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went to the offices of Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase to demand that their congregations’ money be withdrawn from these financial institutions.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.

#TakeWallStreet is a self-contained belljar of fake populism

Let's be honest with ourselves. The crowd in this #TakeWallStreet vid from yesterday's launch of the occupation appears to be 99.9% white folks of middle-class backgrounds who never got off their laptops and phones to get serious about organizing the folks who are suffering most under corporate dominance. 99% white event in NYC where whites are the minority?? (numerically speaking, anyhow)

I admire the moxy of the concept for this movement. But something is clearly wrong. There has obviously been a complete failure to join forces with the grassroots of NYC. This looks like a bunch of out of towners who rode in on MetroNorth. Sorry folks, you do NOT represent "the 99%". If my post puts your nose out of joint, why don't you look in the mirror and check what color it is.

Awesome Woman: Diane Wilson

Today's Awesome Woman is Diane Wilson, a Texas shrimper who has been a long-time, hard-fightin' radical activist against industrial polluters, the war machine, and just about any other Goliath she puts in the sights of her stinging slingshot.

In a July interview on Truthout by Joni Praded, soon after the release of her latest book, "Diary of an Eco-Outlaw: An Unreasonable Woman Breaks the Law for Mother Earth," Wilson explains how her first motivation to action -- which to date has resulted in more than 50 civil-disobedience arrests -- became her nonstop pursuit ever since:

I read an Associated Press story about my county being number one toxic polluter in the nation in l989. That information was too horrendous for me to ignore, so I simply called a meeting, and it snowballed for the next 20 years.

That snowball is made up of some admirably outrageous actions such as sinking her own boat to cover a Formosa Plastics drainpipe in order to block its discharge into her bay. This motivated what she terms "the apathetic fishermen" and the outcome was winning zero-discharge agreements from two industrial giants, Formosa and Alcoa. (In 2002, though, Formosa was still listed in the 90th percentile of the worst environmental polluters by Scorecard, a pollution information site.)

In another incident, Wilson attempted to make a citizen's arrest of Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide which had caused 20,000 deaths in the Bhopal disaster.

Diane Wilson's mission broadened from fighting major polluters and industrial criminality to human rights and peace activisism. In the interview when asked to name her "most surprising" action, she cites her visit to Iraq in 2003 with "an early version of CodePink," where "we were really getting tired of a particular American TV station broadcasting cheerful words for invasion. So, we decided to take over the TV station. And we did. I was amazed that we did the action, and even more amazed that we succeeded." She has also stood outside nude in front of the Houston office of BP after the Deepwater Horizon spill occurred.

Each encounter with unjust and evil systems seems to only strengthen Wilson's resolve and broaden her platform:

... being jailed all those times and for such lengths of time in some of the worst jails in the country, didn't depress me - it gave me ideas on how to fight it and change the way things are done. That's how Texas Jail Project got started. It wouldn't have happened unless I had been jailed. For instance, now, instead of just listening to horrendous stories of women in jail going into labor while shackled and tied to their beds, we try to do something about it. During the last Texas legislative session, Texas Jail Project helped make shackling of all pregnant women inmates, whether in prison or county jail, illegal. So, I believe things happen for a reason.

(Photo by ACMEBoston / Flickr )

Same goods, for less

“Our quality numbers have been very good,” Mr. Walsh said. “And our data doesn’t show any differences per shift or per workstation.”

That's the sound of Detroit bragging about its two-tier wage system, in which new workers do the same work, at the same productivity rate, as longer-term workers earning double their salaries.

Awesome Woman: Laura Moulton

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Laura Moulton, artist, novelist, mother of two young children, and outdoor librarian for the homeless in an effort she founded called Street Books, "a bicycle-powered mobile library for people living outside".

Since June, twice a week Moulton gets on her bike and pedals a wagon full of books to street corners in her city of Portland, Oregon. She loans the books to homeless persons who cannot get a library card for lack of an address. She stores donated paperbacks in her basement and glues the familiar school library due-date pocket inside each one. However, there are no due dates in the outside library -- her customers simply return the book when they are done reading.

A recent Christian Science Monitor article about Moulton reports that "her patrons show a high-level of accountability in returning books, which contradicts some assumptions about homeless people." Also defying stereotypes, she says, is the range of reading material her patrons are interested in. She holds much respect for the "people living outside" and enjoys discussing books and other topics with them:

“If someone can just have a conversation … then I think so much of the other stuff goes away,” Moulton suggests. The “other stuff,” she says, includes perceptions, stereotypes, and judgments.

 Moulton also photographs the people who borrow books and maintains a blog with the images and stories. The blog gives her homeless clientele faces and names, and most often shows them with the books they have selected to read.

Moulton received a grant for her idea from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Now that the grant period has ended, she plans to continue her effort and to experiment with models of sustainability. For example, recently a patron of Street Books became a guest librarian.

I chose Laura Moulton for today's AWOD not because she is famous. Not because she is a head of state. Not because she has given her life completely over to some cause. I chose her because her project proves that in the microcosm of a community, in the course of a regular workaday life, we can find manageable ways to be agents of cheer, humanity and change. The scope of Moulton's project might be local, but her impact runs deep on the men and women she loans books to, and on the attitudes towards the homeless of the people who hear about her work or follow the Street Books blog.

Do you have books you'd like to unload? Also, any old reading glasses? Put them in your car or bag and open your eyes for someone living on the street who might like them. And maybe stop for a few minutes to say Hello, ask How are you doing today? and maybe even get to hear a bit of the person's story. Don't have books to give? Just give a smile and have a conversation then! It's free and takes 5 minutes!

Here's a really touching video about Street Books, guaranteed to dispel any stereotypes you may be subject to regarding the intelligence and spirit of homeless persons: