all night
when necessary and nonviolently face down police. We are the vast majority
of the population and, once we get active, we cannot be ignored. Our leaders
will not fix things for us: we'll have to do that ourselves. We'll have to
make the decisions, too. And we'll have to take care of one another
—provide the food, shelter, protection, and support needed to make it
through long occupations, bad weather, and the hard work of finding
consensus when we disagree.
(Sarah van Gelder (ed.): This Changes Everything, p. 2)
Critics of the movement say they oppose the redistribution of wealth on
principle. But redistribution is exactly what has been happening for
decades. Today's economy redistributes wealth from the poor and middle
class to those at the top. The income of the top 1% grew 275 percent
between 1979 and 2007, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For those in
the bottom 20 percent, income grew just 18 percent during those twenty-eight
years.
(Sarah van Gelder (ed.): This Changes Everything, p. 3)
The movement has also been criticized for its failure to issue a list of
demands. In fact, it is easy to see what the movement is demanding: quite
simply, a world that works for the 99%. The hand-lettered protest signs
show the range of concerns: excessive student debt; banks that took taxpayer
bailouts, then refused to help homeowners stay in their homes; cuts in
government funding for essential services; Federal Reserve policies; the lack of jobs.
A list of specific demands would make it easier to manage, criticize,
co-opt, and divide the movement. Instead, Occupy Wall Street is setting its
own agenda on its own terms and developing consensus statements at its own
pace. It's doing this in spaces that it controls —some in parks
and other public spaces, others in union halls, libraries, churches, and
community centers. On the Internet, the movement issues statements and calls
to action through Twitter,
Facebook, and its own
Web sites. From the start it was clear that the movement would not rely on
a mainstream media corrupted by corporate interest.
(Sarah van Gelder (ed.): This Changes Everything, pp. 6-7)
When political parties talk about building a base, they usually mean
developing foot soldiers who will help candidates win election and then go
home to let the elected officials make the decisions. The Occupy Wall
Street movement turns that idea on its head. The ordinary people who
have chosen to be part of this movement are the ones who debate the issues,
determine strategies, and lead the work.
(Sarah van Gelder (ed.): This Changes Everything, p. 7)
...the movement has important strengths that add to its resilience. It
is radically decentralized, so a disaster at any one occupation will not
bring down the others; in fact, the others can take action in support. There
is no single leader who could be co-opted or assassinated. Instead,
leadership is broadly shared, and leadership skills are being taught and
learned constantly.
What's more, the autonomous groups within the movement that plan and
carry out direct actions of all sorts are extremely difficult to contain.
By choosing the targets of their actions wisely, they can further draw
attention to institutions whose behavior calls into question their right to
exist. When the legitimacy of large institutions crumbles, it is often just
a matter of time before the support of government, stockholders, customers,
and employees goes away, too. There is no institution that is "too big to
fail." This is one way that nonviolent revolution happens.
(Sarah van Gelder (ed.): This Changes Everything, p. 10)
Whatever happens next, Occupy Wall Street has already accomplished
something that changes everything. It has fundamentally altered the
national conversation.
"A group of people started camping out in Zuccotti Park, and all of a sudden the conversation
started being about the right things," says The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. "It's kind of a
miracle."
(Sarah van Gelder (ed.): This Changes Everything, p. 11)
Around thirty people showed up for those first gatherings at 16 Beaver earlier
this summer, recall several people who attended. Some of them hada just come
from "Bloombergville," a
weeks-long encampment outside New York City Hall to protest deep budget cuts to education and
other public services, and now they itched for another occupation. As the
group talked politics and the battered economic landscape in the United
States and abroad, a question hang in the air: "What comes next?"
Begonia S.C. and Luis M.C., a Spanish couple who attended those 16 Beaver
discussions, had an idea. (They asked that their full names not be used to
avoid looking like publicity seekers.) In the spring, they had returned to
Spain for the protests sweeping the country in reaction to staggering
unemployment, a stagnant economy, and hapless politicians. On May 15,
twenty-thousand indignados, "the outraged," had poured into Madrid's Puerta del Sol, transforming the grand plaza into
their own version of Tahrir Square. Despite police bans against demonstrations, the plaza soon
became the focal point of Spain's social media-fueled 15-M movement (named for May 15), which spread to hundreds of cities
in Spain and Italy. When they returned to the United States, Begonia and
Luis brought the lessons of 15-M with them. At 16 Beaver, they suggested
replicating a core part of the movement in the United States: the general
assembly.
(Andy Kroll: How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started, from Sarah van
Gelder (ed.), This Changes Everything, p. 17)
Three months later, hundreds of assemblies, big and small, now operate by
consensus
across America. Decisions are made democratically, without voting, by general
assent. According to conventional wisdom this shouldn't be possible, but
it is happening —in much the same way that other inexplicable
phenomena like love, revolution, or life itself (from the perspective of, say,
particule physics) happen.
