On Jan 15, SOUL (The School of Unity and Liberation in Oakland) organized a panel and discussion on Occupy with veteran organizers from community and labor organizations who have been deeply engaged in the Occupy Movement. Maria Poblet (of Causa Justa/Just Cause), Shaw San Liu (of Chinese Progressive Association), and Brooke Anderson (of East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy) share lessons from on-the-ground mobilizations in Oakland & San Francisco, and exchange ideas about challenges and opportunities in this new moment in the fight against the 1%.

Listen to the panel here

Having trouble listening to the audio? Listen on SoundCloud here.

Panel Speakers:

Brooke Anderson is the Port Driver Organizer at East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, working with immigrant truck drivers who service the Port of Oakland.

María Poblet is the Executive Director of Causa Justa::Just Cause, a housing rights organization uniting working-class black and brown communities from San Francisco and Oakland.

Shaw San Liu is the Lead Organizer for the Tenants and Workers Center of Chinese Progressive Association.

Intro and Framing: Tina Bartolome

Listen to the intro here

Listen to the discussion here

Having trouble listening to the audio? Listen on SoundCloud here.

The event was co-sponsored by: Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Asian Youth Promoting Advocacy & Leadership, Causa Justa::Just Cause, Chinese Progressive Association, Coleman Advocates for Children & Youth and People Organized to Win Employment Rights.

Audio clips from the streets for the panel recording are from “Voices from Oakland’s General Strike”, by LeftBay99, below:

This piece was originally published by the Nation on January 9, 2012.

Naomi Klein is a journalist, activist and author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and No Logo. She writes a syndicated column for The Nation and The Guardian. Yotam Marom is a political organizer, educator, and writer based in New York. He has been active in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and is a member of the Organization for a Free Society. This conversation was recorded in New York City.

This interview by Sarah Jaffe was originally posted on AlterNet on December 22, 2011

Earlier this year, long before Occupy Wall Street turned Zuccotti Park into Liberty Plaza, Stephen Lerner, a longtime labor organizer with SEIU and mastermind of the Justice for Janitors campaign, wrote in New Labor Forum of “large-scale sit-ins, occupations, and other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience that must inevitably overcome court injunctions and political pressures.”

After the financial crash, Lerner headed up SEIU’s banking and finance project, organizing labor and community groups to fight predatory lending and other abusive practices by the banks. He has also been targeted by Glenn Beck for proposing debt strikes as a form of collective bargaining for homeowners and other debtors. Beck called him an “economic terrorist,” and he received death threats.

In a year when labor and working people became the focus for political protest in the U.S. and around the world — when a new slogan, “We Are the 99 Percent” captured news headlines and changed the way Americans talk about income inequality — Lerner’s words seem prescient. So who better than Lerner to discuss the year that was, the present situation, and the future of Occupy? AlterNet recently caught up with Lerner to talk about the targeting of Wall Street, debt strikes, organizing in America, and much more.

Sarah Jaffe: Reading your article at New Labor Forum, It does seem like you sort of predicted Occupy. How did you feel when it all started?

Stephen Lerner: I don’t know if I’d say I predicted it. A lot of us have been trying to figure out for a long time how we get out of the trap we’re in –we’ve been doing the same thing for a long time and it hasn’t been working.

But it’s an exciting feeling to see something a lot of people spent a lifetime hoping for –this kind of dramatic increase in activity that targets financial capital, those who really control the country.

The Justice for Janitors campaign was a campaign where the traditional way of organizing wouldn’t work, so we had to do something totally different. We organized people that everybody said were unorganizable–part-time, subcontracted, often undocumented workers.

There were many reasons why I think it worked, but one of them was that we had an analysis of who had power. In addition to the community organizing and the many different things the campaign did, the strikes and sit-ins, none of that would’ve worked if we hadn’t directed the campaign toward those with the greatest power—the people who controlled the real estate that janitors were cleaning.

The Janitors campaign was ahead of its time, or maybe another way to look at it is that it captured many tactics and strategies from the past and put them in one campaign. We combined the idea of rights at work, the rights of immigrants, race, the way we talk about inequality into a campaign that captured the idea of the poorest workers trying to win justice from the very richest people. We both won public support and had a strategy to lift people out of poverty.

We ran, starting in 2007 for a number of years, a campaign focused on private equity. It has been a growing part of how capital is organized. Workers and other organizations have to learn how to organize around it.

Similar to the ideas behind Justice for Janitors, we campaigned to pressure private equity companies, which are now six of the 10 largest employers in the country, to take responsibility for the companies they own and how they pay and treat their workers.

In the labor movement, as I wrote in the New Labor Forum article, we are constrained by the way we’re intertwined with the very people who are in charge of the economy. It’s not a criticism, it’s a reality. So Occupy has emerged as a third force, which has identified both who the bad guys are: Wall Street. Simultaneously, because it doesn’t have ties with them, it can go at them in a more direct way that has captured the popular imagination. They’re not constrained by historical relationships.

SJ: You wrote “unions are just big enough—and just connected enough to the political and economic power structure—to be constrained from leading the kinds of activities that are needed.”

SL: When I stress that this is the importance of Occupy, it’s not a criticism of unions to say that they live in the real world. That’s part of unions’ strength, and they’re winning real benefits and protecting members. That’s why we need something like Occupy that can do the things that unions haven’t been able to do in recent years.

You know, when you look back to the first organizing of the CIO, the sit-down strikes, they partly were able to do that because they had nothing to lose. It’s hard to imagine unions taking a similar level of risk right now because the very success of unions means that there are pension funds and buildings and assets to protect and a legal system that has dramatic penalties if campaigns have a real economic impact on corporations.

So what’s incredibly exciting is to go from the theory–there’s so many problems in the country, so many people are dissatisfied with what we have that we need something new, and it wouldn’t look like what we currently had. I guess you could say Occupy is sort of theory and practice meeting.

SJ: You mentioned the sit-down strikes and the old tactics of the radical labor movement that we haven’t seen in a while. And while unions do have a lot to protect, they’ve also been losing a lot of ground. The “Protect the ground you have” strategy hasn’t necessarily helped. As somebody who led one of the more radical labor actions of the last couple of decades, do you have some thoughts about that?

SL: It is a failed strategy—which I think most in the labor movement accept–to define your work and your plans and your strategy by defending a declining base. What I’m saying isn’t new, it’s been core to a lot of people’s thinking — that unions have become isolated islands.

The hard part is, what is a winning strategy? I think a key part of the winning strategy is a deep understanding of how the economy is transforming, figuring out how to engage and challenge those who are really dominating the economy.

On the Janitors campaign, we didn’t say this was a war with the cleaning contractor, we said this was a war with the people who control the industry. I think a big problem for a lot of us in the labor movement is that we’re ending up fighting the middleman, we’re fighting people who don’t have that much power instead of engaging those who are really controlling the economy.

SJ: Another thing you said in the article was that on the janitors’ campaign, your wins came when the whole community saw it as something that was about them, beyond the specific workers you were trying to organize.

SL: I’ll never forget in the 1990s, during the Century City police riot, when the police attacked strikers in Century City, one of the things that people in the Latino community again and again said is that “The police beat us up again and again in private; this is the first time that it was on film.”

The reason that people reacted, that there was such incredible support for the union after the police riot, is not that people became pro-union or cared for the wages of janitors, it’s that it became symbolic of how Latinos felt they were treated.

Where we had campaigns that have captured people’s imagination about the demands and needs of those workers, we become enmeshed with what people are feeling more broadly about the loss of wealth and power.

Everybody knows they’re getting zapped by banks, and what’s so good about Occupy is that it’s put that front and center. The fact that they were in Wall Street, I think everybody forgets. It was not Occupy a park somewhere, it was the fact that it was in the middle of the financial district. And I think on an intuitive level, people all over the political spectrum understand that those guys are at the center of how the economy is organized in a way that doesn’t work for most people.

SJ: It’s interesting because, again, a lot of people who consider themselves middle-class probably don’t think about standing in solidarity with janitors. But the 99 percent statement includes the janitors, includes teachers, includes kids graduating from college $60,000 in debt, includes literally everyone but the people at the very top. Do you think we’re seeing a new kind of class consciousness in this country?

SL: That is the brilliance of it, I think it captures so vividly how the country is divided.

If it had been rolled out as a result of polling or focus groups, I don’t think it would’ve caught on the same way as “We Are the 99 Percent” linked in people’s minds with people bravely and heroically doing something about “We Are the 99 Percent.”

I would say that is a really important point — that folks got arrested, were filmed, got pepper-sprayed, the attacks on people in New York City — all of that brought it to life in the same way that the Civil Rights movement, the sit-ins at the lunch counters did. It wasn’t that people hadn’t been saying for years, Jim Crow and segregation were wrong, it was the image of people being attacked for saying it..

I think there’s been something brewing under the surface for a while. More and more people are disaffected, folks don’t know quite where to put their anger and their energy. Some people go to the right, some people embrace scapegoating, but what’s so beautiful about this is it’s not just “We are the 99 percent, it’s “We are the 99 percent and there’s something called Wall Street that’s a key part of the 1 percent.”

I still think that most people are not opposed to folks having money, I think we’re opposed to people having lots of money that they get unfairly. I think that’s a critical piece.

I don’t think people are mad at somebody who invented a product or founded a company. It’s that people see that Wall Street is not productive. Their wealth and their riches, they do not come through any normal means — they come through cheating and gambling and ripping us off, which I think troubles us in a different kind of way.

SJ: Last weekend at the Netroots New York conference you were talking about the multiple prongs of strategy that could help bring the crisis, as you said, back to the ultra-rich, who created it. You talked about foreclosures, student debt, shareholder activism. Can you talk a little more about those individual things and then how you see them fitting together?

SL: Occupy Foreclosure and Occupy Our Homes are a piece that I think is organically linked to the movement — it goes to the heart of a lot of what I think Occupy is about. Wall Street and big banks caused the crisis and that’s why people are getting thrown out of their homes. It’s a combination of physically defending people who are losing their homes but in defending those people, they’re challenging the power of Wall Street in a very real way. It’s a wonderful nexus of occupiers, people in poor communities, and established community groups. It’s tied to ongoing work.

Students, I think there’s three pieces to that. There’s the current situation, with the general cutback of education funding, which is central to how we ended up with such massive debt.

I think what’s really exciting on the student front, is that more and more students are tying the student activity directly to the 1 percent, to Wall Street, that is profiting off of their education.

