Walker’s Recall Victory over Wisconsin Democrats: What the Hell Happened?

Activists will rightly be dismayed that Scott Walker defeated the union-backed grassroots campaign to recall him. The repercussions will be felt in states across the country as right-wing groups see it as  a vindication of their hostility to state workers’ unions. Let’s not forget, however, that Republicans lost control of the Wisconsin State Senate. There is a chance this could be reversed in November, but for now it will prevent them pushing through further right-wing legislation.

Interviewed on Democracy Now, John Nichols pointed out its immediate significance: “Governor Walker is an incredibly ambitious partisan. … He is particularly interested in taking apart many of the state’s environmental laws in order to allow for a particularly controversial form of mining in northern Wisconsin. That is likely to be blocked. Additionally, he’s been very, very aggressive on voting rights issues. He’s a big backer of voter ID laws, changes in registration laws, things of that nature. That would have been the sort of thing that you might have seen him initiate, and his allies initiate, if they had control of the State Senate.”

The narrative on the left is that big money unleashed by the “Citizens United” decision swung the election despite the massive effort behind the recall campaign. Nichols explains: “Over the period not just of this campaign but really of the better part of a year, he [Walker] used massive television advertising, as well as astounding amounts of mailings—more than $5 million worth of mailings—and huge amounts of internet and social media communication, to basically alter people’s impressions of him sufficiently to win a 53-46 victory.”

This has some validity, but it is not the whole story. Money gave Walker the advantage of being able to frame the issues before the Democrats had a chance to get started, but his Republican rhetoric would have had little impact if it didn’t resonate with popular prejudices. In the absence of any accountability for bankers and plutocratic privilege, state workers have become the scapegoats for the recession.

The most important statistic to come out of the exit polls, in my opinion, is that Walker won nearly half the vote from members of union households who were not themselves in a union. The Washington Post suggests that: “Democratic and labor efforts to turn out their supporters (which is labor’s calling card) were largely successful. The problem was that too many of those who came out sided with Walker… the backlash against him was limited to the Democratic base and those directly affected by his decision [to strip collective bargaining rights from public sector unions], while Walker was able to garner plenty of support from everybody else — including family of union members.”

Walker succeeded – and this has to be faced squarely – in leveraging the underlying and growing resentment on the part of Americans made vulnerable by the recession against those who are not yet playing by the new rules set by the plutocracy for the rest of us. The new normal is accepting day to day life as being economically contingent and disposable without protection against corporate abuse. Under the guise of self-sufficiency, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and the characterization of organized labor as mobs, leeches, monsters, etc., plutocrats have adjusted the collective expectations of the middle class to essentially accept the same lot as the immigrant farmworkers they also vilify.

Walker managed to divide the electorate using the fear people clearly have against this new reality as a wedge. Wisconsin Democrats were unable to counter Walker’s narrative and get across the importance of collective bargaining for all workers, not just those in the public sector. John Nichols commented: “This battle over labor rights was where the fight in Wisconsin began, and yet it was Scott Walker who, for the last year, did a lot more of the messaging on the assault on collective bargaining rights that he launched back in February 2011. Similarly, I think that Democrats and labor needed to talk about the recall power and explain it in much more detail. Walker was very, very critical of the recall. And I think, again, he used a lot of money and messaging to win that debate.”

Many voters were opposed to recalls as a means of political protest, so they responded to this criticism. And Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, a centrist Democrat who was not labor’s first choice, had little to offer his base. Gary Younge of the Guardian was not impressed: “In the five days I’ve been reporting from the state I have yet to meet a single person who voted for him as opposed to against Walker. In the end this was just not enough. His failure to give some vision for what Wisconsin under his stewardship would look like could not win over the coveted independents or sufficiently inspire his base. When it came down to it, the people of Wisconsin wanted more than the absence of Scott Walker. They wanted the presence of an alternative.”

The lack of an effective counter-narrative left voters open to Walker’s claims that he was attempting to deal with the state’s fiscal problems. The fact that he balanced the budget with large cuts in further education and mortgage settlement money was drowned out. In These Times reports on a long discussion that John Dupies, a special education teacher in the Milwaukee schools, had with a voter when canvassing. “Dupies asked him, ‘In years, have you seen our state divided like it is now?’  The voter said he supported Walker: ‘I’ve got to pay for my own healthcare…everyone else should do it too.’ … After a friendly exchange about common acquaintances in the local schools, the voter said, ‘As a small business owner, I bust my ass, I pay my own bills, plus I’m paying for all of the illegals.’  Dupies asked whether he thought it was fair for big corporations to get away with not paying taxes.  He answered, ‘No, I don’t think it’s fair.  But there’s nothing I can do about it’.”

The battleground in Wisconsin sums up the dilemma of the left today. Since Obama has not jailed a single CEO or top banker for crashing the economy and plunging America into recession, it appears that there’s nothing that the people, through their government, can do about it. Matt Stoller writes in Naked Capitalism: “Up and down the ticket, Democrats are operating under the shadow of the President, associated with unpopular policies that make the lives of voters worse and show government to be an incompetent, corrupt handmaiden to big business. … Obama’s economic policies have made economic inequality sharper than it was under Bush, due to his bailout of banks and concurrent elimination of the main source of wealth of most Americans, home equity.  With these policy choices, Obama destroyed the Democratic Party and liberalism – under Obama’s first two years, the fastest growing demographic party label was ‘former Democrat.’ … Then, in Illinois and Maryland in April, liberal labor-backed candidates were absolutely wrecked in primaries. … In Wisconsin, the stage was much more high-profile, but the dynamics were the same.”

