We Are Not the Same People Any More: After One Year of Occupy Wall Street, Chicago Teachers Give Lessons in Justice and Unions are Born in New York

The Chicago teachers have returned to work with renewed confidence in their fight against Rahm Emanuel’s attempt to force restructuring on the Chicago Public Schools. They have achieved significant concessions from management, and have done so against the full weight of ideological marginalization by the media, who blamed teachers for the stand-off that left 350,000 students out of school.

The struggle is by no means over. The big elephant in the room, as teachers’ leader Karen Lewis said, is the school board’s strategy of closing 200 public schools while planning to open 60 new charter schools in the next few years.

The decision to strike was an expression of teachers’ anger at the board’s arrogant top-down management tactics, and the delay in returning to work after the agreement was negotiated indicates teachers’ fear of school closures and their distrust of the board.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported: “At Bond Elementary, which is on academic probation, teachers on the picket line Monday wanted more time to think about what they should recommend to delegate Jacqueline Ward. … Teachers wanted to know more about what job protections union leaders had secured for laid-off teachers, and how the new teacher evaluation system would work … ‘If evaluations determine your livelihood, that’s important,’ Ward said. ‘Just treat it fairly. How are we going to ensure this is the way it’s going to be? [Teachers] have zero trust in [Mayor] Rahm Emanuel and the Board of Education’.”

Significantly, the threat of unemployment, which has been used by neoliberals to discipline and intimidate the workforce, is now contributing to a determination to safeguard jobs against layoffs and to a spirit of solidarity in teachers’ fight for  better classroom conditions.

The course of the strike is very instructive. First of all, it was a grassroots struggle against school closures that elected its own leadership as head of the union. Teachers felt themselves to be and were an integral part of the communities they taught in, so they began by building support from the general public. They tapped into communities already engaged in struggles on evictions and labor abuses, so the strike is part of that same struggle.

Low-paid warehouse workers at Wal-Mart’s largest distribution center in Chicago went on strike at the same time as the teachers to protest illegal retaliation and other labor abuses, just days after workers at the California warehouse that supplies Wal-Mart stores walked off the job to protest illegal retaliation and poor working conditions.

In a discussion about the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, journalist Laura Gottesdiener told Democracy Now: “We’re seeing that [direct action] especially in Chicago and especially because of the teachers’ strike in Chicago. I think that’s one of these hotbeds of direct action. We’re seeing incredible work by the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and other sorts of homeless communities saying, We don’t recognize the bank’s ownership of these abandoned—or these vacant houses. … So they’re actually going in, rehabbing these houses that are destroying their neighborhoods and taking them over.”

In the same discussion, Amy Goodman outlined a case study of how the Occupy movement has spread into communities and taken root. “For the past two years, residents of the heavily immigrant neighborhood of Sunset Park in Brooklyn have refused to pay rent on their apartments in three buildings where the same landlord has refused to ensure safe living conditions. …This summer, members of Occupy Sunset Park got word of the rent strike when they saw banners that residents hung on the outside of their buildings. They contacted the residents, have since tried to assist them as they resolve many of the concerns themselves. Now there’s even talk of the tenants taking ownership of their buildings by forming a tenants’ associations or an affordable housing corporation.”

Dennis Flores, an activist with Occupy Sunset Park, explained how after the start of Occupy Wall Street a small group got together and decided that this movement had to be brought into their community. “Our issues that we’ve been dealing with, whether it’s gentrification, low-income housing, police brutality, stop and frisk, we needed that to be part of this conversation of the Occupy movement.” They met up with tenant association organizer Sara Lopez, who said: “When Occupy Sunset Park knocked on our building, because we knocked on so many elected people to help us, and we didn’t get the help, what we expect from them—when they knocked on our door to answer what we need, they really helped us. … I feel more stronger, because I know I have them to push us, to help us to do a lot of things. So this Occupy, I’m glad they’re still around.”

Those who have written off the movement have confused the political form of the movement with the social basis of its support in opposition to debt, low wages and homelessness. That form, the tactic of occupation, was systematically destroyed by the Obama administration to prevent a catalyst for protest from growing. There is still much sympathy with the movement – whose members are mostly young and educated – among the general population.

But there is also a clear groundswell of resistance to exploitation among low-paid workers in America – the neoliberal project of reducing wages and living standards is now encountering a limit to how far it can squeeze labor-power out of workers before they rebel.

For example, in New York City, for the first time ever, workers at a car wash have voted to join a union. There are nearly 200 car washes in the city employing at least 1,600 workers to clean up thousands of cars and taxis by hand. According to the New York Times, “many of the workers are illegal immigrants hesitant or unwilling to join a public campaign, for fear that it might cost them their jobs or somehow expose them to a greater possibility of deportation.” But they were no longer willing to being paid less than minimum wage with no overtime payments.

Their victory was achieved with the help of advocacy groups Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change. In a similar way, deli workers at the Hot & Crusty bagel café on Manhattan’s Upper East Side won official recognition for a brand-new, independent union. In These Times reported: “This virtually unprecedented victory in a hard-to-organize sector was accomplished in just a few months, on a shoestring budget. Along with leadership training from the innovative non-profit Laundry Workers’ Center, the campaign received crucial support from the Immigrant Worker Justice working group (IWJ) of Occupy Wall Street.”

After a series of actions targeting owner Mark Samson’s private equity firm, he has since sold the store to investors prepared to recognize the union. Jacobin magazine tells more of the role Occupy was able to play: “A campaign to organize immigrant restaurant workers – some of whom are undocumented – might have had a profoundly different outcome without the Occupy movement. … Fed up with long hours, abuse and sub-minimum wages, some of the workers eventually ended up at Zucotti Park after starting a free eight week organizing crash course at the Laundry Workers Center (another grassroots institution about to celebrate its first birthday). Some of the employees then joined the Immigrant Worker Justice Working Group, an OWS committee formed to address the lack of immigrant voices in Occupy. Through that milieu, the workers complemented their grassroots campaign by plugging in to New York’s mushrooming activist network.”

The arrests of protesters and photojournalists on Occupy Wall Street’s first anniversary on September 17 signify only the state’s sensitivity to the symbolic power of its actions targeting the banks. Despite the dismantling of the highly-visible occupations, the movement has become a catalyst for alliances between labor, political and community organizations around concrete, local issues.

For workers like Mahoma López , a Hot & Crusty deli worker, Occupy Wall Street has become a social network that has helped transform his political consciousness. “We’re not the same people we used to be,” he says of himself and his co-workers. “Our eyes aren’t closed anymore.”

