Who Cleans Up After the One Percent?

I meant to put up that corner banner before, but had trouble getting it to work. I tried again today, and it worked, so there it is. It would be easy to think that Occupy has passed its moment, with the police clearing out the occupations (though not everywhere, not yet), and the media are sure to tell us it's all over. That might account for the drop in donations to OWS recently. But it's not over. Occupy protests are happening in places you might consider unlikely. Did you notice that Occupy Oakland shut down Oakland Port again on Monday, with similar actions up and down the West Coast?

That's not what I mainly meant to write about, though. We had an interesting event in Bloomington last weekend that sheds light on a lot of the criticism one sees of the Occupy movement: IU won a basketball game against a number-one, and the fans went wild. "Slow-motion drinks flying through the air," says the report; how do you do that? But anyway, the key thing is that the police response, and public response, were very different than response to the local Occupy group, or to the movement nationally. Inside one of the popular bars:

"I don’t think I got to leave till 3 or 3:30 a.m.," [one worker] said. "I usually get off at 1 a.m. It was unreal. I’ve never seen Nick’s so dirty with beer on the floor. We were cooking food until the last minute when we had to shut down. Officially, we were closed, but on a night like last night, you couldn’t get all the people out."

Outside, the streets filled with people as the police watched. A car parked across the street from the bar was "trampled — its roof caved in, hood scuffed with shoe marks, windshield cracked. About an hour into the celebration, the crowd wanted to see it flipped." Which they tried to do, despite a couple of people who told them to stop. The car turned out to belong to a waitress in the bar, who was not pleased. However,

Bloomington Police Lt. Faron Lake was one of the officers who responded to Kirkwood following the win. It took the police some time to clear the area, Lake said, but there were no major problems while he was there. ...

Bloomington Police Sgt. Shane Rasche said there were no mass arrests as a result of the celebration.

"No major problems"? "No mass arrests", eh? Not even any arrests at all, it seems. Just as there were no arrests after Penn State students rioted in support of disgraced Coach Joe Paterno. The owner of the smashed car wrote a scathing letter to the local paper, which was published yesterday. One other letter appeared the same day, drawing unflattering contrasts between the treatment our student rioters received and the reactions of decent citizens to the Occupy camp.

For that matter, the police managed to arrest five IU students from a group who were protesting against the appearance of representatives of J.P. Morgan Chase at the School of Business.

At one point during the commotion, several protesters were allegedly pushed by a man in a gray suit. The man was later identified as IUPD Detective Greg McClure.

The assault was caught on video, of course, but to date McClure has not been arrested. The university has promised an investigation, of course.

(One of the things I, and I hope many other people, have learned from the late wave of protests is that the police cannot be believed about anything. Every time accusations of police violence have been leveled against them, they have come up with explanations that bear no relation to reality at all, which is proved by videos recorded by their targets. I don't suppose that this is anything new, either. It suggests that all police reports should be regarded as false until proven otherwise.)

By all accounts, last Saturday's riot was mild. I was living on the courthouse square in downtown Bloomington in 1976 when IU won the NCAA championship, and the rioters spread through most of downtown. They howled "Number One!", smashed windows, broke beer bottles on the pavement, and drove around honking their horns and ignoring stop signs for about three hours. I've been through two such victories since, which is not why I have no interest in sports -- that predates the 1976 riots by twenty years -- but it is why I always hope that IU or any team in the area will lose all its games.

This kind of behavior (which isn't limited to Bloomington, of course) doesn't lead to any general hostility to organized sport in America. But peaceful political protests are greeted by hostility, police violence, and dishonesty, as regular and automatic as breathing. That's a pretty stark disparity.

(By the way, I know that few of last Saturday's rioters come from the top 1% of the American distribution of wealth; even fewer of them have that much money of their own, as opposed to their parents. But as a matter of sympathy and solidarity, I suspect that many of them identify with the 1 percent. And we all know who cleans up after the messes the 1% make, be they literal or metaphorical; it's the rest of us.)

Who Cleans Up After the One Percent?

I meant to put up that corner banner before, but had trouble getting it to work. I tried again today, and it worked, so there it is. It would be easy to think that Occupy has passed its moment, with the police clearing out the occupations (though not everywhere, not yet), and the media are sure to tell us it's all over. That might account for the drop in donations to OWS recently. But it's not over. Occupy protests are happening in places you might consider unlikely. Did you notice that Occupy Oakland shut down Oakland Port again on Monday, with similar actions up and down the West Coast?

That's not what I mainly meant to write about, though. We had an interesting event in Bloomington last weekend that sheds light on a lot of the criticism one sees of the Occupy movement: IU won a basketball game against a number-one, and the fans went wild. "Slow-motion drinks flying through the air," says the report; how do you do that? But anyway, the key thing is that the police response, and public response, were very different than response to the local Occupy group, or to the movement nationally. Inside one of the popular bars:

"I don’t think I got to leave till 3 or 3:30 a.m.," [one worker] said. "I usually get off at 1 a.m. It was unreal. I’ve never seen Nick’s so dirty with beer on the floor. We were cooking food until the last minute when we had to shut down. Officially, we were closed, but on a night like last night, you couldn’t get all the people out."

Outside, the streets filled with people as the police watched. A car parked across the street from the bar was "trampled — its roof caved in, hood scuffed with shoe marks, windshield cracked. About an hour into the celebration, the crowd wanted to see it flipped." Which they tried to do, despite a couple of people who told them to stop. The car turned out to belong to a waitress in the bar, who was not pleased. However,

Bloomington Police Lt. Faron Lake was one of the officers who responded to Kirkwood following the win. It took the police some time to clear the area, Lake said, but there were no major problems while he was there. ...

Bloomington Police Sgt. Shane Rasche said there were no mass arrests as a result of the celebration.

"No major problems"? "No mass arrests", eh? Not even any arrests at all, it seems. Just as there were no arrests after Penn State students rioted in support of disgraced Coach Joe Paterno. The owner of the smashed car wrote a scathing letter to the local paper, which was published yesterday. One other letter appeared the same day, drawing unflattering contrasts between the treatment our student rioters received and the reactions of decent citizens to the Occupy camp.

For that matter, the police managed to arrest five IU students from a group who were protesting against the appearance of representatives of J.P. Morgan Chase at the School of Business.

At one point during the commotion, several protesters were allegedly pushed by a man in a gray suit. The man was later identified as IUPD Detective Greg McClure.

The assault was caught on video, of course, but to date McClure has not been arrested. The university has promised an investigation, of course.

(One of the things I, and I hope many other people, have learned from the late wave of protests is that the police cannot be believed about anything. Every time accusations of police violence have been leveled against them, they have come up with explanations that bear no relation to reality at all, which is proved by videos recorded by their targets. I don't suppose that this is anything new, either. It suggests that all police reports should be regarded as false until proven otherwise.)

