It is not the job of the protesters to draft legislation. That’s the job of the nation’s leaders, and if they had been doing it all along there might not be a need for these marches and rallies. Because they have not, the public airing of grievances is a legitimate and important end in itself. It is also the first line of defense against a return to the Wall Street ways that plunged the nation into an economic crisis from which it has yet to emerge.
Tag Archives: activism
Protesters Against Wall Street – NYTimes.com
Posted in How To Win
Tagged #occupywallstreet, activism, activist example, new york times
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Tim DeChristopher speaks from prison
Letter from prison: Tim DeChristopher speaks
The following text appeared in a handwritten letter from Tim DeChristopher addressed to Grist’s Jennifer Prediger.
If I had ever doubted the power of words, Judge Benson made their importance all too clear at my sentencing last month. When he sentenced me to two years in prison plus three years probation, he admitted my offense “wasn’t too bad.” The problem, Judge Benson insisted, was my “continuing trail of statements” and my lack of regret. Apparently, all he really wanted was an apology, and for that, two years in prison could have been avoided. In fact, Judge Benson said that had it not been for the political statements I made in public, I would have avoided prosecution entirely. As is generally the case with civil disobedience, it was extremely important to the government that I come before the majesty of the court with my head bowed and express regret. So important, in fact, that an apology with proper genuflection is currently fair trade for a couple years in prison. Perhaps that’s why most activist cases end in a plea bargain.
Since that seems like such a good deal, some people are asking why I wasn’t willing to shut my mouth and take it. But perhaps we should be asking why the government is willing to make such a deal. The most recent plea bargain they offered me was for as little as 30 days in jail. (I’m writing this on my 28th day.) So if they wanted to lock me up for two years, why would they let me walk for an apology and keeping my mouth shut for a while? On the other hand, if they wanted to sweep this under the rug, why would they cause such a stir by locking me up? Why do my words make that much of a difference?With all criminal cases, of which 85 percent end in a plea bargain, the government has a strong incentive to avoid a trial: In addition to cutting the expense of a trial, a plea bargain helps concentrate power in the hands of government officials.
The revolutionaries who founded this country were deeply distrustful of a concentration of power, so among other precautions, they established citizen juries as the most important part of our legal system and insisted upon constitutional right to a jury trial. To avoid this inconvenience, those seeking concentrated power free from revolutionaries have minimized the role of citizens in our legal system. They have accomplished this by restricting what juries can hear, what they can decide upon, and most importantly, by avoiding jury trials all together. It is now accepted as a basic fact of our criminal justice system that a defendant who exercises his or her right to a jury trial will be punished at sentencing for doing so. Transferring power from citizens to government happens when the role of citizens gets eliminated in the process.
With civil disobedience cases, however, the government puts an extra value on an apology. By its very nature, civil disobedience is an act whose message is that the government and its laws are not the sole voice of moral authority. It is a statement that we the citizens recognize a higher moral code to which the law is no longer aligned, and we invite our fellow citizens to recognize the difference. A government truly of the people, for the people, and by the people is not threatened by citizens issuing such a challenge. But government whose authority depends on an ignorant or apathetic citizenry is threatened by every act of open civil disobedience, no matter how small. To regain that tiny piece of authority, the government either has to respond to the activist’s demands, or get the activist to back down with a public statement of regret. Otherwise, those little challenges to the moral authority of government start to add up.
Over the last couple hundred years of quelling dissent, the government has learned a few things about maintaining power. Sometimes it seems that the government has learned more from our social movement history than we as activists have. Their willingness to let a direct action off with a slap on the wrist while handing out two years for political statements comes from their understanding of the power of an individual. They know that one person, or even a small group, cannot have enough of a direct impact on our corporate giants to really alter things in our economy. They know that a single person can’t have a meaningful direct impact on our political system. But our modern government is dismantling the First Amendment because they understand the very same thing our founding fathers did when they wrote it: What one person can do is to plant the seeds of love and outrage in the hearts of a movement. And if those hearts are fertile ground, those seeds of love and outrage will grow into a revolution.
Tim DeChristopher is a climate activist and cofounder of Peaceful Uprising. He has been beatified as a saint in the Church of Earthalujah by the Reverend Billy and convicted as a felon by the United States Government. Each of those honors were earned by disrupting a Utah BLM oil and gas auction in December 2008, in which Tim registered as Bidder 70 and outbid the oil companies. When Tim embarks on a government-sponsored writing retreat later this year, he will continue sending dispatches to Grist.
via Grist
#OccupyWallStreet Bleeds and Leads
Here is an interesting article from Waging Nonviolence about Occupy Wall Street.
A bit after 10 p.m. on Saturday night in occupied Liberty Plaza, there was a celebration around the media tables. Photocopied facsimiles of Sunday’s New York Daily News were being passed around and photographed. After having held the plaza with hundreds of protesters at any given time for a week, and having kept the blocks surrounding the Stock Exchange barricaded by police all the while, the protest was finally getting serious news coverage.
“The Daily News!” I heard someone say on the plaza. “It’s because this is a sustained occupation.”
Exclaimed one of those doing media relations, “We’ve already won!”
Just a few hours earlier, it seemed certain that a full-on police dispersal would come that night. Contingency plans were being discussed by the protesters’ General Assembly. But now the Daily News cover and the presence of TV vans seemed like guardian angels, ensuring that they’d make it until morning.
So what occasioned the media’s sudden interest? To what do these protesters, who purport to represent “the 99 percent” of Americans disenfranchised by a corrupt corporate and political elite, owe these headlines?
Police violence, of course.
Marking the one-week anniversary of the beginning of the occupation, a large march was planned for noon on Saturday. Several hundred marchers paraded around the plaza to their favorite chant, “All Day, All Week! Occupy Wall Street!” They then headed down to the Wall Street area, where police arrested several of them, including filmmaker Marisa Holmes. From there, the march continued up to Union Square, two and a half miles north. It arrived there, then turned south again toward Liberty Plaza. Around 3 p.m., near Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, the police attacked. Unrolling plastic orange barriers, they isolated a crowd of marchers, along with the reporters following them, and began mass arrests for blocking traffic. This was a brutal process. Caught on cameras were scenes of one protester being dragged by her hair, others being slammed into the pavement, and a group of women, netted and helpless, being downed by pepper spray. In total, police say they arrested 80 people. With not enough room for them in vans, many were taken away in regular city buses. The march thereafter dispersed, and those who weren’t arrested made their way back to Liberty Plaza.
In an article that recounts as many gory details as will fit, the Daily News devotes only two short paragraphs to what the protest is actually about and what protesters have been doing all this time: “attempting to draw attention to what they believe is a dysfunctional economic system that unfairly benefits corporations and the mega-rich.” True, but too little. The real story for the Daily News, it seems, is not this unusual kind of protest, or the political situation which it opposes, but the chance to have the word “busted” on the cover next to the cleavage of a woman crying out in pain.
ABC’s Channel 7 Eyewitness News, despite being one of the day’s most zealously-persistent outlets, ran a doubly fallacious headline Sunday morning: “Occupy Wall Street Protest Gets Violent Overnight.” For one thing, the protest itself did not get violent. Protesters attacked nobody. They threw no stones, they carried no weapons. The police got violent. Secondly, the arrests and violence did not happen “overnight” but during the day—an error the article repeats several times. This seems especially odd since the Channel 7 reporter and cameraman were witnesses to what did happen during the night, which their article confusingly splices in with an account of the day’s arrests: a mainly silent, completely peaceful vigil march on the sidewalk to Police Plaza to ask after the protesters arrested that afternoon—with locked arms and peace signs held high—accompanied the whole time by officers carrying orange nets, followed menacingly by empty police vans, and barricaded several times from reaching their destination.
While protesters were stopped at a barricade at Canal and Elizabeth Streets, Channel 7 reporter Darla Miles showed the picture of a protester with his face covered in blood on her Blackberry to help persuade the police to give an update on him. (She was careful to keep it away from the cameras of those who might be able to help publicize it: “Channel 7 News property!”) But they were gone by the time the protesters finally made it near Police Plaza, calling out in unison, “Our Brothers! And Sisters! You Are Not Forgotten!” as well as the phone number of the National Lawyers Guild, eliciting some chuckles from the police.