Lesson from Wisconsin: Time to Defend Common Wealth against Shared Misery

The American left is beating itself up over the fact that Walker won in Wisconsin. They blame big money, dirty tricks, everything except dealing with the fact that a substantial number of union members voted against their class and for the party of the rich.

Why did this happen?  You can’t simply say that people were fooled by Republican propaganda. That’s insulting. They voted for Walker because they believed in him. As Jeffrey Sommers pointed out in Counterpunch, “Walker’s constituency desperately needs a hero. Who are they? Overwhelmingly, they were the white working classes with no college education. By and large they have lost these benefits.  They may have not seen raises in years.  The public sector is an inviting target for them. It’s one of the few places where the working and middle class still receive decent benefits (medical, retirement, etc.).   This makes them suspect to a population that has largely lost these. … In short, Walker has given voice to the working and middle classes so much hurt by the Reagan Revolution.”

And this sentiment is not confined to Wisconsin: San Diego and San Jose residents voted overwhelmingly for a Democratic initiative to cut the pensions of city workers.  Karen McDonough, who has worked for the city of San Jose for two decades, told the Washington Post she tried to change voters’ minds by telling them she is a hardworking senior employee who had gone years without a pay raise. “The response I got the most was ‘I don’t get a pension. Why should you?’ ” she said.

Andy Kroll concludes in TomDispatch that it was wrong to have campaigned for the recall in the first place: “The movement’s mistake: letting itself be channeled solely into traditional politics, into the usual box of uninspired candidates and the usual line-up of debates, primaries, and general elections. … The takeaway from Walker’s decisive win on Tuesday is not that Wisconsin’s new populist movement is dead. It’s that such a movement does not fit comfortably into the present political/ electoral system.”

But this analysis also avoids the necessity of an ideological struggle against the Republican narrative. By all accounts the majority of Wisconsinites who protested in 2011 were not thinking in terms of continuous mass action. They genuinely supported the Democratic party as what they assumed would be a vehicle to defend themselves, and the movement inspired and was given legitimacy by the 14 Democratic senators who held up the legislative process.  The failure of the recall was a learning experience for the whole movement.

The real lesson of Wisconsin is that the Democrats and unions were unable to counter the Republican strategy of pitting sectors of the middle class against each other: privately employed workers against workers who work for the state. The Republicans’ potent ideological theme is that the super-rich have wealth because of their own individual efforts, creating the illusion of equal opportunity and a level playing field, and if you are not wealthy, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough. Objectifying the “state” as a dead weight on private efforts is part of this narrative, and helps to justify pushing the costs of capital reproduction onto the public. State workers are then a highly-convenient political target.

The national Democratic leadership is thoroughly intimidated by the right’s neoliberal rhetoric and cannot bring themselves to defend the positive role of government in enabling a collective solution to communal problems. Washington Post commentator E.J. Dionne is baffled by the Democrats’ reluctance to counter conservative anti-government ideas. “Both Clay and Lincoln battled those who used states’ rights slogans to crimp federal authority and who tried to use the Constitution to handcuff anyone who would use the federal government creatively. Both read the Constitution’s commerce clause as Franklin Roosevelt and progressives who followed him did, as permitting federal action to serve the common good. A belief in government’s constructive capacities is not some recent ultra-liberal invention.”

The extent to which neoliberal anti-government thinking has penetrated government itself is shown by the way states and localities suffering from budget crises are imposing cuts and layoffs rather than challenge the financial industry, which, in many cases, ensnared municipalities in extremely bad deals.

To take one egregious example: Wall Street banks persuaded many transit and other municipal authorities to issue bonds and simultaneously enter into complex interest-rate swaps in the heady days before 2008. When interest rates then dropped through the floor, bond-issuers found themselves trapped by hefty termination fees when they sought to refinance. New York Times finance writer Gretchen Morgenson reports that New York State alone  “has paid $243 million in recent years to extricate itself from swaps-related debt. That money went straight from taxpayers’ pockets to Wall Street.”

A group that supports public transit recently published a report that they had found 1,100 swaps deals at more than 100 government agencies that are costing taxpayers $2.5 billion a year. Transit agencies have cut services and increased fares to pay for these loans. Morgensen explains: “Money that might go toward services is going to swaps instead. … Everybody else — workers, riders, taxpayers — makes concessions. Banks give up nothing. … The trillion-dollar question is why debt issuers don’t push the banks to cut or reduce these exit fees.”

Government authorities that raise a lot of money in the debt markets have considerable leverage, given how much they pay Wall Street banks to underwrite their debt. If the financial markets were truly free, agencies could threaten not to place new bonds with a bank unless it agreed to renegotiate on the swaps. But when Morgensen asked Patrick McCoy, the New York transit authority finance director, why the agency doesn’t use its leverage to lower the fees, he replied: “It’s working. Why would I want to incur the costs, aggravation and bad faith that goes with it to suggest that we want out?”

Politicians and bureaucrats have internalized the banks’ own myths about their power to enforce contracts, when the reality is that they depend on public institutions to do it for them. The deputy director of the Fiscal Policy Institute in New York, James Parrott, complained, “Government officials need to acknowledge that they made a mistake when they signed up for these ill-conceived, high-risk financial bets. But that mistake is woefully compounded when they then impose austerity rather than stand up to the banks.”

Combatting neoliberal ideology within the labor movement and the government is a number one priority for activists. It means continuing the dialog that the Occupy movement started, together with rebuilding the civic infrastructure of communities and reasserting the concept of the public good in finding common solutions to the provision of health care, education and social security for all.

Resistance Resurges in New York Despite Police Batons: We Are Still Occupying Wall Street

The spring resurgence of Occupy protests shows that despite continuing police suppression, the impulse to defy the authority of the corrupted political and financial system is stronger than ever. As part of a worldwide May Day mobilization, large demonstrations were organized in cities across America, including Chicago, Denver, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York and Boston.

The May Day “general strike” action also revealed how the inclusiveness and carnivalesque forms of protest facilitated by Occupy Wall Street has enabled it to act as a focus and connection for unions, community groups, immigrant rights groups and the student movement. During the winter months occupiers were busy building alliances with these groups.

In New York, an estimated 30,000 people filled Lower Manhattan in the late afternoon, converging on Union Square to join a city-permitted march to Wall Street. Commenting in the Guardian, Janet Byrne noted the diversity of the marchers’ affiliations: “Among the groups chanting ‘We are the 99%’ were the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns, construction worker union LIUNA Local 78, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, and the AFL-CIO.”