By all accounts, last Saturday's riot was mild. I was living on the courthouse square in downtown Bloomington in 1976 when IU won the NCAA championship, and the rioters spread through most of downtown. They howled "Number One!", smashed windows, broke beer bottles on the pavement, and drove around honking their horns and ignoring stop signs for about three hours. I've been through two such victories since, which is not why I have no interest in sports -- that predates the 1976 riots by twenty years -- but it is why I always hope that IU or any team in the area will lose all its games.

This kind of behavior (which isn't limited to Bloomington, of course) doesn't lead to any general hostility to organized sport in America. But peaceful political protests are greeted by hostility, police violence, and dishonesty, as regular and automatic as breathing. That's a pretty stark disparity.

(By the way, I know that few of last Saturday's rioters come from the top 1% of the American distribution of wealth; even fewer of them have that much money of their own, as opposed to their parents. But as a matter of sympathy and solidarity, I suspect that many of them identify with the 1 percent. And we all know who cleans up after the messes the 1% make, be they literal or metaphorical; it's the rest of us.)

Giving the People What They Want

(photo by Steve Rhodes via)

Someone pointed me to this item about a survey which found that, contrary to the propaganda line about overtaxed, over-regulated small businesses, taxes and regulations are quite low on the list of small business owners' concerns. What's particularly intriguing is that the people who conducted the survey evidently expected to get results that fit their right-wing preconceptions. One shouldn't rely too much on one survey, of course, but happily ThinkProgress could point to other surveys which came to the same conclusion.

I hadn't heard this before, but I wasn't surprised. By now I'm used to the idea that government, business and media elites shouldn't be trusted.

Similarly, we are frequently told that most of the citizenry objects to dirty communists taking over the streets, going on strike, and otherwise disrupting the peaceful course of modern life. So I wasn't at all surprised to hear that a BBC poll found that a solid majority of Britons supported the public-sector workers' strike that began today. American support for the Occupy movement appears to be dropping right now, but that doesn't mean that most Americans support the Right's programs; public opinion presumably is unchanged from the status quo, which consistently wants social programs to continue, is less worried about the deficit than about jobs and mere petty survival, and is comfortable with imposing higher taxes on the rich. And this state of affairs persists even in the face of deliberate attempts to mislead the public.

(I've been wondering why I haven't been hearing more from my usual sources about the Egyptian parliamentary elections. Maybe it's because it's hard to squeeze the results into the usual boxes? Turnout, the head of the election commission reported, is high, but "he did not give figures." The US-supported military claims the high turnout vindicates them, though some voters "said they were voting simply to avoid a fine the military announced would be imposed on anyone who did not cast a ballot — 500 Egyptian pounds, or about $85, a significant amount in a country where 40 percent of the population makes less than $1 a day or just slightly more." Egyptian Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood are claiming "an early lead", which worries Israel, the beacon of democracy in the Middle East that got along so well with Mubarak's long dictatorship. Protesters continue to occupy Tahrir Square despite state violence that has killed dozens of people. But the segments of the blogosphere I watch have not had much to say about the elections yet.)

I'd been meaning to write about this stuff before, but then today I found two articles that gave me pause. One, by Ian Welsh, whose point of view and arguments I take seriously even when I don't agree with them, began as follows:

When Occupy started, there were polls that showed the public supported it. Later, polls showed that support had dropped and a majority no longer supported Occupy. In the first case progressives were pleased, in the second upset.

I didn’t care either time. Repeat after me:

Public opinion does not matter.

It is irrelevant. A large majority of the population wanted a public option added to the healthcare bill. A small majority wanted single payor. Calls against TARP were running 100:1 to 1200:1 against. There is no public option, there is no single payer, and TARP passed.

He went to point out the successful suppression of referenda on economic issues in Europe. "Our elites will do what they will do regardless of what public opinion is ... What matters isn’t what the public thinks, what matters is what the public does which has a tangible, real, cost to politicians or their masters."

True enough, as long as it's understood what "public opinion" means in this context. (There's also a begged question there: matters to whom?) As I've argued before, it's not possible that politicians in Washington, especially the Obama administration, don't know what the public wants; they just think they can ignore it. And yet they keep doing the polls, which seems odd. Elections, however empty a ritual, are required by law to take place, but opinion polls are not. Maybe our rulers keep hoping that someday they'll get the results they want.

Elections are interesting, though. On one hand, the ever-rising cost of running for office ensures a certain narrowing of the field of candidates. But on the other, the Tea Party managed to have a palpable impact on government at numerous levels in 2010. This happened partly because their corporate sponsors didn't realize until it was too late that their creation was going to blow up in their faces. I can't help wondering why some "progressive," even left candidates couldn't do the same thing. Despite the best efforts of the major parties to avoid unpleasant surprises, they keep happening. It's clear that Obama is doing his best to ignore pressure from his left (via), hence his silence so far on OWS.

I also stumbled on this post by Will Wilkinson, who appears to be a libertarian. I've read his blog a little, because IOZ has him on his blogroll, but I haven't been impressed. Today's essay, "The Occupy Movement's Enthusiasm and Contempt for Democracy," appeared under the rubric of "The Moral Sciences Club," which sounds like something out of a 1940s comic book for boys, and turns out to consist entirely of posts by Will Wilkinson. He begins by declaring that

now that the Occupy movement has succeeded in shining a spotlight on its primary concerns -- rising inequality, political corruption, and debt peonage -- Occupiers and their allies now ought to pull up stakes, give up their whimsically undemocratic semi-privatization of public spaces, and endeavor to reform public policy through the democratic institutions established to make the collective determination of binding public rules legitimate. Moving on to seek reform through established democratic channels would require giving up the insolent and frankly disrespectful presumption that these often radically left-wing congregations somehow represent not only a majority of Americans, but 99% of them. It would require Occupiers to square up to the fact that their movement's implicit ideology is an ideology, and a minority ideology at that -- just one among our society's many rival moral and political worldviews. The intransigence of the Occupy movement suggests an unwillingness among its numbers to take seriously the fact of pluralism, and the corollary impossibility of consensus, which makes majoritarian democratic procedures necessary in the first place.

I'm sure that Wilkinson must know that many of the public spaces OWS and its spawn have been occupying were already fully privatized when they got there, so I presume that "semi-privatization" is meant to be provocative. It shows just how unseriously he's taking on the questions the movement has been addressing. I could sort of agree with his remark about the "presumption that these often radically left-wing congregations somehow represent not only a majority of Americans, but 99% of them", though of course the Tea Party was even more sweeping and far more dishonest in its claims to represent all Americans. And I don't think Occupy's presumption is at all "disrespectful", let alone that it "suggests an unwillingness among its numbers to take seriously the fact of pluralism" -- very much the opposite. As for so many people, the Occupy movement functions for Wilkinson as a Rorschach blot, onto which he projects his own obsessions.

