Occupy Wall Street

Nova Scotia and both London's aren't in America, however.
--- merged: Nov 18, 2011 2:15 AM ---

Touche, my bad. It is a pretty large city though.

 

uh. i know. i was assumed continuity between my posts, which weren't addressing the wider movement of which the us is a subset. could if you want, but it'd shift the grounds to what i was arguing. the property/"safety" arguments have been getting made by mayors around the us as they've moved to shut down various occupations. that and i spent some time today tracking what was happening in nyc. so my brain is on narrowcast.

 

Well, if the idea is that the evictions in America are symbolic of a greater amount of oppression in that country as compared to others, then the (faster) eviction orders in other countries would seem to contradict that.

 

I was just rubbing it in... We Canadians are pretty used to people not knowing where are towns and cities are.

 

i'm not quite sure how you arrived at the oppression business. its the fact that the us is a relatively open culture with vestiges of meaningful democracy that are can still be activated that explains how the existing arrangement can be challenged---and the ways in which it's happening. it's quite different from egypt, say, not only at the level of civil liberties (30 years of martial law in egypt, systematic repression of political dissent, a joke of a court system) that explained the difficulty of mobilization and, once things began to turn, the relative fragility of the mubarak regime. but that fragility of mubarak has, so far, revealed the depth of entrenchment of the military structure that mubarak came out of and which he referred back to as the center of his support. in the states, power is more diffuse and change is harder to bring about. its more open, but this is also a situation of structural crisis brought about almost entirely by people acting through neo-liberal ideology, which has also enabled a concentration of wealth (for example) and a transfer to the top 1% unprecedented in the metropole. the political consequence of that concentration is the plutocracy--but i think it's as much an ideological matter as a class politics matter. and ideological form is hard to mobilize against---shifting it is a matter of shifting the basic grounds of political consent (an immanent critique anyway)--creating something different is another matter. there is a class dimension to it--the concentration of wealth, the narrowing of power---but my sense anyway is that the central issue is ideological. this is quite different than you'd find in a space dominated by a more centralized form of domination. think about it---the united states is the creator of neo-colonialism---give places formal independence but control their economies. there's a form of internal neo-colonialism here. it just happen that this form of neo-colonialism was wedded to an idiotic, one-dimensional ideology, one that's demonstrably unable to even think its way through the crisis it created. figuring out coherent responses is obviously a problem. that's the space ows is moving into. all this to say that there's no particular illusions about the situation in the united states. it's nowhere near as simple as you present it as being. diffuse power, indirect control is far more difficult to mobilize against than older-school authoritarian forms, ultimately. but you're seeing a mobilization and it's been pretty effective so far. and you're also seeing the use of these private-property legal options on the part of mayors to try to make it go away. whence the kind of arguments against your emphasis on the rule of law in the way you presented it.

 

The concept of oppression was very prominent in your posts. And it's the idea that disallowing political dissent is reactionary and - therefore, I imagine, oppressive - that I very much disagree with. There's a reason we have representative legislatures, courts, laws and restrictions. Allowing everyone to do what they want would be anarchy. The principle of popular sovereignty would have resulted in James Meredith not attending university in Mississippi. It would result in Conservatives refusing to pay taxes, while Liberals camp out in parks as a way of demanding they pay more. I imagine that you think people should pay taxes, and that they should not be able to avoid paying them for political reasons, but this is disallowing people from dissenting from the status quo. Perhaps certain forms of protest are more worthy or allowable then others, but that's certainly not for you to decide.

As I've said, dissension against certain regimes is justified. The Arab Spring is one such movement. However, the concept of political structures being malleable is chaotic. Of course, constitutional documents should be living, to a degree, so as to not suppress modernity. Still, one of the great American contributions to political philosophy is the idea that there should be a degree of legal rigidity, if only so that the whims of mobs or politicians cannot sloppily manifest as binding law.

It's for this reason that an eviction of the OWS movement is completely justified. I find nothing very immoral about innocently breaking the law to make a political point, but I would find it highly immoral if the government forgave legal transgressions based on you or I agreeing with the transgressors. If someone blocks traffic to protest financial fraud, or evades paying taxes to protest the welfare state, the law should treat them accordingly, or else it is not blind.

