Occupy the SEC: Against Capitalism Unbound

There is abundant evidence of a shift in the relation of bank capital to state power in the U.S. Historically, the state has facilitated the accumulation of capital through enforcement of laws and spending on infrastructure, intervening to defuse class resistance. Politics has been about control of state power on behalf of one faction or another of the ruling elite, using social wedge issues to conceal the class-warfare nature of state legislation.

But now, the unlimited PAC moneys of billionaire ideologues has destabilized the political system. Rightwing billionaires spectacularly have split the Republican party by the funding of extremist candidates, mobilizing the base against the establishment-supported business candidate. There is a real possibility that Rick Santorum will win more primaries – and the establishment knows his views are so far off mainstream that it would sink the party in the election.

Juan Cole points out: “Big money has always been a problem in American politics, but now humongous money threatens to capsize the ship of state. … the GOP super wealthy, having produced the tea party in 2010, have now given us national candidates so extreme that they often seem to be running for Supreme Leader of Iran instead of president of the United States. Although the Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court contributed to this problem, the culprits here are, fundamentally, the length of U.S. campaigns and the cost of television advertising for them.”

Santorum’s blend of social conservatism and blue-collar populism has clear racist undercurrents. He inverts conservative morality – that prosperity is a sign of righteousness – to mean that only the righteous (meaning white men) deserve to be prosperous and that everybody else in the world should be punished for their unrighteousness. A spokesman for Santorum stated: “He discusses religion in a broader context, that we are given rights, we are endowed by our Creator with rights, and those rights are being taken away when government grows in size.” Santorum is not objecting to government regulation of the rights of women or minority citizens, but to state limits on the divine rights of white men.

The Democrats are held together by Obama who for them represents a safeguard against extremist Republicans; in his speeches he has adopted some of the rhetoric of the Occupy movement, while behind the scenes his administration has actively prevented bank accountability for fraud. The recent settlement with mortgage lenders was achieved because Obama put huge political pressure on state attorneys-general who were resisting giving the banks a get out of jail card on falsely documented repossessions.

Simon Johnson comments in TruthOut: “… the Obama administration’s settlement with the mortgage lenders is consistent with its track record on all of its policies related to the financial sector, which has been abysmal. But it is also puzzling. Why would the administration continue to bend over backwards to be lenient towards top bankers under these circumstances? … at stake in the mortgage settlement are fundamental and systemic breaches of the rule of law – perjury and fraud on an economy-wide scale. The Justice Department has, without question, all of the power that it needs to prosecute these alleged crimes fully. And yet America’s top law-enforcement officials have consistently – and now completely – backed off. The main motivation behind the administration’s indulgence of serious criminality evidently is fear of the consequences of taking tough action on individual bankers. And maybe officials are right to be afraid, given the massive size of the banks in question relative to the economy. In fact, those banks are bigger now than they were before the crisis.”

Banks’ social power has increased along with mounting personal debt: today, one in seven Americans is being pursued by debt collectors. Matt Stoller comments: “One of the characteristics of the new social contract ushered in by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama is the increasing power of creditors to govern outright, from tax farming by banks to the use of credit checks to access employment opportunities. There are now thousands of people legally jailed because they aren’t paying their bills, ie. debtor’s prisons have returned. … Increasingly, creditors are coming to set up the institutional structures for financial surveillance, state-sponsored enforcement of their claims through tightened bankruptcy laws and the selective use of jail, and the denial of economic opportunity based on one’s interaction with the financial system.”

Michael Hudson points out that Greece is being used as an experiment by policy-makers to see how far wages and pensions can be lowered before the population presses back. “The EU and the banks have appointed a bank lobbyist, who is euphemistically called a ‘technocrat’, to be in political charge of Greece. His job is to see how much labor renumeration can be squeezed out. The neoliberals realize that the left in Europe is completely fragmented and does not have a defense against neoliberal policies. … Greece is being used as a laboratory experiment to determine the results when labor is squeezed very hard. It’s like trying to feed a horse less and less and see whether it’s really going to be more efficient until it keels over dead.”

Unlike Europe, the US has a still-viable civic culture and it will not be easy to impose this kind of austerity on the population. “Occupy the SEC” has taken advantage of legal avenues to present detailed proposals for the implementation of the “Volcker Rule” section of the Dodd-Frank act, whose intent was to reign in the speculation that led to economic meltdown in 2008. Volcker’s idea was to ban proprietary trading and investments in hedge funds at government-backed banks: or to put it another way, to stop banks making risky bets and then have the government bail them out if the bets go wrong. However, the SEC’s proposals have watered down the rule in favor of the banks.

