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.

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.

Recall Walker vote sabotaged by Democratic National Committee

On June 5 Wisconsinites go to the polls to vote in recall elections. Even though extreme right-wing governor Scott Walker has presided over a disastrous jobs record, has been linked to corruption and crony capitalism, and taken away collective bargaining rights for state workers, it’s not going to be easy for Democrats to win this election.

Wisconsin’s voters are already highly polarized for or against Walker on party lines. The results will be a test of whether the Democrats can attract enough new voters to overcome the strength of Walker’s highly-motivated Republican base. In a virtually uncontested primary, he got over 600,000 votes, close to the total for all the candidates in the Democratic primaries combined.

Yet the Democratic National Committee – the body responsible for political activity in support of Democratic Party candidates – has refused a request from Wisconsin’s Democrats for a major investment in their campaign, in sharp contrast to Tea Party Republicans who are pouring resources into the election and view it as a national referendum on their right-wing policies.

The national Democratic leadership has no stomach for a fight that came up from the grassroots in defense of the social contract. They are themselves tied to corporate interests and the financial industry, and don’t want to get involved in a movement to remove elected officials when Democratic governors are also cutting state workers’ jobs and benefits to fix budget shortfalls. They want Democratic voters to stay passive, and they avoid contact with a mass movement intent on fighting for change. Obama has effectively neutralized the left within the party, regularly exploiting people’s desire to believe in him by making rhetorical but vague promises for reform while in practice ensuring nothing changes – even after the $2 billion loss by JP Morgan Chase, Obama still praises Jamie Dimon as “one of the smartest bankers we got.”

The popular protest movement that led to a three-week occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol and over 100,000 to demonstrate outside became harnessed to a campaign to get signatures for recalls.  In the second round, over a million signatures – twice the number needed to force Walker into an election – were gathered. But the union leadership made a strategic mistake in not building a movement that took up issues such as unemployment, homelessness and bank evictions in order to broaden their support, as critics of the protests noted at the time.

That’s not to say that the recall campaign has been ineffective: the first round last summer reduced Walker’s senate majority to one, and resulted in a shutdown of his more blatantly partisan legislation. It was a significant victory against Republicans who had been elected against the Democratic trend in 2008. But the restricted electoral focus of the Walker recall meant that Democratic primary voters understandably made a pragmatic choice for their candidate, picking Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett rather than Kathleen Falk, who had aligned herself closely with the recall campaign from the beginning and had pledged to veto the state budget if it did not restore collective bargaining rights.

The problem for Democratic voters is that Barrett’s strategy is for a return to rule by consensus at a time when Republican voters have steadily moved rightwards. In 2010 Walker was silent about eliminating collective bargaining, but voiced generic Tea Party slogans such as cutting taxes and balancing the budget. This got him decisive numerical support from the very conservative population of Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties, large suburban areas that ring Milwaukee – described as “the pulsing heart of the GOP electorate” in Wisconsin .

The large blue circles show Democratic voters concentrated in Madison and Milwaukee. The red circles around Milwaukee represent the concentrations of suburban Republican voters.

The demographic of these counties fits exactly the profile of Tea Party Republican supporters described by author Anthony DiMaggio: “white, over 40-50, middle to upper income Americans who have generally done pretty well for themselves over the years, but are being pressured by the neoliberal attack on working Americans.  They’re rightly angry at being excluded from the tremendous economic prosperity that has taken place over the last three decades.”

Political science professor Barry Burden points out that none of the primary groups affected by current high unemployment rates — African American and Latino workers, those without college degrees, and manufacturing-based workers — are represented in the area. “If voters in Waukesha County don’t perceive widespread societal problems, they see problems as rooted in individual choices, he says. Therefore, he adds, ‘They don’t accept government as the solution to an individual problem’.”

Waukesha grew as a bedroom community for Milwaukee during the prosperity years of the 1960s, when a strong manufacturing base gave blue and white-collar workers well-paid jobs that enabled them to buy houses out of the city and to commute to work. A post in a 2004 Democratic Underground discussion board described the migration more bluntly as white flight: “Waukesha County used to be ‘Good Ol Rural America’ up until around twenty years ago. The county itself wasn’t made more prosperous overall since then, the rich from Milwaukee just migrated for better schools, less crime, and frankly less of/distance from blacks. Busing had a *huge* amount to do with the development of Waukesha county. It’s like why Detroit and Chicago have a bunch of rich suburbs. Milwaukee just basically all went in one direction because there is nothing in Racine and Kenosha worth looking at.”

