The Occupation of Wall Street Spreads

[Shroom Man 777]

You should get people to do concerts, like Woodstock. Whatever happened to all those counterculture musicians? There should be an Occupy American Idol thing, where the contestants sing all sorts of hippie anti-establishment anti-war songs, man.

[Ryan Thunder]

Toronto reneged on its agreement with OT and are kicking them out of Victoria Park.

What's their excuse?

The hay?

[The Yosemite Bear]

oh, Thursday at 3pm there's a big rally here in the park.

[Lord Zentei]

You should get people to do concerts, like Woodstock. Whatever happened to all those counterculture musicians?

They turned 64.

[Zinegata]

Gandhi had a lot more supporters precisely because his non-violent approach appealed to a broader part of the population. Again, I'm not saying the Gandhi non-violence doctrine is perfect and applicable to all cases. But given the context of the protests happening in a democratic state, countering that "Gandhi advocated violence too!" just makes you look like an idiot and justifies mainstream America's fears that OWS are nothing more than a bunch of anarchists out to create trouble.

Frankly, it seems to me that quite a few OWS members (and people in this thread) are deliberately hoping for violent incidents to happen, hoping it will trigger revolution/change/martyrdom/whatever not realizing it will instead just further alienate them from the mainstream population.

This needs to be said: There is no broad desire for violent solutions for America's internal problems. Not even in the conservative camp which has all the guns (to use a Jon Stewart joke). And it's silly to think otherwise, and calling anyone who isn't busy masturbating over the OWS the "mindless middle" just further reinforces how divorced from reality the OWS extremists and their supporters in this board are.

Moreover, getting arrested for being part of an OWS rally is not really comparable to getting arrested in India during the independence period. They'd get hit by a couple of misdemeanors at worst if they follow the Gandhi-style non-violence. Spend a couple of nights in jail, then get right back to protesting. If you're saying that the protests will die just because you sat in jail for a couple of nights, then it only demonstrates how little traction the protests are actually getting.

[Raw Shark]

This needs to be said: There is no broad desire for violent solutions for America's internal problems. Not even in the conservative camp which has all the guns (to use a Jon Stewart joke). And it's silly to think otherwise, and calling anyone who isn't busy masturbating over the OWS the "mindless middle" just further reinforces how divorced from reality the OWS extremists and their supporters in this board are.

I think that, if you read it in context, you'll see that I was using "mindless middle" for something else.

Who in this thread is "deliberately hoping for violent incidents to happen?"

[Zinegata]

Who in this thread is "deliberately hoping for violent incidents to happen?"

I've already had one person implying that the situation in America is comparable to Jews in Nazi Germany; a couple pointing out that "There was violence in India during Gandhi's time!", again implying that the violence during Indian independence is somehow applicable to America today.

Again: There is no broad desire for violent solutions for America's internal problems. There are very real ideological divides in America, but neither side is calling for armed struggle (and the few who idiots who do are generally ignored), because armed struggle makes no fucking sense when you have a (generally) working democratic system of government.

If you want to disprove that Gandhi non-violence doesn't work, then people should be citing instances of failed peaceful protests in democractic countries. But I suspect the OWS supporters here don't want to do that, because the main reason peaceful protests fail in democractic countries is because the mainstream population simply does not support the movement - either because they don't like what the movement is proposing, or it's too unclear for them to support it - and that the major decisions are ultimately decided by the ballot box.

[Bakustra]

Noice. We've got efforts to de-legitimize any form of political action apart from voting, although that's depressingly common.

But the point of noting that Gandhi wasn't the pacifist he's been elevated into and Indian independence was a lot more complex than just satyagrahis getting beaten by British soldiers and Raj police forces until people got sick of it, assuming that remembering truth is not a goal in and of itself, is that this distortion is generally used to A) justify condemnation of whatever movement you're talking about and B) cut off its ability to exert power by limiting it to passivity. A large part of why Gandhi was successful is because he was the most "moderate" of the many Indian factions pushing for independence. When faced with a choice between accommodating him or fighting violent groups, the simplest path became working with Gandhi for Indian independence.

Similarly, radicalism in the American Civil Rights Movement helped make the demands of groups like SCLC more palatable because they were a workable alternative to groups like the Nation of Islam. It wasn't just a case of Birmingham boycott-March on Washington- everybody went home. There was a constant process throughout the 1950s that culminated in the 1960s and the realization that some kind of accommodation would have to be made in the corridors of power. Of course, OWS could work with purely non-violent means, but many other non-violent organizations have benefited from the implied threat of violence from other groups to get what they wanted done. This also doesn't constitute a call for violence, by the way.