The national story is what frames the lives of Americans, whatever the local issues. In order to counter the Republican onslaught, the progressive wing of the Democratic party—reduced as it has been under the Obama administration—needs to regroup and reassert its presence. The Occupy movement has begun this conversation; the best hope for countering the plutocratic Republican brand of fear and envy is Occupy’s message of how we can recover our solidarity for a more just America. That my neighbor has healthcare and I don’t does not mean that he should lose it to make things fair; the fair thing, in this enormously wealthy country, is that we both have it.

Hey Honchos! Wake up and Smell the Wisconsin Recall: The Government Serves People, Not Corporations!

Whatever the final result of the recall election for the Wisconsin governor next Tuesday, the fact of the recalls themselves and the huge grassroots campaign to achieve them – in the face of the reluctance of the Obama administration and Democratic establishment to give support until the last minute – is a major victory. The first round of recalls last year reduced the Republican senate majority to one, and on Tuesday there are four more senate recalls together with the governor’s and lieutenant-governor’s.

Cap Times editor John Nichols points out that “this is the most sweeping set of recalls in American history. We’ve never had a situation where on a single day a state could change control of both its executive branch and the dominant house of the legislative branch. … if just one seat is picked up – the Democrats gain full control of the state senate. That in itself is a pretty big deal.”

If Walker were voted out of office, or even if the Democrats were to regain control of the senate, it would curb his attempts to sell the resources of the state to the super-rich – his slogan “Wisconsin is open for business” is code for “The public property of Wisconsin is up for grabs.” It doesn’t matter to him if the natural beauty and ecology of the state is destroyed by strip-mining, or that people sink deeper into debt. He just wants to keep his wealthy donors rewarded with whatever tax breaks or immunity from legal control they can profit from.

As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted: “Wisconsin has become the most glaring example of a new and genuinely alarming approach to politics on the right. It seeks to use incumbency to alter the rules and tilt the legal and electoral playing field decisively toward the interests of those in power. … This recall should not have had to happen. But its root cause was not the orneriness of Walker’s opponents but a polarizing brand of conservative politics that most Americans, including many conservatives, have good reason to reject.”

Walker’s huge spending on attack ads is not aimed at changing the minds of independents – it’s to keep his base fired up. He needs to keep his potential voters motivated because otherwise some of the scandals surrounding his political career will cause them to doubt his suitability for any kind of government responsibility. The frenzied media blitz helps to keep partisan divisions at fever pitch.

John Nichols in the interview cited above explains that “aides for the governor, and perhaps the governor himself – that remains to be seen – set up a secret campaign operation in the [Milwaukee] County Executive’s Office where people were paid out of the Treasury for pretty much just full-time campaign work for Scott Walker and his favorite candidates. It was effectively a recreation of an old-style political machine without any rules. It appears to have been illegal. That’s why his deputy chief of staff, his scheduler, his former deputy chief of staff have all been charged. … It’s also why the governor is now represented by four separate law firms, including two of the top criminal defense law firms. … The guy is looking at major state and potentially federal investigations into his activities.”

What Walker’s regime means for ordinary people is made clearer by another series of scandals surrounding the state environmental agency, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR).  According to an investigation in the Wisconsin State Journal, a former Republican state legislator, Scott Gunderson, who was appointed as executive assistant to DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp by the Walker administration, “chose not to send a complaint against an Oconomowoc waste hauler to the Department of Justice for prosecution despite findings by agency staff that the company was treating fields with so much human waste from septic tanks it risked poisoning nearby wells … Instead, Gunderson decided to ask district attorneys in Waukesha and Jefferson counties to issue five citations against Herr Environmental and fine the company $4,338 — the minimum forfeiture for the permit violations, which the lead DNR investigator called ‘among the worst’ he’d seen.”

Also implicated is the local state representative, Joel Kleefisch, who is the husband of Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefish who is facing recall on Tuesday. According to a DNR investigator who spoke to the State Journal, he argued that five citations were too many and should be reduced by two or three “as a show of good faith.” At a public meeting, concerned homeowners in the area were told that neither the DNR nor the hauler would pay for tests on the water quality of their wells and they should do it themselves.

The Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch explained that the story was “the second part of a two-part series by the State Journal, the first part having revealed that the DNR’s environmental activity has dropped dramatically in the past two years under the Walker administration and that the number of permit violation notices from the department hit a 12-year low last year. The DNR’s Secretary Cathy Stepp, appointed by Walker, is a former Republican state senator who ran her family’s construction business after leaving public office. Before her appointment, Stepp was an outspoken critic of the DNR, calling its employees ‘anti-development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes, karner blue butterflies, etc.’ Walker said that his controversial decision to appoint Stepp was because he was looking for a DNR chief with a ‘chamber-of-commerce mentality’.”

At the same time, the landscape in northern Wisconsin is being devastated to feed the growing appetite of the natural gas fracking industry for high-grade sand. Rolling hills containing the sand are being leveled and the valleys filled with dumped industrial waste water. The DNR has done nothing to monitor how much crystalline silica – a carcinogen like asbestos – is released into the air by sand mining, and it recently denied a petition by people living in the region that it control the amount being dispersed by mining operations.

Given the appointment of Cathy Stepp as DNR Secretary, one of the petition’s signatories, Ron Koshoshek, wasn’t surprised. “For 16 years he was a member of, and for nine years chaired, Wisconsin’s Public Intervenor Citizens Advisory Committee.  Created in 1967, its role was to intercede on behalf of the environment, should tensions grow between the DNR’s two roles: environmental protector and corporate licensor. ‘The DNR,’ he says, ‘is now a permitting agency for development and exploitation of resources’.” Instead of being able to protect the public good, state environmental professionals are being overruled by Walker’s political appointees.