The direct democratic process adopted by Occupy Wall Street has deep roots in American
radical history. It was widely employed in the civil rights movement and by the Students for a
Democratic Society. But its current form has developed from within
movements like feminism
and even spiritual traditions (both Quaker and Native American) as much as from within anarchism itself. The reason direct, consensus-based democracy has
been so firmly embraced by and identified with anarchism is because it embodies
what is perhaps anarchism's most fundamental principle: that in the same way
human beings treated like children will tend to act like children, the way to
encourage human beings to act like mature and responsible adults is to treat
them as if they already are.
(David Graeber: Enacting the Impossible: Making Decisions by Consensus,
from Sarah van Gelder (ed.), This Changes Everything, pp. 22-23)
We may never be able to prove through logic that direct democracy, freedom,
and a society based on principles of human solidarity are possible. We can
only demonstrate it through action. In parks and squares across America,
people have begun to witness it as they have started to participate. Americans
grow up being taught that freedom and democracy are our ultimate values, and
that our love of freedom and democracy is what defines us as people
—even as, in subtle but constant ways, we're taught that genuine
freedom and democracy can never truly exist.
(David Graeber: Enacting the Impossible: Making Decisions by Consensus,
from Sarah van Gelder (ed.), This Changes Everything, p. 23)
Through a direct democratic process, we have come together as individuals and
crafted these principles of solidarity, which are points of unity that include
but are not limited to:
- engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy;
- exercising personal and collective responsibility;
- recognizing individual's inherent privilege and the influence it has on
all interactions;
- empowering one another against all forms of oppression;
- redefining how labor is valued;
- the sanctity of individual privacy;
- the belief that education is a human right; and
- endeavoring to practice and support wide application of open source.
(The Occupy Wall Street General Assembly: Principles of Solidarity,
from Sarah van Gelder (ed.), This Changes Everything, pp. 25-26)
Can you now imagine this group having a democratic discussion? Imagine
the people's mic,
where people speak in short phrases and the group repeats them so all can
hear. In the first week, up until tonight, the people's mic worked for
a few hundred people —not ideally, but one can hear. With thousands,
the people's mic has to be repeated not one time, not two times, but three.
Each wave of sound representing another mass of people hearing the voice of
the person speaking. Each wave of sound representing people actively
listening by repeating. The facilitators (a team at this point) help
remind the person speaking, by gently touching their arm, that they have to
wait for each wave to finish before the next phrase is spoken.
Imagine the quiet of people listening, and the sound of the repetition of
the words of the person speaking. Imagine the power of direct democracy
moving through your body, along with thousands around you. I have chills
writing this. I was moved beyond words this evening.
(Marina Sitrin: The Chills of Popular Power: The First Month of Occupy
Wall Street, from Sarah van Gelder (ed.), This Changes Everything,
p. 30)
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the
human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must
protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the
individuals to protect their own rights, and those of theyr neighbors; that
a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but
corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the
Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is
determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations,
which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression
overe equality, run our governments. We have peacebly assembled here, as is
our right, to let these facts be known.
- They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite
not having the original mortgage.
- They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to
give executives exorbitant bonuses.
- They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace
based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity, and sexual
orientation.
- They have poisoned the food supply through negligence and undermined the
farming system through monopolization.
- They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment
of countless animals and actively hide these practices.
- They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate
for better pay and safer working conditions.
- They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt
on education, which is itself a human right.
- They have continuously outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as
leverage to cut workers' health care and pay.
- They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people,
with none of the culpability or responsibility.
- They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to
get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
- They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
- They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the
press.
- They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering
lives in pursuit of profit.
- They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their
policies have produced and continue to produce.
- They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible
for regulating them.
- They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on
oil.
- They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people's
lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already
turned a substantial profit.
- They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping,
and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
- They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their
control of the media.
- They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when
presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
- They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
- They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians
overseas.
- They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive
government contracts.
(Declaration of the Occupation of New York City: In Their Own Words, Why
Protesters are Occuplying Wall Street, from Sarah van Gelder (ed.),
This Changes Everything, pp. 36-38)
Those who extol nonviolent discipline might be disappointed to learn that
Occupy Wall Street has officially embraced "diversity of tactis," a phrase
that often serves as a byword for condoning acts of violence. However, the
way that the Occupation movement has carried out this policy might lead us to
think of this concept differently. For the occupiers, it is less a license
for violence —which they have generally avoided— than a broader
philosophy of coordinated, decentralized activism.