[madd0ct0r]

so by your argument, OWS should remain as peaceful as fucking possible, and let other radicals stir up trouble?

which leads back to Zinegata's argument: the ows group should remain as peaceful as possible.

[Bakustra]

so by your argument, OWS should remain as peaceful as fucking possible, and let other radicals stir up trouble?

which leads back to Zinegata's argument: the ows group should remain as peaceful as possible.

That's not my argument, and that's not Zinegata's argument. Zinegata's argument is that only peaceful protests work and are inferior to voting anyways. I'm not making an argument about "should". It's not my place to say what OWS should or should not do. They should do what they agree is the best course, as the movement is democratic and decentralized. I was simply providing some corrections to common distortions and misunderstandings of history.

EDIT: Also, "other radicals" is a curious turn of phrase when looked at in light of my post. Very curious indeed.

[Simon_Jester]

Half the issue is that Occupy Wall Street isn't one group; it's a bunch of groups that all share the same naming convention and help each other out on a small scale over short distances. What Occupy Berkeley does and what the original Occupy Wall Street does (let alone Occupy Toronto, Occupy Denver, Occupy Timbuktu, or Occupy My Sock Drawer) are kind of unrelated. There's no one person setting policy for the whole movement.

That makes it challenging for the nonviolent protestors to avoid getting tarred with the same brush as the rowdier ones. It also means that "What OWS is doing" is only half-meaningful: which OWS?


Of course, this isn't all going to be resolved in a matter of months, since we're looking at deep discontent against structural changes in our society that took decades to evolve and are supported by an entrenched establishment. Over the long haul, we may see protests stop calling themselves "Occupy" and start calling themselves something else. Or not, who knows?

And some groups will calve off from the Occupy movement to do other things. Like voluntarily getting arrested without resisting, which we've already seen people do for various purposes. Then again, some will calve off to throw bombs and shit. It's pretty much inevitable, when tens of millions of people are upset with the status quo, that you'll see a spectrum of reactions.

[open_sketchbook]

I don't know if the culture exists to make completely non-violent protest work over this issue. If the protestors simply marched into the back of police vans, then they lose the advantages created by the instant media culture, not to mention it's not terribly sensationalist so it won't get picked up by mainstream news. In addition, they are fighting an uphill battle of public opinion; the media and most of the louder voices will be against them regardless of how peaceful or violent they are; the Glens and Rushes call them rapists and homeless drug addicts just for being out there.

To be honest, I have absolutely no problem with a bit non-violent resistance as opposed to completely passive resistance. Saying that you can only express an opinion in a public space if you are a saint and you bow down to authority immediately when told to stop doesn't sit well with me. I think to take advantage of the guilt of the ruling class, there has to be some guilt existing already. Things like the "We are the 99%" blog do that very well to those it's going to effect, but people learn about that blog because other folks went out into the streets and made a big stink about it. If they just left when the cops told them, there would be no story, no message would get out, and it'd all be pointless.

[Bakustra]

Well, the problem with comparing this movement to, say, Gandhi or the Civil Rights Movement is that it's built around the mass-revolutionary ideas of the Arab Spring. That was the basic reasoning for "We are the 99%" and for the idea of occupation in general. So the goal is ultimately to build a massive base of support and be able to exert power through numbers. So what I wrote above is not and should not be taken as a recommendation. Those organizations largely functioned through small numbers of activists and a number of relatively passive supporters except for events like the March on Washington. OWS is about getting as many people actively supporting it as possible.

[Lord Zentei]

It depends on how much easier it becomes to demonize them by making a big deal out of those instances when they do resist. In any case, such resistance can potentially spiral out of control.

I'm not sure that resistance is ultimately going to be beneficial, especially if they want to form a respectable political movement. While the Rushes and the Becks are going to demonize them no matter what, it's up to the middle as per usual. I'm not familiar enough with the zeitgeist in America to say whether they'd be more sympathetic to non-resisting protestors or resisting ones, though the latter obviously garners more attention.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

The year was 1967. Body bags were coming back from Vietnam at the rate of 1,000 or more a month. I had skipped my freshman year and finished my honors thesis in my third year, but I stuck around at Harvard for the simple reason that I didn't want to die in Vietnam or grow old in Canada. To fill the time in what would have been my senior year, I got a book contract.