“Move Your Money,” I think is a wonderful 99 percent piece. Moving money, individually is step one, the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve said “I don’t want to get robbed by big banks anymore.” What’s really exciting now is that in Minneapolis they’ve delivered 11,000 petitions to the school board saying that they need to divest from Wells Fargo. LA saw an ordinance proposed for responsible banking, getting people to move public monies, both to get them out of big banks but then also to put them in places that create jobs. It’s a simple fact that if you invest your money locally, it turns over into the local economy, while if you give it to Wall Street then 40 percent of it goes into compensation for CEOs.

That work all ties into the bigger principal reduction campaign.What we need to do is reduce people’s mortgages to the real value of the house, which would put an average of $400 a month in every homeowner’s pocket. It would create a million jobs if banks had to reduce principal to current value and address the $700 billion in negative equity homeowners have.

One of the untold stories of the financial crisis is the disproportionate impact on communities of color. So the fight about foreclosures, Occupy our Homes, and principal reduction is really about how to return the wealth that’s been sucked out of communities of color.

Then the final piece that we’re seeing more energy around is “occupy the shareholder meetings.” Increasingly corporations control our government, but corporations in theory have these meetings where decisions are made about their governance and their investment. People should buy shares and we should be visiting key executives, we should have demands of these companies, we should show up at the shareholders’ meetings and say we want a say in how the corporations that are running the country should be run.

So you add all those things together and they end up being the streams that when they flow together, they end up creating a mighty river which can win really fundamental and transformative change and in doing so set the stage for ultimately rebuilding the labor movement. Which is what we’ve done at other points in our history, to really confront corporate power—by occupying work sites.

SJ: Glenn Beck called you an economic terrorist for proposing debt strikes as a tactic, yet we’re seeing campaigns launched around debt strikes this year. What role do they play in the coming fight?

SL: Right around a year ago, I argued that corporations have always had a way, whether it’s through bankruptcy or walking away from deals or renegotiating, to get out of their debt. So what I said that got Glenn Beck so cranked up was, what if we as consumers, as workers, behaved in the same rational way corporations did? What if we said, ‘we’re not going to pay back debt, especially debt that we got tricked into having, we’re not going to pay it back until we get to renegotiate the terms?’

I think what was so fascinating about why the right-wing went so berserk, is that I really nailed their biggest fear, which is if regular people join together and acted in the same way corporations do, we could challenge their power.

SJ: I think the language you used was collective bargaining for homeowners or students or whomever the debtors might be.

SL: After the economic crisis, the banks are more consolidated than ever. The top five banks control something like 40 percent of all banking in the country. You have a tiny group of people who basically are making decisions that control all of our lives. So it’s a very simple notion: why don’t we bargain with them collectively? They like it when we bargain as individuals, but they work together. They all meet and decide they’re not going to reduce principal, and what chance do you have as one lone homeowner?

So one idea for students or homeowners is what we do with unions. It’s not that one person goes on strike — you say, “if we get a critical mass, we’ll go on strike.”

The key idea for homeowners – or it could be for students — is can you get a critical mass? I’m not going to do it by myself, but if millions of other people did it, then we’d say we want to negotiate a better deal, and we’d actually have a lot of power to do that. If we all refuse to pay at the same time, it would put enormous financial pressure on them.

SJ: In the New Labor Forum piece, you said “If our goal is to offend no one, we’re in danger of doing next to nothing.” How do we balance the need to build a real majority with the need for escalating tactics?

SL: It goes back to the need for different streams of work. I think we need ways that people can enter at their comfort level. That’s why “Move Your Money” is so exciting — it’s not that hard to do, it actually creates a wonderful discussion about what’s going on with wealth in this country, why in the world the Federal Reserve gave trillions of dollars of low or no-interest loans to the banks while cities and states then had to pay high interest rates to borrow it.

The key is that you’re doing many things on multiple levels simultaneously. Some of those are majoritarian tactics like “Move Your Money” or some, like the shareholders’ meetings, will really excite a lot of people. When people realize they can buy a share of Bank of America stock for $5 and go to a shareholder meeting, I think that will attract a whole other group of people. I think it would be a terrific mistake to think it was all about getting arrested. Most people aren’t going to do that.

But you want to continue to tap into that emotion, communicate to people that we’re not doing this just for fun, we’re doing this because it really is what the problem with the country is.

The principal reduction piece is how we talk about solutions. When you say to somebody, “If we wrote down mortgages to what they’re really worth, which is just what corporations do when they go into bankruptcy or they walk away from properties, it would put $400 a month into the average person’s pocket at no cost to anybody but the banks,” people will go “Wow!”

Those are the kinds of things we have to look at, and very consciously avoiding polarizing just for the sake of polarizing. It’s a delicate dance, I think.

One thing that is critical with all of this is the commitment to nonviolence. When people are willing to risk arrest, and where it’s around people sacrificing or doing something out of high moral cause, there is huge tolerance for that even among people who may not agree. The use of violence is devastating to the majoritarian concept. That’s a huge challenge for the movement, the commitment to nonviolence and how that permeates everything that we do.

That’s what we learned again and again on the janitors’ campaign. We did things that were massively disruptive, on the janitors’ strikes. The response was totally different, when it was poor workers who were willing to go to jail to try to make a better life than when somebody in a more traditional strike engaged in something that was thought of as violence, even against property.

SJ: When I told my Republican mother about Occupy Our Homes, and when I told her specifically the story of the family at 702 Vermont here in East New York, and she said “Yeah, I approve of that.” That story worked for her, the way things like the We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr, the Occupy Student Debt Tumblr, really impact people. I think we’re seeing more willingness on the part of people to share their personal stories now.

SL: I think what’s key about that, people have been raised to feel shame if they’re a debtor or they can’t pay their bills. We’ve had wonderful experiences where multiple neighbors get together, and nobody’s had a discussion with each other that they’re all on the edge of foreclosure, or that their houses were worth so much less than they paid for them that they were every day losing money when they paid their mortgage.

People had this breakthrough when they’d say “You’re in that situation too?” Even on predatory and unfair loans, they don’t want to admit that they got suckered. People don’t want to say, ‘I’m an adult, I’m a smart person, and I didn’t see the trick in this.’ You hear people talk about penalties for early payments. Who in the world would ever think, “I get penalized if I make my payment early”?

People tell their stories in multiple forms, whether it’s online, in teams, watching videos, it gives that feeling of “Aha, it’s not me in isolation, this is something much bigger,” and I think it empowers people to take action.

SJ: We were talking at the beginning about the shrinking union base; can we rebuild the union base now that we’re no longer an industrial economy? Or are we looking at different kinds of organizing for the 99 percent?

SL: In a way it goes to the analysis question. Often when you looked at janitors one way, you’d say, well they’re all small work sites, there’s five people in the building at a time, there’s 10 people in the building, the employers don’t have that many workers, you’d say it’s hopeless. But really there’s a handful of real estate companies that control an entire city. You’re then able to think about the 1 percent.

I don’t know if there’s a country in the world that’s had a real progressive movement or the kind of change most of us believe in without a vibrant labor movement. And you can’t have a vibrant labor movement that just represents the public sector. It has to represent the private sector.

So I’m actually extraordinarily hopeful that what Occupy partly does is reawaken people to the fact that it’s not their fault that they have a lousy job, it’s not that they didn’t work hard. We’re awakening to a range of strategies and tactics, ranging from focusing on who’s really in charge to thinking about how nonviolent civil disobedience and occupations can really put financial pressure on those who are mistreating workers. And as we did with the janitors, thinking about whole geography of the industry to organize at one time rather than organizing in isolation.

When you look at labor history, you see that growth in organizing has never been incremental. There were times when there were bursts, when lots of good work paid off and it caught fire and grew far bigger. That’s the challenge for organized labor, to figure out what our relationship to these emerging movements is. How do we support them? And it’s key that they in turn are willing to do the things that unions may not be able to, that start to change the balance of power so workers can assert their rights.

SJ: Before Occupy, the first fight back in this country was in Wisconsin, around a collective bargaining bill. Not many would have thought that an attack on unions could have such a response.

SL: I think part of the reason Wisconsin and Ohio had the response is there were people to go after. These were government people, and you could un-elect them or change their behavior.

What Occupy has said and shown is that you can win the majority of Americans over to the idea, just as Wisconsin and Ohio could win people over to the idea that these government leaders were doing something bad. The key to the revival of labor is to convince the majority of people that big companies and Wall Street and bankers are doing something bad, so that when workers start to organize, it’s not seen as a campaign just for high wages for them, it’s a campaign that will make a more just, fair, and sustainable economy.

SJ: What do you see coming up this year? We talked about debt strikes, foreclosures, but is there anywhere else you see some forward motion that we haven’t discussed?

SL: I don’t think anybody should view a sort of holiday or winter lull in activity as a sign of anything. As people have said, movements ebb and flow, and whenever we look back, spring is the time that things take off again. It’s really important that people not say “Oh, everything was front page news and now it’s not.” People instead should be stepping back, saying, “In three months we did more than anybody imagined we could do, now it’s time to step back and figure out the next stage.”

To me when we marry our rhetoric and our actions, that’s when we both capture people’s imaginations but also develop the strategies and tactics that win.

In my head I always come back to this: it’s when words and acts mirror themselves that you then build real movements. If the Civil Rights movement had just said Jim Crow and all this are terrible and therefore we’re just going to do petitions, people would have said, that’s not sufficient.

I think we’re doing lots of great work, but it’s not sufficient unless when you add it all up it has the words and the tactics that really mirror each other in a way that really lets us challenge what’s going on.

Sarah Jaffe is an associate editor at AlterNet, a rabblerouser and frequent Twitterer. You can follow her at @seasonothebitch.

Marisa Franco interviewed Mohammed Abdohalli and Gopal Dayaneni about direct action and the Occupy Movement in November 2011.

The #Occupy movement has tapped into a collective frustration spanning across the globe.  The rallying cry of 99% and the tactic of occupying public spaces has changed the conversation from one that continues to benefit the 1% to one that questions the political and economic system we live in and ventures to directly practice alternatives.  It’s also a moment that has brought the power of direct action and civil disobedience to the public’s eye.

This audio installment of Organizing Upgrade features organizers Mohammed Abdohalli and Gopal Dayaneni, two of my favorite organizers who have spearheaded compelling and brilliant civil disobedience and direct actions.  Mo is a member of DreamActivist and has helped develop actions you may have heard of, first taking arrest in a sit-in in Arizona Senator John McCain’s office to helping organize most recently an action in Alabama post HB56.  Gopal’s experience has spanned across sectors and continents, active in the global justice and climate justice movement, and he is one of the most gifted strategists I’ve had the privilege of working with.

In this interview, we cover the basic and fundamentals of direct action and understand more deeply about the way that civil disobedience has taken shape within the cause of migrant youth for equality and justice.  We also talk shop on Occupy and what’s next for the 99%.

Or play interview here!

Here’s a few teasers to give you a sense of why you need to listen to this interview!

“There’s structural failures in the system.  You’ve gotta break the rules, because the rules serve the rulers.  We’re never gonna win if we’re not willing to break some rules.” – Gopal Dayaneni

“For us civil disobedience has become a two part thing, to being able to show other undocumented youth how we can challenge the system and if you challenge the system the system falls apart…if you’re actually more out there, more public you’re safer.” – Mo

“Like many other social movements around the world, at the heart of its power is the direct action component.  That’s one of the things that has liberated people’s revolutionary imagination.  We’re not gonna lobby ourselves out of the situation.  We don’t have the money we don’t have access to these people at the federal level to get what we want.  But this notion of uprising that’s happening all over the world and bringing it home..I think its very very powerful and important.”  – Gopal

“We need to not allow it to get turned into being just about the camps.  Everybody is part of this popular movement at this moment who sees the need for fundamental changes in our society, from law enforcement to immigration enforcement and criminalization all the way through to economic injustice and climate change.  Everybody is a part of that movement, and the question is how do we capture all that together in a way that’s coherent and smart.” – Gopal

“For us we were forced into doing civil disobedience as a way of giving undocumented youth a voice, giving ourselves agency and the space we deserve…We learned the power of direct action and the power of putting undocumented folks directly on the frontlines and how safe we really are if we do that.  We kinda fell into it by accident, but now its become a powerful tool and tactic.”  – Mo

The Occupy Strategy Lab of Organizing Upgrade is excited to share the thoughts of movement innovator and strategist Max Rameau. With his experience founding the Take Back the Land movement and advancing land-liberation and eviction defense strategies, Max is well positioned to provide some insight into how organizers can and should strategically connect with the Occupy movements. Over the last few months, Max has been engaged in strategic thinking, dialogue and planning with Occupy movements in Miami, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Wall Street. This article is part of a series in which Max explores the potential for movement building within the Occupy movements. Forthcoming pieces will address the Basis of Unity (between #Occupy and Liberate) and a proposal for a  2012 Spring Offensive.

The last few years have been hard for us: record foreclosures, high unemployment, drastic cuts in social services, and government actively doing the bidding of big business at the expense of regular people.

With a combination of bewilderment and frustration, concerned global citizens had asked one question over and again: when and where are people in the US going to rise up and take to the streets?

Turns out, the answer was September 17, 2011 on Wall Street.

Of course, for all it’s simplicity and elegance, that answer is not entirely accurate. Communities of color, albeit in smaller numbers and with less media, have taken to the streets for years around issues of police brutality and the impacts of the economic crisis, particularly gentrification, foreclosures and evictions.

Since 2007, The Take Back the Land movement has identified vacant government owned and foreclosed homes and “liberated” them by breaking in and transforming vacant houses into homes for families. Our objective is to transform land relationships to secure community control over land and elevate housing to the level of a human right. With the crisis deepening, many more organizations are liberating land or waging eviction defenses with increased success.

This one grand crisis, then, has elicited two very different responses, each strong and each relevant to its core constituency. With the combination of low-income communities of color and working and middle class whites taking to the streets, this society is on the cusp of a major social movement, the likes of which have not been experienced in the U.S. in more than a generation.

Far from homogeneous, this budding movement is evolving towards parallel, but interrelated campaign tracks: #Occupy and Liberate. The two look similar in many regards, but are distinguished by three important characteristics: composition, primary frame, and target/base.

1. Composition. #Occupy has mobilized mainly, though not exclusively, disaffected young and impacted working and middle class whites. Liberate is mainly low and middle income people of color.

2. Primary Frame. #Occupy’s primary frame is the economic system and the injustice it produces. Liberate frames issues in terms of land control and use (such as housing, farming and public space);

3. Target/Base. #Occupy targets those symbols, institutions and persons responsible for perpetrating the economic crisis–the 1%–through the “occupation” of public and private spaces, most notably New York’s financial district, the Oakland seaport and individual bank branches. Liberate’s base are the victims of the crisis, who are protected via land liberation and eviction defense.

Social movements are not single celled creatures on a linear path, but dynamic complex organisms with multiple moving parts, each responsible for a different series of tasks. Such a division of labor must be understood, appreciated and fully embraced. This movement is a complex organism with two tracks, and each track performs unique and critical functions.

Two intractable images of the housing crisis include the banks responsible for this financial mess and the homes from which families are evicted. This movement must take the fight to the banks, protesting and occupying them on their turf. Those same banks are occupying our communities, neighborhoods and homes. We must end that occupation through Liberation and eviction defense. The crisis simply cannot be resolved by choosing to fight on either one front or the other.

Not only must we both #Occupy and Liberate, but the chances of success for one-track increases exponentially with the actual success of the other. Therefore, the Occupy-Liberate dichotomy is not an antagonistic one; it is complementary.

We must occupy the 1% and liberate the 99%.

That is not the job of one organization, but the mission of everyone’s movement.

There is growing awareness of the two tracks, their characteristics, strengths and limitations. As we struggle to properly understand and define this relationship, we must resist the tendency towards two competing orientations:

The first tendency is to examine both tracks, note their size, frames and composition and conclude that each track actually represents its own separate and unique movement essentially unrelated to the other. The second, and polar opposite, tendency is to remark the similarities in approach and tactics and conclude the tracks are effectively identical and must be merged into a singular monolithic track. Both tendencies are wrong.

We must take care not to expect large numbers of Blacks, Latinos, indigenous, and other oppressed nationalities or immigrants, each with particular historic relationships to the police, to “occupy” banks and financial institutions. In fact, it is not clear that #Occupy could have succeeded if first executed by people of color. We must also resist the temptation to allow 1,000 young white kids to “occupy” historically people of color communities, still reeling from the more onerous occupation of gentrification. At the same time, we must find creative, effective and empowering ways to work together through parallel, supportive and even joint actions and campaigns.

While engaging the dual tracks in parallel actions is a prerequisite to building a holistic and powerful movement, it is not sufficient to guarantee trust and success. Two sets of actions, even during the same time frame and in the same city, will not result in an instant movement.

Forging these dual tracks into a cohesive movement with mutually supportive actions, requires at least three basic understandings:

1. Basis of unity. Why are we fighting and what are we fighting for? Do we want the same things or are we just doing the same thing in order to get to different places. What is the basis of our unity.

2. Framework of unity. How are we working together? How are decisions made? What do we do when one track disagrees with the other?

3. Next steps. What are we doing next? We propose a 2012 Spring Offensive.

We must Occupy to Liberate.

Max Rameau is a Haitian born Pan-African theorist, campaign strategist, organizer and author. He is one of the founding members of the Take Back the Land movement and is currently with Movement Catalyst, a movement support organization, providing campaign development and other support to social justice organizations. 

Approximately 50,000 people turned out to mass actions held during the Oakland General Strike on November 2nd, called by the General Assembly of Occupy Oakland at Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant plaza, and supported by dozens of community based organizations, unions, and activist groups. The actions shut down every major bank in downtown Oakland, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Chase, and then shut down the port, and in the process built solidarity beyond anything we have seen in the SF Bay Area since the days of the movement against the US war on Vietnam.

The call for this general strike mobilization came from the General Assembly at Occupy Oakland immediately following the violent police attack which razed the encampment and fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the peaceful crowd (inflicting a critical brain injury on young Iraq vet Scott Olsen) thus galvanizing the Occupy Oakland movement into the national and international spotlight. A petition started by Causa Justa :: Just Cause at the moment of the attack, and picked up by Moveon.org, garnered 60,000 signatures in support of the 1st amendment right of the Occupy Oakland camp, and against police abuse. A mere 24 hours after the police attack we delivered this petition to Mayor Jean Quan — 60,000 signatures from her base — with an entourage of community and labor organizations demanding that the police stand down. That night back out in the streets when the fences came down and the camp re-established itself with an outpouring of community support — with not a cop in sight — it was clear that the general strike was going to be a historic moment.

Occupy Oakland General Assembly while reclaiming the camp after the police raid and after forcing the police to stand down.

The answer to the General Strike call came from all over the SF Bay Area, from organizations, unions and groups spanning different sectors of the progressive movement, from unaffiliated individuals, and from an emerging formation knows as “Left Bay 99.” Left Bay 99 developed after a successful mobilization on 10/12/11 to “Foreclose Wall Street West”, which brought together Causa Justa :: Just Cause, UNITE/HERE 2850, Occupy San Francisco, The Ruckus Society, and dozens of direct action activists, unions, and community based organizations. That mobilization shut down Wells Fargo’s corporate headquarters in downtown San Francisco and, maybe even more importantly, left us all eager to collaborate again, and to continue building across sectors towards a movement of the 99%. [watch videos and read press coverage here]

Coming out of that mobilization, community organizers and activists came together to discuss what we could do to support Occupy SF and Occupy Oakland, and what we could contribute to those efforts.  We were involved in different ways, some as members of the general assembly and camps in each city, some in solidarity as grassroots organizations, and all in advancing demands of the 99%.  We believed that these emerging relationships were important for building a long-term movement for racial justice, gender justice, and for building an alternative to the plunder and suffering that the current economic order causes in our communities here in the US, and to communities around the world.

The exciting combination of seasoned organizers and newer activists formed into committees to advance the work.  Camp defense was a high priority, and we created a rapid response network that could mobilize people in the case of a police raid.  We leveraged relationships with elected city officials that organizations and unions built over the years to secure meetings with the Mayor of SF and the Mayor of Oakland, advocating in each meeting alongside Occupy campers for the right of the camps to remain, for an end to police violence and harassment, for the release of people who had been jailed unjustly during protests, and in support of the first amendment rights of protesters.  In addition to that, we formed an action committee that worked with campers to develop and carry out mobilization plans, and a communications committee to support those actions with media work, all of which came together as a major contribution to the general strike in Oakland on 11/2/11.

