The post mortems on the disastrous recall defeat in Wisconsin have begun and many of them rightly focus on factors such as the role of money, the failure of Democrats and labor unions to get their message out, and the flawed strategy of channeling activist energy solely into electoral politics.  But I want to focus on a more fundamental problem, one that preceded Governor Scott Walker’s first election and the historic protests, and that extends beyond Wisconsin.  That problem is exemplified by this story from a Charles Pierce article in Esquire magazine.  Pierce was reporting on Monday night campaign rallies prior to Tuesday’s election.

Out in the parking lot, I fell into conversation with Phil Waseleski, who was wearing a T-shirt celebrating the U.S. Postal Service that was festooned with Scott Walker buttons. Phil was a letter carrier in the neighborhoods around the Serb Hall for nearly 40 years, but he retired last year when his days were cut back to three a week as part of the fiscal crisis forced upon the USPS by Republican legislators who would like to see it go away entirely.

“A friend once told me, ‘Well, we only need mail three or four days a week,'” Phil told me. “I politely told him, ‘Dave, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree.’ I could have told him, ‘Dave, you know, maybe at that engineering place where you work, they only need you three days a week, and then you could come help us.’

“The politicians, I think, it’s a tough call, because if you don’t keep the postal service in business — you and I will both agree that there’s nothing more personal than taking pen in hand to write to your mother, sister, or brother. Until June of last year, I gave my heart and soul to my job. I worked right through lunch most days.”

Eventually, I asked him why he was here, at the Serb Hall, supporting Scott Walker, whose politics were far more in tune with the people who are trying to strangle the postal service than they are with the people who still work there. Phil told me that it was about his sister-in-law. “The problem is that, when you start handing out free health care out to teachers, that annoys me to no end,” he said. “I never got free health care. My brother’s wife is a teacher and I once asked her, when I was getting my teeth worked on, what it cost her and she said, ‘Nothing.’ It should never get to that point where somebody’s getting free health care. Something’s way out of whack there.”

This story resonated with me because I can tell so many similar ones.  They’re stories of envy and resentment successfully exploited by a strategy of divide and conquer – a strategy that Walker explicitly told his wealthy funders during his first gubernatorial campaign he planned to use.  It’s a story of otherwise intelligent people ignoring some facts and choosing to take out their frustrations not on the distant elites that created the economic problems they’re experiencing, but rather on those near to them, neighbors, relatives, and friends.

In this story, Phil, whose work schedule was cut due to a fiscal “crisis” at the USPS concocted by those who would destroy it, doesn’t empathize with state workers who, before Walker’s first election, were also forced to take furlough days for two years running to help remedy state fiscal problems brought on in large part by our national economic crisis.  Instead, he focuses on his sister-in-law teacher who supposedly receives “free” health care.  Phil surely knows that her health care is not “free.”  But undoubtedly she has good health insurance benefits.

Years ago, when I was a state worker, I had major surgery and never saw a hospital bill.  I was aware – and deeply grateful – that, unlike many Americans, I had great deal on my health insurance.  Our monthly premiums were $240 a month for my husband and myself.  But it certainly wasn’t “free.”

Here’s another story:  A friend of mine who is a Wisconsin state worker told me back during the protests in 2011 that her neighbor, with whom she’d previously had good relations, had informed her that he sided with the governor.  State workers were draining the taxpayers and the cuts to their pension and health care benefits were justified.  The protests were just spoiled Madisonians throwing a tantrum.

My friend was bewildered.  “I never begrudged him all the money he made during the housing bubble,” she said. “I thought, ‘Good for you!’”  Her neighbor is a plumber who made money hand over fist during the go-go days of the latest housing boom.  After the crash, however, work has been scarce.  Does he blame the banking industry and Wall Street – the folks who engineered the whole thing, got rich at our expense, and tanked the economy?  No, he thinks his neighbor deserves a pay cut.  “I’ll never make the kind of money he [the plumber] made,” my friend told me.  “But I was okay with that.  I needed a steady job and good health care benefits for my family.”

The problem is deeply entrenched, extends beyond Wisconsin, and includes people who are not stereotypical right-wingers.  For example, when the protests were going on, I had long conversations with an out-of-state relative, a college-educated woman who generally votes Democratic.  She sided with Walker and even invoked his rhetoric, calling state workers the “haves” and taxpayers the “have nots” – as if state workers are not also taxpayers.  (This framing had also been adopted in her state and a number of other states.  Clearly it was a national strategy of the Republicans.)

I explained about the furlough days; I pointed out that the state fiscal bureau had projected we would finish the year in the black – before Walker took office and gave over $100 million in tax breaks to corporate and other interests. I explained that the “crisis” was, in part, manufactured by Walker to justify his agenda and that it wasn’t that big of a “crisis” anyway.  We’d faced bigger deficits and come out of them without this kind of drastic action. I argued that this was about larger issues, about union-busting, making ordinary workers pay for the economic problems created by elites, and a privatization agenda.  I invoked Pulitzer Prize-winning financial writer David Cay Johnston to explain that state workers weren’t getting “free” health insurance and pension benefits.  These were instead part of a total compensation package, where negotiated wages were divided among current and deferred income and benefits.  Walker had framed the issue as making state workers pay a little something toward the “free” benefits they were receiving.

