2011-11-16 10:28:31

OCCUPY WALL STREET: Bloomberg’s New York Meets Mubarak’s Egypt In Zuccotti Park?

Filed under: Featured, Occupy Wall Street
Posted by: Purple State of News

What exactly happened in the early morning hours of Tuesday, November 15 in Zucotti Park in New York City? The following details of the raid were reported yesterday in the New York Times.

Between the hours of 1:45 a.m., when the raid began, and 5 a.m., when the last skirmishes occurred south of the park, 142 people were arrested. Belongings were confiscated. Tents were ditched. Two people chained themselves to a tree, and wire cutters had to be deployed. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly showed up in person.

The rough shape of events seems clear enough, but the ramifications remain murky. Does the raid count as a victory for the city of New York and a loss for Occupy Wall Street? Or vice versa? Is this movement over?

Let’s begin with the matter of press coverage. Based on accounts of several journalists who attempted to cover an early morning police raid on the encampment, it appears that NYPD cops cordoned off members of the press from the action that successfully removed the three-month-old tent city from the park.

Here’s an excerpt about the treatment of journalists from today’s Columbia Journalism Review: “On the night of November 14, when the NYPD sprung a surprise raid to evict Occupy Wall Street’s foundational Zuccotti Park encampment, credentialed press were pushed back by police into a pen, unable to watch the eviction at close hand. Mother Jones magazine’s Josh Harkinson live-tweeted how he was physically dragged along the ground and removed from the park by officers. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg defended police action the next morning, stating that journalists were kept at a distance to “protect” them. Commentators on Twitter, meanwhile, decried the move as a “media blackout.””

The NYPD says it was protecting the journalists from harm, and some reporters have been menaced at Occupy events, but if you’re looking for a more substantive reason for a press black-out and for the raid in general, clues are hiding in plain sight.

Here’s what came out of the Bloomberg press office on the day before the raid:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today announced New York City will reach a record 90,000 hotel rooms by year’s end, representing a 24 percent increase since 2006. More than 7,000 rooms are in the pipeline that will add to the City’s hotel inventory, with an average 40 percent of new openings taking place in boroughs other than Manhattan, including in Long Island City, Queens, a hotbed of hotel development. The increase in hotels reflects an overall upward trend for the City’s $31 billion tourism industry – in September for instance, an estimated 323,000 people were employed in the travel and tourism sector, a record for the month. Last year, New York City welcomed a record 48.8 million visitors who collectively spent $31 billion. The City is on track to reach a record number of visitors this year. Room rates are steadily increasing, and occupancy remained at close to 85 percent, the highest in the nation. The Mayor made the announcement at the newly opened Z NYC Hotel in Long Island City, where he was joined by State Senator Michael Gianaris, NYC & Company CEO George Fertitta and Z NYC owner Henry Zilberman.

On the same website, the following small item is scrolling right now:

“Zuccotti Park has been cleaned and reopened. Protestors may enter the park, but they will not be allowed to bring in tents or other camping equipment.”

In recent days, park vendors and small businesses in the area complained about “unsanitary conditions” in the tent city. Brookfield Properties, Inc., which owns and manages Zucotti as a public park, supported the view, and clearly so did the mayor’s office. To hell with the substance of the protests–unsanitary conditions do not fly in Bloomberg’s New York. Occupy folks should have known better.

Today’s shiny, clean and safe New York rose on the back of one of the great urban success stories of the 20th Century. Under Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, the dirty old town once known as New York had become a thing of the past. Evidently, at City Hall, Occupy Wall Street began like either a throwback or–much worse–a back-slide.

Yesterday, responding to a petition by Occupy lawyers to challenge the legality of the police raid, Justice Michael Stallman of the New York Supreme Court ruled that the NYPD acted lawfully, and that the protestors had no First Amendment right to stay in the space indefinitely.

With the raid, the city has drawn a clear line in the asphalt, but as of yesterday, Occupy protestors were returning to the park and discussing future plans. What happens now?

This being New York, real estate questions must be answered first. Is Zucotti Park sacred ground, the necessary location for the protest, or can the protest move its tent city to Central Park and be even more effective? Zucotti Park, as a privately-owned space in a fairly remote part of the city, was never ideal, and the symbolic presence of the protestors in the vicinity of Wall Street itself may be less important as the movement evolves. Central Park is public property and surely a more difficult site for the city to seal off.

On the other hand, there are those 90,000 hotel rooms to worry about, and Central Park, unlike Zucotti, is ground central for Manhattan tourism. If this week is any guide, going forward, the slightest hint of unsanitary conditions in the Ramble will be met with serious force.

Meanwhile, the president of the New York Press Club, Gabe Pressman, has written a letter of protest to Mayor Bloomberg about the treatment of the press.