Earlier in the day, protesters had picketed banks, corporate headquarters, and other locations throughout Manhattan. Democracy Now interviewed Jackie DiSalvo, a liaison to the coalition that Occupy Wall Street formed with labor and immigrant organizations for the May Day events. She explained: “We organize what we’re calling the ‘99 Pickets’ campaign, and there are many going on today. In fact, right now, the National Association of Broadcast and Entertainment Technicians are picketing ABC-Disney. And they were going to pick up some supporters at—from Occupy at Bryant Square and march up to 67th Street. There’s—this morning, the New York Times reporters were out in front of the New York Times. The Newspaper Guild can’t get a contract. There are just—we have over 40 labor pickets, and then a lot of pickets that are going to the 1 percent, the banks, mainly.”

Sarah Jaffe of Alternet covered the UAW picket at the New York Times building, where they were supporting lawyers and legal support staff of Legal Services NYC who face cuts to their healthcare benefits and to the free legal aid they provide to low-income New Yorkers. “As we stood talking, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra and a small march rolled in, playing ‘Which Side Are You On?’ and thrilling the workers, who didn’t seem terribly connected at first to the larger May Day celebrations. The picket line turned into a dance party, and the band played along with chants of ‘Hey hey rich boy, my job is not your toy’ and ‘We’re legal services for the poor, fired up won’t take no more’.”

Robert Sietsema of the Village Voice described a protest outside St. Vincent’s hospital in Greenwich Village: “There’s about 60 demonstrators walking around in a circle, some of them costumed with bloody bandages. Among them are doctors and nurses who used to work at St. Vincent’s before it was closed last year. The average age of the demonstrators is probably 60, with several walking with difficulty with canes and walkers. Clearly, the closing of the hospital has had a devastating impact on many lives.”

The mainstream media ignored this aspect of the day’s protests in favor of reporting the more than 80 arrests in Manhattan. The Guardian reported that clashes with police began when protesters attempted to break out of Bryant Park where they had been kettled: “During one such attempt, at around 1pm, demonstrators, most clad in black and many with their faces covered, faced off against scores of NYPD officers. Shortly after 1pm, the demonstrators attempted to begin their march amid chants of ‘a-anti, anti-capitalista’. Moments after they stepped off the sidewalk, attempting to cross an intersection, police moved in to stop them. A confrontation ensued and one young man was pulled to the ground by his hair. With his face pressed against a sewer grate the man was handcuffed and arrested along with several others.

“The ruccus at the front of the park created an opportunity for others to slip out through the rear, where demonstrators quickly moved into the roadway. The march tore through China Town and Soho, with demonstrators darting down streets and sprinting to stay ahead of police scooters in pursuit. As he watched the rowdy march pass, Jason Rose cheered in support. ‘I think they’re doing the right thing,’ Rose said. Seth Carter, another bystander, agreed: ‘I think this is the best thing’.”

The effectiveness of black bloc tactics seemed to vary across the country; in New York unpermitted “wildcat” demonstrations attracted support from onlookers, but also led to attacks on the press. According to the Gothamist, some protesters were seen knocking photographers’ cameras out of their hands, in one instance shooting black paint at a lens. C.S. Muncy of the Village Voice reported: “Interaction between the black bloc and the press, it’s pretty ugly. I had a couple grab at my lens.”

Protesters started to rally at Union Square in mid-afternoon. According to Alternet blogger Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: “One of the only spots with a city permit, [Union] Square was the destination for the day’s live music, but it also served as a safe space for protesters unwilling or unable to risk arrest. As such, the undocumented faction came out in droves, and it became a symbolic place where unions and Occupy joined forces with immigrants’ rights movements. People carried signs reading, ‘Amnesty Para Todos,’ ‘Trabajando y Educación Para Todos,’ ‘Stop the Raids’ and, most crucially, ‘No a la guerra, ni a la militarización de la frontera’. … the most salient point of the rally was made by a speaker later in the day, who reminded us that the Supreme Court is on the cusp of legalizing Arizona’s immigration law, SB 1070, and that it was up to us to stand against similar racist laws like it.”

At 6 p.m., 30 minutes after the official start of the march, thousands were still trapped by police barricades at Union Square.  OWS blogged: “Broadway is packed, stretching for blocks for the permitted march. Some people report being stuck in the same place for 45+ minutes. Chants: ‘Let us march!’ Large union presence. Chants at front: ‘Obama, escucha! Estamos en la lucha!’ ‘One struggle, one fight! Workers of the world, unite!’” (Watch video here)

When the marchers finally reached the financial district they found police had blocked off Wall Street, so many continued to the Veterans Vietnam Memorial Plaza in lower Manhattan. According to the Guardian: “Scores of New York City police officers with riot gear moved in to enforce a 10pm curfew at the memorial. Roughly a dozen clergy members and veterans – some of them having served in Vietnam – locked arms and attempted to block the eviction. They were arrested and the NYPD proceeded to clear all remaining demonstrators from the area.”

However, students planned to stage a continuation of the May Day action at CUNY’s Brooklyn College Campus starting May 2 with teach-ins, political theater, food, music, and events to show that “Another University is Possible.”

Occupy Wall Street protests reveal divisions between NYPD and Feds

Ever since their attempt to re-occupy Zuccotti Park in March was prevented by police arrests, Occupy Wall Street protesters have been engaged in a series of skirmishes with the NYPD over exercising their First Amendment rights.

Police officials want to prevent occupiers from having a visible base in the city because any resurgence of the movement will interfere with a political strategy to segregate Wall Streeters from the victims of the recession and from the poverty of inner-city communities. There are tensions, however, between the brute-force approach of the NYPD and the more sophisticated containment tactics of federal agencies.

After being evicted a second time from Zuccotti Park, protesters moved to Union Square in midtown Manhattan, but were not allowed tents or anything signifying permanence, and police began to enforce a midnight park closing rule. Occupiers ingeneously found a legal loophole: a 2000 New York court decision that allows for sleeping on the sidewalk as a form of symbolic political protest. They started a novel protest tactic on April 10 by sleeping on Wall Street across from the New York Stock Exchange, which enabled them to engage with Wall Streeters and the public and defend themselves from police with the legal decision.

However, on Monday morning, April16, the NYPD began arresting occupiers again, disregarding the judiciary. It’s not clear why the police started to make these illegal arrests after leaving the protesters alone for a week, but New York Magazine writer Joe Coscarelli thinks that the decision came from city authorities: “Controlling the narrative seems important for the city in the wake of last fall’s turbulent clearing of Zuccotti Park … For the city, fighting a few demonstrators in court might be preferable to facing growing numbers of them on the streets again.”

