This originally appeared on
TomDispatch. It is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in print at the
Nation magazine.
The “other men” (and of course women) in the current American class alignment are those in the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution — the bankers, hedge-fund managers, and CEOs targeted by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have been around for a long time in one form or another, but they only began to emerge as a distinct and visible group, informally called the “super-rich,” in recent years.
Extravagant levels of consumption helped draw attention to them: private jets, multiple 50,000 square-foot mansions, $25,000 chocolate desserts embellished with gold dust. But as long as the middle class could still muster the credit for college tuition and occasional home improvements, it seemed churlish to complain. Then came the financial crash of 2007-2008, followed by the Great Recession, and the 1 percent to whom we had entrusted our pensions, our economy, and our political system stood revealed as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists, and possibly sociopaths.
Still, until a few months ago, the 99 percent was hardly a group capable of (as Thompson says) articulating “the identity of their interests.” It contained, and still contains, most “ordinary” rich people, along with middle-class professionals, factory workers, truck drivers and miners, as well as the much poorer people who clean the houses, manicure the fingernails and maintain the lawns of the affluent.
It was divided not only by these class differences, but most visibly by race and ethnicity — a division that has actually deepened since 2008. African-Americans and Latinos of all income levels disproportionately lost their homes to foreclosure in 2007 and 2008, and then disproportionately lost their jobs in the wave of layoffs that followed. On the eve of the Occupy movement, the black middle class had been devastated. In fact, the only political movements to have come out of the 99 percent before Occupy emerged were the Tea Party movement and, on the other side of the political spectrum, the resistance to restrictions on collective bargaining in Wisconsin.
But Occupy could not have happened if large swaths of the 99 percent had not begun to discover some common interests, or at least to put aside some of the divisions among themselves. For decades, the most stridently promoted division within the 99 percent was the one between what the right calls the “liberal elite” — composed of academics, journalists, media figures, etc. — and pretty much everyone else.
As Harper’s Magazine columnist Tom Frank has brilliantly explained, the right earned its spurious claim to populism by targeting that “liberal elite,” which supposedly favors reckless government spending that requires oppressive levels of taxes, supports “redistributive” social policies and programs that reduce opportunity for the white middle class, creates ever more regulations (to, for instance, protect the environment) that reduce jobs for the working class, and promotes kinky countercultural innovations like gay marriage. The liberal elite, insisted conservative intellectuals, looked down on “ordinary” middle- and working-class Americans, finding them tasteless and politically incorrect. The “elite” was the enemy, while the super-rich were just like everyone else, only more “focused” and perhaps a bit better connected.
Of course, the “liberal elite” never made any sociological sense. Not all academics or media figures are liberal (Newt Gingrich, George Will, Rupert Murdoch). Many well-educated middle managers and highly trained engineers may favor latte over Red Bull, but they were never targets of the right. And how could trial lawyers be members of the nefarious elite, while their spouses in corporate law firms were not?
A Greased Chute, Not a Safety Net
“Liberal elite” was always a political category masquerading as a sociological one. What gave the idea of a liberal elite some traction, though, at least for a while, was that the great majority of us have never knowingly encountered a member of the actual elite, the 1 percent who are, for the most part, sealed off in their own bubble of private planes, gated communities, and walled estates.
The authority figures most people are likely to encounter in their daily lives are teachers, doctors, social workers and professors. These groups (along with middle managers and other white-collar corporate employees) occupy a much lower position in the class hierarchy. They made up what we described in a 1976 essay as the “professional managerial class.” As we wrote at the time, on the basis of our experience of the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, there have been real, longstanding resentments between the working-class and middle-class professionals. These resentments, which the populist right cleverly deflected toward “liberals,” contributed significantly to that previous era of rebellion’s failure to build a lasting progressive movement.
As it happened, the idea of the “liberal elite” could not survive the depredations of the 1 percent in the late 2000s. For one thing, it was summarily eclipsed by the discovery of the actual Wall Street-based elite and their crimes. Compared to them, professionals and managers, no matter how annoying, were pikers. The doctor or school principal might be overbearing, the professor and the social worker might be condescending, but only the 1 percent took your house away.
