Cost is $15 to $50 per plate per person, sliding scale. Call me, 831 331 1153 or email me at homes4everyone@yahoo.com to secure a place if you're coming, or just show up Sunday at
418 Front Street, Santa Cruz, CA ~ India Joze Restaurant
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
India Joze Restaurant Hosts Benefit to Fight the Lodging Law, Keep Linda Out of Jail, and Support the First Amendment of our Constitution
Monday, November 28, 2011
Human Rights Leader on Occupy Santa Cruz
David Sweet: Occupy an innovative approach to a centuries old quest
Santa Cruz Sentinel, November 28, 2011 01:30:57 AM PST
There must be hundreds of thousands of old geezers like me around the country who've been opposed all our lives to a system that can cough up gazillions for war, incarceration and corporate welfare, but can't find the means to guarantee housing, health care, high-quality education and a job with a living wage to a great many citizens.
Such people today, though we may be a bit incredulous still, are exhilarated despite ourselves by this fast-growing "Occupy Wall Street" movement. A readable, fascinating book about Occupy, just published by the Yes! magazine people and available for 10 bucks at your local bookstore proclaims "This changes everything!" Maybe it does, or will. It's unlikely just to dry up and blow away. But where's the program? What are the demands?
The answer comes back loud and clear from the occupations everywhere: concrete demands would miss the point entirely. They could be met, or negotiated with the powers that be. But the powers that be are the problem. What the Occupiers want is a change in the system itself -- from one that works pretty well for many people, to one that works well enough for most everybody.
And it's clearer to them, so far, than to lots of us, that in order to achieve that change we have not only somehow to elect competent, responsible and incorruptible legislators, we have to get together and talk with our neighbors, no matter how different they are, figure out what we want, get to work in a
This makes the Occupy movement, however it talks about itself, or is talked about by others, a brand new, innovative, extraordinarily promising development in the centuries-old worldwide movement for human rights. The human rights movement wants a system that is centered not on power and profit, but on the dignity, worth, equality and enormous potential of all people everywhere. A system that protects rather than raping the natural environment that sustains us. Every step in the long history of that human rights movement has been made possible by the many individuals like Occupiers today who are willing to join in exercising, at whatever cost to themselves, the responsibility we all have to proclaim, protect and promote the common good.
Americans have contributed as much as anybody, and more than most, to the international movement for human rights: to the abolition of slavery, child labor, lynching and racial segregation, to establishing the eight-hour day and the rights of women, gays and lesbians and the disabled. Many times in the past our government itself, yielding to popular pressure, has contributed quite a lot to broadening and establishing some human rights in national and international law -- even though its policy has generally been to ignore, oppose or drag its feet about them.
One great moment in the history of America's and the world's struggle for human rights was the elaboration under United Nations auspices, and by a commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, given to the world on Dec. 10, 1948.
The Declaration's birthday will be celebrated on Saturday, Dec. here in Santa Cruz with a parade down Pacific Avenue followed by an informative and enjoyable Human Rights Fair in the Galleria on Front Street. Occupiers, geezers exhilarated or not, the simply curious and the public at large are urged to attend.
Local community activist David Sweet taught Latin American and world history at UC Santa Cruz for 30 years.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Sunday General Assembly, Occupy Santa Cruz, a glimpse
November 13, 2011 ~~ San Lorenzo Park from steps of courthouse, near Water St. The Sunday General Assembly, OCCUPY SANTA CRUZ
OCCUPY WALL STREET MAKES MORE SENSE - Rolling Stones writer Matt Taibbi
Published on Friday, November 11, 2011 by Rolling Stone
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests
Much more than a movement against big banks, they're a rejection of what our society has become
I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.
The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.
That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."
The protesters, chirped Supreme Reichskank Ann Coulter, needed three things: "showers, jobs and a point." Her colleague Charles Krauthammer went so far as to label the protesters hypocrites for having iPhones. OWS, he said, is "Starbucks-sipping, Levi's-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters [denouncing] corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over." Apparently, because Goldman and Citibank are corporations, no protester can ever consume a corporate product – not jeans, not cellphones and definitely not coffee – if he also wants to complain about tax money going to pay off some billionaire banker's bets against his own crappy mortgages.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don't give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego.
What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.
We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.
If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.
That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.
But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.
We're a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays even the palest federalism is swiftly crushed. If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state – like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar – the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO. Even if 40 million Californians vote tomorrow to allow themselves to smoke a joint, the federal government will never permit it. And the economy is run almost entirely by an unaccountable oligarchy in Lower Manhattan that absolutely will not sanction any innovations in banking or debt forgiveness or anything else that might lessen its predatory influence.
And here's one more thing I was wrong about: I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.
But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.
This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.
It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.
People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.
© 2011 Rolling Stone
As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.
Published on Friday, November 11, 2011 by Rolling Stone
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests
Much more than a movement against big banks, they're a rejection of what our society has become.
I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.
The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.
T
hat's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."