A similar self-segregation of major cities can be found in most U.S. states. Lawrence Davison of West Chester University gave this analysis of Pennsylvania, which could apply equally well to Wisconsin: “…the people in the relatively rural center of the state as well as those in the urban suburbs, not only care little for those living in cities such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, they actively dislike them. They don’t feel like they live in the same society. And they certainly don’t want to be taxed to help an urban population with a lot of poor folks. In others words, whatever sense of social solidarity rural and suburban Pennsylvanians feel, it does not go much beyond their own local community.”

Whatever happens in Wisconsin’s elections, in the longer term a wider, inclusive and pluralist community has to be rebuilt in America. To date, only the Occupy movement has made this a central issue and worked on ways of creating a new society which values members of the 99 percent: as they stubbornly assert, another world is  possible.

Despite Republican primaries, most Americans are not insane

Those who rely on the mass media for their information about what is happening in America today most likely think the country has gone crazy. The Republican presidential primaries have produced political comments that have comedians struggling to parody them further. But what is unreported is the huge gap between the discourse of the Washington power elite and mainstream Americans.

E.J. Dionne comments on the primaries in the Washington Post: “Republicans cannot shut down their presidential nominating contest because the party is in the midst of an upheaval wrought by the growing dominance of its right wing, its unresolved attitudes toward George W. Bush’s presidency, and the terror that the GOP rank and file has stirred among the more moderately conservative politicians who once ran things. … Bush’s efforts to craft a ‘compassionate conservatism’ friendlier toward those in the political middle collapsed into ruins years ago. This year’s Republican candidates almost never speak Bush’s name. It is to Santorum’s discredit that he did not dare defend his perfectly defensible vote in favor of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education program. Santorum, too, fears the pitchforks wielded by those who see any exertion of federal authority as leading down a road to serfdom.”

Likewise, when Santorum attacks women’s rights to birth control and denigrates the opportunity for higher education, he is attacking the premises of the chance of a middle-class future for most people. This is central to mainstream American values: yet the media and talk shows find nothing wrong with his statements. In contrast, the Washington Post reports: “a new Bloomberg poll finds that an overwhelming majority, 77 percent, believe birth control should not even be ‘part of the national political debate.’ It also finds that 62 percent think the contraception battle is ‘a matter of women’s health and access to birth control,’ the Dem framing of the issue, while only 33 percent believe it’s about ‘religious liberty.’ Fifty-three percent think Rush Limbaugh should be fired for his ‘slut’ comments.”

And the same disconnect also applies to the Supreme Court. “If Americans were wary of the Supreme Court opening the floodgates of outside election spending with Citizens United two years ago, they like it even less now that they’ve seen what the decision has reaped. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll Tuesday shows 69 percent of Americans think super PACs should be illegal,” comments Talking Points Memo.

A refreshing display of true mainstream opinion was given over the last weekend (March 12) in Wisconsin, where a mass rally at the state Capitol commemorating the fight against governor Walker’s legislative attacks on state worker unions, and the continued push for his recall, confirm that resistance to his implementation of right-wing Republican priorities has continued and is stronger than ever. The rally was estimated to mobilize up to 60,000 people.

Symbolic of the energy of the powerful recall movement is the candidacy of housewife Lori Compas, who organized her own grass-roots drive to recall the GOP Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald. Democratic professionals had not planned to try to unseat him, since he represents a strongly Republican district, but Ms. Compas, one of his constituents, succeeded in collecting enough signatures to force him into an election. When she spoke at the rally, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, she held up a memo from the Government Accountability Board that said four recall elections against GOP senators should move forward. “This is Scott Fitzgerald’s pink slip,” she said.

Walker is a good example of what Republican rhetoric actually means. His onslaught on unions has been accompanied by major cuts in funding for the University of Wisconsin and the state school system, as well as programs for the sick and poor in the state. But what polarized Wisconsinites against him so completely was the way in which he refused any kind of compromise, forcing legislation down the throats of his political opponents.  Although Wisconsin is a politically divided state, he is far enough to the right of mainstream opinion there that even conservatives joined in the campaign for his recall.

The Democratic party leadership and most union leaders present Obama as the best alternative to the crazy Republicans. But he, too, is to the right of U.S. public opinion. He is projecting war with Iran, asserting the right to assassinate political opponents, is in thrall to the big banks (which the corporate Dems have staked the economy on), and has reneged on everything he professed to stand for. Ultimately, he’s a political lightweight who has accepted the status quo and merely seeks a more rational way of smoothing over conflict.

