Those speaking out at the meeting were prepared. In general people were not speaking off the cuff, but working from a prepared statement or note cards. We did our homework on this.

One of the recurring themes environmental activists have been hearing at the local level is that fracking is a state-level issue and that municipalities have limited ability to address it. That has been true in Portage county generally, and it was the case in Shalersville on Tuesday night. At the start of the meeting, one of the trustees announced that the speakers were strictly there for public comment and that no questions would be permitted.

The trustee then stated that they were essentially powerless to do anything because the state of Ohio had eliminated most mechanisms of local control (which incidentally is in defiance of the state constitution’s guarantee of home rule - more on that here). Fortunately, one well prepared resident addressed that issue head on in her response. Namely, at times in our history we have had immoral laws - ones that permitted slavery and banned universal suffrage, to name just two:

Simply declaring that the law must be obeyed under all circumstances is not persuasive. It’s fair to ask first if the law is right and just. And if a great many people are persuaded it is not, that is an issue that ought to be addressed instead of swept aside.

There is another aspect to the “our hands are tied” argument that has not received a whole lot of attention: that our conceptual horizon of what is possible is greatly - maybe even primarily - influenced by the degree to which we favor an outcome. In other words, if you are adamantly opposed to policy A, then your idea of what is possible in regards to permitting it will be far narrower than it is for supporters of policy A.

Here is how that plays out with fracking. An official who favors fracking is approached about a home rule-based bill of rights for a village that bans fracking. What will be the most likely response? “Nope, the state makes that call. Case closed. Thanks for coming.”

What about an official opposed to fracking? That person might also believe that invoking home rule will not work in this case and might be opposed to going down that road. But then s/he might say, OK - what else can we do? Why don’t we try this, and if that doesn’t work then try this other thing? In other words, the decision not to pursue the first suggestion doesn’t mean an end to the effort; it just means it’s time to try something else.

An official’s conceptual horizon of what is possible often implies that official’s policy position. So when a council says “our hands are tied,” I think that gives a pretty good idea of what their preferred outcome is. In this case, I think Shalersville trustees are generally supportive of fracking operations in our township, which means those of us opposed to fracking are really up against it.

One last note on the meeting. There weren’t any questions allowed, but someone in the audience managed to sneak one in after all the statements had been given: Was it true that two of the trustees had signed fracking deals with gas companies? One of the trustees responded that it was true, but the deals were on the trustees’ private lands and not on those owned by the township. Because of that, the deals were not germane to the topic at hand, represented no conflict of interest, and presumably didn’t restrict their understanding of how able they were to respond to residents’ concerns.

If you drive by the well and pump shop a couple miles north of here on 44 you’ll see a new sign. It says “test water before fracking.” It’s right out front. You can’t miss it.

Why is it there? Because the Ohio EPA recommends that people have their water tested before fracking begins in case it gets contaminated after. These out-of-state operators breeze into town, set up shop and start pumping God knows what into the ground. WE certainly doesn’t know what’s in it. The industry doesn’t have to disclose the chemical composition of fracking fluid. They say it’s a proprietary formula and they’ve rigged the game with the state so there’s no transparency.

These companies are already notorious for ruining the water in the communities they move in on, and that is why businesses are encouraging everyone to get their water tested. Tomorrow will be the one year anniversary of the biggest fine ever to an oil and gas company in Pennsylvania history. Chesapeake Energy’s fracking operation contaminated water supplies for 16 families in Bradford County and they were fined $1.1 million for it.

They haven’t cleaned up their act since then either. In February they were fined another half million for poisoning a local creek. These companies don’t really know what they are doing, and no one knows the long term effects. Horizontal fracking is a new technology; Ohio’s very first permit for Utica Shale fracking was only issued in March of last year. And the industry has put all its effort into finding ways to extract natural gas, and almost none into safety or environmental protection.

So when some distant company - Chesapeake Energy is one of the major players here and it is headquartered in Oklahoma - when one of these companies wants to set up shop, the burden is on local citizens to establish the quality of their water beforehand. It’s a fracking tax on each and every resident who wants some insurance against a big driller poisoning their water.

And it doesn’t come cheap. I got an estimate from the well and pump shop, and it’s $360 for what amounts to a composite test. But even that might not be enough. There are three different levels of testing, and testers can’t guarantee their work will stand up to a court challenge by a bunch of expensive suits.

In addition, regulation of this industry is a joke. Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine has admitted that there is no transparency into what these companies are doing, that the current fines are inadequate and that citizens have no easy recourse when problems inevitably occur.

We saw what happened last year in the Gulf of Mexico when new drilling technology outpaces safety and regulation. I don’t want fracking to have its own Deepwater Horizon disaster in our backyard.

Even if that worst case scenario doesn’t happen, Shalersville will not benefit from fracking. These companies exist to enrich their executives and shareholders, not to share their spoils with the communities they operate in. The best case scenario for residents of Shalersville is that we each spend several hundred dollars out of pocket to get our wells tested and don’t end up with our property values destroyed.

Keep in mind that having your water tested is not the same as insuring its quality. The Ohio Revised Code states that “An owner shall replace the water supply” if it gets poisoned, but that only happens after you figure it out. In other words, after your household has already been drinking contaminated water.

If history is any guide, they’ll just pay some fines, write it off, and leave it to the rest of us to deal with the mess. On Wall Street they call that privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. Here’s the thing, though: They might see these fines as the cost of doing business, but my family is not a business. There’s no going back to square one. Square one right now is that I can use my plumbing; supplying us with bottled water because we can’t use our faucets doesn’t make everything just fine. Square one right now is that my kids are healthy; money will not remove toxins from their systems.

These big companies have no stake in the long term health of Shalersville’s environment, or in keeping Shalersville a great place to live. WE do. WE will have to live here long after they’ve pulled up the stakes and moved on to their next target. I am not interested in gambling on my community’s future, and I’m sure as hell not interested in gambling on my family’s health. Fracking is a raw deal for Shalersville and I urge you to not allow it here.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak.

I disagree.  Everything is going according to plan for Walker and friends.

Walker’s primary goal when he took office was to improve the “business climate” in Wisconsin.  That’s a euphemism for facilitating the upward transfer of wealth.  And that’s fancy talk for the ruling class (the 1%) profiting off the suffering of the working class (the 99%).  

High unemployment is great for business!  It creates a surplus of desperate jobseekers who are willing to work for less pay and no benefits.  It allows companies to easily hire scabs and break strikes.  And it creates an environment of fear, jealousy, and distrust of our fellow workers - ideal conditions for passing extreme anti-worker legislation.  Would Walker have been able to take collective bargaining rights away from public employees if workers in the private sector had job security and a living wage?  No; and furthermore, if that had been the case in 2011, I think Walker would have had little chance of getting elected in the first place.

You know what else is great for business?  State budget deficits.  Walker used the state’s projected $3.6 billion budget shortfall to blackmail us into accepting austerity measures like cuts to social programs and teachers’ salaries.  Meanwhile, he continues to dole out tax cuts to private businesses and bonuses to his favorite employees.  Once again:  the upward transfer of wealth. 

I sound like a broken record because I keep repeating this: PAY ATTENTION TO GREECE.  Watch what happens when people really start to suffer under the austerity imposed by their government.  And watch how the government takes advantage of that suffering.  The government is harnessing the anger and frustrations of the public in order to implement a draconian immigration policy that involves rounding up immigrants and placing them in internment camps.  What’s happening in Greece and other countries in the EU is a pretty good indicator of the kind of thing we have to look forward to over the next several years in Wisconsin if we continue down this path. 