None of this seemed to penetrate her skull.  Her 401k had taken a beating due to the economy; why shouldn’t state workers also take a hit in their pensions?  She was paying through the nose for health insurance; why should state workers get a better deal?  We can’t afford these generous benefits now, she said.  Beginning teachers where she lived received better compensation than she did when she was starting out as an accountant.  Ergo, teachers are overpaid.

Divide and conquer is a successful tactic because it taps into basic human emotions – negative ones, to be sure, but very common human weaknesses, like envy and resentment.  In yesterday’s Counterpunch article, Steve Horn argues that working class people succumb to right-wing populism because “the Left” – by which he means unions and the Democratic party – have abandoned them.  There is some truth to that, but it wasn’t just working class or uneducated people who bought into the “haves” and “have nots” framing.  And the people they turned against weren’t only generalized institutions like unions and the Democratic party.  They were specific people – their own neighbors, friends, and relatives.

Another reason divide and conquer is so successful in the United States is because we have for decades been propagandized into an extreme individualist ethos.  As a result, the ability of many Americans to understand where their collective interests lie is deeply impaired.  They are vulnerable to strategies that persuade them to ally themselves with powerful elites rather than other workers.

So what is the solution?  How do we overcome the susceptibility of human beings to the divide and conquer strategy?  The tendency to fight among ourselves for scraps while ignoring the elites pulling the strings?

I don’t pretend to know the answers.  I have only one suggestion and a story of hope.  My suggestion is to keep talking to one another and to do so with respect.  We can’t wait until important elections come up and emotions are high to have relevant conversations on the issues at hand.  We can’t afford to let off-hand, ill-informed remarks go by.  Somehow we have to find ways to talk – not preach – but engage in dialogue, even if only in short conversations here and there, so that we can begin to understand and bridge our differences.  (That’s my weakness – I tend to preach.  I’ve been practicing asking pertinent questions and listening – it’s a work in progress.)

The dialogue can’t be patronizing.  Noam Chomsky and the late great Joe Bageant are right.  Talking down to and ridiculing Tea Partiers and “low information” voters is not a winning strategy for getting people to understand where their true class interests lie.

My story of hope is from a panel presentation on water rights at the Democracy Convention here in Madison last summer.  Water rights activist Ruth Caplan (chair of the  Defending Water for Life Campaign) made the startling claim that “the most radical work being done in the US today is in rural conservative Republican communities.”  Caplan was discussing the push back against water privatization and the assertion of water rights for both people and nature.

Caplan explained that in Barnstead, New Hampshire, in March of 2006, citizens passed a water rights ordinance declaring that “water is essential for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, both for people and for the ecological systems which give life to all species.”  The ordinance further declared that

all our water is held in the public trust as a common resource to be used for the benefit of Barnstead residents and of the natural eco-systems of which they are a part.  We believe that the corporatization of water supplies in this community… would usurp democratic processes and result in tyranny and that we the people are therefore duty-bound under the New Hampshire constitution to oppose such usurpation and tyranny.

Caplan went on to describe who was leading the charge:

The chair of the select board of Barnstead, New Hampshire, is a Vietnam vet who voted for George Bush.  And he got it.  And when he was told by the lawyer working with them that this would take on settled law of more than 100 years of Supreme Court decisions, you know what he said?  He said, “Well, I understand that.  And I’m ready to walk point for you.”  Walking point means walking ahead and flushing out enemy fire.  That’s walking point.  He understood that they were taking this on.

In the room, I cried. And every time I tell this story, it just touches me so deeply that he understood it in this very, very deep way.  And who did he work with, hand in glove?  A Rastafarian biodynamic gardener.

And that’s why I think that while twittering and blogging and all of these new communication devices are important, it is the person to person that is so important in our organizing.  And I don’t want us to lose sight of that.

Caplan urged us to deal “person to person,” giving the example of another town where similar water rights legislation was passed, and where a key individual who made it happen was a Tea Partier.

So it can be done.  It is being done, in some places on some issues – although I admit haven’t personally experienced it.  I don’t for a minute imagine that it’s easy.  In some cases, it may be impossible.  I’m not talking about Democrat and Republican politicians working “across the aisle.”  I’m talking about finding ways for different segments of the 99% to work through differences, identify common ground, and unify against the class warfare perpetrated against us by the oligarchs and their puppets, the politicians.  For if a large segment of the 99% continues to ally itself, against its own economic interests, with financial elites, we are doomed to continued failure, despite the heroic efforts of people like the Wisconsin activists who worked so hard to defeat the austerity agenda and monied interests.