Economist James Crotty comments “what Obama and the Democrats seem to be striving for is a moderate or a less savage attack on social programs [compared to Republicans]. But the narrative is largely the same: we’ve lived beyond our means (which isn’t true), and the solutions therefore are going part of the way with the Republicans but nowhere near all the way. So it’s a kind of a less savage, less intense assault on social democracy, but an assault nevertheless.”

In These Times writer Mike Elk points out: “a few days after the Communications Workers of America (CWA) endorsed President Obama for re-election, the president signed a bill funding the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that, according to CWA President Larry Cohen, makes the organizing rights of airline and rail workers “worse than it’s ever been.” … As president, Obama publicly distanced himself from labor law reform—he didn’t give a single major speech on the subject of workers’ rights, as opposed to immigration and climate change. Likewise … Obama’s most recent State of the Union address did not mention the unprecedented attacks on workers’ rights at the state level, in places like Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana.”

Instead of endorsing Obama for president and contributing large sums towards his re-election, unions should be using their resources for on-the-job organizing and grass-roots campaigns to repair the damage caused by the Republican drive to dismantle what union rights still remain. They cannot depend on Obama to defend them.

Political opinion polarizes against Republican plutocrats

The announcement that over a million signatures were gathered for recalling Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has met with a deafening silence from the media. It’s remarkable how little has been written about this significant pushback against Walker’s Tea Party policies, compared with the barrage of commentary that has been generated about the relatively inconsequential Republican primaries.

The Wisconsin State Journal reported: “United Wisconsin, the organization formed to recall Walker, turned in a total of 1.9 million signatures, a number than includes 845,000 to recall Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and more than 21,000 signatures apiece for Republican Sens. Pam Galloway of Wausau, Van Wanggaard of Racine and Terry Moulton of Chippewa Falls.”

In a theatrical move to show that anti-Walker sentiment was not confined to Madison and Milwaukee but was distributed throughout the whole state, “a procession of volunteers from each of the state’s 72 counties hauled boxes of recall signatures from the back of a U-Haul through a path cleared through some 700 chanting volunteers, and up the steps to a room in the state Government Accountability Board offices.”

The number of signatures surprised most observers, but made visible both the extent of hostility to the ALEC-inspired legislative assault on unions and the grass-roots activation of Democratic party supporters against it. The Wisconsin electorate is sharply polarized over an issue which, like the Occupy movement, raises questions of fairness and justice, and won’t be washed away by a flood of campaign money backing Walker. Greg Sargent commented: “… the mere fact that there’s already so much support for the recall suggests that despite the Dem failure to take back the Wisconsin state senate last year, there’s still a tremendous amount of grassroots energy on the ground on the Dem side — nearly a year since the fight in Wisconsin first began — in a key swing state in a presidential election year.”

Ryan Lawler, a board member for United Wisconsin, told the New York Times: “Scott Walker and his supporters tried to demean and marginalize recall circulators, but in Wisconsin winter, an army of more than 30,000 Wisconsin born-and-bred recall volunteers took to street corners, malls, places of worship, dinner tables and sidewalks to take their state back.”

What the Republican primaries express is one extreme political pole, like Walker’s, on a national scale. Romney’s 15 percent tax rate and tone-deaf dismissal of his $370k fees from public speaking as a “small sum” puts him on a different planet from Americans facing poverty and foreclosure. The racist resentment and militaristic name-calling that Gingrich and Santorum have adopted to feed the prejudices of crazed Republican voters is far removed from Main Street America.

The New York Times opined: “[Romney’s] suggestion that it is un-American to talk about rising populist resentment is self-serving and hypocritical. Republicans, in particular, have eagerly stoked such resentments against minorities and the poor. That was the essence of the ‘Southern strategy’ that Republicans, beginning with Richard Nixon, used to urge white voters to defect from a Democratic Party that supported civil rights. It continued for decades with attacks on busing, affirmative action, immigration and welfare, and was sounded most recently by Mr. Gingrich, with his attacks on Mr. Obama as ‘the food stamp president’.”

Social inequality, which the Republicans try to cloud over with wedge issues, is coming to dominate the election narrative. Romney is understandably shy about releasing his tax returns, because, according to Daniel Berman, a former U.S. Treasury deputy international tax counsel and now director of tax at Boston University’s graduate tax program, they could shed light on how Romney and Bain use offshore strategies to avoid taxes. ABC News reports: “In addition to paying the lower tax rate on his investment income, Romney has as much as $8 million invested in at least 12 funds listed on a Cayman Islands registry. Another investment, which Romney reports as being worth between $5 million and $25 million, shows up on securities records as having been domiciled in the Caymans.”