Our organization, Causa Justa :: Just Cause, was deeply involved in all areas of this work.  We called the first mobilization on 10/12/11, seeing lots of alignment between the critique of Walls Street and our bank accountability campaign work against Wells Fargo Bank. And as the momentum grew we continued investing time and energy, committed not just to our own campaign but to making a contribution to building a movement bigger than any one campaign or organization.

A key priority was to respect the suspicion of some Occupy Oakland campers that organizations wanted to come in and dominate.  We worked hard to maintain constant communication to campers and camp committees, so that our work would complement and amplify the camps’ work, while adding the much needed participation and perspectives of working class people of color and their organizations.  This was an experiment, and it was not easy.  It’s never fun to be called an “outsider” when you have been organizing in Oakland against the 1% for 10 years.  But people brought their most generous spirit to this project, a healthy sense of humor, and a commitment to building the relationships and trust needed to advance the movement.  An important part of building these relationships and trust is the fact that many of us are active participants in Occupy Oakland, attending General Assemblies, contributing to work committees, volunteering at the camp, and members of people of color and feminist caucuses of the camp. Activists from Arab, Muslim, and anti-Zionist Jewish communities, including members of AROC, PYM, and IJAN set up an “Intifada” tent, where overnight campers affiliated with LeftBay99 stay, and Causa Justa :: Just Cause set up a “Serve the People” tent where free know-your-rights information is provided to tenants and homeowners facing foreclosure, to immigrants encountering ICE, and where volunteers and ally organizations provide mental health counseling, referrals, and other crucially needed social services.

The outcome of this joint work was impressive.  On November 2 city workers, teachers, students, union people, elders, children, chanted, swayed and danced through the streets of Oakland. We roared, “We are the 99%” as we marched through downtown, with dozens of inspiring actions and contingents forming part of the celebratory day.

Causa Justa :: Just Cause helped organize a march to shut down the Big Banks demanding  a moratorium on foreclosures; and demanding banks like Wells Fargo stop investing in detention centers, dirty energy, and predatory payday lending.  The marches highlighted the responsibility these banks have for the economic crisis, called for them to pay their fair share in taxes, and highlighted Black and Latino families struggling to save their homes from foreclosure.  Given that both Oakland and San Francisco bank with Wells Fargo, there was also talk of the need for cities to divest from big banks and instead create local and community-based banking options.

“This economy does not benefit us, it benefits from us. It’s time to change that,” said Causa Justa :: Just Cause Immigrant Rights organizer Cinthya Muñoz Ramos. “Our communities are being pushed out of the economy, jobs, homes, and neighborhoods into prisons and detention centers as slave labor.”

At the State Building, teachers and youth demanded greater funding for education, and disabled people and homecare workers demanded greater funding for social services.  The children’s brigade started with story time at the public library, and carried signs reading “Don’t you dare steal my future!” and “Share!”

Labor had a strong presence, including the participation and endorsement of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, California Nurses Association/National Nurses United, Service Employees International Union and Oakland Educational Association.  The Alameda County Labor Council was also supporting, and served grilled hot dogs and hamburgers to protesters, in a delicious show of solidarity.

Maria Reyes, of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Mujeres Unidas spoke before the crowd, reminding us that immigrants are part of the 99% and have been waging the battle for fair treatment long before the Occupied movement kicked off.

“We take care of the 1 percent’s children and their grandparents and their elderly.  While we’re taking care of the elderly and their children, our children stay late at school or home alone and we come home from work frustrated because we don’t get treated right. That is why we want a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights so that we are treated fairly.”

Movement veteran Angela Davis spoke: “We do not assent to economic exploitation. We do not assent to global capitalism, to police violence, to corporate inequalities. We do not assent to the prison industrial complex… the eyes of the world are on our city.”

Following the bank marches people took to the streets again, shutting down the Port of Oakland,  the fifth busiest port in the US.  Jack Hayman of the ILWU stated in a press conference that the Longshoremen had stopped work on their own in the morning. The port was shut down. “The trucks with containers are backed up for at least a mile. None of the cranes are moving… and the rank and file of the Longshoreman’s Union did this on their own. The leaders of the union wanted them to work today, but they by and large are not working the port.” Thousands then marched to the port, shutting down the roads for miles around. By 6pm the Port of Oakland announced that “all maritime activities” had been shut down because of the sea of thousands of protestors descending on the port.

Dozens of protestors clambered up on cargo boxes and truck cabs as a sea of marchers could be seen coming across the bridge toward the port.

Oakland was the site of the last great general strike in 1946 when 130,000 workers refused to work in solidarity with 400 female retail clerks.

Dwight McElroy, president of the chapter 1021 Service Employees Union said, “Our city and our coworkers are taking furlough days, they are losing their homes. We have individuals having to choose between their mortgage and having their cars repaired. We need to stand in solidarity. America has caused a marriage between the occupy and labor movement — it’s something that should have come some time ago but it’s never too late.”

Hundreds of teachers and nurses came out as well. Sharon Blaschka, a nurse practitioner, and member of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United Union said, “I believe in the OWS movement. It’s been a long time coming. It should have happened a long time ago. The 1 percent count on the fact that we don’t have enough time to get out there and do something major because we have to support our families and they’re counting on that fact. I had patients today but I rescheduled all of them and when I called them to tell them why — they were excited about it.”

She added, “I also came with my family to support our family and our schools. The Oakland Unified School District is closing five elementary school, but yeah, we can drop a billion dollars on Libya. So, if we can drop a million dollars on the war then why can’t we drop a billion dollars into our education system?  Like they say, if you’re not outraged, your not paying attention.”

Said Nell Myhand of the day’s actions. “It was fantastic. This is the moment we have been working for — many of us for years and years,” said Myhand, who is Oakland Homeowner Clinic Coordinator for Causa Justa :: Just Cause, and fighting to keep her own home from foreclosure: “We get divided within our class. But we can see this dramatic shift when we start talking about the 99%. We can see the divisions that the top 1% capitalize on based on our differences in class. Well that’s over. We see the thing we have in common is that the banks are bankrupting all of us.”

The tone after the march was one excitement about what is to come, but there are many hurdles ahead of us.

Unfortunately, some media outlets focused on incidents of property damage instead of on the thousands of people who participated in the strike, and are intent on re-framing away from the demands of the 99%.

This serves law and order types in the city, including certain city council members, who have leaped in opportunistically, attempting to paint a picture of disorder and violence in order to advance their agenda of gang injunctions, curfews, and an overall increase in policing and decrease of rights.

And besides fighting back against these attacks on the movement, there are crucial conversations to be had within the movement now.  How do we continue building on this momentum?  How can we branch out from the camps to a much broader community-based resistance to the 1%?

There are two crucial components to this next phase:

One is to get clear on the US’s role in the international arena, since our government is the 1% to the rest of the world.  We must tie our local fights to the international sphere.  We can’t separate the lack of investment in affordable housing in Oakland from the massive investment in military occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We must make those links that will make our movement stronger, and grow our movement to the international scale, which the 1% operate in.

Two is to get clear on our demands. Only demands can help us win concrete changes that our communities so desperately need, and only demands will help us avoid co-optation.  Once we have demands, we can work with more mainstream or center forces, and benefit from their expertise and resources in policy initiatives that reflect those demands. Without demands, with the danger of co-optation looming, if our only reference point becomes the camps, then the possibilities to advance are limited.

With a strong set of demands, and a clear internationalist perspective, the 99% can continue to grow as a political force, have greater influence over the mainstream, and move one step closer to building a movement too big to fail.

by María Poblet & Rose Arrieta, Causa Justa / Just Cause

María Poblet is the Executive Director of Causa Justa :: Just Cause. She is Chicana and Argentine, and has more than a decade of experience in Latino community organizing. At St. Peter’s Housing Committee, María was instrumental in transforming a service provision model into a membership and organizing structure, and a grassroots leadership development and political education program. In 2009, she helped lead the merger between St. Peter’s and Just Cause Oakland that created Causa Justa :: Just Cause, bringing together the organization’s respective work in the Latino community in San Francisco and the African American community in Oakland into a single, regional organization for racial and economic justice. She has been a leader in movement building work at the grassroots, including the US Social Forum and the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. Maria had the privilege of being mentored for many years by June Jordan, and was the Artistic Director of Poetry for the People before she fell in love with community organizing.

Rose Arrieta: With over 20 years of journalism experience from mainstream to community media. Rose has come on board to lead our organization’s communications work. She’s originally from Los Angles and her work has been inspired by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, the Chicano Movement, American Indian Movement, and lots of conversations around the kitchen table with her pro-union family.

One significant aspect of the relationship between community organizing and Occupy movement in New York City is the synergy between Occupy Wall Street and several community organizations that have been organizing around revenue issues for the past year.   This piece is a dialogue between organizers from two of the organizations – Community Voices Heard and VOCAL New York (formerly known as New York City AIDS Housing Network / NYCAHN) – that have been active in that revenue organizing. This organizing around revenue issues – which included a civil disobedience action at the Capitol on March 1, 2011, a Wisconsin-inspired overnight occupation of the New York State Capitol in late March and the May 12^th Mobilization on Wall Street – has put CVH and VOCAL in closer relationship with larger community organizations and labor unions on the one hand and, on the other,  with many of the direct action activists who helped to initiate Occupy Wall Street.  Since the occupation began in September, VOCAL and CVH have related to it in several different ways.  In this interview, CVH and VOCAL organizers reflect on those experiences and discuss their vision for how those relationships should unfold.

SONDRA YOUDELMAN: Sondra is the Executive Director of Community Voices Heard (CVH) in New York State, a membership organization of low-income New Yorkers fighting to influence policy change around issues that affect low-income families.  She serves on the Boards of the Pushback Network and Grassroots Global Justice, and she is active in National People’s Action and the Right to the City Alliance.

HENRY SERRANO: Henry is the Lead Organizer of Community Voices Heard (CVH) in New York State.  He is also on the Boards of both the North Star Fund and the Progressive Technology Project.

JEREMY SAUNDERS:  Jeremy Saunders has been organizing in New York since 2001. He has worked at ACORN, Community Voices Heard and the North West Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition. He is currently the lead organizer for VOCAL New York, formerly the NYC AIDS Housing Network (NYCAHN), which organizes low-income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS, the formerly incarcerated as well as active and former drug users.

CHRIS KEELEY: Chris is the Coordinator of the New Deal for New York Campaign, a collaboration of community organizations across the state of New York that are working collaboratively to lift up the need for new revenue raising and increased investment in job creation and critical social services.

