"The Most Powerful Workers in New York City"

Locked-out Con Ed worker in Brooklyn: "If We Go Out the Lights Go Out!"

On Sunday, July 1, contract negotiations between New York City's electric utility, Consolidated Edison or Con Ed, and its 8,500 unionized workers represented by the Utility Workers Union of America broke down. Even though New York City was entering a heatwave, stressing the electrical grid across the city, the electric company locked out the workers, replacing them in their crucial jobs with a smaller number of managers and bosses. The union for the workers has continued to try to negotiate with the electric company, but they've also been holding daily pickets and solidarity rallies across New York City.

A group of revolutionary organizers calling themselves the New York City Renegades have been agitating among the workers with some of the most powerful worker-focused propaganda I've seen in years. This is a brilliant example of some of the fruits of the Occupy Wall Street movement: class consciousness, solidarity, autonomous community/worker organizing outside the confines of existing organizations, all in convergence with solid revolutionary organizing traditions. The goal of these organizers is to "unite the workers with the 'hood." I met with some of the Renegades in time to pass out some leaflets at a rally of the UWUA workers outside the Con Ed offices on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn; I found the gathered workers hungry for solidarity, the leaflets flew out of my hand.

These leaflets are a necessary challenge to the top-down strategies of existing union leadership. Union-busting is a priority strategy of state and local governments, both Republican- and Democratic -led, across the country. The Renegades are arguing that the small minority of working people who are still unionized must unite with those who are not, in order to beat back a fundamental attack on the right of people to organize themselves. A bitter defeat is possible: the unions who still hold sway with public employees desperately need allies.

Here are two of the leaflets distributed by the Renegades to the locked-out Con Ed workers in preparation for organizing a workers and community meeting to plan a course of action.

THE MOST POWERFUL WORKERS IN NEW YORK CITY

Con Ed, MTA and healthcare workers are the most powerful workers in the entire city. But they have been defeated by the bosses and politicians in every major labor fight in the last decade. Unless things change quick, more defeats are coming.

The bosses win because they pit the poor and working class public against the workers when the workers resist. In this right over the Con Ed contract, many everyday people see the wages of Con Ed workers as the cause of their high utilities bill, instead of a small taste of what all working class people could win if they stick together. Others consider the lockout a private matter to be handled between Con Ed and its workforce, instead of an issue that affects all New Yorkers. This is a trap set by the bosses and politicians, and it has worked all too well.

The only way to escape this trap is for workers to lead the whole of New York City in a struggle for a better life, including people outside their own workplaces and unions. If MTA workers called a fare strike with free transit for everyone in the city, all poor and working people would immediately support it. If Con Ed workers called for a strike to end stop and frisk and make utilities free, every young person of color in the city would have their back.

If workers provided this kind of leadership, all the crap about young people smoking weed and acting like delinquents would disappear. Young people would show up at picket lines and throw eggs at managers. They would fight the police tooth and nail if scabs were brought in. Instead of beefing with each other and hurting the community, poor and working class youth would direct their anger at the bosses, politicians and police who oppress us all. One million students are on summer vacation right now, with no work and few social programs, waiting to take up this fight.

Will Con Ed workers provide this leadership for New York City? It will require leaving isolated pickets outside Con Ed yards, and doing public actions at drop-in centers and other busy locations across the city. It will require explaining to millions of everyday people what the Con Ed workers are fighting for, and discussing how to fight together against the bosses in the common interest. It will require finding new ways to fight, and taking initiative without waiting for direction from the union leadership.

If free utilities, healthcare, and transport become part of workers' demands, the working class of New York City will unite, and become unstoppable. Then workers will be able to win not only a contract, but a hell of a lot more.


And here's a second, follow-up flyer:

THE MOST POWERFUL WORKERS IN NEW YORK CITY, PART 2

Management is preparing for a long battle with Con Ed workers, and is willing to risk the deaths of New Yorkers and its own management to win. An opponent like this can't be defeated with kid gloves. Con Ed workers need to take their gloves off and beat management to a pulp. But how?

Praying for a blackout to bring Con Ed to its knees is hardly a winning strategy. It's more like the hail mary of people who don't have a plan to win by their own initiative. Rallies are often just glorified pep rallies, and do little to win over the public. The rally on July 5th was like the festivals put on during Roman times. Orgies and spectacles were the order of the day while the rest of the society was collapsing. Right now we have millions in prison, many more in failing schools, and even more with no jobs and no hope of finding them — many Black and Latino. These same people are being told in the Daily News that stubborn workers are the cause of their problems.

There is a lot of big talk about the power of the union. But a lockout tells another story, that management was preparing this for months, getting ready to sucker punch the workers. Where were the union leaders when this was happening? Sitting around, reassuring workers that they were powerful, while sipping margaritas with [NYC mayor] Bloomberg and the ruling class of this city. That's not a winning strategy.

Con Ed workers have a choice: either build a citywide counterattack against the bosses, or submit to a drawn-out, exhausting negotiation process that will probably end in an ass whooping. Tough talk is not enough.

A growing crew of young people is ready, willing and able to join with Con Ed workers. We want to strategize and try out new ways to bring the workers' struggle to millions of everyday New Yorkers. We want to uppercut [Con Ed CEO] Kevin Burke and knock his ass out. Together we can make it happen.


Here's an excerpt from a third flyer calling for a community meeting:

WORKERS AND COMMUNITY MEETING

We believe only the rank and file of Local 1-2 can win against Con Ed and lead NYC. The ranks have power, but they have not used it so far. There are only two endings to this struggle: defeat or victory. The next 10 days will determine the next tens years of your life. Won't you wish you gave everything you had to fight against Con Ed?

