DES MOINES–”They’re closing, so if you want to get arrested, come now!”
An older woman made the announcement as she breezed into and Occupy Iowa Caucus’ headquarters early Thursday afternoon: word had gotten out about the group’s latest demonstration. They’d already hit local offices for Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and the Wells Fargo branch irresistibly close to Romney’s campaign headquarters, and now their next target apparently knew they were coming.
The occupiers scurried to their cars, armed with their anti-Wall Street placards still fresh with marker ink. While navigating the streets of downtown Des Moines, Jess Mazour, 24, fumbled with her cell phone and a Ziploc bag of reporters’ business cards as Katie Rockey, 19, fed her phone numbers from the back seat.
“Let me call Channel 13,” Mazour said. “I know that number by heart.” After an answer, she began her spiel: “I’m calling to let you know we’re headed to occupy Iowa’s Democratic headquarters right now.”
Welcome to the latest and perhaps most unique iteration of Occupy Wall Street, where a splinter cell of Occupy Des Moines protestors, many of them former Obama supporters, are heading the movement’s first significant injection of street politics into electoral politics. And if what’s happening in Iowa augurs anything for the 2012 cycle, Democrats nationwide will be facing a vote of no confidence from former allies who now see the party as part of the system they’re trying to occupy. Earlier this week, when more than 100 progressive occupiers caucused to pick their candidates of greatest “dispreference,” the largest number, 30, picked Barack Obama.
“I voted for Obama in 2008, and I feel really let down by what’s happened since then,” said Ross Grooters, 37, of Pleasant Hill, Iowa. His mother-in-law had to move in with him, his wife and his daughter after she lost her job and then her home.
If disruption is the name of Occupy’s game, Occupy Iowa Caucus has already succeeded in Des Moines. The local Obama campaign office was conspicuously shuttered on the day occupiers had identified it as a protest target. Meanwhile, state Democratic leadership had no idea what to do with the few dozen protestors — many of whom they’ve worked with before — who then decided to show up on their headquarters’ doorstep for a sit-in instead.
“You are preventing them [Democratic volunteers] from entering or leaving,” a frustrated Iowa Democratic Executive Director Norm Sterzenbach told the occupiers, who later dubbed him Scrooge McDemocrat. “I see that as a violent action.”
“We will defend our right to do a nonviolent protest,” replied occupier Frank Cordaro, 60, something of a local legend; he’s a Catholic anarchist who’s been arrested more times than he can remember.
“Well, we see it as violent, and I’ll treat it as such,” Sterzenbach told Cordaro.
State Democratic party chairwoman Sue Dvorsky tried to be more patient with the protestors, but even patience proved incompatible with the Occupiers’ demands.
“I’m just here to listen,” Dvorsky said as a small crowd of occupiers gathered around and volleyed anti-corporate grievances at her for 20 minutes. “I just don’t know what you want from us.” We want to talk to Obama on the phone, the occupiers said, and ask him to take corporate money out of politics. “We do not have the ability to get the President on the phone and to get him to do the things that you want to do,” Dvorsky replied.
Democratic Party, meet Occupy Wall Street. To many outsiders, the Occupy movement has a particularly infuriating brand of Zen obliqueness to it because of its refusal to appoint leaders and lay down clear, negotiable demands, the typical mode of American activism. The movement sort of exists for its own sake; there’s no obvious authority that will realistically give it the kind of vast economic reforms that many occupiers would like to see, so many participants figure they’ll band together, stick around and raise hell until an authority exists that can.
“No longer does it matter who gets elected,” Cordaro told me earlier this week. “Tweedly dee, tweedly dum. There could not be two more different presidents in our history than George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and yet the corporations still run the system.”
This Democrats-equal-Republicans rhetoric, at least among the far American left, isn’t particularly new. But what’s new is that Iowan occupiers, which includes a somewhat broader ideological array of members than the left’s usual suspects — there are Occupy nuns! — are starting to act on it, and the upcoming caucuses gives them the perfect opportunity.
No one here has uttered the phrase “lesser of two evils” by my hearing, and that doesn’t bode well for a Democratic party already facing an enthusiasm gap against its motivated Republican opposition. State Democratic executive director Sterzenbach said liberal activists had never picketed its headquarters or shown such open confrontation since the movement’s first sit-in at party headquarters last week. Twelve were arrested on Thursday night.
Occupy Iowa Caucus faces its own pitfalls, for those in New Hampshire watching Des Moines’ experiment for cues. The movement’s leaderless structure and diverse ideological grievances have made for sluggish decisionmaking sessions on who and where to protest — a major impediment for activists facing a Jan. 3 deadline to inspire statewide voters to vote “no preference” on both parties’ ballots.
The result is that all the protests have thus far looked the same: a few familiar die-hards decide at the last minute to sit down in front of a given candidate’s doorway for the sake of getting arrested in front of a few cameras.
It’s worked so far; the Des Moines movement’s received exactly the boon of journalistic interest that it clearly craves and needs for new members. But in Iowa, where the relationship between the activists and the police remains startlingly polite compared to the bitterness harbored in many coastal Occupy movements — there have been no incidences of rough arrests — could the lack of violence lead to media and public disinterest? It’s hard to say, when so many national journalists are here and starved for a stories beyond candidates desperately shaking strangers’ hands.