The book was Notes from the New Underground, an anthology of the "underground" press. To gather the articles, I went to California for what I thought would be a week. Los Angeles took, as expected, two days. Then I flew up to Berkeley, where I quickly found a lot more to read.

I also found a girlfriend who went by the name of Blue Cheer, and great music at cheap prices -- like Jefferson Airplane and two other bands for $3. I called my roommate and told him I wasn't planning to be in Cambridge any time soon. "If you don't get on the next plane, you may never come back," he said, and because he was from California and knew a bit about the pleasures of Berkeley, I returned to college and my book project and the writing that became my life.

I'm not a child. I've always thought of Berkeley as sunny and friendly, crunchy and stoned, but I also remember it as the site of one of the greatest political speeches I have ever heard. Mario Savio. Sproul Hall. 1964. The conclusion:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all....

The video is even stronger. It's only a minute. Do watch:



I thought of Mario Savio when I read the first accounts of the rout of "Occupy" protestors last week in Berkeley and watched Stephen Colbert's brilliant takedown of the Berkeley police:




Then I started getting emails from Berkeley:

This past week at UC Berkeley, several thousand students, faculty, and employees of the university came together to protest a proposed 81% tuition hike, increased privatization of the UC system, the troubling conflicts of interest demonstrated by Board of Regents members' private business interests and their responsibilities to advocate on behalf of the UC community with the State government. While, for example, the governing body of the UC Regents (publicly appointed officials of the State of California) and campus administration have decided that the burden of making up losses in the budget crisis should fall heavily on students through rapidly rising tuition (the current figure is already triple what it was ten years ago) and on members of faculty and staff who've received reductions in pay and increased workloads --- or have been laid off entirely --- the current Regents have invested at least $1.5 billion of the UC's money in projects in which many of them personally hold significant stakes and, of course, also authorized $3 million in bonuses to top administrators last year alone.

These are some of the reasons why so many people (myself included) gathered together on Wednesday to stand in peaceful protest in front of Sproul Hall. In addition to organizing numerous teach-ins, a rally, march and campus-wide walkout, students also hoped to set up a two-day encampment in the spirit of the other Occupy movements around the country to create a public forum for discussion and education about the current financial situation of the university and the condition of public education in the country today. All day, the crowd was gathered in explicitly peaceful assembly to petition our government for a redress of grievances. As the university first responded by the early afternoon not with administrators to enter into dialogue, but with hundreds of riot police, some students even took the time to recite the first amendment to police and protesters alike.

Whether or not you agree with the reasons for the protests, however, I would hope that you would all at least share my horror at what followed. As hundreds of students linked arms to form a human chain around the one tent they had (the few others they had tried to set up were ripped down and confiscated by the police with no warning earlier in the day), riot police began beating them mercilessly without warning or provocation. Some of you may have seen the following clips.

Here, you can see the police suddenly start to attack the protesters without cause. The young man in the front that they keep beating even after he's unable to get up is a first-year graduate student in my department named Josh Anderson. He was the first of a number of students that had to be taken to the hospital that day. As you can see from the video, neither he, nor any of the other students being beaten with batons strike back at the police with violence. Instead, you can see him, barely able to stand, gingerly raise a peace sign after being repeatedly struck on the head, neck, ribs, and legs.



In the following video, the first woman (in pink) that the police drag out of the crowd by her hair is Professor Celeste Langan, a beloved professor of British Romanticism and media studies in my department and director of the UC Townsend Center of the Humanities. As she places herself in front of students, the police approach her with batons. She repeatedly told the police not to beat her but arrest her instead. As you can see here, they respond by dragging her out by force and throw her to the ground.



When the police violence occurred again later that night, they broke the ribs of another English professor, poet Geoffrey O'Brien. When the police wouldn't stop beating him even after he too had fallen to the ground, a good friend and fellow graduate student, Ben Cullen, rushed in and demanded that they stop. The police, in turn, rained multiple blows on him, bruising his ribs as well. And just in case it's not clear yet that the violence was not only against 'some kids looking to make a fuss,' the police also thought it necessary to jab 70-year-old former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass several times in the stomach with a baton as well.

Many of us have knee-jerk reactions to cops beating citizens. Mine comes from George Orwell, the subject of my honors thesis. He wrote something like this: When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don't have to ask whose side I'm on. But with the exception of the great Colbert, you will look in vain for an intelligent conversation about any of this on television.