Protesters retreated to the nearby steps of Federal Hall, a National Park site which is under the jurisdiction of the federal government and not the NYPD. The Gothamist reported: “For the most part, U.S. Park Police tolerated their presence, provided they didn’t violate a ‘no sleeping or camping’ rule. But as day turned to night, the NYPD continued to make arrests, frequently singling out protesters who seemingly did nothing wrong, and in some cases violently detaining them. … Around 9:40 p.m., police began arresting protesters in front of Federal Hall, some for disorderly conduct, others for unreasonable noise. One woman who was crying was singled out for unreasonable noise.”

A Village Voice reporter noted: “ ‘White-shirt’ officers pointed out protesters they wanted arrested — in many cases for ‘excessive noise’ violations — and sent less senior officers to arrest them. In at least one instance, city police made an arrest on federal property, at the top of the stairs.”

The NYPD then placed barricades across the steps to create a ‘protest’ and ‘non-protest’ side. According to the Gothamist, “protesters were told they could not ‘sleep’ or ‘camp’ on the stairs, and [demonstrator Jo] Robin says she was told last night that if she fell asleep, Parks Police would ‘remove, but not arrest me’.”

By Friday, April 20, the situation had an unexpected twist: the U.S. Park Police release a six-page set of regulations for protesters on federal property, which made the barricaded protest area an official “First Amendment Rights” zone, but imposed onerous restrictions on the occupiers.  According to the Gothamist: “if there are more than 25 protesters on the steps, they require a permit, or face arrest. So the protesters are now working it like a nightclub at capacity, by having one protester enter the ‘Free Speech Cage’ whenever one exits.” The limits placed on the occupiers’ free speech rights put the federal authorities within the letter but against the spirit of the First Amendment.

Charlie Grapski gives a blow-by-blow account of Friday’s events:  “With the NYPD in dark blue, its senior officers in their notorious ‘White Shirts’, lined up and gathered at the center of the street, others in either the brown of Park Rangers or the light blue of Federal Park Police stationed themselves around the perimeter of the ‘Free Speech Zone.’   The center of American capitalism took on an appearance more like that of a demilitarized zone precariously situated between two hostile nations.

“Eventually, as could also have been predicted from the start, individual police officers took umbrage with those who did not as fully or quickly comply with their orders to disperse as they wished.  …  Tensions remained high throughout the stand-off, several times NYPD officers appeared ready to take action to evict or arrest those constituting the Occupy 25 of the moment stationed and standing their ground on the steps.

“Each time the NYPD appeared ready to move in, however, a ranking member of the Park Police would walk up to the gathered officers apparently engaged in the planning with a piece of paper in his hand.   The paper’s function was to communicate to the members of the City’s force that the Occupiers in fact had a right to be there, guaranteed by the First Amendment, recognized by the Park Service, and that the Federal officials were there to protect that right.”

The NYPD have committed a great deal of resources to monitoring OWS protesters – $17 million in overtime alone since the protests began. Elected officials are objecting to these large sums being committed without any legislative input, and are resisting police commissioner Kelly’s proposals for large increases in the department’s budget. The NY Metro reported Park Slope councilman Brad Lander saying: “Commissioner Kelly asks us to trust him that NYPD officers are following the law, but he either could not or would not tell us what the NYPD is spending our money on. This is at a time when resources for patrol officers, after-school programs, and summer jobs have all been decreased dramatically.”

Large federal grants have enabled the NYPD to achieve a relative independence from the scrutiny of elected officials; the department used $24.3 million in federal homeland security grants to pay overtime in 2011. According to AOL Government ”some believe the NYPD has made a deliberate effort to avoid federal oversight by not participating in the Department of Homeland Security’s national Fusion Center effort, which would open the department’s surveillance programs to greater scrutiny and legal challenges.”

They also maintain a consistent ideological campaign to retain legitimacy, according to John Whitehead using “crackdowns and scare tactics that keep New Yorkers in a state of compliance. A 60 Minutes report describes the police state atmosphere: ‘At random, 100 police cars will swarm part of town just to make a scene. It happens with complete unpredictability. Cops signal subway trains to stop to be searched. And sometimes they hold the trains until they’ve eyeballed every passenger’.”

Middle-aged White Guys Pick Fights with Occupy Wall Street

After a day of marches through lower Manhattan last Saturday to celebrate the six-month anniversary of the Occupy movement, protesters reoccupied Zuccotti Park. A violent intervention by the NYPD, however, resulted in large numbers of brutal arrests. Occupiers have since moved to Union Square to maintain the right to assemble and voice dissent in public spaces.

According to the Village Voice, “Where many of Occupy Wall Street’s recent actions have consisted of no more than a couple hundred protesters at most, this march was unquestionably larger. The protesters were clearly enjoying their greater numbers, and some took the opportunity to taunt police, hurling insults and flipping the bird at officers attempting to herd the march. For their part, police were also more aggressive than in recent Occupy actions, repeatedly shoving protesters who got in their way. When the march returned to the square, there were further standoffs, as police arrested half a dozen protesters, provoking an angry response from the occupiers. Three times, senior ‘white-shirt’ officers paraded in a column through the center of the park without discernible purpose, agitating protesters and escalating the level of tension in the park.”

The violence seems to have been deliberately instigated by senior officers, frustrated by the protesters’ defiance of police control. The New York Times reports: “The crowd was small but spirited and marched past the bronze sculpture of a bull at Bowling Green, which had served as a mustering spot for the first march. … And, as they did that day, the marchers made sudden turns that appeared to surprise the police and walked along Wall Street for at least a brief time. … members of the group ignored orders from the police to remain on sidewalks and flowed onto parts of Exchange Place and Beaver Street. Later, on Broad Street, a deputy inspector turned to a sergeant and said, ‘We got to start collaring some’.” Allison Kilkenny identified one individual, 1st Precinct Commanding Officer Edward Winski, acting unnecessarily aggressively toward protesters: “shoving them out of his way even as they were trying to move back onto the sidewalk, for example,” who was involved in starting the first major scuffle between police and protesters.

Police told a large group of protesters they could not stand on the sidewalk on a stretch of Liberty Street, pushing them against a wall that borders the park, the Times report continues. “Then the police began grabbing and arresting people, taking into custody at least half a dozen. Officers surged into the crowd, dragging protesters toward the street, as people yelled objections. ‘They were grabbing people randomly,’ Zachary Kamel said, adding that his girlfriend, Lauren DiGoia, had been arrested while dancing on the sidewalk. One sergeant grabbed a woman wearing a green shirt by the bottom of her throat and shoved her head against the hood of a car. A moment later, another officer approached and forcefully pressed her head against the car before placing her into the back of a police truck.”

