Shorter Showers

One of the many pamphlets I picked up in Zuccotti park was an anarchist essay by Derrick Jensen “Forget Shorter Showers – Why Personal Change Does Not equal Political Change”. I didn’t take to it’s argument then, that change in the personal sphere has negligible effect on the public sphere, but it took what Chris Hedges had to say on liberals talking about the needs and interests of the poor without ever being in danger of meeting the poor for me to understand why not.

Personal change is essential for political change. Political change requires passion, authenticity and an ability to empathize.  As banal as it might seem, it is exactly learning to buy less that awakens us to the unsustainable nature of our consumer society. It is learning to eat better, to make our own food, to know what we are putting in our mouths, that allows us to realize the importance of promoting equal rights to good nutrition. It is precisely through caring for others that we come to understand our short comings as a society in caring for the needy.

If all we do is concentrate on grand ideas, theories and mass political movements in order to affect change, we are not likely to get very far. We need to marry these ideas to practical change on the ground. It is only when enough people stop believing that change is impossible that it starts to take place. It is only when people feel that change will affect them on a personal level that they will invest the emotional capital needed. How can we convince others to affect change if we haven’t made it ourselves? Who will believe is when we speak of hollow theory?

Even though the Arab spring is more about civil liberties and self determination while protests elsewhere are more about the consequences of economic oppression, what sparked and allowed these protests to grow is personal change, personal example which allowed masses of people to realize that they were in the same predicament. One of the reasons why the protest movement has not yet turned into a mass movement in the States is because the majority of people who are struggling are still embarrassed to admit it, still believe that somehow, magically they’ll realize the American dream.

Like others I believe that the watershed in Tunis, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Damascus, Athens, Madrid and Lisbon came when people no longer felt that they were the only ones that were struggling with the system. This loss of shame at not being able to keep up the farce that everything was ok; that although the economy is tough, you’re keeping your head above water; that although you need to bribe to get ahead, you are managing; that although your neighbor got dragged away by the secret police in the middle of the night, they won’t come for you. This is what is fueling the revolutionary change in governments, in the way so many of us are thinking about the way our world should look. It’s the understanding at a personal level that the status quo simply can no longer be maintained. It is seeing your friends and neighbors struggling, seeing them protesting, defying power, that will move you to join the attempt to reshape our world.

Block Black Bloc?

Sometimes there is nothing better than a good disagreement when you want to better understand an idea. Recently Chris Hedges published an article, in which he called Black Bloc the Cancer in Occupy. Hedges, a war correspondent for decades and now a radical social commentator and activist describes in almost religious terms the need to maintain passive civil disobedience as the only effective means for achieving social change. He warns against the use of violence and specifically what he describes as the tactics of Black Bloc as playing into the hands of establishment forces and their attempts to de-legitimize the occupy movement.

The article caused a lot of very virulent feedback, most of it angry rants against Hedges, but also some excelent responses that detailed the nuances missed by Hedges.

Susie Cagle quite possibly does the best reporting on Occupy Oakland I have run across. In her piece she calls out Hedges for buying into establishment propaganda as well as berating both him and most other journalists for not bothering to do the leg work. As most of the references to Black Bloc violence in the Hedges piece refer to Oakland, she shows him to be both wrong and lazy.

David Graeber is an American anthropology proffesor, anarchist and one of the early organizers of Occupy Wall Street. In an open letter to Hedges, he explains that black bloc is a tactic and not a movement, the use of anonymity when confronting established power and that Hedges' call for imposing peaceful protest as interpreted by him (or someone else) as a  form of violence.

All three pieces are well worth reading and will leave you better informed on the complexities of a democratic protest movement where pluralism is put to the test, how there is a large gap between what is often reported even by those sympathetic to a cause and what people on the ground experienced as actually having taken place and what anarchy and it's tactics represent when not approached as a the destructive dogma it is often presented as being.

Thank you Chris for starting this fire.

Practical Occupation

Last month protesters from OWS along with community organizers broke into a home in East New York that had stood empty since being foreclosed in 2008 and turned it over to a woman and her family who had been homeless for the last 10 years. In similar actions in Columbus, Atlanta, San Francisco and Southgate, foreclosed, empty houses are being occupied by Occupy and turned over to those without homes. Evictions, sometimes as soon as 2 months after failing to make a mortgage payment, are being resisted by large crowds making it impossible for police to force people out of their homes. Through this action, OWS is putting its money where its mouth is by highlighting poor communities and how they have been affected by our economic system. It is also exposing some of the central questions we should be considering if we want to rethink how we run our societies.

In order for the movement to grow the coming year it is essential that it proves its relevance in helping to solve problems. The true relevance of OWS in starting a new conversation on how we want to see the future of our societies can only be maintained by not restricting ourselves to pointing out what is wrong but by proposing alternatives and implementing them where possible. Only by testing our ideas can we ascertain if they work. We have nothing to fear from the messy process of trial and error.

The focus on repossessed homes exposes one of the central differences between capitalism and socialism, between private property and community property, between the right of the individual and the right of the community. The question is what is of greater value, the right of an individual to buy an apartment building and leave it empty, for whatever reason, or the right of 20 families to housing at the expense of the individual?

A city belongs to all its inhabitants. When you buy a plot of land in a city that has been zoned for dwellings, do you have the right to not develop that land? The permits and deeds give you the right to make a profit from developing an apartment building that will serve a number of families, it does not give you a right to not build that building.

Finding the correct balance between the rights of individuals as opposed to the rights of a collectives is tough. Within reason, there is much to be said for the concept of private property. It is not difficult to find examples where the tyranny of the masses, or those claiming to speak for the masses, has trampled the rights of individuals. That this can and does happen in collectivist societies should not be used as an excuse to prevent criticism of the opposite extreme.

We are witnessing a tyranny by individuals who have amassed enough wealth and political power to trample the rights and interest of the many in order to serve the privileged few. Besides highlighting these perversions, we need to make sure we spend enough time thinking about how we break these power structures without merely replacing them with equally unbalanced and perverse structures and then to act. The housing crisis, at the heart of the current economic meltdown, is the perfect testing ground to try and rethink the balance between these rights in very practical terms.

Maintaining Indignation

Having spent the last couple of weeks with family visiting for the holidays and entertaining my kids on their winter break, I have felt markedly less angry at the outrages of our plutocracy. This is a good thing, to be reminded how easy it is to go through life oblivious of how the very few are running us into the ground. I was reminded of what Jamie Kilstein from Citizen Radio said, about living in a progressive bubble when you are mainly tuned in to other progressives and their independent media.

I’m still amazed and often at a loss for words when I have to explain what OWS is all about. What they want. Why they are so upset. Why they don’t just get a job. When you think about it, with the reality tv, unbridled consumerism, the cheap, processed crap we keep on stuffing our faces with on top of the usual day to day struggles, it’s no surprise that relatively few that manage to maintain their indignation.

And maintain our indignation we must! They told us we were a spoiled bunch of bored rich kids in New York, while they continued to repossess people’s homes without even holding the deed to the properties. They told us we were a bunch of sushi eating liberals in Tel Aviv while privatizing public lands. They called us lazy, welfare addicts in Athens while pushing austerity on the poor and debt relief on the rich. They call us terrorists in Damascus, when they have already killed more than 5,000 of us.

This will be our challenge in the coming year, to remind everyone why it is unacceptable to cause economic collapse and not be held accountable; why it is unacceptable to make housing, education and a decent wage inaccessible to many while the few take an ever growing share of the GDP; that to continue to expect the current system to supply different results is the definition of insanity.

And if that didn't piss you off, watch some of this, it worked for me...

Seeing Red

Say it, don't spray it

Some Facts Are More Equal Than Others

The problem is not Fox news which is obviously identified with the GOP establishment but rather the rest of the mainstream media which continues to pretend to be neutral.  It is nothing short of childish to claim that all arguments are equal. To equate faux evenhandedness with good reporting is disingenuous. For make no mistake, Fox news may not be guilty of pretending to be neutral but it also wouldn’t know good reporting if it spat in its face. Good reporting should be about revealing a truth. By denying our biases we are obscuring part of the truth, much in the same way that we obscure the truth when we refuse to hear arguments we think are counter to the narrative we want to believe in.