Of course, the political climate is a little different in Greece, with their vast array of political parties ranging from extreme right-wing fascists to neo-liberal fascists.  Instead of just two flavors of evil, Greece has many.  It’s like the Baskin-Robbins of evil.  But I think the comparison is still valid.  Let these other countries be an example of why the “anybody but Walker” attitude is so dangerous.  We can’t just oppose one person or one party.  We must fight the ideology that’s behind these attempts to divide and exploit the working class – an ideology and a strategy that’s shared by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Anti-fracking activism has been influenced by developments both inside the state and beyond. At a recent public anti-fracking meeting a representative from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) described the experience of activists in western Pennsylvania several years ago.

Residents there began seeing lots of drilling sites, processing plants and other fracking infrastructure pop up. Neighborhood opposition responded through the regulatory process. Drillers needed permits, so locals educated themselves on permit writing. They enjoyed some early victories as improperly written permits were thrown out.

The wins were only temporary though. Drillers came back weeks or months later with rewritten permits that fixed the problems in the earlier ones. The new permits passed regulatory muster and the frackers moved in. At one point counsel for the companies jokingly thanked a CELDF representative for its help in putting together a bulletproof permit-writing process. As you might imagine, this was not the intended outcome.

The regulatory process may not be a suitable one for anti-fracking activists for other reasons as well. For one, regulations are not ultimately about protecting citizens; they are about legalizing harm. Regulation on, say, arsenic in drinking water is not based on the maximum amount that humans may safely consume, but on the maximum amount the industry can get legislators to allow. If they allow an amount that is unhealthy for humans or animals, those who suffer as a result have no legal recourse. The harm was permitted.

If you do not want the fracking to occur at all - if you think it is too unregulated, too opaque, and generally too hazardous - then fighting over regulation is a sucker’s game. You are not fighting over whether or not your community will expose itself to the tender mercies of the oil and gas industry, but over how much damage the industry will be allowed to do to it; and since the oil and gas industry is flooding the statehouse with lobbyists how do you think that fight will go?

Which leads to the second problem with the regulatory process: it happens at the state level, where ordinary residents have precious little access. Aside from both the specific issue of fracking and the perennial issue of the will of the majority being frustrated by the powerful, wealthy and privileged, there are dynamics at play in Columbus that tilt the playing field against local communities.

The successful effort to implement term limits back in the 90s has born its expected fruit: Legislators do not have the opportunity to build up a store of knowledge and experience on how the legislative process works. Lobbyists, under no such constraint, can learn the system inside and out, and bring that to bear. (Incidentally, the inability of legislators to thoroughly learn how the machine works also - surprise! - creates demand for legislative chop shops like ALEC.)

Far from promoting good government, term limits have hobbled it - which is how the slow erosion of home rule began. It’s easier for industries to get their legislative agenda enacted once at the state level instead of multiple times at the local level. Term limited legislators aren’t around long enough to see the consequences, so why bother thinking long term? Add to that the current state government’s mania for selling off every valuable asset it owns - and the crippling of those public institutions that it cannot outright kill - and you are left with a statehouse that is content to let the private sector call all the shots.

Columbus has gone out of its way to kneecap local communities on fracking in particular. Governor Kasich, having failed in his first clumsy attempt to strip localities of the ability to negotiate road use and maintenance agreements with industry, now appears poised to slip it in through his new energy bill. (The bill includes other giveaways to industry as well.) Kasich has also stripped communities of jurisdiction over industrial construction. At this point there is little regulatory action that towns can take aside from zoning ordinances.

So if regulation was not a losing proposition going into the anti-fracking effort, the sellout to lobbyists in the capitol and virtual elimination of home rule seals the deal. What does that leave local activists? Trying for complete bans instead of tweaking around the edges. It may sound absurdly lofty for a one light town to adopt a bill of rights for its residents, but that may be the last (and best) ground to fight on. Don’t bother with processes that postulate harm and try to negotiate how much. Don’t fight neutered regulatory agencies or politicians in the pocket of the industry. (Or ex-politicians who have become industry shills, for that matter.)

Go big instead. Say that you simply want no part of it. Insist on the right to self determination. The fracking industry has already rigged the system; trying to get it to build safely, drill responsibly or disclose its hazards plays to its strengths. But what about a document that declares the rights of citizens to have full and final say on the most pressing quality of life issues that face their communities?

Would industry lawyers be eager to go into a courtroom and essentially say, “we know you don’t want us here but we’re forcing our way in anyway”? It doesn’t seem like a winning position. Trying to get a court to overturn such a fundamental declaration would probably be wildly unpopular. While a sympathetic judge might well go along with them - and that’s a whole other post - the process itself would smoke out the industry’s cold indifference to the communities it is endangering. That prospect might just get the industry to back off. And in any event, what else have we got? As one citizen put it: “The federal government has failed us. The state government has failed us. You are our last resort.”

Many of the residents I’ve spoken to have emphasized that OM provides something to them that the city’s shelter services don’t offer.  The Occupy site is not just a homeless shelter, it’s a homeless community that provides its members a sense of personal responsibility and self-determination.

I’ve never lived on the street, but I imagine that people who have find it lonely.  At Occupy Madison, there’s a fairly close-knit group of people who are always around.  There’s always someone to watch your back and listen to what you have to say.  There’s a place where you can keep your belongings instead of carrying them on your back all day.  There’s 24/7 free food and clothing, heat, bathrooms, and a place to hang out and sleep that’s out of the snow and wind.  There’s also the opportunity to take part in building the community and democratically make decisions about things that directly affect your life.

I could write a whole post on the city’s growing problem with homelessness and the striking inadequacy of the city’s homeless shelters, managed by Porchlight, Inc.  I’ve heard many complaints from people:  Porchlight’s shelters are not open during the day, there’s no place for people to store their belongings, there’s theft and violence, and people have been kicked out or banned for drunkenness or for having lice.  The biggest difference is that at the shelters, people feel isolated and powerless because they have no control over their environment.  Not everyone fits into the shelter system, and that’s why many of them have turned to Occupy Madison instead.

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, a Democrat, announced in February that when Occupy Madison’s permit on the current space expires, there will be no chance for renewal.  As of April 30 at noon, we are no longer permitted to be on the site and will be subject to arrest and confiscation (read: destruction) of property by the police.  Allen Barkoff, a local activist who’s been involved with OM, wrote a letter to Soglin requesting he either allow the residents to stay on the site or allow the group to find a new location.  Soglin’s response was a firm and emotionless “no”.

Last week, the Madison city council passed a resolution recognizing Occupy Madison’s efforts.  The resolution originally contained strong language arguing for letting us continue to exist as a homeless community, but that language was removed, leaving the resolution a toothless pat on the back.  The passing of the resolution may just be a symbolic victory, but the city council meeting itself was of great value.  A number of citizens, including many residents from OM, registered to speak at the meeting and testified about the importance of the Occupy site.

The first hour and 12 minutes of this video is a better testament to the value of Occupy Madison.  But since the video is so long, I’ll include some quotes from the testimonies here.

Dave Peters, a resident at Occupy Madison who organized 30-40 fellow homeless people from the streets of Madison to come stay at the site:  “When I saw people living in alleys and doorways… that’s just not gonna go.”  Dave believes that Occupy Madison has made a difference by giving its residents “a chance to buy time so they can figure out a way to get a job, to get money in the bank, to get themselves on their feet”

Lyle works as a flooring installer but recently became homeless when he could not find enough work to be able to make rent.  “We’re all displaced. It’s not like we wanna be there. ” But Lyle explained that Occupy is a safe place to be where people look out for each other.

Sofia Martinez said, “I am not homeless. I’m houseless, because I come home to a fantastic community… they welcomed [me] as nobody ever did  We don’t want to be labeled as misfits.”