The protesters, chirped Supreme Reichskank Ann Coulter, needed three things: "showers, jobs and a point." Her colleague Charles Krauthammer went so far as to label the protesters hypocrites for having iPhones. OWS, he said, is "Starbucks-sipping, Levi's-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters [denouncing] corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over." Apparently, because Goldman and Citibank are corporations, no protester can ever consume a corporate product – not jeans, not cellphones and definitely not coffee – if he also wants to complain about tax money going to pay off some billionaire banker's bets against his own crappy mortgages.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don't give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego.
What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.
We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.
If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.
That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.
But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.
We're a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays even the palest federalism is swiftly crushed. If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state – like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar – the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO. Even if 40 million Californians vote tomorrow to allow themselves to smoke a joint, the federal government will never permit it. And the economy is run almost entirely by an unaccountable oligarchy in Lower Manhattan that absolutely will not sanction any innovations in banking or debt forgiveness or anything else that might lessen its predatory influence.
And here's one more thing I was wrong about: I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.
But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.
This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.
It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.
People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.
© 2011 Rolling Stone
As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.
Published on Friday, November 11, 2011 by Rolling Stone
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests
Much more than a movement against big banks, they're a rejection of what our society has become.
I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.
The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.
That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."
The protesters, chirped Supreme Reichskank Ann Coulter, needed three things: "showers, jobs and a point." Her colleague Charles Krauthammer went so far as to label the protesters hypocrites for having iPhones. OWS, he said, is "Starbucks-sipping, Levi's-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters [denouncing] corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over." Apparently, because Goldman and Citibank are corporations, no protester can ever consume a corporate product – not jeans, not cellphones and definitely not coffee – if he also wants to complain about tax money going to pay off some billionaire banker's bets against his own crappy mortgages.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don't give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego.
What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.
We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.
If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.
That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.
But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.
We're a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays even the palest federalism is swiftly crushed. If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state – like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar – the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO. Even if 40 million Californians vote tomorrow to allow themselves to smoke a joint, the federal government will never permit it. And the economy is run almost entirely by an unaccountable oligarchy in Lower Manhattan that absolutely will not sanction any innovations in banking or debt forgiveness or anything else that might lessen its predatory influence.
And here's one more thing I was wrong about: I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.
But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.
This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.
It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.
People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.
© 2011 Rolling Stone
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Francis Fox Piven ~~ Is Occupy Wall Street Movement Helping Poor People Yet?
Can OWS end America's war against the poor?
by recasting extreme inequality as an ethical
issue, the movement could bring about a new kind
of moral economy
By Frances Fox Piven, November 7, 2011
We've been at war for decades now - not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it's been a war against the poor, but if you hadn't noticed, that's not surprising. You wouldn't often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it's been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed - until now.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.
By making Wall Street its symbolic target, and branding itself as a movement of the 99 percent, OWS has redirected public attention to the issue of extreme inequality, which it has recast as, essentially, a moral problem. Only a short time ago, the "morals" issue in politics meant the propriety of sexual preferences, reproductive behavior, or the personal behavior of presidents. Economic policy, including tax cuts for the rich, subsidies and government protection for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and financial deregulation, was shrouded in clouds of propaganda or simply considered too complex for ordinary Americans to grasp.
Now, in what seems like no time at all, the fog has lifted and the topic on the table everywhere seems to be the morality of contemporary financial capitalism. The protestors have accomplished this mainly through the symbolic power of their actions: by naming Wall Street, the heartland of financial capitalism, as the enemy, and by welcoming the homeless and the down-and-out to their occupation sites. And of course, the slogan "We are the 99 percent" reiterated the message that almost all of us are suffering from the reckless profiteering of a tiny handful. (In fact, they aren't far off: the increase in income of the top 1 percent over the past three decades about equals the losses of the bottom 80 percent.)
The movement's moral call is reminiscent of earlier historical moments when popular uprisings invoked ideas of a "moral economy" to justify demands for bread or grain or wages - for, that is, a measure of economic justice. Historians usually attribute popular ideas of a moral economy to custom and tradition, as when the British historian E.P. Thompson traced the idea of a "just price" for basic foodstuffs invoked by eighteenth century English food rioters to then already centuries-old Elizabethan statutes. But the rebellious poor have never simply been traditionalists. In the face of violations of what they considered to be their customary rights, they did not wait for the magistrates to act, but often took it upon themselves to enforce what they considered to be the foundation of a just moral economy.
Being Poor By the Numbers
A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call "the poor" who struggle to survive in the shadow of the over-consumption and waste of that top 1 percent.
Some facts: early in 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 14.3 percent of the population, or 47 million people - one in six Americans - were living below the official poverty threshold, currently set at $22,400 annually for a family of four. Some 19 million people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children. Indeed, more than half of all children younger than six living with a single mother are poor. Extrapolating from this data, Emily Monea and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution estimate that further sharp increases in both poverty and child poverty rates lie in our American future.
Some experts dispute these numbers on the grounds that they neither take account of the assistance that the poor still receive, mainly through the food stamp program, nor of regional variations in the cost of living. In fact, bad as they are, the official numbers don't tell the full story. The situation of the poor is actually considerably worse. The official poverty line is calculated as simply three times the minimal food budget first introduced in 1959, and then adjusted for inflation in food costs. In other words, the American poverty threshold takes no account of the cost of housing or fuel or transportation or health-care costs, all of which are rising more rapidly than the cost of basic foods. So the poverty measure grossly understates the real cost of subsistence.