There was, as well, another inescapable problem embedded in the right-wing populist strategy: Even by 2000, and certainly by 2010, the class of people who might qualify as part of the “liberal elite” was in increasingly bad repair. Public-sector budget cuts and corporate-inspired reorganizations were decimating the ranks of decently paid academics, who were being replaced by adjunct professors working on bare subsistence incomes. Media firms were shrinking their newsrooms and editorial budgets. Law firms had started outsourcing their more routine tasks to India. Hospitals beamed X-rays to cheap foreign radiologists. Funding had dried up for nonprofit ventures in the arts and public service. Hence the iconic figure of the Occupy movement: the college graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debts and a job paying about $10 a hour, or no job at all.
These trends were in place even before the financial crash hit, but it took the crash and its grim economic aftermath to awaken the 99 percent to a widespread awareness of shared danger. In 2008, “Joe the Plumber’s” intention to earn a quarter-million dollars a year still had some faint sense of plausibility. A couple of years into the recession, however, sudden downward mobility had become the mainstream American experience, and even some of the most reliably neoliberal media pundits were beginning to announce that something had gone awry with the American dream.
Once-affluent people lost their nest eggs as housing prices dropped off cliffs. Laid-off middle-aged managers and professionals were staggered to find that their age made them repulsive to potential employers. Medical debts plunged middle-class households into bankruptcy. The old conservative dictum — that it was unwise to criticize (or tax) the rich because you might yourself be one of them someday — gave way to a new realization that the class you were most likely to migrate into wasn’t the rich, but the poor.
And here was another thing many in the middle class were discovering: The downward plunge into poverty could occur with dizzying speed. One reason the concept of an economic 99 percent first took root in America rather than, say, Ireland or Spain is that Americans are particularly vulnerable to economic dislocation. We have little in the way of a welfare state to stop a family or an individual in free-fall. Unemployment benefits do not last more than six months or a year, though in a recession they are sometimes extended by Congress. At present, even with such an extension, they reach only about half the jobless. Welfare was all but abolished 15 years ago, and health insurance has traditionally been linked to employment.
In fact, once an American starts to slip downward, a variety of forces kick in to help accelerate the slide. An estimated 60 percent of American firms now check applicants’ credit ratings, and discrimination against the unemployed is widespread enough to have begun to warrant Congressional concern. Even bankruptcy is a prohibitively expensive, often crushingly difficult status to achieve. Failure to pay government-imposed fines or fees can even lead, through a concatenation of unlucky breaks, to an arrest warrant or a criminal record. Where other once-wealthy nations have a safety net, America offers a greased chute, leading down to destitution with alarming speed.
Making Sense of the 99 percent
The Occupation encampments that enlivened approximately 1,400 cities this fall provided a vivid template for the 99 percent’s growing sense of unity. Here were thousands of people — we may never know the exact numbers — from all walks of life, living outdoors in the streets and parks, very much as the poorest of the poor have always lived: without electricity, heat, water, or toilets. In the process, they managed to create self-governing communities.
General assembly meetings brought together an unprecedented mix of recent college graduates, young professionals, elderly people, laid-off blue-collar workers and plenty of the chronically homeless for what were, for the most part, constructive and civil exchanges. What started as a diffuse protest against economic injustice became a vast experiment in class building. The 99 percent, which might have seemed to be a purely aspirational category just a few months ago, began to will itself into existence.
Can the unity cultivated in the encampments survive as the Occupy movement evolves into a more decentralized phase? All sorts of class, racial, and cultural divisions persist within that 99 percent, including distrust between members of the former “liberal elite” and those less privileged. It would be surprising if they didn’t. The life experience of a young lawyer or a social worker is very different from that of a blue-collar worker whose work may rarely allow for biological necessities like meal or bathroom breaks. Drum circles, consensus decision-making, and masks remain exotic to at least the 90 percent. “Middle class” prejudice against the homeless, fanned by decades of right-wing demonization of the poor, retains much of its grip.
Sometimes these differences led to conflict in Occupy encampments — for example, over the role of the chronically homeless in Portland or the use of marijuana in Los Angeles — but amazingly, despite all the official warnings about health and safety threats, there was no “Altamont moment”: no major fires and hardly any violence. In fact, the encampments engendered almost unthinkable convergences: people from comfortable backgrounds learning about street survival from the homeless, a distinguished professor of political science discussing horizontal versus vertical decision-making with a postal worker, military men in dress uniforms showing up to defend the occupiers from the police.