Protesters returned to the park by 7 p.m. for a General Assembly, where the crowd started to grow. The Occupied Wall Street Journal describes the event: “As the sun went down, hundreds of additional people marched to the park from the nearby Left Forum, including Michael Moore, tipping the crowd well over the 1,000-mark. At 11 p.m., a clique of French bagpipe players dropped by the park after participating in a St. Patrick’s Day parade earlier in the day and began serenading the assembly. This was apparently too much revelry for the NYPD: within 10 minutes, the bagpipers had been arrested. At this, the crowd grew understandably tense. Police had already been massing on Broadway in preparation for yet another raid – this one clearly illegal, as a court order allowed occupiers back into Liberty Square on November 15, 2011, albeit without tents. A commander then announced that the park was closed.”

Occupiers shouted back that the park was obliged through an agreement with the city to remain open. The commander then announced that anyone who remained inside would be arrested and charged with trespassing. Police forced demonstrators out of the park and from nearby sidewalks, and protesters began a new and determined march, which was met with more violent arrests. “The activist Cecily McMillan was one of the ejected demonstrators: after being handcuffed and pushed to the ground by cops, who then kicked her and cracked her ribs, she began having a seizure. Luke Rudkowski of We Are Change filmed the police as they surrounded her on the ground while she seized, refusing to remove her zip-tie handcuffs. Eventually two ambulances arrived, and she was taken to a hospital – where police refused her a phone call, according to a friend at her bedside.” Eyewitnesses describe her treatment here.

The Village Voice reports: “As the march veered south on Crosby Street, police arrested one man after throwing him up against metal shutters. C.S. Muncy, who photographed the arrest, described a police officer smashing his megaphone into the back of the man’s head. Continuing north, the march crossed Houston, then swerved left down 10th street, which was again the scene of violent arrests. Police threw one man into a plate-glass window, cracking it, before cuffing him. At least three others were also arrested there.”

The Occupied Wall Street Journal confirms this account: “On Crosby Street, an OWS medic named Jose was detained by multiple officers, who smashed his semi-bald head into a fortified glass window, cracking it. When a fellow demonstrator asked why such brutality was necessary, an officer replied, ‘No reason.’ … Stanley Rogouski, a photographer who has captured the Occupy Movement since its infancy, said the violence was not coming from young, relatively inexperienced cadets, but rather the NYPD’s top brass: ‘It was absolutely not the cadets who were stirring up the trouble. Thinking so couldn’t be more wrong. It was the white shirts (senior officers almost all in their 40s) who were ratcheting up the tension again and again and again. The blueshirts and younger cops were standing around looking confused. This wasn’t only a police riot, it was a riot of the top brass. I’ve never seen so many middle aged white guys picking fights with college age kids in my life. …This was about fortyish white guys, senior NYPD officers ratcheting up the tension in a very calibrated, very well thought out manner,’ Rogouski repeated for emphasis.”

The assault on protesters and press expresses the politicization of the NYPD leadership and other police forces around the country as part of a state drive to criminalize dissent. Far from opposing it, the Obama administration has mounted a vicious campaign against whistle-blowers, the most prominent being Bradley Manning, while continuing the Bush erosion of civil liberties. But the refusal of occupiers to back down in the face of deliberate intimidation is confounding the authoritarian plans of the state and confirms that the American people will resist allowing the one percent to continue commandeering all of society’s resources.

Occupy the Dream: a Hopeful Beauty is Born

Despite a defeatist and rightwing narrative that minority workers have no interest in the OWS/ We are the 99 percent,” the interracial and pluralist alliance that we called for on this blog has begun to come together, signaling a truly transformational era for America.

Occupy Wall Street and Black clergy have started “Occupy the Dream,” joining forces to protest the hold financial institutions have on the economy. They have initiated a new series of actions they consider a continuation of Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy. “Dr. King did not die for a monument,” said the Rev. Jamal Bryant. “He died for a movement and that movement must move forward.” According to Afro.com, Rev. Bryant described OWS as having “taken the methodology of the black church in the civil rights movement and brought it to the 21st Century.” Occupy the Dream will hold major demonstrations every month in 10 to 15 select cities across the U.S., beginning on Martin Luther King Day, Jan. 16, 2012.

Behind this is the fact that economic privileges expected by the middle class have disappeared, so that all Americans face the same fate of poverty without a safety net. The political divide between the professional middle class and the working class, which has been fostered by Republicans since the time of Nixon, has now no basis in social reality.

Barbara and John Ehrenreich, following E.P. Thompson’s analysis of the formation of the English working class, describe how the 99 percent began to articulate their interests as a group despite race and class differences. “For decades, the most stridently promoted division within the 99% was the one between what the right calls the ‘liberal elite’ — composed of academics, journalists, media figures, etc. — and pretty much everyone else. … [but] the idea of the ‘liberal elite’ could not survive the depredations of the 1% in the late 2000s. For one thing, it was summarily eclipsed by the discovery of the actual Wall Street-based elite and their crimes. Compared to them, professionals and managers, no matter how annoying, were pikers. The doctor or school principal might be overbearing, the professor and the social worker might be condescending, but only the 1% took your house away.”

Even though they have lost their encampments, the OWS are continuing to build alliances with groups protesting home foreclosures and evictions, and as in New York City working in solidarity with labor unions. The first union to come out in support of OWS was Public Transit Union (TWU) Local 100, and the occupiers returned the favor on Thursday by joining the TWU’s rally outside MTA headquarters in Manhattan to demand a fair contract and then marching to a rally at Liberty Plaza. Bus and subway workers are rejecting a 3-year wage freeze and givebacks on working conditions.

The pluralist orientation of the 99 percent has helped diverse groups to articulate their perception of the accumulation of vast wealth by the one percent at the expense of everyone else. Nurses on East and West coasts, who are on the front line of changes in Medicare provisions, have been made militant by reductions in staffing ratios and attacks on wages while the CEOs at the top of the medical industry earn huge salaries and bonuses.

In New York City, “nurses, who voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, say they are being treated with disrespect by a corporate hospital culture that demands sacrifices from patients and those who provide their care, but pays executives millions of dollars.” They are being made to pay hundreds of dollars a year more for health care and medication, while the nurse to patient ratio is being reduced to an extent that threatens the quality of patient care.

The New York Times reported that the nurses’ sense of disrespect “crystallized when a management negotiator told them: ‘We have the money. We just don’t have the will to give it to you’.” The story quoted the president of the nurses’ bargaining unit, Jacklynn Price, who said: “‘They go home with bags of money, what I call these nonprofit oligarchs.’ … She cited a $1.2 million bonus paid last year to the [Mount Sinai] hospital’s chief executive, Kenneth L.  Davis, which brought his compensation to $2.6 million. ‘None of that could they do without nurses’.”