Soberer outlets missed the point as well. What the Associated Press and Reuters saw was something along the lines of a typical one-day march-in-the-streets protest, only mysteriously happening over more than a single day. They barely mention the sustained occupation of Liberty Plaza, much less what has been happening there and why. The New York Times’s Ginia Bellafante at least took the time to visit the plaza, though she doesn’t seem to have stayed long enough to notice its main activity, the General Assembly. There, she would have found that the protesters’ purpose is anything but “impossible to decipher”; they’re busy taking part in a purposely-leaderless, consensus-based process based on people, not money, right in the capital of American corruption.
None of these articles captures what is distinctive about this occupation, or how it works, or what the protesters are doing for most of the day, or the courage they have shown in the face of the brutality. These are common oversights in press coverage of nonviolent resistance movements, but that doesn’t mean there’s any excuse.
The thing is, there are tremendous things happening in and around Liberty Plaza, stories in which these mainly-young protesters are anything but passive recipients of police abuse. I’ve already written about the arrests of protesters like Jason Ahmadi and Justin Wedes, who were also portrayed as victims in the media, but who in fact were arrested on their own terms, for simple, peaceful acts of resistance. One could also speak of the stories of how those arrested on Saturday kept each other’s spirits high by singing and chanting together and trying to woo the police while they were being taken away in plastic cuffs. Watch, for instance, between 1:25 to 3:15 on this clip from the occupation’s 24-hour livestream:
There’s a story, too, in the wake of every arrest or other shocking incident, when the protesters’ habitual response is not despair (at least for long), but dialogue: a meeting. It’s a story I still haven’t seen in mainstream reports, yet it goes straight to the heart of what the protest is about.
I also think of things that happened before major news outlets were paying much attention, at times when the watchful crowds were away. At about 9:15 p.m. on Sunday the 18th, for instance, came one of the first police incursions into the plaza, during a General Assembly meeting. I have yet to see it recounted anywhere. The officers ordered, through protesters reporting to the Assembly, that all signs be taken down. There was a fractious reaction at first. Some thought it a reasonable request and wanted to comply. Others refused on principle, not wanting to be taking orders from the police. People made speeches on either side. There were defiant chants of “Occupy Wall Street!” Some took it upon themselves to remove signs, and others tried to stop them, such as by shouting. There were whispers that undercover cops were sowing divisions—though it hardly seemed like the protesters needed any help with that. Just when unity was needed, it wasn’t there. Officers started taking down posters themselves while protesters chanted, “Shame!”
The focal point of it all became a spot in the middle of the eastern edge of the plaza, along Broadway. Several protesters—men and women, young and older—decided to sit down there in front of a Socialist Workers Party poster (whose affiliation has since been stripped from it) that says, “A JOB IS A RIGHT! CAPITALISM DOESN’T WORK.” Others tried to get them to move, but they wouldn’t. The police didn’t move them either. Their willingness to sacrifice, it seems, solved the problem. There were no gory arrests. The sign remained as long as they did, police and fellow protesters withdrew, and the meeting continued.
Events like these are messy, and they’re far from entirely flattering, but they’re human. Properly told, they have the makings of a good story. Reporting accurately and critically on police violence is of course essential—Colin Moynihan of The New York Times has done so extremely well on the paper’s City Room blog—but that is only a small part of the story of what’s going on here. We in the press need to think more highly of our readers, as well as of our own ability to report on stories that don’t depend simply on the shock value of violence, or on cheap-shot ridicule, or on stifling formulas. For many Americans, nonviolent direct actions like this occupation are the best hope for having a political voice, and they deserve to be taken seriously as such.
Get Loud, Move Quickly, and Shifting Focus
I love stuff like this because of the metaphors it supplies.
I’m not a fighter. I haven’t been in anything close to a fight in 15 years. I’m resistant to the idea of fighting, and fear fantasies where I would need this (knock on wood) though being prepared… blah blah blah. But I like how these principles can be applied to non-violent creative activism.
- Get Loud – This is the element of surprise. It makes you seem more powerful than you actually are, stuns your subject, and puts them off guard. In terms of non-violent creative activism, how can you use the element of surprise? How can you metaphorically (or literally) get loud?