Dear Mr. Mayor and Police Commissioner Kelly:

On Tuesday morning, November 15th, as police officers acted to remove Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park, several reporters protested that they were the victims of harassment and that their rights under the First Amendment were violated.

A few were arrested or detained.

The actions of some police officers were not consistent with the long-established relationship between the NYPD and the press.

The brash manner in which officers ordered reporters off the streets and then made them back off until the actions of the police were almost invisible is outrageous.

We want the department to investigate the incidents involved this crackdown on Zuccotti Park and we want assurances it won’t happen again.

Sincerely,

Gabe Pressman
President, New York Press Club Foundation
Chairman, Freedom of the Press Committee

It’s unlikely that an investigation will occur unless a protestor or reporter suffered grievous harm, and the NYPD went to great lengths to prevent such an occurrence, but it’s even more unlikely that the raid has solved the mayor’s problem. In fact, based on everything we know about civil disobedience, the night of November 15 may have given the movement a much-needed shot in the arm.

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon. Indifference kills protest. Brutality clarifies and sharpens it. The muzzling of the press, if that’s what happened, suggests that law enforcement and by extension city government have something to hide–and even more to fear. Just when the protestors in Zucotti Park had started to look from a distance like an aimless rabble, just when liberal schoolmarm Jon Stewart had delivered a tongue-lashing for sloppy tactics, the government of what is supposedly the most open-minded city in America takes a page from Mubarak’s Egypt and raises the possibility that the protestors are onto something.

That’s not how protest movements die. That’s how they’re born.

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2011-10-21 14:24:08

OCCUPY WALL STREET: October Revolution Or Summer Fling?

Filed under: Featured, Occupy Wall Street
Posted by: Purple State of News

Twenty two years ago, on Monday, September 4, 1989, a small crowd of East Germans gathered in a Lutheran church in the city of Leipzig to protest the restrictive policies of their government. It was a few weeks before the 40th Anniversary of the East German state, and in that place, at that time, though no one quite recognized the fact, theirs was a revolutionary gesture.

As the month wore on, the numbers grew. Every week, on the same day, more and more people came to the church, and by the end of the month, these gatherings had a name that became a matter of historic record–the Monday Demonstrations.

America is not East Germany, and 2011 is not 1989. Let’s say that right up front. Yet something distantly familiar appears to be happening in streets and cities across the United States. Crowds with signs are gathering. They’re not protesting a wall this time, but they are opposed to a street. Politicians want to coopt them and can’t. Enemies hope to defame them and stumble. Media tries to describe them, and words fail.

What exactly is going on with Occupy Wall Street?

Leipzig is one way to think about the question. By the end of September 1989, a week before Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev paid a state visit to East Germany, thousands of people were marching from the church to nearby Karl Marx Square.

By October 9, the Monday after the 40th anniversary, 70,000 people were in the streets; that’s 60,000 more than have so far gathered in downtown Manhattan, but 30,000 less than the total number who are estimated to have joined Occupy Wall Street so far worldwide.

Where do we go from here?

In Leipzig, the numbers kept building.

On Monday, October 16, 120,000 people were on the streets, and the marches started to spread; 10,000 in Dresden and Magdeburg, which lay in different corners of the country, 5000 in Halle, and 3000 in Berlin, the seat of the government and the symbolic heart of the system.

The following Wednesday, shocked and mortified by the demonstrations, long-time dictator Erich Honecker left office.

That only encouraged the protests.

On Monday, October 23, Leipzig saw the largest demonstration in the country’s history, 300,000 protesters, doubling the number of the previous week.

Monday, October 30, half a million people descended, and the following Sunday, in Berlin, a million showed up. Within days, the Berlin Wall fell, and within the year, the East German state was gone.

Since 1989, we’ve seen it happen over and over–in Russia, Ukraine, Serbia. People rise up against terrible governments, and the governments fall. This year alone, we’ve seen three Middle East dictators go.

The death yesterday of Libya’s dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi didn’t follow the program to the letter–his political and personal demise is descended more directly from the bloodier and more violent end of Romania’s Nicolae Ceaucescu–but the spirit is roughly the same. Rotten systems topple one by one.

Is that what Occupy Wall Street wants? To throw down a corrupt American political system?

If we’re asking the question in the sense of pre-1989 revolutions, then clearly the answer is no. The protests so far are blessedly free of the sort of ideology that motivated Lenin and his successors through 1968. By design, there is no hard and fast, old school leftwing program, and even if there were, no cadre exists to enforce it.

In the latest edition of the New York Review Of Books, Michael Greenberg neatly sums up the vibe of the Occupy movement:

“The most common question asked about the protesters—after what do they want?—is, who are the organizers, who is behind it? Occupy Wall Street is the kind of deliberately elusive movement that, once the question is posed, its very premise is disputed: the word “organizer” is pregnant with just the kind of hierarchical connotations the protesters eschew. Nevertheless, there are organizers, and they are extremely astute, as well as reluctant to put forward their names. To them, “leaderless” is not an insult but an ideal.”