If the Republicans are blatantly the party of the one percenters, the 99 percent have little confidence in the Democratic leadership. U.S. society is as politically polarized as in Wisconsin, and major upheavals are in the offing. Already lawmakers have had to back off from support for SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) laws after internet companies turned to the public, dramatically publicizing their opposition to the legislation by blacking out their sites today.

“Occupy/We are the 99 percent” movement takes steps towards a clearer strategy

The decisive defeat by referendum of Ohio’s anti-union legislation on Tuesday was a clear rejection of Tea Party Republican assaults on unions and social programs. Across the country, from Iowa to Mississippi, Maine and Arizona, right-wing initiatives were repudiated by large margins. The votes show that the public never really supported Tea Party policies: they were conned in 2010 by demagogic rhetoric which appealed to a sense of losing ground economically.

Washington Post writer E.J. Dionne describes the vote as a rebellion against Republican “overreach” which should guide them to back away from social-issue extremism. But he assumes that the Republicans are capable of returning to a centrist policy: their presidential candidate circus has given no indication that this is possible.

Political commentators have seen the Ohioans’ rejection of mandatory healthcare plans as inconsistent: but it’s not difficult to understand. Voters were not expressing support for the Democratic party leadership and don’t want to be chained to making regular subsidies to insurance and pharmaceutical companies any more than they do to one for the banks. Their motivation is to resist corporate encroachments on living standards: a survey of those voting in Ohio revealed that 57 percent believed “Republicans backing Kasich’s law are putting the interests of big corporations ahead of those of average working people.”

Union support cohering around the Occupy movement, from the base rather than the top, is a clearer indication of the public mood. Union activists are adopting some of the direct action tactics of the occupiers, and have provided material and political support to the occupations. The New York Times reports that: “A dozen Verizon workers plan to begin walking from Albany to Manhattan on Thursday in a ‘March for the 99 percent.’ … In Los Angeles, labor leaders have repeatedly lobbied Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa not to evict the protesters.”

The Occupy movement has its problems – the weather, security, and a drumbeat of official concerns about public safety – but they are addressing them imaginatively in New York through the use of large military tents for communal use, which not only provide more warmth but make it easier to maintain occupiers’ security. They are oriented outwards to the public: together with initiatives to join with grassroots groups in minority/immigrant communities, a march from New York to Washington, called “Occupy the Highway,” is taking their message into communities not normally reached by political movements. The march will go through Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore, as well as smaller cities. And they are due to arrive when the congressional supercommittee announces its decisions on cutting social welfare, in order to focus attention on the continuing tax cuts for the super-rich.

In Oakland, a fatal shooting near the camp has intensified the pressure to close down the occupation as the mayor now calls on protesters to disband, but the biggest problem facing occupiers is the political paralysis of the General Assembly in the face of an ideological incoherence introduced by a concentration of dissident anarchists.

These anarchists are rushing to throw themselves into street battles with Oakland’s militarized police when the real fight is to win over the public in a way which creates divisions among state forces. KALW reporter Ali Winston comments: “A lot of the momentum that built up before the General Strike seems to have stalled, and that is due in no small part to the chaos that broke out late in the evening following the General Strike. There has been a lot of soul searching about the failed occupation of the vacated Travelers Aid Society on November 2. … many of the people involved in that action, not all of them, were actually visitors to Oakland from other west coast areas, such as Olympia, Washington, Santa Cruz, and Modesto in California, which are communities where there are large anarchist elements as well.”

Wednesday night’s General Assembly voted to march Saturday in support of Egyptian activists, but had difficulty reaching a decision on a resolution disavowing black bloc tactics. Oakland North reported some of the discussion: “‘Violence and vandalism only leads to one thing,’ one middle-aged protester with long hair said from the stage during the ‘pro and con’ portion of the meeting.  ‘They escalate, we escalate, and this thing does not end well.’ ‘We can’t start developing ways to police people’s behavior,’ said another man from the stage.” However, after the shooting on Thursday the general assembly declared: “This is what we are fighting against” and “This is a peaceful revolution.”

America is not a dictatorship: black bloc vandalism only alienates the majority the movement needs to win over. One participant in the Oakland general strike notes: “there is this consistent need by black block anarchists to be coercive with their tactics, by bringing property destruction to [nonviolent protests] without any kind of agreement from others who are participating … The use of property destruction around the general strike was terrible strategy as we are now seeing with the footage that has been broadcast across the globe. … The events that followed left a sour taste for everyone as local small businesses were smashed and vandalized. … With this masculine centered eroticism of property destruction, there also appears to be a general sense of entitlement around ownership of a protest event.”