Katherine Acosta is a freelance writer currently based in Madison, Wisconsin.  She blogs at UndisciplinedPhd.com.

Visiting with my dad last week, talk turned, as it inevitably does, to politics.  A retired electrician and proud member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Dad has been closely following the attack on labor in Wisconsin since the 2011 uprising.  He expressed amazement at the reluctance of the DNC to offer anything more than token support of the attempt to recall our notorious Republican governor.  “I just don’t understand it,” he marveled.  “What can they be thinking?”

“Well,” I said, “clearly they don’t want to encourage mass mobilization against austerity measures.  They plan to work with the Republicans after the national election to implement austerity – cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and so on.  Remember, Obama and Boehner made a deal last July to do just that.  Ironically, it was the Tea Partiers that derailed the whole thing, and not because they care about social programs.  Outside money is supporting that kind of policy in Wisconsin.  It’s not just an attack on collective bargaining; it’s cuts to Badgercare, education – all kinds of things.”

Dad just kind of stared for a moment; then we went onto other topics.  Although he has only a high school education, he’s well-read and intelligent.  He senses I’m right; he just doesn’t want to believe it.  I don’t blame him.  Not so many years ago, I would have reacted similarly.

It’s obvious that if the DNC were truly interested in a progressive agenda, Wisconsin would be a high priority.  Massive funding from organizations such Freedomworks, Club for Growth, and ALEC, as well as from wealthy individuals such as Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who funded Newt Gringrich, Bob Perry (funder of the Swift boat ads), URL Pharma President Richard Roberts, and Christy Walton of the Wal-Mart Waltons, has poured into the state to support Governor Walker.  If their dollars can buy the implementation of their neoliberal and austerity agenda in a state where hundreds of thousands marched in the snow, week after week, to strenuously protest that agenda, then they can do it anywhere.  The DNC, Wasserman-Schulz, and Obama clearly understand this.  They know exactly what they’re doing.

Andrew Levine expands on this in an article in Counterpunch today:

One would think this would be a no-brainer for Obama and the DNC.  A Walker defeat would all but insure that Wisconsin, a battleground state, would again go Democratic.  It would demoralize the Republicans nationally, and (re)energize the forces that put Obama in office in 2008.  But there’s the rub.

Obama needs the people who enthused over him four years ago to enthuse over him again; that’s where the votes are.  And so we can count on him trying to reel the base back in.  Therefore expect more of what we got two weeks ago on gay marriage: encouraging words.  Some of those words may even come packaged in a vaguely populist register.

(snip)

But the last thing he or Wasserman Schultz or any other national Democrat wants is for the people to call the shots.  It’s not just that they want to run the goings on from the top down as in 2008.  More than that, they want to make sure that popular mobilizations don’t get out of control – to the point that they threaten the interests of the fraction of the one-percent whose favor Obama and the DNC assiduously court.

Levine goes on to explain that the uprising in Wisconsin, which began as a reaction to the attack on collective bargaining, evolved into a deeper understanding of our economic and political predicament that prefigured the emergence of Occupy:

Although the anti-Walker insurgency was defensive in nature, it developed into a movement that began to name the enemy, the plutocrats behind Walker and his fellow over-reachers.  From there, it is not a great leap to move on to Obama’s plutocrats, the ones who fund him already and the ones he still seeks to enlist.

This, of course, was what the Occupy movement, drawing on the Wisconsin experience, was about.  And this is what Obama and Wasserman Schultz cannot abide, even if it means acting against their own electoral interests.

Levine is on the money here.  The Wisconsin protests were exciting for me for just this reason – the conversations that took place in bars during breaks between marching, with people asking, Who are the Koch brothers again?  What’s ALEC? I was thrilled that people were interested, waking up, asking questions, and making an effort to get informed.

And this is precisely what Obama and the DNC don’t want.  Like the Republicans, their loyalty is to their corporate paymasters, not the people.  So Wasserman-Schulz will make a couple of belated token appearances in Wisconsin.  President Clinton will try to “sort out his schedule” to see whether he can drop by.  The strategy is very Obama-esque – make a pretense at doing something, but ensure it’s mostly ineffectual.  Then privately carry on with the agenda of the 1%.

It remains to be seen whether people power will win over corporate money in Wisconsin next week.  In any event, I expect the outcome to be a portent of things to come.  Just as the protests in Wisconsin helped to inspire Occupy, a victory will infuse the movement and its fellow travelers with a shot of energy.  A defeat, on the other hand, will further embolden our corporate overlords.

The black civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s is one of the most studied and analyzed social movements in American history – with good reason.  After centuries of slavery, followed by another 90 years or so of segregation, economic oppression, and political disenfranchisement, African Americans managed to reverse some of the most egregious denials of their civil rights in just a couple of decades.