All this could be overturned in Tuesday’s election. As John Nichols put it: “… this mass mobilization, which the unions have put a lot of their resources and energy into, has the potential to produce a sufficient number of new voters. The traditionally unpolled voters such as young people, people of color, and rural people can make this a close and potentially very winnable race not just for Tom Barrett but for the incredible movement that developed last year.”

Wisconsin Democrats hamstrung by national leadership: grassroots doing the fighting

If Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett beats Walker in the recall elections, it will be no thanks to the national Democratic leadership and entirely due to the tenacity of Wisconsin Democrats channeling a grassroots movement to defend the social contract. Indications are there will be a high turnout: early voting is at or near record levels in key municipalities like Milwaukee and Madison, and also the conservative stronghold of Waukesha.

Although Republican governors are coming out in force to support Walker, not one nationally-known Democrat has campaigned with Barrett. And in an interview on Friday, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said: “there aren’t going to be any repercussions” nationally if Wisconsin voters re-elect Walker.

This is a serious underestimation of the national significance of the recalls. When Walker was elected he immediately legislated a prefabricated right-wing agenda, part of a strategy devised by Republican groups like ALEC to force change in America from the state level. Their aim is to destroy Democratic support by crushing unions, restricting the franchise, and redistricting to achieve a permanent Republican majority.

At a national level, the Democratic leadership focuses heavily on Obama’s re-election calculations and carefully avoids the populist message that successfully fired up the recall signature-gathering campaign in Wisconsin. They appear to have left Wisconsin Democrats to fight Walker on their own.

This is certainly how it appears to people at the base. In comments on a blog post about the fact that Obama has avoided taking a public stand on the recall, “PJ” says: “I think it’s pretty clear that the DNC has decided that voters’ minds are set at this point. If that is so, then the Democratic establishment bears the brunt of the responsibility for not offering an early, frequent, clear, and genuine alternative to the conservative agenda. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the protests and ensuing recall effort were an historic, game-changing moment that Democrats squandered.”

The fight in Wisconsin is important because it mirrors a national struggle against the Republican narrative that, when states are faced with fiscal shortfalls, budgets need to be balanced by spending cuts targeted at state workers and programs for the poor. They manufacture support for this program with a consistent message that public sector employees are allegedly protected from the recession while others are suffering – in Walker’s words, “divide and conquer.”

As the recall approaches, this message is accompanied by vicious demonizing and witch-hunting of unionized state workers. In Janesville, southern Wisconsin, a pro-Walker group distributed anti-teacher fliers listing teachers’ salaries “and urging parents to request their child be assigned to a ‘non-radical teacher’ next year. The fliers, which included the names, titles and salaries of the 321 highest-paid Janesville teachers, also urged readers to go to iverifytherecall.com to determine if the teachers signed the petition to recall Gov. Scott Walker.”

The legislative onslaught on state workers’ unions was set up to conceal Walker’s primary agenda of enormous tax breaks and concessions to the rich. A “domestic production” tax credit was slipped into his 2011-13 budget which could reduce state income tax for the richest Wisconsinites from 7.75 percent to zero, or even end up as a credit, according to The Cap Times. It noted: “The production tax credit was just one of the ‘gifts’ in the budget approved by Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature last June. Most, if not all, are targeted at corporations, investors, upper-income residents and campaign contributors. Combined, they will reduce state revenues significantly. Making up the difference, opponents argue, will be average Wisconsin families.”

How did Walker get away with this? An insightful commentary by Paul Fanlund in The Cap Times draws attention to a series of interviews with regular people across Wisconsin carried out between 2007-10 by a UW-Madison professor. Fanlund writes: “… what she found in her chats in gas stations and restaurants was an almost seething resentment toward public employees, who in the interviewees’ estimation had not suffered like they had in the economic downtown and were less likely to be ‘working hard.’ There was no similar, visceral blame for their economic suffering directed towards the private sector, even after the Wall Street crisis and even as the income gap has grown exponentially in recent years and the comparative tax burden on the wealthiest has shrunk. …

“Katherine Cramer Walsh is the UW-Madison professor I referenced above who interviewed many Wisconsin citizens. ‘In all my conversations about causes of the great recession, maybe a handful of times’ was any blame directed at the private sector even after the Wall Street crisis, she says. ’The most striking thing to me is how much those attitudes were in place when Walker tapped into them,’ she says.”

A comment from a Wisconsin resident on a New York Times magazine article about how divided the state has become, expresses the political consequences succinctly: “Wisconsin, hit as hard as any state by the economic collapse that originated on Wall Street and in Washington, was a pile of dry tinder. Walker was a flaming match. Legislation enacted rapidly after his inauguration was the equivalent of gasoline.”

The Democrats have struggled to create a coherent response to this rapid polarization of the state, and have missed chances to broaden their support, opting instead for a return to consensus politics. As commentator John Nichols points out: “Soft messaging by Democrats on labor issues has done them serious harm with voters in their potential base. And a failure to educate the broad mass of voters on the importance of collective bargaining to protecting middle-class wages and benefits has been equally damaging. Republicans do not make this sort of mistake. … Walker knows that a recall election in a closely divided state is about maximizing appeal to the base, not softening messages and avoiding issues.”

Paul Fanlund, in the article quoted above, also cites another UW-Madison professor, Barry Burden, who said: “What the [Wisconsin Democratic Party] has not done a good job of is saying ‘look at all the things that public spending actually does for you, like providing roads, or fire protection, or education for your children in the UW System or on public schools.’ ”

This cannot be blamed on the Wisconsin Democrats alone. They are hamstrung by the national leadership, which should be fighting to uphold the essential things that the government does on behalf of the community – education, emergency services, medical care, social security for the elderly, housing, and more. They need to sustain the idea that the community should take responsibility for the young, the sick and the weak. But most legislators, including the great deceiver Obama himself, accept the neoliberal ideology that banks must be supported at all costs.

