4/30/2012

Occupy Wall Street: Back, But Does Anyone Care?

So true!
Occupy Wall Street: Back, But Does Anyone Care?

Posted By: Jeff Cox | CNBC.com Senior Writer

CNBC.com

| 30 Apr 2012 | 02:13 PM ET

After spending 2011 near the top of the news headlines, Occupy Wall Street finds itself in a struggle to regain relevance as a grassroots protest against corporate greed and Washington corruption.

The movement hopes to regain some of its mojo Tuesday, when it stages a nationwide May Day protest and celebration that will focus on a broad agenda of causes it hopes to push.

But with neither presidential candidate paying much attention to the OWS faction and the bloody protests in Europe seemingly quelled for the time being, this is a pivotal moment for the Occupy movement either to regain its footing, or risk being dismissed as a non-factor in the national dialogue.

"They lost relevance a little bit. A lot of people felt like it wasn't going anywhere," says filmmaker Emil Chiaberi, who wrote, produced and directed "Murder by Proxy: How America Went Postal," a documentary that explores the motivations — and extremes — of protest movements that predated Occupy Wall Street or its conservative twin, the tea party.

"This whole idea of let's just protest the corporate greed — yeah, but what are you trying to accomplish?" Chiaberi adds. "How are you going to affect change?"

Primarily, the group hopes to get noticed again simply by getting busy.

Though Occupiers have held small demonstrations this Spring around the New York Stock Exchange, Tuesday's May Day effort marks the year's first coordinated nationwide event.

In New York, events include a kickoff at 8 am in Bryant Park of a "Pop-Up Occupation," followed by a Free University in Madison Square Park at 10 am. At 2 pm, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello leads a march from Bryant Park to Union Square.

Later in the day, there will be a Solidarity Rally in Union Square at 4, followed at 5:30 pm by another march "into the heart of corporate corruption on Wall Street," according to the maydayncy.org Web site.

Similar events last year drew heavy media coverage but not always huge crowds. Weekend gatherings tended to be more raucous and well-attended, while weekday protests, such as the Upper East Side march in front of several Wall Street kingpins' homes, attracted noisy but relatively small crowds.

Occupiers often complained about how the mainstream media covered their protests, focusing more on arrests and uproar than the actual message being conveyed.

A group of alternative media outlets has bonded this year to make sure the OWS message is heard without distortion.

"We were worried that corporate media tends to focus on arrests, on police action, on violence, because it makes really great TV," says Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, a spokeswoman for "Media for the 99 Percent," a group that has coined a popular OWS motto to demonstrate the type of coverage it plans. OWS claims it represents the 99 percent of Americans not in the ruling class.

"We will be tracking arrests, but our interest is really in understanding why these protests are happening now and what they're trying to accomplish," she says. "When you have hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people, who are volunteering their own time to be a part of a protest movement, who are willing to camp outside, who are willing to attend mind-numbing General Assemblies, for hours on end — we want to understand why people are doing that."

The media group entails indie outlets like Yes! Magazine and AlterNet, as well as more recognizable names like The Nation and Mother Jones.

Kaiser said the outlets are undeterred by the notion that adopting the "99 Percent" moniker might betray a bias of their own.

"The difference isn't that we're taking a side, the difference is we can offer more perceptive coverage because we are more interested in the context," she said. "The one place where we are very sympathetic with Occupy is, honestly, we feel that we're fighting a battle against corporate media."

OWS also will face some other constraints with which it is well familiar — the New York Stock Exchange is planning stepped-up security, while the city police department also is prepared to make sure the protesters don't get out of hand.

More than that, though, the movement confronts the challenge of making sure its message doesn't get lost. While the OWS message that Wall Street has damaged the national economy through reckless greed certainly garners sympathy, OWS often is faulted for offering little alternative.

"No one even thinks about asking the question as to why every country in the world protects its banking system," banking analyst Dick Bove of Rochdale Securities said. "The answer, of course, is because the banking system holds the key to the health of middle to small business and the people they employ."

May Day, then, provides both an opportunity and a challenge for OWS to show it still matters.

"Even if the movement itself is losing relevance, what's relevant are the feelings, emotions and concepts that brought those people together in the first place," says Chiaberi, the filmmaker. "If Occupy Wall Street dissipates or loses relevance, something else inevitably will appear in its stead. I hope it will morph into something more organized."

URL: http://www.cnbc.com/id/47233587/

4/27/2012

MSNBC at it again

Stupidity masquerading as journalism.

The picture that she is talking about is here:
http://weaselzippers.us/2012/01/27/msnbc-analyst-compares-jan-brewers-confrontation-with-obama-to-segregation-era-racist-screaming-at-black-kids/

OWS and its liberal democrat assocation

For any idiot who claims that OWS is not aligned with any political party, the association of moveon.org with OWS shows that OWS is lying.

How Occupy Co-Opted MoveOn.org

The 99% Spring campaign trains gray-haired progressives to ditch their internet petitions and take to the streets.

By Josh Harkinson | Fri Apr. 13, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

If you're one of the millions of people who get emails from MoveOn.org [1], then you've probably heard of the "99% Spring." Far from another clickable internet petition, it is possibly the largest attempt ever to train people in nonviolent protest techniques. Some Occupy types have criticized the effort as a scheme by Democratic operatives to co-opt their movement [2]. But the reality is probably the opposite: It seems that America's best-known progressive fundraising organization is now taking its cues from Occupy Wall Street.

