Partial change of mind (yup) re OWS

Last week I reacted with strong criticism of the very white makeup of the crowd that occupied Wall Street. I am not satisfied yet that those assembled there generally understand how many oppressed Americans are left out of the equation and have no voice in a protest when outreach is done almost exclusively on the Internet. I do wish to express, however, my admiration for anyone who makes personal sacrifice and takes personal risk to put their body in the streets in protest. And I'm seeing developments that lend more credence to, and give me more faith in the potential efficacy of, the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I continue to watch for specific proposals and ideas coming from this group. Sally Kohn expressed the reasons I feel skeptical better than I ever could in her Tuesday article in the American Prospect, "Follow No Leader":

One of the downsides of anarchists is they tend to oppose most forms of organization—including their own. Rather than the usual “we’re all in this together” sense of purposeful community that propels meaningful protests, Occupy Wall Street felt like the political equivalent of a rave; it made recent uprisings across the globe seem like a trivial fad. Standing in its midst, I was reminded of the uppity kids from my college days who dressed up like punks and protested because it seemed cool.

If you want to see the difference between effective organizing and pantomime, compare Occupy Wall Street with the New Bottom Line coalition, a group of community organizations that have put together protests across the country to demand that big banks put back into our economy what they drained from communities. In San Francisco yesterday, groups of homeowners, community members, students, and clergy went to the offices of Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase to demand that their congregations’ money be withdrawn from these financial institutions. It is part of a series of coordinated actions over the next several weeks that not only has a clear message and concrete demands but is organized by accountable community groups that represent millions of Americans—not some well-meaning but isolated and angry kids who met on the Internet.

But now we may be seeing an incipient coalescing between specific groups with specific goals and the OccupyWallStreet movement. Maybe it all did need to start with some form of pure idealism, a seemingly silly gathering of the lesser-oppressed with no plan of action, and then gradually boil down to concrete actions and demands.

In the past week or so there have been instances of groups heading out to protest on behalf of unionized labor. The one that caught my attention this week and had me cheering the effort was the disruption by a crew from OWS of a Sotheby's auction to point out the auction house's disregard for  striking art handlers:



Now this is a meaningful action with a specific target and a clear point being made. Items sold at Sotheby's auction are high-ticket items sometimes running into the millions of dollars. Sotheby's turns a very healthy profit, even in these times. It seems that the rich have lost faith in their own banks and are now investing heavily in objets d'art -- according to L Magazine profits are up 74 percent to $4.8 billion in 2010. Yet, rather than negotiate with their striking workers, they locked them out.

Another development is that the unions are beginning to see Occupy Wall Street as a movement on which they can piggy-back, as a camera-rich location where labor can stage marches and protests. It was great to see the pilots of the merged United Continental Airlines marching by the hundreds downtown (:

When I see OWS find the way to organize and attract into the fold the homeless, and jobless from the outer boroughs, and generally speaking a much more representative cross-section of the ethnicities and classes of people suffering in all kinds of ways under the current cutbacks and austerity measures and mega-topheavy distribution of wealth, I'll eat my last blog post.