Instead of taking up the critique of the Occupy movement, the national Democrats have helped foster the belief that the crimes of the rich operate at an incomprehensible economic level and to be “part of the way business works”; this impression is reinforced by the fact that no high-flying executives have yet been jailed.

They are accomplices in the Obama administration’s purging of whistleblowers and the federal use of agents provocateurs against Occupy protests across the country. But they will be unable to control the growing movement of political defiance: like the grassroots movement to recall Walker, which was initially opposed by Democratic political operatives, it will break through the party straitjacket and create new and more effective forms of resistance.

Trayvon Martin and racial profiling as an undercurrent in Republican rhetoric

The second-degree murder charge against George Zimmerman undoubtedly signals a victory for the movement initiated by Trayvon Martin’s parents. Trayvon’s killing and the lack of an arrest captured the public imaginary throughout America and created a demand for justice to be seen to be done. While a charge is not a conviction, the trial will be played out in the public eye, so attention will be drawn to laws that have been promoted by the rightwing organizations ALEC and the National Rifle Association – concealed carry of weapons, easy access to guns, and “Stand Your Ground” – which will likely form Zimmerman’s defense.

The special prosecutor, Angela Corey, a Republican reputed to be tough on crime, denied that Zimmerman’s arrest was a response to pressure and maintained the state was following its due process. Corey’s statement announcing the charge attempted to overcome the perception of a conflict between her investigation and the Sanford authorities by linking the decision to prosecute to the constitutional rights of citizens: “Let me emphasize that we do not prosecute by pressure or petition,” she said. “We prosecute cases based on the relevant facts of each case and on the laws of the state of Florida. … By strictly adhering to this standard we vigorously pursue justice for all victims of crimes while maintaining the rights of every defendant. … Every single day, prosecutors throughout this country handle difficult cases, always keeping at the forefront their mandate to seek justice.”

However, the probable cause affidavit released by her office on Thursday made clear that Corey rejects Zimmerman’s claim – accepted at face value by police at the time – that Martin attacked him. Her investigators determined that Zimmerman “profiled” Martin and then pursued and confronted him.

The state had to respond to the demands for justice, to have a trial at least, to maintain its legitimacy. The ideal of equality under the law is important to the ideological justification of state rule. But this also intersects with other social currents in America. The NRA, which advocated and wrote the Stand Your Ground law, is an important conservative constituency for Republicans: Mitt Romney went out of his way to cultivate ties with the group and adopt their inflammatory anti-Obama rhetoric at their annual convention in St. Louis, Missouri, last week.

Speaking at the same convention, the NRA’s vice-president Wayne LaPierre tried to deflect criticism of Stand Your Ground by attacking the media for publicizing Martin’s killing and ignoring other violent crime. “By the time I finish this speech, two Americans will be slain, six women will be raped, 27 of us will be robbed, and 50 more will be beaten. That’s the harsh reality we face, all of us, every single day,” he said. What the NRA wants is to use the fear of crime to enable armed white citizens to enforce vigilante justice against a perceived criminal threat – exactly what Zimmerman did – without fear of legal consequences.

Supporter of right-wing causes and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz chimed in to pillory Angela Corey, saying he thinks she doesn’t have a case for second-degree murder. “What you have here is an elected public official who made a campaign speech last night for reelection when she gave her presentation and over-charged.”  He described the affidavit of probable cause as “thin,” “irresponsible,” and “unethical.”

While there is a clear division in public opinion over the case, it is not purely on race lines. Gary Younge overstates his argument in the Guardian when he says: “What follows from here has the potential to be every bit as divisive as the OJ Simpson trial and every bit as inflammatory as the Rodney King case – only this time there’s a black president in an election year.” According to the Washington Post: “Eight in 10 blacks say they think Martin’s killing was not justified, compared with 38 percent of whites. Most whites say they do not know enough about the shooting to say whether it was justified.” Almost 40% of whites agree with the overwhelming majority of African-Americans, and the rest are uncertain: that’s more nuanced than opinion was on OJ Simpson’s guilt. The divisions in the country over this case are more ideological than racial – racism is expressed through attitudes on gun control and stoking fears of criminality.

A Washington Post writer, Colbert King, points out: “The murder charge doesn’t settle the question raised by Martin’s shooting. As Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander, the author of ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,’ told the Christian Science Monitor, Martin’s killing is ‘not an exceptional case except for the fact that the one who did the accosting while armed was a private citizen’ rather than a police officer. … High rates of arrest, incarceration and unexplained stops by police, Alexander said, send ‘the message to young black men that no matter who you are, what you do, whether you play by the rules or not, you’re going to be viewed and treated like a criminal and you’re likely to wind up in jail one way or another’.”

Interviewed on DemocracyNow, NAACP president Benjamin Jealous raised the same issue: “We have not had an honest conversation about racial profiling in this country in a decade. And the reality is that [the Trayvon Martin] case, for a whole generation of young people, is the first time they’re seeing their country really talk about this problem. … You know, in 2003, what, there were about 160,000-170,000 stop-and-frisks in New York; 87 percent of those resulted in no summons, no one being locked up or taken to the station. Last year, 285—excuse me, 685,000 stop-and-frisks, 685, and 88 percent of them found nothing. You know, less than 10 percent of those were of white people; you know, more than 90 percent were black and Latino people. And the reality is that we’ve seen a massive upsurge in racial profiling over the last decade …”

Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison told the Guardian: “They keep saying, we have to have a conversation about race in this country. Well, this is the conversation. We’ll see if it plays out, if it makes a difference in terms of not just the hate crime thing, but the law.” She drew attention to the coded racial language of the conservative right, and how Santorum described Obama as a “government nig – uh.” “He said he didn’t say that! They used to say ‘government nigger’ when black people got jobs in the post office, stuff like that. And that’s what he was saying.”

