Occupy Wall Street

The latest Occupy impostors

Two groups claiming to represent America's youth are, in fact, fronts for phony D.C. centrism

Tens of thousands of young people took to parks, streets and banks last fall to demand an end to the laissez-faire political order that permitted financial titans to bankrupt the economy and deny us a chance at finding decent jobs.

Half a year later, a collection of young people backed by major foundations and companies like Dell are promoting two new organizations, Campaign for Young America and Fix Young America. In a recent profile, the New York Times touts the groups as “advocacy groups for jobless youth” on the order of the AARP or NRA. They are, the Times claims, “younger siblings of Occupy Wall Street, but with a nonpartisan agenda, more centralized leadership and one specific mission: to help young people find jobs.”

But don’t be fooled. This is Occupy as reconfigured in the subconscious of Thomas Friedman: The country’s problems can be solved by promoting technological wizardry and unleashing the potential of everyone’s inner risk-taker in a sink or swim economy. Think Americans Elect, for kids.

The Campaign for Young America is backed by Young Invincibles, an inside-the-Beltway organization backing the healthcare reform law and tied to a number of mainstream liberal groups. Fix Young America is a product of something called the Young Entrepreneur Council, which seeks to “help rebuild the economy” by unleashing an “entrepreneurial revolution in America.” The latter has a book of proposals out today with a vision to restore the American dream by teaching young people JavaScript; giving student loan forgiveness — if the students are “entrepreneurs who start businesses that create jobs” — and “teaching entrepreneurship to ALL young Americans, including at-risk youth.”

This book proposes fixing the American economy and the youth jobs crisis by creating more IT start-ups: Silicon Valley to the rescue.

In other words, they are nothing at all like Occupy Wall Street: The groups have no real criticism of the American economic order, they are not democratically run, and they seem to focus on providing Monster.com-like service of helping individual people find jobs.

The book even includes a contribution from Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., the conservative legislator who last May infamously accused Elizabeth Warren of being a liar.

There is certainly a place for entrepreneurialism: Research shows that start-up cultures are important for spurring innovation in technological industries. But to think that making cheap capital available to a young entrepreneurial elite will solve youth joblessness is dead wrong, and a distraction from what should be the priority: ending budget-cutting austerity that has decimated opportunities for jobs and education.

Secondly, the idea that the jobs crisis in this country can be solved by turning everyone into an entrepreneur is just as wrongheaded as the notion that sending everyone to college will result in widespread gainful employment. For young people with crushing debt loads this can actually be a recipe for yet more risk and dislocation: The majority of new business ventures fail within five years. This may be a solution that appeals to centrist lawmakers, but it is a sorry substitute for real public investment when it comes to creating a sustainable labor market that can begin to heal the scars inflicted on recent cohorts of young adults.

Finally, it is a big mistake to think that the tech sector is a panacea for the jobs crisis. University of Michigan professor of business and sociology Gerald Davis has examined the data and found that the job-producing high-tech’s potential is consistently overplayed.

“Although the handful of teen billionaires who manage to cash in on the latest app may suggest otherwise, surprisingly few people actually work in the high-visibility success stories of the tech economy,” Davis writes in an article to be presented at the American Sociological Association meeting. “The combined global workforces of Google (32,467), Apple (63,300), Facebook (3000), Microsoft (90,000), Cisco (71,825), and Amazon.com (56,200) — 316,792 as of the end of 2011 — are smaller than the U.S. workforce of [grocery chain] Kroger (339,000). Notably, a recent survey of college graduates under 40 found than one in five listed Google as their most preferred employer, followed by Apple and Facebook. They might as well have chosen the NBA as Facebook, given the firm’s minuscule employment, and Apple’s recent surge in net jobs is almost entirely attributable to the roll-out of its retail stores, where most of its current employees work. The Computer and Electronic Products industry has seen a loss of 750,000 jobs since 2000 as production has been almost universally offshored. But even the Information Services sector, which includes telecommunications, broadcasting, publishing and data processing, shed over one million jobs during the same period.”

Fix Young America’s proposals are as bold or visionary as any piece of conventional Wall Street-to-Washington wisdom.

Occupy criticizes the two-party order. These two groups, by eschewing “partisanship,” embrace the most noxious aspects of the bipartisan status quo. Fix Young America even seems to implicitly knock Occupy’s political edge on its website, chiding that “only the loudest negative voices in the room are getting mainstream media attention.” Likewise, YEC founder Scott Gerber complains that “the government seems to only care about partisan politics.”

And in a fairly weird turn, the group is mounting a campaign to demand that Stephen Colbert speak publicly in favor of their “movement.” Sadly, fake and well-funded centrist social movements that promote the status quo as the answer to our nation’s problems are very much en vogue in elite circles.

Indeed, both groups seem like mini-me’s of Americans Elect, the “centrist” group fawned over by Thomas Friedman and funded by considerable Wall Street largess ($9 million of which went to its website), which pledged to field a “nonpartisan” presidential candidate — and miserably failed. Americans Elect, Alex Pareene wrote in Salon, is in thrall to the “common elite myth” that “Americans as a whole are crying out for ‘bold,’ nonpartisan political leadership, and that their strong desire for moderate, independent solutions is stifled by the two-party system.”

America’s elite “moderates” are bafflingly dissatisfied with the deeply centrist Obama, terrified by Occupy Wall Street and betting that, as H.L. Mencken said, they won’t lose “money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Banks are still making plenty of money, and young people are just plain unemployed. So last year, Fix Young America’s Gerber made a pilgrimage to Wall Street — not to protest, but to be honored at a NASDAQ closing bell ceremony.

Daniel Denvir is a staff writer at Philadelphia City Paper and a contributing writer for Salon. You can follow him at Twitter @DanielDenvir.

Adam Goldstein is a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley who studies the financialization of the American economy.

Chomsky: “Jobs aren’t coming back”

Wealth is concentrated with the 1 percent because America no longer makes things: Financiers just manipulate money

(Credit: iStockphoto/buzbuzzer)
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of.  If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory won’t come quickly — it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s — although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today — nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world — you could see it in the business press at the time — because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

On the Working Class

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today — the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression — and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren’t going to come back.

The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy — a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it’s no good for the work force.

Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise — producing things people need or could use — to financial manipulation. The financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

On Banks

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college. That changed dramatically in the 1970s. Until then, there had been no financial crises since the Great Depression. The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

And it was egalitarian.  The lowest quintile did about as well as the highest quintile. Lots of people moved into reasonable lifestyles — what’s called the “middle class” here, the “working class” in other countries — but it was real.  And the 1960s accelerated it. The activism of those years, after a pretty dismal decade, really civilized the country in lots of ways that are permanent.

When the 1970s came along, there were sudden and sharp changes: De-industrialization, the off-shoring of production, and the shift to financial institutions, which grew enormously. I should say that, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was also the development of what several decades later became the high-tech economy: Computers, the Internet, the IT Revolution developed substantially in the state sector.

The developments that took place during the 1970s set off a vicious cycle. It led to the concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. This doesn’t benefit the economy — it probably harms it and society — but it did lead to a tremendous concentration of wealth.

On Politics and Money

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation. Alongside this began a sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drove the political parties even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector.

The parties dissolved in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).

This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble. Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.

There has always been a gap between public policy and public will, but it just grew astronomically. You can see it right now, in fact. Take a look at the big topic in Washington that everyone concentrates on: The deficit. For the public, correctly, the deficit is not regarded as much of an issue. And it isn’t really much of an issue. The issue is joblessness. There’s a deficit commission but no joblessness commission. As far as the deficit is concerned, the public has opinions. Take a look at the polls. The public overwhelmingly supports higher taxes on the wealthy, which have declined sharply in this period of stagnation and decline, and the preservation of limited social benefits.

