Occupy Wall Street: Plan - B

David Seaton's News Links

Foreclosure is a national tragedy and a relentless drag on economic growth. Jobs can’t be created until demand increases, and demand won’t increase until consumers get out of debt, and housing is the biggest obstacle. If we had healthy institutions, the White House, both parties in Congress, the leaders of the biggest banks, and consumer groups would have sat down together and worked out a solution that keeps millions of people in their homes without wiping their debts completely clean. But we don’t, and so the history of the past few years has been written by Rick Santelli and Occupy Wall Street. George Packer - New Yorker

The big question that people who want to change things have to ask themselves over and over is "what is to be done". That is the question that OWS must ask itself and answer quickly if it doesn't want to peter out into irrelevance... something that would be tragic if it were to occur.

The role of OWS is pedagogical, it is about raising awareness, consciousness. This is the terrain of what is known as the "propaganda of the deed". A practical, non-violent, American illustration of this would be the lunch counter sit-ins and  freedom riders of the Civil Rights Movement, photogenic action which captured the attention of the media daily and soon the imagination and the "hearts and minds" of the American people. These acts were the thin wedge that opened up the conscience and the consciousness of Americans and changed the face of America.

In my opinion the tragedy of mass foreclosures and thousands upon thousands of Americans being evicted from their homes in the midst of the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression is an issue that has the same transformational potential.

Here is another quote from George Packer's article, that shows that political work is waiting to be done:

There’s no powerful D.C. lobby supporting Americans in Foreclosure, no mass movement of underwater mortgagees. Like unemployment, it’s a trauma that isolates people, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Few things could be more inspiring of compassion, empathy and fellow feeling than watching men, women and children being torn from their homes and ejected into the streets... only a heart of stone (and there are plenty of those) could fail to be moved by such a sight. Anyone who stands up for them and defends them is bound to win the sympathy and support of most decent human beings.

Showing the evicted -- or the about to be evicted-- that they are not alone, not leaving them to fend for themselves, would be the fulcrum that could turn the OWS into a powerful lever for changing the political life of America forever, in the same way that the Civil Rights Movement did.

How would this defense take place?

On one hand it would require an army of lawyers working pro bono to review all paper work leading to the foreclosures as much of it appears to be shoddy, slapdash and even outrageously fraudulent. Organizing this army of investigators and putting them on the case would win the gratitude and even the love of millions of Americans.

The next line of defense would be direct actions of non-violent, civil disobedience. Sit-ins, where dozens, hopefully hundreds, of activists would have to be carted away, one at a time, by police before the eviction could ever take place... with all the media recording it... every day, everywhere in America. The impact would be tremendous, transformational.

During these months of occupations, friendships of the like-minded without number have been made and a huge network of the politically conscious has been created. This instrument should be put to use in a way that connects in solidarity with the deepest fears of their fellow citizens. In doing this, a much, much more powerful instrument will be created, one that could forever change and purify the face of American politics. DS

The magnificent quest for Shinola

David Seaton's News Links

Shinola, take a whiff

Watching the antics of Romney, Santorum, Bachman, Paul, Cain and Perry and contemplating the mere possibility that someone who should only be handled with forceps like Newt Gingrich could now lead a party once led by Abraham Lincoln or Dwight Eisenhower, one gets the feeling that the spirit of the republic is a little like the Bruce Willis character in "The Sixth Sense", he's dead but doesn't know it yet and only one small boy seems to understand the situation... Perhaps the Occupy Wall Street movement is that "small boy".

In American-Speak someone of little understanding is said to be unable to distinguish between excrement and shoe polish, we say then that he or she "can't tell shit from Shinola".  It appears that in the Occupy Wall Street movement, a perhaps critical mass of Americans have taken it upon themselves to investigate the why and the how of the odor coming from the collective "shoe" and have set about to do something about it. Not a moment too soon if the race for the Republican presidential nomination is any sort of a leading olfactory indicator of the nation's mental health.