The national discussion of race coincides with an election campaign in which the subverting of state law by the Republican right is being pulled into the public eye. Zimmerman’s trial will highlight racial profiling as an undercurrent in American political rhetoric – and will build opposition to it.

Hot Delivery, Cold Comfort: Obama’s Message to the 99 Percent

Although the winter has meant that the Occupy movement has not been able to maintain its most visible presences, it still dominates political discourse in America. It cast a long shadow over Obama’s State of the Union speech Tuesday, which, while delivered with a preacher’s skill, was a piece of political theater aimed at diffusing Occupy’s message.

Obama framed his narrative with multiple appeals to national unity as a counter to economic inequality – spinning a patriotic fantasy of energy and manufacturing self-sufficiency. The country’s victory in the Second World War was followed, he said, by “a story of success that every American had a chance to share.” He ignored the divisiveness of racism and the struggle of black Americans in the Civil Rights movement in order to get that same chance.

He cajoled the rich to contribute to economic fairness. The Washington Post commented: “the heart of Obama’s message — one he has underscored in appearances around the country in recent months — was that America’s wealthiest citizens must do more to cement the economic recovery and pull the country from its dire fiscal condition.”

Appealing to the rich sounds good, but achieves nothing without state compulsion. According to Talking Points Memo “the new push suggests a growing confidence on [the Democratic leaders’] part that the public has tired significantly of the anti-government themes of 2010 and 2011 like slashing federal programs and shrinking the size of the federal government. They represent a populist turn for a Democratic incumbent, suggesting a recognition that these views have gone mainstream…”

So the whole speech was attuned to the change in the public mood, but without any substantive change in the administration’s political strategy. The populist turn was encapsulated by Obama’s call for a 30 percent tax on millionaires’ income. Given Romney’s tax disclosures less than 24 hours before, this was an easy target; but achieving such a tax would involve mobilizing the public for an all-out war on the political influence of the ruling elite – not marshaling them to vote for another presidential term.

Obama’s most cynical political ploy was his announcement of a federal investigation into Wall Street. Obama’s exact words were: “I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

MoveOn was completely taken in by this rhetoric and lost no time emailing its constituents asking them to thank Obama for a “progressive victory.” It is no such thing. The Washington Post commented: “This is nothing new. Obama formed a similar task force over two years ago to accomplish the same objective. The task force has brought a number of high profile cases, but many observers have been disappointed that regulators and prosecutors have been unable to bring a criminal case against a high-profile banking executive involved in the financial crisis.” Attorney General Eric Holder has been unable to prosecute a single banker, while he has brought six prosecutions against alleged leakers under draconian espionage laws.

The NYT pointed out: “the proposals seek to acknowledge the continuing frustration among many Americans — exemplified by the Occupy Wall Street movement — that few financial executives have been prosecuted for their actions leading up to the crisis. Given the election-year pressures and the continuing gridlock on Capitol Hill, neither measure is certain to win approval in this session of Congress.”

Far from embracing the demands of the 99 percent, Obama has simply made a tactical change, acknowledging the extent of frustration with economic inequality, while doing nothing in practice to change the political control of Washington by the financial industry – the NYT comments that his ultimate goal “remains a bipartisan deficit deal along the lines of the one he nearly negotiated with Speaker John A. Boehner.”

Yves Smith was scornful of the whole thing. She points out that the proposal simply creates another task force staffed with people who have deep ties to the financial industry. “If you wanted a real investigation, you get a real independent investigator, with a real budget and staffing, and turn him loose. We had the FCIC which had a lot of hearings and produced a readable book that said everyone was responsible for the mortgage crisis, which was tantamount to saying no one was responsible. We even had an eleven-regulator Foreclosure Task Force that looked at 2800 loan files (and a mere 100 foreclosures) and found nothing very much wrong.

“Now we have a committee full of people who have made numerous statements in the media and to Congressional committee minimizing the severity of the mortgage mess. Are we to believe they all had a conversion experience on the eve of the State of the Union address? But apparently the members of what passes for the left are prepared to take ‘investigation’ at face value since it would be unpleasant to consider the possibility that they are being snookered again.

“And it seems awfully plausible that the aim of getting [New York Attorney General] Schneiderman on board with an Administration ‘investigation’ is to undermine the effort by 15 Democrat attorneys general to devise their own strategy for dealing with mortgage abuses. … It would be better if I were proven wrong, but this looks to be yet another clever Obama gambit to neutralize his opposition. With all the same key actors in place – Geithner, Walsh, Holder – there is no reason to believe the Administration has had a change of heart until there is compelling evidence otherwise.”

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!

The Unmasked Face of Violent Anarchists in Occupy Oakland

Occupy Oakland has an ideological war on its hands. A group of anarchists wedded to the black bloc tactic of violence against property is entrenched in the occupation and hell-bent on imposing their own agenda on the movement.