The outcome of the deficit commission is probably going to be the opposite. The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger pointed at the heart of the country.

Plutonomy and the Precariat

For the general population, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it’s been pretty harsh — and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1 percent and even less — the .1 percent — it’s just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they’re concerned, sure, why not?

Take, for example, Citigroup. For decades, Citigroup has been one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations, repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer, starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I won’t run through the corruption, but it’s pretty astonishing.

In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.” It urged investors to put money into a “plutonomy index.” The brochure says, “The World is dividing into two blocs — the Plutonomy and the rest.”

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they’re sometimes called the “precariat” — people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still “Saint Alan” — hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible) — was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired.

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat — in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

Toward Worker Takeover

I mentioned before that, in the 1930s, one of the most effective actions was the sit-down strike. And the reason is simple: That’s just a step before the takeover of an industry.

Through the 1970s, as the decline was setting in, there were some important events that took place. In 1977, U.S. Steel decided to close one of its major facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from the company, hand it over to the work force, and turn it into a worker-run, worker-managed facility. They didn’t win. But with enough popular support, they could have won.  It’s a topic that Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, the lawyer for the workers and community, have discussed in detail.

It was a partial victory because, even though they lost, it set off other efforts. And now, throughout Ohio, and in other places, there’s a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of sometimes not-so-small worker/community-owned industries that could become worker-managed. And that’s the basis for a real revolution. That’s how it takes place.

In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn’t profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don’t think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.

And there are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them are major. Not long ago, President Barack Obama took over the auto industry, which was basically owned by the public. And there were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done: reconstitute it so that it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership, and continue on its traditional path.

The other possibility was to hand it over to the workforce — which owned it anyway — turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that’s a big part of the economy, and have it produce things that people need. And there’s a lot that we need.

We all know or should know that the United States is extremely backward globally in high-speed transportation, and it’s very serious. It not only affects people’s lives, but the economy.  In that regard, here’s a personal story. I happened to be giving talks in France a couple of months ago and had to take a train from Avignon in southern France to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, the same distance as from Washington, D.C., to Boston. It took two hours.  I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the train from Washington to Boston, but it’s operating at about the same speed it was 60 years ago when my wife and I first took it. It’s a scandal.

It could be done here as it’s been done in Europe. They had the capacity to do it, the skilled work force. It would have taken a little popular support, but it could have made a major change in the economy.

Just to make it more surreal, while this option was being avoided, the Obama administration was sending its transportation secretary to Spain to get contracts for developing high-speed rail for the United States, which could have been done right in the Rust Belt, which is being closed down. There are no economic reasons why this can’t happen. These are class reasons, and reflect the lack of popular political mobilization. Things like this continue.

Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons

I’ve kept to domestic issues, but there are two dangerous developments in the international arena, which are a kind of shadow that hangs over everything we’ve discussed. There are, for the first time in human history, real threats to the decent survival of the species.

One has been hanging around since 1945. It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve escaped it. That’s the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. Though it isn’t being much discussed, that threat is, in fact, being escalated by the policies of this administration and its allies. And something has to be done about that or we’re in real trouble.

The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat.  It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?”

We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke.  And if that’s happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn’t going to be averted — and in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter. Something has to be done about it very soon in a dedicated, sustained way.

It’s not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures.  It’s inevitable. But unless the spirit of the last year, here and elsewhere in the country and around the globe, continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

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Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT. He is the author of many books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues, and a long-time participant in activist movements.

