======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/21/occupy_san_francisco_gets_down_to_business/
Occupy Wall Street
Friday, Jan 20, 2012 9:34 PM EST
Occupy San Francisco gets down to business
After a brief hibernation, a refocused movement takes aim at corporate
America
By Gary Kamiya
SAN FRANCISCO–Act II of the Occupy Wall Street movement, San Francisco
version, kicked off on a rainy, blustery Friday in the heart of the
city’s financial district. Targeting specific corporations like Wells
Fargo and Bank of America and emphasizing real, tangible issues like
home foreclosures, affordable health care and education as well as
broader ones like the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, several
hundred protesters – the exact number was impossible to estimate –
fanned out across the city, snarling traffic, getting arrested, holding
sidewalk teach-ins, and generally serving notice that after its brief
winter hibernation, the Occupy movement was back and kicking.
Occupy’s first act, the Tent Phase, ended in early December, when city
authorities raided its urban camp at Justin Herman Plaza near the Ferry
Building. But even before the tents were removed, it had become clear
that the movement needed both to develop new tactics and deepen its
strategic vision.
“After the raid, when our attention was no longer focused on [the
encampment], people turned back to their neighborhoods and their
campuses,” said David Solnit, who is part of a direct action working
group associated with Occupy SF. “We started Occupy Bernal Heights [a
multi-ethnic, mixed-income neighborhood on the edge of the Mission
District], and we had 65 people at the first meeting. We went door to
door meeting folks facing foreclosures. We got meetings with mid-level
people at Wells Fargo Bank.”
Solnit – who is the brother of San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit –
said that OccupySF Housing, a housing-related spinoff of the movement,
had held marches in four neighborhoods and succeeded in saving four
homes from foreclosure.
“We’re more diversified now, but more powerful than when all our eggs
were in one basket,” Solnit said. “Gene Sharp came up with 198 different
methods of nonviolent action. Camping out is one tactic. We still have
197 more tactics to go through, and another 500 to create.”
At 6:20 a.m., in pitch darkness, with a miserable rain pelting down in
front of the enormous 52-story monolith of 555 California, it seemed
like a good idea for Occupy to come up with a new tactic immediately.
The schedule on the Occupy Wall St. West web site had announced that
there would be a wacky 6 a.m. protest against Goldman Sachs, featuring a
squid fry (“bring your own frying pan”) and protesters dressed as
squids. (The squid theme derived from Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s
famous description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped
around the face of humanity.”) But no one seemed to be giving out fried
calamari – not that anyone could have digested it at that ungodly hour —
and there were only four protesters standing near the entrance. They
were dwarfed by a phalanx of waiting police and TV journalists.
The last person you would expect to find standing in a bedraggled squid
costume in front of a financial district skyscraper at six in the
morning would be a 69-year-old retired psychology professor. But the
Occupy movement is full of surprises. The human squid, Eleanor Levine,
said, “I’m out here to bring attention to the irresponsible financial
practices of Goldman Sachs. I also want to bring attention to the
concept of corporate personhood [which was behind the Supreme Court
ruling in Citizens United]. Corporations are not people. This company
played a role in bringing not just the country but the world to
financial ruin. People have to face up to what Goldman Sachs has done.
Their CEO made $28 million.” Asked if the dreadful weather had prevented
more people from joining the protest, Levine said calmly, “Yes, the rain
put a damper on the turnout, but more will come.” Her pink tentacles
waving, she walked cheerfully off.
I approached a mustachioed man in a yellow poncho inscribed with the
words “Money 4 Housing and Education, not 4 Banks and Corporations.”
Alex Carlson, 34, was a paramedic who said the biggest reason he came
out was to protest America’s lack of educational opportunities. “I
couldn’t get into school just to get an EMI license. I had to beg a
teacher to let me into his class. Nursing was my real goal, but there’s
no money for nursing schools. It’s crazy because there’s a nursing
shortage and there’s going to be a crisis of care when the bay boomers
die off.”
Carlson said he had come out at the crack of dawn in the rain because he
felt he had to.
“Like everyone else I’m just trying to carve out a little life for
myself, but my knife is getting shorter and shorter,” he said. “I’m not
a crazy activist person. I have a wife and a young son. Camping out
isn’t an option for me. But I was able to come out today, so I did. And
I’m proud.”
I walked down a block to a building housing Wells Fargo, where people
protesting the bank’s role in the national foreclosure crisis had
chained themselves in front of the entrances on all four sides. In one
of the entrances, about eight people were squeezed in, their arms inside
big yellow PVC pipes that were connected together. A policeman came up
and politely informed them they were creating a public health risk and
would be arrested if they didn’t leave. Dozens of police waited on the
corner.
A woman with a bullhorn shouted slogans. A wildly energetic street band,
three saxes, a trumpet, a big bass drum and a snare, played surreally
cheerful Kurt Weill-like tunes, their vaguely Weimar sound oddly
appropriate.
A fresh-faced young woman with glasses was sitting among the crowd in
the entrance, with a sign that said “Give us our homes back.” I asked
her why she was there. “My parents had their home in Southern California
foreclosed,” she said. Her said her name was Sarah Lombardo and she was
28 years old. “They couldn’t make their payments because of medical
costs. My mom had breast cancer and my dad had a stroke. They were told
to leave in two weeks and our house was auctioned off. Now they’re
living in an apartment, but their credit was destroyed so they had to
pay three times the normal deposit.”