I'm not completely sure what this means, to be honest, but if I had to guess, I would think it means that the existence of property rights and their perceived corrupt use means that civil dissent is justified. If so, then we again arrive at the problem of people being legally allowed to withdraw from adhering to the status quo whenever they don't like it. Conservatives who believe that the institutions of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are corrupt would opt not to pay for them, although perhaps still use them. Society cannot operate like that. Society requires law and blind justice, which requires that the government enforce laws and rulings that they or you disagree with, and we also must abide by laws that we dislike. ​

 

Equal "fringe elements" took over the Tea Party, because the press and nutjobs wanting their 15 minutes decided to use each other. What OWS started as was truly a great idea, what they are becoming is something else. One can argue is society to blame, in that, society would rather not look at the true problems? Perhaps. One can also argue that as people started to look at the OWS and realized they had no true solid answers and that true or not, they were getting a bad rep for crimes such as rapes and there was a bombardment of negativity, they haven't done much to help themselves get out of the negative light. It's obvious in some of the above's supporters posts.

To quote Will:

IF the battle is truly about the 1% then ummmmm creating havoc in the stock market BY YOUR OWN NUMBERS affects the very people you are supposedly trying to help. 19% own a majority of stock, while 80% owns close to 9%. That's not just attacking the top 1%.

Closing down ports, making it hard for average joes to get to work or open their small business IS IN NO WAY attacking the 1%. You are costing people, the VERY PEOPLE, you state you are trying to help jobs and income. There is simply NO F'N EXCUSE FOR THAT, except pure unadulterated blind hatred and greed. You want things YOUR WAY and fuck anyone else who gets in the way. It's pure and simple BS.

Sadly, OWS has become the very operation of those they were fighting. It was a noble cause, I truly even believed (as many did at first) that it wasn't a partisan ploy. But, the more light that shines on OWS shows them to believe they are above the laws, that they truly don't give a damn about the 99%, that they are out for only themselves and what THEY want, but no one truly knows what they want.

However, this does take the focus off of a war we should not be involved in. Does OWS picket the Pentagon, military installations, military contractors? NOPE, they barely even talk about the war.

I truly supported OWS, UNTIL they started acting as though they were above the law. I may be out there in my views but one thing I won't do is expect that the government give me rights that the average citizen is not entitled to. I am not going to defecate in the streets, have unsecured tanks of propane that can be used as explosives or protect rapists. Now the OWS can say that has all been blown out of proportion and perhaps it has been, but affecting small businesses and jobs of the workers you supposedly are speaking out for hurts you far more than those things the press blows out of proportion. The voices of your members basically saying, they don't give a fuck about small businesses and the workers losing their jobs, speaks louder than any assumed negativity the press or the Right would put upon you. So while your original cause may be noble, your actions and attitudes tell a totally different story.

Unlike the TP, I fear that OWS will not just quiet down and become "that weird faction of the party" that the TP has for the GOP. No, the OWS crowd is scary, in that they truly believe that they should get what they want by any means necessary, if that means destroy a small business nearby costing jobs and people in the 99% their means of livelihood then so be it. If it means protecting rapists and criminals, then so be it.

The ends DO NOT justify the means here. OWS will increasingly become more and more full of nutjobs and crazies as the true sane people with focus get fed up by the antics and tactics of the few who have been given power.

Sad really, they could have done so much good. In the end they are nothing more than self righteous, holier than thou hypocrites that are driven by very selfish reasons. They will take over the far extremist left of the Dem party just as the TP took over the far extremist right in the GOP.

This is the group that will riot when they have lost support. This is the group that will turn to interior terrorism when they realize they no longer have the attention of masses. I pray it won't have to get that far, but they are headed that way and show no sense in changing their M. O. which is to create chaos that doesn't affect the 1% but negatively impacts the very 99% they say they are speaking for.