The point of this meeting is not to tell each other Burke is a jerk, Con Ed is making lots of money, and the unions are under attack. All of us know these things. The purpose of this meeting is so Con Ed Workers, along with community members, can discuss how we can win against Con Ed. We must think, plan, and execute a strategy to defeat Con Ed. We do not have even a second to lose. Management is working its ass off to defeat you. How hard are you willing to think and work to win?

[...] Should we occupy Con Ed HQ, should we march through the streets of Manhattan shutting them down or occupy Brooklyn Bridge? Should we ask the people of NYC to not pay their bills while workers are locked out?... Bring your ideas to the table!

The Right Wing's Prescription for Women

Planned Parenthood has been a target of the right wing for years. The current congress has gone to great lengths to demonize the private non-profit agency which provides millions of women, poor and otherwise, with health services including contraception and abortion. For all the insistence on the part of the rightwingers that the issue is preventing government-funding of abortion, the facts show that this is a smokescreen. There's a pie-chart floating around that clearly shows that abortions represent a small portion of Planned Parenthood's services. Given the legal hostility from many Republican and Democratic congresspeople in recent years, Planned Parenthood has worked very hard to follow the letter of the law and isolate the federal funding it gets from those abortion services. But it's futile to present either of these facts to the foes of Planned Parenthood, because the truth is that abortion is only the tip of the iceberg of their objections.

The rightwingers claim they are waging a battle based on moral and religious opposition to abortion based on the "sanctity of life." But what is actually quite clear is that these right wingers are actually waging a battle against something much bigger. And this is revealed by the current controversy over the initial Obama administration insistence that healthcare reform means that religious employers must include access to contraception in the insurance plans they offer to non-clerical employees like the teaching and medical professionals who work for churches and hospitals run by religious institutions. While it seems tragically likely that the Obama administration will concede this argument, the current controversy forces the right wing to admit that contraception itself is their actual problem, even knowing that contraception is a proven abortion preventative. Yes, that's right, the right wing does not want women to have access to the means to control their own bodies.

The right wing wants to defund Planned Parenthood not out of concern for some moral abstraction, but because it wants to preserve the dependency of women, especially poor and working-class women. The Sarah Palins and Michel Bachmanns of the far-right fringe notwithstanding, independent women who are not dependent on men are societal threat to the way the far right wants the world to look. And more fundamentally working-class women who rely on the affordability that government-funded healthcare provides are to them simply expendable.

The recent flap over the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure's shameful temporary plan to withdraw financial support of Planned Parenthood is illustrative. The Komen Foundation is less an institution concerned with women's health than a money-making scheme, a front for fake concern about the inadequate funding of women's healthcare. Forget how an organization allegedly concerned about women's health could sponsor pink buckets of the Colonel's greasy chicken, how could an organization allegedly concerned about women's health, full of smart people who know every last detail of those financial distribution pie-charts, claim that pulling the plug on poor women getting breast screenings could have anything to do with abortion at all? Who actually believes that? Only right wing ideologues with an agenda, that's who.

Here's the truth: This is yet another front on the class war being waged by the privileged classes on regular people. They don't want to pay for abortion, for contraception, for breast screenings, because they don't want to fucking pay for anyone's healthcare at all. Well, except their own.

Funny, it always comes down to the same problem....and the same solution.

Without Comment: 1% vs. 99%

"MATT LAUER: When you said that we already have a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy, I’m curious about the word ‘envy.’ Did you suggest that anyone who questions the policies and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country, is envious? Is it about jealousy, or fairness?
MITT ROMNEY: You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus one percent — and those people who have been most successful will be in the one percent — you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God. The American people, I believe in the final analysis, will reject it.
LAUER: Yeah but envy? Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as ‘envy,’ though?
ROMNEY: I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like. But the president has made it part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail."

— from a televised Today Show interview with Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney this morning.

"I personally don’t want to have anything to do with people lobbying or running for office right now, nor do I want to focus all of my time winning small policy changes, and I don’t think that’s the role of Occupy Wall Street. But I sure as hell hope the people whose terrain that is do go and do it. I hope that they can recognize that what’s happening now is the creation of a climate where it’s possible for them to push left and win more. I’m not going to be happy with all the compromises those people have to make, and I don’t think we’re going to survive on reforms alone, but we need that too. If we want a real, meaningful social transformation, we need to win things along the way, because that’s how we provides people the foundations on top of which they can continue to struggle for the long haul, and it’s how we grow to become a critical mass that can ultimately make a fundamental break with this system.

And in the meantime, our role as Occupy Wall Street should be to dream bigger than that. I think it’s our job to look far ahead, to assert vision, to create alternatives and to intervene in the political and economic processes that govern people’s lives....

I think there is more possibility right now than I could have ever imagined. I think in the not-so-distant future, we can win a lot of things that actually improve people’s lives, we can continue to change the political landscape, and we can grow into a mass movement with the strength to propose another kind of world and also fight for it. I think we’re only in the beginning of that, and I think there is a ton of potential. And I also see that kind of possibility in the long term. I think we can win a truly free society. I think it’s totally possible to have a political and economic system that we have a genuine say in, that we democratically control, that we participate in, that is equitable and liberating, where we have autonomy for ourselves and our communities and our families, but are also in solidarity with one another. I think it’s possible, and necessary. That’s kind of the amazing thing about this moment and this movement, I guess. Right now, sitting here, I can’t even imagine the limits of possibility."

