I cite

Reflections for the US occupy movement - Peter Gelderloos | libcom.org

While the central plazas of the cities of Spain are no longer occupied, in some places the momentum of May continues with force. Particularly in Barcelona, a dynamic struggle continues to evolve, including a heterogeneous and broad group of people in weekly neighborhood assemblies, protests, hospital occupations, road blockades, fights against mortgage evictions and housing repossessions, and solidarity demonstrations against the inevitable repression.

The neighborhood assemblies in particular form a strong backbone that holds up all the ongoing struggles. In about twenty neighborhoods throughout Barcelona, once a week, twenty to a hundred neighbors meet to discuss their problems, propose actions, and share news. Each assembly has a different structure, and members of each assembly gather periodically to share and coordinate between neighborhoods. Half a dozen neighborhoods had assemblies before May 15, and a couple assemblies even predate the September 2010 general strike, but the participation in these assemblies exploded after the beginning of the plaza occupations, and over a dozen new neighborhoods formed assemblies of their own.

These neighborhood assemblies are changing the face of the struggle in Barcelona, overcoming the isolation and separation of the various, pre-existing political ghettos, creating spaces of informal, intergenerational debate, gathering resources for propaganda and legal support, and preempting the isolation that is the express purpose of government repression. The neighborhood assemblies are directly responsible for at least part of the unprecedented turnout of nearly a thousand people taking the streets in a solidarity demonstration the same day that Catalan police began arresting protestors identified from the June Parliament blockade (see “Wave of Arrests Sweep Barcelona http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/10/crackdown-in-spain/). Since we’ve met our neighbors in the streets, we’re no longer alone, and the State can try to lock us up or wear us down, but they cannot isolate us.

What’s more, the neighborhood assemblies attack capitalist isolation and the enclosure of public space in the very act of meeting. Every neighborhood assembly is also an occupation that takes over a plaza, park, or street corner without permission, eroding legality and demonstrating that the city is ours. On countless occasions, neighborhood assemblies have blocked major streets as an act of protest (against a hospital closing, for example), or they have decided, almost whimsically, to hold their meeting in a large intersection and simply shut down traffic. In the feeder marches to major protests the people of a neighborhood have met to march all the way to the center, blocking every street along the way, even though they may only consist of forty people. And because of the greater social legitimacy enjoyed by the neighborhood assembly as opposed to some political faction or specific organization, the police have been hesitant to create problems because any repression would draw more people down into the streets. Temporarily, the neighborhood assemblies have negated government sovereignty in the streets; if the police ask whether marchers have a permit, they just get laughed at.

via libcom.org

Astra Taylor: Occupy & Space

So far, in New York at least, energy for protest has not waned. The movement can appear anywhere at any time. There are inventive demonstrations every day, too many for any one person to keep up with, and more in the works. Yet attempts to occupy and hold space beyond Liberty Plaza have has missed the mark more than they have hit it, from the ridiculous and ridiculed takeover of the non-profit gallery Artists Space to the failed occupation of a student center at the New School, which initially had enormous promise yet quickly devolved despite the fact the building was secure thanks to support from sympathetic faculty and administrators.

Without a doubt, the most successful attempt to expand the concept of occupation took place on December 6th during a national day of action called "Occupy Our Homes," an attempt to refocus attention and outrage on the havoc wrecked by the mortgage crisis—a crisis experts say is only half over (around 6 million homes have been seized since 2007, and over the next four years an estimated 8 million more are predicted go into foreclosure). In Chicago, a homeless woman and her baby moved into a foreclosed home with the blessing of the previous owner and the help of more than forty supporters; in Atlanta, protesters made an appearance at foreclosure auctions in three counties; in Denver, activists collected garbage from abandoned properties and delivered it to the mayor; in Oakland, a mother of three reclaimed the townhouse she lost after becoming unemployed while another group held a barbeque at a property owned by Fannie Mae. "To occupy a house owned by Bank of America is to occupy Wall Street," one activist told me, explaining the underlying logic. "We are literally occupying Wall Street in our own communities."