I didn't know what to think of the 99% Spring [3] until I stopped by a three-hour training session—one of more than 900 being held nationwide this week—at a Unitarian church in San Francisco. My presumption was that the 60 or so gray-haired attendees would be interested in supporting Democratic candidates—after all, the event was cosponsored by the Progressive Democrats of San Francisco—but many seemed just as disillusioned with electoral politics as the folks who took over New York City's Zuccotti Park this past fall. "I believed Obama when he said he would change things and he didn't, so I quit the Democratic Party," said one middle-aged MoveOn member who asked that I not use her name. She went on to talk about about how "the deck is stacked" and "voting doesn't work anymore." She'd come to the training looking for a new way to get involved.

"It's clear that the sorts of tactics we've engaged in in the past are no longer enough," Justin Ruben, MoveOn's Executive Director, wrote in an email to his staff last week, arguing that the growing corporate influence on policy-making has left the group little choice but to take to the streets. In a subsequent interview with Mother Jones, he added, "We know that whoever wins in November, they are still going to be listening more to the 1 percent than to the rest of us because our political system is completely broken. So we don't have the luxury of not engaging in this kind of action."

"MoveOn needs some co-opting," says 99% Spring trainer David King, "because they got co-opted a few years back."

David King, a social worker who led the training I attended, told me he wanted to see MoveOn focus less on electoral politics and more on Occupy-style activism. "MoveOn needs some co-opting," he said, "because they got co-opted a few years back."

The session began with a slick video urging trainees to break into small groups and share their personal stories. Then came a condensed history of American social movements, followed by drills on nonviolent protest strategies. At no point did trainers suggest that their students get involved in specific political actions. "It was a really important piece for me that this wasn't trying to funnel people into one campaign and wasn't trying to funnel people into electoral politics," said Sam Corbin, a veteran member of Occupy Wall Street's Direct Action Working Group who agreed to star in the training video. "When they said we want to talk about 'people power' and making people understand and be comfortable with direct action, they meant it. I am really proud to have been part of it."

Like their Occupy counterparts, organizers of 99% Spring are loath to admit that anyone is leading the effort.

Over the past six weeks, the 99% Spring has gone from an idea batted around on lefty email lists to a full-bore collaboration between dozens of activist groups, who, just like Occupy Wall Street, are loath to admit that any one of them is leading the effort. In addition to MoveOn, the coalition includes most of the nation's largest labor unions, environmental groups like Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network, and grittier Occupy allies like New Bottom Line and the Working Families Party. MoveOn contributed some its staff, access to its 7 million members, and use of its sophisticated web platform, where it will host online trainings next week.

Since fall, MoveOn has struggled to figure out how to ally itself with the Occupy movement. Though it donated tents and sleeping bags during Occupy's Zuccotti Park phase, the movement's radicals still tend to write off the group as an arm of the Democratic Party. At a December gathering of Occupy groups in DC, a tearful MoveOn council member from Connecticut complained that she'd been getting emails from people in her state "that we are not welcome at the Occupies there."
While tensions remain, the 99% Spring might be a more natural way for MoveOn and similar groups to make friends with Occupy. Ruben says the coalition will eventually connect its trainees with Occupy-friendly actions such as protests at corporate shareholder meetings, defenses of foreclosed homes, and campaigns that encourage people to switch to credit unions over big banks. But it won't recruit them to work on elections, despite what is likely to be a nail-biter presidential race.
Not that MoveOn's participation in the effort will hurt its everyday electoral efforts. Ruben points to the role of Occupy in the GOP primaries, where none other than Newt Gingrich attacked Mitt Romney as a heartless capitalist. "The power of a relatively small group of people to shine a light on these issues that the whole political class would rather ignore just by virtue of their bravery and their moral clarity and willingness to put their bodies on the line—that's always how justice is moved forward in America," he says. "It's on us to figure out how to support it in every way we can."

"Are we going to stray out of our comfort zones and take some direct action together?" coaxed an elderly woman.

Of course, MoveOn could have simply directed its members toward their local Occupy groups, which have been holding direct action trainings from the start (see "Meet Professor Occupy [4]," my profile of activist Lisa Fithian), but Ruben felt that the 99% Spring needed to move beyond Occupy Wall Street if it wanted to train 100,000 people in a couple of weeks time. Aiming large also allowed the coalition to attract people who might feel uncomfortable sucking tear gas fumes—like a 72-year-old retired car salesman I met at the San Francisco training, who showed up to see whether he should "spend my time volunteering for election stuff, or do this sort of thing."

As the training session wrapped up, the facilitators urged anyone involved in organizing protests to speak up. One attendee referred the crowd to the websites of Occupy Oakland, Occupy San Francisco, and even Occupy Monsanto. May Day—a national day of action that Occupy has planned for May 1—was mentioned repeatedly. There were also rallies in support of postal workers and against Wells Fargo. Nobody said a word about gathering signatures or canvassing for candidates.

"It's fine that we have MoveOn.org and we can press a button and sign a petition, but that isn't going to get the job done," an elderly woman in a red sweater told the crowd. "So we are here. And the real question is: What are we going to do when we leave here tonight? Are we going to stray out of our comfort zones and take some direct action together—or not?"

Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/04/99-spring-moveon-occupy-wall-street