CUNY students and faculty mobilize against tuition hikes; Board of Trustees lockdown Baruch’s vertical campus

So you say you wanna #OccupyWallSt? Some lessons from experience — Part I

Note: I started writing this weeks ago, but wanted to share its content now, since plans are being laid for Monday and beyond. Ultimately, as a speaker said at yesterday’s opening rally: “Monday is a work day; and that’s when we have to get to work.”

There is Internet buzz and face-to-face planning going on around a September 17 occupation of Wall Street. With a pitch in the August Adbusters as a grain of sand, this proposal is crystallizing energy around a common action:

• On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

Internet forums have been setup, and in-person general assemblies are taking place in New York City (next one: August 9). The vision and politics behind the event reflect 20 years of Euro-American activism against corporate rule, but the plan and the courage are coming from the success at Tahrir Square. Or as Adbusters puts it:

• A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote: The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people.

And at the center of this swarm are places for people to assembly, to debate plans, to envision their futures.

In the coming weeks, key preparations will help to decide the fate of this effort. Aside from enthusiasm, I want to offer some past experiences, all of them from the United States to help people who are making plans. The advice below is almost entirely about tactics, and not about old debates about which tactics are morally acceptable or politically enticing. Rather, this is to open a conversation about what works and doesn’t work on the ground for gathering, holding space, and taking over a place where hostile decisionmakers meet.

1. 2011 Capitol occupation in Madison, Wisconsin

I was a hemisphere away from this when it happened, but the basic structure has so much that could be replicated on Wall Street. Wisconsinites who followed this protest the whole way through should be hosted at least one night in the next six weeks in every community that plans to participate on September 17. One key idea:

• Interplay of mass marches with more disruptive actions. Taking the Capitol inspired the whole state; bringing tens of thousands to the capitol justified the more confrontational action. Each effort should think about how it can best be a love letter to the other.

2. January 2002 World Economic Forum Protests in New York City

The buzz about #OCCUPYWALLSTREET that isn’t enthusiasm is basically about one thing: NYPD Lockdown. These protests, held four months after 9/11, saw the worst of times for mass deployments of cops and demonization of protesters. The key tool? Not some fancy weapon shooting rubber bullets or piercing sounds, but linkable security fences. NYPD circulated the idea that any legitimate protester needed to put him- or herself inside of a ring of these, or on street blocks enclosed by them at front or back. Then they arbitrarily closed protesters in and pushed them around using them. Options for resistance: It turns out these cages open with a good upward shove and are quite movable, if a crowd isn’t intimidated by the letters N,Y,P, and D in metal on the side.

Despite the clampdown, actions took place across the city. It turns out that Manhattan is a long island with lots of centers for corporate power stretched out along it. Police have to drive up and down it to get to your protest. Overly concentrating makes their life easier; a variety of locations makes your life easier. Also, pop-up actions in public places like forced security forces to play catch-up while locating their actions in view of the general public. Non-participating witnesses are a major deterrent.

Know the NYPD: Thanks to lawsuits, we now have a view of how the police saw their tactics in 2002. Some key elements:

• “It should be noted that a large part of the success in policing the major demonstration on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2002, was due in part to the proactive arrest policy that was instituted at the start of the march at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, and directed toward demonstrators who were obviously potential rioters.”
• In another report, a police inspector praised the “staging of massive amounts” of armored vehicles, prisoner wagons and jail buses in the view of the demonstrators, writing that the sight “would cause them to be alarmed.”

• Indeed, one of the documents — a draft report from the department’s Disorder Control Unit — proposed in blunt terms the resumption of a covert tactic that had been disavowed by the city and the federal government 30 years earlier. Under the heading of recommendations, the draft suggested, “Utilize undercover officers to distribute misinformation within the crowds.”

Extra reading: People with time may find useful information in these reportbacks on the tactical situation from the protesters’ perspective: 1.