It's not for me to say (though based on this piece it's not for Wilkinson to say either) whether it's time for Occupy to move to new tactics and procedures, though numerous writers sympathetic to the movement have already been discussing such possibilities. But I think it would be premature for the movement to abandon street action in favor of "majoritarian democratic procedures." (I'm reminded of the commenter at alicublog who argued just before OWS took off that progressives unhappy with the state of our government should write letters to the Washington Post, a move guaranteed to put fear in the hearts of the Beltway elites.) Since the movement isn't interested in being subsidized by corporate donations like the Tea Party, and has a "healthy" distrust of the Democratic Party machine, I'd say it needs to build more of a base before it did such a thing. ("Healthy," by the way, is a word Wilkinson overuses in his piece; I speculate that it's to keep himself from screaming "dirty fucking hippies!" at OWS, but I could be wrong.)

So, where does this leave me? I think that our rulers do care about public opinion, if only because they need to know what to squash. We've seen that in elite responses to OWS, beginning with panic and proceeding to police violence. (I think that Welsh mistakes OWS' tactics toward the police, too. "Nothing," he writes, "is more pathetic than watching folks at Occupy who seem to genuinely believe the cops are on their side." I haven't gotten the impression that they believe any such thing: what I've heard indicates that they're trying to win them over, to remind them of their shared humanity, to remind them that the rich aren't on the cops' side either, to undermine the state's repressive arm. It won't be completely successful, but it might make a difference now and then. And since Welsh also advocates targeting the ruling elites directly, he knows perfectly well that the police are not the real enemy.)

For the movement, knowing public opinion can be useful too, even if it chooses not to be guided by it. But then, contrary to Wilkinson, the Occupy movement is the public. We're back again at the dictum that when the media talk about "special interests" they're referring to the overwhelming majority of people, and the "national interest" refers to a tiny elite minority. The "majoritarian democratic procedures" we have are currently structured to exclude the concerns of the majority of people; the question is is how, if it's possible at all, to make them more responsive. We didn't reach our current situation through the transparent working of those procedures, but through their subversion.

P.S. This episode of Making Contact offers an excellent discussion of the state of the movement. Listen or read the transcript. Andrew Levine has a very good analysis at Counterpunch, Democracy Now! did a story on the Egyptian elections, and the Daily Show (via) also noticed the curious lack of interest in them in American media.

Giving the People What They Want

(photo by Steve Rhodes via)

Someone pointed me to this item about a survey which found that, contrary to the propaganda line about overtaxed, over-regulated small businesses, taxes and regulations are quite low on the list of small business owners' concerns. What's particularly intriguing is that the people who conducted the survey evidently expected to get results that fit their right-wing preconceptions. One shouldn't rely too much on one survey, of course, but happily ThinkProgress could point to other surveys which came to the same conclusion.

I hadn't heard this before, but I wasn't surprised. By now I'm used to the idea that government, business and media elites shouldn't be trusted.

Similarly, we are frequently told that most of the citizenry objects to dirty communists taking over the streets, going on strike, and otherwise disrupting the peaceful course of modern life. So I wasn't at all surprised to hear that a BBC poll found that a solid majority of Britons supported the public-sector workers' strike that began today. American support for the Occupy movement appears to be dropping right now, but that doesn't mean that most Americans support the Right's programs; public opinion presumably is unchanged from the status quo, which consistently wants social programs to continue, is less worried about the deficit than about jobs and mere petty survival, and is comfortable with imposing higher taxes on the rich. And this state of affairs persists even in the face of deliberate attempts to mislead the public.

(I've been wondering why I haven't been hearing more from my usual sources about the Egyptian parliamentary elections. Maybe it's because it's hard to squeeze the results into the usual boxes? Turnout, the head of the election commission reported, is high, but "he did not give figures." The US-supported military claims the high turnout vindicates them, though some voters "said they were voting simply to avoid a fine the military announced would be imposed on anyone who did not cast a ballot — 500 Egyptian pounds, or about $85, a significant amount in a country where 40 percent of the population makes less than $1 a day or just slightly more." Egyptian Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood are claiming "an early lead", which worries Israel, the beacon of democracy in the Middle East that got along so well with Mubarak's long dictatorship. Protesters continue to occupy Tahrir Square despite state violence that has killed dozens of people. But the segments of the blogosphere I watch have not had much to say about the elections yet.)

I'd been meaning to write about this stuff before, but then today I found two articles that gave me pause. One, by Ian Welsh, whose point of view and arguments I take seriously even when I don't agree with them, began as follows:

When Occupy started, there were polls that showed the public supported it. Later, polls showed that support had dropped and a majority no longer supported Occupy. In the first case progressives were pleased, in the second upset.

I didn’t care either time. Repeat after me:

Public opinion does not matter.

It is irrelevant. A large majority of the population wanted a public option added to the healthcare bill. A small majority wanted single payor. Calls against TARP were running 100:1 to 1200:1 against. There is no public option, there is no single payer, and TARP passed.

He went to point out the successful suppression of referenda on economic issues in Europe. "Our elites will do what they will do regardless of what public opinion is ... What matters isn’t what the public thinks, what matters is what the public does which has a tangible, real, cost to politicians or their masters."

True enough, as long as it's understood what "public opinion" means in this context. (There's also a begged question there: matters to whom?) As I've argued before, it's not possible that politicians in Washington, especially the Obama administration, don't know what the public wants; they just think they can ignore it. And yet they keep doing the polls, which seems odd. Elections, however empty a ritual, are required by law to take place, but opinion polls are not. Maybe our rulers keep hoping that someday they'll get the results they want.

Elections are interesting, though. On one hand, the ever-rising cost of running for office ensures a certain narrowing of the field of candidates. But on the other, the Tea Party managed to have a palpable impact on government at numerous levels in 2010. This happened partly because their corporate sponsors didn't realize until it was too late that their creation was going to blow up in their faces. I can't help wondering why some "progressive," even left candidates couldn't do the same thing. Despite the best efforts of the major parties to avoid unpleasant surprises, they keep happening. It's clear that Obama is doing his best to ignore pressure from his left (via), hence his silence so far on OWS.