The self-centered individualism of the dissident anarchists and their attitude to property mirrors that of the financial elite they are protesting: they think that simply taking possession of something gives them the right to dispose of it as they see fit. But what has to be changed is social acceptance of the right of individuals to privately “own” and control resources needed by the community, be it water supplies or buildings. This right is enforced by the state, but a democratically-based state can only govern if it is recognized as legitimate by the majority of citizens.

In other words, activists can’t substitute their own actions for a necessary political and ideological change in the whole of society. “Occupy Wall Street/We are the 99 percent” is developing and counterposing a new morality to the property owners of Wall Street through the use of nonviolent actions which to date have successfully challenged the legitimacy of the financier-controlled political system.

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.

The Occupy Movement realizes significant political victories

Thousands of demonstrators marched in Oakland on Wednesday in support of Occupy Oakland. During the day enthusiastic crowds forced a number of banks to close, and as evening fell their numbers swelled to an estimated ten thousand as they effectively shut down the city’s maritime port.  The minimal police presence at the marches confirmed the occupiers’ political victory over the police and local administration, who are now pointing fingers at each other over the fallout from their militaristic attack on the encampment at the weekend.

The New York Times report makes clear the mass support the occupiers enjoyed: “Throughout the day, the mood at the protest remained largely jovial. Ice cream vendors pushing carts joined marchers as temperatures climbed into the mid-70s. Police officials said no arrests had been made as of Wednesday afternoon. In addition to the many hundreds of city residents who joined the strike, people drove in from across the state to participate.”

Another victory for the Occupy movement took place in Albany, where New York governor Cuomo had threatened to enforce an 11 p.m. curfew on the occupiers. Albany police officials refused to go along with this arbitrarily-decided regulation, a reflection of popular pressure in support of the movement. Cuomo is particularly rankled by the comparatively small occupation because they have taken up the issue of renewing the New York millionaires’ tax, which Cuomo is determined to allow to expire in December.

The Times Union of Albany pointed out that: “What is particularly problematic about this otherwise unimposing Occupy splinter-movement is the apparent lack of political leverage the governor has been able to exercise over it, and the backlash he now faces for trying. In what one police official described as an ‘egregious abuse of power,’ Cuomo’s top aide Larry Schwartz ‘coordinated’ with Albany police officials to have an 11 p.m. curfew enforced at the demonstration, in Academy Park, which is controlled in part by the state and partially by the city.”

The New York Times gives more details of the climbdown: “Albany’s police chief, stirred by the presence of hundreds of demonstrators, including parents, young children and the elderly, had second thoughts. At the same time, Albany County’s district attorney, P. David Soares, informed the police chief and the mayor that he would decline to prosecute anyone arrested. ‘I expressed the view that if we engage, with all the colleges nearby, we could see the population triple, quadruple in a matter of hours,’ Mr. Soares said. ‘It would be a mistake to pre-emptively strike’.”

In Manhattan, angry veterans marched to protest the injury of Scott Olsen by the police raid in Oakland and asserting the right of the Occupy movement to protest under the constitution. Joseph Carter, a two-time Iraq war veteran spoke at the demonstration. “For ten years we’ve been engaged in wars that have enriched the wealthiest one percent, decimated our economy and left our nation with a generation of traumatized and wounded veterans that will require care for years to come.”

These victories are signs of the rapid growth of support for the Occupy movement; the state remains determined to stifle it, however, trying out different tactics. Insofar as the NYPD cannot contain Occupy Wall Street by force, they are attempting to subvert the political composition of the occupation by directing disturbed homeless people, drug addicts, and released convicts to Zuccotti Park.

“In These Times” writer Patrick Glennon points out that “protesters are aware of unaffiliated individuals taking advantage of some Occupy camps’ amenities. The encampment in lower Manhattan is seeking ways to distinguish between uncommitted freeloaders and legitimate participants when it comes to food distribution, opening debate on the movement’s structure and policies.”

State attempts at infiltration and the oncoming winter pose major challenges for the occupiers, and they will need as much practical support from the public as possible. Whatever else happens in the next few weeks, the developing crisis of the euro and the looming decision of the undemocratic Gang of Six to make cuts in federal entitlements are certain to inflame public opinion against government appeasement of arrogant bank CEOs. Obama intends to run for reelection on the platform of the lesser evil to the Republicans, but the pluralist movement being built by OWS against the plutocratic stranglehold on power has gone way beyond him. Issues of popular sovereignty are coming to the fore, as in Greece where a plebiscite may yet reject the draconian austerity conditions demanded by European bankers.