No wonder, then, that as the gap between the 1% and everyone else grows, Americans are uniting across racial, ethnic, and class lines. The tremendous solidarity of that union, which in the 1960s dreamed a better vision of what America could be and fueled the fight for it, has been revitalized.

As Barbara and John Ehrenreich write: “The Occupation encampments that enlivened approximately 1,400 cities this fall provided a vivid template for the 99%’s growing sense of unity. Here were thousands of people — we may never know the exact numbers — from all walks of life, living outdoors in the streets and parks, very much as the poorest of the poor have always lived: without electricity, heat, water, or toilets. In the process, they managed to create self-governing communities. General assembly meetings brought together an unprecedented mix of recent college graduates, young professionals, elderly people, laid-off blue-collar workers, and plenty of the chronically homeless for what were, for the most part, constructive and civil exchanges. What started as a diffuse protest against economic injustice became a vast experiment in class building. The 99%, which might have seemed to be a purely aspirational category just a few months ago, began to will itself into existence.”

A hopeful beauty is reborn in America.

Occupy Blooms in Main Street: Americans fight for their homes and their rights

The Occupy movement’s strategic turn to occupy and defend homes facing imminent foreclosure is an immensely significant escalation of its protest. It directly challenges the banks’ practice of extracting tribute from society through mortgage debt.

The timing of this move is important. The state has evicted occupiers from public spaces with massive force, and has made it impossible to sustain the protests that defied the corporate-controlled political system at the same time that protesters spotlighted social problems we all face. Having captured and inspired the political imagination of the public, the Occupy movement can retain their support as the occupiers resist the state-backed evictions of people from their homes.

Foreclosures and evictions punish anyone who cannot pay their debt with homelessness. That’s why they take the form of dumping a whole family’s possessions on the sidewalk: the whole process is a form of ritual humiliation and depersonalization intended as a warning to others to keep on paying mortgages they can’t afford. The banks don’t want the property itself, which in many cases is left to rot: there are enough empty buildings in the U.S. today to house all the homeless people in America.

Occupy Wall Street said on its website: “Today, Americans stood up and said, ‘We have a right to shelter. No one can take that right from us.’ … a callous bank that split ownership of our homes into hundreds of parts, redistributing them across the world under false ratings does not own our homes. … Across the nation occupiers along with community groups shut down foreclosure auctions and reclaimed homes for families displaced by the global economic crisis. Two homes in Atlanta were re-occupied. In Oakland, foreclosure auctions were disrupted at the county courthouse – more than a dozen homes were saved.”

As BagNews commented on a photo of “Occupy” yellow caution tape draped around a foreclosed home: “How smart, simple and confident it is for the movement to not only occupy the foreclosed home but to co-opt officialdom’s own institutional ritual for keeping the public at bay. I think the creativity and the audacity goes further than that, though. Occupy is not just ‘crossing the line’ and appropriating the boundaries of a political and economic structure that has left American’s very access to shelter in limbo, the movement dares to occupy caution tape itself. Even if the smell of pepper spray will soon be wafting down the block, it’s quite a lucid and audacious assertion of the people’s authority.”

A writer from Salon.com spent Tuesday’s day of action in East New York on the Occupy Your Homes march. “It was one of the smoother Occupy events I’ve attended, likely because of the guiding hand of experienced organizers with the community, religious and labor-affiliated groups that helped put the day together. The crowd progressed in an orderly way from vacant property to vacant property in East New York, with stops at each one to hear stories from people who have gone through foreclosures. … the march ended at a vacant home that had already been occupied by a homeless family with two children, who are 5 and 9 and were on hand for the day’s festivities.”

The New York Times reported: “In Oakland, Calif., a journalist named Davey D. reported on Twitter: ‘Just coming from Alameda courthouse steps, where Occupy folk shut down the sale of foreclosed houses. It was a beautiful thing. … What they did was surrounded the auctioneers w/ noise makers and started shouting “Shame on You.” … Cats could not do bizness. … One of the auctioneers was damn near in tears, said he hopes people hold the banks accountable. This was the only job he could find after a year’.”

The technical illegality of the home occupations needs to be weighed against the real illegality of foreclosure practices of banks and mortgage companies. Naked Capitalism last week carried a guest post by Michael Olenick explaining how his analysis of a representative sample of foreclosures in Florida reveals how the laws covering evictions are being repeatedly broken by lenders through notary fraud or robosigning, “Banks are using faceless robos in rural California, Louisiana, and Nebraska to rob the people of Palm Beach County of the protection of the law and in many cases, their homes.”

Given this context, Obama’s Kansas speech appears considerably less radical. The New York Times gave the speech its official editorial approval: “After months of Republican candidates offering a cascade of bad ideas about the economy, President Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kan., Tuesday came as a relief. He made it clear that he was finally prepared to contest the election on the issues of income inequality and the obligation of both government and the private sector to enlarge the nation’s shrinking middle class. … The president repeated his calls for the rich to pay higher taxes, for financial institutions to be more closely regulated and for education to become a national mission.”

But, as Matt Miller pointed out in WaPo,”Think about the challenges Obama laid out in Kansas. Pervasive economic insecurity. The erosion of upward mobility. Lagging schools. All in the context of a fast-changing global economy. It’s clear this new world demands bold, creative responses. But that’s not what Obama is offering. If this is what the president calls ‘the defining issue of our time,’ and ‘a make or break moment for the middle class,’ what is he summoning us to march for? A modest payroll tax cut for a year? And a return (pretty please) to Clinton-era tax rates?”

Obama’s attempt to coopt the Occupy movement’s moral message in his speech was made in order to construct a rhetoric which made him appear opposed to financial fraud but didn’t commit him to taking action against any of his Wall Street backers. As Yves Smith, who has been following the whitewashing of illegal banking practices, pointed out: “Obama is using the Rooseveltian imagery to claim he will pass legislation to get tough on Big Finance miscreants. That posture, is of course meant to underscore the idea that you just can’t get the perps with the present, weak set of laws. … No, [the administration] has plenty of tools, starting with Sarbanes Oxley. … Sarbox required that top executives (which means at least the CEO and CFO) certify the adequacy of internal controls, and for a big financial firm, that has to include risk controls and position valuation. The fact that the Administration didn’t attempt to go after, for instance, AIG on Sarbox is inexcusable.”

However, Attorneys-General in a number of states are determined not to let the banks off the hook. “Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto … has targeted Lender Processing Services and is going after more mid level employees. Her effort has the potential to bust open bad conduct across all major servicers. LPS has among other things, allegedly engaged in escrow abuses and charging other impermissible fees, as well as foreclosure related abuses. LPS maintains that everything it did was with the full knowledge and approval of its clients, meaning the big [mortgage] servicers.”

