Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

By DC, the last eviction I wrote about, not even I could stay outside this need anymore. We all stood on the police line, cold and wet and sad, 12 hours into the rainy eviction. We took blows and kicks from riot police and SWAT rather than step on the people behind us that had slipped in the mud. We had relearned in each argument and every pitched tent that the fundamental job of humans is to care for one another, to keep each other whole and safe.

https://twitter.com/quinnnorton/status/279332051411402752

lol

so, now what?

well.

i think the strength of occupy--and i think quinn's awesome piece has given me the courage to use that word without scare quotes to subtly distance me from the worst of it--is that it represented a moment of unity between people fighting a lot of different enemies. it was a season of fraternity where we could stand in uneasy alliance knowing that whether homeless addict or college student, union mom or fired yuppie, we had a common antagonist in an industry that gladly bought our debt and our government while we drowned.

i think those pre-occupy issue silos are recalcifying, and i think the fact that there's a democrat in the white house is keeping many liberals & democrats from stepping into the streets where they might have in case of a mccain or romney victory, else being equal.

the alter-globalization movement of the late 90s was folded into the international anti-war movement, which i will kind of never forgive either for, because like occupy those two movements represented moments of unification between enormous and varied constituencies that were largely squandered. the anti-war movement such as it is has slowly faltered and faded into irrelevance for a number of reasons, but i do think it's significant that the players in it have reappeared in the last year as the weekend warriors* have faded. throughout the last year there's been a sense both that this is *something new* and that the "new activists" have ~something to learn~ from the ostensible "old guard" that's been around for somewhere between 11-13 years.

i think we've opened new fronts, with varying degrees of long-term viability, on things like consumer debt and eviction defense. quinn touches briefly on those. there have been people using direct action to fight unjust evictions and foreclosures for years, but the occupy brand-name has brought those fights new attention, and i think that attention in itself leads to more victories than might otherwise be possible. my friends think aloud about eviction defense direct action becoming the stuff of mass movement, the leading edge of a change in our cultural understanding of housing and community and ownership and capital(ism), but this strikes me as optimistic.

ultimately i think quinn gets it right, even if it is a little eye-roll-y and romantic for our cynical culture. we're from a broken future to tell a broken past that its time is up, and if we work fast enough we can do better. or, if you like, the batsignal got it right too.

WE ARE A CRY
FROM THE HEART
OF THE WORLD
WE ARE UNSTOPPABLE
ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

and i think what we do now is continue to fight our silo'd battles with what i hope are the significant reinforcements made possible by some of the newest alliances. in my mind class struggle and the environmental battles are deeply bound up together, and it's sort of my mission to make their links clearer to other people so that hopefully we can build more bridges between those two movements. maybe if the working class can save the world we'll get to run it for a while.

^^^ wishful thinking

Don't know everything about these people or the whole idea, but this seems like a really cool thing.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12797-occupys-new-offshoot-set-to-cancel-millions-in-medical-debts

Medical debt is the cause of 62 percent of bankruptcies, say organizers of Strike Debt, which threw last night's offbeat fundraiser for their new “Rolling Jubilee.” Ordinary people donated enough money to collectively buy an estimated $5.9 million in bad debt in order to cancel it.

I saw some of them on Chris Hayes a few months ago and I love the idea.

Of course, other opinions are available: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/strike-debts-rolling-jubilee-puts-borrowers-at-risk-to-politicize-debt-issue.html

Interviewing some of those folks on my show next week--we're working on an offshoot in DC, too.

to yves' point

"I'm a little mystified by the critiques based on the tax implications," says the tax lawyer who has been advising Strike Debt. (The lawyer works in the tax department at a top international law firm -- her employer knows she is advising Strike Debt, but doesn't want its name attached to the project.)

The tax lawyer dismisses the concern that the Rolling Jubilee is engaged in commercial activity: "It doesn't make a great deal of sense to me," she said. "When Habitat for Humanity is helping people build houses, someone still has to buy the lumber. It doesn't change their tax status. The critical thing is that this is a not-for-profit organization, and it's not engaged in trying to make money."

Furthermore, the lawyer says, recipients don't have to be poor to receive tax-free debt forgiveness. "This is focused on medical debt," she says, "and people with health problems can be categorized as distressed. You don't need to show that they're impoverished."

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/12/the_rolling_jub.php

(the lawyer is speaking to the point made in the yves smith article gukbe linked to, if i didn't make that clear)

good points!

yves smith, perhaps stung, strikes back:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/tax-authority-confirms-our-doubts-about-occupy-wall-streets-debt-buyingforgiveness-scheme.html

i am so not a lawyer, and don't have a horse here, but if the rolling jubilee stuff could possibly be taxed in the way that the article presents, that's utterly insane.

the other interesting thing seems to be how much this tax issue is really sort of just a way of talking around the concern that debt might be bought out from people that aren't "deserving," which is a fairly interesting ideological fissure here.

this was gonna be the subject of my weekly monologue before, turns out, i found myself too xmas eve drunk to deliver it

to next week!!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy

lotta people misreading (imo) these docs (namely p. 59) to say that "the fbi was planning to kill occupy leaders with sniper rifles"

having finally just read the wolf thing, god that's nicely done.