Media grows bored of Occupy

And that means, according to a new report, that Americans can expect to hear a lot less about income inequality

(Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)

As evidenced by the lack of stories about the May Day general strike last week, the mainstream media’s interest in Occupy Wall Street has waned. It’s a shame because, as a new report indicates, Occupy has been central to driving media stories about income inequality in America. Late last week, Radio Dispatch’s John Knefel compiled a report for media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which illustrates Occupy’s success: Media focus on the movement in the past half year, according to the report, has been almost directly proportional to the attention paid to income inequality and corporate greed by mainstream outlets. During peak media coverage of the movement last October, mentions of the term “income inequality” increased “fourfold.” Meanwhile:

As mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” or “Occupy movement” waned in early 2012, so too have mentions of “income inequality” and, to an even greater extent, “corporate greed.” The trend is true for four leading papers (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times), news programs on the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), cable (MSNBC, CNN, Fox News) and NPR, according to searches of the Nexis news media database. Google Trends data also indicates that from January to March, the phrases “income inequality” and “corporate greed” declined in volume of both news stories and searches.

Knefel notes that tokens of Occupy rhetoric — most notably the idea of a “99 percent” against a “1 percent” — has seeped into everyday cultural parlance. Since Occupy’s inception last fall, references to “the 1 percent” don’t elicit the response, “of what?”; these numbers are now understood far and wide to connote class disparity  – even though many Occupy participants have at times felt the slogan too reductive to signify complicated socio-politico-economic issues. Knefel points out too “the danger, of course, is that ‘the 1 Percent’ simply becomes a buzzword and ceases to have any connection to the way American capitalism produces and reproduces economic and social inequality.”

FAIR’s findings prompt a number of critiques, both of the media’s attention span and of Occupy’s lasting power. It is a troubling state of affairs that in order to push conversations about rampant inequality in the press, it seems there needs to be continuous, headline-grabbing protests, occupations and public manifestations of anger (with newsworthy slogans, of course). But this should perhaps come as no surprise — after all, it was in recognition of our very troubling state of national and international affairs that Occupy participants took to the streets, parks and encampments in the first place.

Occupy supporters may well be saddened by FAIR’s news: that their important messages about corporate greed and class disparity have not permanently shifted the mainstream media’s coverage of these issues. Knefel’s report is at once a reminder of the long slog it takes to really shift a discourse. It’s a reminder too that mainstream media outlets are fickle creatures, ready to move on to the next shiny object with little focus on the issues underpinning stories.

It’s reasonable (although perhaps less so after the mass mobilizations in streets across the country on May 1) to debate Occupy’s current relevance. For me, the problem highlighted here might not be a radical movement’s failure to stay in the headlines, however; the fault is rather with a mainstream political and media machine that ignores economic and social inequality; hence the importance of radical movements. The question then becomes whether assemblages like Occupy should continue to work to hold the attention of such a machine, or work toward challenging its ability to determine political discourse.

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Natasha Lennard covers the Occupy movement for Salon. A British-born, Brooklyn-based journalist, she has been covering Occupy Wall Street since before the first sleeping bag was unrolled in Zuccotti Park. One of the first journalists arrested at an Occupy action, she has managed to enrage Andrew Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. You can follow her on Twitter (@natashalennard), and email her any Occupy updates/videos/ideas to natasha.lennard@gmail.com

The NYPD May Day siege

Pundits can argue back and forth over what Occupy's May Day achieved, but I just can't get over the police presence

New York City police officers watch as Occupy Wall Street activists march through the Lower East Side during May Day demonstrations on Tuesday. (Credit: Reuters/Andrew Kelly)

A number of reports have pointed out that the Occupy calls for a May Day general strike drew tens of thousands in the street Tuesday — with actions from the militant to the family-minded — in cities across the country, particularly in New York and Oakland, Calif. The culmination of scheduled action in New York — a mass march of around 30,000 union workers, immigrant workers and OWS supporters that descended (with a permit) on Manhattan’s financial district — felt powerful from within, as chanting bodies jostled south. But I jumped over the barricades, which hemmed in the crowd, and walked a few blocks away. Only a muffled din signaled the crowd’s presence nearby; that and the constant flow of riot cops flooding past me and the police vans lining the street as far as the eye could see.