By now, the movement has achieved near legendary status.  Who among us doesn’t recall the iconic images of courageous nonviolent protesters facing down the shocking violence that enforced the Southern caste system?  If we are not old enough to have seen the news reports back in the day, we surely saw the images in documentary films shown at school or on television.

For many Americans, the strategies and tactics of the early civil rights era have become the gold standard by which later movements, strategies, and tactics are judged.  However, the successful template of one social movement cannot be applied in assembly line fashion to every social movement that follows.  What worked for the black civil rights movement (in the South – the strategy was less successful in the North) will not work for Occupy.  This is due, in part, to a changed political and economic environment, and in part to differing goals and values of the two movements.

The strategy of the civil rights movement began with a legal agenda pursued by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), resulting in a number of Supreme Court decisions in the 1940s and 1950s affirming the civil rights of African Americans.  Activists then attempted to nonviolently assert those rights, knowing that segregationists would respond with violence.  The ensuing crisis would compel the federal government to enforce rights upheld by the courts.

So, for example, the Supreme Court decision, Brown vs the Board of Education (1954), which prohibited segregated public schools, prepared the way for the integration of Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.  When the nine black students chosen to integrate Central High arrived on the first day of school, they were met by an angry crowd and denied entry by the Alabama National Guard under orders from Governor Orval Faubus.

Ultimately, President Eisenhower sent the 101^st Airborne to protect the students and compel the integration.  “Mob rule cannot be allowed to overrule the decisions of our courts,” said Eisenhower.  That year, the black students rode to school escorted by armed soldiers in jeeps in front of and behind their vehicle.  Once at school, a soldier was assigned to each student and walked the students to their classes.  Nevertheless, the Little Rock Nine, as they were called, were taunted and physically attacked by white students in places like restrooms and gym class, where the soldiers did not follow them.

The Freedom Rides, begun in May of 1961, employed the same strategy.  The goal of the rides on interstate buses, initially organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was to compel the federal government to enforce two Supreme Court decisions (Boynton v. Virginia (1960) and Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946)) that banned segregated interstate travel.  James Farmer, then director of CORE, explains:

We decided the way to do it was to have an inter-racial group ride through the south.  This was not civil disobedience, really, because we would be doing merely what the Supreme Court said we had a right to do…  We felt that we could then count upon the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce federal law.  And that was the rationale for the Freedom Ride  (Eyes on the Prize, 1987).

The riders were met with savage violence in the Deep South.  Outside Anniston, Alabama, the lead bus was firebombed and the exits blocked.  A loud explosion scared off attackers, which allowed the riders to escape the bus.  However, they were then beaten by the mob, twelve were hospitalized, and the bus was destroyed.  The riders were later evacuated from the hospital as staff feared for their safety from the mob outside.

In Birmingham, despite advance information obtained by the FBI that was “quite specific” (Eyes on the Prize, 1987) about the planned attack on riders, both the FBI and the local police stood down.  Freedom Riders were brutally beaten with baseball bats, pipes, and bicycle chains by a mob organized by the Ku Klux Klan.

Remarkably, Attorney General Robert Kennedy called for “restraint” – not from the Klan and white racists, but from the Freedom Riders.   When SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) got involved and it became clear the rides would continue, Kennedy demanded protection for the riders from Alabama governor John Patterson.   If Patterson would not provide it, Kennedy announced, the federal government would intervene.

The governor appeared to relent and provide protection for the bus leaving Birmingham for Montgomery.  But about 40 miles outside of Montgomery, the squad cars and plane disappeared.  A vicious mob attacked the riders as they got off the bus.  Freedom Rider Frederick Leonard recalled attacks with sticks and bricks and shouts to “Kill the niggers.”  Some riders, including James Zwerg, the first off the bus, were severely beaten.  According to Leonard, Zwerg and others were “damaged for life” (Eyes on the Prize, 1987).

In Mississippi, riders were met only by police, who herded them off the buses, through the bus station waiting rooms, out the back door, and into paddy wagons.  Robert Kennedy had made a deal with local officials:  They would see to it that there was no violence and the federal government would not enforce the Supreme Court decision on segregation and interstate travel.   Consequently, the riders were not attacked by mobs, but were left to the mercy of local judges.  They were sentenced to 60 days in a maximum security penitentiary by a judge who literally turned his back on the riders’ lawyer in court and faced the wall.  That summer Robert Kennedy at last petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue regulations banning segregation, and the ICC complied.

Success took longer to achieve where court decisions and extreme violence perpetrated by segregationists against activists could not be depended upon to force federal action.  The Montgomery bus boycott (1955-56) lasted just over a year.  Although the Supreme Court had overturned segregation in interstate travel, southern bus companies circumvented the law instituting local regulations. As black citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., refused to ride the buses until they were desegregated, the NAACP filed suit in federal court.  The bus companies were hit hard by the boycott, but they refused to give in until the Supreme Court heard the case filed by the NAACP and ruled bus segregation unconstitutional.