— Occupy Wall Street activist Yotam Marom interviewed by Naomi Klein

Ron Paul Is A F*cking Nutbag... Who Cares If He Claims to Oppose War

I've seen some great things attributed to the Ron Paul campaign. That sign with the reversed "LOVE" in "REVOLUTION" called out? Genius. The notion that the U.S. should not be marching around the world dictating policy? Laudable. A desire to bring troops home from Afghanistan and stop sending a fortune to Israel? I'm down with that. But you know what? It doesn't fucking matter one bit.

Because Ron Paul is a right-wing, anti-gay, anti-choice, racist, conspiracy theorist NUTBAG. This is plain to see. Obvious from hearing thirty seconds of the man speak. Clear as day from the actual historical record revealed in a simple google search.

And yet there are legions of Ron Paul supporters twisting themselves into pretzel shapes trying to excuse his disturbing history of pandering to the far-right fringe. There are armies of pseudo-intellectual morons trying to make sense of his calamitous economic ideas. And there are unfortunate crowds of young white people trying to focus on his anti-war appeal while pulling the blinders closer to avoid seeing how close this man stands to those other folks on the Republican stage like anti-gay scum Rick Santorum, deranged fantasist Michele Bachmann who actually runs a business that tortures gay people, racist narcissist Newt Gingrich, and tool of big business Mitt Romney.

I could post facts about how Ron Paul has denounced Civil Rights laws. I could link to stories about how his Iowa chief of staff is a veteran of anti-gay hate groups. I could bring up his ties to the John Birch society. I could repeat what his former staffers say about his unwillingness to use a gay man's bathroom. I could link to stories that challenge the distance Paul claims he has put between him and the scandalously racist newsletters of two decades ago. I'm not going to do any of that. These stories are not hard to find. If you are not busy pretending not to see these things you will find them in ten seconds on the internet.

The Mitt Romney machine has been very very busy demolishing each of his Republican competitors one by one, and they are surely a force behind the sudden media scrutiny of Dr. Paul. But I think given Ron Paul's ground operation he could still do quite well in the upcoming Republican Iowa caucuses. In truth I don't really care who the Republicans go with...they're all horror shows beyond the pale. But I have acquaintances (who should know better) who are actually suckered in by the bizarro-world Ron Paul delusion. I find it sad that people outside the rarified club of bigotry and hateful ignorance that is the Republican party should find themselves strolling down such a doomed path of bad thinking. Actually it doesn't make me sad; it makes me furious.

Libertarianism is a cult-like ideology that elevates selfishness into an economic and political theory. Key to Libertarianism is its omission of a class analysis (the same class analysis rudimentary to the nascent concept of the 99% expressed by the #OWS movement). And there's a good reason for that: because Libertarianism isn't egalitarianism, it's rich-ism. It's about a system where the rich and wealthy are unfettered in their exploitation of the rest of us. With impunity. It's worth repeating: If you want to visit a Libertarian paradise, visit Somalia. I am not exaggerating.

There are Libertarians and Ron Paul supporters running around in OWS, for sure. But take a deeper look. They do not actually want the same things the rest of us want. What the Libertarians are doing is filling an ideological vacuum: given the history of Democratic Party betrayals (hello, Mr. Obama) and the failure of the Marxist left to (yet) emerge from its historically discrediting Cold-War defeat, Libertarians are talking systemic changes and ideological solutions, even if the substance of what they're talking is absolute nonsense.

The 2012 election is still eleven months away. A lot will happen in that time. If I've learned anything from the last year it is that voting for President once every four years is a sad substitute for actual democracy. I think the optimism that so many felt with Obama's rise, and the subsequent reaction to the failure of that rise to actually bear the sweet fruit that many of us hoped for is one of the factors that has contributed to the Occupy Wall Street awakening. The challenge of the next period is to sustain the momentum of last year, to make an alternative to the electoral trap feasible, to show what real direct democracy is. We can aim higher than choosing the best of the worst to predictably disappoint us.

Adolph Hitler was a vegetarian who loved puppies. If you're looking in a library for books about Hitler, I'll make an educated guess that "pet care" and "cookbooks" are probably the wrong places to look. When the books are written about Ron Paul, I'm certainly not saying they will be on the shelves next to books about Hitler, but they sure won't be on filed under "anti-war" either.

If Ron Paul sometimes sounds like a fucking right-wing nutbag... it's because he is one.

Keep Occupying!

The #OWS movement is off the front page headlines...for the moment. The Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City and those across the country have been mostly trashed and uprooted by a coordinated national campaign of violent repression...for the moment. But this is not over. And I'm not just saying that.

The movement is alive, and deepening all the time. There has been a sea change in political consciousness, and that continues filtering out across the roots and branches of society. As The Occupied Wall Street Journal says, "The Beginning Is Near." Protests and direct actions continue in NYC and nationally, building support for the notion of direct democracy. The words "Power to the People" have returned to life.

The movement of consciousness springing to life is not just the same old, same old. It's not just the shop-worn cliches and trite stereotypes and stale abstract ideas: it's the drive for human collective liberation returned to life, tidily encapsulated in the simple notion of the 99%.

One of the blogs I read is The Wild Hunt, a blog about the Neo-Pagan community that helps me to stay in touch with some of the ideas that have informed my own journey. Consider the editorial just published by its mainstay Jason Pitzl-Waters, "Occupying Everything" that concludes: "There have been those who’ve spent a lot of time pointing out that the Occupy movement has feet of clay, or has lost the moral high ground due to one incident or another, but I think such arguments miss the point. This isn’t about the good behavior of every Occupier, its about what needs to happen now. We need a shift in our priorities, we need the dramatic excesses of our current capitalistic system to be reigned in, and we need justice. I think modern Pagans have much to offer the Occupy movement, and that this movement has much to teach us in return. We are, after all, part of the 99% too. I know that there will be Pagans who disagree, who’ve written off the Occupy movement in one fashion or another, but I can no longer sit on the sidelines and pretend to have no opinion. For me, the Occupy movement is the movement I was waiting for during the anti-globalization protests of the 1990s, a true continuation of the work sparked by social justice pioneers like Dorothy Day, Gandhi, King, and Jane Addams. Now is the time for Pagans of a like mind to envision what our social justice looks like, to craft a theological and historical framework for a future where we have a voice, because that future is happening now. I guess what I’m saying is that we need to Occupy Paganism, and in turn, Occupy everything."

