I went to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Occupy Time Square action this evening, hoping that this cadre-organized left-wing start-up (it's not a movement, although it has gathered many hangers-on) would really turn to an antiwar message as promised -- they said they were going go protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I saw about...three antiwar signs the entire time I was there (about 4-7 pm) -- which is about how many People of Colour I saw as well.This was a largely white-people's crowd, with the #firstworldproblem of their banks not doing what they wanted them to do.
Most of the people looked like middleaged fading hippies and progressives, remembering the 1960s. Very white, not even Hispanic (the union march with the transit workers and nurses last week had many more black and Hispanic workers). Quite a few in this crowd of protesters were likely Jewish, as it's New York. And you wished they cared more about the antisemitic undertones and groups with hateful messages on hand.
ANTISEMITIC STEREOTYPES
A particularly ugly poster -- Ben Bernanke, in a stereotypical antisemitic cartoon -- the hooked nose, squinting eyes, and horned devil's head with a protest about the greed of Wall Street (he's the head of the Federal Reserve, and I guess this is part of the "banks got bailed out, we got sold out" message -- ugh).
"Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine," says another sign. A couple more Free Palestine type signs among the kaffiyeh-wearing set -- and this comes from Internationational ANSWER, the discredited sectarian anti-war group that I remember back from the first march against the war in Iraq, when I wanted to make sure not to get into step beside their hateful signs, obsessing about Israel.
MARXIST SECTARIANS' REUNION
Like other OWS event, this march might have been the sectarians' old-home week. The Worker's World newspaper-hustlers were out in full force, I haven't seen so many since the 1980s anti-missile marches. There's the PSLWEB.org people who have the largest signs and most aggressive and lustily chanting people. Like the International ANSWER gang, they have this very tightly-wound notion that racism comes from capitalism, i.e. there wouldn't be racism if there were no capitalism. This was the Cuban ideological contribution to the Durban World Conference Against Racism, and I've always found it fundamentally wrong -- it implies that racism can't be dealt with except by violent world revolution, and that socialist or communist countries (like the Soviet Union) can't be racist -- when...of course they were and are.
Many people are out there earnestly telling you that OWS is not Marxist or socialist, that they are beyond parties or labels or sects and just unemployed or unhappy people. Yet these sectarian Marxist groups that show up in force let you know that the socialist cadres are working overtime -- the PSLweb.org people are avowed Marxist-Leninists. So is the International People's League of...something...I have to go look at the folded-up flyer in my pocket.
One thing that's funny about these sects is that some of them clearly were out of the loop and weren't part of the ingroup around Adbusters and Anonymous cadres who got this bureaucratic start-up going (bureaucratic in the sense of a limited group of people who call the shots undemocratically without seeking democratic representation or legitimacy). You can tell because their flyers and newspapers are addressing the OWS people as if they were others, not theirs, outside of their ranks. International ANSWER acts as if they invented it and organized all the events all over the country; some of the others are playing catch-up (notably moveon.org, which was busy telling people to click on stuff while the OWS were actually already sneakers-on-the-ground.)
CHE GUEVARA, CALL YOUR OFFICE
A Che Guevera flag waving relentlessly -- always part of the scenery for OWS.
Some Native Americans -- with signs calling to DECOLONIZE WALL STREET (no sense in having all those whiteys occupy it, they may have concluded, give it back to the red man).
Prosecute CEOs. (Why? For what?) Prosecute the banksters.
Oh, and my favourite: here's a girl with Airways plaid kicks, black spandex tight pants, multi-coloured leg warmers, a short leather jacket, a cotton shirt, pink sunglasses and an i-phone -- her look probably took at least $300 to put together -- those sneakers and warmers aren't cheap. Her sign? "STOP CONSUMERISM!"
WHERE'S THE ANTI-WAR?
But as I said, I was there hunting for the anti-war movement. Where was it? The calls for this march had said they were going to emphasize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here we had 10 years of horrible war in Afghanistan, thousands of our soldiers killed and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians -- in Iraq, we're told 100,000 civilians have been killed, and as I always point out, most of them are massacred by terrorists (and in Afghanistan, most are killed by the Taliban). If the point is that this wouldn't be happening if our troops weren't there (not a point I necessarily find valid, but worth debating, always), then...where's that antiwar movement at?Why isn't there one? Why isn't *this* movement somehow more explicit in its connection between "banksters" and "war"?