3. March 2003 Financial District Shut-down in San Francisco

This large-scale mobilization paralyzed the city’s financial district on the first two days of the invasion of Iraq. In summary,

• In San Francisco, the Bay Area Direct Action to Stop the War called for a next-day shutdown of the city’s financial district if the United States invaded Iraq. The well-publicized goals of the shutdown said in part, “We will impose real economic, social, and political costs and stop business as usual until the war stops…” (David Solnit and Aimee Allison, Army of None, p. 140)
• Thousands of anti-war protesters poured into San Francisco on Thursday, fulfilling their promise to disrupt life in the city as they occupied intersections, blocked buildings and tried to shut down the Bay Bridge in protests that occasionally turned violent.Sirens wailed throughout downtown and helicopters whirred overhead most of the day as police in riot gear hustled to keep up with bands of demonstrators. Often they were unsuccessful, as small groups of protesters scurried into place in intersections or dodged around corners to elude police.  (SF Chronicle, March 20, 2003)
• Up to 1,400 had been arrested before the protests finally began to wind down after 11 p.m., and about 1,000 remained in custody. Most face citations for blocking traffic and failing to follow police orders, but at least 18 face felony charges.”This is the largest number of arrests we’ve made in one day and the largest demonstration in terms of disruption that I’ve seen,” said Assistant Police Chief Alex Fagan Sr., a 30-year department veteran. (SF Chronicle, March 21, 2003)
• A more detailed view here, and on video in We Interrupt this Empire.

Tactics for organizing: David Solnit and Aimee Allison assign the success of this movement to four factors that make up what they call a “common-strategy framework”:

•  Clear What-and-Why Logic:  Shut down the Financial District in order to impose a cost on war.

• Broadly Publicized: Repeated lead-up actions and press conferences, street art, tens of thousands of fliers, a widely utilized Web site and broad community mobilizing made sure a huge portion of the Bay Area knew what was planned and why.

• Mass Training and Mass Organization:  A few thousand people received civil-disobedience trainings at schools, churches, and rallies, and well over a thousand people were directly involved in the organizing via affinity groups, working groups, and public meetings.

• Decentralization: Many allied groups who had minimal contact with the initiating organization understood and supported the strategy, and participated in the action without  coming to an organizing meeting or bothering to identify as part of the organizing nucleus, “Direct Action to Stop the War.”

From my experience in this mobilization, it’s clear that all of these things were crucial. But so too was the nature of the overall plan, traditions of taking the streets, methods of responding, and sheer numbers. And one more thing helped incredibly:

• The civil disobedience pick and roll: Those of us who have gone through conventional nonviolence training usually learned to plan an action around arrests. Maybe not everyone gets arrested, but people who are willing to use that willingness to hold space, shut down an office, or simply make a point (recent example: the Tar Sands protests at the White House). Most normal people, on the other hand, tend to get out of arrestable situations while the getting is good. With an aggressive police force, this results in a very boring game of cat and mouse where people are swept all over town.
  What San Franciscans accomplished in 2003, however, combined the best of both worlds. Committed activists, with our without lockdown equipment sat down in roadways, linked up across the fronts of corporate offices, and surged through semi-private spaces like lobbies and malls, in potentially arrestable actions. They took their places as if ready to get arrested, and they worked together with larger gathering crowds. But when the arrests came, nearly all of them melted back into the crowd. Meanwhile, the larger mass took advantage of the police concentration on one corner, including the really massive effort it takes to lock people up and cart them off to jail, to start taking over the next. Like the basketball move the pick and roll, this let people hold space in one place while setting up the next. It kept San Francisco protest rolling all day, while shutting down the financial district.

There’s much more experience to feed in, but all of this is a good start.

Bolivia: A Year in Ten Protests

I returned this week from nearly a full year researching mass protest in Bolivia. As luck would have it, 2010 has seen protests in greater numbers (67 per month!) than any year since 1971 , when the Center for Studies of Economic and Social Reality (Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Económica y Social) began keeping records on the subject. And based on both a comparative look at Bolivian history and pure population growth, it’s safe to extend that title to the most protests in a single year since the beginning of the 19th century, or even Bolivia’s history as an independent country.

Unlike 2003 and 2005, Bolivian protests did not mount into an overarching national wave capable of toppling a sitting government. However, many of the forces involved in those years are showing increasing independence from President Evo Morales and the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) party. Morales was ratified by a 64% majority in the December 2009 presidential elections and his party won the mayor’s office in nearly two-thirds of the country’s 337 municipalities in the April 2010 elections. However, this year many of the voters who backed the MAS in national fights showed their willingness to take to the streets to denounce its policies. Meanwhile, the MAS itself mobilized its base in a spectacular welcome to a global summit of climate change activists and against a 2011 workers’ strike.

Here, then, are the one election and ten mass mobilizations that defined the past year.