Class happens, as Thompson said, but it happens most decisively when people are prepared to nourish and build it. If the “99 percent” is to become more than a stylish meme, if it’s to become a force to change the world, eventually we will undoubtedly have to confront some of the class and racial divisions that lie within it. But we need to do so patiently, respectfully, and always with an eye to the next big action — the next march, or building occupation, or foreclosure fight, as the situation demands.
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For the past eight months, when chants of “Anti-Capitalista!” have echoed through New York streets, they’ve tended to emanate from crowds with a penchant for black clothing. But on Tuesday night, when once again a march of around 300 snaked through the streets around Washington Square Park, the color scheme was different: red flags, red banners, red clothes, red masks and little red felt square pins adorned the marchers — a mixture of long-term Occupy participants, students and others taking the streets and donning some red in solidarity with the Quebec student strike.
Reminiscent of ad hoc Occupy actions last fall, the march in Manhattan blocked streets and confused police attempting erratic, aggressive arrests. It was, however, just a small nod to the action taking place in Montreal. There, up to 500,000 people took to the streets on Tuesday in what’s being called the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, marking the 100th day of a powerful student strike.
The situation in Quebec has escalated since February from a student strike over planned tuition hikes — effectively shutting down universities — to a state of generalized insubordination and anger at a government adopting draconian measures to stifle dissent. A year and a half ago, the Quebec government decided to raise university tuition fees — currently the lowest in Canada — by 75 percent over a five-year period (a plan that, despite negotiation efforts by student unions, was revised to an 82 percent rise over seven years). In response, thousands of students and faculty members went on strike and struck a blow to the province beyond the university gates, taking to the streets and building numbers.
“I don’t think many people, including the [Quebec] government, anticipated that this would escalate and continue everyday since March 22,” Danna Vajda, 29, a former student of Concordia University Montreal, who attended the New York solidarity march, told me via email. She noted: “By the time the government was willing to negotiate with appropriate student associations, earlier this month, the position of many students had already fermented into something much more committed to achieving the goals of the strike than getting back to business as usual and finishing the semester, and the deal offered by the government was rejected by over 80 percent of the student associations.” Vajda added too that the strike is widening its nets, with students in neighboring Ontario considering striking in the fall semester and numerous unions in Quebec potentially joining “what is now becoming an ‘unlimited general strike.’”
In a move indicative of a leadership grasping for control, the provincial government passed Law 78 in mid-May. Attempting to end the strikes and force the reopening of the universities, the law in no uncertain terms makes protest illegal. Groups planning demonstrations with more than 50 expected participants, according to Law 78, must inform the police in writing at least eight hours in advance of the protest with details of time, location, size and duration. More perturbing still, expressing support for demonstrations and strikes deemed unpermitted under Law 78 renders one guilty of that offense and liable to face the same steep fines. Québécoise have been targeted, tear-gassed and arrested by police for the mere act of wearing the red-felt square on their clothes (the symbol of solidarity with the strike). But on Tuesday, the response to Law 78 in the streets of Quebec was unequivocal: a 500,000-strong middle finger.
What the Quebec uprising means this side of the border is yet to be seen. As was the case with the Arab Spring and mobilizations in public squares and streets in Greece and Spain, how actions in Canada might shape or inspire actions in the U.S. becomes a question of resonance. And the grounds for resonance here are strong: relative to U.S. education costs, the proposed tuition hikes in Canada seem almost negligible. The red square of the student strike — symbolic of “being in the red” because of student debt — might resonate more profoundly with students in the U.S. than anywhere else worldwide. Aside from Occupy efforts to build student debt strike campaigns, the student occupations at the University of California in 2009 over tuition hikes laid much of the ground from which Occupy emerged.
Writing on AlterNet last week, two student activists from the City University New York argued that the lesson to import from Quebec lies in the importance of institutionalizing student power: “We believe that if students in the United States hope to have the kind of impact on our universities that we witnessed in Montreal, we will need to first establish radical, federated student unions here at home, organizations capable of replacing our currently weak systems of student participation.” For many student organizers, this will be the take-away from Quebec.