Since the early stages of the movement, those taking part have been in a
deadlock on the question of nonviolence. At a planning meeting in Tompkins Square Park prior to
September 17, I recall a young man in dark sunglasses saying, knowingly,
"There is a danger of fetishizing nonviolence to the pooint that it becomes
a dogma." In response, a woman added, quite astoundingly, that "nonviolence
just means not initiating violence." The question of nonviolence was
ultimately tabled that night and thereafter. "This discussion is a complete
waste of time," someone concluded.
(Nathan Schneider: No Leaders, No Violence: What Diversity of Tactics Means
For Occupy Wall Street, from Sarah van Gelder (ed.), This Changes
Everything, p. 39)
My sense of the dynamics at play here is something like the following: The
NYPD, as a hierarchical,
highly structured organization, operates according to certain plans and
procedures arranged in advance. Its commanders gain the best intelligence
they can about what protesters intend to do and act accordingly. When the
protesters act outside the plans police prepared for, or their plans aren't
unified, the police feel they have no choice but to resort to a violent
crackdown, which in turn highlights the protesters' own nonviolence in the
media reports, and their movement grows. The net effect is that it almost
seems as if the police are intentionally trying to help the movement, for
that's what their every action seems to do.
(Nathan Schneider: No Leaders, No Violence: What Diversity of Tactics Means
For Occupy Wall Street, from Sarah van Gelder (ed.), This Changes
Everything, p. 41)
(...) For many years, people working in public health have looked for a
link between poverty and social problems like mental illness, crime, and
infant mortality. We thought that once you found the relationship between
income and death rates, for example, you would be able to predict what a
state's death rate would be. Actually, though, that doesn't produce a good
prediction. It turns out that what matters aren't the incomes themselves,
but how unequal they are. If you're a more unequal state, the same level
of income produces a higher death rate.
(Brooke Jarvis: How Inequality Poisons Society and Equity Benefits
Everyone: An Interview with Richard Wilkinson, from Sarah van Gelder (ed.),
This Changes Everything, pp. 52-53)
After Wall Street
drove the nation into the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration enacted significant financial reforms. Those reforms
put in place a system of money, banking, and investment based on community
banks, mutual savings and loans, and credit unions. We had laws that
prohibited one bank from owning another and severely limited the number of
branches a bank could operate. These institutions provided loans to
individuals and financial services to Main Street businesses that employed Americans to produce and
trade real goods and services in response to community needs and opportunities.
Corporate shares were held by individuals who knew the companies they owned.
The Main Street economy, which Wall Street interests now dismiss as quaint
and antiquated, financed U.S. victory in World War II, the creation of a strong American middle
class, an unprecendented period of economic stability and prosperity, and
American world leadership in industry and technology. It also made the
American dream of a secure and comfortable life in return for hard work and
playing by the rules a reality for a substantial majority of Americans.
In the 1970s, Wall Street
interests mobilized to use their financial and media power to re-establish
control of the economy. It was class warfare, and Wall Street won.
Their primary targets were the regulations that limited the size and function
of banks and other financial institutions. Step by step they transferred
the power to create and allocate credit from locally owned, independent Main
Street financial institutions —community banks, mutual savings and
loans, and credit unions— to Wall Street institutions that had no
particular interest in investments that create community wealth.
Wall Street institutions quickly developed a more profitable business
model. The model has come to feature excessive fees and usurious interest
rates for ordinary customers, financing speculation, luring unwary into
mortgages they cannot afford, bundling the resulting junk mortgages into
derivatives sold as triple-A securities, betting against the sure-to-fail
derivative products so created, extracting subsidies and bailouts from
government, laundering money from drug and arms traders, and off-shoring
profits to avoid taxes. Much of what provides profits to Wall Street
either is, or should be, illegal.
(David Korten: Six Ways to Liberate Main Street from Wall Street, from
Sarah van Gelder (ed.), This Changes Everything, pp. 56-57)
Here are six steps we can take to liberate Main Street from Wall Street and
build a democratically accountable economy based on sound market principles.
- Reverse the process of bank consolidation and rebuild a national system
of community-based, community-accountable financial institutions devoted to
building community wealth. Break up wht mega-banks into independent,
locally owned financial institutions backed by tax and regulatory policies
that favor community financial instituions.
- Implement appropriate regulatory and fiscal measures to secure the
integrity of financial markets and the money and banking system. Such
measures properly favor productive investment, limit banking institutions to
basic banking functions, and render financial speculation and other
unproductive financial games illegal and unprofitable.
- Create a state partnership bank, modeled on the state Bank of North Dakota, in each of
the fifty states to serve as a depository for state financial assets.