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station

always down for quoting Lasch

oh man, the response in jacobin to this (by a grad student, of f'n course!) is very whiny and hurt and not at all agl. http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/modify-your-dissent/

haha either i'm lolold, or this is so awful, or both: "It does not diminish the Baffler’s importance if we now locate it as a morbid symptom of the Clinton interregnum, when the current system seemed hopelessly corrupted but fresh alternatives had yet to appear."

seriously if the author actually ever grows up i hope he feels awful for what a dick he was to some very talented people at a very nice magazine because he disagreed with them.

my problem with jacobin, which gets to be more and more of a problem with each article i read, is not necessarily that the ideas in any given article are bad -- most ideas in most magazines are bad. my problem is that the writing is young in an embarrassing (not endearing) way, and the attitude is consistently smug without actually being very deeply knowledgable.

i need to stop thinking about this article, because its making me feel awful. i mean frank can write a takedown as much as the next person (or moreso even), but they don't have this needy personal edge, they have a real depth behind them, and they have a sense of humor. for a magazine claiming to be the young fresh thing (and very narcissistically and incessantly so), and a break from the dour voice of frank, jacobin is incredibly humorless. big-upping that beyond dumm "sex house" article as the way forward is also hilarious. i mean i love the show, but debating whose cult-crit better deals with ten episode youtube miniseries is just miserably narrow.

another thing frank has that jacobin's editorial voice seems to lack is some reflection of how much is actually at stake.

i prefer new inquiry.

3 months after our 'tot offensive' action that shuttered every BoA in DC for a day to bring the spotlight to a gay reverend being wrongfully foreclosed on, BoA has quietly reached out to the Rev. they're stopping foreclosure proceedings and signing the deed back over to him. a local bank is in talks to step in and buy out the remainder of the mortgage to get him a sustainable monthly payment. it feels good to win one.

^ forgive the cliff notes version, but there you are.

i've read a couple good pieces on jacobin, but yeah, most of them have this undercurrent of pompous nastiness. that kind of i-am-lefter-than-thou pose has turned me off a lot of otherwise smart ppl's blogs (corey robin, for one).

that is very inspiring hoos, thanks for the update xp

actual quote after a black bloc did their quadrennial pre-inauguration smashy

"man, nobody EVER invites us to the property destructions, man"

“Anti-government and anti-police” literature was left at one of the locations, Officer Alali said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/21/dc-police-report-first-incidents-tied-inauguration/

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-lupe-fiasco-kicked-out-inaugural-concert-20130121,0,7560111.story

radio's on. my segments are over, but still a solid 90 minutes coming up: http://tunein.com/station/?StationId=22091

still up: updates on the 2 year anniversary of the egyptian revolution, great interviews with davey d (!), bella eiko & a minister from the black riders liberation party on bill "stop & frisk" braddock being hired by the city of oakland (plus details on the mechanics of the black riders' various social programs), and a few other items. good show imo.

haha um @TheRealRoseanne just RT'd us again. never sure how i feel about that.

Occupy the SEC has filed a lawsuit in the Eastern District of New York against six federal agencies, over those agencies' delay in promulgating a Final Rulemaking in connection with the "Volcker Rule."

http://www.occupythesec.org/

The DC eviction defense group, after two victories and just this week getting a quiet, painful second loss, is going into hibernation.

The IMF comes to town in a few weeks, and I expect that just like last year, several thousand black bloc'ers will fail to show up despite all their internet bandanna-rattling.

Strike Debt is doing their--depending on who you ask--variously advisable thing. http://www.thenation.com/blog/173480/strike-debt-abolishes-11-million-medical-debt#

Wins defending homes all over the country. Minnesota & Atlanta both still killin it with direct action: http://stonemountain.patch.com/articles/occupy-our-homes-atlanta-backs-local-evicted-woman

Radio still on every week: mixcloud.com/mariahblank/

So strange, to think we all had this moment together. Feels a long time ago now.

Getting a lot of perspective from this great book--wish I'd read it two years ago: https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=518

I always take heart in the Utah Philips quote "the joy is in the struggle", also expressed eloquently in Philip K. Dick's "Radio Free Albemuth" - our job is to carry shreds of light through the new dark ages, not necessarily to win.

<3

goddaaamn today was fun

also glad the nazis at the white house (actual nazis waiting for us at the white house, that's not like a 'white house is full of nazis' thing) got their feathers nice and ruffled. those bullshit flags are way more useful on fire anyway.

wore an orange vest and Peacekept for the day; saw a lot of faces i hadn't in a while.

friend of mine in seattle had the windows of her small business smashed. it's just a little bar/distillery :(

good on you for peacekeeping today, dlh.

i ended up having to do absolutely nothing; was proud of us. sorry about your friend clay.

oh and hoos as usual making righteous calls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCb2Le3wtIk

btw there were all kinds of organizations at this march doing all kinds of cool stuff like foreclosure resistance or worker education or helping day laborers or being wobblies or whatever, and they all had people in them i recognized from occupy and i think had met each other at occupy (occupy here meaning The Camps), but what the official "occupy" representatives were there doing was they had a big papier-mache golden bull with bank/corporate logos on it and they dressed up as ancient egyptians and danced around it for five minutes to cake's "comfort eagle". this is nothing people haven't been saying since last may (i just haven't been in touch cuz i'm a useless fair-weather rank-sweller) but felt like there's a tremendous legacy of occupy as event + bankruptcy of occupy as brand.

i do like comfort eagle tho.

friend of mine got hurt during his arrest for Being Black In The Cops Way, charged with apo--all charges dropped and he just walked out the courtroom door

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/05/03/may-day-anarchists-will-compensate-small-businesses-whose-windows-were-smashed

i have a variety of competing impulses about this. the synical interpretation is obvious, but if it's legit i enjoy this.

friend of mine in seattle had the windows of her small business smashed. it's just a little bar/distillery :(

― Clay, Thursday, May 2, 2013 6:58 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is your friend one of the above by chance, clay?

Oh I didn't see that, yes, Sun L1quor! That's awesome that some people are standing up and helping out!