Ample ink has already been spilled (outside the mainstream press, that is) about May 1, some praising Occupy’s success in staging events like teach-ins and the permitted solidarity march, which garnered a diversity of support from union and community groups; some point out the obvious — that no May Day actions actually shut down any of America’s vast metropolises; some have decried the property damage carried out by participants in Seattle; Reuters first reported the day as a “dud” and then recanted, noting it “far from a dud.” We could debate forever, using different, incommensurable metrics, as to whether May Day was or was not successful. But when I think about my Tuesday on strike, my memory is of New York City shrouded in an impenetrable blanket of police.

Having reported on, and participated in Occupy actions for seven months, heavy police presence is by no means unusual. Cops routinely flank banks when protests are called outside, they surround squares where Occupy groups gather, and are swift to disperse any attempts (even when legal) to assemble against capitalism in New York’s public spaces. But on Tuesday, I left downtown Manhattan shell-shocked.

It began on Monday night, when the NYPD, aided by the FBI, raided the homes of prominent activists in New York. Following these preemptive, unwarranted visits — during which activists were questioned about May Day plans –  the police presence throughout Manhattan on May 1 was incomparable to anything I’ve seen in my three short years in the city. Friends, whose time in New York and its radical subcultures far predate mine, agreed; they’d never seen anything quite like it.

Notably, the unpermitted “Wildcat March,” called by New York anarchists and anti-authoritarians, was surrounded by hundreds of police before the 300-strong crowd could even leave its rallying point at Sarah D. Roosevelt park. Barely reaching the sidewalk from the park’s steps, a line of cops stormed into the march’s front banner, snatching and grabbing three participants. I joined a running splinter group as the crowd was chaotically dispersed into smaller marches; we then proceeded, almost one cop to every striker, as we made our slow way to regroup at Washington Square Park.

I didn’t head to the Union Square rally to join crowds swelling to over 10,000; I missed the hundreds of guitarists marching alongside Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello in a “guitarmy”; I missed musical performances, free food and free lectures from prominent thinkers like Francis Fox Piven and David Graeber. Instead I wandered around Manhattan in shock and awe with a handful of co-strikers, counting as I passed every block: at least four cops per corner. The buzz of a police helicopter overhead continued all day; I couldn’t count the number of police vehicles.

Writing for In These Times, Rebecca Burns points out that the police have changed their tactics since the early days of Occupy. Although on May 1 Oakland police once again deployed tear gas, we did not see the mass arrests or large crowd kettles typical of police responses in previous months. Burns notes: “Unlike the now-familiar Occupy scene of demonstrators being arrested en masse in dramatic, late-night evictions, May Day protesters in many locales were arrested individually throughout the day, in some cases for crossing over onto sidewalks or, according to local media on the scene in Oakland, seemingly at random.” There were only a reported 97 arrests in New York relating to May Day activity.

Snatch-and-grab police tactics intimidate crowds, but do not lead to the sort of dramatic mass arrest scenes that capture national headlines; it’s a more insidious form of crowd control. It is worth adding, however, that there was no shortage of police aggression: At one point I saw firsthand as a marcher was grabbed by police in the Lower East Side, his face slammed to the street. When pulled up and taken away, officers covered his face with his T-shirt so onlookers could not see the blood.

Then, after the mass evening march in New York had finished and no more than a thousand people had moved to the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial park at Manhattan’s southerly tip, the NYPD once again covered the area. Some remaining hundreds of the May Day participants had gathered for a mass general assembly; others milled around, sharing stories about the day or dancing to the ever-present drumbeats. The police encircled the small concrete park in time to disperse the relaxed crowd at 10 p.m., when the park closes. Clad in riot gear, the number of officers kept growing; hundreds and hundreds on foot and in vans surrounded the memorial park and every office building, street and corner. The NYPD is a standing army of around 35,000, and on the evening of May 1, New York felt like a city under military siege — it was terrifying.