International ANSWER, which has remained sectarian, stupid, and not influential all these years precisely because it is an impossibly hoary Marxist-Leninist concoction, has scared away what might be a more mainstream movement, but so have the Democrats' vacuous Support Our Troops pablum, which has displaced what might be a more robust and strenuous antiwar cause.
When I arrived at about 4, there were hundreds already inside the pens created to keep the streets free from being overrun by demonstrators. In the three hours I watched, I truly saw only 3 antiwar signs, after the Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine fellow moved past. These were strategically deployed right in front of the TV vans and camers, and they said STOP THE DRONES (with a papier mache mock-up of a drone plane) and another one that seemed to be saying fund human needs, not war -- but it wasn't clear, because the circle with HUMAN NEEDS and WAR seemed to be equally partitioned in the drawing. A third said SMASH WAR. Well, nothing like violence to fight violence, I always say!
(A note on the drones issue: If you're going to be against an unjust war, you might accept that drones, with their pinpointed targets of specific Al Qaeda operatives and Taliban leaders, might be a better option that sending in massives of troops. Of course they kill civilians, and of course it's not ultimately moral. But if you have an array of bad options, including killing lots of people through massive troops deployments, or killing less troops and less civilians with drones, it seems obvious that drones are more rational.)
There were a lot less signs here today than at the two past events I went to in recent weeks because:
o people sitting in Zuccotti Park all day have time on their hands and can craft signs. In fact, as I noted before, the sign-making department of their ideal city-under-a-sidewalk is among the sacred spaces free of people there -- but the signsters may have been tired out after occupying Chase Bank or didn't make it uptown
o unions have printing shops and people and funds to get standard signs printed up and distributed -- but the unions didn't come to this demonstration in Times Square -- I saw one union hat in the entire bunch of several thousand
o but if you have a lot of middle-aged WBAI listeners and Democracy Now! watchers and those sectarian old-home folks, they tend not to produce any signs at all. It was funny, a few people I saw walking along told each other that they were there to participate, but they "didn't want to do anything too like in your face like carry a sign or get arrested." And those are the kind of people that any movement has to reach and this one won't reach because of their propensity for making trouble deliberately as a Leninist tactic.
The chants were the same as at other affairs:
o All Day, All Week Occupy Wall Street
o Whose Streets, Our Streets
o Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out
o This is What Democracy Looks Like
Well, no, I always fell like adding: this is what a bureaucratic leftwing start-up with ad skills and social media savvy looks like; it's not what democracy looks like.
ANTI-LOBBIESTS
If I had to pick one sign in Times Square that was the most frequent, it would be variations on this theme: "I don't have a voice because I'm not a monied lobby". Of course, marching in highly-visible Time Square with dozens of prime-time mainstream television cameras trained on you could hardly be called being silenced, but there it is, people feel that they exist in lives of quiet desperation as evil lobbyists run off to Washington and buy votes. That they could join any one of a zillion PACS of all flavours, including moveon.org and go and influence politicians like the moneybags seems to evade them.
The idea that these unknown -- but evil -- lobbiests are buying votes and buying politicians is of course an attractive notion to get people's blood boiling, but I see a lot of the left with plenty of money to lobby with, too, from where I sit, so I can't quite get as exercised as the "progressives" about the Koch Brothers. There's a kind of learned helplessness in this throwing up of one's hands and deciding that everything is bought, everything is crooked and therefore...therefore...what? Some graduate student in a socialist committee should run things? That's the part I'm not getting.
ZOMBIES
I saw several dozen young people dressed up in various zombie outfits -- some with really excellent makeup jobs with really realistic rotting skin and drooling -- roamed through the crowd. They were unsettling rather than humorous or Halloween-like. Those pale faces and realistic blood like the joker look that sometimes Obama's face is turned into or other figures that somebody doesn't like.
And...what's the connection between Zombies and Wall Street? Ghost payrolls? Um...killing people with their greed? It wasn't clear.
I went into the second pen and walked around seeing what was what. One of the problems with a "movement" attempting to pretend it doesn't have leaders (of course it has them, they're just behind the scenes) is that...nobody is really organizing the meeting, so that people stand around a lot and do nothing and don't even have any conversations. There are no speakers with bullhorns, even.