Marcus Robinson is homeless and a student at MATC who is planning to transfer to UW:  “I’m not a waste to anybody, I haven’t done anybody any harm or wrong”.  Speaking about the Occupy encampment, Marcus said, “I’ve noticed that we’re self sufficient. That’s something.. I never had that hope. I always though that the city or state government or someone would always have to fund [the homeless], that we’d always have to beg… the fact is that we’re self sustainable.”  He spoke about how the homeless are losing hope, and one thing Occupy Madison has done for the homless is to restore that hope.

Robert Jones has worked as a cook and moved from Los Angeles to Madison, where he lives at the Occupy site.  “The homeless problem will not go away.  We are people who, for one reason or another, have become homeless.  Occupy Madison gives us a cause, self respect, and also gives us pride in what we do to help each other.  If it were not for Occupy, there would be about 50-60 people wandering around downtown right now.  People in Occupy are getting jobs.  They’re getting apartments… we’re not just sitting around and doing nothing.”

I think this is the first time the Madison City Council has ever seen homeless people come to one of their meetings as a group of this size.  Some council members may never even hear from their homeless constituents at all.  The testimonies given, not just by residents at Occupy but by other members of the community as well, were heartfelt and moving.  All of us are committed to keeping this going, and possibly expanding Occupy into a long-term housing cooperative for people who otherwise don’t have homes.

The resolution passed unanimously that night, and the formal recognition by the city that it provides is important and relevant.  But the mayor remains committed to eradicating the Occupy Madison encampment.  I believe he and other city officials are having a hard time accepting Occupy because everything we’ve done is outside of the established norms.  But as Dave Peters said in his testimony, “We’re part of a social experiment… that needs a chance to function, And we need time.”

As the eviction date approaches, site residents and supporters are working frantically to prepare and figure out what the next steps will be.  My hope is that this develops into an active homeless movement in Madison.  People who previously felt voiceless and powerless are becoming empowered and finding a voice.  Whatever may happen down the road, Occupy Madison is committed to fighting for its right to continue to exist and serve the needs of the community.

The purge of livestreamers and other transparency advocates at Occupy Oakland has been largely successful, and last weekend produced one of its predictable results. At the weekly Fuck the Police march there was a huge spike in vandalism (via) over previous ones, and there was a greatly escalated police response. The unilateral disarmament of livestreamers meant that, as Sue Basko (among others) pointed out, only the authorities were able to record the events of that night. If they choose to selectively edit or show only clips that support their side of the story, what will there be to rebut that?¹ (Basko also points out that livestreaming video can be used to rebut charges made by authorities, something the accused in this case might find handy. Her Occupy Symposium has been collecting really nice essays on this topic, incidentally.)

It actually is not strictly true that there were no live streamers at Fuck the Police. There were a couple, and they were physically threatened.² Because of that intimidation they radically trimmed their coverage. The resulting video is of some help, but not nearly as much as a full and open livestream.³ In an email exchange afterwards affinis noted that livestreamers have become afraid of covering the news, to which lambert responded: “Exactly. Since when is covering the news about respect? This is no different from the Washington Post!”

On the face of it that is just a little bit of snark, but there’s a very serious subtext. At its most ambitious Occupy represents an audacious leap of imagination, what some call prefiguration: Envision the world you want to see, and then begin to inhabit it. Model the behavior you want to see in the larger society. Or more colloquially, fake it till you make it.

Doing so takes time and patience, though. It takes a while for something that radical to sink in to people’s heads, even those people who are sympathetic. Matt Taibbi - a close observer of the movement and no friend of Wall Street - took a couple of months to come around, but he finally did: “People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something.”

Getting people on board with something so different requires openness and transparency. One very important aspect of openness that has either been only sporadic or entirely missing from Occupy is stated values. The consensus process at Occupy - which has been criticized for not being an authentic one - has largely prevented the adoption of broad principles that a minority object to. With something like a statement of nonviolence, a tiny minority with strenuous objections has shown the ability to frustrate the will of the overwhelming majority. A dynamic like that could ultimately cause the long term failure of Occupations that cannot resolve it, though as in science failures can be useful (lots to examine and learn from for those inclined!)

As for transparency, advocates need to not only expect visibility into others’ processes, but must willingly open themselves to that visibility too. If your new model does not allow for that - if, for instance, you want to plan violence in secret and carry it out anonymously (neither of which is transparent) - then you can’t very well expect to draw too many others to your cause. Why go to all that bother to trade one opaque, unaccountable elite for another?⁴ The prefiguration is crucial.

One type of prefiguration is media ecology. Big media outlets catering to power instead of challenging it have been a major source of dissatisfaction for nearly a generation now.⁵ That dissatisfaction may be driving viewers away, which opens up new possibilities - which Occupy is showing an ability to seize. The emerging sensibility of the new media environment is one of lightly mediated - or entirely unmediated - transmission of information. There are certainly hazards with this approach. For one, it means trying to take a drink from a firehose. A twitter stream or livestream can be hard to process; too much information, too much video to watch, too many links to click on, too many stressors maintaining online relationships. Consumers need to be their own quasi-editors, deciding which sources to rely on in order to be able to process what’s coming in.

Another hazard is epistemic closure, the condition where one only gets information from sources one trusts. The resulting echo chamber serves only to reinforce one’s prior beliefs, and causes people to retreat into rigid, sclerotic worldviews consisting exclusively of agreeable sentiments. There’s an entire book that can be written about that, though, so I’ll just note that it’s a phenomenon that predates the Internet.

For all the potential problems, though, there is no denying that Occupy’s media ecology is a very different model than legacy media’s. Which is the point! I don’t think most of the people who support Occupy do so because they want some new version of the Washington Post. I for one have had quite enough trembling deference towards those in power, and I’m not especially interested in seeing the same thing start to happen in this new context. As John Seal put it, “some Occupy supporters are now eagerly mimicking the high-security, everything-is-classified government they supposedly hold in such contempt.” And they are attempting to impose the same atmosphere of meek compliance on those who cover them. None for me, thanks; I’ve seen how that movie ends.

Lack of transparency leads easily to lack of accountability, and unsurprisingly that was what happened in the Fuck the Police march. In addition to the absence of livestreamers, those engaged in violence concealed their faces. This is a preferred tactic among violence advocates, but it has some obvious drawbacks that Jasper Gregory pointed out: One, a child could figure out how to infiltrate such a group, and two, the choice of that tactic made it irrelevant who did the actual violence. If you choose anonymity in advance, then anyone who uses it is one of your fellows - whether you want them to be or not.⁶

Some violence advocates tried to distance themselves by saying it wasn’t the real black bloc that did it (“no true Scotsman”), but a heretofore unknown imposter black bloc that is merely comprised of an immature group of transient kids who are only in it for the adrenaline rush of violent confrontation. Unlike the actual black bloc, of course! It’s hard to know where to even start with unconquerable ignorance like this, though Jasper captured its essential absurdity nicely. (Bonus stupidity: “if pigs want to smash capitalism by my side, i say let em.” Yes, capitalism was certainly dealt a death blow while you - and the pigs, naturally - engaged in petty vandalism against a Quizno’s and a local credit union. Well done.)

For as much as conformity, opacity and lack of accountability have become characteristics of elites that Occupy is rebelling against, it may be that their violence is the most objectionable - and therefore the most important not to reproduce. A country exhausted by endless wars (including of the death-from-above covert drone variety), militarized police forces, executive assassination programs and a brutally punitive criminal justice system is not going to rally around a movement that promises more of the same. Those who are rising up against the wholesale theft of ordinary citizens’ houses (a truly great act of violence) will not generally see justice in wild acts of retribution.

“Retribution” is the most charitable way to describe the rioting that violence advocates are so enthusiastic about. And yes, it is wild. While there are occasional lazy stabs at trying to circumscribe their vandalism, violence is a fundamentally chaotic act. It can veer out of control with little warning, and the destruction at the Fuck the Police march is just the latest example. Small wonder there has been so little discussion about it. People did not flock to Occupy to shift the locus of antisocial behavior in society from wealth-addled bankers in suits to twentysomething punks in black.

In order to have a chance at substantial and lasting change there has to be more to Occupy than some crude idea getting even. There has to be something that calls the overwhelming majority of people to something better. Part of that call is strategic. There is already a great deal written on the ultimate advantages to a nonviolent approach, with this being a great example. Lambert recently made the case in an email: “Rhetorically, I think we need to frame over and over again that [nonviolence advocates’] strategy has the greatest chance of success. That’s what we want, success. We want to look to successful movements.”

While that is certainly important (winning counts!), I believe the greater part of that call is moral (or ethical if you prefer). In an extended exchange (see footnote), Hugh wrote: “Change does not come from winning arguments but by changing hearts.”⁷ If you turn people off the way violence advocates do, then the only way to produce change is at the barrel of a gun. This would be the “neither hearts nor minds” approach. It is oppressive, and those under it will throw it off at the first opportunity. If you seek to persuade people to your cause, it is possible to win them over. You can then make more durable changes, though it can be reversed by a shift in the political winds or effective sophistry. This would be the “minds but not hearts” approach.

But if you change people’s hearts as well, they are liable to do more than simply accede to your wishes; they might just join in the effort as well. In the case of Occupy is also allows for the greatest contrast with the ruling class. Convincing most that our bellicose foreign policy is making us more enemies than friends, or that rampant lawlessness by the people running our biggest financial institutions will prevent the housing market from finally bottoming out; saying that such things are bad policy for America and ultimately against our long term interests might get lots of head nodding in agreement. But convince those same people that these things are grave injustices and deeply immoral? That’s the stuff revolutions are made of.

NOTES

1. “Marchers wearing black clothing and backpacks were captured on video committing acts of vandalism and retreating into the marching crowd, police said.” Also: “Several of these acts of vandalism and suspects were captured on video surveillance.” Way to go, dumbasses.
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2. See here for how violence advocates have intimidated livestreamers. In particular, jeffkloy, Josh and worthoftheworld were all present; Eiko Huh stayed away entirely. Josh appeared to be representing the Oakland Media Group, but no livestream of the event is available at their site. Jeffkloy avoided recording violence to “show respect” to those engaged in it (not that it won him any good will). Meanwhile, worthoftheworld - who appears at least somewhat sympathetic to those engaged in violence - announced a livestream, but as far as we know has not posted it. Interestingly, she had this to say about the suppression in a series of Tweets (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

every1 is so quick to confront the streamers for their accountability in capturing sensitive evidence… we should put same energy on holding ourselves accountable to our actions, helping comrades make wiser decisions in the heat of moments & ultimately, we need to put serious energy in holding the system (#SFPD, #OPD, #DEA, etc..) accountable!!! every1 attacks a streamer for their footage, who actually makes a physical effort to hold the System accountable? Beyond #Ftp marches? streamers are not the key element of arrest. an action of wrong doing has to happen first. this is The System failing,or comrade mistake. so on the topic of streaming, 3 elements of accountability. let’s spend equal time on all of them. and be fair

3. Affinis: “The basic chronology is pretty clear. Watching what actually happened (or at least, what Kloy was able to capture) is very different from you’d infer if the OO twitter stream was your only source of info.”
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4. Here is where things start to get a little interesting. One sticking point among those working out prefiguration is, prefigured by whom? Or more precisely, excluding whom? In a movement of the 99% presumably the 1% would have no say, right? Are Wall Street executives kept out of the discussion? Violence advocates? There’s a whole slippery slope argument around that, as well as around who performs the gatekeeping function.

Without laying down any specific markers, I’d just say as a general principle that more inclusion is better. If the goal is to subvert existing pillars of the establishment, it seems to me that engaging with those who provide crucial support for those pillars - not antagonizing them - is the best way to win them over. If the prefiguration includes a rigorous process of harmonizing new groups and ideas with the stated values, there’s a pretty good chance it will be robust enough to resist falling into a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” trap.
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5. That’s provided you date your disillusionment with the start of the Clinton impeachment circus and the way the big outlets uncritically catapulted right wing propaganda during the entire affair. There are lots of different places one could put that marker down, though.
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6. Those fellows could include modern day Pinkertons, among others (emph. added):

Approaches more often used by intelligence agencies are needed to confront this threat. The creative use of intelligence officers, either developed internally or borrowed from the private sector, can afford police agencies the speed, knowledge and agility needed to counter these emerging threats and the chaos that they promote.

7. Original exchange here. Here is a lightly edited (for readability) version:

By Hugh on Fri, 03/30/2012 - 10:42pm

Also I think people need to go back and study social movements in the past. I would suggest in particular Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. King and the movement were effective because they were willing to confront authority in the pursuit of justice and they infused their movement and actions with a moral purpose. This not only served to unify those involved and keep them moving together in the same direction but the morality of what they were doing and what they were willing to risk and sacrifice won over millions to their cause.

It wasn’t that they were intellectually right on the issues that swayed the country. That in itself was insufficient. Nor was it the justice of their cause. That might have won them a few converts. It was the moral purpose with which they imbued their struggle and which they were able to communicate to the general public that gave them their power. They did it in their words, their actions, and their sacrifices. They made millions care. They put their opponents on the defensive. They did this by focusing on the moralness of their purpose. People can dance around an issue for an age and still remain uncommitted. But by their example and sacrifice, those in the civil rights movement forced Americans to respond to them on a moral level. And on that level they were irresistible because a moral response is about who and what we are as human beings. It is the one place, if only for a little while, that we can cut through all the bullshit.

John Jay Chapman who belonged to a different era and another struggle said that reform movements to be effective must be religious in character. At the time when I read him, I wasn’t sure I agreed. But with time, I have come to see the wisdom in what he was saying. Change does not come from winning arguments but by changing hearts. Change someone’s mind, they may acknowledge the justice of your arguments, and do nothing. Change their hearts, and your struggle becomes their struggle. It is on the moral level that all this plays out. Words must fit actions and both must fit the moral purpose being invoked. If there is a dishonesty in any of that, then the battle is lost because people will be repelled by the falsity. They don’t need to know all the facts and arguments. They only need to see the flaw. But if these are true, suffused with a moral purpose, and tempered by real sacrifice, most people will respond to that truth and act according to its demands.

This is what I see missing from Occupy. Certainly you can see bits and pieces of this in particular actions but overall the movement remains strangely morally empty.

I think I agree with the sentiment if not the terminology. “Morality” to anarchists means the morality of religion and society - personal restriction even when it would harm no one, for no other purpose than control of individuals by institutions such as the church and State.

If you mean something more along the lines of ‘vision’ that we certainly have.

Yes, “vision” will win you 3 or 4 new converts at the least. Sorry for the snark, but it really looks like you have no interest in making common cause with the 99% because you reject right off the bat speaking to them in any way they are likely to respond to. Not only will you be unsuccessful but you will deserve to be because you are being incredibly disrespectful of those you want as allies. You can not expect them to set aside their prejudices for even a little while if you are not willing to do the same.

Most people are focused on their everyday lives. They have their plans and their schemes. It is a lot to ask them to set that all aside, but there are moments in life such as before a great cause when they will if addressed precisely on that moral level which you discount. And that is where the disrespect comes in. The moral level is inherently respectful because, as King understood and what he counted on, was that millions of Americans could be reached at that level because he did not just believe in his own morality but he also believed in theirs. That’s respect. He did not necessarily believe in their plans and schemes nor ask them to believe in his. This was not about doing away with difference. It was about finding the underlying similarity, and for that you have to go deep into a person. At that level if you ask them to stand shoulder to shoulder with you, you better damn well be ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. And if you are not even willing to go to that level, well the game is over before it is even begun. You are left on the level of everyday plans and schemes. And why really should they sacrifice theirs for yours?