Instead, on a daily basis, Very Smart People tell the likes of Joe Scarborough that it is "class warfare" when "the left" calls for the rich to pay taxes at the rate they did in 1999. Oddly, they never call it class warfare when they discuss proposed Social Security and Medicare cuts -- that's "reform." I'm not taking sides here; I'm just noting, as Orwell and others have, the power of a simple change in language.

That change is now coming to the "Occupy" movement. Polls show that many Americans agree with the protestors: "35 percent had a favorable impression of the protest movement.... Only 16 percent could say the same for Wall Street and large corporations." But the words you are starting to hear to describe the Occupiers are ones I came to hear often when the 1967 "Summer of Love" ended and the body bags from Vietnam started to top 1,500 a month: filthy, violent, promiscuous, etc.

As I was following a trail of links about police violence in Berkeley, I happened upon a video showing how, in May, police in Barcelona dealt with students protesting the Spanish government's proposed "austerity" measures.

On a message board that accompanied this video, someone proposed a definition of "class warfare" you won't hear on television: "The rich are now rich enough to pay half the population to kill the other half of the population."

Sickening, that -- and, I fear, prophetic. When some student or "Occupy" protester dies from a police beating -- and you know that's coming -- no doubt we will hear some cheers.

Chocula, SVPD, Kamikaze; look just what the fuck you are defending. You are defending violent Fascism. CEASE AND DESIST or be named cowards and supporters of White Collar Crime and State Terrorism.


Meanwhile, on Reddit:

Okay, what is your exact reasoning for supporting criminal banking scams like packaging credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations that are known to be bad, bribing the credit rating agencies to rate them as AAA securities, selling them to pensions nationwide, then betting against them?

In short, why do you support fraud and theft of everyone's investments by the rich?

[Ryan Thunder]

Chocula, SVPD, Kamikaze; look just what the fuck you are defending. You are defending violent Fascism. CEASE AND DESIST or be named cowards and supporters of White Collar Crime and State Terrorism.

Perhaps amusingly, I'm very sympathetic to the subjects of the article--until you open your tryhard, overdramatic goddamn mouth and ruin the effect. Then, well, I'm still sympathetic, but I wish you would just do them a favour and stay off their side.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Chocula, SVPD, Kamikaze; look just what the fuck you are defending. You are defending violent Fascism. CEASE AND DESIST or be named cowards and supporters of White Collar Crime and State Terrorism.

Perhaps amusingly, I'm very sympathetic to the subjects of the article--until you open your tryhard, overdramatic goddamn mouth and ruin the effect. Then, well, I'm still sympathetic, but I wish you would just do them a favour and stay off their side.

Really?! Is that the best you can do? The cops are trying to kill university professors Rodney King Style, and all you bring to the table is to call me a tryhard? How would you like it if your friends were the ones getting clubbed half to death and shot down for telling the plutocrats it's time for them to go? Your post is a glorified ad hominem, and you know it.

Do yourself and future generations a favor. Find your nearest Occupy and join it.

[madd0ct0r]

Chocula, SVPD, Kamikaze; look just what the fuck you are defending. You are defending violent Fascism. CEASE AND DESIST or be named cowards and supporters of White Collar Crime and State Terrorism.

[/quote]

Mate, seriously, you have no fucking idea what protesting in a fascist country is like.
Or state terrorism
or how to use capital letters for that matter.
and who the fuck was 'shot down' or even 'beaten half to death?'

I just wasted 6min of my life watching that video, waiting to see evidence of police abuse. One officer (out of about 15) seemed a little more prod happy then others and he was the point man for that wedge. Even then, most of his attacks were aimed at the guy wearing a backpack on his front, where he'd expect to do the least damage.
There were more people filming the protests then actually protesting.

SVPD and KS has been consistent on their positions. Politically, they support or sympathise with OWS. Professionally, they have certain sympathies with the police. Part of the thing of doing a job.
The police members officers are not the issue here. The use of the police is only part of the issue. It is the controlling money at the top of the pyramid that is the issue, not the poor schmucks at the bottom, which ever side of the badge they're on.

[Night_stalker]

That is anything BUT police brutality.

That is a example of how to properly move a protest group away with riot gear without using anything above a simple shove.

Little word to the wise: Look up valid examples of police brutality, and then compare them to this, and you'll find that this is calm and controlled police moving a crowd.

I applaud these police officers for maintaining their calm with moving this crowd and not giving into the temptation to just start bashing skulls left and right, unlike what some members would like to see so they can claim to be martyrs.