The other week  I witnessed an interesting twitter exchange between a couple of journalist. One, Joshua Holland, was calling out Naomi Wolf on an unsubstantiated piece she had written claiming a conspiracy by police departments across the US to coordinate violent crackdowns on occupations nationwide.  Two other journalists, Allison Kilkenny and Mike Elk, although initially more or less supportive of Wolf, upon rereading her piece and taking some of Holland’s points into consideration agreed that the piece was off. Holland eventually published a piece dissecting Wolf’s claims and showing them to be not much more than hearsay. As conducive as a nationwide police conspiracy against OWS might be  to the worldviews of Holland, Kilkenny and Elk, for neither of these three hide behind “fair and balanced” reporting to camouflage their biases, none of them seem to want to base such claims on flimsy conspiracy theories.

What followed was troubling if not entirely surprising. Holland shared some of the feedback his readers had been giving to this latest piece. Suffice it to say that I now know what an asshat and a douchecanoe are. Holland got called every kind of traitor for pointing out inconsistencies in a narrative that a lot of his readers, few who seem opposed to the OWS movement, want to believe. This is very troubling.

How can we on the one hand rage at the obvious lies being peddled on Fox or wishy-washy excuses for journalism in much of the rest of the mainstream media and at the same time reject criticism of stories that are not backed up by facts, just because we want to believe those stories? If we become fundamentalist about the narrative of our protest movement; if we prefer to spend our time with the timidly likeminded; if we cry foul when we are confronted by our own misdeeds, then we are no better than those we are trying to displace.

All this reminds me of Animal Farm. All facts are equal but some facts are more equal than others. What these critics of Holland are saying is basically that although you can’t trust the right for twisting the truth to their own needs and desires, it is both acceptable and warranted when it is done in the service of a noble cause. What they don’t seem to realize is that the strength of our argument, the reason that our movement has struck such a chord, the source of what has got the ruling elite lashing out nervously, is based on the fact the we are expressing a truth that despite many and varied attempts is very hard to deny. Holland performs a service to that same cause by policing our use of the truth. Wolf and her supporters mistakenly believe that we can only defeat our opponents by lowering ourselves to their tactics. They are mistaken.

Slip into Something Less Comfortable

Class Warfare

We take our democracy for granted as much as those in power take their privileges for granted. One of the greatest achievements of the protest movement sweeping the world is that it is exposing the lies and half truths peddled by the power elites and our willingness to lap it all up. It reminds us that rights are never given, but taken. It reminds them that they rule by our assent, which will eventually be rescinded when that privilege is abused. It exposes the lengths that they will go to hold on to power and the means by which they hope to achieve this.

Mitt Romney describes Occupy Wall Street as class warfare. He is not wrong, just that it isn’t the recent protest that started the conflict. It started with Ronald Reagan’s 1981 campaign to destroy organized labor, with further shots being fired by partner Margaret Thatcher during the coal miners’ strike of 1984-85. All of this being just the start of a campaign by conservatives, neo-liberals, free-marketeers and corporate interests to bring back the Gilded Age and the Roaring 20’s.

This campaign has been going on for a very long time, with much success. While we have been busy shopping, expressing ourselves with Nikes, Diesel jeans, gold and platinum credit cards, the right usurped the left. It was on Bill Clinton’s watch that Glass-Steagall was repealed. It was Tony Blair, with his New Labour, who implemented privatization that Thatcher could only have dreamed of. Most of the rest of the developed world followed suit, with the IMF and WTO often encouraging similar moves to free market capitalism amongst those developing nations that came to seek relief.

With the cooption of the entire political machine now exposed, it becomes clear that our Democracy has devolved into little more than a farce. We snicker at despots that claim to receive 98.76% of the popular vote in what they call democratic elections. At the same time we freely choose between candidates that all essentially implement the same policy. Where is the Democracy in that?

Each time the establishment lashes out, whether in New York, California, Egypt or Tel Aviv  it assists in more clearly contrasting the choices we are faced with. It is this conflict that is exposing what is at stake. It is the disobedience of the governed and the establishment’s reaction that is making the scam so blatantly clear. Is it a coincidence that Mayor Bloomberg held a news conference to reveal a foiled terror plot that had been under control for two years, complete with a video of what the plot’s success would have looked like, only days after realizing that he was loosing the public relations battle? Was there no connection between the incessant chatter about the Iranian threat by the Israeli government over the last couple of weeks and the passing of new anti-libel laws, laws against financing of NGO’s, laws on giving politicians more control over the selection of Supreme court justices?