There is certainly a sense that something is terribly wrong, something mysterious, but I think it could be something quite simple, if intractable, that is afflicting the system. Like the Bruce Willis character, we really don't understand our true situation. In my opinion we are going through something similar to what the USSR went through only a little more than twenty years ago. Twenty years may seem a long time to someone under forty, but in historical terms it is nothing more than a blink of the eye. From the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 to the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 is only twenty years.

Absurd, you say, the two systems are totally different, like oil and water... I would say that the similarities are more interesting than the differences and that America has simply been more efficient than the USSR was in resisting the same acids that are eating away at its structures in much the same way as they did on the Soviet's.

Both the USSR and the USA have relied on huge government spending to propel their economies. The role of government funded research has been essential in almost every high tech area: computers, the Internet, aviation, etc, in all of them the input of the state has been paramount. Where the United States won hands down was in turning the sophisticated technology so expensively acquired into affordable consumer products and fomenting never-never credit to keep them affordable when salaries stagnated.

"What about freedom?", you say, to which I would reply that the social control of the Soviet system was extraordinarily brutal and primitive compared to our system of social control, which is infinitely more sophisticated than theirs was. I never lived in the Soviet Union and my experience of how a well-oiled dictatorship controls public opinion comes from having lived in Franco's Spain. Franco lasted forty years and the Soviets lasted seventy. Although the USSR was communist and Spain's regime was authoritarian/fascist, the similarities in maintaining control would be great.

Under Franco, all newspapers were of course owned by people approved of by the regime, however until very late into the dictatorship, all articles appearing them were previously censored before publication, after that any violation of the regime's standards could be punished by imprisonment and fines. There was only one television channel to begin with, later two, both state owned and censored, as were all books, stage plays and  films, which were previously dubbed into Spanish. There were private radio stations, but they all connected to the state radio for all their hourly news programs. Here is something that will give you an idea of how paranoiac such a regime can be: radio dispatched taxis came into use in the USA in the late 1940s, but they were still forbidden in Spain until well after the dictator's death, as they constituted an independent communication network outside state control. There is no way that the Franco regime could have ever tolerated the Internet, cell phones, SMS or social networks. 

Getting back to the Soviet Union I have read that you needed very high level permission to even have access to a photocopying machine.  A system of social control cannot operate successfully in an environment of free movement of information. 

This is where the USA has always been more sophisticated and effective, however, like the mysterious intruder in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death", you can run, but you can't hide and the same forces that brought down the Soviets and would have made Franco's regime impossible, have morphed under the combination of US military technology, hooked to an insatiable consumer society and are now even eating away at the American system.

As we observe in the political paralysis of today, the Founding Fathers of 18th century, WASP, America created a political structure that is not designed to reflect a society as complex and multicolored as contemporary America's has turned out to be. 

The centrifugal forces of a country as huge and diverse as America's have been kept more or less under control until recently by what Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann called, "the management of consent", that is to say the American science of public relations applied to forming public opinion. Heretofore "freedom of the press" required the money to buy a press in the first place, therefore the creation of opinion was in the safe hands of people with enough money to pay to play. The major newspapers, radio and TV networks and of course Hollywood all worked together naturally to manufacture a national opinion leading to political consensus.

Herein lies the importance of the OWS, with its 99% slogan... this is a self generating phenomenon, which has required minimal capital outlay to influence the opinion of millions of people, which is helping many millions to tell the shit from the Shinola. This is totally outside the control of those who have always manufactured consent until now. OWS is only the beginning, in a couple of years it will be looked back on tenderly like watching a home movie of a baby's first steps.

However "our" system has been reacting to this danger its own technology and marketing have produced -- again with much more sophistication than the USSR or Franco could have ever have mustered -- and under the cover of the war on terrorism, or the protection of intellectual property, is putting mechanisms in place that only await a "national emergency" to tug on our leash.