I want to urge a different lesson entirely. Vajda noted, “Many students did not think at the outset that they would be sacrificing the semester worth of work, tuition, fees, but I think increasingly it is becoming clear that the stakes are high and those sacrifices can create leverage to work toward shaping a different future that will not follow the neoliberal model of debt-fueled education.” Crucially, the increasingly radical strike has been — and continues to be – a daring experiment for those involved, far surpassing the assumed remit of the original student walkout. The conviction and strength of the strike, according to Vajda, grows every day as people continue to meet and act in the streets. Law 78 only served to galvanize and generalize this experimental dissent.
The powerful message from Quebec, for me, is not the importance of strong student leadership. Rather, it is that thousands of individuals have taken risks, broken with their daily routines and found each other in the streets (despite numerous social and political divisions) to engage in a radical political experiment with no clear endpoint. One of the main Twitter hashtags relating the Quebec actions is #manifencours, an abbreviation of “manifestation en cours, meaning simply “demonstration in the streets.” As the proliferation of the phrase suggests, the situation in Quebec is no longer just about negotiating tuition fees; it’s a manifestation with an open trajectory.
Occupy for many months was a radical experiment in challenging business-as-usual and reclaiming space as public. And at times it too was emboldened by police repression. Although police response may not have been codified into a measure like Law 78, the crackdowns on Occupy encampments and actions — even legal, subdued demonstrations on sidewalks — made clear that dissent in this country would be treated as illegal. But the lack of something as concrete as Law 78 here is important: The attempts to control protest have thus been more insidious, although no less brutal, coordinated and consistent. If people in this country look to Canada and see the defiance of Law 78 as strong grounds for hitting the streets, they too should see those grounds in the various crackdowns and in the persecution of Occupy participants and anarchists. It goes without saying that if there are grounds for radical student action anywhere, they are in the U.S. We — students and non-students alike — are “in the red” as much as and more than our neighbors to the North; and we, like them, should be in the streets.
“In this hour of the ever-changing season, may our tears not douse the fire in our hearts.”
That’s a guy named Michael Pless singing “Something’s Got to Give.” Even without hearing the song, you can surely imagine the essential elements: Plaintive acoustic strumming, an earnest vocal, and an air of polite outrage to match the stilted syntax and hoary platitudes. Welcome to “Occupy This Album,” the collection of protest-minded songs released by Occupy Wall Street. Sprawling across four CDs and a slew of bonus digital tracks, this behemoth set includes 100 (why not 99?) new and previously released tracks from artists representing a range of generations, genres, backgrounds, settings, and styles. Folkies join hands with rappers; ominous post-rock marches alongside peppy radio pop. There’s spoken-word poetry, tribal percussion, earnest singer-songwriter fare. Even a bit of jazz.
Especially with Occupy reaching a crossroads in summer 2012 — a time when it needs to reassess its ideals, its accomplishments, its methods and its artifacts — “Occupy This Album” plays like a state-of-the-field survey of the protest song. From Jeff Mangum covering the Minutemen to the anonymous drum circles that soundtracked the demonstrations in real time, music has been a constant presence in the movement, although it’s not quite clear what role it has played. The new album portrays a movement with a broad scope and an admirably varied constituency, but the same criticisms that have been leveled against Occupy can also be applied to “Occupy This Album:” There is general unease but no clear direction forward. There is outrage but no plan. There is deep feeling but no clear message.
Ostensibly, there should be something on “Occupy This Album” for everyone to love, but that also means there is more than enough here for everyone to hate. It’s an unwieldy tracklist, almost daring you play it front to back. Of course, it’s pointless to review a 100-track release the same way you would approach a studio album, where functionality and some sense of logical progression are crucial. But there’s no consistent development of political or musical ideas weaving these songs together, nothing to link them or to justify this particular sequencing. As a result, “Occupy This Album” cannot make a statement as an album. In one sense, this release mirrors the leaderless ethos of the movement, which stridently preserves the democracy of the demonstrations. While that idea has certainly energized the Occupy protest, it makes for an amorphous blob of music and a messy, often frustrating listening experience.