The New York Times editorializes bluntly: “The law prohibits banks from “proprietary trading” — securities’ transactions where the profits and losses are sustained by the bank, not its customers. The sound premise is that taxpayers, who back the banks, should not be on the hook for speculation that mainly enriches traders and bank executives. So that banks can continue to serve customers, the law instructs regulators to allow certain forms of nonproprietary trading, including ‘market making,’ in which banks can buy and sell securities, but only for the purpose of facilitating transactions for clients. The proposed regulations fail to adequately distinguish between the two types of trades. That could allow banks to engage in proprietary trades under the guise of market making. … The Volcker rule is not as complicated as banks so eagerly claim. What is complicated is standing up to the banks, who are determined to do everything they can to preserve their high profits, no matter the risk.”

This is the site of an important struggle against plutocratic power. Occupy the SEC explains: “Whenever a federal agency proposes a substantive new regulation, by law it is required to seek public comment first. Normally the only parties that respond to agency comment requests are the companies that are affected by the regulations, and their attorneys (i.e. lawyers at the investment banks, in this case). As you might guess, their comments are always critical of regulation.” The pressure from bank lobbyists has inflated the size of the legislation document to over 500 pages, primarily to include loopholes that negate Congressional intent; simple rules have been avoided in favor of multi-factor tests and exemptions. Occupy the SEC’s 325-page rebuttal letter to bank lobbyists that oppose the Volcker law makes detailed comments that identify the loopholes and advocates a strong enforcement of the law to protect average Americans from risky banking activities.

Two members of the group, Caitlin Kline and Alexis Goldstein, discuss the letter on video here.

The Black Bloc Cyclops: Enabling, not fighting, Government Psyops Against Occupy

An article by Chris Hedges in Alternet criticizing the black bloc as “the cancer in Occupy” has created a stir among anarchist sympathizers.

Susie Cagle replies that anarchists are inspired by struggles in places like Greece. Their critics, she says, portray property destruction “by perceived black bloc ‘hooligans’ as a discrediting force in the movement, even while they understand the role of focused property destruction at, say, the Boston Tea Party, or in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s struggle against EGT in Longview, Washington.”

To conflate property destruction by individuals with a mass movement of protest in Greece or anywhere else is a remarkable piece of historical confusion. Anarchists believe that by recreating the image of other struggles across the world, they can create a movement in America. However, this only satisfies their own egos and alienates potential supporters of the Occupy Movement.

Ms. Cagle writes approvingly that “On November 2, an autonomously organized anti-capitalist black bloc marched through Oakland, destroying windows and other property at banks and, allegedly, strike-busting businesses such as Whole Foods. … That march resulted in the Oakland police calling in mutual aid, but it did not result in a discrediting of the national movement; tens of thousands still marched on the Port of Oakland hours later.”

What she omits from this story is that the black bloc members were a small minority of the marchers on that day, and that after the success of the thousands who marched on the Port of Oakland – despite the black bloc, not because of it – the occupation of an abandoned building by a small group led to a violent confrontation which overshadowed the day’s action. At the time, Colonel Despard quoted a critical letter from a non-black bloc anarchist, “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.”

Ms. Cagle herself makes the best argument against individualistic black bloc tactics: “A full plastic water bottle lobbed at police in full riot gear, whether it hits one of them or not, is enough to legally warrant the shooting of less lethal, rubber-coated steel bullets at a crowd. Occupiers, of course, threw more than just water bottles on January 28 – glass bottles, bricks, lawn chairs – but police, according to their own statements, sustained no injuries beyond two small cuts and one bruise. …”

In other words, throwing objects at the police is completely ineffectual and only serves to give them legal justification for firing their rubber bullets. But anarchists turn up their noses at legality; they don’t want to fight a political battle, using the provisions of the First Amendment, to win over millions of Americans to their cause. Chris Hedges is right to point out the absolutist arrogance of anarchists on this point. “The Black Bloc movement bears the rigidity and dogmatism of all absolutism sects. Its adherents alone possess the truth. They alone understand. They alone arrogate the right, because they are enlightened and we are not, to dismiss and ignore competing points of view as infantile and irrelevant.”

They are motivated by ideological purity, not by any kind of concrete evaluation of the situation the Occupy movement is in. Another anarchist supporter, Kevin Carson writes in self-justification: “The state is simply a group of human beings cooperating for common purposes — purposes frequently at odds with those of other groups of people, like the majority of people in the same society. … The state is nothing but an association for armed violence on the part of those who make money at the expense of other people. … The state is by far the greatest concentration of organized violence, and it almost always employs such violence for evil purposes — whether at Tahrir Square, Hama, or Oakland.”