In short "shoe sniffing" is a fight that is never fully won, but never must be lost.

A toast to Shinola! DS

Frank Miller's rant: a wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.

David Seaton's News Links

We are cohabiting with a wounded political-economic system that is pouring legitimacy out of its every vein and with every beat of its heart, spurting incoherency from every artery and its heart is beating very fast as it thrashes around. In this company paranoia is a default option.

Paranoia is a home game for the ultra-right, because that is where they live in the flushest times... it is in the times of the disintegration of the most common and garden variety certainties that their message resonates most dangerously.... times like these. To some extent all of us are vulnerable to that message now. Awareness is our best defense.

In trying to get to the heart of any movement's mentality the art it produces is the most accessible path. Artists exist to reveal just as politicians often  exist to conceal. A picture is worth a thousand words: "Socialist Realism" tells you more about the bleak mentality of "Really Existent Socialism" than a hundred "World Peace Conferences" ever could.

Probably the most fertile and creative artist on the American ultra-right is Frank Miller,  the author of endless noir comic books, screenplays and films.  I would say that you could learn more about the American ultra-right and neocon mind set from even  tiny samples of Miller's prolific production than by a wastepaper basket full of articles and policy papers by such neocon icons as William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer or the American Enterprise Institute.

Lets look at a brief sample of what he does.

Now let us visit him personally and catch his vibe in the following short interview.

A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.

This brings us to Frank Miller's Occupy Wall Street rant. Here is a juicy bit:

The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.(...) Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy. Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism. And this enemy of mine — not of yours, apparently - must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horselaugh - out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle.

I would maintain that if a group of such reasonable, nonviolent protestors like the people who make up  OWS: men and women of all ages, and from all walks of life, can so stimulate the juices of a talented crypto-fascist such as Frank Miller, then they are doing something very right; it proves that they are drilling very close to the nerve of the wounded beast I opened this post with.

Summing up: there are few artists of American fascism as talented or as prolific as Frank Miller and to have attracted his attention so powerfully is a victory for America's progressive movement and should be celebrated as such. DS

Oakland and OWS... an inch ahead lies darkness

"An inch ahead lies darkness"

Japanese proverb

David Seaton's News Links

Many people are making facile comparisons between today's OWS movement and the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era. A major difference between what happened then and what is happening today is that the 60's anti-war movement occurred in the context of great prosperity and full employment, was led by middle class students anxious to avoid the draft, was not seconded by labor and  in the context of a foreign war was often opposed by the "silent majority" on patriotic grounds.

None of this applies today. Now we are seeing students, organized labor and even war veterans arm in arm lined up against the "one percent" and it is also significant that they are ignoring Washington and concentrating their actions directly on the economic powers themselves, occupying Wall Street and now paralyzing America's most important sea port, Oakland California. 

In other places and other eras, both these actions would have been considered pre-revolutionary.

Copyright D. Seaton

Thousands of anti-corporate greed demonstrators have closed one of America's busiest ports. The authorities at the Port of Oakland in California said maritime operations had effectively halted. The shutdown capped a day in which hundreds of city workers, including teachers, joined the call for a strike.The crowds also stopped traffic at a junction where a military veteran was seriously injured last week as protesters clashed with police. (...) That incident catapulted Oakland, which is on San Francisco Bay, to the centre of the national Occupy Wall Street movement and has spurred fresh demonstrations across the US.(...) The demonstration, which included students, families with young children and union members, began with a rally outside city hall. One large protest banner read: "Occupy Everything, death to capitalism." - BBC

Karl Marx oversold socialism, but he was right in claiming that globalization, unfettered financial capitalism, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct. As he argued, unregulated capitalism can lead to regular bouts of over-capacity, under-consumption, and the recurrence of destructive financial crises, fueled by credit bubbles and asset-price booms and busts.(...) Any economic model that does not properly address inequality will eventually face a crisis of legitimacy. Unless the relative economic roles of the market and the state are rebalanced, the protests of 2011 will become more severe, with social and political instability eventually harming long-term economic growth and welfare. Nouriel Roubini