The videos, testimonies, and images of the Main Street solidarity between the Occupy Movement and ordinary Americans from a plurality of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds will undoubtedly transform the political dialogue further. The struggle against evictions is set to become the flashpoint for major upheavals within the financial system and the state, but the people are asserting their power without shame or fear.

Thanksgiving Lesson From Occupy Wall Street: Not On Bread Alone

The Occupy Wall Street movement has all but disappeared from the pages of the New York Times. When the librarians from the occupation held a press conference on Wednesday to condemn the trashing of over 5,000 books when police evicted the occupiers, full reports appeared in McClatchy Newspapers and The Guardian, but nothing in the New York Times, despite its pretensions to journalistic responsibility.

Despite the efforts of the New York Times and the Bloomberg administration to diminish the occupiers, the treatment of the library still raises many questions. Was trashing the books part of a militaristic plan to punish and humiliate the protesters or was it just standard procedure for police involved in an eviction? The symbolism of the act could not have been misunderstood by the perpetrators, and it certainly wasn’t by the victims or Bloomberg’s staff. The NYPD is acting to negate the cultural validation of the Occupy movement’s protests and to deny a sense of permanence to the occupiers.

According to the McClatchy and Guardian reports: “In a photo posted to Twitter on Nov. 15, Bloomberg’s office showed piles of books, neatly stacked on a table and arranged in plastic bins below. … When protesters went to retrieve the books from the sanitation facility the next day, they said the only books they found in good condition were those shown in the Twitter photo.”

“At an emotional press conference on Wednesday, the librarians laid the torn and damaged books they were able to recover from the garage on a table taking up much of a cramped room in an office block in Madison Avenue. It was a sorry sight. Only 1,273 books – a third of the stock – were returned to them, they said, and around a third of those were damaged beyond repair. Only about 800 are still usable. About 2,900 books are still unaccounted for.”

The Village Voice added: “Many of [the recovered books] were on display on a conference table at the press conference, and the profusion of mildew, snapped bindings, and crumpled, filthy pages made it seem entirely plausible that the entire library had been treated like trash. … Librarians, like the other occupiers, were given only 15 minutes notice before the eviction, and so didn’t have time to remove the library. At the press conference, they told of rebuilding their library with new donations after the eviction – only to have their new collection taken by police again, the books placed in the trash and smeared with old food.”

Laurie Penny blogs at the New Statesman that after appeals went out to restock the library, the NYPD “have been hovering with menace around the fledgling collection in Zuccotti Park, where anything that looks even vaguely like an occupation is now forbidden by order of the city. They have already confiscated a second load of books, and a third is being accumulated.”

Librarians declined to put a monetary value on the missing and destroyed books. Daniel Norton, a volunteer with the Peoples Library, told the Village Voice: “I think what this represented and what we were affording people was the literacy to articulate their criticism. So to place a dollar value on the physical books themselves would completely undervalue what it was that the library was affording people.”

The lack of New York Times coverage doesn’t mean that occupiers are not still active in the Big Apple. The OWS website notes that “Occupy The Hood dropped off hundreds of meals at shelters across Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The OWS kitchen cooked enough warm meals for 4000 people and handed them out at Liberty Square and to the Occupations at New School and Rockaway.”

The police just couldn’t let this go without some drama. The Wall Street Journal reported that “protesters were digging into donated turkey and all the trimmings when police told a drummer at lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park to stop playing. … About 200 of the protesters surrounded a group of about 30 officers and began shouting. ‘Why don’t you stop being cops for Thanksgiving?’ yelled one protester. ‘Why don’t you arrest the drummers in the Thanksgiving parade?’ hollered another. A van rolled up with more officers, but they hung back. The protesters … held an impromptu forum and decided to call off the drumming. The noisy standoff ended, and the protesters returned to their food.”

Occupy Wall Street: Not Going Gentle into that Good Night

Some journalists in the mainstream media are busily writing obituaries of Occupy Wall Street. Like most obituaries, they extol the virtues of the movement while at the same time damning it with faint praise.

David Carr, writing in the New York Times, sums up OWS like this: “Reporters live for spectacle, and for more than two months Occupy Wall Street has provided one at a fixed address. … Occupy Wall Street is animated by a central, galvanizing idea – that the distribution of wealth is unfair. That struck a very live nerve, grabbing something that was in the air and turning it into simple math: 1 percent should not live at the expense of the other 99 percent.”

What Carr has missed here is that OWS was able to connect a committed group of young activists – by themselves numbering in the few hundreds – with the precariousness felt by the majority of Americans as the recession destroys their hopes and dreams. The occupiers were not simply stating the fact that the rich and powerful have appropriated more and more of society’s wealth. They were also rejecting the limitations on political resistance to the plutocracy imposed by the state, which betrayed the trust placed in the electoral process to restore social equity.

E.J. Dionne comments in the Washington Post: “This movement is about something much bigger than ‘occupying’ a particular space. Occupations proved to be a shrewd tactic. They are not a cause or an end in themselves. Focusing on holding a piece of public land simply makes the movement a hostage to the decisions of local officials, some of whom will inevitably be hostile to its purposes. More important, the movement should remind itself of its greatest innovation, its slogan: ‘We are the 99 percent.’ This is an affirmation that it is trying to speak for nearly everybody. Its tactics should live up to this aspiration by building support among the vast number of Americans who will never show up at the encampments.”

However, the occupiers didn’t initiate the violence meted on them by cohorts of militarized police. In the main they followed tactics of nonviolence. The destruction of their encampments required not just force but also the coordinated ideological manipulation of media and public officials by the Homeland Security infrastructure. The occupations had succeeded in creating a powerful spectacle of popular sovereignty, a reassertion of the ideal that people have the right to decide how they should be governed. Not only is the movement not dead, but, unlike our dysfunctional political system, it has captured the imagination of Americans. It lives in the changed consciousness of the 99 percent, which forms the real context of the 2012 elections.

The Occupy movement has in fact reemerged in a new guise on campuses as students challenge large tuition increases. The New York Times reported: “A video that showed two University of California, Davis, police officers using pepper spray on seated protesters has gone viral, with hundreds of thousands watching what might have been a relatively small encampment compared with the larger protests across the country. … The attack has galvanized protesters on other campuses. Students at the Los Angeles, Berkeley, Riverside and Davis campuses said Monday that they intended to restart their encampments Monday night, in part to test whether they will be rousted or arrested in the wake of the pepper-spraying.”

