Conversations @OccupyPortland
I didn't want to go at first, but a friend was going, so my wife wanted to go, and I figured I should support the thing I've defended from people who only knew that they were being inconvenienced.
"I supported them at first...
...they don't have any end goal, any message,
they're just in the way,
they're making life harder for the 99% they claim to represent
If they spent time getting a job instead of asking for a handout they might deserve attention
and
they're just a wretched hive of scum and villainy."
I can't call myself the most informed person that exists, especially since I've been working and coming home to a bored/talkative mother-in-law and a social life. But I've been lucky to be prepared to handle these arguments. In bars, cars, kitchens, streets, and the internets, I'm proud to have answered the call when I heard it; at every turn, the issue was information. The above sentiments came from people who did not watch democracy now or surf alternative media but from people who got their news from fox or mainstream/local news. Mostly it came down to a confusion about the cause and the value of the method.
As for the cause, I hear assertions from the right that it's all about wanting a hand out. Of course, if your world view is all black and white, then when tens of thousands are moved to the point that they go into the street, then they are "Obama's fleabaggers," "parasites," "children," a mindless mob of the greedy poor. Yeah, and the Tea Party was just mercilessly and unfairly assaulted by the liberal media - the people with the racist signs don't define the movement, but the anarchists carrying the suspicious chunks of concrete define ours. The problem with believing the world is totally binary is that you tend to think if someone is on the wrong side of your opinion, then anything that looks bad for them must be true - confirmation bias.
The cause of the Occupy movement is similar to the Tea Party, actually, and at least can agree that money is damaging to democracy. When you boil everything down, I think, it's distrust with the money in politics that most defines the Occupy movement. Mega-Businesses invest in lobbyists and funnel money into political campaigns and then those politicians grant bailouts, poo-poo an audit of the FED, and rig regulations and tax law in favor of only the biggest companies. This is why the big protest is on Wall Street and not Washington: it's Wall Street that calls the shots.
So what do they want? Well, the "open protest" model means a lot of people can walk in and fight for their favorite causes, but you'll find that there's a unifying theme. There's the stinking symptoms of the problem, like extreme economic disparity and broiling unemployment despite record profits among the Orwellianly named "Job Creators." There's the constant causes of the left, like ending economic globalization plans that ship jobs oversees and strip communities of economic safety, or the constant wars that steal money that could be used to invest in our infrastructure, higher education, and food/energy security. And there's calls for solutions, like a constitutional convention to repeal Citizens United and proclaim that corporations are not people and that money is not free speech. Election reform. Regulating lobbyists. Bringing the tax code back to at least the Reagan era, removing loop holes and removing incentives to just get an address in the Caymans and legally avoiding taxes.
Doesn't sound vague or confused to me.
So these people all converged at highly visible spots in urban centers, and while making these demands they built their own societies to support their permanent protest. Food, shelter, clothes, books, teach-ins, panels, discussions, crafting, cleaning, and cooking, all volunteer, all inclusive, and all without a hierarchy, with general assemblies open to everyone and using 90% consensus to handle problems; internal, like safety and sanitation, and external, like long term plans with the city and the police. If society argues that it takes away our freedoms for our own good, it's communities like these that suggest that things are better when we have more freedom and leeway.
Of course, with the promise of shelter and free food, the tired, cold, and hungry weren't far behind. Word is that the police were even telling people to come to Occupy Portland for food. The influx of a segment of the population disproportionately afflicted with mental illness and addiction made for great stories for the main stream news. Local news channels were giddy to report on needles found nearby and depict a downtown blighted and unsafe - rarely mentioned was that these people were not materialised by the movement. It was already there, especially in the park known as a popular place for the homeless to sleep, but it just became centralised. In fact, there were doubtlessly people whose lives were saved by those camps; people who could try and get clean and redirect their energy toward something constructive, people who suddenly found themselves among people familiar with the infrastructure devoted to helping people with addiction, people who were far more safe sleeping in tents surrounded by liberals than sleeping outside the bread factory near 10th and oak.