What emboldens those in power to continue using excessive force to deal with these annoying protests is the knowledge that the majority will look at these transgressions and believe that they will never be perpetrated against them. But they always are. What starts with Jews will end with anyone opposing the regime, by way of Homosexuals, Communists and Gypsies. What starts with Muslims will end with privileged white college kids speaking in opposition to the establishment by way of Arabs, Mexicans and the unemployed. As Matt Taibbi so aptly puts it, what is hardest is the transgressing against the first liberty, trampling the rest becomes increasingly easy.

Armed with this knowledge, that we are next; that if we are not now unemployed to allow for greater profitability, we soon may be; that if we are not now being poisoned by yet more exploitation of our natural resources, we soon will be; that when we sympathize with others that have had their freedom curtailed, we know ours are soon to follow. How can we continue to sit at home and wait for someone else to bring change.? Get you down to Zuccotti Park, to Tahrir, to Rothchild boulevard and put your body on the line before they have your soul.

Democracy is for the Uncertain

More often than not, my best thoughts are not my own. This one came to me while reading Mark Martinez book on free market capitalism called “The Myth of the Free Market”. He titled one of the sections “Democracy is for those that are not sure they are right.” This resonated with my thoughts on the importance of pluralism. I had been thinking this though, just never quite so succinctly.

As a pluralist, I am deeply suspicious of fundamentalists of any stripe. I am thoroughly convinced that there are very few things in human experience that encompass only one correct truth. That is not to say that every idea and opinion is of equal validity, far from it. Rather, this means that, especially when you are passionately convinced of the validity of something you’re doing or believe in, it is important to entertain the possibility that you may be wrong. It is a certain skepticism that really gives out beliefs and values their worth. If you hold something to be true, test it, question it. If your belief is correct, it will hold up to scrutiny. If it proves to be false, you can disabuse yourself of the illusion, we all entertain illusions from time to time, and change your perspective.

Not questioning and not allowing questioning by others is the mark of an intellectual coward and someone who, deep down, is aware of the shakiness of their beliefs. Democracy, in my mind, is not meant to achieve a singular way of organizing ourselves as groups. 9 times out of 10, those offering “the way” will lead you to fascism, communist tyranny or some other fundamentalist, totalitarian dictatorship. Rather, it is a system that should force us to recognize our differences, accept that they will continue to exist and reach some kind of compromise that will leave the vast majority only somewhat disappointed.

Only through the recognition and acceptance of our diversity can we truly accept our responsibility towards one another. A society belongs to all of its members, not just to those in power. A healthy economy is the result of the efforts of all its participants and not just those making the most. A democracy does not just belong to those that are in the right but also those that are in the wrong.

Occupy Rothschild, Occupy Wall Street

As originally posted on the Israeli Green Movement blog

This summer I watched with envy as Israelis took back ownership over determining what society will look like. I had just moved to New York and spent countless hours watching streaming video from Israel, often tearful as I realized just how many people shared the ideas and values that I believe are so important. What impressed me most though was the change in the actual conversation being held. People where suddenly talking about how we live together rather than how I get ahead.

Two weeks ago a small group of people started a protest on wall street in New York City called Occupy Wall Street. What started as a few individuals has changed into a few thousands camped out in a park in Manhattan. Once again there are people discussing how they want our society to look, what they think needs to be changed, why we cannot continue going on the way we have up to now. Once again, it’s the act of the conversation that impresses me most. What they want to achieve is clear, an end to the free market economic policies and the corporate dictatorship of our politics.

How to achieve this, on the other hand, is very unclear and the subject of countless, passionate discussions and arguments. This is the beauty of recent protest movements because they signal a change in the way we perceive our problems. We have tried working through the regular channels in order to affect change only to realize that everyone that makes it to power is enamored to the Chicago School of Economics, whether he is Netanyahu, Bush, Livni or Obama. It seems that the time has come to try something else.

No one really knows what this something else is exactly. News media here, just like in Israel this summer, keeps on insisting on getting a clear list of demands and some kind of idea when the protest will end. There cannot be a clear list of demands as what is being asked for is a change in the way we conduct ourselves and not just a change in this policy or the other.

It took conservatives 40 years to break down the welfare state, deregulate the financial industry and establish the consumer society. These protests aren’t going to change that within the space of a couple of months. What they are doing is reminding us that it is us that decide on the character of our society. It is us who allowed the corporate greed, the wholesale privatization of public services and goods, the monetization of everything we do to take place. It is us that will decide to put an end to this. This is our responsibility.