 

arw: the reason for the difficulty you may have with my argument is that we are operating from different premises.

you're arguing from procedural legitimacy. i'm arguing from a version of popular sovereignty. in normal situations---so within a extant legal situation that is legitimate because it is an aspect of a coherent state system that is able to administer the problems caused by the ongoing production of crisis that is capitalism's most consistent and best-loved product---in normal situations, i would agree with you in fact, even as in principle i would maintain that it is the capacity--and freedom--to withdraw consent from that order that defines it as "free" (which is quite from a procedural viewpoint, which would take as a definition of freedom the definition(s) elaborated in the framing documents).

another way: the issue here is a perspective embedded in law as over against a perspective from legal theory.
from a law viewpoint, i can see where the constitution would be a necessary starting point and the existence of a constitutional order would necessarily mean that system crisis was excluded--this because one's professional comportment is shaped by the rules of the game that starts with the constitution. it does not start with the overthrow of the previous order, the interregnum and establishment of a new order, and does not need to be concerned with the relationship between a given constitutional order and crisis---everything is necessarily normal.

but that's entirely ahistorical. and it makes of the legal system a prison because it deprives people operating within it of the space for political action at such points where socio-economic crisis spills over into political crisis because the state system(s) cannot address the former, so the point(s) at which the legitimacy of the political order itself (and the legal order is a subset of that, not its infrastructure as you seem to imagine) comes into question. this is where the united states is now, at an early stage of legitimation crisis.

if the situation were such that normal political channels were seen as operative or coherent, you wouldn't see mobilizations in the streets, particularly not of the ows variety (and they are not inventing the wheel here, but i won't go into the history of direct-democratic revolutionary movements--though i could)

just as the arguments that move from an assumption of procedural legitimacy are at cross purposes with those that move from a political theory/legal theory viewpoint, just as viewpoints that take the existing legal order as necessarily legitimate because it exists are at cross purposes with viewpoints that work from a broader historical viewpoint that takes into account how orders come into being and are changed---so the existing legal framework is bound to come into conflict with popular mobilizations.

what typically limits this conflict is control over the framing of the political actions. commenting on this conflict as i think it's been playing out at the local level in nyc has been the base of the debate cynthetiq and i (and others) have running through this whole thread. it is the framing---which is political---that determines the legitimacy of a given action and whether and in what ways it is reasonable to violate certain laws, particularly laws that govern private property in a context that's shaped fundamentally by a campaign from the right of 30 years duration (de facto anyway) to reduce or eliminate public spaces whenever and where-ever possible. this is maybe another of the many legacies of conservative reaction against the vietnam period (another would be the rejection of the draft, because in conservativeland that explained opposition to the vietnam war)....

 

The problem I see even on this thread are the hardcore making excuses why OWS should be above the laws, the hardcore against them that wave them off as a joke and a few on here that offer legitimate criticism of OWS that the hardcore supporters tend to brush off as "well we are breaking laws to prove a point, we are disrupting the lives of those in the 99 to prove a point, we don't give a damn because we ARE above what you are, we are fighting for the 99 (sure we disrupt their lives, but they need to lose those jobs those small businesses to wake up).

It begins to sound like an excuse so that this group can do whatever they want under the guise of "helping" even when people are saying you are damaging those you are suppose to be protecting. But the attitude comes off as :"so what, Fuck you, we have our rights. We'll protest and kill jobs and hurt the people we are "speaking out for" because in this area there are no innocents, you either support us or you are part of the problem. And attitudes like that ain't gonna win people over, it'll drive supporters away and then the laws that cities have been letting slide will be enforced heavily. The holier than thou attitudes or the extremists are driving away the moderate support the movement truly needs to succeed.

And what exactly is it that is going to dictate success? Whole areas in cities that people are scared to go to? Small businesses going totally out of business costing jobs and life savings to disappear? What is the end here? What is the goal?

Once you lose supporters, good luck getting them back. Eventually, the media will move on, people will look and point and say, "wow, I remember when they had thousands there now, they have hundreds." The donations will stop flowing in. There will be internal struggles and blame games. and the end will not be pretty. As I said the people you NEED to succeed are being turned off by your self righteous attitudes.