Moreover, in 2006, interest payments on consumer debt had already put more than four million people, not officially in poverty, below the line, making them "debt poor." Similarly, if childcare costs, estimated at $5,750 a year in 2006, were deducted from gross income, many more people would be counted as officially poor.
Nor are these catastrophic levels of poverty merely a temporary response to rising unemployment rates or reductions in take-home pay resulting from the great economic meltdown of 2008. The numbers tell the story and it's clear enough: poverty was on the rise before the Great Recession hit. Between 2001 and 2007, poverty actually increased for the first time on record during an economic recovery. It rose from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.5 percent in 2007. Poverty rates for single mothers in 2007 were 49 percent higher in the U.S. than in 15 other high-income countries. Similarly, black employment rates and income were declining before the recession struck.
In part, all of this was the inevitable fallout from a decades-long business mobilization to reduce labor costs by weakening unions and changing public policies that protected workers and those same unions. As a result, National Labor Board decisions became far less favorable to both workers and unions, workplace regulations were not enforced, and the minimum wage lagged far behind inflation.
Inevitably, the overall impact of the campaign to reduce labor's share of national earnings meant that a growing number of Americans couldn't earn even a poverty-level livelihood - and even that's not the whole of it. The poor and the programs that assisted them were the objects of a full-bore campaign directed specifically at them.
Campaigning Against the Poor
This attack began even while the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s was in full throttle. It was already evident in the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater, as well as in the recurrent campaigns of sometime Democrat and segregationist governor of Alabama George Wallace. Richard Nixon's presidential bid in 1968 picked up on the theme.
As many commentators have pointed out, his triumphant campaign strategy tapped into the rising racial animosities not only of white southerners, but of a white working class in the north that suddenly found itself locked in competition with newly urbanized African-Americans for jobs, public services and housing, as well as in campaigns for school desegregation. The racial theme quickly melded into political propaganda targeting the poor and contemporary poor-relief programs. Indeed, in American politics "poverty," along with "welfare," "unwed mothers," and "crime," became code words for blacks.
In the process, resurgent Republicans tried to defeat Democrats at the polls by associating them with blacks and with liberal policies meant to alleviate poverty. One result was the infamous "war on drugs" that largely ignored major traffickers in favor of the lowest level offenders in inner-city communities. Along with that came a massive program of prison building and incarceration, as well as the wholesale "reform" of the main means-tested cash assistance program, Aid to Families of Dependent Children. This politically driven attack on the poor proved just the opening drama in a decades-long campaign launched by business and the organized right against workers.
This was not only war against the poor, but the very "class war" that Republicans now use to brand just about any action they don't like. In fact, class war was the overarching goal of the campaign, something that would soon enough become apparent in policies that led to a massive redistribution of the burden of taxation, the cannibalization of government services through privatization, wage cuts and enfeebled unions, and the deregulation of business, banks and financial institutions.
The poor - and blacks - were an endlessly useful rhetorical foil, a propagandistic distraction used to win elections and make bigger gains. Still, the rhetoric was important. A host of new think tanks, political organizations and lobbyists in Washington D.C. promoted the message that the country's problems were caused by the poor whose shiftlessness, criminal inclinations and sexual promiscuity were being indulged by a too-generous welfare system.
Genuine suffering followed quickly enough, along with big cuts in the means-tested programs that helped the poor. The staging of the cuts was itself enwreathed in clouds of propaganda, but cumulatively they frayed the safety net that protected both the poor and workers, especially low-wage ones, which meant women and minorities. When Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office in 1980, the path had been smoothed for huge cuts in programs for poor people, and by the 1990s the Democrats, looking for electoral strategies that would raise campaign dollars from big business and put them back in power, took up the banner. It was Bill Clinton, after all, who campaigned on the slogan "end welfare as we know it."
A Movement for a Moral Economy
The war against the poor at the federal level was soon matched in state capitols where organizations like the American Federation for Children, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Institute for Liberty and the State Policy Network went to work. Their lobbying agenda was ambitious, including the large-scale privatization of public services, business tax cuts, the rollback of environmental regulations and consumer protections, crippling public sector unions, and measures (like requiring photo identification) that would restrict the access students and the poor had to the ballot. But the poor were their main public target and again, there were real life consequences - welfare cutbacks, particularly in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, and a law-and-order campaign that resulted in the massive incarceration of black men.
The Great Recession sharply worsened these trends. The Economic Policy Institute reports that the typical working-age household, which had already seen a decline of roughly $2,300 in income between 2000 and 2006, lost another $2,700 between 2007 and 2009. And when "recovery" arrived, however uncertainly, it was mainly in low-wage industries, which accounted for nearly half of what growth there was. Manufacturing continued to contract, while the labor market lost 6.1 percent of payroll employment. New investment, when it occurred at all, was more likely to be in machinery than in new workers, so unemployment levels remain alarmingly high. In other words, the recession accelerated ongoing market trends toward lower-wage and ever more insecure employment.