Pitzl-Waters understands, in a profoundly spiritual way, how the Occupy movement has resonated across society with a call for a world in which together we take back what is ours and then collectively share out of love, mutual respect, and responsibility.

I was at a meeting of Occupy Sunset Park, the organization that has sprung to life in my own Brooklyn neighborhood. A fellow emerging activist was saying how she felt the movement was reclaiming the notion of what is public, where parks and institutions are places that welcome and serve the communities in which they are located rather than act as fenced-off monuments to somebody's money.

I attended a terrific forum by the group Kasama which counts among its adherents one of the members of the Occupied Wall Street Journal editorial collective. Kasama is a profoundly radical communist organization but one that has approached the Occupy movement with creativity and respect. While I'm not sure they would use the word, I think they understand what a spiritual revolution OWS is engendering in peoples' consciousness. One Kasama leader described exactly how I feel: that for decades those of us who early in life awakened to consciousness as people yearning for social justice and human liberation — as revolutionaries — felt defeated; that the best we could hope for were lesser evils and retreating into living politically moral but isolated lives. And how the Occupy movement has changed everything, giving us back the hope and energy of what is possible.

We've experienced devastating one-sided class warfare for decades now, and finally the battle has been joined. People are opening their eyes and seeing. It's different now, from here on out.



For sure this has been recognized by the other side. The 1% understands what a threat looks like. The violent repression, the media manipulation, the attempts to subvert the movement, these have shocked people into paying attention to what's happening. But don't be fooled by the lack of headlines now. As the movement roots down into communities like mine we know there are plenty of obstacles in our path. But we also know what we can do, together.

#Occupy together; Spring is coming! Power to the people!

Photographs by me from the #OWS rally in New York City's Foley Square a couple days after the Zuccotti Park eviction

Déjà Vu or, Better Late than Never

"[C]ivilized society is split into antagonistic, and, moreover, irreconcilably antagonistic classes. ...

In a democratic republic, Engels continues,"wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely", first, by means of the “direct corruption of officials” (America); secondly, by means of an “alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange" (France and America). At present, imperialism and the domination of the banks have “developed” into an exceptional art both these methods of upholding and giving effect to the omnipotence of wealth in democratic republics of all descriptions. ...

The exploiting classes need political rule to maintain exploitation, i.e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority against the vast majority of all people. The exploited classes need political rule in order to completely abolish all exploitation, i.e., in the interests of the vast majority of the people, and against the insignificant minority consisting of the modern slave-owners — the landowners and capitalists."

—V.I. Lenin, 1917, "The State and Revolution"

Today: Liberate Oakland!

Occupy Oakland, part of the Occupy Together/Occupy Wall Street/#OWS movement, in the aftermath of last week's outrageous repression, has taken the unprecedented step of organizing a General Strike for today in Oakland. I can't predict at this distance what will happen, but I've seen reports that labor activists — that means working people like you and me — are taking this very seriously and that a number of one-day wildcat protest strikes are likely. So much for a bunch of privileged spoiled hippies, eh?

See the inspired collection of organizing materials at Occupy Oakland's website. If I worked in Oakland I know I sure wouldn't be heading in to the office. If successful, and I define that as having a noticeable effect on the city and the news, this could be one of the most significant actions of the Occupy Together movement so far, and in fact one of the most significant actions of mass protest in years.

Some official chants for the strike action:
“Strike, Occupy, Shut it Down! Oakland is the People’s Town”
“Every Hour, Every Day! The occupation is here to stay!”
“Occupy Everything! Liberate Oakland”
“Politicians & Bankers, Liars & Thieves, We’re taking it back! We’re not saying please!”
“No more cops, we don’t need ‘em! All we want is total freedom”

Kasama has provided a post for reports of the day's action as they come in. #OWS puts the strike in the context of a month of global action.

It's all about sticking together. Shut down the 1%...even for a day! Occupy Everywhere!

#OWS Occupy Wall Street in Danger

From OWS:

"EMERGENCY #OWS EVICTION DEFENSE:
Prevent the forcible closure of Occupy Wall Street

Tell Bloomberg: Don't Foreclose the Occupation.
NEED MASS TURN-OUT, SHOW UP NO LATER THAN 6 A.M.

This is an emergency situation. Please take a minute to read this, and please take action and spread the word far and wide.

Occupy Wall Street is gaining momentum, with occupation actions now happening in cities across the world.

But last night Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD notified Occupy Wall Street participants about plans to “clean the park”—the site of the Wall Street protests—tomorrow starting at 7am. "Cleaning" was used as a pretext to shut down “Bloombergville” a few months back, and to shut down peaceful occupations elsewhere.

Bloomberg says that the park will be open for public usage following the cleaning, but with a notable caveat: Occupy Wall Street participants must follow the “rules”.

NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has said that they will move in to clear us and we will not be allowed to take sleeping bags, tarps, personal items or gear back into the park.

This is it—this is their attempt to shut down #OWS for good.
PLEASE TAKE ACTION

1) Call 311 (or +1 (212) NEW-YORK if you're out of town) and tell Bloomberg to support our right to assemble and to not interfere with #OWS.