But they mean well, right? It’s a charity album after all, with each disc sold separately and with all proceeds benefiting Occupy directly. You’d probably be better off contributing directly to the cause and just making your own mix of politically minded music. You might even have some of these songs in your iTunes already, although why you’d want to include Lucinda Williams’ drippy “Blessed” or Mogwai’s interchangeable “Earth Division” is beyond me.
The music that actually is new — that purports to find direct inspiration in either the righteousness of the demonstrators or the plight of the 99 percent — is generally unimaginative, hokey, disappointingly safe. Most of these artists address these economic issues either through narrative or through high-minded rhetoric. The latter produces the most lackluster results: Jackson Browne’s “Which Side Are You On?” which he has been touting for several months now, turns out to be political white noise, a gentle fist bump to the like-minded that barely puts across either side of the debate. At least it’s better than My Pet Dragon’s epiphany on “Love Anthem”: “Only love can save us now.” To their credit, they sing it like they might actually believe it.
The storytellers have more success, if only because they’re willing to entertain a bit more grit, a bit less blind hope. Featuring Joan Baez and Steve Earle, James McMurtry’s “We Can’t Make It Here” sounds downright curmudgeonly as it surveys the state of the working class in an economy that regularly sends its manufacturing jobs overseas. The song, however, goes a bit overboard when the trio decry litterbugs and graffiti artists.
One of the true standouts among these 100 tracks is Richard Barone’s ditty “Can I Sleep on Your Futon?” about a veteran-turned-singer who couch-surfs from one generous soul to the next. The verses are specific and soulful, as through he’s derived them explicitly from lived experience, and in that regard, the song could function as commentary on the music biz. But Barone stumbles over that massively awkward chorus, “Can I sleep on your futon?” It’s hard to imagine a crowd of protesters singing along.
If there is one overarching theme here, it is, vaguely, “history.” The past informs and even defines this music. Even the very idea of this type of compilations seems like a throwback to the CD’s heyday in the 1990s, when seemingly every charity, from NARAL to the Red Hot Organization, had its own release. It’s an impression reinforced by much of the music, especially hip-hop tracks by Born I Music and George Martinez & the Global Block Collective, whose lyrics and beats sound like they were scavenged from 1994. (For a better example of how hip-hop can address political themes, check out Killer Mike’s new track “Reagan.”)
Of course, there is a lot of folk music on “Occupy This Album.” That style has proved one of the most politicized musical forms of the 20th century, as lefties in the 1930s and 1940s adopted labor songs as battle cries. Clean-scrubbed, buttoned-up folkies like the Kingston Trio had some chart success in the 1950s, but they were quickly rendered obsolete by the Village bohemians reimagining the music as a vehicle for countercultural sentiments. That’s the model so many Occupyers are reverently appropriating, never suspecting that it might not be a natural fit for 21st-century dissent. The folk revivalists of the 1960s drew from the past as well, but took pains to update the music to the times: The mere fact that Dylan wrote new songs in this old style was revolutionary, alienating an older generation of folkie purists.
“Occupy This Album” obviously represents a counterculture, but too many of the artists are too caught up in role playing the past, which seems like an especially boomer enterprise. Michael Moore (yes, that Michael Moore) performs the most chipper version of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” imaginable, one that seems wholly unaware of the gritty realities of 2012, much less of 1964. (The less said about his skiffle version of the song, a hidden track on disc four, the better.) Perhaps the one artist who understands how to plumb history for present-day relevance is Loudon Wainwright III, whose wry “The Panic Is On” updates an 80-year-old tune originally penned by Hezekiah Jenkins (the cover originally appeared on Wainwright’s album “Ten Songs for the New Depression”). It’s an unusual artifact from the early 1930s, but there’s a sneaky observation about class disparity that sounds more disgusted and potent than anything else on the album.
Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about “Occupy This Album” is that the music is deeply conservative. There are so few moments that grab your attention or make you see the world differently. When Occupy already seems to be in danger of losing momentum, it’s hard to say whether the movement has failed to inspire these artists or the artists have failed to document the movement.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
As long as there has been a thing called Occupy Wall Street, there have been people who’ve suggested it should become the left’s version of the Tea Party. Josh Harkinson’s piece is a notable contribution to the conversation because it comes after eight months of in-depth reporting on the movement. Harkinson, like Jennifer Granholm, suggests that Occupy should recruit and run candidates, so the left has champions in Congress and can credibly threaten less ideologically aligned Democrats. According to this logic, it doesn’t matter if Occupy does this itself or essentially outsources the job to our progressive allies — the point is to find ways to elect more good Democrats.