So without speakers or leaders, pPeople tend to wave their signs at each other, or any cameras, and it being social-media-saturation-time, they take lots of photos of each other. I helpfully took a picture of four kids, one of whom had a black t-shirt on that said "This is What a Socialist Looks Like". I contemplated saying something to object to socialism, but it was getting too noisy to talk -- that idiotic People's Mike wasn't in force, fortunately, because these weren't the hard-core cadres from Zuccotti, but there was a group of people playing drums and dancing, including the one black man who was present that day -- and nearby was a visiting Indian man with a button.
NO BUTTONS -- BUT LOTS OF GRADUATE THESES!
I realized that what was also really missing from this bunch was buttons. I have been in numerous marches and pickets and demonstrations in my life -- we always had buttons. Where are the buttons? There aren't any.
Instead, there are lots and lots of these signs that looked like graduate theses. It's funny -- they are about one DNA strand away from being the kind of weird nutty signs of crazies in the park or subway about the end of the world and such -- and in fact, there were a few like that in the park when I was there last week.
Although Twitter has supposed to have taught young people how to tweet in 140 spaces, perhaps when they demonstrate, they have to let it all hang out more, as they tend to long signs with lots of sentences. Not only will they talk about repealing Glass-Steagall, something the average person probably has to stop and look up on the Internet, they make 10 point or 20 point programs in increasingly tiny print.
I caught up with one such earnest fellow who looked like a Union Square hipster who had a sign that said something like this:
o Repeal Citizens United
o Corporations are not people
o Federal funding of elections
o Prosecute CEOS
-- and about 6 other things I can't recall now, but seemed to involve nationalizing banks and overthrowing capitalism.
DEBATING OWS: CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE, TOO.
I asked the young man that if he opposed the concept of corporate persons being able to give to political campaigns, if he'd also be for removing the concept of unions and nonprofits as corporate entities, as they are people, too. After all, unions, nonprofits, law-firms -- these are big contributors to the Obama campaign -- and they are all corporate entities, not individuals. Was he really for no entities being able to give campaign funds, and have the entire election federally funded (presumably by some...tax...or...something).
He seemed to think about it for a minute but immediately countered that Citizens United was giving unequal outcomes as it wasn't fair, as corporations were more powerful.
But, I continued, they weren't able to prevail in the last election, arguably before Citizens United went into effect, but they had lots of other ways of bundling and giving as individuals -- and the reality is, unions, the Trial Attorneys of America, and even corporations of course gave to the Democratic Party. I continued to debate him, and some hefty middleaged lefty came up and began telling me to shut up, to "let him talk".
I pointed out that as the young hipster was occuping a park and Times Square and carrying a large sign, it was perfectly fine to challenge him -- he had the louder voice. He kept objecting.
"What, are you saying we can't talk back to the occupiers?" I challenged him.
Put that way, gosh, they sound like those evil people in Palestine and Afghanistan, eh? Occupiers...
A girl came up and started ranting at me that the Republicans had taken over Congress. I replied that Obama was in the White House, the Democrats still had a lot of power, and, well, those Republicans got elected, and which means Obama wasn't persuasive. She was furious at me.
I asked the young man if he had health care -- he did. He acknowledged that he was well off, but that he had to come down and help other people -- he wasn't living in the park but joined the group a week and a half ago, he said.
I pointed out that I hadn't elected the people occupying the square, and that it wasn't democratic in that regard, it was just hijacking power if it actually considered occupying squares, banks, streets, buildings, etc. and if it grew. This was coercive.
A middle-aged Russian woman came up and began huffily telling me that *she* would vote for them and they were all great people. I said that they weren't so hot if they were in fact going to undo elections, and it looked like stop people from even being able to contribute to campaigns, as if they got their way, elections would be federally funded.
I began to speak to her in Russian, and pointed out the similarities between the Bolsheviks, and how they swept to power by closing the parliament and taking over in the streets, and how there were some similarities here.
"Have you forgotten your roots?" I asked her. She seemed not only shocked that I was speaking to her in Russian, but shocked that anyone would challenge what was supposed to be The People's Movement.
There is a fond fantasy -- and I even share it at times -- that "movements" like this will spark conversations, debates, "the re-evaluation of values," as the Communists used to say. That there will be some genuine questioning and searching. But this young man kept repeating the slogans on his sign, and this hefty lefty who had marched up the minute I questioned The People kept telling me to shut up. Eventually, I drifted away -- you can't reason with people who so viscerally and hysterically hate corporations and the rich and Wall Street as some kind of package, that you can't get them to see that here and there, might be good corporations or that the corporations as an entity wasn't necessarily any evil, but in fact a good in society.