2) Come to #OWS TONIGHT AT MIDNIGHT to defend the occupation from eviction.

For those of you who plan to help us hold our ground—which we hope will be all of you—make sure you understand the possible consequences. Be prepared to not get much sleep. Be prepared for possible arrest. Make sure your items are together and ready to go (or already out of the park.) We are pursuing all possible strategies; this is a message of solidarity.

Click here to learn nonviolent tactics for holding ground.

Occupy Wall Street is committed to keeping the park clean and safe—we even have a Sanitation Working Group whose purpose this is. We are organizing major cleaning operations today and will do so regularly.

If Bloomberg truly cares about sanitation here he should support the installation of portopans and dumpsters. #OWS allies have been working to secure these things to support our efforts.

We know where the real dirt is: on Wall Street. Billionaire Bloomberg is beholden to bankers.

We won't allow Bloomberg and the NYPD to foreclose our occupation. This is an occupation, not a permitted picnic."

This morning on the radio (WNYC no less) the pro-Bloomberg media cheerfully reported that Bloomberg visited the encampment and said they would be allowed to stay if they temporarily vacated the plaza for cleaning. Of course the radio didn't say that the city's intention was to end the encampment by establishing "rules" denying the right of people to lie down in the park after they "cleaned" it. For the record, when I've been to the plaza it was cluttered and full of people but it didn't smell, there was no filth, and no evidence of the lack of sanitation facilities (which for crying out loud, New York should have in its public spaces anyway). Let this be crystal clear: Bloomberg and his media enablers are liars on the side of the 1%.

UPDATE: The overnight protest effort seems to have at least postponed the eviction. Some inspiring details in this Gawker account.

The peasants are revolting...

'Heather Amato, 35, a psychologist who lives near the protest area, said she felt disturbed by some of the conduct of the protesters. She said she had to shield her toddler from the sight of women at the park dancing topless. “It’s been three weeks now,” Ms. Amato said. “Enough is enough.”' — New York Times, October 7

As the Occupy Wall Street movement gains momentum, spreading across the country to dozens of local Occupy protests, marches, sit-ins and encampments, the establishment, to use a word spawned by the 1960s protests, has begun to look down on the movement with some consternation and confusion. Besides the hatchet job quoted above about how Occupy Wall Street is nothing but dirty, smelly, rude hippies with no respect for property, there was an extraordinarily condescending OpEd piece by the Times's resident old-line conservative, David Brooks:

"If there is a core theme to the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is that the virtuous 99 percent of society is being cheated by the richest and greediest 1 percent. This is a theme that allows the people in the 99 percent to think very highly of themselves. All their problems are caused by the nefarious elite....The Occupy Wall Street movement may look radical, but its members’ ideas are less radical than those you might hear at your average Rotary Club." Of course, Brooks is a die-hard defender of the 1%.

A two-pronged attack on Occupy Wall Street is unfolding: it's an attack by the class that has the most to lose from these protests that hint at the incredible potential suggested by the awakening of those who have thus far been the victims of class war waged against them. The attack will be a classic good-cop bad-cop act.

The first prong of the attack, the "good cop" is as Kasama warns: "Here is the deal: The smell of sulfur is upon the land. Satan himself is coming now… Of course we don’t believe in Satan. It is a metaphor. What I mean is this: The real and difficult struggle within this movement and for this movement is now starting. The media is turning on the machinery. The unions officials will now come as “supporters” but broker for the liberal establishment. “Advisers” will show up. People (who are pliant and acceptable) will now be declared leaders and spokespeople in the media. Demands will be announced or promoted or demanded that correspond to the program of the Democratic Party…. and much more." This will be the strategy of the liberal establishment to co-opt and blunt the Occupy Wall Street movement...to feign sympathy for its ends while trying to channel its energy away from radical potential.

The second prong will be the "bad cop," as those forces who will do anything to defend their privilege and power attempt sway public opinion against the Occupy movement, and then when they believe the movement to be weak, they will unleash whatever forces of repression are necessary to sweep up the remnants.

On the internet front, check out two widely circulated graphics from the teabaggers trying to demean the Occupy movement. The first attempts to paint the movement as idiot hypocrites for being consumers as if to oppose Wall Street we should all walk around in burlap sacks. The second attempts to paint them as anti-patriotic criminals looking for government handouts. For those with strong stomachs, check out the Think Progress video contrasting how the right-wing media coddled the Teaparty and attack the Occupy movement. I could only watch half of it. Link here. And read Gawker's evisceration of the thoroughly tragic attempt by the right-wing to paint the protesters as freeloaders and get suffering working-class Americans to identify with the cause of their suffering, "We are the 53%." To quote Gawker editor Richard Lawson: "these people have been glamoured by vampires, have bared their necks and welcome the pain as a gift. It's so deep and so bedrock in national mentality that the only salve seems, honestly, to be some sort of genuine revolution. I kind of feel like a French person in 1788. I wish these people knew they had allies behind them."

We don't know what will happen. The Occupy movement may grow and bloom, or it may succumb temporarily to winter. I do know that it's impressed the hell out of me personally, and the people involved in it are very, very smart, and becoming very very very wise by their own actions. The time is overripe for this kind of movement. If there's one thing that I hope people in the Occupy Movement understand, and I suspect many of them do, it's that the so-called 1%, whatever that true number is, do not need to understand or be educated, or learn anything: they are doing what they are doing because it is in their self=interest to do so. The rich want to stay rich. The powerful want to keep power. Appealing to the better natures of those with power has its limitations, especially when they understand the logic of the movement even if not everybody in that movement has drawn the same conclusions through to the end.

Those of us who want — who need — change or economic and social justice: it is for us to take. These things are, by virtue of our absolute majority and humanity, our right. No begging is necessary.