JEREMY: VOCAL got involved in the revenue fight when our flagship AIDS housing bill – which would have ensured that 10,000 low-income New Yorkers who are living with HIV/AIDS would not have to pay more than 30 percent of their income towards rent – was vetoed by Governor Paterson. Paterson had been supportive of the bill, but he said he couldn’t approve it because it would cost too much, and the state couldn’t afford it during a crisis.  So then, we found ourselves stuck in these reactive fights to defend AIDS services in New York City. It was clear that these dynamics were only going to get worse – that we were going to end up focusing on defending a smaller and smaller pool of services – unless we fought on revenue issues.  So, on March 1^st of this year, VOCAL New York and CVH organized a big action in the hallways of the Capitol building to protest the fact that the government was cutting services for poor people at the same time as it was giving tax breaks to New York’s wealthiest.  Seventeen people were arrested that day, and it got a lot of attention. Everyone – from the media to the police to elected officials – said that they hadn’t seen anything like it in a long time.  That action put us on the map. It was what got us working with these larger community organizations, unions, and direct action activists. It helped to build towards the overnight occupation of the Capitol in late March and the May 12^th actions on Wall Street.  As we started to plan more and more actions together over time, we’ve built up good working relationships.

SONDRA: Community Voices Heard started getting involved in organizing around revenue and the big banks about a year ago.  Recovery funds were dying out very rapidly. Everything that we were demanding was based on a proactive plan that would require more money, but instead we were having to fight against budget cutbacks. We felt like we needed to move into working on revenue issues and to really think about proactive revenue fights and alternative taxation campaigns if we were ever going to be able to win and fund any of the stuff our members wanted.  At first, it was this weird wonky set of issues around taxes that seemed too disconnected.  It didn’t resonate well with our members.  Then, when the recession started to get talked about in the media, and there were tons of stories about inequality, our members began to react. “Recession?  It’s a depression!  And we’ve been experiencing this for years.  But at least people are talking about it now.” The fact that government needed to be forced to invest back in people and communities if we were going to turn things around was pretty clear to our members.  And, when government kept saying there was no money, that’s when the need to get it from the institutions and people that have more to give started making sense as something to work on. This recession put us in a moment where everyone needs the safety net, so we have a chance to build broader alliances around safety net fights.  However, our members had hesitancy about what it means to build that broader front: will our issues get lost?  When we fight for the broader safety net, our constituencies – like African American and Latino workfare workers – are not the main-ticket items that are going to get the press. But we knew we needed to build this broader fight around revenue if our issues were going to have any chance of winning.  So we started working on the revenue campaign, which made it clear that we needed to do statewide work, perhaps with some new partners.  It was during the May 12^th actions that our organizations met some of the people who helped to initiate Occupy Wall Street.  There were working relationships across our organizations and the activists, which has made it easier to integrate our work since it all exploded.

HENRY: There has also been a realignment of some of the other political forces that we’ve been working with: labor and some of the other community organizing alliances. Some of those   broader forces have been humbled over the last several years, and – at the same time – we’ve been growing, so we’re more powerful than we were in the past.  That doesn’t at all mean we have more people than they do, not even close.  But there’s a perception that we have power.  What was happening with some of those broader forces?  The former ACORN forces have been in a period of transition because they were attacked organizationally and shut down; they have been rebuilding.  The unions were humbled through the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) fight.  They tried to pass EFCA proactively and instead they had their collective bargaining rights shot down across the country.  Even Wisconsin – which is an important part of the inspirational narrative over the last year – was a reactive fight to defend collective bargaining.  Labor has had to reconsider what they have been doing.  At this point, union members have had to fight to defend basic quality of life issues, so it’s still a “self-interest” fight.  But what’s changing is that it can’t just be a fight for a narrow self-interest. Even a fight around self-interest has to engage broader issues because of the crisis.

At the same time, things started shifting internally. Our members’ sentiments started changing after Egypt.  We started to get calls from our leaders around these kinds of actions.  I’ve been organizing at CVH for ten years, and this was the first time that our members started talking openly about being willing to take arrests.  During a statewide strategy meeting, we talked about this spectrum of actions that went all the way out to more militant actions including civil disobedience. When we got to the point in the spectrum that talked about civil disobedience, at first everyone was silent.  And then one woman stood up and said, “We just need to go Egypt on their ass.” I saw a real change in the sentiment in the leadership during that meeting. They had been going through these long, slow struggles, and now they were ready to get more aggressive.  That was around the same time that we connected with VOCAL to start this statewide work around revenue.

SONDRA: So our work was shifting externally around our issues and we were shifting internally in terms of tactics. And there was a realignment of the groups that we were working with.  All of that positioned us to be players at a state level in a way that we weren’t before.  And then the Occupy moment happened, which opened a whole new amount of space. We were on this trajectory of building statewide power, and then suddenly there’s this massive shift in public consciousness that we could take advantage of.

HENRY: We have been working on issues related to revenue and the big banks for about a year now. In that work, we have been working on parallel tracks with the activists who initiated Occupy Wall Street, and our work intersects.  About six weeks ago, we started planning a week of action around the banks that was largely driven by labor, and then Occupy Wall Street pops up.  We’ve continued to work with them, and what they have been adding is scale and media attention.  For example, we had been planning this “Millionaires Tour,” and we expected to have about 150 people participate.  We got 700 people.   And, for the first time that I’ve ever seen, our action became a joke on Saturday Night Live: this guy who was playing Bloomberg started giving addresses to other rich peoples’ houses so they’d leave him alone. That kind of attention impacts our members.  Our membership has always felt isolated in their fights.  They feel solid in directing the actions and doing some incredible work, but they have always felt isolated and like no one pays attention to them.  And now suddenly the media is paying attention to us.  We have gotten more media hits than we’ve ever gotten.  That came under the banner of “Occupy Wall Street” but – when that banner comes together with our organizing – it can have a more tangible policy impact.  Occupy Wall Street…they aren’t trying to have a concrete policy impact, and I think that’s fine.  They bring general frustration about the bigger issues. I wouldn’t actually want them to put more structure on that or develop more concrete demands.  I would discourage them from taking on a specific issue or a structure.  What they bring is a different level of scale and media attention to a wide range of issues.

JEREMY: We had the same experience.  VOCAL went down to Occupy Wall Street with five members, and they had turned that into 300 people within 48 hours.  Our five members worked with a handful of Wall Street organizers to organize somewhere between 300 and 500 people to march to the District Attorney’s office and then to march on Cuomo.  We went down there that day because we had this leader from VOCAL who had participated in the OWS actions when they were trying to evict them. He got the shit knocked out of him by a cop, and his attack became one of the most prominent attacks by the cops because of how blatant and, probably more importantly, because it was widely captured on video. So we organized a march to the DA’s office calling for the investigation of all OWS attacks, an end to all police attacks and to demand the NYPD stop listing our leader, Felix, as wanted. Here was this low-income person living with AIDS who’s homeless and who is  a highly marginalized  person at the protest that day.  Just yesterday, we found out the charges have been dropped. After the DA action we mic-checked to the crowd that Gov 1%, Cuomo was going to get a “Gamechanger” award from HuffPo across town, so we led about 200 to 300 people across town to protest Cuomo as well.  There is just a huge shift in the kind of scale and an energy that you can mobilize quickly right now.

HENRY: That may start to change now that OWS doesn’t just want to be a “mob for hire.”  They don’t just want to show up to action to be there.  They may start organizing their own stuff and stop showing up at ours.  We’ll see.

SONDRA: That’s their strength, not ours. Our strength is not in having thousands of people in the streets or holding one big march. It’s consistent action around the public debate – whether that’s through media or hitting a target strongly or creatively enough to get attention.  You don’t actually need thousands of people to do that.

HENRY:  We should take the relationship between our work and theirs as far as it goes. We shouldn’t try to decide what they’re going to do. It’s a different constituency with different class issues and different racial issues.  I’m not big on critiquing Occupy Wall Street for being a bunch of white people. White people should do these kinds of things. They have specific issues.  They’re 63% of this country. Yes, they are entitled in a way that we will never have among our membership. But that kind of entitlement isn’t bad.  We could use more of it. They are more entitled in their demands and in their approach to confrontation. Right now, white people are the majority while we’ve always represented a strong minority. You’re going to approach politics differently when that’s the situation.

JEREMY: There is a certain level of absurdity to people – including progressive groups – saying things like “Wow. This is amazing. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”  Organizers have always known that if you did crazy shit, you’d get media coverage.  Earlier this year, we did this occupation in Albany, and we got a ton of media. We’ve shut down the Capital. Other organizers have taken over highways and shut down cities. Another part of the absurdity is how much people forget when these kinds of militant actions have happened before.  Like ACT-UP marching down the street with a dead body, or the May 1^st immigrants rights march or the time when Justice for Janitors took over the freeways in Los Angeles. The World Trade Organization demonstrations and the FTAA protest in Miami were also good examples of a moment when there was strong (though usually off the record) labor-activist support and collaboration. There’s such a forgetfulness on our part, to read this moment like nothing like this that has ever happened. There’s been an anger in this country for a long time that we’ve seen explode in a number of ways. It may have been stifled but that doesn’t mean that we should forget about it.

SONDRA: There are some things that are different about this moment though.  I think that occupying a physical space for an extended period of time adds a new element. Of course, not everyone is focused on occupying that space. There are many community organizers and leaders that are going in and out of the physical occupation over time. But it’s significant that they have created a space where people can go and – just by going – they can feel like they are part of a movement, whether they sleep there for a month or go down there for an hour.

HENRY: We’re looked at as part of the political system.  They are looked at as organic.  The fact that they don’t have an issue is an advantage.  We say, “We want money for public housing.”  They are saying, “I’m angry at our government.”  That’s great.  They should do this broad messaging and visioning stuff. We can do the policy stuff. That’s fine. They can take care of organizing on emotion; we’ll organize on policy. We have to keep doing our own very specific policy and campaign work.  No one else will take that on, and the issues of our constituencies will get lost.  The best way to interact with the Occupy movement is that we need to occasionally interact with each other, connect in specific moments around specific actions.