A participant in the Occupy Oakland General Assembly on Friday November 4 describes the report-back from small group discussion: “… in what appeared an orchestrated tactic, each time a small group recommended ‘taking over vacant buildings,’ it drew the loudest applause.  Alternately, when there was any criticism of violence, or mention of non-violent actions, the dissident members, and their compatriots dispersed throughout, yelled out almost in unison, ‘diversity of tactics, diversity of tactics.’  It is clear that the dissident anarchist group of some 150 or so is deeply embedded within Occupy Oakland. …

“The anarchists see #Occupy as a ‘resistance movement’ requiring a vanguard to wage war against oppressive forces (the police). During the dissident actions on ‘General Strike Day,’ non-violent [Occupy Oakland] members who attempted to halt acts of property destruction being perpetrated by the anarchist group, had their own safety threatened with claw hammers.”

Affinis comments in Corrente: “It seems that a large fraction of the Occupy Oakland GA attendees are unwilling to renounce violence/vandalism as a tactic. I don’t think this reflects the majority of attendees (many are passionately opposed to black bloc tactics), but it’s apparently not a small minority either. … Friday’s GA did not repudiate the black bloc tactics. Also, apparently previous proposals at OO GA meetings to renounce violence/vandalism have been rejected.”

Clearly the anarchists are working to coopt the Occupy movement using the inclusiveness of the occupation to subvert the principle of consensus and gain ambiguous support for their own agenda. They argue that they are engaged in a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, and so random acts of vandalism against property are inflated by their philosophy into acts of sabotage against capital. Anyone who opposes them carrying out such acts is a supporter of capitalism, and deserves to be thrashed.

Sound familiar? This simplistic worldview is a throwback to the 1990s, when there was an economic boom and there was no mass movement against the system. And the violence of the dissident anarchists today is directed against the very people who are making the greatest challenge to the capitalist princes in Wall Street: BagNews draws attention to a photo showing an Occupy security member being beaten up by the black-garbed provocateurs.

The naivete of the anarchists’ political agenda is apparent from their justification for breaking into the foreclosed building near to Oscar Grant plaza: “We had plans to start using this space today as a library, a place for classes and workshops, as well as a dormitory for those with health conditions. … the ferocity of the police response surprised us. Once again, they mobilized hundreds of police officers, armed to the hilt with bean bag guns, tear gas and flashbang grenades, despite the fact that these so-called ‘less-than-lethal’ weapons nearly killed someone last week.  … Whereas the blockade of the port – an action which caused millions of dollars of losses – met with no resistance, the attempt to take one single building, a building that was unused, met with the most brutal and swift response.”

They just hadn’t realized that the police would respond differently to a mass demonstration than an isolated group taking over a building in the middle of the night. Clearly, they were not serious about building support for such a takeover. An open letter by an anarchist to the “Violent November 2nd” faction points out: “Thousands of citizens took to the streets and shut down the 5th largest port in America. You burned some garbage and broke some glass. Thousands of people took to the streets and marched on banks to shut them down. You painted some walls. Thousands of people made headlines by organizing successfully a massive general strike that drew attention from the entire world. You made headlines by throwing rocks at the police, who incidentally didn’t show any use of force, who were in fact not even a significant presence, until your actions. In other words, you brought in the police. Thanks for nothing.”

In a response to objections by supporters of the violent faction to the letter, he adds: “What is the goal of employing property destruction, as exercised here in Oakland? … according to you, if I understand you correctly, some anarchists are both organizing to address human needs like food, shelter, and medical attention AND participating in property destruction. If that is correct, they are undermining their own work.”

The fact is that attacks on property are not part of a discussed and worked-out goal, but are an individualistic response to the power of the police and an implicit acceptance of the state’s cohesiveness, when in fact the police can be restrained with the right tactics and were restrained by the political success of the Occupy Oakland general strike following the October 25 police attacks.

The anarchists don’t understand that the strength of capital does not lie in the ownership of buildings or machines: it is a social power which underpins the moral imperative to repay debt, reinforced by the state. It doesn’t rest on brute force alone but on an ideological acceptance of its inevitability. Once that is ended in the popular imagination, capitalism is finished.

So the family members, babies in strollers, teachers, lawyers, and accountants who demonstrated nonviolently during the day in Oakland and whom the anarchists despise are the people who really express this questioning of the foundations of capital – not the amateur-hour but dangerous antics of black-clad vandals.

“Occupy Wall Street/We are the 99 percent” has grasped this at a visceral level. That is what is disturbing the ruling elite; what the movement has done is to create a new political imaginary which evokes the possibility of a more just economy.

“We Are the 99% /Occupy Wall Street”: Lessons in Civic Discipline from Liberty Park

A headline in Sunday’s Metro edition of the New York Times asserts that “Occupy Wall Street Protest Reaches a Crossroads.” The implication of such a title is that the writers believe OWS must change direction. The article manufactures a narrative that the occupation is a temporary affair rather than the beginnings of a long-term movement, and if the encampment at Zuccotti Park is ended, for whatever reason, the movement will founder.

Of course, the occupation does face many challenges: the onset of winter, an infiltration of mentally-unstable homeless people, the lack of bathrooms, the painstaking process of OWS’s horizontal democracy, the hostility of the mayor and some local residents. However, the occupiers are perfectly capable of imaginatively overcoming all of these problems and in fact are already devising ways of doing so.

But what really seems to be driving the Times’s narrative is the authors’ frustration by the movement’s lack of engagement with electoral politics through specific demands on the Democratic party. They cannot bring themselves to embrace the occupation’s assertion of popular sovereignty against the corruption of the political system, when the orientation of NYT writers is to attempt to influence the American political elite.