(The graphic, of course, is Mel Brooks and Harvey Korman in "The History of the World, Part 1." If you've seen it you'll know why it's here!)

If You're Not Careful...

Floating around facebook: "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." —Malcolm X

Happy Alienation Day!

I was reading Facebook and browsing the internet this morning when I noticed something. Many people were saying great things about today's holiday, Labor Day (what I like to call "fake" Labor Day since everybody knows real labor day is May 1). People were telling stories about their factory-worker parents or grandparents, or talking about the labor battles of the past that gave us this day off along with the forty-hour work week and minimum wage. But you could tell that to most of these people "labor" and "laborers" was something quite outside their vision of themselves. Certainly most of the wonderful and decent people I know are office workers and not factory workers: and it's true most of us do not go home dirtier and sweatier than the subway has made us.

Through some diabolical masterstroke, today's corporate bosses have a huge percentage of this country's workers persuaded that they're not workers, but upwardly mobile career professionals. It's kind of like how sales clerks are today called "sales associates." Associates of what, exactly? While for some working in an office can be a trip up a corporate ladder to reward and responsibility, most people will find themselves eventually reminded that their humanity just doesn't qualify them for continued employment as some mysterious corporate id somewhere reorganizes or reprioritizes them out of a job. Sorry!

It's absolutely alienation in the service of an illusion: if you sit there long enough acting enthusiastic enough and never saying "no," maybe you'll get plucked out of your cubicle, pushed into a corner office, and sent on your road to fortune and retirement. You've made it, baby! Well, as long as you do what you're told and make more money for somebody else than you get to keep for yourself.

Your company might call you an "associate," or even a "manager," or any number of clever titles chosen to provide you with imitation dignity as a substitute for anything you can take to the bank. Oh by the way, we need you to work overtime, the finite hours of your life aren't as important as getting this project done, are they? Thanks! But the company knows who you are: you're just an expendable body.

The company I freelance for is currently eliminating one department — a unionized one, no less. It's being split up and outsourced, half to a non-union shop in the south, and half overseas. The union who is so badly representing these soon to be ex-workers seems to have been caught in a deadly partnership web with management. Appeasement strikes again. Sorry, it's the economy!

I understand that a person has to make the most of working for a living. Being pissed off all the time is no way to spend your days. I don't blame today's "employees" for being optimistic about their chances. Surely the chickens in a coop dare not dwell on the hens that occasionally disappear without driving themselves mad with anxiety. A couple winters ago I visited a wonderful small farm upstate. We stood in a low barn, smelling the rich smells of hay and manure. There was a wonderful, affectionate steer. The farmers introduced us to this magnificent bulky creature. Our hosts laughed warmly, standing around this creature as they discussed how he'd be slaughtered for steaks the next year. The steer mooed, happy in its stall, occasionally searching with its great warm tongue for a taste of people passing by. The steer had a better life than many, I'm sure, outside a factory farm, cared for by people and not machines. And I'm sure he was very delicious. Cause he was, in the end, a steer, raised for his many pounds of meat.

Here's a truly horrifying quote from Matthew Vadum, some kind of wingnut teabagger policy hack: "Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote? Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery. Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers." Setting aside, for the moment, the unspoken racist dogwhistling in this comment, it's clear that the corporate bosses and their friends on the right wing are more than ever self-aware of their class destiny and privilege. If there is a problem with the class war in this country is that it is so one-sided: the vast majority of working people are standing on the sidelines thinking that this is all happening to somebody else. Caution: rude awakenings ahead.

But that old saying, "Workers of the World Unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains," you know that's talking about you, right? Take a day off. You earned it!

Welcome Back to Amerikkka

I'm back from vacation. My boyfriend's parents invited him on a cruise to celebrate his father's 70th birthday; I got invited along as the significant other. It was a lovely, relaxing time chugging off to the floating suburb of Bermuda: a tiny, beautiful, interesting country apparently even more expensive than my own New York City, without the social tolerance. It was nice to enjoy some beautiful weather, beautiful beaches, tasty food, and pleasant company.

But how strange to be at arm's length from the world for a week, and then at the mercy of somebody else's spoon-fed perspective: we got New York Times headlines, and a choice of CNN or Faux News satellite TV, and a quick daily peek at the internet pro-rated at 75 cents a minute. The economy seems as rocky as the waves on the trip out; rioting in the U.K. seems to have brought out an orgy of racist commentary; and political news is dominated by the Iowan rise of mentally-ill fantasist/liar Michele Bachmann (that's her above) and the entry into the Republican presidential race of creepy secessionist/Christianist Texas governor Rick Perry, both heavily invested in an attempt to deprive gay Americans of their rights. Perry wants very much to inflict his union-free, minimum-wage, death-penalty friendly vision onto the whole country; his version of multi-culturalism means welcoming all kinds of people...to praise Jesus and pray for rain.

I was struck by how clear the class perspective of the media is: in the case of both the UK riots and the local Verizon workers' strike, the media voice adhered closely to the narrative of bosses and property owners. I turned off the cabin's TV this morning as some idiot (white, upper-classed) talking head was blaming the British violence not on the austerity policies of the Tory government but on the "nihilism" of hip-hop culture. Nevermind that British hip-hop is among the most socially progressive and conscious musics in the world.

I guess I'm back in that world now. Time to unpack.

Sympathy for Barbarians

Defeated (temporarily?), the Roman legionaries are stripped of their armor and humiliated: they are marched naked past the sacred grove. The heads of their generals are displayed on spikes; the children are mocking the once proud legion, their pride a contrast to the defeated soldiers. The women wail and cry out over the men who didn't return from the field of battle, and sing the praises of those who did.