SONDRA: It would be stupid to reorient everything around Occupy Wall Street. And it would be stupid to not realize that we can’t do the same old thing in this moment.  It’s a fluctuating environment. We need to keep our focus on the place where were trying to get to, keep our eye on where we’re headed in terms of building power for low-income families (like we’re focusing on a point far in the distance) and be ready to navigate reality as it changes and shifts.   My hope is that this moment helps us shift that long-term vision to the left.  That’s my hope for Occupy: to shift everything to the left. Occupy Wall Street creates a moment when we can push for more around policy, more in terms of our demands. If we need to do anything with respect to Occupy Wall Street, it’s to push them to make sure to keep pushing. Because even the radical organizing groups have been limited to fighting around crumbs.  We don’t need them to consolidate into a 501c3 and consolidate their issues into specific demands.  They need to do what they’ve been doing: to focus on the public discourse and create a climate where it’s not crazy to call for bigger things.

JEREMY:  My general feeling is that this collaboration is great and needs to continue. When it comes to our organizations’ involvement I do have concerns. I’m worried that this can detract from all ongoing work that has major impact on our membership/constituency. We’re being asked by progressive allies, funders and a few OWS work groups to engage in various ways, like meetings, actions and so on. We want to stay connected. We want to continue to find moments where we can support each other, but we have to realize that the amount of time we dedicate to OWS takes away from other work. There’s just no way around that.

We’ve got to keep doing our work. We can’t let go of the campaigns we’re working on, which are all about addressing specific issues impacting our membership that others aren’t going to take up (and don’t necessarily need to) like the AIDS housing bill or changes to welfare. At the same time, we have to find moments to connect with and support Wall Street with our members when it’s around issues that we both support. This has been happening pretty well. We have to think about building a core team of people from OWS who want to help support and build community organizations that haven’t been able to grow to scale in the past because they lack a broad base of volunteers. There’s a number of OWS protesters who’ve shown that they’re willing to dedicate time and energy and want to support building stronger grassroots organizations.

I’ve heard this continued call by the progressive community, prior to OWS, to get out of our silos, to build collaboratively, to build a broader movement. We at VOCAL feel like we’ve done that in a serious way. We’ve gotten out of our silo, dedicated serious time and resources to fighting for a fair economy. We rarely ask for our agenda to be included, because we realize it’s not the space for that and that there are moments to put that to the side for the larger cause and to accept that we’ll have to fight for our specific campaigns on our own.  We get a small amount of resources to do this work, and it often doesn’t feel mutually beneficial. It often feels like we’re being asked to take action by much larger, better-resourced organizations, without recognition of our ongoing work. I don’t mind joining coalitions, breaking out of silos, and I don’t even mind others not taking on our issues, but it has to come with some acknowledgement of what’s at stake and why some of us may feel hesitant to drop everything to “join the 99%.” I think this is a moment when those dynamics can start to change and – regardless – we know that we need to throw in on the fight around the economy.  So we’ll be down there.  We just hope it will play out differently this time.

HENRY: The next step is that we have to open up the political opportunities for our membership, so our membership can get more engaged in this sense of entitlement that happens at OWS. OWS is hungry to have conversations with the communities that we work with. We haven’t gotten our members down there enough to have interactions so they can engage and help to move what’s going on down there. In some ways, staff may have even acted as a barrier for our members going down there. It could be important to figure out how to engage our members in the organic process down there.  Our members have been fighting in their individual lives forever, and they’ve been fighting collectively with us for a few years. But being down there will give them a sense of being part of a much larger movement.  Our leaders have experience in direct action, in campaigns, in not being intimidated by people in power. The people down at Occupy Wall Street could benefit from that. And our members could benefit from this sense of entitlement.

CHRIS: Getting members to go down to Wall Street is an important part of the political opportunity.  Occupy Wall Street is seen as the anchor for the broader Occupy movement around the country.  If we can build relationships and they acknowledge the members and leaders of the community organizations that have been part of this fight for a long time, Occupy Wall Street could serve as a model for other occupations in other cities and help build some important relationships.

Boston Shows Us How to #Occupy with Purpose and Political Vision

Presley Obasohan is fighting foreclosure on his home by Bank of America. Mr. Obasohan is underwater on his loan because in Dorchester, MA – the most diverse neighborhood in Boston  – building values have sunk to half or less of mortgage loan debt. Presley is trying to save his home for his daughters. He has petitioned and he has pled. He has waited on hold and stood in line. But on Friday, Presely joined the Right to the City Alliance in a mass action of civil disobedience, and was proudly arrested, along with 23 other Boston residents, for siting in at the Boston headquarters of Bank of America.

“I blocked the doors at Bank of America so that my neighbors, and me, can stay in our homes,” Presely told the press. “So many people have been thrown out of their homes or lost their jobs needlessly because of mistakes made by Wall Street Banks. Yet it’s the banks who are now rewarded with billions in tax refunds. Its time to fight back!”

Bank of America announced Friday that it would begin charging customers $5 per month to use their debit cards. This comes after B of A received $230 billion in taxpayer bailouts and other assistance since 2008 and received a $4.2 billion dollar tax refund for 2009, and as the nations largest lender has ramped up foreclosures on distressed homeowners in recent weeks, according to new data from the foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac. August 2011 saw the largest monthly increase in foreclosures since August 2007, right after the housing bubble burst.

As of March 2011, Bank of America had more homes in foreclosure than any other bank in Boston, with
two-thirds of these in “majority minority” neighborhoods. 61% of Bank of America’s subprime mortgages were concentrated in these same neighborhoods, revealing a pattern of pushing bad loans on People of Color and
the poor.

Building an Urban Alliance for Municipal Power

Across the country, we are seeing the same story: the mortgage bubble created by Wall Street pushed predatory lending on urban communities, and since the bubble burst the fall out has been catastrophic. Unemployment and foreclosure have hit communities of color first and worst. This has exposed a national economy that cannot produce wealth or jobs for working class people. The economy is therefore unable to get out of a deep, deep recession.  Meanwhile, the right wing gets more and more entrenched in protecting the rights of corporations and banks to hoard wealth and to plunder the planet.

The combination of these factors means that we are hurling headlong into  cascading meltdowns in the economy, ecosystem,, and in the very fabric of social relations in our cities.  Between the apartheid-type laws in Arizona and Alabama to the murder of Troy Davis in Georgia, we are living in dangerous times.

But in this time of crisis, it is urban communities who are at the forefront of the movement to fight back.  It is People of Color organizations that are building out a more deliberate and powerful direct action flank of their organizing to demand payback from Bank of America and Wall Street, and to fight for transformation of our urban spaces – the places that are the economic engine rooms of global capitalism.

The  courageous action by Presley Oboshaun came at the end of a raucous march of over 3,000 people carrying colorful banners and banging drums to confront the nation’s largest lender for their role in the economic crisis. The march was led by members of City Life/Vida Urbana and the Right to the City Alliance, who carried signs that told their stories of predatory lending and foreclosure. As the rowdy procession snaked through downtown, they were joined by members of UNITE/HERE picketing at the Hyatt Hotel, and CWA picketing at Verizon Wireless.

The march and action was called by the Right to the City Alliance, a national movement of urban economic and racial justice organizations, deeply rooted in the neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by the implosion of the economy, and where centuries of economic and racial oppression is compounding the crisis.

Recognizing that the current political moment calls for a broad unification of key forces, Right to the City built an impressive coalition of over 50 organizations with progressive organized labor, the Green Justice Coalition, the Youth Jobs Coalition, the Immigrant Rights movement, and a diverse array of progressive groups to pull together one of the best organized and widely covered marches in recent memory.

This coalition was a representation of Right to the City Alliance’s strategy for municipal power. This strategy is to intentionally unite the core constituencies of the alliance’s member organizations with other sectors of the progressive community: progressive labor and urban environmentalists. Right to the City is advancing a program of community defense, and pro-active agenda setting to fight for the type of cities that will benefit the constituencies and provide solutions to address the root causes of the crises

Take Back The Block – #Occupy the Hood

On Saturday, Right to the City took their message into the neighborhood. The Four Corners area of Dorchester has been ravaged by foreclosures, with some streets seeing 5 or 6 properties totally abandoned. Led by the community organizing powerhouse City Life/Vida Urbana, the group staged an occupation of a wrongly foreclosed home, hoping to return it from the hands of Deutsche Bank to its rightful owner, a family who was illegally evicted and has left the area.

The action team cleaned the home, brought in donated furniture, hung art on the walls and a banner off the porch. Hundreds toured the house and cheered in solidarity from the street, while music played and children danced.
Meanwhile the youth of Roxbury’s Alternatives for Community & Environment took over an abandoned lot and created a community garden “so that the community can grow our own food.” They asked people to stand with them for a blessing ceremony of the garden, and asked for food to grow strong and the land and community to heal and be healthy. They told the story of their journey to the 2010 US Social Forum, and how they had toured a community garden created by young people in Detroit, and been inspired to create a similar project in Boston.

Right to the City supported their vision and tied it to a movement building action about the banks and the political moment. It was a powerful  example of the practical and visionary action that is needed in order to begin reclaiming our homes, our dignity, our cities.

Movement Momentum: Harnessing The Psychic Break

These bold actions in Boston unfolded in concert with the #OccupyWallStreet protests and the launch of #occupyBoston, an offshoot inspired by the infamous encampment in Zucotti park in lower Manahattan. The growing popular sentiment against Wall Street was an inspiring backdrop for the action, and indicates a growing frustration with the status quo by all walks of life.

So what is the role of community organizers and progressive leaders in this moment of #occupy momentum? After the dramatic mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge and the #occupy meme is spreading like wild fire,  progressive and liberal forces are rapidly aligning around the protests.

At smartMeme, we have a theory about “the Psychic Break:” a moment when the dominant narrative unravels and there is an opening for a new story to take hold on a massive scale. We saw this moment come and go in 2008 when the stock market collapsed, $700 billion was given to financial giants, and progressives mostly stayed home and kept quiet while the Tea Partyers got into position.

But we believe that #occupyWallStreet is re-opening that window and provoking another such psychic break moment, an opportunity that community groups, progressive labor and environmentalists cannot allow to pass by.

The Right to the City Alliance actions were organized and led by decades-old community-based organizations, led by People of Color and rooted in People of Color communities. This work will go on for decades after #occupy stops trending on Twitter, but  there is a clear understanding of the need to join these movements together and seize the political moment.

In Boston, Right to the City leadership shaped the message and the coalition building strategy, and made demands on Bank of America and other corporate targets. Right to the City had the vision, the know-how, and the people power to make this march a huge success. It was organized long before the occupation of Wall Street or the hastily planned takeover of Dewey Square next to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, but the alliance stands in solidarity with these encampments and those to come throughout the country and is working to help fortify and expand them.

