In previous entries, I have expressed my deep concerns of the increasing inequality in American society, the corporate takeover of federal and state governments, and the legalization of graft. I also noted that nothing is going to happen until we have a social movement that addresses the de-democratization of American society. As of September 17, 2011, that movement has emerged. I have visited the Wall Street encampment and have interviewed several people. I talked to a young black man from Brooklyn who complained about the relative lack of a black contingency. He was on the sanitation crew; after I interviewed him, he got his broom and dust pan and started sweeping the area, as did many others. I talked to two female high school students from Chatham, New York who decided to join ranks when school was out. I talked to a guy who graduated from Syracuse University who was unemployed and was manning the information desk on the Northwest corner of Zuccotti Park. I observed the drummers on the southwest corner of the park. I interviewed a young woman who came to the encampment from London, England, who came to New York to participate in the movement. I observed the food distribution center in the middle of the park, where people were handing out beans and salad and other people were washing down the area and cleaning up. I listened to the human public address system where people would shout out a sentence; those closest to them would repeat the sentence and then people beyond would again repeat the sentence, after which the speaker would issue a new sentence. How do you know when the speaker stops? Easy! All announcements end with, "Thank you!" Below are pictures that I took from the park in mid October. Please note how Wall Street has been barricaded by the police. The place looks like a garrison.
At the Occupy Wall Street encampment, civility to all, including the police, is a strongly enforced norm. For example, I was watching Fox News interview one of the elders of the encampment, who was explaining the movement to them. I chimed in with, "You are being interviewed by an arm of the Republican Party." He turned to me and said that I should learn social graces. Meanwhile, I looked for his interview on Fox News. I couldn't find it. Instead, the lead on Fox News the following day was accusations that the Occupy Wall Street Movement was being led by, of all organizations, the now defunct ACORN. ACORN was a community organizing agency that was vilified and destroyed by the political right as a consequence of heavily doctored videotapes aired on Fox News by conservative activist James O'Keefe. They gave the impression the organization was engaged in providing advice on how to avoid taxes and detection for human smuggling and child prostitution. By the time the raw videos were subpoenaed and reviewed in the judicial system and found that no laws of been broken, ACORN had been destroyed because Congress defunded it and it lost many of its private contributors. As it turned out, the doctored videotapes often gave the impression that ACORN members were abetting crime, when they were gathering information on O'Keefe and his sidekick to report to the police.
In my previous blogs, I have pointed out several issues that relate to the Occupy Wall Street Movement: first, the growing inequality between rich and poor; second, the taking over of our government by corporate interests; third, how tax policy has resulted in a shift of tax burdens from the rich to the rest of us; and fourth, how the wealthy benefit from recessions that usually increase inequality. I pointed out that federal policies concerning taxes, trade, and deregulation have led to stagnation of wages while increasing the wealth of the rich. On occasion, I have stated that the only way in which these inequities can be righted is through a social movement. It looks like we have one now. Not only that, the occupy movement has become global! According to news reports, more than 1000 cities worldwide have had occupations of public spaces by protesters in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street; approximately 200 American cities have experienced encampments. There actually was an "Occupy Poughkeepsie" encampment!
As a student of social movements, I must say that I am surprised by the rapidity by which the movement has spread. It has expanded dramatically in just a few weeks. If we look at the history of the labor movements and analyze the movements of the 1960s, we find that they took years to build to a critical mass. For example, if we date the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, it is not until five years later that the first sit in occurs in Orangeburg, South Carolina in 1960. Freedom rides occurred the following year, and the apogee of the movement occurred in 1963, with Martin Luther King delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Monument. Mississippi freedom summer was the following year, at which time the civil rights movement metastasized into its black power phase and moved into the ghettos of northern cities: Newark, Watts, Detroit, Harlem. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in the wake of the Mississippi summer, expelled its white members telling them that the problem of racism was in the white community and to organize against racism in their own communities. This lead directly to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. Students who participated in the Mississippi freedom summer tried to recruit UC students to fight racial injustice were arrested for handing out literature.
Poll after poll has shown that underlying the conservative consensus and gridlock in Washington, DC, Americans have been saying that the country is going in the wrong direction. Because the pollsters have not asked cogent questions about which direction the country should be going, both political parties have blamed the other for the malaise. #OWS has given a potent new voice to that disquiet: the fruits of American laborers have increasingly been appropriated by those at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid. Governments, especially at the state and federal levels, operate on a pay-to-play system in which those with money purchase influence to the detriment of the public interest.
The #OWS critique of American society is radical and conservative at the same time. It is conservative because it is an appeal to the American values of democracy, equality, and the government "of the people." It is radical because it identifies the fundamental contradiction in the social structure. The issue transcends politics and focuses on social privilege and inequality. Here's a quote from that we are the 99% website:
We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent
Some people have criticized #OWS for not having a platform. From my perspective, that is part of their genius. They should not have a platform; they are engaged in a much-needed education program for Americans. They are pointing to the inequality and identifying the institutions that are responsible for the decisions that led us to this sad place of economic instability, unfunded and unpopular wars, degradation of our environment, and so forth. It will be up to others to formulate specific initiatives for social change. As some commentators have pointed out, what #OWS seems to want was contained in the 2008 platform of the Democratic Party.
We can expect that the #OWS movement will transform itself as the context changes. Already, we are seeing #OWS encampments on college campuses. We are witnessing behavior of local police departments reminiscent of police departments in the South during the civil rights movement: instead of dogs and fire hoses, they use tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray. Meanwhile, the political right, caught aback, doesn't know what to make of the phenomenon. Therefore, they denigrate #OWS protesters as unwashed, politically naïve, lazy, un-American, and so forth. The Republican nominees for president are acting as if there has been no change in the sensibility of Americans, even though a large majority sympathizes with the issues raised by #OWS. Foolishly, Bill O'Reilly, after Mayor Bloomberg temporarily evicted them from Zuccotti Park, declared the movement over. Talk about wishful thinking. But the message of #OWS has resonated worldwide to:
· The boomerang generation of students who got baccalaureate degrees and are unemployed or underemployed
· Students whose education is going to indebt them for decades
· Union workers under attack for their pensions and bargaining rights
· Workers whose pay cannot support their families
· Unemployed workers who can't find a job
· People whose mortgages are underwater and see that the banks got a bailout but they didn't
· Military veterans who served their country and come home to an indifferent world
· People who see that the American dream is no longer achievable
· People who think that the government no longer works for them but only the rich and corporations
· People who want to live in an open society in which the rich and powerful are not cordoned off from the rest of us in gated communities, limousines with dark tinted glass, and sophisticated security details
· People who equate democracy with equitable sharing of material wealth
· People who feel that it is the government's function to provide for the public good by eliminating poverty, providing quality education, making sure that everyone has the basic necessities of life, including access to affordable healthcare; that the government takes responsibility for protecting the most vulnerable among us, including children, the infirm, and the elderly
I'm sure that more constituencies could be added to this list. But here we go! History has come back from its coffee break! We live in interesting times!