Those of us who have been inspired by Occupy over the past year, those who see the importance of reclaiming and repurposing space (for public use that is not commerce), and who see the necessity of manifesting in the streets, are not fizzling or losing momentum. We are, however, being trampled, pushed, threatened and dispersed at every turn by well-armed, militarized police forces who once again made clear: We are not allowed to assemble on our own terms in this country.

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Natasha Lennard covers the Occupy movement for Salon. A British-born, Brooklyn-based journalist, she has been covering Occupy Wall Street since before the first sleeping bag was unrolled in Zuccotti Park. One of the first journalists arrested at an Occupy action, she has managed to enrage Andrew Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. You can follow her on Twitter (@natashalennard), and email her any Occupy updates/videos/ideas to natasha.lennard@gmail.com

Occupy skirts the MSM

The movement is attempting to build its own media infrastructure so it doesn't need to rely on traditional outlets

Photographers at the Occupy LA encampment in November, 2011. (Credit: Reuters/Gene Blevins)

Thousands of people marched in cities across the United States yesterday in observance of May Day. But if you were watching the mainstream media, it would have hardly been a blip in their coverage. Without mass arrests or an ongoing occupation, mainstream media has been unable to craft a narrative or find the movement sensational enough to report on.

Instead of bemoaning the lack of coverage of OWS, however, activists have begun to cultivate a media strategy that aims to supplement, and, in some cases, circumvent, the need for mainstream media. The revolution will be televised; the revolutionaries will be broadcasting it themselves.

“I don’t think we’re able to spread our message without the mainstream media. But the mainstream media follows us,” said Michael Levitin, who edits the Occupied Wall Street Journal. “We can help shape the narrative of the movement, we can help clarify, and as journalists, that’s what we need to do.”

During the months leading up to yesterday’s May Day protests, the Occupy movement developed an independent media infrastructure that both mirrors and acts as an alternative to mainstream media outlets. From newspapers, pamphlets and magazines, to radio and television coverage, Occupy-related media was able to cover yesterday’s protests in a more sophisticated and comprehensive way than it ever had before.

Media for the 99%, a project of the Media Consortium, compiled the work of over 25 independent media outlets and provided streaming broadcasts, an interactive map and breaking news reporting. By aggregating work from a myriad of outlets, independent journalists are trying to create a reliable, comprehensive media source.

The Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Manhattan’s Public Access Television Station, devoted 15 hours of coverage to the protests, broadcasting to its over 620,000 viewers. Karanja Gacuca, an independent filmmaker who used to work on Wall Street, helped organize the coverage, “People were astonished we were able to take over the television for so long, but in reality, we just asked if we could.” MNN’s broadcast constituted the only nonstop television coverage of May Day. “I would call it a success. We were able to broadcast HD live streams from the ground. I think we were the trustworthy outlet yesterday. The mainstream media covers the angles that they cover, the sensational – there was much about arrests. But it was really a day of celebration. A day of coming together.”

And Levitin has launched an offshoot of the Occupied Wall Street Journal, Occupy.com,  which looks to be the central media platform for the movement. “We have a long way to go with the website, but we want it to be a legitimate expression of the movement,” he says.

They still have a lot of work ahead of them.  “I worry that the people who read Occupy media are already part of the movement. I worry that we’re just talking to ourselves,” said Joseph Sutton, who edits the site Occupied Stories, which offers “First-person news from the Occupy movement.” Sutton, who spent the day at the protests in New York City, was receiving stories from contributors from all over the country, and posting them on the Occupied Stories website.

Not everyone was satisfied with Tuesday’s result. “Yesterday was the day to do some good coverage, but we just didn’t have the outlets we needed,” Sam Lewis, a 24-year-old independent journalist told me over the phone this morning.

Still, the stitching together of independent journalists, citizen journalists, livestreamers and tweeters into a cohesive and popular platform seems to be a priority for occupiers over the next few months, as Occupy looks to remain in the headlines (even if they might be their own). “I saw a great sign that I believe sums up what we’re doing,” Lewis told me. “It said: Don’t criticize the media, organize journalists.”