So the members of Occupy Wall Street aren’t 1968 revolutionaries, but could they be better understood in the 1989 sense, or more currently, in the Tahrir Square framework? That’s the real question. Can a leaderless protest movement lead people anywhere but back into quiescence?

The Leipzig demonstrations became the forefront of a genuinely successful revolutionary movement not because they had a coherent ideology or especially brilliant organization or outstanding national leaders. They had none of the above to any pronounced degree. In fact, given the unbelievably rapid pace of change, there is plenty of evidence that the initial leaders of the demonstration had no earthly idea what they had started.

They were caught by surprise, in other words, but after the first moment of shock passed, there was little mystery about what had to change, and no argument about what had to be done to make that change, at least in the initial stages of the protest.

The current government was rotten to its core and had to go. The demonstrators mobilized against that target, which was widely and almost uniformly understood, and by the end of the following year, they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams–to a fault, many of them later believed.

The government was gone, so was the state itself. An entire world and way of life followed Erich Honecker into the proverbial dustbin of history.

Ladies and Gentlemen, that’s a successful protest movement

*

Can Leipzig tell us anything about Manhattan?

So far, the numbers don’t make the comparison obvious, unless, of course, you look at the rate of increase. In July, inspired by the Egyptian uprising and on the prompting of a senior editor at Adbusters magazine, a hundred people began to gather every week in Tompkins Square Park in lower Manhattan. An NYC General Assembly was formed, and hackers showed up to help out on the digital side.

Since then, a few thousand have joined the protest in New York. Tens of thousands have claimed some affiliation in Europe. Conservative pundit Andrew Breitbart has dismissed claims that the numbers of this “wealth-hating class”, as he describes the protestors, are significant, and he likes to insist that the entire show is trumped up.

We’ll see. In this country, where serious leftwing protest movements haven’t existed in decades, an evolution from 100 per week to thousands each day may be more significant than it looks. Meanwhile, while it’s certainly to the advantage of supporters of the movement to inflate numbers, it’s equally critical for ideological foes like Breitbart to play them down.

Finally, what happens next may come down to what Occupy Wall Street ultimately wants. What they reject is clear enough. That’s best described with numbers:

“A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.”

The line comes from Mother Jones. The information underlying the line comes from a variety of sources and is a matter of what country singers like to call the cold hard facts of life. Those facts now apply to the vast majority of people in this country.

Disparity in wealth in an era of economic wreck and ruin is not nearly as clear a target as a hated government, but it’s not a bad place to start if you want to mobilize crowds. Out-of-work people have time on their hands, and their deepest animosity tends to be directed at the companies and individuals who most recently sacked them.

The words on the Occupy signs aren’t cast in the esoteric language of professional revolutionaries or academic departments. They’re plain enough for everyone to understand. Wall Street Is Our Street. Do You Feel It Trickle Down? We Can End The Capture And Corruption Of Governments By Wealthy Elites…

Still, are we looking at an October Revolution along the lines of Leipzig or a summer fling in the spirit of May Day demos in Paris? Hard to say.

So far, it would be premature to assign too much importance to the people carrying these signs downtown. Lower Manhattan is no Leipzig. Bank of America doesn’t yet look like the Berlin Wall. So many questions have yet to be answered. How do you topple a corporation? How do you oust the board of a bank from outside the walls? How does representative democracy fit into the equation?

Still, on the basis of two decades of truly revolutionary history, only a fool would dismiss these protests. From similarly humble beginnings, world-changing events have often enough proceeded.

These performance artist-cum-dissidents may not look like they can shake the country to its foundations, but stranger things have happened–many of them in the last nine months.

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2011-10-20 09:23:42

MUAMMAR EL-QADDAFI: The Last Chapter In The Green Book Closes

Filed under: Featured, International
Posted by: Purple State of News

He wanted to be Mao, but his little green book never had even remotely the influence of the Chinese leader’s little red one. In fact, it never had any influence at all. It was exactly what it appeared to be: A-Little-Green-Book.

Green as in Martian.

That was Muammar el-Qaddafi, the least enviable of 20th Century types, the wannabe revolutionary dictator. Too strange and self-centered to establish himself as a member of a movement, too powerful to be completely ignored, he vied instead for biggest weirdo on the world stage, edged out even there by the Kim family of North Korea.

He was killed today in his hometown of Surt, probably trying to escape NATO gunships. Here’s the New York Times obit.

His death arguably opens the next phase of the Arab Spring, as restive Arab populations begin the long work of building the new world on the shards of the old. It’s too soon to tell what comes next in Libya, but it’s clear that it won’t be another el-Qaddafi dictatorship.

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