In New York, Occupy worked with a variety of community organizations and allies to host a foreclosure tour and coordinate the re-occupation and renovation of a vacant bank-owned property. When we reached our final destination, a small house at 702 Vermont Street in Brooklyn, the new residents, a previously homeless family of four, were already inside, along with a veritable army of activists coordinating the event and scheduling rotating teams to guard against eviction. Tasha Glasgow, the mother, was almost too shy to speak, but managed to express her sincere thanks to everyone assembled. Alfredo Carrasquillo, the father of her two children, including a 9-year old daughter who is severely autistic, held back emotion as he addressed the crowd, making sure to acknowledge the NYPD who dotted the sidewalks and could be seen on the roofs of nearby buildings. "I'm just hoping they don't wake me up in my bed at 2 am," he joked. As of this writing, almost a week later, the NYPD has not made any arrests at the house, though they have repeatedly intimidated the people staying there. The neighbors, in contrast, have welcomed the occupiers with open arms, inviting them over for tea and to baby showers held on the block. One woman, who lives a few doors down, said they could use her kitchen a few nights a week since the utilities in the occupied house aren't hooked up.

Not only does the occupation of abandoned foreclosed homes connect the dots between Wall Street and Main Street, it can also lead to swift and tangible victories, something movements desperately need for momentum to be maintained. The banks, it seems, are softer targets than one might expect because so many cases are rife with legal irregularities and outright criminality. It's not uncommon for customers to be misled, crucial paperwork lost and documents robosigned. While the mortgage crisis involved credit default swaps and securities and other complex financial instruments, one thing that clued investigators in to the systemic fraud now known to have taken place at Countrywide (right before it merged with Bank Of America) were the extra Wite-Out dispensers on brokers' desks, the tool of choice for low-fi chicanery: signatures were forged, paperwork faked, and numbers fudged, leaving countless people with subprime mortgages when they qualified for better ones. This duplicity is why banks often change their tune when threatened with serious scrutiny; they count on cases to go uncontested, as the vast majority do, because they often lose if actually taken to court. In Rochester, one bank called off an eviction when they got wind that a protest—a blockade and a press conference—was being planned.

It's interesting, given the glowing media coverage Occupy Our Homes received, that the action—billed as Occupy's big leap forward—was not exactly innovative. Take Back The Land, which started in Miami, has been rehousing people in foreclosed properties since the mortgage crisis began. Going further back, the same techniques and rhetoric can be traced to the squatters campaigns that took off in New York City in the late '70s (indeed, some of the squatting pioneers are now mentoring a new generation of activists) and the largely forgotten poor people's movements of the late eighties and nineties. On May 1st, 1990, in an effort remarkably similar to Occupy Our Homes, homeless activists in eight cities reclaimed dozens of government owned properties, many of which they wrested control of for good. Occupy, in other words, is not breaking new ground, but bringing public attention to the kind of civil disobedience that typically goes under the radar.

But what's clear—and terrifying—looking back on the occupation efforts of decades past, is that the potential base of support today is far broader than previous generations of activists could have ever dreamed. With one in five homes facing foreclosure and filings showing no sign of slowing down in the next few years, the number of people touched by the mortgage crisis—whether because they have lost their homes or because their homes are now underwater—truly boggles the mind.

via beyondthechoir.org

Occupy Education | The Nation--Liza Featherstone

It’s not only in New York City that the Occupy spirit has invigorated education activists. In late November Occupy Rochester, along with parents and other community activists, disruptively mic-checked a school board meeting to protest an undemocratic process for selecting a new school superintendent, a process that involved a corporate search firm. In Chicago, on the same day as the Queens PEP meeting, protesters shut down a school board meeting to protest recent failed reforms. Like New York, Chicago has been shutting down failing schools and replacing them with new ones, often charter schools. As in New York, many of the new schools perform even worse than the old ones. Parents and teachers mic checked the meeting, yelling, “You have failed Chicago’s children…. These are our children, not corporate products!” Two days later, protesters occupied the lobby of New Jersey’s Department of Education, protesting Governor Chris Christie’s efforts to open more charter schools in the state.