[Simon_Jester]

Before we applaud, Night_Stalker, I think it bears debating whether the police should be moving the crowds of protestors in the first place- why are they being pushed and shoved?

Arguably, that's the matter that deserves discussion. Not just random exchanges of charges of police brutality on the one side and cries of "everything's fine here" on the other.

[Ryan Thunder]

Do yourself and future generations a favor. Find your nearest Occupy and join it.

I'm already helping with supplies, actually. Bought them a bunch of blankets the other day. Of course, that's all for nothing because they're getting kicked out, I hear.

The cops are trying to kill university professors Rodney King Style, [...]

Since you mention it;


Uh-huh. I don't disagree that the protesters should be left alone, but you're being ridiculous (as usual.)

[Shroom Man 777]

Einy might be melodramatic.

I think if society or whatever actually considers OWS' demands, at least the salient ones like holding those responsible for the current financial situation accountable, and doing actual reforms and whatever, rather than the establishment once more kowtowing to the parties responsible for creating (and maintaining) the current state of affairs, if society actually did this rather than entrenching and defending the oligarchy and the so-called 1%, not only would there be no need for people to take to the streets and get tear gassed in the face, your country might also end up becoming a better place for your own people.

The reason why these people are so outraged, thus taking to the street to get tear gassed, and why folks like Einy are screeching, is because this isn't happening, because this will probably never happen. The disparity between rich and poor, haves and have nots, the powerful and the powerless, that's the true problem and no matter what comes out of all these arguments on non-violent or violent protests, the degrees of brutality or fatality or animality of police actions, or the solubility of pepper spray particulates in solvent related to the application of dihydrogen monoxide and the decibel level of Formless' incessant screeching, or dialectcal apologism, so long as this disparity between 1% and the 99% continues to exist, well, all of that will mean shit and everything that's wrong with your country - and by extension the entire planet too, since other people are protesting and occupying elsewhere and are also encountering just as bad or if not worse treatments from their governments - will continue on and on.

So, yeah. Even if they litter, or violently link arms and dangerously refuse to move, or masturbate in public, or engage in ritualistic coprophagia, still I can't help but sympathize with the OWS for they are railing against what's really wrong with society in general, and so far they're pretty much harmless, and their message is something many of us can sympathize with, and a bunch of squatters getting beaten up with sticks and gas and shit is a pretty lousy way for society to respond to them even if they are guilty of the heinous crime of squatting and littering semen on the pavement or eating shit in public and all these other things that procedure states should be responded to with stickbeating and gas-tearing and spray-peppering and whatever have you even if it's true and blue and by the book and shit.

[madd0ct0r]

well yeah, but we're all agreed on that.

hence it comes down to arguing the details: the best way to secure the change; the precise amount of violence needed compared the amount society tolerates from either side or what historical precedents are truly valid.

Einy is pissed off and lashing out at the nearest thing he has to the Berkley police. Doesn't mean we're not going to point out the holes in his argument. If you let one end of the spectrum shout too much for too long then you find the entire spectrum drifting towards them.

OWS should be, like you said, about effecting that change. but the methods used are important, and going out looking for a fight won't help anyone.

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, OWS isn't the end all be all. The fact that so many people have shown themselves willing to do this in itself a sign of great change. OWS might not achieve anything, aside from all these people with these mindsets shouting "we are here" to the world, but change can come when these folks are no longer camping in the streets but doing other stuff. You can say that it's the birthcry of the USA's own internet-interlinked politically radical demograph, a group of people connected via social networking and inspired to cry out against the wrong they see around them, something that was gestating in the past years of the 2000s, and finally manifesting now. And... who knows how these dudes are gonna change your nation. It's gonna depend also on how outside factors, like pre-existing factions and such, react to them in the coming years. This is pretty cool. Not unprecedented, but still cool.

You'd think a horde of thousands of angry people taking to the streets would make you fearful of the future. But I think it's actually an encouraging and optimistic sight. It might not be change, but it's hope. They are the future.

[madd0ct0r]

MY country? hollow laughing sound.

I currently live in Vietnam, which is one of the reasons I was so rude to Einy over his fascist police comments.

As for the birthcry - I dunno. A lot of people in usa and Blighty marched against Iraq, and that had jack-shit effect.
Of course, students now were barely teenagers then so presumably the demographic has grown a bit. Maybe it's the ability to link between groups, document protests and organize incredibly quickly if enough people agree.

But it's a new voice in America politics, and that's a good thing, I think.