This was published with considerable feedback from affinis, Jasper, JuliaWilliams and lambert. My sincere thanks to them for their help.

A few weeks ago Occupy Oakland (OO) began to emphasize secrecy (or security culture) over transparency, which resulted in livestreamers being attacked as snitches or quasi-authorities. In addition, large group of transparency advocates have been ostracized as racists with little or no due process.

The attacks on transparency have become an ongoing effort; last week Kate Conger Tweeted her experience in running afoul of the secrecy police at OO. Interestingly, she is a freelancer who was more interested in the decision making process than whatever nefarious purpose the more conspiracy-minded saw in the shadows. And she also asked: “Explain to me why a movement founded on free speech principles doesn’t support freedom of press?” Which as far as I know has not been answered yet.

This week it has gone even further, led by the explosive charge that police used livestreaming video in the arrest of activists Nneka, Cincinnati and Teardrop - aka the Ice Cream Three.¹ There has been a great deal of comment on the piece; the key excerpt:

According to defense lawyer Dan Siegel, it was the livestream footage that allowed OPD to target and arrest the Ice Cream Three at subsequent demonstrations over a week later: “There would be no case at all if people were not taking video and posting it publicly, and if the defendants had refused to speak with police once they were in custody.” Patti, Nneka’s mom, commented, “The really sad thing is that the footage came from Nneka’s best friend. She would never have wanted this!”

One of the, ahem, benefits of shutting down efforts at openness is that those who are calling the shots can hide in a cloak of anonymity and make decisions from behind the scenes. Occupations that have shut down what began with a robust culture of openness have constructed a neatly self-contained universe - one that permits them to wield substantial authority but disclaim ownership of anything produced by it. (It also tends to create its own self-reinforcing structures.) Decision making done by a few, responsibility shared by all. See here for an analogous dynamic.

Those who want to constructively criticize that dynamic are then left grasping at straws: with no transparency, there is no way to know who in particular is driving these unhealthy developments.

If it seems that, say, facilitation has turned into a power center where much of the direction is set, but there is no way to see or read exactly what is going on, how does one even begin to offer a critique? Those who are happy as clams with this state of affairs can simply demand to know who in particular is the source of the problem. With no transparency into the process, this is unknowable from the outside. So those who wish to be insulated from accountability get a free ride. A nice arrangement, if you can manage it.

Perhaps not coincidentally, opacity tends to work well in conjunction with violence advocacy. A culture of repression is very congenial to chaotic notions of autonomy, “no snitching” orders³, and an apocalyptic mindset that insists if revolution does not happen immediately then all is lost.

It also seems supportive of a certain moral vacuousness that stridently denies any responsibility for violence on the grounds that the violence had already been completed by the real villains (e.g. “anarchists don’t fuck up health centers. Corporations and the government does”).⁴ Cries of snitching and sexism in support of an attack on a clinic that serves the community are a bit hard to take.

Opacity works well with a certain kind of wilfully naïve view of the process, too. Consensus doesn’t mean “everyone agrees” or even “most people agree.” It is very involved, and some in the Occupy power centers seem largely ignorant of it⁵. Look at the contrast between this from one of the folks on an InterOccupy listserv:

The early facilitators seemed to believe that OWS invented the consensus process. Many of us who had training and experience in consensus decision-making were dismayed from the beginning, because what we were witnessing was not consensus, but a faux consensus. Many didn’t return. I stayed to see if I could persuade the facilitation working group to adopt other modes, e.g. breaking up into groups during GAs, allowing for debates during GAs, making sure that substance was at least as important than process.

We have had a big problem of late in that insisting on being “leaderless” has left a vacuum that has been filled by tyrants in the group. Until the various dysfunctions are dealt with, we’re unlikely to make significant progress. A few of us have identified the dysfunction rooted in lack of nonviolence training, including true consensus decision-making. And add to that a lack of vision of how it all fits together in horizontalism self-governance on a broader scale.

And this by an anarchist in the OWS Direct Action Working Group

This is just such an elementary understanding of the anarchic nature of occupy’s functioning. It disregards autonomy entirely. You don’t need “the movement” to do something. When you do something that is movement. Movements are more time than group. If this is a time of a peoples liberation movement then things that happen now in that vein are pieces of that movement. If what you are doing appeals to folks you will get their buy in and if not you will be doing it on your own. Those are both ok, so long as you’re not speaking for people other than those present to consent to what’s being said on their behalf.

The reason consensus would be a burden is if you’re trying to force others into something they don’t want. Nothing about other’s non interest keeps you from doing something with those who choose to participate.

The ideas expressed in the second excerpt strike me as shockingly immature. You cannot just say, do your own thing and if others dig it a hundred flowers will bloom! Nor can you say that whatever any subset of Occupy does is by definition Occupy; some actions - most notably violence - will be seen as representative of the entire movement. For those who want a nonviolent mass movement, a violence advocate’s “when you do something that is movement” ends up being the negation of the movement.⁶

None of this is merely academic. Maintaining the charade that Occupy is leaderless, preventing any sort of visible decision making structure from emerging, not implementing any sort of review or sanction mechanism for those who refuse to adhere to an authentic consensus process: these all come at a terribly high cost, and nowhere was that more obvious last week than in the The Million Hoodie March. Elon James White wrote about his experience with an Occupy movement that at least partially attempted to co-opt a protest against the murder of Trayvon Martin. His report is consistent enough with others’ (Esther Choi’s, for example) that it cannot be dismissed as the griping of a malcontent.

Saying that those who tried to use the protest for their own ends are just a few bad apples is - in addition to being pretty stunningly unaware of the term’s unsavory recent history - a nonsensical response if your position is “when you do something that is movement.” In the kind of amorphous culture being created by those opposed to transparency, everyone does their own thing and therefore no one can be held responsible for anything. “That’s not the REAL Occupy” isn’t terribly persuasive under those conditions. However much logic it might have to those locked into that solipsistic world, the view of those like White and Choi who encounter it from the outside is overwhelmingly negative.

An Occupy movement that becomes increasingly insular and suspicious will thus alienate larger numbers of people. It will insist on its rightness and purity, oblivious to how it looks to those who haven’t been marinated in its exotic narrative. It will be unwieldy, with uncoordinated arms each pursuing its own agenda, sometimes in contradiction. It will turn off all but the true believers. The backlash against the actions of some at the Trayvon Martin protest is a good snapshot of where Occupy goes if it does not become more open and yes, more organized.

1. Here’s a summary of the incident from the Oakland Police Department:

On February 22, 2012, at 6:00 p.m., the Oakland Police Department contacted a female victim after responding to a report of a robbery in the 4000 block of Piedmont Avenue. The victim told officers she had been walking down the street, across from the Wells Fargo bank, near a small group of Occupy Oakland protesters calling for a riot. The victim, who has been a resident of the area for over 20 years, suggested to the protesters not to riot in her neighborhood.

She was surrounded by three protestors and battered as they yelled vulgar epithets regarding their perception of her sexual orientation. Her wallet was taken during the crime. The victim broke away from the group, and called police who were able to arrest one suspect near the scene.

The Oakland Police Department prioritizes hate crimes for immediate investigation. A suspect who commits a hate crime aims not only to terrify or harm one individual, but to threaten and terrorize the entire actual or perceived group of people to which the victim may belong.