In Albany, Georgia (1961), the strategy broke down entirely.  Invited by locals to help organize against segregation, SNCC challenged the system in bus stations, libraries, schools, and movie theatres.  But Police Chief Laurie Pritchett had read Dr. King’s book and understood the strategy of drawing out violence and filling up jails.  He prevented violence against the demonstrators and arranged for jails in surrounding areas to accept arrestees.  Meanwhile, the city filed suit in federal court requesting a restraining order to stop the demonstrations.

Stymied, and with hundreds of local activists in jail, black leaders invited Dr. King to help out.  King had other commitments, but spent some time in Albany giving speeches and leading marches.  After almost nine months of action, a federal judge sided with the city, and issued the restraining order.  Coretta Scott King explains the dilemma:

When the federal courts started ruling against us, that created a whole different thing in terms of what strategy do you use now?  Because, up to that point, Martin had been willing to break state laws that were unjust laws.  And our ally was the federal judiciary.  So, if we would take our case to the federal court, and the court ruled against us, what recourse did we have?  (Eyes On the Prize, 1987).

King asked President Kennedy to intervene, but he declined.  Defeated, King left Albany.  (SNCC, however, remained to carry on the fight).

The strategy of some of the most famous actions of the civil rights era depended upon favorable decisions from the federal judiciary and the willingness of the federal government to exert its power – backed by violence, as is the power of all governments – to enforce those decisions.  Note also that the activists’ goal of exposing the violence that enforced the Southern caste system was intended primarily to force a confrontation between the federal and state governments and secondarily to appeal to Northern and international supporters.

The notion, further developed by Gene Sharp, that violence inflicted on nonviolent protesters will eventually win the hearts and minds of individual civil servants, police officers, and others who uphold the system, and that those individuals will then withdraw their cooperation with the system, thereby enabling a victory for the activists, quickly went out the window.  Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (SCLC) explained in a discussion of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott:

We thought we could shame America…  But you can’t shame segregation… Rattlesnakes don’t commit suicide.  Ball teams don’t strike themselves out.  You’ve got to put ‘em out (Eyes on the Prize, 1987).

Occupy cannot employ a strategy similar to that of the civil rights movement for a number of reasons.  To begin with, the focus of the Occupy movement is corporate power – the economic, political, and social inequality it creates, as well as the destruction of the environment it perpetrates.  Supreme Court decisions in recent years increasingly favor corporations over individual citizens.  The most egregious of these is the 2010 Citizens United decision asserting first amendment rights for corporations and thereby banning limits on their campaign contributions.

Indeed, the Supreme Court increasingly appears unwilling to uphold even basic civil rights.  Witness the recent decision allowing police to strip search citizens arrested for any offense, no matter how minor – a practice banned by international human rights treaties.  The Court has also signaled that it may uphold portions of Arizona’s controversial immigration law; in particular, the requirement that police officers check the immigration status of anybody who looks like they might be an illegal immigrant.

With or without favorable court decisions, it’s a pretty safe bet that the Obama administration will not be sending in the 101^st Airborne to protect us from corporate malfeasance anytime soon – or even to protect Occupiers against the violence of local police.  A more likely scenario is that the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and federal law enforcement worked with local officials and law enforcement, suggesting tactics and offering advice that resulted in a semi-coordinated and brutal crackdown on encampments late last year.

Even if the contemporary political climate was favorable to a legislative agenda enforced by the federal government, it is unlikely that Occupy would pursue that strategy.  Appealing for concessions from a higher authority is not consistent with the overlapping values and goals of horizontalism and anarchism that shape the Occupy movement.  Horizontalism, as Marina Sitrin explains, involves a concept of power as “something we create together…  It’s not about asking, or demanding of a government or an institutional power.”  It’s a way of relating to one another, as equals, rather than according to positions in a social hierarchy.

Horizontalism, or horizontalidad, emerged in Argentina, after that country’s 2001 economic crisis.  People gathered in the streets, at first banging pots and pans and generally registering protest.  Eventually, taking their cue from the landless movement in Brazil, which organized around the slogan, Occupy, Resist, Produce, Argentineans “recuperated,” or reclaimed workplaces such as factories, schools, and clinics and collectively managed them.  Similarly, anarchism envisions an ideal society organized voluntarily and cooperatively, with no one having power over another.   The bottom-up organizing principle of Occupy, then, is inconsistent with appeals to a higher power.

In their classic text, Poor People’s Movements (1977), Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argue that opportunities for insurgencies to emerge are not available most of the time, and when they are, those insurgencies are shaped by contemporary social conditions.  In this view, both the civil rights movement and Occupy were and are shaped by the historical moment in which they appeared. I admire the veterans of the civil rights movement and what they were able to achieve.  Contemporary economic and political conditions preclude that strategy for Occupy, but at the same time present different, and in my view, more exciting opportunities, for social change. The possibility of relating to one another in a more egalitarian way, of empowering people rather than seeking relief from a higher power, and of, as Noam Chomsky says, working toward a different way of living “not based on maximizing consumer goods, but on maximizing values that are important for life,” is deeply appealing.  Occupy is the movement for our time – and I am deeply grateful to all of those on the front lines.