"Well they weren't TRUE supporters and the media really had more ways to brainwash them against us."

Really? Really??????

Let's see, when the police enforce the laws who complains? Hmmm yeah, the big bad media only gives airtime and attention to those complaining about how the laws are suddenly being enforced.

The small businesses losing business and having to fire hard working, innocent, people, trying to feed their families, are just "war casualties".

I see. So in the end it isn't about getting greed and corruption OUT of government, because believing you are above the law and expecting laws NOT to be enforced is ummmm hoping for corruption from government sympathetic to your cause while NOT caring about the true laws.

In other words, when the inevitable does happen and you are forced to "un occupy", it'll be everyone else's fault. "They didn't understand", "the media and 1% have the sheeple brainwashed."

We are seeing the OWS become the TP.

 

Pan...don't you think you might be making sweeping generalizations based on the actions of a few. How many small businesses have been adversely impacted as oppose to how many support the movement?

Earlier you complained that the OWS protestors should act more like Ghandi and MLK....and when they do by engaging in civil disobedience and passive resistance, you suggest that they are nothing but lawbreakers. Should the Greensboro Four have unoccupied the lunch counters in the 60s because it was hurting those businesses? Can't have it both ways, dude.

OWS becoming like the Tea Party? Only after we see OWS become funded by astroturf corporate fronts.

 

like ben & jerry's?

 

Only when they match the funding levels of Koch Brothers or when Ben or Jerry organize the events, bus people in, and control the agenda.

The difference, IMO, is that Ben & Jerry share the goals of the OWS movement where the Koch Brothers changed/controlled the message of the Tea Party to support their own goals and corporate interests, not the goals of the original movement.

 

Did someone say "sweeping generalizations?"

 

pan--my argument is in a different register, but i'm not sure i'm making it clear enough so it's getting taken as something else.
i'm not saying that ows is above the law.

what i'm saying is that the political theater that ows is the center of is doing what it set out to do--erode the legitimacy of the existing arrangement--by which i mean ideological paralysis in a time of crisis, which follows from a longer-term concentration of wealth and power that happened while everyone was being told that (a) this was rational and inevitable (progress dontcha know) and (b) these concentrations were in a sense an illusion because, somehow, there'd be this trickle-down effect (variously labelled) that would bring about the greatest good for the greatest number. as i've said before, market ideology as we've experienced it for 30-40 years is basically an ethics--it promises social justice will follow from the appearance of social injustice. and had the people who operate within that general ideological framework been able to deliver, we wouldn't be in this position. but the fact is that the ideology was never rational. never.

but, somehow, for much of this time people have been seemingly asleep. ows is functioning as an engine in a way that is helping people to wake up. so the various movements operate in an interesting political space, one that challenges necessarily some aspects of law. the one i have been returning to---private ownership of public spaces---is the center of the conflict between various city administrations and the occupation itself. the problem is the private ownership of these space, which has been encouraged consistently by neo-liberalism under the illusion that giving private entities a financial stake in managing public land will bring about some kind of more rational management. but what that also does is erase public space, and in erasing public space it erases spaces in which the people can mobilize to bring pressure to bear on the system in general in contexts where conventional channels are either paralyzed or arrayed against them---turns out that ows is acting primarily in the first context. as cities start acting against it, they are bringing down on themselves the second.

this is not to say that ows is above the law---this is to say that the conflict between political expression and private ownership of public space first, and between political expression and urban circulation secondarily---is inevitable and is itself a form of political theater.

that political theater makes it, in my personal view, self-defeating for cities to act as they are acting.

and the information that's available linking these actions to the co-operation amongst mayors and, in from some sources (ap carried a couple days ago) to doj acting under the umbrella of the patriot act could very well start to break up the idea that the disbanding of the occupations is simply a local matter. so the implications of the occupation are spreading *through* this conflict, which makes the conflict a necessary aspect of how the movement has been working to this point. the conflict is spreading those implications.

if ows really was, in some imaginary counter-world, above the law, so outside these conflicts, they'd have a much harder time getting political traction. these conflicts are in a sense the friend of the ows message.
even as they are heavy-handed and unnecessary and stupid in the main. they are creating what they set out to prevent.

so no, i'm not arguing they're above the law. my arguments are about the status of the conflicts and what they mean.