February 22nd was a day of arraignments for Occupy Oakland protesters at Wiley Manuel Courthouse in downtown Oakland. According to Nneka’s mother Patti, a group of approximately two dozen left the courthouse after the day’s proceedings for Fenton’s Creamery on Piedmont avenue and then convened a protest at the nearby Wells Fargo bank. An altercation took place later, around 5:45pm, in front of Dr. Comics & Mr. Games and was initiated by Stowers herself. In Stower’s testimony, she saw one Black woman, one Black man and one white man standing together on the sidewalk shouting the words “Let’s start a fucking riot!” As she passed them on her way to Piedmont Grocery she said, “I’ve lived in Piedmont for twenty years and I know you don’t belong here,” to which Nneka responded “that sounds pretty fucking racist to me,” and to which Teardrop replied “we need to talk about this.” In the confrontation that ensued, Stowers’ Obama pin was allegedly ripped from the outside flap of her purse. Then, she alleged, she saw Cincinnati’s forearm emerging from her purse. She did not actually see him remove her wallet.

2. Note the assumption that live streaming being used to arrest violent insurgents is a bad thing. There are many possible objections to the arrest of activists in general. For instance: activists could just be removed and warehoused for extended periods without trial or in other ways denied due process; they could get shot through a judicial proceeding little more than a kangaroo court; put through a penal system that is heavy on retribution, light on rehabilitation, and that brands them as criminals long after they pay their debt to society.

Those are all perfectly legitimate points to raise. As a general proposition, though - and specifically without comment on the details of the Ice Cream Three case - I would regard the use of livestreaming to identify and arrest those engaged in violence as a ringing endorsement of live streaming, a vindication of its use and a victory for transparency.

Also: look at the contrast between this and a nonviolent mass movement like Otpor. They spared some energy to try to win over the police instead of taking a stance of unrelenting antagonism, took arrests in stride and included all walks of life (“Parents of the kids were informed, and we had a network of old ladies who called the police station continuously” etc.) Which approach is more flexible? More sustainable? Which is better able to subvert authority?
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3. The fact that conspiracies of silence are championed by gangs, the mafia, and those engaged in cover-ups tells you roughly where that tactic resides on the ethics spectrum. As David Graeber noted, one of the goals of Occupy should be to demonstrate an improvement on the existing culture and not merely to shuffle its privilege:

That’s why it’s key to have an effect that will genuinely benefit people’s lives. #Occupy certainly doesn’t contradict that revolutionary impulse, and helps move us in a direction towards greater freedom and autonomy, by which I mean freedom from the structures of both the state and capitalism. Now, to create broad alliances along those lines, you’d have to be very careful about your organizational and institutional structures. Because one of the things that is revolutionary about the #Occupy movement is that it’s trying to create prefigurative spaces in which we can experiment and create the kind of institutional structures that would exist in a society that’s free of the state and capitalism. We hope to use those to create a kind of crisis of legitimacy within existing institutions.

4. Tina Dupuy makes the connection between transparency and nonviolence explicit:

A true nonviolent movement can have its plans known – the cops can know, the public can know, it can be on the livestream for everyone to see – because you can’t thwart civil disobedience by disclosure. Vandalism, property damage, graffiti, sabotage, throwing rocks and bottles at the police and petty criminal acts are not what the perpetrators want on UStream.

5. For as important as consensus is, though, it shouldn’t be fetishized. It is a means, not an end, and if not monitored carefully it can obstruct the achievement of the ends it is being used to further.
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6. For just one example of how violence is inimical to a mass movement, look at how Canadians reacted to the use of it during protests. When the public views you as a terrorist maybe you aren’t some romanticized revolutionary vanguard as much as a common criminal.
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The Occupy movement has already had a positive impact in many areas, but potentially the biggest one is rescuing concepts of public rights and the understanding of what is public. The very idea that there could be a common good, that there are things that belong to all of us and that in fundamental ways we are all in this together seems to have been under attack for a long time now.

For example, part of the right wing assault on the right to vote has included the talking point that since you need a license to drive why wouldn’t you need a photo ID for something as important as voting? Which actually gets the logic backwards. Driving is a privilege, so setting a more stringent standard for it makes sense. When it comes to the right to vote there ought to be a presumption that the individual requesting a ballot is eligible. The law should bend over backwards to accommodate voters, not erect barriers. Of course, on the rare occasions when fraud does happen it needs to be prosecuted vigorously.

Similarly, the idea of the public has been under assault. The fight for a public option in the health care debate a few years back is one prominent example. The idea of the government offering a basic menu of elementary health services to everyone seemed terribly provocative. It ended up being left out of the final bill despite the fact that it was a very modest (compared to, say, single payer) reform. This despite the fact that a similar model for banking has been a demonstrable and phenomenal success for nearly a century.

Meanwhile, things that currently are public are being spun off like crazy to the private sector. Here in Ohio I’ve watched John Kasich push to privatize prisons, the turnpike, the lottery, and more - while turning down federal funds for public transportation. Residents of other states have seen their own versions of this process.

Occupy has pushed back on those dynamics. In the environment sketched out above, a group of citizens simply becoming physically present in a public space over an extended period is provocative - and has the potential to produce change. Anything that would work against Occupiers’ ability to continue to hold public space ought to be considered antithetical to the spirit of the movement. Nothing would degrade that ability faster than violence, and having already posted extended thoughts on that subject I’ll just link to both and leave it there for now.

Occupation sites that have successfully endured without too much interruption have eventually had to answer the question, now what? Seizing and holding public space is significant, but how is it then put to use? Here is where the struggle over what Occupy means becomes most pressing. There seems to be a general agreement in using it to fight against systemic problems, but there seems to be a split as to how to express it. Some favor a nonviolent mass movement, others a smaller and violent insurgency. Which has more to recommend it?

One way to answer that is to ask: Which approach does the status quo favor? Because the answer favored by the establishment might not be the one for activists to embrace. A systemic critique by definition is at odds with established power. What might authorities favor?

A movement that puts an emphasis on social justice is at least antagonistic towards those in power, and potentially is outright hostile to them. Staging a protest against, say, stop and frisk policies is necessarily a critique of the system. This is really just a nice way of saying to those in charge “you are not doing your job well enough.” That is not a welcome message. Similarly, keeping people from being thrown out of their homes or pressuring banks to make real efforts to modify loans are implicit criticisms of those who are running things. (Note also that social justice is concerned with preserving or building up, not tearing down.)

If Occupy takes the approach above it will be hard to discredit and destroy. Nonviolent social justice is open to all and transparent, and it has an immediate, direct, and meaningful impact in the lives of those it helps. Those who want to see that approach fail cannot go the direct route. Instead of trying to persuade everyone that such activity is bad, it’s much easier to either bog the group down in other matters or redirect the group’s energy into activities that will discredit it.

Looking at how governments have subverted political movements in the past, discriminatory behavior and advocating violence feature prominently. Presumably that is because it tends to discourage and splinter members of the movement, but in a way that leaves no obvious footprints. Those engaging in either of those are doing the work of those who want Occupy to go away. They may express deep antipathy towards it and may in fact feel that to the very depth of their souls, but as a practical matter they are assisting authorities. As Charles put it in relation to violence, “if the police are paying people to smash windows, why are you doing it for free?”¹ The same is true of those in Occupy who engage in harassment, racism, misogyny, homophobia or other kinds of bullying.

Similarly, look at the effects of the direct political action linked above: Nonviolent challenging of police procedures that infringe on civil liberties is far more provocative to the system than throwing a bottle at a cop. Violence causes public support to drop and also excludes those who are not in a position to engage in a “might makes right” gesture of spectacular futility towards officers. This too supports the state in its effort to discredit the movement in the public eye.

Finally, anything that tends to take discussions into long-winded esoteric territory (like arguments over semantics) should be viewed with extreme skepticism. This is obviously a much more subjective measure; My brevity might be your long-windedness, and your esoteric might be my essential. Looking at the effect of the discussion might be a good rule of thumb, though. As Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers recently wrote about an extended discussion of finances at Occupy: “Whether paid or not, the impact is the same — it takes the Occupy off its political agenda and turns people off to participating in the movement.” Those things that tend to take Occupy away from the activities considered most threatening by the state will eventually subvert the movement.