The article complains: “the protest’s leaderless and nonhierarchical structure raises the question of how effective it can be. The demonstrators have yet to proffer clear demands and have rejected any involvement in electoral politics.  And it remains to be seen what will become of the action should they lose their foothold at Zuccotti Park. If the question used to be ‘What do they want?’ it has shifted in recent days to ‘How long will it last?’ …”

But the article itself depicts the political space in which OWS operates: a space between respect for the First Amendment and the desire for public order that has enabled the movement to wedge open the restrictions imposed by the Patriot Act. This space remains viable because the legitimacy of the state is still founded on democratic ideals and because people are claiming it. Otherwise, the First Amendment would be as fictional as Humpty Dumpty.

“On Monday, a group of four local government officials sent a letter to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, insisting that he address the rising tensions in Lower Manhattan. Some protesters were still using the streets as toilets, they complained. Drumming was disturbing nearby residents. Long lines of barricades were making the sidewalks feel as congested as cattle drives. The city should enforce noise and sanitation laws more strictly, the letter said, and take the barricades down. But should it kick the protesters out? Adamantly no. ‘The quality of life needs to be solved but should not be an excuse by those unsympathetic to the message or the protesters’ First Amendment rights,’ one of the letter’s authors, State Senator Daniel L. Squadron, said.”

The concerns of neighbors are not all directed at the occupiers. “Half the residents are completely out of their minds and need Occupy Wall Street to leave immediately,” said Patricia L. Moore, who lives near Zuccotti Park and also leads the Quality of Life Committee for the community board. “And half are residents who came to the last meeting and said, ‘Welcome to the neighborhood.’ ” Ms. Moore said that most of the residents’ complaints were less about Occupy Wall Street’s presence than about getting the city to make life better for the protesters and the neighborhood. “It’s not about getting them out,” Ms. Moore said of the protesters. “It’s about public officials doing their jobs.”

The NYPD continue to harass demonstrations in the city but also seem to be nonplussed by the demonstrators’ refusal to acknowledge their authority. They are forced to manufacture trivial reasons for arrest, which undermines their own credibility. On Saturday afternoon hundreds of demonstrators streamed into a public square in lower Manhattan which houses several government buildings and is deserted at the weekend. The marchers “split into two groups, with about 200 on the sidewalk outside the court buildings and a larger group across the street on a large pedestrian island. Some of the protesters marched briskly toward the granite steps at 60 Centre Street, but officers ran to block their path. A lieutenant, using a bullhorn, said the crowd was not permitted on the steps. At another point, an officer ordered the protesters to leave the sidewalk, saying, ‘You are blocking pedestrian traffic.’ But many in the crowd of demonstrators shouted back, ‘We are pedestrian traffic.’…

“As the confrontation continued, the police kept yelling orders that the sidewalk was closed, or temporarily closed, or had to be closed to keep order. They fanned out in a line, stretching orange mesh netting across the breadth of the sidewalk, and walked along, pushing protesters back and sweeping them away. The strategy drew expressions of puzzlement from many in the area. ‘The police warned these people to move because of pedestrian traffic, but this is an empty place,’ said Robert Rosen, 66. ‘Who are they talking about?’ ”

What Occupy Wall Street needs to do is to maintain its course in the political space it has opened up, which means continuing to develop nonviolent methods of protest which gain it legitimacy and support from the 99 percent of Americans struggling with the effects of the recession and disgusted by the financial oligarchy’s control of the Democratic and Republican parties.

“Occupy Oakland” general strike more significant than anarchist vandalism

Much press coverage of Wednesday’s general strike in Oakland focuses predictably on the actions of a small group of anarchists in the early hours of Thursday morning. But most of the media at least acknowledge that the anarchists were a splinter group and that the main body of marchers resisted their attempts to stage provocations during the day.

Not so one writer at Salon.com: Emily Loftis portrays the anarchists as a “core group of occupiers” who broke into a former homeless shelter “in accordance with the Occupy Oakland General Assembly’s vote to support such occupations.”

She makes a case that the anarchists are the core of the occupation and that opposition to their adventurist actions comes from more moderate newcomers to the movement. But clearly the planned occupation of the foreclosed building did not follow the Occupy movement’s philosophy of achieving a consensus on tactics, which would have meant making a realistic assessment of the viability of the action. If the anarchists were really following a General Assembly decision, why occupy an empty building in the middle of the night after a massive demonstration that closed the port?

She writes: “Since last week’s raid, the size of the movement has more than doubled as its ranks swelled with union members, families and teachers, groups previously hesitant to join in. But many of these new protesters are also much more moderate than the anarchist core that first got the camp up and running. Occupy Oakland has heard a lot of debate around the use of violence and nonviolence, with peaceniks assuming the movement will be pacifist while other urbanites feel government-sanctioned violence against citizens should be resisted, even if it means engaging in self-defense.”

There is a big difference between self-defense and staging a provocative occupation with a small group of people who couldn’t possibly sustain it against a police assault. The net result of the action was not to liberate the empty building and transform it into a library or workshop, its stated aim, but to give the police political cover for attacking nonviolent protesters and injuring another Iraq veteran, Kayvan Sabehgi, now in intensive care with a lacerated spleen.

The New York Times reported: “Conflicts within the protest movement were evident throughout the night as people on the street argued and screamed at one another, encounters that on several occasions nearly came to blows. Some members of the group that had closed the port reprimanded those who smashed windows, threw rocks, ignited a 15-foot-high bonfire of garbage and covered downtown storefronts with graffiti. When a man wearing a bandana broke a window with an empty beer bottle, another protester yelled, ‘Who are you? That isn’t what this is about!’ Another man screamed, ‘The police are not your enemy!’ at young people wearing gas masks and the Guy Fawkes guise that has come to represent anarchists and the hackers group Anonymous.”