I also stumbled on this post by Will Wilkinson, who appears to be a libertarian. I've read his blog a little, because IOZ has him on his blogroll, but I haven't been impressed. Today's essay, "The Occupy Movement's Enthusiasm and Contempt for Democracy," appeared under the rubric of "The Moral Sciences Club," which sounds like something out of a 1940s comic book for boys, and turns out to consist entirely of posts by Will Wilkinson. He begins by declaring that

now that the Occupy movement has succeeded in shining a spotlight on its primary concerns -- rising inequality, political corruption, and debt peonage -- Occupiers and their allies now ought to pull up stakes, give up their whimsically undemocratic semi-privatization of public spaces, and endeavor to reform public policy through the democratic institutions established to make the collective determination of binding public rules legitimate. Moving on to seek reform through established democratic channels would require giving up the insolent and frankly disrespectful presumption that these often radically left-wing congregations somehow represent not only a majority of Americans, but 99% of them. It would require Occupiers to square up to the fact that their movement's implicit ideology is an ideology, and a minority ideology at that -- just one among our society's many rival moral and political worldviews. The intransigence of the Occupy movement suggests an unwillingness among its numbers to take seriously the fact of pluralism, and the corollary impossibility of consensus, which makes majoritarian democratic procedures necessary in the first place.

I'm sure that Wilkinson must know that many of the public spaces OWS and its spawn have been occupying were already fully privatized when they got there, so I presume that "semi-privatization" is meant to be provocative. It shows just how unseriously he's taking on the questions the movement has been addressing. I could sort of agree with his remark about the "presumption that these often radically left-wing congregations somehow represent not only a majority of Americans, but 99% of them", though of course the Tea Party was even more sweeping and far more dishonest in its claims to represent all Americans. And I don't think Occupy's presumption is at all "disrespectful", let alone that it "suggests an unwillingness among its numbers to take seriously the fact of pluralism" -- very much the opposite. As for so many people, the Occupy movement functions for Wilkinson as a Rorschach blot, onto which he projects his own obsessions.

It's not for me to say (though based on this piece it's not for Wilkinson to say either) whether it's time for Occupy to move to new tactics and procedures, though numerous writers sympathetic to the movement have already been discussing such possibilities. But I think it would be premature for the movement to abandon street action in favor of "majoritarian democratic procedures." (I'm reminded of the commenter at alicublog who argued just before OWS took off that progressives unhappy with the state of our government should write letters to the Washington Post, a move guaranteed to put fear in the hearts of the Beltway elites.) Since the movement isn't interested in being subsidized by corporate donations like the Tea Party, and has a "healthy" distrust of the Democratic Party machine, I'd say it needs to build more of a base before it did such a thing. ("Healthy," by the way, is a word Wilkinson overuses in his piece; I speculate that it's to keep himself from screaming "dirty fucking hippies!" at OWS, but I could be wrong.)

So, where does this leave me? I think that our rulers do care about public opinion, if only because they need to know what to squash. We've seen that in elite responses to OWS, beginning with panic and proceeding to police violence. (I think that Welsh mistakes OWS' tactics toward the police, too. "Nothing," he writes, "is more pathetic than watching folks at Occupy who seem to genuinely believe the cops are on their side." I haven't gotten the impression that they believe any such thing: what I've heard indicates that they're trying to win them over, to remind them of their shared humanity, to remind them that the rich aren't on the cops' side either, to undermine the state's repressive arm. It won't be completely successful, but it might make a difference now and then. And since Welsh also advocates targeting the ruling elites directly, he knows perfectly well that the police are not the real enemy.)

For the movement, knowing public opinion can be useful too, even if it chooses not to be guided by it. But then, contrary to Wilkinson, the Occupy movement is the public. We're back again at the dictum that when the media talk about "special interests" they're referring to the overwhelming majority of people, and the "national interest" refers to a tiny elite minority. The "majoritarian democratic procedures" we have are currently structured to exclude the concerns of the majority of people; the question is is how, if it's possible at all, to make them more responsive. We didn't reach our current situation through the transparent working of those procedures, but through their subversion.

P.S. This episode of Making Contact offers an excellent discussion of the state of the movement. Listen or read the transcript. Andrew Levine has a very good analysis at Counterpunch, Democracy Now! did a story on the Egyptian elections, and the Daily Show (via) also noticed the curious lack of interest in them in American media.

Bold Independent Thinkers

Today there was another letter in the local paper asking rhetorically why the Occupy Wall Street protesters don't occupy Washington DC? I've seen this trope quite a bit in the past couple of weeks, by people who think they've really caught those hippies in their own hypocrisy. Another popular trope the letter-writer used was "stop whining and vote!" Why yes, we found out how well that worked in 2008! To his credit, the letter-writer didn't include the "take a bath, you dirty hippies!" trope, but maybe that was edited out for reasons of length.

Funny thing, though. There is already an Occupy DC. It's no more acceptable to clear-headed, public-spirited citizens than Occupy Wall Street or Occupy Oakland or any of the other sites, though FOX News is trying by reverse psychology to make it look bad. (I liked this piece at The Week, which called a 2 percent drop in support for OWS as "plummeting." True, the same poll showed a 9-point jump in opposition, but the story is obviously more complicated than the headline, though you wouldn't know it from the piece itself, which ignores the corporate media's ongoing antipathy to the movement.)

Anyway, I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the "go occupy DC!" line is a talking point that these people were handed by someone else; but it does indicate that their hostility to OWS is motivated by something other than reason or fact.

Bold Independent Thinkers

Today there was another letter in the local paper asking rhetorically why the Occupy Wall Street protesters don't occupy Washington DC? I've seen this trope quite a bit in the past couple of weeks, by people who think they've really caught those hippies in their own hypocrisy. Another popular trope the letter-writer used was "stop whining and vote!" Why yes, we found out how well that worked in 2008! To his credit, the letter-writer didn't include the "take a bath, you dirty hippies!" trope, but maybe that was edited out for reasons of length.

Funny thing, though. There is already an Occupy DC. It's no more acceptable to clear-headed, public-spirited citizens than Occupy Wall Street or Occupy Oakland or any of the other sites, though FOX News is trying by reverse psychology to make it look bad. (I liked this piece at The Week, which called a 2 percent drop in support for OWS as "plummeting." True, the same poll showed a 9-point jump in opposition, but the story is obviously more complicated than the headline, though you wouldn't know it from the piece itself, which ignores the corporate media's ongoing antipathy to the movement.)

Anyway, I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the "go occupy DC!" line is a talking point that these people were handed by someone else; but it does indicate that their hostility to OWS is motivated by something other than reason or fact.

Moving On

What I noticed most about Mayor Bloomberg's defense of his cleansing of Zuccotti Park was that he mentioned only freedom of speech. "The First Amendment protects speech," he said at his press conference. "It doesn’t protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space."

Let's look at the First Amendment for a moment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Occupy Wall Street is certainly about freedom of speech, of course, but even more it's about "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Every right has its limits, and it may well be that peaceable assembly doesn't include "the use of tents and sleeping bags," though I don't see why it shouldn't. But I can't help thinking that Bloomberg, "a cold ruthless billionaire who bought his way into the mayor’s office",* deliberately chose to sidestep that issue.