Bolivia’s Literate Political Culture

While sitting in the midst of the massive coca chew-in in Cochabamba’s central square, the overwhelming mass of people was cris-crossed by two types of vendors: sellers of cloths on which to dry coca leaves, and a ubiquitous Bolivian sight, the hawkers of copies of new laws recently passed by the Plurinational Legislative Assembly. The hot seller of the day was last year’s Law 045, the Law Against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination.

Bolivian laws are a widely circulated commodity. Newspapers, both broadsheet and tabloid, publish copies of both draft laws and their final versions as free supplements. Wednesday’s Los Tiempos had the draft statute of autonomy for Cochabamba Department stuck in alongside the sports and fashion sections. On the streets of downtown La Paz, Cochabamba, or Potosí, you can buy bound versions of all the major laws in Bolivia—the laws on criminal procedure, the labor code, and indigenous legal process, for instance—at all the main newsstands. Just by attending social movement conferences, I’ve accumulated three bound copies of the 2009 Constitution.

And that Constitution is surely the most cited text at Bolivian political rallies. You can count on the text of the constitution being referenced (though rarely directly quoted) when a series of political speakers lines up. Always referred by its formal name, the [New] Political Constitution of the State, it is a touchstone of legitimacy for protesters. It comes up as much as the so-called October Agenda, the combined political demands embodied in the 2003 Gas War, the first protests to topple a neoliberal government.

So, it was most surprising to read how America’s diplomats think about Bolivia’s political literacy, as revealed by the Wikileaks release of cables:

Although the opposition is making a mighty effort across the country to rally against the constitution, the forces of inertia seem to be conspiring against them, particularly in the form of a largely uneducated rural base in the Altiplano. Leading daily La Razon interviewed several community leaders from the Altiplano, and their supporters, and reported on January 18 that neither the leaders nor the supporters had read the Constitution.  Instead, the repeated message was that rural communities would take their marching orders from the MAS, and vote for the constitution. … In the countryside, the number of those reading the constitution is much lower.  Post suspects disinterest, blind faith in Evo Morales’ political project, and illiteracy, despite the Cuban literacy program, all play a role. (Cable 09LAPAZ96)

While the length of the new Constitution—literally hundreds of articles—no doubt limited the number of people who read it through, it’s clear that American diplomats have yet to clue in on Bolivia’s grassroots political culture. No one who has sat through a campesino rally, or the well-attended presentations on technical details of pensions or gas production, or who even sat with coca chewers ready and willing to buy the new anti-racism law, could look down so easily on alleged popular ignorance.

Attendees at World People's Conference on Climate Change—25,000 Bolivians and 9,000 foreigners—snap up a free newspaper

International Day of Action in Defense of Coca Chewing Underway

On the plaza, a giant coca leaf made out of coca leaves

Coca growers from the Chapare (Cochabamba Department) and the Yungas (La Paz Department)—Bolivia’s two coca-growing regions—have travelled to Bolivia’s nine departmental capitals today to publicly chew the traditional leaf and to support the Bolivian government campaign to end the UN prohibition on coca chewing. Coca leaves are a traditional crop in the Andes and are both chewed in the mouth and boiled into a tea called mate de coca. Both forms are valued for their medicinal properties and cultural role in Andean culture, particularly the protection they offer against altitude sickness, fatigue, and upset stomachs. Bolivia’s demand that a 1961 UN drugs convention be amended has attracted broad support, including from the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and Africa, and several countries that had expressed doubts about the move have been won over. However, the United States—a major cocaine-consuming country and the main international sponsor of Bolivia’s once-heavily-militarized war on drugs—and Sweden continue to block the move. The deadline for changing their position is January 31.

Events in Cochabamba are still underway, but here is an early preview of the gathering in the city’s main square, the Plaza 14 de Septiembre.

 

Vendors from the May 27 Association bag coca leaves to give away

Two women from the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba march with young coca plants and bags of coca leaves

TV journalist interviews Leonilda Zurita, president of Coca Growers' Women's Federation

A more complete set of photos from today’s protest is online at flickr.

Change will come from us, when and where it comes…

It’s 19° here in DC this morning, where I will be joining some six or seven digit number of people outside for the inauguration. Washington is an old hometown to me, but it does have a different feel when it’s claimed as a front yard by people from across the country. Walking around last night, I saw more people on the street than I ever have, black folks selling “I was there” sweatshirts, and other black folks dressed to the nines out partying, a big time reception or three in different night spots, people dressed to be dropped off in limos (and clearly used to that too) walking through the cold because of the security perimeter, and a cleared out and brightly lit Pennsylvania Ave. surrounded by security fencing but nonetheless open to the public.