In truth I'm not exactly sure what this is a picture of. I downloaded it years ago and haven't been able to retrace my steps. I'm guessing it's a classic 18th- or 19th-century engraving of a "barbarian" victory over Rome in Germania or Gaul, and probably a victory that was short-lived. But I find it fascinating because it's such a romantic view of a scene that seemingly stands the usual historical narrative on its head: the invincible Romans are being mocked and the savage barbarians are jubilant. It is said both that the victors get to write history, and that he who laughs last laughs best, but I wonder about how that is interpreted.

We are taught about the glories of Rome, about the civilization, albeit at the point of a sword, that it spread throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. To be sure the Roman Empire, decadent as it may have been, has had a lasting influence on our culture, our civilization. But that's not the complete story. Because ultimately, after centuries of glory, as all empires do, the Romans fell. If you, like me, trace the blood of your ancestors across the Atlantic to Europe, that last generations of effete Roman nobility, those ones they are not our ancestors: those were the people thrown to the flames, their children dashed to the paving stones or thrown under the hooves of the advancing barbarian horde. The people who survived were the peasants watching from the field as the villas burned, or the ones eking out a life in the wild hills and forests.

As near as I can ascertain, my ancestors weren't kings or queens or lords or princesses, they were just people. But they did make it into the history books: read as the frightened nobles shriek "the barbarians are at the gates!" That's us they're talking about. My people. Now I'm not suggesting running through the streets with torches and pitchforks, or looting prep schools and throwing aristocratic children into fires or arbitrarily smashing the good things about our civilization. Living in a yurt doesn't look fun or practical to me. I'm just suggesting a little change in perspective.

In this age of politicians trying desperately to make sure they and their friends get to hang on to the money, to the power, to the right to control other people and take things away from them, it's worth remembering the lessons of the past. Empires fall. We barbarians win, in the end, every time.

Right Does Not Equal Left

It's been fascinating to watch the aftermath of yesterday's attempted assassination of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Quitter, right-wing idiot and inspiration for the shooting Sarah Palin has of course offered up her prayers and condemnations, as has Arizona's bigot-in-chief Jan Brewer, Governor of Arizona. Charged shooter Jared Loughner left behind a legacy of confused video rants leading him to be dismissed as a mentally disturbed "extremist." Ever fearful of calling out the right wing and therefore alienating an audience who might pay its advertisers, the media seems to have settled on a convenient trope of denouncing some imaginary meeting point on the other side of the circle where crazed left- and right-wing extremism converge. Uncivility is the issue! Both left and right extremes are guilty of fanning the flames!

Bullshit.

The shooting in Arizona which gravely wounded Giffords and took the lives of six people is the fruit of two years of right-wing propaganda about "reloading" and "watering the roots of the tree of liberty with blood." Ludicrously Sarah Palin's organization has taken to denying that the crosshairs on her now-infamous poster had anything to do with guns or violence, but anybody with half an eye can see this is a blatant lie. And Giffords' recently defeated right-wing Republican opponent in her congressional race? His campaign images showed him in combat fatigues with an assault rifle at crotch level. The right-wingers full well knew what they were doing, and now that they were caught with the fruit of their advocacy, they're dissembling as fast as possible.

The left had nothing to do with this. There's no reason to bring it -- us -- into this. This is full on the result of the right-wing's gun worship, its crass patriotic bravado, its little Chuck Norris B-movie fantasy about taking the country "back" from the ni**ers who are ruining the place. The shooter's crazed ideology is part and parcel of the bad thinking rampant on the right where liars and fantasists like Glenn Beck try to whip up convoluted nonsense theories to cover for the blatant racist revanchism at the core of their reason for being.

This shooting was not the result of a dialogue between sides run amok. Just try to find equivalents on the left of all the ridiculous violence-courting rhetoric amongst the teabaggers. It doesn't exist, it's not there. And the real left, the one that values peace, justice, equality and civil rights, it doesn't fantasize about grabbing guns and shooting people. That's your sickness, American rightwingers, own up to it. Leave us out of it.

Decent people will be doing some simple math, looking at Sarah Palin's crosshairs poster targeting Congresswoman Giffords and her rhetoric about reloading and seeing a bunch of people filled with bullets including a little girl born on 9/11, and their correct response will be to shun this political monster and all she stands for. Americans who find themselves unconvinced need to pay attention to who doesn't take that basic step of human decency. It won't be those of us on the left.

Defend the Right to Organize!

Get ready for it. It's coming. A full-scale assault on the rights of working people to organize themselves for their own defense. The new Republican majority in the House, the new Republican majorities in state houses across the country, the new Republican governors--and some of the new Democratic governors as well--are about to scapegoat the trade unions for the nation's economic woes. And if they don't successfully blame the unions for the country's problems they will sure enough try to make them pay for them.

I've never been a member of a union. Well, except for the pathetic Freelancers' Union which is a glorified front for a profit-making insurance company. From a distance they seem like strange institutions: somehow it's a whole level of bureaucracy: leaders who speak a good line but, just like politicians, tend to disappoint when the fat hits the fire. Who needs them? They're just outdated institutions that are out to preserve privilege, protect lazy people who don't want to work, enforce strange rules, and make life difficult and more expensive for the rest of us, right? WRONG!

Unions as they currently exist aren't perfect. But if you look at what they really are and how they came to be, what they represent is hope. Here's the thing. We're taught to think that politics is something that's important around election time. That a party, an organization, is important only because that's how elections are organized. Once in power, these parties, they're just self-perpetuating money machines, right? Well the thing is what American political parties actually are is the brainwashing device by which American working people are dissuaded from taking matters into their own hands. Now I'm not embarrassed to admit that I have advocated, and will advocate, voting for Democrats. Elections have winners and losers, and I think it's useful to have a voice in who the winner is. But the real political struggle out there is not about elections, it's about who has the power to control society.