The recession also prompted further cutbacks in welfare programs. Because cash assistance has become so hard to get, thanks to so-called welfare reform, and fallback state-assistance programs have been crippled, the federal food stamp program has come to carry much of the weight in providing assistance to the poor. Renamed the "Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program," it was boosted by funds provided in the Recovery Act, and benefits temporarily rose, as did participation. But Congress has repeatedly attempted to slash the program's funds, and even to divert some of them into farm subsidies, while efforts, not yet successful, have been made to deny food stamps to any family that includes a worker on strike.
The organized right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming "dependent" on government assistance, or they scrutinize government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants.
The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping - and gasp was all we did for decades. This is why we so desperately needed a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street, which has already changed the national conversation, may well be its beginning.
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch. com here.
Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is the author, along with Richard Cloward, of "Regulating the Poor and Poor People's Movements." Her latest book, just published, is "Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven? The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate."
Piven is renown for her support of the Welfare Rights Movement in the 70s-80s, and has always shared her professional and academic accomplishments on behalf of "welfare moms" like I was for so long. My heroine! ~~Linda's Hearth
by recasting extreme inequality as an ethical
issue, the movement could bring about a new kind
of moral economy
By Frances Fox Piven, November 7, 2011
We've been at war for decades now - not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it's been a war against the poor, but if you hadn't noticed, that's not surprising. You wouldn't often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it's been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed - until now.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.
By making Wall Street its symbolic target, and branding itself as a movement of the 99 percent, OWS has redirected public attention to the issue of extreme inequality, which it has recast as, essentially, a moral problem. Only a short time ago, the "morals" issue in politics meant the propriety of sexual preferences, reproductive behavior, or the personal behavior of presidents. Economic policy, including tax cuts for the rich, subsidies and government protection for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and financial deregulation, was shrouded in clouds of propaganda or simply considered too complex for ordinary Americans to grasp.
Now, in what seems like no time at all, the fog has lifted and the topic on the table everywhere seems to be the morality of contemporary financial capitalism. The protestors have accomplished this mainly through the symbolic power of their actions: by naming Wall Street, the heartland of financial capitalism, as the enemy, and by welcoming the homeless and the down-and-out to their occupation sites. And of course, the slogan "We are the 99 percent" reiterated the message that almost all of us are suffering from the reckless profiteering of a tiny handful. (In fact, they aren't far off: the increase in income of the top 1 percent over the past three decades about equals the losses of the bottom 80 percent.)
The movement's moral call is reminiscent of earlier historical moments when popular uprisings invoked ideas of a "moral economy" to justify demands for bread or grain or wages - for, that is, a measure of economic justice. Historians usually attribute popular ideas of a moral economy to custom and tradition, as when the British historian E.P. Thompson traced the idea of a "just price" for basic foodstuffs invoked by eighteenth century English food rioters to then already centuries-old Elizabethan statutes. But the rebellious poor have never simply been traditionalists. In the face of violations of what they considered to be their customary rights, they did not wait for the magistrates to act, but often took it upon themselves to enforce what they considered to be the foundation of a just moral economy.
Being Poor By the Numbers
A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call "the poor" who struggle to survive in the shadow of the over-consumption and waste of that top 1 percent.
Some facts: early in 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 14.3 percent of the population, or 47 million people - one in six Americans - were living below the official poverty threshold, currently set at $22,400 annually for a family of four. Some 19 million people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children. Indeed, more than half of all children younger than six living with a single mother are poor. Extrapolating from this data, Emily Monea and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution estimate that further sharp increases in both poverty and child poverty rates lie in our American future.
Some experts dispute these numbers on the grounds that they neither take account of the assistance that the poor still receive, mainly through the food stamp program, nor of regional variations in the cost of living. In fact, bad as they are, the official numbers don't tell the full story. The situation of the poor is actually considerably worse. The official poverty line is calculated as simply three times the minimal food budget first introduced in 1959, and then adjusted for inflation in food costs. In other words, the American poverty threshold takes no account of the cost of housing or fuel or transportation or health-care costs, all of which are rising more rapidly than the cost of basic foods. So the poverty measure grossly understates the real cost of subsistence.
Moreover, in 2006, interest payments on consumer debt had already put more than four million people, not officially in poverty, below the line, making them "debt poor." Similarly, if childcare costs, estimated at $5,750 a year in 2006, were deducted from gross income, many more people would be counted as officially poor.
Nor are these catastrophic levels of poverty merely a temporary response to rising unemployment rates or reductions in take-home pay resulting from the great economic meltdown of 2008. The numbers tell the story and it's clear enough: poverty was on the rise before the Great Recession hit. Between 2001 and 2007, poverty actually increased for the first time on record during an economic recovery. It rose from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.5 percent in 2007. Poverty rates for single mothers in 2007 were 49 percent higher in the U.S. than in 15 other high-income countries. Similarly, black employment rates and income were declining before the recession struck.