54 percent of Americans support OWS, with only 23 percent opposed—but because the system is corrupted beyond repair. This slowly dawning realization is both invigorating—an invitation to engage in the kind of bold, blue-sky strategic thinking that leftists have not entertained for decades—and disturbing, a harbinger of just how nasty the future may get. Gordon Lafer - The Nation

The one place the protestors are not occupying is Washington D.C., they have given Washington up as useless. The idea being that Washington's political class only represents the rich and powerful and not the people who are asked to vote for them. In short they are merely the punks, lapdogs, errand boys, (lackeys? running dogs? :^)) of those entrenched and manipulative economic powers. this is a strategy that might be expressed as "kill the head and you kill the snake".

Certainly from a classic left wing point of view, what is happening spontaneously today is much more interesting then what happened in the 1960s. However, the right's classic answer to this level of domestic unrest and system questioning is to start a foreign war to create a spirit of national unity as an answer to fear...

And what do you know, right on schedule, as Wall Street is being occupied by angry American citizens, we are hearing rumors that Bibi Netanyahu, to the apparent horror of Israel's general staff, the intelligence establishment, and a majority of his country's already angry citizens, is preparing to start a war with Iran. This is something that would probably put oil at an unimaginable price and trigger a worldwide depression, but certainly would take peoples minds off of OWS, cottage cheese and the Palestinians bid to join the UN. Who knows who might be egging him on in this, the candidates are too numerous.

Certainly the Japanese proverb, "an inch ahead lies darkness" is especially appropriate nowadays. DS

OWS leaderless? Let a hundred Chomskys bloom!

“Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.” 
Archimedes

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
Rahm Emanuel

David Seaton's News Links

How can any movement function without leaders? Dumb question, a much better question would be: how can any movement function with leaders, when all leaders will immediately get purchased with corporate money?

The danger of having a "leader" is staring at us from our TV screens every night: Barack Obama, the enthusiasm he aroused and the paucity of his achievements.

Watching president Obama floundering around in the middle of the biggest financial meltdown since the 1930s after all the expectations he raised, has turned out to be the final proof that the political system is no longer connected in any significant way to the needs of the people... And that is a frightening thought if ever there was one.

In many ways, the United States, which is not a defined ethnic or religious group with centuries of common history, only exists as a political system. Some countries have had several different regimes in the space of a hundred years, each with a different constitution,  and still have remained perfectly recognizable. What would glue together the people who populate today's United States  if something similar happened in America?

The challenge then is to take or retake the system from outside the system, without destroying the system.

Lets take a stroll down memory lane and see how America's clearest thinking political mind sized things up just after Obama got elected:

Obama's organizers regard the network they constructed "as a mass movement with unprecedented potential to influence voters," the Los Angeles Times reported. The movement, organized around the "Obama brand" can pressure Congress to "hew to the Obama agenda." But they are not to develop ideas and programs and call on their representatives to implement them. These would be among the "old ways of doing politics" from which the new "idealists" are "breaking free." (...) In earlier periods of American history, the public refused to keep to its assigned "function." Popular activism has repeatedly been the force that led to substantial gains for freedom and justice. The authentic hope of the Obama campaign is that the "grass roots army" organized to take instructions from the leader might "break free" and return to "old ways of doing politics," by direct participation in action. Noam Chomsky - November 25th, 2008

Regular readers of my blog may remember that back in 2008 I predicted that Barack Obama would bitterly disappoint the young people who worked, and hoped, so hard to get him elected and that I also feared that this would tragically turn off an entire, heretofore supposedly apathetic, generation of American young people from politics forever. I got the first part right, but fortunately not the second part, but of course, Noam Chomsky - may he live a hundred years - got both parts right.