The idea of a progressive Tea Party was totally my jam before Occupy started. Like Harkinson, I didn’t see how the left could create real change in America without taking control of the Democratic Party. Now I think it’s important to recognize that the problems we face as a country can’t be solved by electing more Democrats, or even by electing more good Democrats. A progressive Tea Party would be a welcome addition, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough to create the kind of change we need.
If Occupy tried to start a left Tea Party, we would be following in the footsteps of several progressive movement efforts that came up short. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign turned into Democracy for America to reclaim the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” the Progressive Change Campaign Committee explicitly references the DCCC, andRebuild the Dream originally billed itself as the progressive Tea Party. I have worked for each of these organizations and have lots of respect for their work. But unfortunately, none of these projects, despite their many successes, have managed to mount a serious national effort to take out bad Democrats and replace them with good ones. They are constrained by the lack of a grassroots base in many congressional districts and big donors reluctance to fund challenges to Democrats. Even big, collaborative efforts to take out bad Democrats have a relatively poor record (See Sheyman, Ilya; Halter, Bill; or Lamont, Ned).
Occupy is less well suited than the Progressive movement to overcome these challenges. Most occupiers I know aren’t interesting in learning how to raise money, knock on doors, or run campaigns. Starting a progressive Tea Party is a completely legitimate, useful goal — but it’s something for the progressive institutions to take on. New York state and city provide a good model for how this can work harmoniously: the Working Families Party is a unified progressive block within the Democratic party. They support Occupy and we support them on the issues. Together, we won a huge, unexpected victory for the millionaires tax.
Despite the hard work of our progressive allies, the unfortunate reality is that our political system as presently constructed is simply incapable of responding to people’s needs. The election of the most progressive Democratic nominee of the past 30 years and a Democratic super majority in Congress resulted in relatively little change in American political economy, even during a time of massive economic crisis. The tepid response showed our political system was designed to serve the whims of the market, and no politician has the power to do much about it.
My generation doesn’t put all, or even most, of the blame for this state of affairs on President Obama. We don’t hate the player, so much as we hate the game. I believe Democrats are better than Republicans, because Democrats care more about the lives of gays, women, and people of color. I also believe everyone should all vote, because not voting would hurt people that I care about. That being said, we won’t just win by getting new players — we need to change the game. The system is fundamentally incapable of healing itself.
Occupy is hardly alone in believing our political system is in a state of crisis. Congress’ approval is at 9 percent. Many have written that our 18th Century political system has proven itself uniquely incapable of responding to external circumstances, including noted radicals likeJames Fallows, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias. The presidential system is prone to gridlock (and, frankly, falling apart) and our byzantine, bicameral legislative system makes it incredibly difficult for even winning parties to put their agenda into law. The crisis of parliamentary democracy taking place in Europe is happening in America as well.
Occupy grew at such an exponential rate because it spoke to people’s sense that the rules of our society are deeply unfair and the political system couldn’t do anything about it. In the midst of systemic failure, only Occupy was talking about systemic change. Occupy transformed the public debate by naming the problem — inequality of wealth and power — and the cause – the power of Wall Street. More important than our discursive accomplishments, we showed what an independent, citizen-led social movement for equality and democracy could look like in America. I don’t want to argue we’ve yet built that movement, because it’s still very much a work in progress. By giving people the space to connect, Occupy showed that people power is the only force capable of shaking the foundation of our corrupt system.
Only Occupy can provide the space, literally and figuratively, for this conversation. The Occupy movement would derelict of duty if we focused on the electoral at the expense of putting pressure on the system as a whole. The entirety of civic life can not be reduced to a get out the vote campaign. The left needs strategies that take aim at all the ways neo-liberalism breaks down our communities. The inherent conservatism of America government, and the limitations of electoral organizing, means we need inside and an outside strategies.
Occupy has already inspired a new generation of social justice leaders to build an inclusive, radical movement that also speaks to the mainstream. We continue to push institutional groups towards more confrontational forms of resistance, bring new people into the struggle and provide a unifying message. Like the civil rights, women’s rights, environmental movements before us, we can’t afford to ignore the electoral realm, but we also shouldn’t expect to succeed by voting alone. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party didn’t succeed by electing candidates — it succeeded showing the limitations of the electoral system. Occupy should aim to do the same.