Such banks can use their funds to spur community investment by partnering
with community financial institutions within the state on loans to local
home buyers and locally owned enterprises engaged in construction, agriculture,
industry, and commerce.
- Restructure the Federal Reserve to limit its responsibility to managing the money supply,
subject it to federal oversight and public accountability, and require that
all newly created funds be applied to funding green public infrastructure.
Assign what is currently the Fed's responsibility for the regulation of
banks and so-called "shadow banking" institutions to specialized regulatory
agencies with clear public accountability.
- Create a Federal Recovery and Reconstruction Bank (FRRB) to finance
critical green infrastructure projects designated by Congress. Fund this
bank with the money that the Federal Reserve creates when it determines a
need to expand the money supply. Rather than introducing the new money
into the economy through Wall Street banks, as is currently the Fed's
practice, introduce the money through the FRRB to fund projects that directly
and immediately serve the common good. This reform makes funding available
for critical projects without drawing on tax revenues.
- Rewrite international trade and investment rules to encourage
national ownership, self-reliance, and self-determination. Bring
international rules into alignment with the foundational assumptions of
trade theory that the ownership of productive assets belongs to citizens of
the country in which those assets are located and that trade between nations
is balanced. Hold corporations that operate in multiple countries accountable
for compliance with the laws of each country of operation.
(David Korten: Six Ways to Liberate Main Street from Wall Street, from
Sarah van Gelder (ed.), This Changes Everything, pp. 58-59)
The history of popular uprisings like Occupy Wall Street is far from
reassuring. The last one to have any staying power was the populist farmers
revolt of the 1800s, and it was aggressively dismantled by everyone from
the two major political parties to the banks and railroad corporations of its
day.
Most revolts are snuffed out well before their efforts affect the political
scene —not because their ideas and issues aren't relevant, but because
the major institutional players within the system-that-is attempt to snag
the power and energy for their own. In the eyes of the Democratic Party
or the national environmental groups, this revolt is merely an opportunity to
assimilate newly emerging troops back into those groups' own ineffective
organizing. Yet, if those institutional groups had actually been
effective all of these years, why the need for a revolt at all?
(Thomas Linzey and Jeff Reifman: How to Put the Rights of People and Nature
Over Corporate Rights, from Sarah van Gelder (ed.), This Changes
Everything, p. 70)
Instead of diluting themselves to meet the needs of already-institutionalized groups who aren't going anywhere, the Occupy folks must move in the opposite
direction: deepen and strengthen their effort by demanding structural
change. That means moving away from the mainstream progressive
organizations and the institutional advocacy they promote (which has proven
ineffective against the type of consolidated wealth that influences decisions
about every aspect of our lives today) and towards a new form of advocacy and
activism. Rather than negotiating the terms of our de-occupation, we can and
must rewrite the very rules under which our system operates.
Mainstream progressive groups have failed by working within legal and
regulatory systems purposefully structure to subordinate communities to
corporate power. Transformative movements don't operate that way.
Abolitionists never sought to regulate the slave trade; they sought freedom
and rights for slaves. Suffragists didn't seek concessions but
demanded the right for all women to vote.
(Thomas Linzey and Jeff Reifman: How to Put the Rights of People and Nature
Over Corporate Rights, from Sarah van Gelder (ed.), This Changes
Everything, pp. 71-72)
Unfortunately, in spite of the title of the book, the reality is that the
occupy movement has not changed much. It wimpered away without much
fanfare as soon as the winter approached and, while it may have helped
introduce the issue of income inequality into the political debate (something
that, to be fair, is no easy task in a country like the US where the topic
has been ignored for quite sometime), it had little direct impact in the
policies being carried out. If anything, perhaps its most clear impact
has been assisting in the re-election of Barack Obama in the presidential elections by undermining the
image of Mitt Romney
as someone utterly incapable of dealing with the above mentioned issue of
income inequality.
However, even on this front, one would argue that the main problem the
Romney campaign had to deal with was not so much the actual topic as the
candidate's amazing ability to shoot himself on the foot, as well as his
image as a wealthy corporate honcho from the Norhteast completely out of
touch with the real life that most middle class and working class Americans
have to live. Said that, is it safe to think that the movement has
been defeated? Well, it all depends. It depends on how th economy does in
the next year or so. Actually, I'd say the economic stimulus plan applied by
the Obama Administration worked for the most part, also helping defuse this
potential threat, at least for the time being. That is precisely the key
difference between the protest movements in the US and Europe. Of course, it
remains to be seen whether or not Obama will manage to keep the economy more
or less under control during his second mandate. There is little to no room
for a new econoic stimulus package, and the public finances are definitely
not in good shape.
Entertainment Factor 5/10
Intellectual Factor: 5/10
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