- Move Quickly – if you remain stationary, you’re an easier target. Our subjects are smart, and can adapt to our tactics if they stay the same. As creative activists, how can we remain in motion with our ideas and actions?
- Shifting Focus – redirect attention, or changing the frame. Don’t try to beat your opponent at their game, or work with what suits them best. When your opponent is focused on one area, you strike at another causing a mental shift. These are valuable concepts. How can your creative action change the frame, shift focus, or engage in a way your subject is not prepared for?
Towards the end, the hosts asks about fear and Redenbach’s answer has a wonderful moment. If, when something goes wrong, you “erroneously interpret it as ‘this is proof that I can’t deal with it’ you actually go into a negative spiral.” And what prevents that? Education and preparation.
Creative militancy meets militant creativity
Police protect people from books
By Sarah Amsler Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) via the Huffington Post
Under what might now need to be termed comparatively normal circumstances, I have often agonised over helping my students understand the practical significance of critical theory. They ask, but what can one actually do with Herbert Marcuse today? In a scheduled class, it all feels so remote.
Now I can say, look: his work is a defense against injustice. Or in the more eloquent words of the London Book Bloc, inspired by its Italian counterpart, “books are our tools — we teach with them, we learn with them, we play with them, we create with them, we make love with them and, sometimes, we must fight with them.” In today’s fourth, most passionate and most ungoverned national demonstration against the British government’s wholesale privatization of higher education, books-as-shields replaced pens-as-swords. Creative militancy meets militant creativity, and this may be one of the most defining characteristics of the emerging student movement. It distinguishes it not only from the Chartist and 68er forebears to whom students increasingly refer, but also from many of the more traditionally rationalist responses of the most committed, but still institutionally invested, professional academics.
The photograph of students marching down the streets of London behind body-sized book shields entitled “One-Dimensional Man, Negative Dialectics, Catch-22 and Deschooling Society” is worth more than a thousand words; the image of a police officer pushing back an oversized edition of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is simply too ironic to be called so. The accomplishments of the performance are breathtaking. Wrenched from the abstractions of formalized education, with all but the barest of text abolished from view, social theory is materialized not only in practice, but as practice. By visualizing immaterial value, students restore to the figure of the book a gravitas that years of digitization and commodification have depleted. They do not shield themselves behind knowledge, but hold before them the symbolic promise of all the radical traditions of oppositional knowledge and politics signified through these works. The resulting spectacle of oppression is profound: students communicate symbolically the intellectual and cultural violence of the state’s abdication of education, and the authorities, ridiculously, actually interpellate themselves.
The material-symbolic warfare of the book blocs is only one example of the new type of creative militancy, or militant creativity, now developing apace amongst British students, particularly in England where the attack on universities has been most severe. It has been marked even by the mainstream media, which published photo galleries of students’ handmade placards displayed at “Day X,” the first national anti-cuts and fees demonstration. The surprise was indicative: it seemed that no grown-ups thought students had much creative energy at all. So, when they showed up covered in Monopoly money carrying a sign saying “do I look like I’m made out of money?,” or dressed in bowler hats and bow ties carrying photos of David Cameron that read “this man has Eton my future,” or even simple sideways-held notebooks scribbled with “I can’t even afford a sign” and “where are your humanities?,” people took note. These kids know language. They say: we are not post-ideological. Even more importantly, though, their word games do not have quite the same fully carnival-esque spirit of some of the recent alter-globalization and Reclaim the Street protests, although the anti-privatization demonstrations often do involve singing, dancing, and hastily organized brass bands. There is rather a different kind of urgency about them: the performances are intended to entertain and educate, but also to defend and offend. The tradition of reclaiming space and time, of displacing the seriousness of the political, is growing well here, but in new conditions where cultural production must serve the needs of physical struggle as well as symbolic rupture.