I have tried to be careful not to assume motive in anyone in the above. I take those who claim to be passionate supporters of Occupy to be just that. But political movements are often targets of government subversion and provocateurs. We know enough about how these agents work to identify their most common tactics. To the extent that true believers engage in the same tactics, they act as the state’s volunteer auxiliary unit.

Whether intentionally or by accident, from the outside or within, they have the potential to do great damage to Occupy. For that to happen to a movement that is reclaiming public space, challenging injustice and dedicating itself to the common good would be a tragedy. We have enough testimony from those who once advocated pro-government subversive tactics and have since had the opportunity to watch the reverberations echo over several decades; we do not need to repeat the mistakes that they themselves now see as catastrophic with Occupy.

1. Affinis recommends the documentary If a Tree Falls for a good example of activists who grew frustrated and felt powerless, then turned to violence. The common refrain from activists on the long term impact of those decisions (Paul Soglin: “When school reopened a couple of weeks later, it was as though the life had been sucked out of the anti-war movement.” Mark Rudd: “Assuming we weren’t in the pay of the FBI, we should have been.”) is that they damaged the movement they were claiming to help, and helped those they claimed to oppose.
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Last month, Occupy Portland put out a national call to action on February 29 to other Occupies around the country.  Dubbed “Shut Down the Corporations”, the idea was to target corporations that are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) with creative, non-violent actions.

The Occupy Madison Direct Action Committee, an autonomous offshoot of the larger Occupy Madison group, put together a modest action of our own.  From the long list of some 300 corporations that are involved with ALEC, we chose Kraft Foods, Inc., a member of ALEC with a representative on the corporate “Private Enterprise” board.  Oscar Mayer is a subsidiary of Kraft and one of Kraft’s leading brands, and operates a large factory right here in our town.  That’s right, the formerly family-owned business known for that cute hotdog-festooned vehicle we occasionally see on the streets of Madison has been assimilated into the mega-corporation that markets processed junk food to children and is pretty evil in lots of other ways too. 

Our plan for #F29 was to stand on a visible, high-traffic street corner next to the Oscar Mayer factory holding signs that exposed Kraft’s ALEC ties and make a video.  Pretty innocuous, right?  Not from the perspective of a major corporation whose parent company has something to hide. 

When I showed up at Oscar Mayer that afternoon, the first thing I noticed was the strategically placed cop car directly across the street.  Not only were Oscar Mayer apparently tipped off that we would be protesting that day, but whatever information they gleaned must have made us sound much more frightening than we actually were.  In reality?  About eight people braving the freezing rain and 25+ mph winds to stand on a public sidewalk with signs while passing cars honked.  But in the minds of Oscar Mayer’s management…

Throughout the course of the hour or so we managed to tolerate the weather, I noticed various police cars drive by at least seven times.  Some were Madison PD while others were unmarked cars.  It seemed overkill, to say the least.  Oscar Mayer’s own security team even made an appearance at one point and yelled at us to get off their lawn.

The overreaction to our event by the local police and the Oscar Mayer management who no doubt called them in really made me wish we could have done more.  With limited time and resources available to our committee, this small yet apparently intimidating action was all we had planned.  If they were expecting us to break into the building and shut down production, perhaps we should have escalated our protest beyond sign-holding!

Actions like this one, while small and seemingly ineffective in the grand scheme of things, do serve at least one important role.  We had no idea how terrified Oscar Mayer management was of us peaceful protesters until we showed up at their site.  In doing so, we helped expose an example of how one-percenters (and some 1% wannabes) live in constant fear that the rest of us who make up the 99 percent will someday move and begin to notice our chains.

Other #F29 actions resulted in riot cops kettling and arresting protesters, and even a standoff with police in California (photos from shutdownthecorporations.org).  My assumption as we were planning our event was that what we were doing was so tame in comparison that the cops wouldn’t bother, and that Oscar Mayer probably wouldn’t even notice us.  As it turns out, even smiling and waving at cars while holding signs is enough to warrant a police presence at least the size of the protest itself.

Oh, and here’s what scared the pants off those wieners at Oscar Mayer:

Occupy has seemed to be in a bit of a winter hibernation. There are still encampments, meetings, decisions, protests, and so on, but it seems like there has been a relative lull in its activity level. This is fine; you can’t stay cranked all the way up to 10 all the time. A little pause to regroup, rethink and recharge is a good thing. There is a chance that the some occupations that emerge might have a very different character than the one that began to recede from public consciousness towards the end of last year, though.

Some recent developments have prompted me to refer back to my experience with the No on SB5/Issue 2 campaign in Ohio last year. For instance, there was tremendous outreach by supporters and organizers to the general population, and the umbrella group We Are Ohio went to great lengths to accommodate anyone who showed an interest in being part of the effort. Those who could only participate on a limited basis were given the opportunity. Whether it was a walk list for education or phone banking for those who couldn’t get around so easily, anyone who wanted to help was found a way to do so in whatever capacity they could. A low barrier to entry is very mass movement friendly.

The fact that SB5 centered around an issue and not a candidate made it very different from the usual election year political campaign, too. On the surface it might not have looked much different from a Vote For Me effort; the logistics of mounting it, connecting with voters, and turning out support were all probably lifted from some strategist’s playbook. But the spirit animating it was very different. It SB5 was driven by those who cared most about the issue, with elected officials generally falling in behind. As a direct democracy action it gave citizens the chance to work for an issue they cared about and, if successful, vote on the issue in the next election.

Putting together an effort like that (and winning, of course - which we did) is far more satisfying than working to elect someone who, given the labyrinth any proposal usually must travel to become enacted, will at best be able to offer the change and whip up support for it. That kind of open, issue-oriented campaign is not just a template for other direct ballot actions like tax hikes on the rich or card check for union membership (to name just two issues that have been paid extravagant lip service by politicians and somehow - darn the luck! - continue to resist being enacted anywhere). It is something activists in general could learn a lot from.

For instance, in the last week or so the issue of transparency at Occupy has become very contentious. Perhaps the most prominent examples have been in Chicago and Oakland. Occupy Chicago adopted a resolution that sharply limits streaming of the General Assembly, and a number of folks there voiced their disappointment, perhaps none more than occupiechicago. Meanwhile in Oakland a proposal for what was called a “principle of solidarity” called for, among other things, not posting “potentially incriminating video footage or photos of our comrades.”¹ This was described by Kit O’Connell as a security culture meme, while Jasper Gregory correctly noted it was a “self-censorship proposal” and its “logic would lead to total social media boycott.”

Now, you could say: Disagreements happen, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. The proposal was submitted through the General Assembly process and passed². That’s how the process works.

However, this disagreement goes directly to the heart of Occupy’s ability to keep and attract participants. Lack of transparency leads to information asymmetry; those who are able to hoard information gain a large and artificial advantage over those who don’t.³ As occupiechicago put it: “Livestreaming forces people to be accountable and weeds out infiltrators. Why would we allow people to make a decisions that affect our community without our community knowing who they are?”⁴ The degree to which Occupy is visible is the degree to which it has the potential to be a mass movement. As the movement nears its six month mark it each occupation seems to be developing - in some areas, anyway - its own subculture. Some of these subcultures are familiar, too. While the initial exhilaration of a leaderless movement was driven by a deep disillusionment with leadership over the past decade or so, the current narrative seems to be transitioning to a much less contemporary one - and one with an abysmal track record.

Lack of transparency leads to lack of formal procedures, which in turn produces unstructured networks. Jo Freeman examined this dynamic in relation to the women’s liberation movement in the early 70s and noted: “The more Unstructured a group is, the more lacking it is in informal structures, and the more it adheres to an ideology of ‘structurelessness,’ the more vulnerable it is to being taken over by a group of political comrades.”⁵ Freeman’s article is long, but provides a thorough examination of related social and small group dynamics: The (impossible) claim of structurelessness, the rise of an unaccountable elite, the opacity of decision-making processes and the inevitable marginalization of the groups that embrace those qualities.