Katrina vanden Huevel made the connections in the Washington Post: “At UC Davis, in particular, students had spent a week protesting a possible 81 percent tuition increase, from $12,192 per year to $22,200. … ‘One of the reasons I am involved with OWS and advocating for an occupy movement on the UC campus is to fight privatization and austerity in the UC system, and fight rising tuition costs,’ said one victim of the pepper spraying who was interviewed anonymously the following day (and who still had a burning sensation in his throat, lips and nose). ‘I think that citizens have the right to get an education regardless of economic condition.’ Those tuition rate hikes were the result of a massive budget shortfall in California which, in turn, was the result of the housing collapse and recession, which, in turn, was caused by the same bankers and politicians thousands are protesting against in New York and Washington, D.C., and throughout the rest of the country.”

Whatever form or direction this social movement now takes, it is swollen like a river in flood by an economic recession which leaves 15% of twenty-somethings without jobs, threatens 30-50 year-olds with the evaporation of their Social Security and Medicare, while the 60 plus set watches their retirement turn to smoke. Meanwhile in Washington, Democrats and Republicans are in thrall to bankers, bond sellers, and corporate lobbyists—whoever is the highest bidder.

UPDATE: Juan Cole has a report in TruthDig on this issue well worth reading. He makes this point: “A year and a half ago, then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger complained that California was spending nearly 11 percent of its budget on prisons and only 7.5 percent on the university system. He noted, ‘Thirty years ago, 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education and 3 percent went to prisons.’ The spike in penitentiary spending is artificial, and does not reflect crime trends. Since the early 1990s, crime in the state has fallen, whereas the prison population has skyrocketed. …  the defunding of higher education in favor of an enormous gulag dovetails with a rise in the paramilitary repression of the population as one of America’s premier industries.”

Banking Plutocrats Get Occupy Wall Street’s message

Members of the Occupy Wall Street movement are resting and regrouping after their major show of support on Thursday. Tens of thousands rallied in NYC (the NYPD estimated 32,500) including union-organized contingents of workers and students. OWS members are reported to be seeking an indoor space before the end of the year, so protesters have a place to sleep away from Zuccotti Park and be able to continue their campaign, whose impact has already been huge. Occupy Wall Street succeeded where government failed in indicting Wall Street for creating the recession and the continued economic and political precariousness faced by the 99 Percent.

One sign of this success is the seriousness with which the ruling elite views Occupy’s influence.  After the dismemberment of the Zuccotti Park/Liberty Square encampment, hedge fund and private equity executives are considering a campaign to punish politicians who run against Wall Street. Already they are pouring money into Massachusetts senator Scott Brown’s reelection campaign, likely to be against corporate critic Elizabeth Warren. Brown was elected at the high point of the Tea Party’s influence, and he is unlikely to get the same support in 2012.

MSNBC reported that a lobbying firm with close ties to the financial industry and the Republican party leadership has circulated a memo proposing that they get paid “$850,000 to conduct ‘opposition research’ on Occupy Wall Street.” The aim of this research is “to construct ‘negative narratives’ about the protests and allied politicians. … According to the memo, if Democrats embrace OWS, ‘This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street. … It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.’ … Wall Street companies ‘likely will not be the best spokespeople for their own cause,’ according to the memo.  ‘A big challenge is to demonstrate that these companies still have political strength and that making them a political target will carry a severe political cost’.”

This last statement confirms that the plutocrats and their ideologists get the message the media claimed OWS didn’t have. OWS has brought into sharp focus not just the unequal distribution of wealth, but the way that immense wealth at the top of society enables an oligarchy to exercise political power and direct it against the majority, the 99 percent. “Our political system should serve all of us — not just the very rich and powerful. Right now Wall Street owns Washington,” said OWS participant Beka Economopoulos. “We are the 99% and we are here to reclaim our democracy.”

A much more dangerous exercise of power is signified by the pronouncement of banking-sector economists that credit rating agencies will lower the U.S. rating (i.e. increasing interest payments on government bonds by billions) if the congressional supercommittee fails to come to an agreement by Tuesday. By definition, that means cuts in entitlements, since the Republicans are committed to never raising taxes. Put simply, the financial class will blackmail the government and punish the rest of us by sucking yet more money out of the economy if Social Security is not cut.

The Guardian reports that “Morgan Stanley analyst Christine Tan predicted earlier this month that there was now a one-in-three possibility of another downgrade. ‘If the supercommittee fails to reach a $1.2tn deficit reduction deal, if such a deal relies more upon accounting changes than real deficit reduction, or if congressional action lessens the impact of the $1.2tn automatic trigger, we believe this could potentially provide S&P with a pretext to downgrade the US further from AA+ to AA,’ wrote Tan in a note to investors.”

This threat represents the financial industry flexing its muscles against the government in order to pressure Democrats to cave to Republican ideological inflexibility. The Obama administration’s reluctance to prosecute anyone for the financial meltdown, the result of systemic illegal practices by the banks, handed the banking oligarchy more political power.

However, the Nevada Attorney General, Catherine Cortez Masto, has initiated a prosecution against companies involved in mortgage fraud. Matt Stoller blogs in Naked Capitalism that Masto “handed down 606 counts of felony or gross misdemeanor indictments on robo-signing against two employees of big bank subcontractor Lender Processing Services. It’s pretty clear from the indictment that these are mid-level employees, one level up supervisors of fraud rather than top CEOs. And yet, even if this were as far as it goes, it would still be a big deal. These would be the only charges served involving the housing crisis and its link with the structurally corrupt securitization chain so far. …

“The indictments handed down, and the ones to come, show that corrupting our property laws and the basis of our economy is a crime. … The felony indictments from the Nevada AG’s office are the first sign that the law enforcement community can take financial crimes seriously, that blowing up the economy through financial mismanagement can carry costs.”

Since the Obama administration has refused to prosecute anyone responsible for the financial crisis, it remains for the Occupy movement to follow the lead of the Nevada AG with a denunciation and people’s court prosecution of Goldman Sachs and the top players in the financial industry. As Cornel West pointed out: “To think that New York City spent all of that taxpayer money on policing the protesters and arresting people, while right there on Wall Street are all these financial criminals and no one has been charged. The oligarchs get away with everything. The hypocrisy is just too much to take. The shift towards truth and justice is what the movement is all about.”

Bringing the banking and finance plutocrats to justice and holding our own government accountable for their corruption is the beginning of truth about the recession. They need to be reminded that, as Lincoln declared at Gettysburg, government is of the people, by the people, for the people, not a power to be hijacked by credit rating agencies and banks. Occupy Moody’s! Occupy Standard & Poors! Enforce legal control of bankers!