But the students are clearly reading their shield-books as well, and insight into other practices of creative militancy leaks out daily from occupied lecture halls and buildings through frenetic drips on twitter, blogs and online publications. Theories of how to reclaim and transform the university, or the idea of it. Theories of how to transcend it. Theories of how to begin to imagine something that is both radically alternative, and radically inclusive. And then there is practice. Practices, yes, of occupation and autonomous movement; of learning to radicalise the colonial gaze by exploiting its knowledge of oneself to anticipate, and thwart, one’s own confinement; of deploying critical research and argumentation to sway deeply held convictions, or deeply rooted attachments to power. But there is also practice, in the sense of an art and craft of resistance, of not being governed thus, by them, in this way, and etc. At the School of Oriental and African Studies, this week’s teach-in was followed by a day-long teach-out; as an attempt to “break out of the university bubble” the organizers offered a “massive symbolic lecture” at the Euston train station, distributing their own, utopian, Evening Substandard. People stopped to listen, both to the lectures and to the drums. All this with the intention, in the words of the already intrepid public-pedagogical University for Strategic Optimism, which stages five-minute occupation lectures in banks and shopping malls, to “educate your markets if you marketize our education.” It’s only been a few weeks, and already they are succeeding.
Tonight, the UK news media was for the first time in my memory dominated by the serious voices of students, on the streets, in debates with government ministers, performing their new possibilities. In England they now talk openly about bringing down much more than university tuition fees. They can sing, dance, speak — and they understand critical theory, as well as know how to shelter behind it. Perhaps there is hope for a new education and a new politics after all.
Miami's Community Avengers
Have No Fear the Community Avengers are Here!
As the right wing mob mobilizes to shut down democratic debate on health care reform; as Van Jones is forced from the White House through distortions of the truth and plays on racial and political fears; as the recession deepens – the masked marauders known as the Community Avengers are swooping in to save the day.
The Community Avengers are a team of residents from Miami who are standing up in these trying times, calling out the criminal bankers, and inspiring action. They have been spotted tumbling out of a van at a recent Miami Dade County budget hearing, moving into the seething crowd and taking to task politicians with their lively chants and street theater. After mixing with all those malcontented with proposed cuts to the Miami Dade County budget, the Community Avengers did a double header and headed over to a health care town hall for a show down with the riled up right wing.
Just this week the Community Avengers joined forces with residents and pastors from Miami Gardens to fight back against banks bent on eviction rather than loan modification.
Always on call to do battle with the villains of bad government and corporate greed, the Community Avengers rallied to support an ordinance that would sanction foreclosing banks.
Click here to read more about this action: http://tinyurl.com/Communityavengers
It is time for progressive people everywhere to learn a lesson from the Community Avengers. Let’s creatively mobilize and call out the culprits across the country. Where right wing pundits play on irrational fears, we will be there. Where greedy bankers rob our people, we will be there. Where government bows to a marginal and maniac minority, we will be there.
You too can be a Community Avenger!
- Joseph Phelan, Miami Workers Center
Posted in How To Win
Tagged action, activism, activist example, comedy, humor, media, performance, politics, popular culture, pranks, resistance, showmanship, street, stunts, theater
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The power of the symbolic win (do-over)
apparently I added the wrong video the last time I tried to do this, so let me try again.
Mainly for Jay and Duncombe. I think at the core, one of the things he’s talking about, is if all that work getting Obama elected actually mattered…
Posted in How To Win
Tagged activism, activist example, perceptions, politics, symbols
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Utah Student Wrecks Federal Land Auction
This guy is great. He saw an opportunity and jumped on it, disrupting a corrupt auction, costing major corporations money, and drawing attention to an issue that easily could have been buried under the mountain of year-end top 10 lists and countless other examples of Bush Administration corruption.
What started out as a spur of the moment prank is now developing into a more developed plot that could actually save the land from development instead of just delaying the sale. De Christopher also has some quotes from his interview with Amy Goodman that show while his action wasn’t premeditated, it was the result of a line of thinking very much in line with the ideas of “How to Win.”
via: Democracy Now
“I saw some protesters walking back and forth outside, and I knew that I wanted to do more than that and that this kind of injustice demanded a higher level of disruption. And so, I just decided that I wanted to go inside and cause a bigger disruption.