One week later on “Columbus Day”/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the Right to the City led coalition in Boston was in active collaboration with the #OccupyBoston encampment, and over 2,000 people marched together to demand jobs, and end to wars and Wall Street greed. It is not surprising that this alliance, with the muscle of labor and community base-building groups behind it, represented enough of a threat that the Boston Police moved in to clear part of the encampment last night. Over 50 people were arrested and many are still in custody. The networks built by Right to the City have been activated to support the protests and mobilize support, as well as advise on strategies to move forward. This is a model for how the work must be joined and the potential that this moment holds.

We have an opportunity to offer a narrative of explanation about what has happened, how we got here, and how we can move forward together. We are faced with the potential of rooting this insurrectional energy into a strong social movement that can rival the Tea Party and change the story about our economic system, solutions to the crisis, and deepening democracy. The actions by Right to the City in Boston offer us an instructive model on the kind of analysis and organizing strategy that is necessary now.

This moment requires the building of a united front that will not dissipate after the march/rally/campaign is over.  The task before us is to create strategic alliances locally, regionally nationally and beyond, to be prepared to make compromise but hold fast to our principles and the dire need for those most affected to be leading the charge.  Like the 30,000 who marched in support of Occupy Wall Street on October 5th in New York, our numbers must swell and represent this united front.

But we must be agile and graceful and bold enough – like the ballerina on the bull of the #occupyWallStreet poster. We must be visionary and courageous and tenacious enough – like the youth of Roxbury blessing their occupied garden.  And we must be brave enough, like Presley Obasohan, to put our bodies on the line and commit civil disobedience against the banks and for the people and planet that we love.

If we can do this, and build in good faith together to harness this moment and channel the momentum towards fundamental, radical social change – we just might be witnessing the stirrings of the new world that beats in our hearts. Let us dance to that beat, sing to this beat, and march together to this beat …all the way down to Wall Street. #occupytogether!

Doyle & Rachel worked together to amplify the impact of these actions in Boston.

Doyle Canning is co-director of the narrative strategy center smartMeme, and is co-author of Re:Imagining Change – How to Use Story-based Strategies to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World (PM Press, 2010). She lives in Boston.

Rachel Laforest is the Executive Director of Right to the City Alliance.  She lives in New York.

Readers Forums are a space where Organizing Upgrade’s readers can weigh in on the debate.  This debate between Subhash Kateel and  Sally Kohn has inspired a number of people to submit extended comments and reflections. We wanted to share their thoughts with you and invite you to join the dialogue.  Share your thoughts here (using the comment function below), or email us an extended comment at upgrade@organizingupgrade.com and we can upload into this post. And, remember, Organizing Upgrade wants to encourage principle and productive debate, not character assassination and division.

Organizing Upgrade also wants to encourage our readers in New York City to join the community-labor march to Wall Street next week (information below), an action called by several organizations that are members of National Peoples Action (the national network which is helping to lead the New Bottom Line campaign referenced in this debate). 

COMMUNITY / LABOR MARCH to WALL STREET

WHEN: October 5th at 4:30 pm

WHERE: City Hall (250 Broadway)

DETAILS: Let’s march down to Wall Street to welcome the protesters and show the face of New Yorkers hardest hit by corporate greed. Union workers and community members impacted by the economic crisis have been demanding Wall Street and the wealthiest New Yorkers pay their fair share. It’s time to stand together and continue what started in in Wisconsin.

MAE SINGERMAN

“Exactly who I expected to be at Occupy Wall Street is there doing exactly what I expected them to be doing,” a white friend of mine and an experienced organizer said as we wondered around Zuccotti Square a couple of days ago.

“So what is wrong with that?” I asked her.

She said she just couldn’t help but see Occupy Wall Street cynically. I’ve overheard the snarky cynicism from friends and read it in articles. I can’t help but wonder if the critique, which I’ve heard from white folks especially, is a way to separate ourselves from young, white activists. And more troubling, I worry that it represents an inability think beyond the formula that non-profit organizing groups have prescribed in the past few decades.

First, it is important to say that I generally agree with the critique that I’ve heard. Do I think organizing is more effective and long term? Yes. Are white men in their 20s the majority of people at Occupy Wall Street? Yes. Have they been unable to create actionable demands? Yes. Is it a turn off for “mainstream America” that many people there look raggedy and punk? Yes.

The critique is accurate, but loveless and cynical. Not to mention that most of it has come from the mouths of white people who just 10 or 15 years ago probably would have been setting up camp there in an excited flurry, learning how to use (and abuse) consensus and make large vats of food for lots of hungry people.

There is a time in my life when I (and many of the movement critics) would have dropped everything I was doing and headed to Wall Street. On more than one occasion, I drove 24 hours to attend a mass demonstration. Most were unsuccessful in reaching their stated primary goal of stopping the war, ending free trade agreements or halting toxic environmental practices. Many were disorganized and though they tried, never lived up to their idealistic premise.

I participated on the edges of Take Back the Land Miami, which took over a vacant lot for six months with a demand that Black people should have control of all vacant property in Black communities. Take Back the Land was not a non-profit and had no funding. Their revolutionary demands were not met, but Umoja Village stood for six months, sparking a national debate on housing and inspiring groups around the country to take up the banner. Five years later, a national network of Take Back the Land exists to continue the struggle. Are there critiques I could make of Take Back the Land? Of course. But, I will always honor the imagination and vision that it took to do something completely outside the bounds of what any non-profit organizing group at the time would touch. Take Back the Land’s actions may have even played a role in inspiring Occupy Wall Street’s initial organizers.

Major demonstrations, protest encampments, and other outside the box actions were the first things to draw me into the movement. They introduced me to a worldview I never even knew to imagine previously, to issues of privilege and race and to debates about tactics. Actions and occupations like Occupy Wall Street helped me have a vision that still helps guide me, though I’ve shifted as far as the tactics I choose to use and prioritize.

Occupy Wall Street is a training ground for future action and for a new batch of rabble rousers. It was a starting point for a march to protest the murder of Troy Davis and to support postal workers and an ending point for a City University march about education funding. Three thousand people are watching their live stream at any given time as experienced organizers  pass on their histories of resistance and share information in formal and informal ways. Occupy Wall Street is bringing us the gift of a conversation about capitalism, revolutionary action and how to craft reformist demands in a rotten system.

Most importantly, it is a space that is unabashedly calling bullshit on capitalism. Yes, white activist and organizers should critique it, but with love and respect for people who are part of our collective journey in seeking a more just world. We never know what and who they could be laying the groundwork for and we shouldn’t pretend like we do.

Special thanks to Padraig O Donoghue for contributions to my developing thoughts on Occupy Wall Street.

MARC KRUPANSKI

Many thoughts to respond to Sally’s post, but a few questions…

- I am not certain what she is calling for other than calling names: smelly, anarchist (I’m guessing “anarchist” is a negative term)? Does she want the Occupy Wall Street protests to stop? Does she want the imagined or real “smelly” people to shower? Does she want the imagined or real white people to stop being white? Does she want people of color to go to the protest? Really, Sally, I’m confused as to what you are calling for here – other than, “When you protest, please shower, dress nicely and make sure you wear clean underwear so when the NYT or other media come knocking (or the NYPD come thumping) you can scream angrily, but look pretty for the camera.”

- Her initial post calling for the “well-organized” and well-groomed early 1960s decades reminds me of the in-fighting then between certain leaders of the SCLC against the participants in urban riots across the U.S., the younger crowds in SNCC and later against the Black Panther Party (“don’t try to organize the “lumpenproletariat”!”).

- Also, seeing that she bases her assessment of the Occupy Wall Street protests on that one NYT article (to which a decent response was made by Kilkenny in her 26 September The Nation article) doesn’t only take the columnist from the NYT at their word, but also does not take the activists at theirs. Meaning – she silences and thus, assumes who they are. Many of the activists at Occupy Wall Street are involved in a number of long-term community-based organizing campaigns. I think this is a significant damaging factor of her article: that she silences who the activists are without an attempt to engage with them. Many have come to Occupy Wall Street as an expression of their everyday work, which they continue to do otherwise.

Having been a long-time member of a mostly white, mostly anarchist, and I suppose mostly “weird” or “smelly” seeming organization, I know the immediate reaction many of our members would conjure in the likes of Sally (btw, I agree too with Subhash that not only does Sally silence the other work these activists do, but also the number of other participants who are not “smelly”, “anarchist” or white.). I also have shared the apparent instant gasp at seeing “smelly” “weird” “anarcho-hippie” kids as a face of a movement or organization. I agree that to a certain extent, the way we project ourselves and express ourselves affects the impact we have on various communities. Yet, this does not mean these folks don’t organize. For my group, we were also involved in providing committed, long-term ally support to women-of-color led community based organizations and their campaigns. I guess, in essence, what I am saying is: don’t judge a book by its cover and especially if that cover is the New York Times.

- Lastly, this whole “protest for protest sakes” business. In her line in this article: “Second, yes, Families for Freedom sometimes protested for protest’s sake — understandable given the desperation and powerlessness many of their members felt.” Clearly, this is not protesting for protesting sake. This is protesting as a way to express individual and collective frustration, anger and yes, love as well as a way to feel collective support and empowerment at a time in which we are made to feel increasingly disempowered. Protesting for protest sake can actually help regenerate our energies and build collective strength and at the very least, demonstrate a modicum of dissent and opposition. What is “protest for protest’s sake” for, Sally, if we don’t “win”? So, then all the marches against the U.S. invasion in Iraq or protests for protest’s sake? Again,  in this context, I think she is using this phrase as she assumes the extent of the Occupy Wall Street’s political participation. A sad thing to do.

In the end, if you really want people to shower or change their appearance or – more substantially – change their tactics, maybe you shouldn’t start with insults and dismissive rips, the kind of which are received enough by those in opposition? Generally not a good idea when our movement is already small and you identify OWS participants as being within our movement. I’m sure this is not the organizing tactic taken by the New Bottom Line.

CHRIS GUNDERSON

Subhash was right to take apart Kohn’s original piece. Kohn’s piece polices the boundaries of what is considered acceptable protest in the United States. Not in the literal sense of policing with a badge, a gun and a can of pepper spray. But in the no less important sense of marginalizing and isolating those acts of protest that fall outside fairly narrow bounds.