Are not Social Security and Medicare also functions of the state? Shouldn’t we fight to defend Social Security and Medicare? Carson’s simplistic nineteenth-century definition of the state excludes organs of mass persuasion like TV and the press, or the creators of ideology in universities and think tanks, and assumes the impossibility of political pressure placing limits on state intervention. If the state were such a monolithic entity in support of capitalism, why is it that the super-rich have spent literally billions of dollars to push for legislation in their favor at the federal and state level? It’s clearly important for them to reverse state-imposed limits by agencies like the EPA and the IRS.

Carson quotes Andy Robinson, a professor at Cambridge University, who critiques news coverage of the Occupy movement. “There’s no mention of the fact that police have repeatedly, violently attacked Occupy protests which consisted simply of sit-downs and camp-outs. … The fact that police use violence routinely and with impunity is not mentioned.  In fact, police violence as such (as opposed to excessive brutality) is treated as uncontroversial.” Official lies by politicians and cops, Robinson argues, are a “psyop designed to conceal their own repeated use of violence.”

There is a psyops war going on, but the anarchists don’t want to fight this war. Otherwise they would recognize that black bloc activities assist the state’s psyop campaign to isolate and destroy the Occupy movement. We do have democracy in America, not a police state, and governments claim legitimacy for their actions by reference to the popular vote. Treating the state as always and everywhere engaged in violence against the people is an ideological justification for abstaining from using legal methods of struggle aimed at winning over the American people, who are the basis of popular sovereignty.

The Secrecy of Direct Action: A Trojan Horse in Occupy Wall Street

Nothing could assist the state more in its aim of denigrating the Occupy movement than black bloc tactics, which encourage anonymous provocateurs to create havoc and tarnish the rest of the movement. The debate over “diversity of tactics” taking place among occupiers confuses the issue. What needs to be clarified is whether the aim of direct action is to build a mass movement, or allow a small group of activists to substitute themselves for the people they claim to represent.

Looking at the state itself, it’s clear that the police have refined their tactics in order to control their media representation, following the political consequences of earlier attacks on occupations. Online videos of police pepper-spraying women in New York and firing rubber bullets at protesters in Oakland evoked a huge public reaction and gave the Occupy movement a national following.

In Washington DC last Saturday, in contrast, police were careful to avoid violent confrontations, saying they were not evicting protesters but were merely enforcing an existing ban on camping. The occupiers, however, were in no doubt what was happening. “This is a slow, media-friendly eviction,” Melissa Byrne told the Guardian. “We’re on federal property, so they have to make it look good.”

The Washington eviction followed a carefully planned protocol where police claimed to be merely enforcing regulations, held bad-faith negotiations with protesters, then declared the area “closed” and used metal fences and shields to physically force occupiers out of the park. The police were well prepared for the eviction: the Washington Post noted “dozens of officers, a patrol wagon, an arrest-processing tent and a cherry-picker truck used to remove the Guy Fawkes mask that had been placed over the face of Civil War general James B. McPherson’s statue.”

According to the same article: “Protesters and police at first interacted in good humor Saturday as they negotiated taking down the big, blue ‘Tent of Dreams,’ which protesters had unfurled over a Civil War statue Monday. But relations grew tense as the day wore on and police began clearing the park of several truckloads of bedding and trash. At one point, dozens of officers pushed back the crowd with riot shields so they could erect more barricades.”

Much was made of the presence of rats and unsanitary conditions, reinforced by the image of park workers in yellow or white hazmat suits dumping bedding. In other words, part of the operation was to depict the protesters as unclean, lazy scroungers, as a rabble without purpose or constitutional rights of assembly.

The police are now ultra-careful because control of images by the mainstream media has been undercut by activists livestreaming police actions and posting YouTube videos. So it’s disturbing that a livestreamer was attached by a masked individual on the Occupy Oakland support march held in Manhattan the previous week.

The Gothamist reported: “From the march’s beginning at Washington Square Park, an unusual amount of masked protesters along with the heavy scent of booze contributed to a heightened state of volatility. The instances of projectiles being thrown were met with scorn, outrage and chants of ‘This is a peaceful protest’ by a majority of the protesters. When a can and a bottle were thrown on 14th Street, the crowd was stunned into silence, as New York’s Occupy Wall Street protesters have largely shied away from the more aggressive tactics used by their mask-donning West Coast counterparts. When a masked man began punching the camera of a livestreamer, other protesters urged the police to arrest him.”