So the news stories kept coming. The local-TV shows would stand on the edge and interview the random, naive, unintelligible, and high while mourning the nice lawn and describing the toll on the portapotties or the cost to the city to pay overtime for cops to stand around and wait for the crackdown. Fox filmed someone looking at a knife at a military surplus store and claimed protesters were stocking up on the sharpest knives they could find, or filming empty shelves and saying they were sold out of gas masks when actually, and there was even a big sign that said so, the gas masks were all behind the counter.
It helps that almost all US media is owned by just 6 companies.
Public opinion was decided. The people that pay for the news don't want people to organize and fight to make it harder to be the sole beneficiaries of democracy and capitalism. Even people who supported a lot of what it was for thought that it should end, that it had made its point. But this is a big deal, an evolution in American protest, an idea borrowed from the Arab Spring - peacefull marches are ignored by the media, so the people tried riots, like the WTO riot in Seattle, but both methods of protest have the problem of being over too soon. A place of permanent protest becomes a place where people can become politically active and engage in discussion far more readily than a march, rally, or riot, and while riots do get media attention, it hardly strays from the negative. The occupy movement, however, was able to outlive media blackout and even persist long enough so that people who heard the bad stories could see it for themselves on that one day a week they have free. Maybe that's why polling shows that the Occupy movement is more popular than the Tea Party.
The method was more effective at communicating its message the more visible it was, which is why Occupy Portland voted to try and hold onto their park, right next to city hall and shouting distance from the giant Wells Fargo building, instead of moving to other areas that would have been much easier for the city to ignore.
Especially hard to ignore because these were not professional protesters. Many had never done anything like this before, and the majority actually do have jobs.
I was there that night in Portland when they expected a crackdown at midnight or maybe 5am. I listened to a couple libertarians talk to an excited engineering student and got into the nitty gritty philosophical arguments behind economic theories. My favorite question will always be, what is a society for? What is an economy for? An impass was met when the point was made that America's period of greatest prosperity was after America's biggest investments in education and infrastructure in the post-war era, and that we've tried leaving it up to the free market to create the same conditions, but it can't. Giant banks might invest in a company that will come up with an innovative tooth brush, but there are some things that don't bring a quick profit, like sending people to college, investing in pure research, building high-speed rail, making the energy grid more efficient, or replacing aging water and waste pipes.
At the very, very least, there are a lot of people talking about this stuff than there ever has been, regardless of your opinions of the Occupy movement.
"I supported them at first...
...they don't have any end goal, any message,
they're just in the way,
they're making life harder for the 99% they claim to represent
If they spent time getting a job instead of asking for a handout they might deserve attention
and
they're just a wretched hive of scum and villainy."
I can't call myself the most informed person that exists, especially since I've been working and coming home to a bored/talkative mother-in-law and a social life. But I've been lucky to be prepared to handle these arguments. In bars, cars, kitchens, streets, and the internets, I'm proud to have answered the call when I heard it; at every turn, the issue was information. The above sentiments came from people who did not watch democracy now or surf alternative media but from people who got their news from fox or mainstream/local news. Mostly it came down to a confusion about the cause and the value of the method.
As for the cause, I hear assertions from the right that it's all about wanting a hand out. Of course, if your world view is all black and white, then when tens of thousands are moved to the point that they go into the street, then they are "Obama's fleabaggers," "parasites," "children," a mindless mob of the greedy poor. Yeah, and the Tea Party was just mercilessly and unfairly assaulted by the liberal media - the people with the racist signs don't define the movement, but the anarchists carrying the suspicious chunks of concrete define ours. The problem with believing the world is totally binary is that you tend to think if someone is on the wrong side of your opinion, then anything that looks bad for them must be true - confirmation bias.
The cause of the Occupy movement is similar to the Tea Party, actually, and at least can agree that money is damaging to democracy. When you boil everything down, I think, it's distrust with the money in politics that most defines the Occupy movement. Mega-Businesses invest in lobbyists and funnel money into political campaigns and then those politicians grant bailouts, poo-poo an audit of the FED, and rig regulations and tax law in favor of only the biggest companies. This is why the big protest is on Wall Street and not Washington: it's Wall Street that calls the shots.