Oddly, most of the liberal commentators I've read since the Zuccotti Park raid let him get away with it. When Robert Reich lamented "the hijacking of the First Amendment," for example, he mainly seemed to be talking about the Citizens United decision. The only other person I've seen who noticed it was Todd Gitlin, whom I wouldn't choose as company in a matter like this. Rather to my relief, he rambled off in some unhelpful directions, with numerous errors of fact and disputable judgments.

I'll grant Gitlin this other good (if platitudinous) observation, though: "Movements wither when they don’t evolve, and they evolve when they learn intelligently how to avail themselves of opportunities and adapt to changes in the environment ..." It looks to me as though Occupy has been doing just that. Yesterday Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh interviewed Marina Sitrin, a "postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Globalization and Social Change at the City University of New York, author of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. She is researching global mass movements from Spain to Egypt and has just come back from Greece." Sitrin's living proof that you can be a successful academic and still communicate outside the academy.

MARINA SITRIN: Yeah, I mean, these raids we’ve been seeing across the United States, and around the world, similarly, as the movements grow and grow in the plazas and the squares, the police come in and repress, and it doesn’t deter the movements. And, you know, similarly as in Greece, where I just was, I think the movements here will start to go more into neighborhoods, which we’ve already started to see happening. So, continuing to occupy a plaza or a park, that’s really significant and symbolic, but then, also, for example, in Athens, there are many, many neighborhood assemblies now dealing with local issues.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting you should say that, because last night at the general assembly, which was remarkable to see—I mean, well over a thousand people, and it went on for hours at Occupy Wall Street—one of the people in the stack—you know, they’re just sort of making announcements in the "stack," is what they call it—got up and said, "Occupy your block."

MARINA SITRIN: Exactly. I mean, that’s—exactly. And they’re actually finding, in Greece, for example, that by being more community-based, local-based, they can address specific needs more. So, for example, electricity is being taxed, so they’re working on making sure people don’t have their electricity cut off, preventing people from being evicted from their homes. So, similarly in Harlem, people have been working with Occupy Harlem in preventing people’s heat from getting cut off; in Occupy Bronx, it’s about preventing people from getting expelled from their homes—so, more and more kind of reterritorializing, but at the same time keeping a space where we can have our assemblies and exchange experiences from around the city. And I think, actually, it’s a much more radical, if not revolutionary, way of organizing, because when we just come to one plaza, we come to a plaza and have a gathering related to that space. When we’re in our neighborhoods and we come together and relate in that way, it’s more like alternative governance, which is I think what we’re seeing to a small extent in Greece now and in Spain, as well, similarly.

Bloomberg may have inadvertently helped Occupy Wall Street to move in this direction by clearing out the park.

This morning Goodman interviewed Dorli Rainey, the longtime activist who was pepper-sprayed in Seattle the other night. In the same segment she talked to Norm Stamper, who was Seattle's Chief of Police during the 1999 World Trade Organization demonstrations, now known as the Battle of Seattle, and to Chuck Wexler of the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum that coordinated the conference call with mayors and police officials around the country" which led up to the purging of the parks. This led to an interesting exchange. Stamper now repudiates the paramilitary response to peaceful protest that he used in the past:

... I do believe that since 1999 and the Battle in Seattle there have been many changes. My concern is, many of those changes have been for the worse. The officers, for example, in Oakland were dressed as my police officers were in Seattle, which is, in effect, for full—in full battle gear. We were using military tactics. I authorized the use of chemical agents on nonviolent offenders. I thought I had good justification at that time. I did not. The police officer in me was thinking about emergency vehicles, fire trucks, aid cars being able to get through a key intersection. The police chief in me should have said, "This is wrong," and vetoed that decision. I will regret that decision for the rest of my life. We took a military response to a situation that was fundamentally nonviolent, in which Americans were expressing their views and their values, and used tear gas on them. And that was just plain wrong.

Wexler, no doubt with an eye toward justifying this week's police tactics, disagreed with Stamper:

But, you know, in fairness, you know, you were faced, Norm, in a very difficult situation, and in fact, there really hadn’t been many demonstrations up 'til Seattle. I mean, prior to the Vietnam era, there was a big lag time. But what was—what does happen in some of these events is you can have 90 percent of the people are there peacefully, and you have this small contingent—and I think, Norm, what you had in Seattle is you had this group of anarchists that somehow was able to cause such disturbances that it forced a reaction, that perhaps was an overreaction, but I don't think the police were prepared for it. And today, you know, the police struggle between these two extremes, between people who go to exercise their First Amendment rights and then people who are there to cause, you know, damage and destruction.

Stamper wasn't having any.

Here’s my point: if the police and the community in a democratic society are really working hard—and it is hard work—to forge authentic partnerships rather than this unilateral, paramilitary response to these demonstrations, that the relationship itself serves as a shock absorber. Picture police officers helping to protect the demonstrators. Picture demonstrators saying, "We see people on the fringes, for example, who are essentially undemocratic in their tactics. And so, we need to work together to resolve that issue." These resolutions are clearly not easy. One of the things that complicates the picture enormously is when a woman like Ms. Rainey is pepper-sprayed. When innocent people who are there to protest what I consider to be very legitimate grievances against corporate America, against a government that has, in many respects, been bought off by corporations, the police have a responsibility to be neutral. It should be apparent that I’m not neutral, but I’m no longer a cop. And police officers on the streets really do need to be neutral referees, and they need the help of their civilian, if I may use that term, partners.

Goodman then brought in "retired New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, who worked as a legal observer early Tuesday morning here in New York." Smith said,

I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested so we could follow them through the system and just observe what was going on. And 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 he kept pushing—they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she said—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. And 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.

This is the kind of thing that eventually strengthens a dissident movement, or at least weakens the position of people like Bloomberg: when people other than hippies and bums get shoved around by the police, they trust the government a bit less. Who knows, even the right-wing Daily Caller, beloved of RWA1, might have second thoughts now that two of their reporters were beaten by New York police officers.

I admit I'm not fully convinced by Stamper's claim that the police don't want to do these bad things, but I hope he's right, because as Michael Tracey wrote today at Salon, the New York Police Department has discredited itself by its conduct.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald has a good piece on the current state of the movement, which also recognizes that, far from needing advice on how best to "evolve" from the likes of Todd Gitlin, it has been changing all along and will go on changing.

Again using nothing more than reader donations, FDL designed and then purchased a full line of winter clothing for free distribution to the various Occupy sites around the nation: hats, sweaters, scarves, gloves, socks, blankets, jackets, thermal underwear, face masks, and more. Every penny FDL raises — 100% — goes exclusively toward the manufacture and free distribution of these products to Occupy protesters. They have thus far raised close to $90,000, and spent roughly $85,000 of it on the purchase of almost 7,000 items. They have also furnished heat generators, tents, and sleeping bags to numerous sites as well.