Just when I thought my opinion of law enforcement couldn’t get lower.  Rough cut video documenting police offering drugs to Occupiers and street people near Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis.  Basically, the police claim they’re studying how people behave under different illegal drugs.  They solicit people, take them to a warehouse near the airport, give them drugs (apparently with no medical staff around or informed consent), then drop them back off stoned or high.

If they’re doing it here, what are the odds they’re doing it elsewhere?  (Sorry, I don’t know how to embed video, but the links above and below work.)

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vTgN17FZGKE

Chris Hedges is on a mission.  That mission is to save the Occupy movement from anarchists who employ any tactic of which Hedges does not approve.  Apparently he never read, or gave credence to, anthropologist, anarchist, and sometime black bloc participant, David Graeber’s respectful and urgent open letter written in response to Hedges’ by now infamous article “The Cancer in Occupy.”   Despite Graeber’s patient explanation that black bloc is a tactic, not a movement, and that anarchists like himself were centrally involved in organizing the occupation of Zuccotti park, creating the General Assembly process, and originating the 99% slogan, Hedges continues to refer to black bloc as a group of people and to assert that their “cynicism” and “feral” acts of violence will destroy Occupy from within.

Nor does it seem to matter to Hedges that his pronouncements do not reflect the spirit of a movement he claims to value and hopes to “grow.”  That spirit is epitomized by the General Assembly, a remarkably democratic institution, where all voices are allowed a chance to be heard.  Instead, the Harvard educated master of divinity continues to pound the pulpit, fulminating against what he describes as “black bloc anarchists,” and calling for the expulsion from Occupy of those who do not adhere to his extreme version of nonviolence.

In a video posted at Truthdig last week, of a question and answer period following a panel discussion at the April 2^nd Control the Corporation conference, a self-identified anarchist asks Hedges how much he actually knows about Occupy, noting that many of the movement’s processes were authored by anarchists. Hedges responds that he, too, is an anarchist, a Christian anarchist, and that in his article he was not criticizing anarchy, but instead “stupidity.” Consider for a moment how it must feel to have someone not only telling you how the movement you helped to create ought to be run, but also demanding your expulsion from that movement, and calling your tactics “stupid.”  I marveled, watching the video, at the restraint of the anarchists questioning Hedges.  There was shouting at the end that I couldn’t make out, so perhaps they did ultimately respond with insults, but by then, who could blame them?

Central to the dispute between Hedges and the anarchists who helped to found Occupy is the issue of violence versus nonviolence – and how those are defined.  In general terms, anarchism refers to the absence of rulers (hence, the “leaderless” Occupy movement).  The idea is not lawlessness or general chaos, but rather, freedom from hierarchical authority and ruling power enforced by violence.  Anarchism has a long history in the United States and many anarchists were involved in the early labor movement.  Then, as now, anarchists sought to push back against police brutality.  One contemporary method for doing so is the black bloc.

The black bloc tactic originated in Germany in the 1980s in response to police brutality against peaceful protesters.  Participants dress in black and cover their faces to avoid identification and more easily evade police.  American anarchist David Graeber describes the attire as:

a gesture of anonymity, solidarity, and to indicate to others that they are prepared, if the situation calls for it, for militant action. The very nature of the tactic belies the accusation that they are trying to hijack a movement and endanger others. One of the ideas of having a Black Bloc is that everyone who comes to a protest should know where the people likely to engage in militant action are, and thus easily be able to avoid it if that’s what they wish to do.

Graeber also notes that anarchists are not the only activists who participate in black blocs.

Christian anarchism similarly rejects secular rulers, but embraces submission to god and the teachings of Jesus; in particular, the Sermon on the Mount.  For the unchurched among us, these are the teachings that include the verses about the meek inheriting the earth, turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, praying for those who persecute you, and calling peacemakers blessed. Nonviolence and pacifism are central tenets of Christian anarchism.

In the video cited above, Hedges calls for “a rigid adherence to nonviolence,” including “linguistic violence.”  The “violence” that motivated Hedges’ original impassioned denunciation of “black bloc anarchists” was an action in Oakland on January 28^th, during which, Hedges writes, some protesters “thr[ew] rocks, carried homemade shields and rolled barricades.”  When protesters in New York took to the streets in solidarity with their comrades in Oakland, Hedges continues, “a few demonstrators” threw “bottles at police and dump[ed] garbage on the street. They chanted ‘Fuck the police’ and ‘Racist, sexist, anti-gay / NYPD go away.’”