And in the past month, I’ve seen a disastrous war, bought, paid for, armed, and endorsed by my country but carried out in Gaza. I’ve called my black, Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn, Ed Towns, only to hear the exact Israeli line from his legislative aide, calling the deadliest assault in Palestine in three decades an act of “self defense.” Now over 1300 people are dead, and 50,000 are homeless.

I’ve also seen on video a black man shot in the back in Oakland, while waiting to be cuffed by BART police. And Oakland was my city, and New Year’s is my holiday in the Bay, and I had helped break up a fight earlier in the week, so I can sure imagine being swept up when the cops arrived. Oscar Grant could have been me.

These causes for despair can be healed, but it will be us, our actions that heal them by standing up and challenging injustice. I’m proud of so many people for standing up to these two in recent weeks (on Gaza | on Oscar Grant). They are what I have to celebrate today.

A couple months ago, I signed on to a call for a Bloc to be present at today’s inauguration called “Celebrate People’s History, Build Popular Power.” Given today’s mega-concert like feel, it might not be the action with the greatest impact. But I’m grateful for a way to set myself a bit apart today, to say the words “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” in a way that can never be the same as listening to the same words. To make the future we want, we all need to produce rather than consume our politics. See you in the streets, celebrating and fighting.

Laidoff Green Economy Workers Occupy Factory in Chicago

[Yes, more of an overview update is coming soon; there's been big news in the past two months. The bailout has morphed into something bigger, with both interesting and scandalous implications (some times at the same time); we have a new president; anti-authoritarians have some interesting things to think through around grassroots political campaigning, public works projects and an economic crisis, etc. Plus, Thai mass direct action just brought down a government. But everything starts somewhere, so let's start with a new kind of protest..]

In Chicago, the economic crisis hit the road in the form of worker suddenly cut off from their jobs at Republic Windows and Doors (company website here). Republic’s (apparently one and only) factory closed Friday, three days after its 260 workers were notified. Standard notice is sixty days. Severance and unused vacation for the workers have not been paid. In response:

Members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, which represents 260 workers at the company’s Goose Island plant, have taken shifts at a sit-in at the plant, 1333 N. Hickory Ave., since Friday. (Chicago Tribune)

Scores of workers laid off from a factory here that makes windows and doors have refused to leave, deciding to stage a “peaceful occupation” of the plant around the clock this weekend as they demand pay they say is owed them.

[...]

The workers, many of whom were sitting on fold-up chairs on the factory floor Saturday afternoon, said they would not leave.

“They’re staying because the fact is that these workers feel they have nothing to lose at this point,” said Leah Fried, an organizer for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America Local 1110, who said groups of 30 were occupying the plant in shifts. “Telling them they have three days before they are out on the street, penniless, is outrageous.” (NYT)

Clearly, this is the face of the overall downturn: we saw 533,000 lost jobs in November, bringing the total ot 1.9 million in the current recession. It’s also the front end of the bailout: Bank of America, backed up by our bailout, is Republic Windows and Doors’ creditor, and is accused by workers of not releasing the funds for the company to meet its obligations. Bank of America, by the way now includes ABN AMRO North America, FleetBoston, LaSalle Bank, NationsBank, predatory lender Countrywide Financial, Merrill Lynch, credit card giant MBNA. As of July, after taking on Countrywide, the company controlled between 20 to 25 percent of the home loan market. As Jobs with Justice reminds us, “Bank of America has received $25 billion in bailout funds, ostensibly in order to extend credit to companies that need it.”

You can back up their protest with letters to Bank of America here.

Bailout fails in Congress; Dow falls; Wall Street eerily silent. Now what?

I paid a second, shorter visit to Wall Street today, in the midst of the sharp crash that followed the House of Representative’s surprise rejection of the financial bailout bill. It was just plain quiet. Only two, fairly sectarian-looking representatives of public protest stood at Wall and Broadway, amid a tableau of tourists and television cameras, slack-jawed business people and an unearthly calm.