We are looking at a sea change brewing here. For the first time we have the educated middle class being proletarized… The business of “99% vs. 1%” is baby talk for “class struggle”. This is a radically new feature, not seen in America for generations.

Americans normally have tolerated more inequality than the people of other similarly developed countries because they thought that anybody who worked hard could better their situation and that their kids would live better than they did. That was the deal and the deal has been cancelled. The American dream has been called off because of rain.

I think that we are looking at the very timid beginnings of a real critique of the whole system by those, who up till now, have been the very pillars of the system. It is very exciting to think about and it could change the whole world if it continues to develop. The Democrats and the Republicans could end up in the attic gathering dust with the Whigs.

Chomsky speaks of "direct participation in action". What sort of action?  What should be the immediate objective of that action?

In my opinion the retaking of the system from outside the system, without destroying the system can only be effected by changing the consciousness of the American people in large numbers. That is what OWS is on the threshold of doing right now: changing the way the American people see themselves, individually and as members of a collective.

What would the changed consciousness finally look like if it happened, and how would it change the system without destroying the system?

Here is a brutally simple example of what I mean. Imagine if a majority of American came to view certain types of financial transactions with the same visceral disgust that they now view the sexual abuse of small children. No amount of corporate money could change that opinion, just as no amount of corporate money and lobbying could justify child pornography or create laws to protect it, because the culture of the people would simply not tolerate it.

How can that change of consciousness take place?

The answer is to continue what is going on now: occupations and assemblies, the creation of a vast national conversation, symbolized by the occupations, a conversation carried on over the Internet and around kitchen tables, where all the participants compare their experiences and research together and consensus grows organically in contact with their objective realities, so that individual experience becomes a collective experience. This has happened before, witness the civil rights struggle.

Other types of direct action such as foreclosure defense and student debt strikes serve to attract public attention to the "conversation", which is symbolized by the occupations. The important thing is the un-intermediated conversation. The fundamental thing is not to "waste the crisis" and to use it to change the consciousness of the American people.

What America needs now and this crisis may provide,  is hundreds, thousands, of citizens who can analyze the reality of the nation with the acute vision of Noam Chomsky, like him, peeling back the layers of media induced mental fog and hypocrisy and communicating what they find as clearly as he does. That is why I entitled this post "let a hundred Chomskys bloom". Today with tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, a spontaneous and viral creation of countless teaching "cells" can channel the energy  the American people showed in the Obama presidential campaign toward real "change they can believe in".

As Gordon Lafer writes in The Nation, this is a very special moment, one where a critical mass of the people realize that there has been some sort of corporate coup d'etát that impedes any meaningful change:

This is not because the agenda is unpopular—54 percent of Americans support OWS, with only 23 percent opposed—but because the system is corrupted beyond repair. This slowly dawning realization is both invigorating—an invitation to engage in the kind of bold, blue-sky strategic thinking that leftists have not entertained for decades—and disturbing, a harbinger of just how nasty the future may get.

Make no mistake, as this change of consciousness gathers momentum, this is bound to turn ugly. The defenders of privilege's traditional answer to the natives getting restless, is to start wars and foster fear and paranoia. The Tea Party is only a tame lapdog compared to the wolves they might be prepared to turn loose. For some reason this behavior is called "conservative".

For what is being mislabeled "conservative" in the USA is no longer any rational political option.  Its basic goal is, in fact, to make rational thought as difficult as possible, because those who sponsor it rightly fear that if people could think straight for even a moment... they might come to the same conclusions as the OWS. You can easily understand why people like the Koch brothers would happily spend millions and stop at nothing, however vile, to keep that from happening.

But this is a struggle that can be won. Americans are first and foremost children of revolution.

I opened this post with Archimedes boast, that given a fulcrum and a lever he could move the whole world.

Because of America's unique position in world affairs, the Occupy Wall Street movement is a chance that the American people have found for themselves to change their own lives, and while they do, change, move,  the whole world with them. For nothing will ever really change until America does. DS