POLICE CONFUSION
Now a word on the police. They did not seem to be terribly organized. I'm not sure why, as there was plenty of warning of this event, and they of course had all the police gates set up and plenty of officers on hand. The crowd got large and it became hard to move fairly quickly, but the pen concept didn't work as planned.
For one, there was no portals along the police fences to come in and out of the large pens -- there were three or four of them staged along 43-46th Streets, in areas that are sometimes closed off for pedestrians to mill around in Times Square anyway. So if you hadn't managed to get into the pens in the first rush in the first half hour or so, but you wanted to be in the demonstration and had come with your sign, you were forced to arrange yourself along the police barriers and wave your sign at your fellow sign-wavers.I was there fairly early, before the crowd got to its peak, and I couldn't get into the pen unless I walked about four blocks through a crushing crowd and shouting policemen, and then managed to enter way at the top of the third or fourth pen.
The problem with this pen concept as deployed is that once you also had tourists trying to get through to the Hard Rock Cafe or their Broadway show, and gawkers just trying to take pictures of "this historical moment" plus shoppers at Sephora and the other stores, the sidewalks rapidly filled up, and the police began shouting at everyone to move along.
It would have been a good idea to open up even one police gate per pen and let the sign-wavers into and out of the pen, particularly those coming later, but anyone trying to move the gates were pushed along, and only very skinny young kids were sliding through. So the whole mess pushed and shoved aimlessly.
At one point the police kept sweeping us along with their arms shouting "Go South! Go South" as they pushed us...northwards. Then as people tried to cross the street to get away from the dangerously burgeoning crowd on the sidewalk, one policeman shouted us to "Come this way, come this way" even as parodoxically another shouted to us "No, go that way, go that way" -- ensuring that two streams of people collided crossing the street and made more of a mess.
This is the sort of thing that people invoked at the Brooklyn Bridge, and one can see how it happens -- two officers with different vantage points trying to move crowds and people not listening (and in this particular crowd, there were quite a few foreign tourists who may not have understood English very well). Of course, with Brooklyn Bridge, even if some people didn't hear, and even if police gave contradictory advice, the real story of what was happening is that the cadres had linked arms and shouted "take the bridge, take the bridge" and headed into the street.
There comes a time in these marches -- and I've seen it before -- when you see the people who are the hardliners and extremists trying to whip up the crowd, or the seasoned cadres trying to turn the movement more radical, swing into action. And somehow, the police are not matched to that kind of stealth organizing.
One man began walking through the crowd methodically and intoning like some 1950s news announcer that people all over the globe were marching in revolution, the revolution was here! This caused people to swell up with shouting and cheering.
A group of young women and men appeared like pop-ups with Global Revolution is Here signs and all began chanting, "What do we want? Revolution! When do we want it? Now".
OWS operatives appeared out of the subways with armloads of newspapers -- agitprop is here! -- but it was stale -- Oct. 8's edition, nothing new, alas, probably they hadn't managed to deploy another $20,000 on the print job?
Now several young men were shimmying up streetlight poles and shouting hoarsely "Whose Streets? Our Streets!" over and over again. The graduate-thesis-sign-bearers were starting to get drowned out by these types. But by now, the STOP THE DRONES guy was in place with his very camera-worthy display, and you could almost believe there was an antiwar movement -- unless you had wandered through this crowd for two hours and seen only two other signs and seen most people chanting at best "We are the 99 percent" -- surely one of the most witless cries of a protest group in American history. It was originally intended, no doubt, to cunningly combine woe-is-me self-pity with eat-the-rich class hatred -- yet it results in a crazy monkey-math proposition. Wait, I found myself thinking. Doesn't the 99 percent contain some people exploiting workers, not paying for health insurance, behaving greedily on Wall Street?
Some of the tourists by now were pretty mad at having their way blocked, and were swearing at the demonstrators. Others -- these would be Germans -- would fawningly clap for the demonstrators, even waving to them from the top of tour buses -- and cluck that the poor Americans were trapped in pens like prisons.
Well, no. They're in pens so that they don't block the sidewalks and the streets? And that's ok?
Except, naturally, as in every other occasion by the OWS operatives, they did block the streets -- in part due to that problem I noted where the pens had no ingress and egress.
POLICE ON THE MOVE
I decided to walk all the way around the block away from Times Square to see if I could get closer to the STOP THE DRONES people to see if any of them were saying anything. I saw four police on horseback letting tourists pet the horses who hadn't deployed near the demonstrations yet.