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Max Rivlin-Nadler is an editorial fellow at Salon.

Did May Day succeed?

Yesterday’s Occupy reboot mobilized a diverse group of people, but reverted to familiar tactics in the end

A May Day protest in Los Angeles on Tuesday. (Credit: AP/Reed Saxon)

In the home city of Occupy Wall Street yesterday, myriad activities dominated three iconic public spaces — Bryant Park near Times Square, Madison Square Park in view of the Flatiron Building, and Union Square, roughly straddling the East and West Villages. An end-of-day march then filled the lower part of Broadway en route to Wall Street, running up to 18 blocks long with as many as 30,000 participants, said organizers. (And whether or not the numbers are too high, the magnitude of the claim seems about right.)

Yet there was still familiar frustration at the end. “I’m actually really disappointed,” said Marisa Holmes, a documentarian and longtime key figure in the officially leaderless movement. She was sitting with about 30 others in an impromptu debriefing on the steps leading to the long-barricaded Chase Plaza a block from Wall Street. Her voice had a tone of exasperation after she listened to another occupier vow that they would soon take over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza — the endpoint of yesterday’s march. Police had just roused the remaining few hundred demonstrators – and arrested a handful – after the plaza closed at 10 p.m. (Minutes later, police cleared the small gathering from the steps of Chase Plaza, as well.)

“That was not my intention going in,” said Holmes, of yet another public-space occupation. “I want to get beyond it and not just replicate and mimic what we’ve done before — but grow and learn and become even better.”

That not-unjustified perception of just redoing what occupiers always do could explain why May Day failed to become a significant national news story. To outsiders, it may have looked like just another case of vague protesters shoving and getting shoved by police.

Yet the familiar cat-and-mouse game with police belied the overall achievements of the day. The afternoon and early evening events — teach-ins, pickets, dancing, art projects, a concert and the march — swelled to embrace a diverse and often mainstream swath of people that made progress toward representing the 99 percent. Socialists and anarchists carried their red or black flags, but Ryan McCarty, a high-school English teacher from the Bronx, carried his 14-month-old son. “It’s one of the reasons I’m here,” said McCarty, looking at his son. “For him.”

Jay Zevin held aloft a large sign that read “Whose Science? Our Science!” Zevin is a Cornell University researcher in cognitive neuroscience. He’s been frustrated for years at cutbacks to National Science Foundation grants and what he sees as overly business-focused, instead of truly research-driven, grant making by the National Institutes of Health. He knows that from having served on NSF committees. In essence, he’s a hardworking, well-educated, articulate professional who knows what he’s talking about. Occupy has emboldened him to speak out. “These ideas [about research funding] are very mainstream in science, but nobody knows what to do about it,” Zevin said.

The march numbers especially swelled with union employees. Roughly 30 labor entities (mainly local chapters) joined the May Day actions, in which, technically, Occupy Wall Street was just one participant — though clearly the dominant one. While unions are seen as fundamental special interests of the institutional left, they are nonetheless composed of real working- and middle-class people. They are among the many (though not necessarily all) demonstrators who defy the “Get a job!” taunts from detractors.

A long view of the movement – beyond day-to-day sit-ins and arrests – reveals no “typical occupier” in New York City. Unless “typical” simply means that they are unhappy with and want to change one or more aspects of U.S. government or business institutions. Some advocates are crystal-clear in their critique and reform goals. Others are virtually opaque with vagaries.

That inevitably makes the loosely connected movement hard to parse from the outside. “A lot of what they’re doing is positive,” said a suit-clad executive who stumbled upon the Madison Square Park teach-ins. “But I’ll be honest with you, a lot of these people are talking out of their asses.”

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Sean Captain is a technology, science and politics writer and the editor of TechNewsDaily.com. Follow him on Twitter at @seancaptain.

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