But for the occupiers risking arrest, it’s become the only conceivable course of action anybody can think of. Take Grooters and Shawn Gude, 22, two 2008 Obama voters who decided to tape dollar bills to their mouths and stand in front of the front doors to state Democratic headquarters until the police came to remove them.
“There’s nothing for a citizen in a democracy left to do than put his or her body on the line and stand up for his principles if voting has become meaningless,” Gude said, his back to the glass, before sheepishly correcting himself: “I should say insufficient, rather than meaningless.”
“It’s not that these aren’t issues that everybody knows or understands,” Grooters added helpfully.
“Well, we have dollar bills taped over our mouths, so it’s a little more difficult to express ourselves,” Gude replied, and that’s about when the cops came to take them away.
“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 benefitting 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 direction 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 protestors 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 roleplaying 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.
In the first week of November 2008, tens of thousands of people gathered in Chicago to watch dewy-eyed as Barack Obama won the presidential election, believing, as the then-president-elect said in his victory speech, that “this time must be different.” This week, the Windy City is welcoming large crowds again — but as was made clear by a small protest action Monday — the president is not the sweetheart of these Chicago masses, which are assembling for a week of actions and protests surrounding the NATO summit.
Eight people were arrested Monday during a protest at Obama’s 2012 campaign headquarters. The rally, organized by social justice and anti-war group Catholic Workers, was the first organized demonstration — and the first instance of arrests — relating to the NATO counter-protests. It was small (just over two dozen participants assailed security and stormed the campaign headquarters and read a statement inside) but set a tone for actions later this week in asserting that the president and Democratic Party are protest targets alongside NATO generals and corporations like Boeing, who receive large government defense contracts.
For months the question has hovered over Occupy supporters, many of whom are attending NATO protests, partly organized by Occupy Chicago, from across the country: How many of them will manifest as Democratic voters come November? Will the energy that has brought hundreds of thousands into streets and parks across the country over the past half year be co-opted by the party machine? Of course, the small Catholic Workers demonstration is no indication either way. It will be interesting to watch, however, as the week of permitted and unpermitted protest actions continue in the city Obama calls home, the ways in which Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the president are willing to crack down on the dissenting crowds whose support they will ask for in November.
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.”
Attitudes toward the police are the source of innumerable disagreements and divisions between those who’ve participated in Occupy-related actions in the past half year. From Oakland, Calif., to New York “Fuck the Police” marches regularly snake through the streets, while in early encampments chants of “We are the 99%, and so are you!” would ring out invitingly to surrounding police officers. (Unsurprisingly, anti-police sentiment increasingly outweighed support for police as more and more Occupy participants felt the jab of billy clubs and the sting of tear gas.)
It’s beyond the purview of these paragraphs to explain the many reasons someone might take to the streets and shout “fuck the police!” However, as a new report from the New York Civil Liberties Union confirms, the consistently racist practices of the NYPD should make fierce anti-police sentiments understandable, even for those who find such an attitude unpalatable.
Using the NYPD’s own statistics, the NYCLU report highlights what they describe as a “two-tiered” policing system, in which black and Latino New Yorkers receive very different treatment from whites. Perhaps the most shocking finding of all: There were more stops of African-American young men in 2011 than there are African-American men living in the city — and nine out of 10 of those stopped had committed no crime.
In nearly half of New York’s 76 police precincts, black and Latino New Yorkers accounted for more than 90 percent of those stopped; in almost all precincts black and Latinos accounted for more than half of stops. Furthermore, frisks, which are only supposed to take place if police suspect someone is carrying a weapon, occurred far more often if the person stopped was black or Latino, even though white people were found more often to be carrying weapons. The report also notes that despite the 600 percent increase in stop-and-frisks under Mayor Bloomberg, the number of guns recovered has not increased proportionately.
“This cannot stand. Real people’s lives are in the balance. Whole generations of boys and girls are growing up afraid of the very people that are supposed to be keeping them safe,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU, told press on Wednesday.
Is it a surprise, then, that in a march of 5,000 predominantly non-white New Yorkers organized to call for justice for the murdered Trayvon Martin, with Occupy support, that chants moved smoothly from “We are Trayvon Martin!” to “Fuck the Police!”? The greater surprise should perhaps be why more people don’t feel angry at the NYPD. Of course, many will continue to disagree with anti-police marches. However, when statistics on policing show what the NYCLU’s Lieberman called “a tale of two cities,” disagreements should only arise over tactics to redress this system; it seems there’s an overwhelming case for fury at the police.
In a statement, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne defended police practices, saying that “stops save lives” and that New York has this year seen a record low for murders. He said that it is “the safest big city in America,” which prompts the question: safe for whom? When vast swaths of New York’s population live in constant fear of being harassed by a well-armed, uniformed gang — and that this fear is largely contingent on a person’s skin color — this strikes me as the sort of safety I have no interest in maintaining.
A protester is arrested for blocking the entrance to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's local campaign office during an Occupy The Caucus demonstration in Des Moines, Iowa. (Credit: AP/J. David Ake) 
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) 
(Credit: Reuters/Andrew Kelly) 