In part, all of this was the inevitable fallout from a decades-long business mobilization to reduce labor costs by weakening unions and changing public policies that protected workers and those same unions. As a result, National Labor Board decisions became far less favorable to both workers and unions, workplace regulations were not enforced, and the minimum wage lagged far behind inflation.
Inevitably, the overall impact of the campaign to reduce labor's share of national earnings meant that a growing number of Americans couldn't earn even a poverty-level livelihood - and even that's not the whole of it. The poor and the programs that assisted them were the objects of a full-bore campaign directed specifically at them.
Campaigning Against the Poor
This attack began even while the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s was in full throttle. It was already evident in the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater, as well as in the recurrent campaigns of sometime Democrat and segregationist governor of Alabama George Wallace. Richard Nixon's presidential bid in 1968 picked up on the theme.
As many commentators have pointed out, his triumphant campaign strategy tapped into the rising racial animosities not only of white southerners, but of a white working class in the north that suddenly found itself locked in competition with newly urbanized African-Americans for jobs, public services and housing, as well as in campaigns for school desegregation. The racial theme quickly melded into political propaganda targeting the poor and contemporary poor-relief programs. Indeed, in American politics "poverty," along with "welfare," "unwed mothers," and "crime," became code words for blacks.
In the process, resurgent Republicans tried to defeat Democrats at the polls by associating them with blacks and with liberal policies meant to alleviate poverty. One result was the infamous "war on drugs" that largely ignored major traffickers in favor of the lowest level offenders in inner-city communities. Along with that came a massive program of prison building and incarceration, as well as the wholesale "reform" of the main means-tested cash assistance program, Aid to Families of Dependent Children. This politically driven attack on the poor proved just the opening drama in a decades-long campaign launched by business and the organized right against workers.
This was not only war against the poor, but the very "class war" that Republicans now use to brand just about any action they don't like. In fact, class war was the overarching goal of the campaign, something that would soon enough become apparent in policies that led to a massive redistribution of the burden of taxation, the cannibalization of government services through privatization, wage cuts and enfeebled unions, and the deregulation of business, banks and financial institutions.
The poor - and blacks - were an endlessly useful rhetorical foil, a propagandistic distraction used to win elections and make bigger gains. Still, the rhetoric was important. A host of new think tanks, political organizations and lobbyists in Washington D.C. promoted the message that the country's problems were caused by the poor whose shiftlessness, criminal inclinations and sexual promiscuity were being indulged by a too-generous welfare system.
Genuine suffering followed quickly enough, along with big cuts in the means-tested programs that helped the poor. The staging of the cuts was itself enwreathed in clouds of propaganda, but cumulatively they frayed the safety net that protected both the poor and workers, especially low-wage ones, which meant women and minorities. When Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office in 1980, the path had been smoothed for huge cuts in programs for poor people, and by the 1990s the Democrats, looking for electoral strategies that would raise campaign dollars from big business and put them back in power, took up the banner. It was Bill Clinton, after all, who campaigned on the slogan "end welfare as we know it."
A Movement for a Moral Economy
The war against the poor at the federal level was soon matched in state capitols where organizations like the American Federation for Children, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Institute for Liberty and the State Policy Network went to work. Their lobbying agenda was ambitious, including the large-scale privatization of public services, business tax cuts, the rollback of environmental regulations and consumer protections, crippling public sector unions, and measures (like requiring photo identification) that would restrict the access students and the poor had to the ballot. But the poor were their main public target and again, there were real life consequences - welfare cutbacks, particularly in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, and a law-and-order campaign that resulted in the massive incarceration of black men.
The Great Recession sharply worsened these trends. The Economic Policy Institute reports that the typical working-age household, which had already seen a decline of roughly $2,300 in income between 2000 and 2006, lost another $2,700 between 2007 and 2009. And when "recovery" arrived, however uncertainly, it was mainly in low-wage industries, which accounted for nearly half of what growth there was. Manufacturing continued to contract, while the labor market lost 6.1 percent of payroll employment. New investment, when it occurred at all, was more likely to be in machinery than in new workers, so unemployment levels remain alarmingly high. In other words, the recession accelerated ongoing market trends toward lower-wage and ever more insecure employment.
The recession also prompted further cutbacks in welfare programs. Because cash assistance has become so hard to get, thanks to so-called welfare reform, and fallback state-assistance programs have been crippled, the federal food stamp program has come to carry much of the weight in providing assistance to the poor. Renamed the "Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program," it was boosted by funds provided in the Recovery Act, and benefits temporarily rose, as did participation. But Congress has repeatedly attempted to slash the program's funds, and even to divert some of them into farm subsidies, while efforts, not yet successful, have been made to deny food stamps to any family that includes a worker on strike.
The organized right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming "dependent" on government assistance, or they scrutinize government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants.
The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping - and gasp was all we did for decades. This is why we so desperately needed a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street, which has already changed the national conversation, may well be its beginning.
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch. com here.
Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is the author, along with Richard Cloward, of "Regulating the Poor and Poor People's Movements." Her latest book, just published, is "Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven? The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate."