Leia Petty, who has been active in OWS but especially in Occupy DOE, said of the education justice movement, “People have been doing this work for years but OWS has opened new possibilities for this work. It’s helped us think bolder. It feels like a whole movement, not just us.”

To be sure, the 99 percent isn’t unanimous in its opposition to the mayor’s reform agenda. At the meeting in Corona, some charter school parents spoke of their satisfaction with their children’s education. But there weren’t many of them, and Gotham Schools has reported that they’d been organized to attend by an Astroturf pro-charter organization called Families for Excellent Schools, headed by Seth Andrews, who runs Democracy Prep, a charter chain.

via www.thenation.com

US hunger, homelessness soar amid cuts in social spending

Buried within the Supplemental Poverty Measure report is perhaps its most shocking finding: the percentage of the population classified as “low-income,” that is, making between 100 and 200 percent of the poverty rate, has nearly doubled. The official statistic puts the portion of families making between 100 and 200 percent of the poverty rate at 18.8 percent of the total population, while the new statistic puts it at 31.8 percent.

According to the supplemental Census report, there are 49.1 million people in poverty and an additional 97.3 million who are considered low-income. The two figures combined total 146.4 million out of a population of 300 million.

Alongside mass unemployment, falling wages play a critical role in the staggering growth of poverty in the US. Just over the past 12 months, wages have fallen by 1.7 percent in real terms.

This is the result of a coordinated and national corporate assault on workers’ wages that was inaugurated with the Obama administration’s forced bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009. Obama insisted that government loans to the auto companies be contingent on a vast expansion of tier-two wages ($14 an hour) for new-hires, and an overall reduction of labor costs to those at non-union foreign transplant auto factories.

Together with the collapse in home values, mass unemployment and wage-cutting have thrown even families with working adults into poverty. According to a study by the Working Poor Families Project released this month, the portion of employed families that classify as low-income grew from 27 percent in 2002 to 31.2 percent in 2010.

“Many of these families used to be solidly middle class but have seen their incomes drop below the low-income threshold because of a pay cut, a reduction in hours, or because a spouse lost their job,” said Mark Mather, a co-author of the analysis.

In the face of this mounting social catastrophe, no section of the political establishment, Democratic or Republican, is proposing any measures to alleviate the crisis and create jobs. Rather, the entire framework of the official discussion revolves around savage austerity measures to make the working class pay for the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the banks. These measures include hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to food stamps, home heating assistance, education and core social programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

via www.wsws.org

Christopher Hitchens: The Most Provincial Spirit of All « Corey Robin

On the announcement of his death, I think it’s fair to allow Christopher Hitchens to do the thing he loved to do most.

Speak for himself:

[On the use of cluster bombs by the US in Afghanistan] If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops…then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, “Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.” No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.

Speak about himself:

I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy–theocratic barbarism–in plain view….I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.

Hitchens had a reputation for being an internationalist. Yet someone who gets excited by mass murder—and then invokes that excitement, to a waiting audience, as an explanation of his support for mass murder—is not an internationalist.  He is a narcissist, the most provincial spirit of all.

Only a writer of Hitchens’s talents could do justice to the culture that now so shamefully mourns him.

via coreyrobin.com

Person of the Year

Pew Poll: Majority favors OWS, loathes Congress

The arguments and concerns of the Occupy Wall Street movement are supported by many Americans, but most continue to reject the core conclusion that America is divided into a nation of “haves” and “have-nots.” Moreover, while the Occupy Wall Street movement draws more support than opposition, its tactics are criticized, with far more saying they disapprove than approve of the way the protests have been carried out.