And from there, I found it really easy to get inside and become a bidder, and went inside and was in the auction room. And once I was in there, I realized that any kind of speech or disruption or something like that wasn’t going to be very effective, but I saw pretty quickly that I could have a pretty major impact on the way this worked. And it just took me a little bit of time to build up the courage to do that, knowing what the consequences would be. And so, I started bidding and started driving up the prices for some of the oil companies. And throughout that time, I knew that I could be doing more and could really set aside some acres to really be protected. And so, then I started winning bids and disrupting it as clearly as I could. ”
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Candy Raver Russian Revolutionaries
Not everyone has much faith in art-activism, but you can’t please ‘em all. Do symbolic protests accomplish anything more than raising morale for the protesters? If not is it enough to simply raise morale? Or do actions like this War prank create temporary autonomous zones and manifest, albeit briefly, the type of reality the activists desire to live in? Maybe today’s protesters just don’t believe violent resistance is a viable strategy and it’s better to moon the oligarchy than throw bombs at their carriages. Maybe Laser Tag is the new moltov.
Also where were the parliment guards when this went down? You shoot a laser beam at Congress and it’s Guantanamo time here in the good ol’ USA. Nice to know there’s still some Dukes of Hazard style parity in Russia.
via: Exiled Online
Last weekend (Nov. 7 actually–ed), a Russian anarchist revolutionary art group called War pulled a fast one on Prime Minister Putin. Or at least they thought they did. Russian revolutionaries sure do fall far from the tree these days.
On the night of November 7, a group of them set up a laser on top of a building across the river from the Russian White House — that’s the place where the prime minister carries out daily his business — and projected a 150-ft. wide toxic green skull and bones on its facade. But the protest didn’t end there. While a laser was sweeping across the building, a half-dozen people were scaling the building’s 20-ft. front gate. But they revolutionaries didn’t linger, staying on hostile territory long enough to pose for a few photos and a quick Rocky victory jog up the stairs. They were in and out so fast, the cops didn’t have enought time arrive at the scene. Take that Vladimir Vladimirovich! (More pictures below.)
The stunt was meant to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, with the laser beam symbolically standing in for the revolutionary signal shot fired from the Aurora cruiser. My first thought was, “Cool!” But then I thought, “Whoa! Are Russian revolutionaries going candy raver?” I mean, this was one of those non-violent and non-confrontational attempts at political change through art. Laser art, probably to techno. It really put Russia’s rich history of revolutionary violence to shame.
Posted in How To Win
Tagged activism, activist example, art, art example, comedy, politics, pranks, stunts
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Bill Ayers on Fresh Air
Bill Ayers on Fresh Air with Terry Gross
This is an except from the end of the interview that I thought was relevant to the questions we’re asking in How to Win.
Gross: Do you think some of the tactics that you took on were in some part this youthful expression of anger, something that only a young person would do?
Ayers: Absolutely.
Gross: What fits into that category?
Ayers: Well I think that you’re caught up in a street demonstration and you are young and full of fire and you just spontaneously find yourself spilling onto the streets. Leaving the line of march. And deciding to throw a rock at the window of a military recruiter. That’s spontaneous opposition. It’s not well thought out, um, but it makes a certain amount of sense but it’s not part of a larger strategy that’s thought through.
Gross: Is there a level of doubt that you feel when you were young you didn’t allow yourself to entertain because you had to feel so committed to the cause and what your plan was that you couldn’t allow certain doubts to enter your mind?
Ayers: Yeah I think that I live with doubt today, every day, all the time. And it is different than being young and certain and jacking yourself up to do certain things. I argue to my students, I argue to young people all the time that you cannot live a political life – you can’t live a moral life – if you’re not willing top open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that’s going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world.
And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.
And when you act, you have a responsibility to doubt.
And when you doubt, you can’t get paralyzed. You have to use that doubt to act again. And that then becomes the cycle. You open your eyes, you act, you doubt, you act, you doubt.
Without doubt you become dogmatic and shrill and stupid.
But without action, you become cynical and passive and a victim of history. And that should never happen.
P.S. If you haven’t seen the Academy Award nominated Weather Underground documentary, I highly recommend it. You can watch it in its entirety below:
Posted in How To Win
Tagged activism, activist example, doubt, evaluation, failure, perceptions, politics
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