And it’s more disturbing that spokespeople for OWS wouldn’t defend the livestreaming journalist.  According to the Gothamist, “That man is Tim Pool, a well-known if extremely divisive documenter of Occupy Wall Street. Pool records everything he sees—including protesters releasing the air out of the tires of NYPD squad cars during the eviction of Zuccotti Park. … Patrick Bruner, Occupy Wall Street’s former ‘official’ press spokesman, told the Voice that he was ‘very uncomfortable’ with Pool’s actions, and shines his light into Pool’s lens whenever he trains it on him.”

The Guardian reported Bruner as claiming: “It wasn’t a random individual attacking Tim Pool. It was an individual attempting to make it so that he could no longer film someone who didn’t want to be filmed. [Occupy] never filed for a permit. Nearly every action that we do, on some level, is illegal and when you have someone documenting it in a way that doesn’t respect an individual’s privacy or their right to choose whether or not they want to be filmed, that puts people in danger.”

Bruner’s remarks are specious: there is a big difference between the illegality of asserting the right to protest, where permits are an arbitrary police restriction, and attacking property, which is a clear violation of laws most people accept. Pool vigorously defended himself in the Gothamist: “… it does offend me when people say I’m putting them at risk. If you throw a bottle at the police, you’re putting people at risk. When two innocent people who were doing nothing get arrested because you threw the bottle, that’s putting people at risk. I’m going to hold those people accountable.”

The Indypendent commented: “Those who had been at the afternoon’s Occupy Town Square beforehand might have seen this coming. Members of OWS’s Direct Action Working Group—which oversees the planning of most marches and other actions—gave an impromptu teach-in about the idea of ‘diversity of tactics,’ which was in many respects insightful, but ultimately became an apologia for undertaking, or at least tolerating, what might be construed as violent actions. The villains of the presentation, perhaps even more so than police, were those within the movement who denounce or try to stop others who want to do such things. They were described as likely to be sexist and racist for trying to insist on nonviolent discipline.”

It seems that the eviction at Zuccotti Park has changed the dynamic within the activists of Occupy Wall Street, and that protesters’ frustration with continuous police harassment has encouraged some of them to adopt the tactics of the black bloc.

Michael Greenberg observed in a recent essay: “The [police] crackdowns scare away less hard-core supporters. Actions now routinely involve a diminishing group of three hundred to five hundred demonstrators or less. Some activists I spoke with preferred the smaller, more concentrated quality of the actions, partly, I suspect, because it gave them the elevated feeling of being the street fighters, the incorruptible ones, the keepers of what is pure. Skirmishes with police could be seen as proof that they were a bona fide threat to the system.”

The Village Voice also noted: “Last night’s episode speaks to an ongoing tension within Occupy Wall Street, as many protesters and organizers embrace radical transparency, while others — especially those involved in planning direct actions — see a need for secrecy and strict security culture to protect the movement from the government infiltrators almost everyone agrees must be within the movement. Bruner warned that the ongoing police crackdowns against occupations from Oakland to New York only serve to encourage protesters to protect themselves with increasing secrecy and Black Bloc tactics.”

Patrick Bruner may only be speaking for one group of activists. Other occupiers would differ, like Ted Hall who told the Guardian he believes Pool is helping Occupy face facts: “We have people within our movement who are doing things that the vast majority of people in this movement would not agree with. The vast majority of us are not going to agree that releasing the air out of the tires of the cops is going to do anything but agitate them, and they have guns.” Occupy should focus its energy on playful, creative actions planned and executed with transparency, Hall contends. … “Our strengths are not in secrecy. Our strengths are in transparency,” he adds. “Anything that’s secretive is going to attract instigators and undercovers like a moth to a flame.”

Occupy Movement: Black Bloc Are the Real Authoritarians

After the Occupy Oakland demonstration last Saturday, the debate about black bloc tactics has been resurrected in the blogosphere. Much of the discussion is about whether property damage is acceptable on principle; but this kind of argument omits the history of Occupy’s experience with the state.

Occupy Wall Street captured the political imagination of the American people by dramatizing the divide between the one percent super-rich and the 99 percent rest of us, bypassing the corrupted political system which straitjackets people into voting for the representatives of the elite and against their own interests.

By elaborating a strategy that refuses to be confined to accepted forms of protest that pose no challenge to the basis of the plutocrats’ power, OWS has broken the two-party monopoly of political discourse, restored communality among the dispossessed and rejected the selfishness of the elite. Its impact has been responsible for the Republican party’s split between an affluent establishment and its agitated base; and it’s also why Obama’s state of the union speech had to pretend to signal action against bank mortgage abuses.

Romney’s slip when he said he didn’t care about the poor expresses a truth: from an electoral campaigning point of view, the poor can be ignored because they are disenfranchised and have no political voice. Occupy Wall Street changed that.