So what do they want? Well, the "open protest" model means a lot of people can walk in and fight for their favorite causes, but you'll find that there's a unifying theme. There's the stinking symptoms of the problem, like extreme economic disparity and broiling unemployment despite record profits among the Orwellianly named "Job Creators." There's the constant causes of the left, like ending economic globalization plans that ship jobs oversees and strip communities of economic safety, or the constant wars that steal money that could be used to invest in our infrastructure, higher education, and food/energy security. And there's calls for solutions, like a constitutional convention to repeal Citizens United and proclaim that corporations are not people and that money is not free speech. Election reform. Regulating lobbyists. Bringing the tax code back to at least the Reagan era, removing loop holes and removing incentives to just get an address in the Caymans and legally avoiding taxes.
Doesn't sound vague or confused to me.
So these people all converged at highly visible spots in urban centers, and while making these demands they built their own societies to support their permanent protest. Food, shelter, clothes, books, teach-ins, panels, discussions, crafting, cleaning, and cooking, all volunteer, all inclusive, and all without a hierarchy, with general assemblies open to everyone and using 90% consensus to handle problems; internal, like safety and sanitation, and external, like long term plans with the city and the police. If society argues that it takes away our freedoms for our own good, it's communities like these that suggest that things are better when we have more freedom and leeway.
Of course, with the promise of shelter and free food, the tired, cold, and hungry weren't far behind. Word is that the police were even telling people to come to Occupy Portland for food. The influx of a segment of the population disproportionately afflicted with mental illness and addiction made for great stories for the main stream news. Local news channels were giddy to report on needles found nearby and depict a downtown blighted and unsafe - rarely mentioned was that these people were not materialised by the movement. It was already there, especially in the park known as a popular place for the homeless to sleep, but it just became centralised. In fact, there were doubtlessly people whose lives were saved by those camps; people who could try and get clean and redirect their energy toward something constructive, people who suddenly found themselves among people familiar with the infrastructure devoted to helping people with addiction, people who were far more safe sleeping in tents surrounded by liberals than sleeping outside the bread factory near 10th and oak.
So the news stories kept coming. The local-TV shows would stand on the edge and interview the random, naive, unintelligible, and high while mourning the nice lawn and describing the toll on the portapotties or the cost to the city to pay overtime for cops to stand around and wait for the crackdown. Fox filmed someone looking at a knife at a military surplus store and claimed protesters were stocking up on the sharpest knives they could find, or filming empty shelves and saying they were sold out of gas masks when actually, and there was even a big sign that said so, the gas masks were all behind the counter.
It helps that almost all US media is owned by just 6 companies.
Public opinion was decided. The people that pay for the news don't want people to organize and fight to make it harder to be the sole beneficiaries of democracy and capitalism. Even people who supported a lot of what it was for thought that it should end, that it had made its point. But this is a big deal, an evolution in American protest, an idea borrowed from the Arab Spring - peacefull marches are ignored by the media, so the people tried riots, like the WTO riot in Seattle, but both methods of protest have the problem of being over too soon. A place of permanent protest becomes a place where people can become politically active and engage in discussion far more readily than a march, rally, or riot, and while riots do get media attention, it hardly strays from the negative. The occupy movement, however, was able to outlive media blackout and even persist long enough so that people who heard the bad stories could see it for themselves on that one day a week they have free. Maybe that's why polling shows that the Occupy movement is more popular than the Tea Party.
The method was more effective at communicating its message the more visible it was, which is why Occupy Portland voted to try and hold onto their park, right next to city hall and shouting distance from the giant Wells Fargo building, instead of moving to other areas that would have been much easier for the city to ignore.
Especially hard to ignore because these were not professional protesters. Many had never done anything like this before, and the majority actually do have jobs.
I was there that night in Portland when they expected a crackdown at midnight or maybe 5am. I listened to a couple libertarians talk to an excited engineering student and got into the nitty gritty philosophical arguments behind economic theories. My favorite question will always be, what is a society for? What is an economy for? An impass was met when the point was made that America's period of greatest prosperity was after America's biggest investments in education and infrastructure in the post-war era, and that we've tried leaving it up to the free market to create the same conditions, but it can't. Giant banks might invest in a company that will come up with an innovative tooth brush, but there are some things that don't bring a quick profit, like sending people to college, investing in pure research, building high-speed rail, making the energy grid more efficient, or replacing aging water and waste pipes.
At the very, very least, there are a lot of people talking about this stuff than there ever has been, regardless of your opinions of the Occupy movement.