According to the LA Times, Occupy Oakland activists have already distanced themselves from the vandalism of the anarchists. Regi Hayes, a 35-year-old artist, said at the camp microphone on Thursday: “We have never ever acted like this in this democratic stronghold,” and pointed to a “stream of negativity” – including signs that said: “Kill the cops.”

Yes, the anarchists hijacked the situation after most of the demonstrators had gone home. That led to police action – and let’s be frank, the anarchists did provoke attacks by throwing rocks and bottles at the police – guided by a mistaken ideology favoring violent confrontation to “expose” the repressive nature of the system.

As rapper-activist Boots Riley, who was on the bullhorn at the front of the marchers for much of Wednesday, said later: “What we did during the day was much bigger, much more disruptive, than what the people breaking windows did last night.”

“We are the 99 percent” movement confronts anarchist adventures

The turn to violent adventurism by a group of self-identified anarchists in Oakland presents a challenge to the Occupy movement. According to the Oakland Tribune, an empty building which had been a homeless shelter was broken into by a group of about 100 protesters early on Thursday morning, following Wednesday’s successful general strike, who hung a banner that said “Occupy Everything.” “The taken-over building that formerly housed the Traveler’s Aid Society was foreclosed upon, according to the flier distributed by protesters. ‘Since then, the space sat vacant, as though it were disposable to those with the keys,’ the flier reads. ‘To us this space is invaluable. We are reclaiming it for the people. It is now open for our use’.”

The Guardian gives a detailed description of the scene: “Scores of protesters entered the building as loud music was played downstairs, some climbing onto the roof while others assessed the internet capabilities. By midnight a street party was in full swing outside the fresh property – but the hi-jinks were to be short-lived. Sporadic reports of a growing police presence had been sweeping through the crowd, and finally about 200 police gathered at 19th Street and Broadway in full riot gear, walking slowly down to protesters. Some demonstrators, keen to keep hold of their new occupation, had created a barricade of wooden pallets and rubbish bins at the corner of 16th Street and Broadway, and as police approached these were set alight. Police stopped around 100m away before advancing again, with some protesters walking forward to meet them. Officers then deployed teargas and about three explosive devices, which were described by some present as flashbang grenades.”

It’s important to distinguish who is who in this account. Occupy Oakland had in fact dealt with many anarchist provocations during the day and had kept the marches orderly and peaceful. “Throughout Wednesday, members of the crowd had attempted to redirect and dissuade those self-described anarchists. When they broke windows and defaced several banks with graffiti, some Occupy Oakland protesters returned to scrub the walls of a Wells Fargo bank branch. Another placed a sign on the shattered window of a Chase bank branch that read, ‘We are better than this’.”

The Occupy movement is using its own security teams to prevent incidents getting out of control: BagNews analyzes a video clip from the day’s events where “a group of protesters approach a Bank of America where they begin to violently bang on the window. The aggression is too much for the first Occupy security guy to handle, but very quickly and sure-handedly, a second Occupy security guy (the one with the green hat) steps in and takes control. In a second, these two guys, along with a woman, apparently affiliated with a local union, are calmly protecting the bank, the situation de-escalating so fast that, in the next instant, we see a girl standing where the rabble-rousers were eating a popsicle as the demonstrators rejoin the march.”

It was only in the small hours of the morning following the main demonstrations that the anarchist group occupied the building and set the barricade on fire, which allowed police to retaliate with “non-lethal” force without risking the public reaction which had led to the success of the general strike during the day. The police succeeded in clearing the building by 2:00 a.m., arresting dozens of protesters, including non-violent protesters who had been caught up in the assault. People involved with the Occupy movement told the Oakland Tribune they were “very sad and kind of angry” that this had happened. Graffiti near to stores which had had windows shattered said “This act of vandalism was not authorized by the general assembly. Peaceful protest.”

So far, nonviolent protest has attracted mass public support for the Occupy movement, which has stymied attempts to close the occupations down by force. That is why it is important to take into account that the OWS movement has gained significant political victories in Albany, where police officials refused to enforce a curfew, and Oakland where there is a split between the police and the mayor. The main occupation has survived in Zuccotti Park partly because local officials pressured the owners to cancel the planned “clean-up” of the park.

The anarchists don’t recognize these gains because they consider that the success of Occupy Wall Street stems solely from its own actions in confronting state forces. They ignore altogether the political influence of public support, in effect substituting their own actions for the mass movement. They believe that direct confrontation of state forces is revolutionary. However, the experience of Thursday morning’s events in Oakland shows that, far from resulting in revolution, the arrogance of their actions strengthens the hand of the state.

The philosophy of anarchism rejects any kind of external authority: any form of state is equivalent to a violent suppression of the individual. That makes it impossible for them to distinguish between different types of state, between a police-military dictatorship and a democratic state. Whatever changes have taken place in America since 9/11, the state’s legitimacy is still based on democracy – otherwise the one percent wouldn’t bother to spend their resources pushing through legislation that favors them. It makes a difference how the state distributes resources within society.

In New York, there is pressure to shut down the main occupation, using as political cover the infiltration of mentally-disturbed homeless people into the encampment, which police are said to be encouraging. On Thursday a front-page editorial in the New York Post called on the mayor to evict the OWS camp, claiming it had been “hijacked by crazies and criminals.” The anarchists in Oakland are giving similar political cover to the police, enabling them to take repressive actions against the occupation.

True revolutionary practice consists in first establishing the actual position of social forces engaged in struggle, judging their relative strengths at a given time, and taking advantage of every opportunity available in a democracy to carry out political activity oriented to the majority of Americans. Divisions in the state, radicalization of army veterans, even the support of elected representatives presents many such opportunities. The success of every action must be judged in terms of how far it strengthens and advances the mass movement.