As I stood just across from the Recruitment Center, I saw the police move in their main troops. They brought some officers in riot helmets in vans and began to sort of march them around the square. I saw this tall, willowy black policewoman seem to falter in her step, adjusting her riot helmet, and frown. I looked into the face of this black police officer, whose policing had probably consisted before then of handing out DWI tickets or responding to domestic violence calls, and I wondered if she was really up for this knocking of heads.
Another group of officers in caps but with billy clubs were brought in, and I saw them ordered to march toward the demonstrators, but then they all seemed to straggle and stop as the person who had given the order then summoned them all back. They huddled for a bit, and then set of again, stopping short of the police barriers. Again, that sense of not-quite-ready-for-prime-time, and this, with those idiot marchers crying THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING over every little thing. The officers with the COMMUNITY blue aprons on had ceased telling people to stop congregating along the police barriers, so there was now a big crowd, like at a parade.
I watched as first a big brawny man in a too-short t-shirt not reaching his pants was arrested and perp-walked in front of the cameras, then woman in her 30s with long black hair. It was strange, as there seemed to be orderly crowds inside the pens, a huge empty block just above 42nd Street, and nothing to get arrested *for*. Except...those cadres climbing up on streetlight posts, those people pushing back the police gates -- they were disobeying direct orders of police. And for that they were getting arrested. Understandably.
The International People's League of...something had taken over one of the pens by the Recruitment Center and were hollering and passing out leaflets. Police were shouting to people to move along, go home, and I tried to see if the subway was now going to be "occupied". I had to go meet my daughter for dinner so I walked away -- and I saw a lot of other people had the same idea. It was sort of funny to suddenly see all the little street cafes and sushi bars in the theater district fill up with people with cardboard signs tucked under the arms....
ORDINARY PEOPLE?
Press reports and of course "movement" reports of these events always accentuate that "ordinary people" are coming to them and "even bringing their kids". That's just fake. I saw at the most, out of several thousand people, perhaps 3 or 4 couples with strollers. I saw one family where the lefty parents had handed out signs saying PLAY FAIR to their five-year-old and three-year-old. Honestly, people bringing kids to a situation like this -- where there is crowding and people deliberately provoking to get arrested -- it's just insane.
As I walked away, I heard ambulances coming to the scene -- and it turns out a policeman was hurt.
This picture summed up the scene -- the people playing to the cameras, the news ticker dutifully reporting their "global" movement. How eerie it was, gazing up at those huge icons of capitalism, the ads for beverages and jeans and makeup and smart phones that many in the crowd were wearing or using, an ad for their hated Fox News with a red rubber bouncing ball, bright lights and neon, and then below, everybody taking pictures of everybody else on their phones or cameras.
Is the movement growing? Are there more and more people "taking to the streets"? I don't think so, now having seen three OWS events. They each seem to have only a few thousands -- but lots more gawking and taking pictures. The lack of demands might be annoying to some, but I know that for these cadres, it's just a tactic -- one guy demonstratively in front of the TV vans had a sign saying NO DEMANDS NO SOUND BITES!!! -- although the entire "We are the 99 percent" *is* a sound bite extraordinaire.
Some people have come with their own causes they are trying to get heard above the din of the "We are the 99 percent" mindlessness. There are a few signs against fracking in upstate New York or stopping the use of coal; there was one sign against the misleadingly-dubbed "Let Women Die" bill in Congress.
"We are Not Anonymous!" said one man's sign, but I saw about a half dozen of the Guy Fawkes Anonymous signs -- again, most pushed up on people's heads.
So are these ordinary, everyday people? Oh, I don't think so. I think it is a cadre-run operation that has spread to some cohorts of young people and scenesters but it seems that the rank and file are mainly made up of old DSA members and WBAI listeners and such who want to relive their youth and their hopes for a real movement to appear. I've been in marches with half a million people in New York and in Moscow, so I know what "democracy looks like". It doesn't look like an International ANSWER cadre ranting Marxist-Leninist slogans.
Could this movement in time acquire more "ordinary people"? It's not clear if it has the social strength or self-awareness to jettison or repel the Marxist sectarians, especially as Marxism is embedded in their very 99 percent shtick as a kind of time bomb -- 99 percent, i.e. supposedly including very wealthy, too, and supposedly only asking for taxation, and yet ready to holler for overthrowing capitalism and demanding global revolution at the drop of a Guy Fawkes' mask.
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