Unions were born from working people becoming self-aware: realizing that the corporations, the bosses, the rich people, had organizations of power they used to maintain and strengthen that power. To protect themselves against that power regular people realized that sticking together, uniting behind an organization, a set of demands, equalized the playing field. People died to forge these organizations. Industrial safety, food safety, a living wage, the social safety net, these things are all fruits of regular people threatening to withhold their labor, threatening to disrupt the workaday world, and in many cases actually doing so, putting their lives behind their words.

Unions today are rightfully running scared. When companies threaten to go out of business unless unions give back gains and protections they've won over the years, it's difficult to argue with the facts of economic crisis. But somehow at the end of the day it's the rich people who are still enjoying their bags of money while regular people are scrimping and stressing out about paying the bills.

The economic crisis is not the fault of the unions. The problem in the educational system is not the fault of the teachers' unions. The crisis in the auto industry is not the fault of the labor unions. The crisis in state governments is not the fault of civil service employee associations. The rich people, and most politicians either are rich people themselves or are the willing hired servants of the rich people, believe they are better than everybody else and that government should exist to protect their privilege, their comfort, their right to control the ship of state. They are selfish motherfuckers; and they do not want to pay for their own mistakes. They don't care that their economic policies are unsustainable, because they know that there are so many working and poor people out there that getting those working and poor people to pay the check will get them off the hook.

But don't be fooled by the lies that they tell. There should be more unions, more labor protections, not fewer. When you hear of governments asking working people to pay for the economic crisis, ask why! Why not make real estate developers pay? Why not make hedge fund managers taking home million-dollar salaries pay? Is your boss smarter than you? A better person? Should s/he have the right to control your destiny, to decide that a company should keep paying him or her four or five times what you make while you're turned out on the street? The rich people are fucking organized. They have a machine, a crazy machine that beats the rest of us down. And we let them tell us that we have to suffer when their crazy machine breaks. That's just stupidity.

Unions, even with their sellout bureaucrats, are a first line of defense against that machine. Regular people should heed the lessons of the union movement's long history. Each of us is only one person standing in front of that crazy corporate machine. But together, together we're oh so much more.

Us vs. Them, Them vs. Us

How did it happen that working-class Americans lost their class solidarity? How did it come to be that working people have come to identify with their bosses? The people in government--overwhelmingly entitled, wealthy people--and the bosses of the business world know what their self interests are. How come working people don't? Who's responsible for this lie that what's good for the business world, for capitalism, is good for everybody?

Marxism, not exactly the most popular of ideologies in our post-modern world, got this one exactly right. One of the simplest but seemingly most difficult concepts of Marxism is that different social classes have different self interests. And the self-interest of the ruling class--them--really is to do everthing possible to stay in power and to game the system so it preserves and enforces itself. To "them," we below them exist to make them rich; to give them power. The self-interest of the working class--us--should be mutual solidarity, banding together to protect each other and to organize together to take what is rightfully ours.

It's true that Marxism hasn't aged well. Class-based methodologies like Marxism, heck even like industrial trade unionism, have been particularly prone to a host of corruptions. The truth is that "they" are very strong and "we" are very weak as long as "we" believe that "they" have the right to make the rules. But it doesn't have to be that way. "We" can make different choices, and these choices start at the smallest level of who we identify with, whose side we instinctively jump to.

One of my favorite jokes probably dates me horribly. (And, careful reader, it's even an example of Indianism.) It has the Lone Ranger and his trusty Indian companion Tonto chased into a canyon by hostile Indians. The Indian war cries echo off the walls of the Canyon, loud and fierce. There's guns shooting and arrows flying. Out from every boulder steps another Indian, and finally the Lone Ranger and Tonto are backed against the canyon wall. The Lone Ranger says to Tonto, "Well, Tonto, I think this is it. I don't think we're going to get out of this one. We are surrounded." Tonto turns to the Lone Ranger and says, "What do you mean we, white man?"

So yeah, us versus them: Which side are you on?

Let Ahmedinejad Visit Ground Zero!

Iranian President Ahmedinejad is coming to New York City next week to speak at the UN. He requested permission to make a formal visit to the World Trade Center site to pay his respects. Not only has the city denied his request, but the Bush administration and a host of politicians have rushed to condemn Ahmedinejad, casting aspersions against Iran as though it was somehow involved in the Al-Qaeda attack.

Among the politicians taking this disgusting war-mongering distortion was none other than Hillary Clinton. She's quoted as saying "It is unacceptable for Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who refuses to renounce and end his own country's support of terrorism, to visit the site of the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil in our nation's history."

Wait a minute! Iran had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact it quickly offered its condolences to the US, and in fact collaborated with the US in hunting down several so-called Al Qaeda terrorists. Iran has long been an enemy of Al Qaeda. The right-wingers (and I include Hillary Clinton on this list) are desperately trying to tar Iran with some brush that would cover their plans to widen the war in Iraq. In the war-mongerers' sick book of racist duplicity they're hoping to demonize Iran so that when U.S. missiles fly against yet another innocent population, Americans will close their eyes to the bloodshed and lend their complicity to another war of aggression.

The accusations of Iranian terrorism are a complicated smokescreen involving Israel. Just let it be said that the Israelis and Americans have killed a lot more innocent civilians than so-called Iranian-backed terrorists.

Ahmedinejad's desire to pay his respects to the fallen of 9/11 should be seen as an olive branch. I for one, as a citizen of New York City, extend my own hand to accept it.