 

The funding of many Tea Party events by Americans for Prosperity, the Koch Brothers astroturf organization, is a fact as is the fact they they bussed people in to many events.

*Shrug* I guess you dont want to see the difference between Ben and Jerry participating in a movement as oppose to the Koch Brothers' attempt to buy influence/control over the direction a movement.

 

Frequent a lot of tea party events do you? Hang out with a lot of tea partiers? Your opinion comes from a biased point of view. I'm sure the liberal media will be pleased that they've indoctrinated you well.

 

I look at funding sources, where available, and recall such event first hand as the Koch orchestrated march on Congress to oppose the health care bill, masquerading as a Tea Party event. I can also point to video of the Koch Brothers speaking at Tea Party events and setting the agenda

Or the recent Americans for Prosperity "Defending the American Dream" conference for Tea Party members (http://site.defendingthedream.org/ Can you point to a similar Ben &Jerry event?

Facts are a stubborn thing but I dont expect you to see the difference I suggested above....participating vs influencing.

 

I don't know, nor is it my responsibility to know. IF ONE business is adversely affected is that just supposed to be a "casualty of war" and acceptable? To me, I don't see it as acceptable. If you close a port down and thus force innocent people to lose a day's wage, is that just a "casualty of war" and thus acceptable? To me, no it isn't. And when you keep day in and day out doing this in MULTIPLE cities, you are hurting more people than you are helping because at this point you have no clear cut solutions to work for. Nor is compromise part of the agenda. So you will continue to hurt innocent people.

And they should be acting more like Ghandi and MLK than self righteous idiots. Ghandi and MLK BOTH had purpose and neither were out to hurt the innocent and "oops casualties of war." Ghandi and MLK BOTH had a clear cut solution they wanted to see. Both were willing to work with government to achieve a solution. BOTH valued other humans opinions and lives. The OWS does NONE of these. The OWS wants to be above the laws and doesn't give a damn about the 99 they say they are speaking out for. Again, I point to that "we have the right to those tents, to those propane tanks, to urinate in public places, to be naked, to hold city and semi-private areas hostage and scare away people from enjoying the park. We have the right to protect rapists, thieves and so on.

Ghandi and MLK would NEVER have complained about not being able to charge their I Phones or laptops. The OWS wants what they want but aren't willing to truly give anything up to fight for what they want. Ghandi and MLK did. SO DON'T YOU EVEN COMPARE YOURSELVES AND SAY YOU ARE BEING WHAT THEY WERE. THAT IS NOTHING BUT FUCKING BULLSHIT AND YOU KNOW IT. YOU WANT TO BE LIKE THEM THEN GROW BALLS AND MAKE SACRIFICES INSTEAD OF FUCKING DEMANDS.

Oh you mean like the businesses around the occupations that you guys will frequent because they are held hostage and let you use their bathrooms for fear you'll interrupt their business and livelihoods? Give me a break, if someone offered you guys a way to charge your laptops and cook your food you'd sell out in a minute.

Not only that but you are giving the owners of Zucotti Park (Brookfield) free advertisement. Look at Brookfield's business THEY ARE THE 1% and you are giving them free advertisement. If they felt threatened you'd be gone so obviously whether you like it or not YOU OWE YOUR VERY EXISTENCE TO THE 1% while hurting innocent people even more. Who is buying the businesses the you close down? Hmmmmmm? You guys are being played and don't even realize it.

You guys are something else, turn on the people that support you because you break laws and don't want to face the consequences. If I got 1,000 people and decided to go and put up a tent in front of the Capital and complain about the war, do ya think they'd let me stay? I doubt it but at least there'd be a clear cut solution.... END the WAR. What is OWS clear cut solution for an end????? *chirp chirp* yeah I thought so.