Piven is renown for her support of the Welfare Rights Movement in the 70s-80s, and has always shared her professional and academic accomplishments on behalf of "welfare moms" like I was for so long. My heroine! ~~Linda's Hearth
Friday, November 4, 2011
Call for Solidarity from Occupy Santa Cruz for the San Lorenzo Campers.
We gather together as Occupy Santa Cruz in solidarity with the worldwide Occupy Movement. We are individuals committed to promoting justice. We have no leaders. We recognize the right of ALL voices to be heard: our diversity is a source of strength. We present a united front in our non-violent approach to addressing the problems we face and generating solutions beneficial to all. Please join us in creating a better world.
We gather 24/7 on the steps of the Superior Courthouse on Water Street.
General Assemblies are held daily at 6pm, and on Sundays at 2pm in San Lorenzo Park.
At today's "Empathy Cafe" workshop on the lawn of the courthouse, we discuss methods for strengthening our community through compassionate communication
Visits from the Santa Cruz County Sheriffs have been increasing, and in the past 24 hours, four of our occupiers were issued lodging citations for resting on the grounds of the Courthouse. Coinciding with the arrival of rainclouds, we sense an increased attempt to dismantle and silence our occupation through harassment and attrition.
The General Assembly has decided that we will hold our space, and assert our right to free speech and free assembly. We will continue to gather daily, we will continue to seek justice, we will sleep when we are tired, and we will refuse to disappear quietly.
We need, now more than ever, support from Santa Cruz and abroad. Rain shelters, warm clothes and blankets, and home cooking are as appreciated as ever. But even more importantly than that: we need your presence, your participation, and especially your vocal and public support as we continue our community-building in the face of adversity. There are an infinite multitude of ways to support this movement, and they all begin with sharing your voice.
We hold General Assemblies daily, and we look forward to conducting more workshops, more rallies, more outreach to other communities, and much more discussion of an equitable and harmonious future. Come be with us!
Mission Statement of Occupy Santa Cruz:
We gather together as Occupy Santa Cruz in solidarity with the worldwide Occupy Movement. We are individuals committed to promoting justice. We have no leaders. We recognize the right of ALL voices to be heard: our diversity is a source of strength. We present a united front in our non-violent approach to addressing the problems we face and generating solutions beneficial to all. Please join us in creating a better world.
Linda's Hearth note: a masthead for Occupy Santa Cruz website is displayed above this release. The whole world is watching.
OSC lodging tickets: Cops cite tourists
Occupy Santa Cruz protestors arrested outside court
Posted: 11/03/2011 08:49:51 PM PDT
SANTA CRUZ - Two men in their 30s were ticketed on suspicion of lodging as part of the Occupy Santa Cruz protest after deputies found them in a tent near Santa Cruz County Superior Court.
The men were from outside the county and were found about 7:30 a.m. Thursday on the Water Street side of the courthouse, said sheriff's deputy April Skalland.
Demonstrators have been camping in about 100 tents on city land at San Lorenzo Park near the courthouse. Santa Cruz police said they have not issued any tickets in the park for camping or lodging.
"People have the right to protest, but lodging's a completely different story," Skalland said.
Also Thursday, deputies ticketed a homeless man on suspicion of lodging on the grass behind the courthouse, Skalland said. He was not associated with the protest.
Linda's Hearth note: I believe April Scalland's "reasoning" will be disproved in court.
Occupy Wall Street: Sparro Kennedy Sticks Up For Homeless and Mentally "Ill" People
Sparro Kennedy Fights For Occupy Wall Street's Homeless, Mentally Ill
Before Sparro Kennedy knew it, she was grabbed and thrown to the ground. All 4 feet, 5 inches of her was sprawled out like a rag doll behind a tent in Zuccotti Park, home base for the Occupy Wall Street protests. No one reacted: not a peep, a yelp or even a gasp from the dozen or so onlookers. No one rushed to her aid or tried to chase off her attacker. They all seemed a bit bored, as if this were as a common as an uptown bus. Even her attacker stood by impotently as Kennedy wiggled slowly to her feet.
"See what I have to go through?" Kennedy said, dusting herself off.
For Kennedy it was just another day at the office, or tent rather, which serves as headquarters for the Comfort Community, where occupiers come for donated clothing, supplies or to sign up for showers. Getting into arguments, the occasional shouting match, or tussle is an everyday occurrence for Kennedy, who has waged a fight within the movement on behalf of Occupy Wall Street's most vulnerable participants: the chronically homeless and the mentally or emotionally unstable. Kennedy herself is homeless, currently living in the tent in the park that she shares with a dog and two other people.
She is a constant presence around Comfort Community and the tent city that Zuccotti Park has become. She's like a little voluble mother figure with dozens of sometimes unruly "babies," many of whom she said believe more in the movement than in taking their meds.
"There's a push to drive out the homeless and those with special needs," Kennedy said. "Our responsibility as a community is to make sure that everyone has a voice and that nobody is left behind. I'm here to make sure of that."