What are those bounds? Most generally they are the familiar bounds imposed in much community organizing of “winnable demands” which automatically excludes from the outset all demands that challenge the foundational assumptions of capitalism or otherwise involve a radical transformation of power relations. The most important victories of progressive movements did not start out as “winnable demands” of course. They started out as insistent cries against injustice that were promptly dismissed by the pragmatists of their age. Cries that were “poorly messaged” and often embodied by spokespeople no less wild-eyed and unkempt as some you will encounter in a sleeping bag in Liberty Plaza north of Wall Street. It has been one of the signal accomplishments of the non-profit industrial complex to separate so many dedicated day-to-day organizers, now dependent on annual grants for their meager salaries, from the wild-eyed, unkempt and often un- or underemployed who have historically been the conscience of progressive movements.

More specifically, the bounds are quite clearly articulated in Kohn’s piece. First, they are the bounds of respectable appearances and hygiene that she lays down by the predictable resort to ridicule which permeates the whole piece. She laments that her “jokes about smelly anarchists fell flat with many” not because they were a cheap resort to an ad hominem argument, but only because they failed to fulfill their mission of marginalization.

Second, they are the bounds of the editorial policies of the New York Times. Never mind that this action is an attack on the heart of global capitalism and the New York Times — and all the other “mainstream” (read: corporate) media who Kohn rightly notes take their cues from the Times — is fundamentally beholden to the preservation of capitalism.

Whether she sees herself this way or not, Kohn was acting as a gatekeeper when she wrote her piece. She ended up sending a message to liberal funders, non-profit staffers, and other progressive “opinion leaders” to keep away from the smelly crazies down camping out on Wall Street. Fortunately events have outpaced that position. A constant flow of people has broadened the base of the Wall Street occupation. The police attacks when they sought to link up with the Troy Davis protests have outraged a broad swathe of New York progressives. And now solidarity actions are being prepared in dozens of towns and cities. It turns out that the smelly white anarchists actually did have a message and that it has captured peoples imaginations in a way that little else has done (Wisconsin being the most notable exception) since the financial crisis began. It may not be sufficient to bring down the rule of Wall Street, but its a real start. One that happened in spite of, not because of, the gatekeepers of respectable protest. Good for them.

PAUL GETSOS

NOTE: This is more of a report from the field, than an engagement in this debate.  but we wanted to include it because of Paul’s long-time experience organizing in communities most impacted by the crisis. 

Down in Zuccotti Park, a few blocks north of Wall Street, a couple of hundred people have taken over a local park, more a sliver of concrete with some trees that provide shade from the sun, in what is simply called “Occupy Wall Street”.

The people in the park are mostly younger and diverse. The overwhelming commonality is that most could fall under the banner of “alternative” lifestyle, people who had made some commitment to living and creating a space or movement that is essentially countercultural. But there were people who did not fit this mode, including a smattering of low-income people, workers from local restaurants, and some suits and ties who were observing the scene.

At the General Assembly I attended, leadership was shared and people who were under the age of 30 facilitated the meeting. A diverse group of people, maybe 120 people participated actively in the General Assembly. Young children tagged along with their parents or played by their side.  Older people connected with more traditional institutions, labor groups, community organizations and campaigns, were also present in the crowd and presented to the larger group.  The GA was a combination of agenda items that dealt with the logistics of keeping an encampment going over multiple days, food, safety and security, clean-up, communications etc. and a range of announcements of various activities and actions. The day’s actions were supporting a rally for postal workers.  There were pieces on outreach, communications and media, and how to engage new people who joined the encampment. At the end of the day, it was in some ways, agenda items about a tactic, not about strategy, power, goals or demands.

Many organizers from the professional organizing field have been as critical of the encampment and the young people who are trying to do something as right wing and conservative commentators and press. And from a traditional community organizing analysis, lots of critiques can be made. There is no clear demand or target, There is no clear plan to build and develop a more powerful base. It’s a tactic that lacks a strategy. Its “middle class elites who are protesting or it’s a revolutionary chic kids who are not connected to a base.

While these critiques may mostly be correct, the critics fail to see something that the media (mostly right-wing and business press) and even Mayor Mike Bloomberg see. That it’s the first time that a group of unorganized young people who no matter what their family background is, feel like that the current economic system where a few smart and/or lucky people win big, and the vast majority of us, no matter how smart, hard working luck or all three lose. And the fact that these young people and their older allies have come to Wall Street, without staff, foundations, individual or labor money, on a limited budget of contributions and pooled resources, have garnered more sustained attention, press, on-lookers and support, than many organizations that have toiled for years in the field or developed and run smart strategic and well financed campaigns.

I believe the reasons for the attention that Occupy Wall Street has gotten are a few. The first is it’s the left critique at the right time.  The economy is in crisis and Wall Street is a good target and while there has been some strong work that has gone after banks, corporate greed and Wall Street, the fact that these are young people and students has resonated in the media and with elected’s because the other formations have not been led or particularly consisted of them. In addition, the media has been interested in what happened in the Middle East and are more interested in “spontaneous” movements and this fits well into that narrative.

Whatever the reasons, for the moment, this group of young people have captivated some amount of press and have tapped into a political moment and an untapped energy. As one young person I met in the crowd who works  as a waiter at a local restaurant told me: “this is exciting. It’s the first time I have seen people my age, out of college with limited options for work and a good jobs, come together. I am angry at Wall Street and the bankers and stockbrokers who are making all this money. I come here and I see people who are also angry and trying to do something, and I want to be a part of it.”

Organizers and activists should be supportive as well and figure out how to join and help this group grow from a few hundred, to a few thousand, the tens and then hundreds of thousands.

I just finished reading Sally Kohn’s piece in the American Prospect titled “Follow No Leader” that outlines her criticism of the Occupy Wall Street (for a good explanation of the action check out this Voices from the Frontline  Occupy Wall Street protests).  Now, I know Sally to be thoughtful and articulate.  I am especially proud of her courage being in the Fox News studios going head to head with the Michelle Malkin’s of the world.  That respect made her article even more curious to me.  In the article she basically reduces the Occupy Wall Street protests to “making noise for its own sake,” and cites a New York Times writer, Ginia Bellafante, who accuses Occupy Wall Street of “pantomiming (maybe I am dumb, but I had to look that word up to make sure I knew what it meant) progressivism rather than practicing it.” Sally even seems to co-sign the Times writers’ characterization of the protestors as hippies and anarchists.

The line I found most interesting?  This one:

“I tend to favor the sort of well-ordered, well-bathed protests of the early 1960s”

Apparently the preferred well-bathed protests in the article are those of the New Bottom Line.  An organization that, no doubt, seems to be doing good work rooted in real communities to hold big banks accountable for their plunder of us small fries.

To be sure, Sally’s point about the disconnect between seemingly privileged participants of Occupy Wall Street and the struggling folks of the five boroughs is well taken. I have heard the same criticism from a bunch of people on the ground.  That being said, the main point of the article left me feeling kinda sideways (Ginia Bellafante, if you are reading this, look that up. The same way I had to look up “pantomime”).

Let me get one thing out of the way.  Sally, I love you, but I am not sure how you could, with a straight face, present a piece from the New York Times as your exhibit A considering that the main social movement the Times helped build in New York is the one pushing working people out of their homes in Harlem, Flatbush, and Jackson Heights to make way for Times’ readers (read: the yuppie friends of those “anarchists and hippies”).  Oh, there is the anti-war movement that the Times helped build, by helping Bush build a fake case to go to war in Iraq.

Ok, I got my “believe 50% of what the Times tells you” bias out of the way.  Moving on…

Sally, as I was reading your article, I came across this video clip of a young man supposedly arrested at the Occupy Wall Street protests. If the reports of the video are to be believed (still investigating), this young man – who doesn’t fit the profile of a white hippie/anarchist – was arrested after sitting down in front of the bank that allegedly took his parents’ home. That doesn’t mean he represents the majority of Occupy Wall Street or that he erases any of its organizational flaws.  But it does sort of mean that the actions or occupations (or whatever people are calling them) have a lot more purpose to some than just “making noise.”

While I appreciate your invocation of the “well ordered” protests of the early 1960’s, the riots of the 1970’s, 80’s, and 90’s seem to indicate that those protests only went so far in addressing the root causes of the problems we are facing today.

The fact is, the people who caused the financial crisis that we are in didn’t just cripple a small segment of the population, they crippled entire continents.  The fact also remains that there are probably more immigrants in jail for selling boot-leg videos on Wall Street’s sidewalks than there are crooked financial planners, investment bankers, ponzi schemers or corporate welfare queens who looted billions out of regular folks’ personal savings.  None of the movements that any of us are in – the Ron Paulists, anarchists, ex-ACORNists, code pinkists, Catholics, bloggers, the people that wear “V” masks – have built 1/100^th of the movement needed to bring true economic justice to this situation.

If any single protest, movement or type of organization had the answer, we wouldn’t see the frustration, pain, anxiety, or anger we see everyday amongst the folks we love.  For us to figure out what will work, we have to seriously try damn near everything until we can truly engage even 20% of the people who have been screwed by this mess into the process of trying to fix it.  That means doubling, tripling and quintupling the attendance at our community organization meeting, prayers meeting, house meeting, fantasy football game meeting and so on.  Until then, we can’t in good conscience play the “we are more effective” card.  And we probably shouldn’t throw darts at or make light of people that are being arbitrarily arrested, corralled, and maced for taking a stand at Wall Street.

One last thing, Sally.  I used to always see this phrase, “Another world is possible,” usually on cheesy t-shirts.  After the execution of Troy Davis, as my Facebook feed was flooded with virtual tears and screams of injustice, one hint that another world was indeed possible was the small yet significant convergence of people protesting Troy Davis’ execution onto Wall Street.

Sally, I know you know that another world is possible.  I know you are dedicated to building it. So why don’t you and me, the guys on the block who I grew up with, the folks who our families went to or didn’t go to church/mosque/mormon temple with, the smelly anarchists and bleached out republicans, the way too hetero and the drag queens, the bikers and Bloods, and B-Boys and Emo kids come together and do this.  Let us figure out in the cleanest and messiest way possible how we can all build a better world now.

Subhash Kateel is the Co-Host of Let’s Talk About It! a Miami based talk-radio show that talks about the real issues that affect the lives of real people.  He is also a long time Immigrant Rights organizer and a past contributor to Organizing Upgrade. 

For more information go to: https://occupywallst.org/