What makes this activism particularly impressive is that it is designed to build an ongoing and highly effective support network. Rather than indiscriminately dumping the clothing at various encampments, FDL has built a network of liasons and representatives to ensure that it goes to the places that need it most, and that it reaches those who will use it for its intended purpose: primarily, the “sleeper” protesters, largely impoverished, who form the backbone of the camps. Beyond that, FDL has expended great efforts to ensure that the goods it distributes are manufactured not in Chinese sweatshops but rather entirely by American unions — a difficult challenge in this age of disappearing American industry — which in turn ensures that the workers producing the products enjoy health insurance, living wages, and a decent standard of living: aims of the Occupy movement itself.

That last point underscores one of the most significant aspects of the Occupy movement: that it is not devoted to voicing grievances as much as it is finding a model to solve them.

The Occupy movement hasn't been only on the receiving end of such gifts: in Zuccotti Park, at least, the OWS library served as a lending library for the neighborhood, which makes its destruction by the NYPD and city sanitation workers the more of an offense. The occupiers' kitchens have also fed the homeless people that the police sent to them in hopes they'd be disruptive. I can't find now where someone associated with the movement was contemptuous of the police intention; it might have been in this Making Contact program I half-listened to this morning. And as the program points out, many veterans, including veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, are homeless, a reminder of how badly mainstream America supports its troops.

One last thing: when I first heard of rumors that the Department of Homeland Security was involved in this week's crackdown, I regarded the news that those rumors had been denied as confirmation that the rumors were true. That is usually the case, after all. Then today I saw that Homeland Security had denied the rumors again -- except, well, "Only in Portland." I expect more confirmations to leak out over time.
------------------------
* And even more: "a Wall Street billionaire who so brazenly purchased his political office, engineered the overturning of a term-limits referendum and then spent more than $100 million of his personal fortune to stay in power, and now resides well above the law."

Moving On

What I noticed most about Mayor Bloomberg's defense of his cleansing of Zuccotti Park was that he mentioned only freedom of speech. "The First Amendment protects speech," he said at his press conference. "It doesn’t protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space."

Let's look at the First Amendment for a moment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Occupy Wall Street is certainly about freedom of speech, of course, but even more it's about "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Every right has its limits, and it may well be that peaceable assembly doesn't include "the use of tents and sleeping bags," though I don't see why it shouldn't. But I can't help thinking that Bloomberg, "a cold ruthless billionaire who bought his way into the mayor’s office",* deliberately chose to sidestep that issue.

Oddly, most of the liberal commentators I've read since the Zuccotti Park raid let him get away with it. When Robert Reich lamented "the hijacking of the First Amendment," for example, he mainly seemed to be talking about the Citizens United decision. The only other person I've seen who noticed it was Todd Gitlin, whom I wouldn't choose as company in a matter like this. Rather to my relief, he rambled off in some unhelpful directions, with numerous errors of fact and disputable judgments.

I'll grant Gitlin this other good (if platitudinous) observation, though: "Movements wither when they don’t evolve, and they evolve when they learn intelligently how to avail themselves of opportunities and adapt to changes in the environment ..." It looks to me as though Occupy has been doing just that. Yesterday Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh interviewed Marina Sitrin, a "postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Globalization and Social Change at the City University of New York, author of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. She is researching global mass movements from Spain to Egypt and has just come back from Greece." Sitrin's living proof that you can be a successful academic and still communicate outside the academy.

MARINA SITRIN: Yeah, I mean, these raids we’ve been seeing across the United States, and around the world, similarly, as the movements grow and grow in the plazas and the squares, the police come in and repress, and it doesn’t deter the movements. And, you know, similarly as in Greece, where I just was, I think the movements here will start to go more into neighborhoods, which we’ve already started to see happening. So, continuing to occupy a plaza or a park, that’s really significant and symbolic, but then, also, for example, in Athens, there are many, many neighborhood assemblies now dealing with local issues.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting you should say that, because last night at the general assembly, which was remarkable to see—I mean, well over a thousand people, and it went on for hours at Occupy Wall Street—one of the people in the stack—you know, they’re just sort of making announcements in the "stack," is what they call it—got up and said, "Occupy your block."

MARINA SITRIN: Exactly. I mean, that’s—exactly. And they’re actually finding, in Greece, for example, that by being more community-based, local-based, they can address specific needs more. So, for example, electricity is being taxed, so they’re working on making sure people don’t have their electricity cut off, preventing people from being evicted from their homes. So, similarly in Harlem, people have been working with Occupy Harlem in preventing people’s heat from getting cut off; in Occupy Bronx, it’s about preventing people from getting expelled from their homes—so, more and more kind of reterritorializing, but at the same time keeping a space where we can have our assemblies and exchange experiences from around the city. And I think, actually, it’s a much more radical, if not revolutionary, way of organizing, because when we just come to one plaza, we come to a plaza and have a gathering related to that space. When we’re in our neighborhoods and we come together and relate in that way, it’s more like alternative governance, which is I think what we’re seeing to a small extent in Greece now and in Spain, as well, similarly.

Bloomberg may have inadvertently helped Occupy Wall Street to move in this direction by clearing out the park.

This morning Goodman interviewed Dorli Rainey, the longtime activist who was pepper-sprayed in Seattle the other night. In the same segment she talked to Norm Stamper, who was Seattle's Chief of Police during the 1999 World Trade Organization demonstrations, now known as the Battle of Seattle, and to Chuck Wexler of the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum that coordinated the conference call with mayors and police officials around the country" which led up to the purging of the parks. This led to an interesting exchange. Stamper now repudiates the paramilitary response to peaceful protest that he used in the past:

... I do believe that since 1999 and the Battle in Seattle there have been many changes. My concern is, many of those changes have been for the worse. The officers, for example, in Oakland were dressed as my police officers were in Seattle, which is, in effect, for full—in full battle gear. We were using military tactics. I authorized the use of chemical agents on nonviolent offenders. I thought I had good justification at that time. I did not. The police officer in me was thinking about emergency vehicles, fire trucks, aid cars being able to get through a key intersection. The police chief in me should have said, "This is wrong," and vetoed that decision. I will regret that decision for the rest of my life. We took a military response to a situation that was fundamentally nonviolent, in which Americans were expressing their views and their values, and used tear gas on them. And that was just plain wrong.