Only in America would we see such hand-wringing and condemnation for such petty and isolated infractions – especially considering the length of the Occupy activity in the fall, the number of groups involved around the country, and the violence inflicted on peaceful protesters by the police.  Hedges invokes Tahrir Square as an example Occupy should follow, yet some Egyptian protesters threw rocks and still considered themselves nonviolent.  On March 29^th, Spain saw a hugely successful general strike, (despite the union leadership), with nearly 80% of workers participating, and concurrent rioting in Barcelona, to protest privatization and austerity measures there.  What happened in Oakland was child’s play in comparison.  Oddly enough, Hedges himself praised Greek rioters in a May 2010 article in Truthdig:

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it. (Emphasis added.)

It is difficult to reconcile Hedges’ celebration of rioting in Greece with his angry screed against isolated incidents of rock and bottle throwing in response to police brutality in the United States.  Hedges says his goal is to “grow the movement” and that the “violence” that occurred in Oakland alienates the mainstream.  In other words, he wants middle-class Americans, including “parents with strollers,” to feel safe and comfortable in joining Occupy.

Who in their right mind would take a child in a stroller to places where police kettle, beat, and pepper spray peaceful protesters?  That would be like taking a black child in a stroller to a lunch counter in Woolworths during the Civil Rights movement.  Hedges himself says the Occupy strategy should follow that of the Civil Rights movement, of drawing out and exposing the violence that enforces an unjust system.  By definition, that’s no place for a toddler – or for anyone expecting a risk-free day at the protest parade.

Then, as now, young people took the brunt of the violence.  Certainly many people of all ages were involved in the Civil Rights movement and are participating in Occupy.  But those at the forefront of the violence, at the lunch counters, on the Freedom rides, and at Occupy actions are primarily young people.

That’s why it’s so difficult to stomach Hedges’ arrogant attitude toward the anarchists and other young people who are the heart and soul of Occupy.  At one point in the video, in response to a question from a young anarchist about diversity of tactics, Hedges reiterates that “nonviolence is the route” and asserts that  “people in groups like Veterans for Peace or Code Pink, they’ve been doing this a really long time and we’d be very smart to listen to the lessons they’ve learned.”

Although Hedges did not speak harshly, in the context of the discussion, the comment reads as a sort of “sit down, shut up, and listen to your elders” type of response.  Adding insult to injury, the moderator followed up by inviting Dorli Rainey, the 84 year old activist who was pepper sprayed in Seattle, onstage to voice probably the most ignorant opinion expressed in the video.  “The anarchists are really not anarchists,” she declared. “They’re hoodlums!”  The crowd of primarily white and middle to senior aged people gave her a standing ovation.

Hedges claims that “black bloc anarchism” is the “portal into the movement” by which agent provocateurs will undermine it; that “the goal is to sever the Occupy movement from the mainstream.”  But black bloc or no black bloc, the movement has been and will be infiltrated – as have all social movements.

Hedges’ intransigent attitude and apparent unwillingness to engage in true dialogue with young activists at the center of the movement, whose views differ with his, constitutes a greater threat to the movement than any government infiltrator.  Dismissing and alienating the brave and spirited young people who created Occupy will not “grow the movement” – though it may allow other entities to co-opt, and ultimately, kill it.

Hedges has written of the so-called “black bloc anarchists” that:

The Black Bloc movement bears the rigidity and dogmatism of all absolutism sects. Its adherents alone possess the truth. They alone understand. They alone arrogate the right, because they are enlightened and we are not, to dismiss and ignore competing points of view as infantile and irrelevant. They hear only their own voices. They heed only their own thoughts. They believe only their own clichés. And this makes them not only deeply intolerant but stupid.

Mr. Hedges, I respectfully suggest that you take a look in the mirror.  Or, at the least, heed Matthew 7:5 and “first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

Related Post:  Reconsidering Violence and Nonviolence in the Age of Occupy

Katherine M Acosta is freelance writer currently based in Madison, Wisconsin.  Contact her at kacosta at undisciplinedphd dot com.  Her blog is UndisciplinedPhD.

Many thanks to Ted Rall for the opportunity to guest post here.  I am so pleased to participate on the blog of someone whose work I admire and appreciate.

Last week Ted Rall predicted that, despite assumptions to the contrary in the “corporate pundit class,” Mitt Romney will be elected president.  Rall observes that Obama is currently leading Romney in the polls by only 4-5 points – not enough to carry him through a long campaign season of pro-Romney attack ads – an aspect of campaigning at which Republicans excel.  Further, Rall asserts that the narrative this time around favors Romney rather than Obama.  People know the economy is getting worse, not better, and historically have been susceptible to the argument that we should run the country like a business.  Finally, Rall points out that Republicans have a huge fundraising advantage and that they are a “loyal bunch.”  For these reasons, his money is on Romney.