It’s hard to believe that the alarms of emergency sounded by both parties and much of the media didn’t push the package through, but they didn’t. The House roll call shows that this wasn’t a resistance of the left, but of the bottom, of people across the country and the political spectrum who didn’t want to be pushed into a massive government buyout of junk debt. Oponents included people I respect like antiwar maverick Barbara Lee and former Black Panther Bobby Rush and people I disdain like Cuba hawk Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and anti-immigrant zealot James Sensenbrenner.

Meanwhile some people on the supporting side, including Nancy “Does she really represent San Francisco” Pelosi, have been inspired by the crisis to speak of principles if not act on them, saying this before the vote:

They claim to be free market advocates when it’s really an anything-goes mentality: No regulation, no supervision, no discipline. And if you fail, you will have a golden parachute and the taxpayer will bail you out. Those days are over. The party is over.

With the express train to a quick bailout now derailed, we may have time to do some collective thinking about the future of our economy. A list of big ideas begins here:

• Economist Dean Baker (who among other things, called the housing bubble back in 2004) argues things aren’t so urgent after all: “the worst case scenario is that we have an extremely scary day in which the markets freeze for a few hours. Then the Fed steps in and takes over the major banks. The system of payments continues to operate exactly as before, but the bank executives are out of their jobs and the bank shareholders have likely lost most of their money.” (“Why Bail?,” Huffington Post)
• Bailout Main Street is compiling a list of counter-proposals.
• Former CIA analyst turned critic of empire Chalmers Johnson notes the government’s long term financial crisis (read potential bankruptcy) boils down to war. (“We Have the Bailout Money–We’re Spending It on War” The Nation)
• Katrina vanden Heuvel & Eric Schlosser echo protesters’ call for a “New Deal for Main Street” (America Needs a New New Deal, The Nation, op-ed in Wall Street Journal)
• Jeremy Jacquot asks “What About the Climate Crisis?“

Bailout Protest on Wall Street

Responding to an open call circulating in the city, some 300 protesters against the bailout plan gathered in New York’s financial district and marched to the New York Stock Exchange at Wall St. and Broad yesterday afternoon. The crowd was loud, diverse and fed up. Video coverage of the rally is part of today’s Democracy Now! The Indypendent has a live blog archive of the protest. Click on the picture below for more Indymedia photos.

Facing the New York Stock Exchange, protesters filled the intersection and the steps of Federal Hall

Apparently, we weren’t the only people pissed off, either. TrueMajority.com is hosting a bulletin board for coordinating protests, with over 250 planned or carried out already, as covered her by CNN.

Being on the streets, there was a happy thrill to be back in force, in a protest taking over Wall Street for my first time since the J18 protest against the G8,* when a Reclaim the Streets protest flooded that intersection for nearly an hour. Of course, this time, our connection to most Americans was much more organic, as everyone from New York anarchists to Montana’s governor are raising big questions about this handover of government loans for junk securities.

What was strange, though, was to look so many Wall Street traders in the eyes. While many waded into the crowd to snap photos with their IPhones, others were visibly unnerved at the display of public opposition. And is the unfortunate nature of public protests we weren’t being the most articulate in our chants (see Tom Tomorrow from 1992 below), even if we were some times hillarious saying things like: “You break it, you bought it” and “You fucked up. Suck it up.” Above all, we needed to be loud and unequivocal in just the right physical space. Thankfully the media was the outlet for my desire to be articulate, and apparently for others desire if you listen to Democracy Now!

How we have to protest when the media and the two parties speak in unison

*Some of you may remember I worked on another more recent protest there, but I spent the morning working phones off-site.

Antiwar GI’s go on Denver’s streets today

Iraq Veterans Against the War, an organization of more than 1,200 soldiers who survived tours in Iraq, is joining this week’s protests outside the Democratic National Convention. IVAW is demanding that Barack Obama sign on to their three-point vision of a responsible withdrawal:

1. The immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces from Iraq. 2. Full and adequate health care and benefits to all returning service members and veterans. 3. Reparations made to the Iraqi people for the destruction caused by the U.S. war and occupation.

One aspect of their presence is Operation First Casualty, a public re-enactment of daily life in US-occupied Iraq on the streets. You can see in this video what OFC looked like here on the streets of New York City. 

more about “GI’s Take Manhattan — Operation Firs…“, posted with vodpod

The video is a creation of the Meerkat Media collective. Meerkat encourages collaborative video production among activists/artists, and hosts a monthly community mixer to help nurture that collaboration and show off the results.