Wexler, no doubt with an eye toward justifying this week's police tactics, disagreed with Stamper:

But, you know, in fairness, you know, you were faced, Norm, in a very difficult situation, and in fact, there really hadn’t been many demonstrations up 'til Seattle. I mean, prior to the Vietnam era, there was a big lag time. But what was—what does happen in some of these events is you can have 90 percent of the people are there peacefully, and you have this small contingent—and I think, Norm, what you had in Seattle is you had this group of anarchists that somehow was able to cause such disturbances that it forced a reaction, that perhaps was an overreaction, but I don't think the police were prepared for it. And today, you know, the police struggle between these two extremes, between people who go to exercise their First Amendment rights and then people who are there to cause, you know, damage and destruction.

Stamper wasn't having any.

Here’s my point: if the police and the community in a democratic society are really working hard—and it is hard work—to forge authentic partnerships rather than this unilateral, paramilitary response to these demonstrations, that the relationship itself serves as a shock absorber. Picture police officers helping to protect the demonstrators. Picture demonstrators saying, "We see people on the fringes, for example, who are essentially undemocratic in their tactics. And so, we need to work together to resolve that issue." These resolutions are clearly not easy. One of the things that complicates the picture enormously is when a woman like Ms. Rainey is pepper-sprayed. When innocent people who are there to protest what I consider to be very legitimate grievances against corporate America, against a government that has, in many respects, been bought off by corporations, the police have a responsibility to be neutral. It should be apparent that I’m not neutral, but I’m no longer a cop. And police officers on the streets really do need to be neutral referees, and they need the help of their civilian, if I may use that term, partners.

Goodman then brought in "retired New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, who worked as a legal observer early Tuesday morning here in New York." Smith said,

I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested so we could follow them through the system and just observe what was going on. And 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 he kept pushing—they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she said—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. And 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.

This is the kind of thing that eventually strengthens a dissident movement, or at least weakens the position of people like Bloomberg: when people other than hippies and bums get shoved around by the police, they trust the government a bit less. Who knows, even the right-wing Daily Caller, beloved of RWA1, might have second thoughts now that two of their reporters were beaten by New York police officers.

I admit I'm not fully convinced by Stamper's claim that the police don't want to do these bad things, but I hope he's right, because as Michael Tracey wrote today at Salon, the New York Police Department has discredited itself by its conduct.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald has a good piece on the current state of the movement, which also recognizes that, far from needing advice on how best to "evolve" from the likes of Todd Gitlin, it has been changing all along and will go on changing.

Again using nothing more than reader donations, FDL designed and then purchased a full line of winter clothing for free distribution to the various Occupy sites around the nation: hats, sweaters, scarves, gloves, socks, blankets, jackets, thermal underwear, face masks, and more. Every penny FDL raises — 100% — goes exclusively toward the manufacture and free distribution of these products to Occupy protesters. They have thus far raised close to $90,000, and spent roughly $85,000 of it on the purchase of almost 7,000 items. They have also furnished heat generators, tents, and sleeping bags to numerous sites as well.

What makes this activism particularly impressive is that it is designed to build an ongoing and highly effective support network. Rather than indiscriminately dumping the clothing at various encampments, FDL has built a network of liasons and representatives to ensure that it goes to the places that need it most, and that it reaches those who will use it for its intended purpose: primarily, the “sleeper” protesters, largely impoverished, who form the backbone of the camps. Beyond that, FDL has expended great efforts to ensure that the goods it distributes are manufactured not in Chinese sweatshops but rather entirely by American unions — a difficult challenge in this age of disappearing American industry — which in turn ensures that the workers producing the products enjoy health insurance, living wages, and a decent standard of living: aims of the Occupy movement itself.

That last point underscores one of the most significant aspects of the Occupy movement: that it is not devoted to voicing grievances as much as it is finding a model to solve them.

The Occupy movement hasn't been only on the receiving end of such gifts: in Zuccotti Park, at least, the OWS library served as a lending library for the neighborhood, which makes its destruction by the NYPD and city sanitation workers the more of an offense. The occupiers' kitchens have also fed the homeless people that the police sent to them in hopes they'd be disruptive. I can't find now where someone associated with the movement was contemptuous of the police intention; it might have been in this Making Contact program I half-listened to this morning. And as the program points out, many veterans, including veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, are homeless, a reminder of how badly mainstream America supports its troops.

One last thing: when I first heard of rumors that the Department of Homeland Security was involved in this week's crackdown, I regarded the news that those rumors had been denied as confirmation that the rumors were true. That is usually the case, after all. Then today I saw that Homeland Security had denied the rumors again -- except, well, "Only in Portland." I expect more confirmations to leak out over time.
------------------------
* And even more: "a Wall Street billionaire who so brazenly purchased his political office, engineered the overturning of a term-limits referendum and then spent more than $100 million of his personal fortune to stay in power, and now resides well above the law."

Whose Ox Is Being Gored

The official backlash against Occupy Wall Street and its many offshoots is well under way. Last night the New York City Police went on a rampage against the people camped out in Zuccotti Park, ordered and defended by the corrupt billionaire mayor himself. It's a sign of the thuggishness of the assault that the police and "hundreds of sanitation workers" tossed protesters' belongings, including their tents, into dump trucks for removal, telling their owners that they would be able to pick them up after noon today at the Department of Sanitation's parking garage. Other workers told the protesters that their stuff was being taken to the dump, so I think the official claim can be regarded as an official lie. By morning OWS supporters had secured an injunction against the City, which Mayor Bloomberg dismissed out of hand. (Later in the day a different judge denied a request to allow the protesters to reoccupy the park, with a reminder that Zuccotti Park is private property -- which is a major reason why public space in New York City has been largely privatized: to prevent public assembly and protest.) Among those arrested (and assaulted by police) were a New York City Councilman and a New York Daily News reporter, which seems to have prompted the Daily News to reconsider its original cheerleading for the eviction. As similar, coordinated evictions occurred in other cities, there were some defections. Dan Siegel, Oakland mayor Quan's legal advisor, resigned, as did Deputy Mayor Sharon Cornu.

All this reminded me of liberal darling Elizabeth Warren's latest statement about Occupy Wall Street, which began: "Let’s be clear. Everybody has to follow the law. There’s no exception on that." (She said the same thing in her first statement about the movement a month ago, so her fans can't defend her now by saying she didn't have time to think her position through.) I didn't really expect her to say anything about government and police violence, of course, but until she does she's established herself as a very familiar kind of spineless liberal, the kind who scolded the Civil Rights Movement for civil disobedience fifty years ago.

And indeed, her fans are evidently just that kind of liberal. I started looking through the comments on the Talking Points Memo article that reported her statement, and not only did most of the commenters exult over her toughness -- "In about 20 years we might be wanting to put her face on Mount Rushmore" one gushed -- they jumped on one commenter who criticized Warren's rejection of principled civil disobedience. One wrote (no permalinks, alas): "You don't put Wall St. in jail by civil disobedience. You put them there by getting elected and pushing the agenda. There are some personalities that glory in being macho, and then there are others who would rather get the job done." Another accused him of being "out of date", while another explained that "liberals generally have some decency and respect while at the same time protesting injustice." Another complained of his harshing their buzz: "Reading down the comments, I was fairly amazed by the uniformity of the praise for Elizabeth Warren ... then came upon your comment in such stark contrast, making you look more asinine than usual." Amazingly, this person was demanding more groupthink, not less.