By a 44% to 35% margin, more Americans support than oppose the Occupy Wall Street movement overall, and by 48% to 30%, more say they agree than disagree with the concerns the protests have raised. But when it comes to the way the protests are being conducted, significantly more disapprove (49%) than approve (29%).

Many of the themes of the Occupy Wall Street protests resonate with the public. About half (51%) say that Wall Street hurts the American economy more than it helps it; 36% are of the view that Wall Street helps more than it hurts. A 61% majority say the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy, while 36% say it is generally fair to most Americans. And fully 77% say that a few rich people and corporations have too much power in this country. While still a minority view, the current survey finds 40% saying that hard work and determination are no guarantee of success, higher than in any other survey conducted over the past 17 years.

But at the same time, most Americans (58%) continue to reject the notion that American society is divided into two groups, the “haves” and the “have-nots.” And when pressed to choose, more Americans describe themselves as part of the “haves” (46%) than the “have-nots” (39%).

via www.people-press.org

Census: 1 in 2 Americans are Poor or Low Income

New census data gives some confirmation to the notion of a disappearing middle class: Nearly 1 in 2 Americans are now officially either low income or impoverished. 

Based on some new designations the Census Bureau created to better reflect the distribution of poverty in the US, the Associated Press explains that 97.3 million Americans are "low income," which means earning at or just over the poverty line. Added to the 49.1 million Americans living in poverty, that’s 146.4 million, or about 48 percent, of the U.S. population. The new account of poverty in the U.S. considers medical, taxes and transportation costs.

The "low income" cut off for a family of four is $45,000, a number more and more middle-class Americans are dipping – and staying – below. That's is putting an increase on requests for assistance, and not all those needs are being met, the AP reports. According to a survey of mayors in 29 cities, 1 in 4 residents requesting food assistance are not getting it. 

Here’s more on the new picture of poverty in the US:

• The South and the South West have the highest concentration of low-income families, while California and Texas each have more than 1 million residents qualifying.
• Children (at 57%) and seniors are the most likely to be poor or low-income
• Hispanics are the most likely to be poor by race and ethnicity, at 73 percent.  That’s followed by, in order, by African Americans, Asians and non-Hispanic whites.
• The share of working families who are now considered to be low income has risen to 31 percent since the start of the recession in 2007. That’s the highest it’s been in at least a decade. 

And wages, with inflation taken into account, are stagnant or falling for the poorest Americans, while rising for the richest. The AP with the details:

The inflation-adjusted average earnings for the bottom 20 percent of families have fallen from $16,788 in 1979 to just under $15,000, and earnings for the next 20 percent have remained flat at $37,000. In contrast, higher-income brackets had significant wage growth since 1979, with earnings for the top 5 percent of families climbing 64 percent to more than $313,000.

via slatest.slate.com

"Worker-Owners of America, Unite": Will Cooperative Workplaces Democratize U.S. Economy?

AMY GOODMAN: Talk more about the banks and the credit unions, the state banks that are developing.

GAR ALPEROVITZ: Well, we’ve had, since the beginning part of the century in North Dakota, a state-owned bank, highly successful. The press doesn’t cover it. But it’s a bank that exists just like other banks, but it doesn’t speculate. It doesn’t use money to do what the Wall Street banks are doing. And as I say, there are about 14 states that have introduced legislation to reproduce that, help finance small business, on the one hand, but co-ops and worker-owned firms, and most of this with a real green edge to it, ecologically developed. And in these city banks, the same thing, trying to focus—for instance, in San Francisco, there’s about $2 billion in state—in city money, that’s taxpayer money. Instead of putting it in the Bank of America, the proposal is put it in a city bank or a city credit union and then use that to finance development in the city.