Freeman writing in 1972 may well be describing the coming future for Occupations that embrace elite privileging proposals like shutting down live streams:

The criteria of participation may differ from group to group, but the means of becoming a member of the informal elite if one meets those criteria are pretty much the same. The only main difference depends on whether one is in a group from the beginning, or joins it after it has begun. If involved from the beginning it is important to have as many of one’s personal friends as possible also join. If no one knows anyone else very well, then one must deliberately form friendships with a select number and establish the informal interaction patterns crucial to the creation of an informal structure. Once the informal patterns are formed they act to maintain themselves, and one of the most successful tactics of maintenance is to continuously recruit new people who “fit in.” One joins such an elite much the same way one pledges a sorority.⁶ If perceived as a potential addition, one is “rushed” by the members of the informal structure and eventually either dropped or initiated. If the sorority is not politically aware enough to actively engage in this process itself it can be started by the outsider pretty much the same way one joins any private club. Find a sponsor, i.e., pick some member of the elite who appears to be well respected within it, and actively cultivate that person’s friendship. Eventually, she will most likely bring you into the inner circle.

All of these procedures take time. So if one works full time or has a similar major commitment, it is usually impossible to join simply because there are not enough hours left to go to all the meetings and cultivate the personal relationship necessary to have a voice in the decision-making. That is why formal structures of decision making are a boon to the overworked person. Having an established process for decision-making ensures that everyone can participate in it to some extent.

Which leads to the second problem. In the absence of structure, and with consensus decision making in large open GAs, meetings last forever and can make few decisions. That means that even separate from the time required to cultivate relationships and gain political capital - to be allowed into the “in” group - those with other commitments such as work or family are deprived of a way to meaningfully participate. Those who can’t sit through hours of meetings simply won’t have a vote. For occupations that adopt this model, barriers to participation are very high. The people who gain power in these situations are the most stubborn and the most militant. They’ll hold out forever, while everyone else goes home. Others either leave or capitulate (to get the meeting over with or live to fight another day).⁷

For as important as the Occupy encampments are, they total in the low thousands nationwide. In a country of 330 million that is a rounding error of a rounding error, and a movement that claims to champion all but the very richest has to find a way to connect to that much larger portion - the 99% of the 99%. Those with obligations that prevent full time participation or that have no convenient way to regularly visit Occupy need to have some way to connect to it. Making the activities of the camps as available as possible is a crucial part of scaling Occupy out to the whole country and all walks of life. (So is being receptive to feedback from outside the camp!)

Maybe some of the Occupiers arguing against transparency don’t much care for a mass movement. Maybe they like the direction Occupy is going and would very much like to take ownership of it (while maintaining the fiction that it is a leaderless movement, of course). That means those of us who want to see it continue as a mass movement and believe that Occupy belongs to all of the 99% have to raise our voices. We need to do our best to persuade everyone else that Occupy must be visible to all and available to all walks of life. It must, in short, embrace a radical openness.

1. Fuller statement:

We enact this principle of solidarity with one another by recognizing our individual and collective responsibility not to incriminate our fellow Occupiers, and hereby agree that:
1) We will not talk to the police about our comrades (This includes all levels of local, state and federal law enforcement, jail staff, Immigration & Customs Enforcement, Internal Affairs, and the Citizens Police Review Board.).
2) We will not post potentially incriminating information about our comrades on the internet and social media (This includes any forms of information posted on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, email, etc.).
3) We will not post potentially incriminating video footage or photos of our comrades (This includes being attentive to the fact that even minor and unintended incidences can be used as the basis for criminal prosecution.).

2. Affinis, re: Chicago (via email):

Based on what’s on the forum, it’s not exactly a complete block. Stack lines can’t be streamed. There’s an “opt-in” where a speaker can consent to be streamed (and a speaker who opts-in will then stand in a specially marked “stream” zone while speaking). Based on a couple of the comments, there was an amendment so that a GA participant can ask for a complete GA blackout. The GA will then be blacked out and discuss whether to proceed with a full blackout for the entire proposal discussion/vote.

It seems that most OC GAs currently are not streamed. Even though the proposal is apparently not a complete prohibition on all streaming, with all these restrictions, I doubt anyone will bother to try to continue to stream (and any stream produced would be swiss cheese).

3. Lambert, via email: “When a march is organized and the participants haven’t been told where they’re going, that’s information asymmetry.” An example of this from outside Occupy:

The problem is that the financial system has been allowed to get so complicated and so rigged in favor of the people with information, that normal people, including homeowners, credit card users, politicians, and regulators have been left in the dark, and many of the little guys are still stuck in ludicrous contracts left over from the outrageous securitizations that took place in the CDO market.

4. Full comment:

After being giulted non stop about how i should not stream i set things up at Cermak so that people were comfortable. I also agreed with this proposal when it was presented, because the “dangers” of livestream were beaten into my head (not literaly…we are non violent).

Remember when we used to call ourselves a transparent movement? This proposal ensures that we are no longer a transparent movement. This allows people to make decisions about Occupy Chicago and not be held accountable. This allows people to hide… I will not hide things like our government does. Livestreaming forces people to be accountable and weeds out infiltrators. Why would we allow people to make a decisions that affect our community without our community knowing who they are? I urge people to vote NO on this tomorrow so that we can preserve the transparency of Occupy Chicago. I will present a counter proposal in the next couple days

5. Note the similarity in language: Freeman describes the fellow feeling among the group taking control as that of comrades - and that word is repeatedly invoked in the OO principle of solidarity.
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6. In his book The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America Richard J. Ellis describes (p. 10) how Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] started as a genuinely democratic group and an unaccountable elite. (Note the use of “solidarity, comrade!” type bromides.)

Chapter 6 addresses a paradoxical development that is central to all radical egalitarian movements but that is particularly acute in the case of SDS. In the beginning, SDS was organized along fairly conventional parliamentary lines: majority rule, Robert’s Rules of Order, and national conventions that elected a president, vice president, and national executive committee. But as egalitarianism became increasingly strong within SDS, these representative structures were dismantled in the name of participatory democracy and antielitism. “No leaders, no structures” was the egalitarian theory; elitism and arbitrary, unaccountable power were increasingly the reality. At national conventions decision making by consensus replaced majority vote, which in practice stripped conventions of their decision-making capacity and thereby transferred decision-making power to the permanent National Office. Annual rotation in office for elected leaders meant concentrating power in the hands of unelected staff, a concentration of power that was furthered by the decision to abolish the offices of president and vice president. These “democratic” reforms produced a leadership that became steadily less accountable to the SDS membership, which in turn made it easier for the leadership to destroy remaining democratic forms. Reforms in the name of democracy produced less democracy; antielitism produced its opposite.

7. Three secondary problems of structurelessness: When decisions get made, given structurelessness, there’s no way to enforce the decision. So democratic decisionmaking (as in making decisions that actually mean anything) is lost, and in practice power devolves to autonomous actors - particularly those actors who are the most charismatic (where others will follow their lead).

Also, the clubiness of the elite would cause individual Occupy encampments to become increasingly isolated from other ones. An idiosyncratic and personality-driven Occupy is an Occupy largely disconnected from the Occupy movement as a whole. While there’s much to be said for the model of independent nodes in activism, the implementation of the model matters. Having it in place and elaborated on from day one is not the same as an unarticulated drift into a cult of personality. Context matters.

Finally, loss of transparency leads to loss of potential corrective input and perspective. It’s the opposite of crowdsourcing. It basically cuts off the possibility of valuable “outside” input (e.g. someone recognizing a potential fatal flaw in a plan of action).
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