The legitimacy of the state is threatened by this new movement, and it responded with an initial baffled violence which created a public backlash and propelled the occupiers to national attention. Local police were then quickly brought under the direction of federal Homeland Security agencies and more subtle strategies were used to politically isolate and evict the occupations with the legalistic justification of public health and security issues.

When the state uses its overwhelming weaponry to suppress OWS protests, individuals who provide them with political cover by initiating violence with pointless vandalism are playing a very reactionary role. Whatever one might think about the need to defend the movement against police attacks, it is tactically cowardly and provocative to throw a bottle and then duck into the crowd. And it is doubly questionable when livestreamers are attacked by masked individuals.

It’s important to understand that the police assault on Occupy Oakland is legitimized by a coordinated propaganda and legal offensive against the movement. Reuters reported Alameda County DA Nancy O’Malley saying: “While we respect every citizen’s right to protest peacefully, we will not tolerate individuals who come to Oakland with an organized strategy to riot, clash with police officers, vandalize property and wreak havoc upon the city.” She was able to justify police violence simultaneously with a respect for citizens’ rights only by invoking the insurrectionist image cultivated by the black bloc.

The blame doesn’t lie with the “kids” on the Oakland march wearing “black bandannas and hoodies. … Some carried impressive movable barricades composed of rectangular sheets of strong corrugated steel, screwed to wooden frames to which handles had been attached so that three or four people could hunker behind them and push them into lines of police.” The blame lies with those who heroicize this form of defiance as somehow revolutionary, when it only makes it easy for the police and press to isolate the demonstration by defining it as a riotous mob.

Let’s look again at the chronology of events last Saturday. Susi Cagle, a comics journalist who was arrested that day, pointed out that: “The police kettled the marchers — contained them in one area with no way to leave — twice. The first time, they declared an unlawful assembly, but provided no escape route, and then shot tear gas into the crowd, sending people into a panic and forcing them to escape by tearing down fences around a lot, by the park, where they were contained.”

This is confirmed by yet another eyewitness statement: “… the march tried to track back toward downtown, only to be fenced in and blocked by chain link fencing and police lines. With nowhere to go the march stalled for a short while until, without provocation, Oakland’s finest began lobbing numerous (probably about 10) smoke/flash grenades into the dense crowd. People scattered briefly without any panicking and then reassembled. About 10 minutes after the smoke cleared, the police from a cruiser speaker declared an unlawful assembly and issued a disperse order.  …  From the way the crowd was blocked an uninvolved observer might well conclude that any confrontations were in response to the police decision to trap the march.”

It seems fairly clear that the police deliberately kettled the demonstrators in order to provoke predictably undisciplined confrontations that would justify mass arrests later in the day. They were following a combined police-legal strategy here. Mike King notes in CounterPunch: “For weeks the police have been raiding groups of people in Oscar Grant Plaza and giving them stay-away orders that prohibit them from being in the Plaza.  This is the same type of technique the city has been using in North Oakland and the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland to harass communities of color (gang injunctions), and it is likely a civil rights violation.”

The criterion for judging appropriate strategy and tactics in this situation has to be the building of a mass movement against the corrupt political system, bank evictions, and state cooption by the ruling corporate elite. Individualistic black bloc provocations make it harder, not easier, to build such a movement.

In These Times writer Rebecca Burns notes: “Embracing a ‘diversity of tactics,’ as is being discussed in Oakland and in New York would mark a shift from the movement’s general stance of nonviolence—but it’s wrong to conflate this with advocating violence. … Thus far, Occupy’s non-hierarchical structure and embrace of ideological diversity has often meant that direct actions serve as a locus for popular anger rather than a means to develop and build agreement on strategy. At stake is not so much ‘nonviolence’ writ large, as autonomy, and the degree to which disparate groups are willing to make and keep agreements that could allow them to act in greater coordination.”

However OWS might decide to work with these groups, the important thing is that occupiers are conscious of the reactionary role the black bloc plays. Arguments about “diversity of tactics” confuse the issue: they are a cover for refusing to deal with the problem of how an open movement can protect itself from being broken up by misguided actions which aid the state in isolating and destroying it. These arguments use the pretext of the accommodation of diverse viewpoints in a broad movement – but the black bloc people want to impose their viewpoint and their strategy, which they won’t discuss with others, on everybody else. They certainly don’t propose street battles with the police on their own.

Those shouting the loudest about “diversity of tactics” are, in the concrete circumstances of the movement today, seeking to use other protestors who may not agree with them as cannon-fodder for their actions. They are the true authoritarians, not those occupiers seeking to restrain them from giving the police political cover for violent suppression of protests.