As Occupy Wall Street has grown, it has attracted its fair share of the chronically homeless who want to take part in the protests or who crave the food and camaraderie that hundreds of occupiers have brought to the park. Among that number are also many with special psychiatric, emotional or medical needs, Kennedy said. Some within the movement view them as troublemakers. These people, who have been marginalized in mainstream life, are being marginalized again here, Kennedy and others claim. This, she quipped, in a movement that purports to represent the 99 percent who have been victimized by American greed and all manner of corporate meanness.
She said many of the people who are leading meetings or voting on legislation for the movement do not live in the park, are not true occupiers, and only come to hoist the occasional sign or vote during meetings. (Who else would pass a rule barring sex in the park, other than those who aren't sleeping in the park? she asked.)
"We have people who are coming from everywhere, from all different types of backgrounds, all different types of educational experiences, and they are coming together, but there are still vestiges of the system that we are trying to break and a culture that we are trying to evict from our psyches," she said. "Those aspects are still present in the movement. They are using these preconceived notions and ideas to express how they feel things should be done. And that doesn't always mean what's right for everyone."
So she said she speaks loud at meetings, harangues those who won't pay attention to the needs of those who hear voices, scream out for help, or seem a bit too confused or detached for comfort. She half-joked that she has been prone to "cuss people out."
"I'm here to make sure that this movement does not leave behind the people really dealing with reality out here," Kennedy said. "Some people have lived in a bubble all of their lives. Well, now that bubble has been popped."
Late yesterday morning, Kennedy buzzed about the maze of tarpaline and tents in Zuccotti Park, dressed in an aqua-blue head wrap and turquoise leggings. She had a cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other. She was coordinating press for Comfort Community, checking on the delivery of supplies and putting out logistical and emotional fires, of which there seem to be thousands each day.
As a coordinator with Comfort Community, she helps to order supplies, field donations and make the occasional clothing run with donated money. This afternoon was to include a shopping run for shoes. She said organizing the supplies can be a major effort, with bag loads coming in daily, including some rather curious donations, like the occasional pair of stilettos or, a few weeks ago, 1,000 pairs of thong underwear in all colors and sizes.
"For a few days you saw a whole bunch of uncomfortable people walking around here," she joked.
She said she deals with the hoarders and those with other compulsions, those who feel the need to ask for "three coats, four pairs of pants and thirteen pairs of shoes, all in different sizes."
Kennedy, who said she graduated from Michigan State University a few years back, is rather evasive about her age. "I never tell, baby," she cooed.
She said she moved from New Orleans to New York in August for a cushy job as a belly dance fitness instructor at a studio in nearby Mt. Vernon, NY. Then about a month after she moved, the program was cut and she was laid off. With no paycheck and no job, Kennedy found herself homeless. Then she caught wind of Occupy Wall Street on Facebook and joined the movement in its second week.
She started off doing protest dances in the middle of the park but soon got sucked into the action. She is no stranger to activism, she said, having worked with community groups and in various sustainability actions in the past.
Though she doesn't have a job or a home with a solid roof, she said that she is happy.
"Yes, I am happy. It's crazy, but I am," she said. "I'm part of this wonderful community, this crazy family that loves and hates each other all at the same time. But we do love each other."
As she sat on a bench a few blocks from Zuccotti, eating the rare treat of a Chipotle steak burrito, her phone rang, signaling another fire to put out.
It was about Josh, a young man she suspects has Asperger's syndrome or schizophrenia, mixed with a serious case of immaturity. He had taken a bag of clothes from a volunteer at Comfort Community. A few days earlier he had stolen cash from the donation jar. The group wanted to vote him out of the community of comforters. Kennedy made her way through the camp and behind the big Comfort supply tent.
Nearly a dozen people stood around Josh, who was in his early 20s with his shoulder-length hair pulled into a pony tail.
"How many vote to have Josh leave the community?" Kennedy asked. Every hand went up. "We love you, Josh, but you have to leave our tent. We love you. But it's time for you to go."
"It's not your group, Sparro," Josh blurted out.
"You're right. It's his and his and hers, and mine," she said, pointing around to each person in the circle.
As she turned to walk away, Josh grabbed her by the collar and threw her to the ground. No one seemed surprised.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
"have you no decency? ... Turns out, not really,
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 in San Francisco Chronicle
I've been trying to think of what the Occupy Movement reminded me of. It is, as others have noted, not a particularly common sort of protest - it's worldwide now, and there seems to be no formal operational plan, and it seems to have drawn many people who would not otherwise be protesting, even on behalf of causes they believed in.
It came to me finally. It's a reference from my childhood, when Boston attorney Joseph Welch confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy over his hectoring of a young law partner of Welch's. "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
I think that is the root of it. We are accustomed to living in a capitalist system; we understand that there are winners and losers, rich people and poor people. But we did think, perhaps foolishly, that all Americans were on the same path and that a sense of common decency would restrain the banks and the brokerages and, yes, the U.S. government from destroying an at least marginally functional financial system.
But there was no decency; there was only the lust for profits. When people realized all the scams that had been perpetrated on them, whether their personal fortune or mortgage or retirement plan was at stake or not, they became embittered. The high unemployment rate, the profits that banks were still making - and their plans to bleed their customers even drier - and the willingness of the president of the people, oh please, to make the banks whole again after their obscene excesses - became the catalysts for the "at long last, have you left no sense of decency?" nationwide movement.