It’s risky to disagree with Rall, given his track record of being wrong only once in 17 years.  But what the heck; here goes!  First of all, I suspect the old narratives are not working as well as in the past.  They’re worn and frayed and more and more people, including conservatives, are suspicious of a businessman who inherited much of his wealth and made the rest by buying up companies, breaking them up, and laying off workers.  As for Republican loyalty, the Christian evangelicals, a crucial voting bloc for Republicans, will not be voting in large numbers for a Mormon.  I suspect that many progressives and young people who have soured on Obama, and Christians who can’t bring themselves to vote for a Mormon, will be sitting this one out and confounding the pollsters.

Finally, President Obama proved himself a champion fundraiser last time around and as of February 2012, had accumulated a war chest more than twice as big as Mitt Romney’s (though, as Rall says, once Romney is the nominee his fundraising will kick into high gear.)  And, Obama is the only presidential candidate ever to have won Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year award for his campaign.  His ability to win an election should not be under-estimated.

However, those are not the primary reasons I believe Obama will be re-elected.  The main difference between my analysis and Rall’s is that Rall is focusing primarily on voter behavior, while my primary focus is on the goals of the oligarchy, the financial elite, if you will, that really run this country.  For that class, Obama is the best candidate to implement the austerity agenda that is going to be foisted on us after the election by whoever wins.  (Here I agree with Rall that “the D vs. R horserace is a parlor game with minor ramifications for our daily lives” and that whichever “corporate party” wins, we will continue to get widening economic inequality.)

Economist Michael Hudson pointed out last July, during the phony debt ceiling “crisis”, that just as it took a Republican president, Richard Nixon, to go to communist China, it will take a Democratic president to dismantle the social safety net and impose an austerity agenda.  Hudson wrote:

Wall Street knows that to get sufficient Congressional votes to roll back the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, a Democratic president needs to be in office. A Democratic Congress would block any Republican president trying to make the kind of cuts that Mr. Obama is sponsoring. But Congressional Democratic opposition is paralyzed when President Obama himself – the liberal president par excellence, America’s Tony Blair – acts as cheerleader for cutting back entitlements and other social spending.

It’s the same in many western countries, Hudson observed, from France where the Socialist government supported the “privatization program dictated by European Central Bank,” to  Greece, where the Socialist party led “the fight for privatization and bank bailouts,” to Britain where involvement of the Labour party proved crucial in quelling popular opposition to privatization of the railways.

Hudson accurately anticipated last July that the playing field would be tilted by a clown car of Republican candidates, and that their extremism would allow Obama to fake left and move right.  He wrote:

The Republicans help by refraining from putting forth a credible alternative presidential candidate. The effect is to give Mr. Obama room to move far to the right wing of the political spectrum.

In addition to being the leader of the most effective political party for imposing an austerity agenda, Obama’s personal style is far superior to Romney’s for the task at hand.  Obama can be charming, gives the appearance of sincerity (unlike Romney, who is so obviously phony), and sounds like the reasonable guy in the room.  He is the perfect executive for the oligarchy, adept at pushing through their agenda while pretending to be one of us, even occasionally appropriating some of the language of the Occupy movement when it suits his purpose.  In sum, he is one smooth operator, highly skilled at “cooling out the mark” (that’s you and me).

Sociologist Erving Goffman used the analogy of a confidence game, and the role of “cooling out the mark,” to illustrate how individuals are persuaded to adjust to loss in various social situations. In a confidence game, potential marks are targeted and then convinced that they have a chance to win the game (actually rigged in favor of the confidence men).  Once relieved of their cash, marks are expected to depart, sadder, but wiser.  Some marks, however, are not prepared to accept their losses.  In these cases, an associate of those running the confidence game has the job of “cooling out the mark,” or getting him to accept his loss.

Goffman explains:

After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team-mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home.

A classic example of a social situation where “cooling out the mark” – or persuading an individual to accept a loss of money and/or status – is required, occurs when someone is fired from a job.   In the film Up in the Air, George Clooney plays a character, Ryan Bingham, whose job it is to fly around the country firing employees whose companies are downsizing.  Clooney’s character functions as a “cooler,” by attempting to defuse the anger and hurt of individuals losing their jobs, and reframing the loss as a great opportunity.   Bingham begins every firing by telling the former employee:

Anybody who ever built an empire or changed the world, sat where you are now.  And it’s because they sat there that they were able to do it.

Whoever wins the presidential election will function as the Ryan Bingham for the 99%, charged with giving us the bad news that the money we have paid in all our working lives for Social Security has been borrowed by the Federal government and they’re not going to pay it back, that Medicare will be privatized, and that programs for low-income people such as Medicaid and food stamps will be eliminated because, sadly, “we’re broke.”  (Of course, we’re not  broke – see this film – but that’s a subject for another post.)

Who do you imagine will be better at “cooling out the mark,” President Obama or Mitt Romney?   Who do you think the oligarchy will favor for the job?

Katherine M Acosta is freelance writer currently based in Madison, Wisconsin.  Contact her at kacosta at undisciplinedphd dot com.  Her blog is UndisciplinedPhD.