And I think that direction, using those public monies, and not simply to finance corporations or speculation, but doing it in a way that builds up this already developing knowledge and base of worker-owned companies, community-owned developments, neighborhood developments, co-ops, that form of development, the way to think about it is the—you know, the two to three decades before the Progressive Era and the Populist Era really made a big national impact. There was a developmental process, step by step, at the state level. Take the women’s right to vote, the same thing: step by step, state by state by state, building up over three to four to five decades. But I think the pain level is so high, it’s going to be quicker this time. So I take this local development process very seriously. And I think it can lead to national change, as the New Deal did at one point when the pain levels really struck. You know, at the other—

JUAN GONZALEZ: You also talk—

GAR ALPEROVITZ: At the other—go ahead.

JUAN GONZALEZ: If I can, you also talk about the changing attitudes, especially among young Americans, toward concepts like capitalism and socialism. Could you talk about that, as well?

GAR ALPEROVITZ: Yeah, there was a Rasmussen poll—now, we’re talking about a fairly conservative polling group—in 2009. People under 30, they found, were equally disposed as to whether capitalism or socialism was a better system. And now that’s a big change. We’re past the time in the Cold War when anyone who mentioned anything like a worker-owned company or cooperative or public-owned enterprise was written out of court. Lots of younger people are looking at what will work in the midst of a failing economy, where the large corporations are falling day by day and the speculators on Wall Street are speculating away the money. I think we’re seeing a change in attitude, both increasing doubts about what’s now going on in the economy, deep doubts, very deep doubts—thanks to Occupation, it’s crystallized—but this other trend of saying, "What do you want? Where are we going?" in some ways to democratize the economy in a very American way, something very—you can explain to your neighbors, this is—this makes sense, in these cities that I’ve been talking about. You get a whole larger coalition of people understanding there’s a hell of a lot of pain here, we can develop something here that moves us in a direction of democratizing local economies and beyond.

via www.democracynow.org

Obama administration backs bill authorizing indefinite military detention of US citizens

The bill would allow for the open-ended detention of anyone caught up in the “war on terror,” without trial or charges, including US citizens. This is the first explicit legislation to effectively abolish habeas corpus (the right to challenge unlawful detentions) and the constitutional rights to a fair trial (the Sixth Amendment) and due process (the Fifth Amendment).

Another provision requires that such individuals be taken into military custody, with an exception for US citizens. The military seizure of US citizens is left to the discretion of the executive branch. This means the effective abolition of the Posse Comitatus Act, which has restricted use of the military for domestic policing for more than a century.

The main concern of the administration was that the requirement for military custody could hamper actions of other agencies engaged in counterterrorism operations, such as the FBI and CIA. An earlier policy statement from last month outlined the White House position that the requirement on military detention was an “unnecessary, untested, and legally controversial restriction of the President’s authority to defend the Nation from terrorist threats that would tie the hands of our intelligence and law enforcement professionals.”

The White House has cited the extra-judicial assassination of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki (a US citizen) as evidence that there should be no restraints on the form through which executive power is exercised.

In response to White House pressure, House and Senate negotiators on Monday agreed to compromise language that states that nothing in the bill will affect “existing criminal enforcement and national security authorities of the FBI or any other domestic law enforcement agency…regardless of whether such… person is held in military custody.”

Another measure would allow the president to waive requirements on the grounds of “national security.”

The administration also expressed the concern that the explicit authorization of indefinite detention was not necessary, as the White House claims that this power is already incorporated in the Authorization to Use Military Force, passed in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks. Its inclusion in the bill could prompt judicial review. Carney’s statement declared, “Though this provision remains unnecessary, the changes ensure that we are merely restating our existing legal authorities and minimize the risk of unnecessary and distracting litigation.”

Commenting on the amended version, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement earlier this week: “The sponsors of the bill monkeyed around with a few minor details, but all of the core dangers remain—the bill authorizes the president to order the military to indefinitely imprison without charge or trial American citizens and others found far from any battlefield, even in the United States itself.”

via www.wsws.org