Max Berger is an organizer with the Occupy movement.
On Occupy Wall Street’s Nov. 17 Day of Action, the NYPD arrested nearly 250 protesters. Ray Lewis, however, stuck out: the retired Philadelphia Police captain was dressed in uniform. He was holding a sign that on one side encouraged people to watch the Charles Ferguson financial crisis documentary “Inside Job.” On the other: “NYPD Don’t Be Wall Street Mercenaries.”
“You have to get rid of corporate America,” Lewis told occupiers in Zuccotti Park. “You have to get rid of the powers that they have … As long as they have the power they are going to continue to exploit and manipulate the working class.”
The blowback from the police establishment was swift: A Nov. 23 letter from Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey demanded that Lewis “immediately cease and desist wearing, using or otherwise displaying any official Philadelphia Police Department uniform, badges or facsimiles thereof or any official departmental insignia.”
Ramsey soon backed down, citing Lewis’ First Amendment rights. Not so for the politically powerful Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, led by president John McNesby, which has continued its campaign against Lewis.
FOP pension director Henry Vannelli has filed a grievance that could prompt Lewis’ expulsion from the FOP, cutting him off from the life insurance and free legal support offered to current and retired officers.
The FOP, which frequently and vociferously defends police accused of excessive force and other misdeeds, must really hate Lewis. As Philadelphia Daily News reporter William Bender put it in a recent story,
It’s usually tough to get kicked out of Philadelphia’s Fraternal Order of Police.
You really have to screw up.
Worse than, say, the cop who allegedly beat his girlfriend with a closed fist and left her a voice mail threatening to ‘stomp your f—ing heart out.’ Or the officer convicted of child endangerment for pointing a loaded Glock at a kid who changed the radio station in his truck at the Police Academy.
Or the cop who allegedly forced a suspect to perform oral sex on him in his police cruiser.
Indeed. The FOP, which did not respond to a request for comment, makes no secret of the fact that its attack on Lewis is an extraordinary one: “It’s quite unusual,” Vannelli told the Daily News. “We had to dig into the books to see what we could do and and couldn’t do … We don’t want that guy around.”
McNesby even continues to insist that Lewis should be arrested, even though Commissioner Ramsey has long since clearly acknowledged that one is not “impersonating a police officer” if they are “not pretending to be a cop.”
“That is so egregious of a thing to say, because what he’s telling all of those officers in Philadelphia is that they should violate the law,” Lewis tells Salon. “There’s enough violation of people’s rights already.”
The same day that Bender’s report was published, the Daily News’ Jason Nark wrote a companion article on an eccentric lawyer and donor to police causes named Jimmy Binns, who, well, likes to dress up like a cop. A lot. It’s even alleged that he once illegally sported a handgun — but was not arrested by Margate, N.J., police because he’s a friend of the police chief. According to the Daily News, that crime carries a mandatory three- to five-year sentence. And Binns has illegally parked his car with an “Official Business” placard from the commissioner’s office lying across the dash, according to Temple University journalism professor George Miller.
Lewis continues to protest. In uniform. Last week he was in Center City Philadelphia, protesting outside police and FOP headquarters. He says that FOP leadership , a major force in city politics, depends on corporate donations to finance its union election campaigns and quarterly magazine.
“The major part of the movement is to hold corporations accountable and to stop them from having so much control over lives and the earth,” he says. “If John McNesby is a receiver of the favors of corporate America, then I’m going to be the number one enemy. Because I’m a tactical warhead.”
An Occupy Wall Street demonstrator holds a sign during what protest organizers call a "Day of Action" in New York November 17, 2011. (Credit: Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters) 
Demonstrators in Montreal on Tuesday. (Credit: Reuters/Christinne Muschi) 
Rahm Emanuel and President Obama (Credit: Reuters/John Gress) 
An Occupy Wall Street demonstrator chants during a march to celebrate the protest's sixth month, Saturday, March 17, 2012, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo) (Credit: AP) 
Ray Lewis (Credit: AP/Joseph Kaczmarek) 