So let's take a short trip down memory lane. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. responded to white moderate critics in the clergy:

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion?...

Sound familiar? The criticisms King was answering have often been dusted off since then for reuse against succeeding movements for social justice. As I've pointed out before, the Black Nationalist line advanced by Malcolm X and his successors, that King "kept the Negro in check," is bogus. Rather, it was the Nation of Islam that kept the Negro in check, advocating quietism until a vague day in the future, while Elijah Muhammad became wealthy on his followers' contributions.

Nor did King have a rosy view of the power of voting and elections to effect change by themselves. I've quoted this passage before, but I might as well quote it again:

No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.

Of the ten titles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, probably only the one concerning public accommodations -- the most bitterly contested section -- has been meaningfully enforced and implemented. Most of the other sections have been deliberately ignored.

...

I'm sure that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes continue to live with racism every day.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 1969

Liberals today like to mock right-wingers who try to claim King as one of their own; but while white liberals in the 1950s and 1960s didn't hate King or the Civil Rights Movement as much as the Right did, most of them weren't really comfortable with them either. (The same applied to the movement against the war in Vietnam: most liberals disapproved of the war, but didn't want the US to withdraw in the foreseeable future, and they disapproved of nonviolent civil disobedience against it.)

I'm glad I don't live in Massachusetts, so I don't have to decide whether to vote for Elizabeth Warren. How much do you want to bet that once she's in office, she and her supporters will be trotting out the same defenses that Obama's supporters have made for him: Oh, it's only her first term, you have to be patient, she's just playing ten-dimensional chess with Wall Street until she's ready to reveal her true glory... That's assuming that the Democrats don't lose more seats in Congress in 2012; and remember, a Senator has much less power than a President. Warren is already being groomed as the new Messiah for (and by) Obama fans of little faith. But the important thing is, she's not Scott Brown and she's not a Republican! Her selective concern for the law is trivial compared to that.

Whose Ox Is Being Gored

The official backlash against Occupy Wall Street and its many offshoots is well under way. Last night the New York City Police went on a rampage against the people camped out in Zuccotti Park, ordered and defended by the corrupt billionaire mayor himself. It's a sign of the thuggishness of the assault that the police and "hundreds of sanitation workers" tossed protesters' belongings, including their tents, into dump trucks for removal, telling their owners that they would be able to pick them up after noon today at the Department of Sanitation's parking garage. Other workers told the protesters that their stuff was being taken to the dump, so I think the official claim can be regarded as an official lie. By morning OWS supporters had secured an injunction against the City, which Mayor Bloomberg dismissed out of hand. (Later in the day a different judge denied a request to allow the protesters to reoccupy the park, with a reminder that Zuccotti Park is private property -- which is a major reason why public space in New York City has been largely privatized: to prevent public assembly and protest.) Among those arrested (and assaulted by police) were a New York City Councilman and a New York Daily News reporter, which seems to have prompted the Daily News to reconsider its original cheerleading for the eviction. As similar, coordinated evictions occurred in other cities, there were some defections. Dan Siegel, Oakland mayor Quan's legal advisor, resigned, as did Deputy Mayor Sharon Cornu.

All this reminded me of liberal darling Elizabeth Warren's latest statement about Occupy Wall Street, which began: "Let’s be clear. Everybody has to follow the law. There’s no exception on that." (She said the same thing in her first statement about the movement a month ago, so her fans can't defend her now by saying she didn't have time to think her position through.) I didn't really expect her to say anything about government and police violence, of course, but until she does she's established herself as a very familiar kind of spineless liberal, the kind who scolded the Civil Rights Movement for civil disobedience fifty years ago.

And indeed, her fans are evidently just that kind of liberal. I started looking through the comments on the Talking Points Memo article that reported her statement, and not only did most of the commenters exult over her toughness -- "In about 20 years we might be wanting to put her face on Mount Rushmore" one gushed -- they jumped on one commenter who criticized Warren's rejection of principled civil disobedience. One wrote (no permalinks, alas): "You don't put Wall St. in jail by civil disobedience. You put them there by getting elected and pushing the agenda. There are some personalities that glory in being macho, and then there are others who would rather get the job done." Another accused him of being "out of date", while another explained that "liberals generally have some decency and respect while at the same time protesting injustice." Another complained of his harshing their buzz: "Reading down the comments, I was fairly amazed by the uniformity of the praise for Elizabeth Warren ... then came upon your comment in such stark contrast, making you look more asinine than usual." Amazingly, this person was demanding more groupthink, not less.

So let's take a short trip down memory lane. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. responded to white moderate critics in the clergy:

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion?...

Sound familiar? The criticisms King was answering have often been dusted off since then for reuse against succeeding movements for social justice. As I've pointed out before, the Black Nationalist line advanced by Malcolm X and his successors, that King "kept the Negro in check," is bogus. Rather, it was the Nation of Islam that kept the Negro in check, advocating quietism until a vague day in the future, while Elijah Muhammad became wealthy on his followers' contributions.

Nor did King have a rosy view of the power of voting and elections to effect change by themselves. I've quoted this passage before, but I might as well quote it again:

No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.

Of the ten titles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, probably only the one concerning public accommodations -- the most bitterly contested section -- has been meaningfully enforced and implemented. Most of the other sections have been deliberately ignored.

...

I'm sure that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes continue to live with racism every day.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 1969

Liberals today like to mock right-wingers who try to claim King as one of their own; but while white liberals in the 1950s and 1960s didn't hate King or the Civil Rights Movement as much as the Right did, most of them weren't really comfortable with them either. (The same applied to the movement against the war in Vietnam: most liberals disapproved of the war, but didn't want the US to withdraw in the foreseeable future, and they disapproved of nonviolent civil disobedience against it.)

I'm glad I don't live in Massachusetts, so I don't have to decide whether to vote for Elizabeth Warren. How much do you want to bet that once she's in office, she and her supporters will be trotting out the same defenses that Obama's supporters have made for him: Oh, it's only her first term, you have to be patient, she's just playing ten-dimensional chess with Wall Street until she's ready to reveal her true glory... That's assuming that the Democrats don't lose more seats in Congress in 2012; and remember, a Senator has much less power than a President. Warren is already being groomed as the new Messiah for (and by) Obama fans of little faith. But the important thing is, she's not Scott Brown and she's not a Republican! Her selective concern for the law is trivial compared to that.