Lombardo said her mom was a purchasing agent and her dad was a factory
worker. “I’m the first one in my family to go to college.” She said she
came out because she wanted “to put a face to the statistics.” It was a
face that looked like it belonged to the girl next door, or to your
daughter.
She said that now that she had finished college, it made it possible for
her to be arrested. “It’s for a good cause.”
I asked her if she had ever been arrested before. “No.” Was she afraid?
“No, I’m not scared.”
Later, behind a cordon of police, I watched as protesters on the north
side of the building were arrested, frisked and loaded into a paddy
wagon. I rode off on my bike to cover some more actions. When I came
back, Lombardo and the rest of the group of people in the doorway had
been arrested.
Back up at 555 California, beyond the big turd-in-a-plaza artwork
jokingly called the “banker’s heart,” I came upon an older man in a
suit, carrying a sign that said “Give Us Our City Back.” I was
intrigued: he was definitely not the usual Occupy protester. But when I
asked him who he was, he turned out to be even more unusual than I could
have expected. He was Warren Langley, the 69-year-old former head of the
Pacific Stock Exchange.
What brought a man with his background out to protest?
“I was in the industry. I worked for an option trading firm that was
sold to Goldman Sachs. So I played the game on the other side. But I
have two grandkids and two daughters, and I became increasingly
concerned that their future wouldn’t offer them the same opportunities
that I had as a young man. The income inequities in our society are a
huge problem.”
Langley said he first heard about the Occupy movement from his pal Ben
Cohen, of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. “He was scooping ice cream for them
in New York. And he told me, ‘These are the real deal.’ So one day I was
eating lunch at the Ferry Building, and I walked across the street to
the camp and started talking to these young people. And they were the
real deal. They’re folks who lost their jobs, or are just out of school
and can’t get a job. I could bring my credibility to the movement, so I
decided to get involved.”
Langley decried the deregulation of the financial industry, in
particular the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that eroded the wall
between banks and investment houses and gave birth to the wild, insanely
profitable speculation
that ultimately dealt the world’s economy a devastating blow. “They bet
our money and then we paid off the bookmaker.”
I asked Langley what his former colleagues in high finance thought about
the Occupy Movement.
“Well, there are some who say, ‘They’re a bunch of whiners and need to
get a job.’ But those are the ones who haven’t actually talked to the
people in the movement. There are others who are more open-minded. I
know one guy, very wealthy, who told me, ‘What’s their plan? I’m ready
to give them $250,000 if they have a plan.’ And I told him, ‘It’s not
their job to give you a plan. They’re hurting.’ So whether it’s job
opportunities, or better health care, or fairer taxes, we need through
the political system to come up with a plan. It isn’t their job. He
didn’t get it. But his kids, who are also very wealthy, were more
sympathetic. It’s a generational thing.”
Langley went on to say that Occupy was sharpening its ideas. “It’s
moving to get a more specific message across, from ‘We’re hurting’ to
“This is what’s hurting us.’ He said he didn’t see the Occupy movement
ever aligning with any political party. “Chuck Schumer does as much
damage as John Boehner. In the end, it’s about occupying people’s minds,
so people who aren’t down here will see that the system is not fair.
There was also a nurse-led protest across town against the big medical
group California Pacific Medical Center, which RN Jane Sandoval said is
shifting resources away from poorer patients. Another nurse, Eileen
Prendiville, said CMPC is emblematic of America’s broken, for-profit
health care system, even though it is nominally a non-profit.
If the new Occupy is meatier and more substantive, it still thrives on
spectacle and encounters with authority– and the latter can be a
double-edged sword. After one nasty encounter outside 555 California
when a young guy who engaged in a scuffle with the cops when they rushed
forward was arrested, quite a few people in the crowd began shouting
“fuck you, pigs!”, “you slaves!”, “pigs go home!” and “your warrant is
to serve your corporate masters” to the police, probably not winning any
hearts and minds in the process. No one told them to can the Black
Panther rhetoric. At the same time, in one of those weird juxtapositions
that Occupy specializes in, across the street stood two gentle souls
holding a big black banner that read, “Buddhist Peace and Justice
League: May All Beings Be Happy and Secure.”
Based on Friday’s actions – which I only saw part of — Occupy’s new
approach seems to have three components.
First, it has become more of a big-tent movement, welcoming outside
groups like labor unions. Second, it is taking deliberate, loud, public
aim at specific corporate targets, like Goldman Sachs and Bank of
America. Perhaps most important, as David Solnit pointed out, it is
reinventing itself as a grass roots organization – reaching out to
ordinary people who may not know much about the Occupy movement, but
whose lives have been devastated by anonymous corporate decisions.
It’s an ambitious, multi-faceted reset, and there’s no way of knowing
how effective it will be. Simply camping out and saying “We are the 99
percent” has the downside of being vague, but for that very reason it
has an abstract, jarring purity. More specific, targeted protests are
more substantive and show the movement is serious, but also make it more
conventional. Still, as long as the movement attracts followers as
committed, intelligent and impressive as the people I talked to, it will
remain a force to be reckoned with. It seems certain to play a role in
the national discourse not just during this election season, but for a
long time.
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: [email protected]
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