And it turns out: not really.
Listen to the political rhetoric. Jobs, jobs, jobs, they say. And how would these jobs be created? Tax breaks for the wealthy, a proven loser in the job creation category, but ever so attractive to the wealthy donors who make up the core constituency of both national parties. Even now, Barack Obama seems to be more interested in raising campaign funds than in confronting the malefactors.
(I am not saying that there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties, although Obama's stance on regulation is just a little muddled for the card-carrying leftie he's supposed to be. There are many social issues on which I prefer the Democratic position; Democrats don't attack scientists as money-grubbers, and one must always think of the people Obama would not nominate to the Supreme Court.)
We feel bereft. The institutions we had counted on have become ugly villains. And so, hopeful as ever, optimistic Americans, the Occupy folks have taken to the streets for the redress of grievances. They have thought to assemble peacefully, make speeches, leaflet, set up tent cities.
And of course, police came to remove the protesters against the status quo. Because the police always do, because they answer to the same big-money people that the politicians do. Jean Quan's dreadful public performance, her tone-deaf statements, her cowardly retreat at exactly the wrong moment, was so sad, particularly when she said, in the aftermath of her police riot, "Oakland is a progressive city."
(Oh, poor Oakland, why hath God forsaken thee? Two bad mayors in a row, and not a lot of strength sitting on the bench. My hometown never can catch a break.)
Occupy is basically a middle-class movement, I think, and mainly white. This is not one of those protests where black ministers take up most of the time on the podium. Maybe African Americans are just unsurprised by the depredations of banks and brokerages, and don't see how a march can change anything. And they may, of course, be right.
Maybe a lot of prosperous humans thought they were too big to fail, but they weren't. Their supposed allies on Wall Street were merely panderers. The supposed agreement between provider and customer was believed to provide a modicum of security. But at long last, it turned out that they had no decency.
A lesson I learned early, back when I was protesting and vigiling to beat the band, is that no one in authority cares about redress of grievances - unless said grievances are submitted in writing at least three weeks before the next meeting. Disorder makes them nervous. The presence of unauthorized people makes them nervous. So inevitably they will stand with the forces of the status quo, whether or not their personal interests match those of the authorities they're protecting.
But democracy should be occasionally disorderly. It should enlist the power of the people to protect the people. More Thursday.
The Occupy Movement continues, in better order and with more sincerity than the government.
Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou has seen jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page E - 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/01/DDFQ1LOIU2.DTL#ixzz1cb0xfBis
Legal Eagle Ally Asks Board of Supes to Honor and Support Occupy Santa Cruz
RESOLUTION IN SUPPORT OF OCCUPY SANTA CRUZ
(Linda's Hearth: presumed DRAFT until this parenthetical disappears)
WHEREAS, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors in its representative capacity serves to support and foster those values and beliefs held by the people of Santa Cruz County and,
WHEREAS, Santa Cruz County has a long and cherished tradition of preserving and defending the individual rights and civil liberties of all those who work and strive for social justice; and
WHEREAS, it has been and remains the policy of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department to support and protect the principles of free speech and freedom of assembly so cherished by our community, and
WHEREAS, Occupy Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department have been and continue to be engaged in a cooperative and respectful dialogue to address the rights and concerns of the all members of our community and,
WHEREAS, it is the sense of the Board of Supervisors that our community is alarmed and concerned about the recent events in the City of Oakland and,
WHEREAS, Occupy Santa Cruz is committed to a philosophy and mission of nonviolence in pursuit of its goals, and
WHEREAS, Occupy Santa Cruz has galvanized our community in an unprecedented action that reflects the finest principles of free speech and freedom of assembly,
BE IT HEREBY RESOLVED that the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors supports the efforts of Occupy Santa Cruz to peacefully work for social justice and create true economic change.
(Linda's Hearth: presumed DRAFT until this parenthetical disappears)
WHEREAS, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors in its representative capacity serves to support and foster those values and beliefs held by the people of Santa Cruz County and,
WHEREAS, Santa Cruz County has a long and cherished tradition of preserving and defending the individual rights and civil liberties of all those who work and strive for social justice; and
WHEREAS, it has been and remains the policy of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department to support and protect the principles of free speech and freedom of assembly so cherished by our community, and
WHEREAS, Occupy Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department have been and continue to be engaged in a cooperative and respectful dialogue to address the rights and concerns of the all members of our community and,
WHEREAS, it is the sense of the Board of Supervisors that our community is alarmed and concerned about the recent events in the City of Oakland and,
WHEREAS, Occupy Santa Cruz is committed to a philosophy and mission of nonviolence in pursuit of its goals, and
WHEREAS, Occupy Santa Cruz has galvanized our community in an unprecedented action that reflects the finest principles of free speech and freedom of assembly,
BE IT HEREBY RESOLVED that the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors supports the efforts of Occupy Santa Cruz to peacefully work for social justice and create true economic change.
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First Posted: 11/3/11 12:50 PM ET Updated: 11/3/11 03:31 PM ET