Pruning Shears

A lot of folks have been jumping on the latest US Bureau of Labor Statistics report, which shows Wisconsin hemorrhaging jobs faster than any other state over the past 12 months.  Many have been quick to point out that these numbers prove that Walker’s plan is failing; that his “tools” are not working for Wisconsin.

I disagree.  Everything is going according to plan for Walker and friends.

Walker’s primary goal when he took office was to improve the “business climate” in Wisconsin.  That’s a euphemism for facilitating the upward transfer of wealth.  And that’s fancy talk for the ruling class (the 1%) profiting off the suffering of the working class (the 99%).  

High unemployment is great for business!  It creates a surplus of desperate jobseekers who are willing to work for less pay and no benefits.  It allows companies to easily hire scabs and break strikes.  And it creates an environment of fear, jealousy, and distrust of our fellow workers - ideal conditions for passing extreme anti-worker legislation.  Would Walker have been able to take collective bargaining rights away from public employees if workers in the private sector had job security and a living wage?  No; and furthermore, if that had been the case in 2011, I think Walker would have had little chance of getting elected in the first place.

You know what else is great for business?  State budget deficits.  Walker used the state’s projected $3.6 billion budget shortfall to blackmail us into accepting austerity measures like cuts to social programs and teachers’ salaries.  Meanwhile, he continues to dole out tax cuts to private businesses and bonuses to his favorite employees.  Once again:  the upward transfer of wealth. 

I sound like a broken record because I keep repeating this: PAY ATTENTION TO GREECE.  Watch what happens when people really start to suffer under the austerity imposed by their government.  And watch how the government takes advantage of that suffering.  The government is harnessing the anger and frustrations of the public in order to implement a draconian immigration policy that involves rounding up immigrants and placing them in internment camps.  What’s happening in Greece and other countries in the EU is a pretty good indicator of the kind of thing we have to look forward to over the next several years in Wisconsin if we continue down this path. 

Of course, the political climate is a little different in Greece, with their vast array of political parties ranging from extreme right-wing fascists to neo-liberal fascists.  Instead of just two flavors of evil, Greece has many.  It’s like the Baskin-Robbins of evil.  But I think the comparison is still valid.  Let these other countries be an example of why the “anybody but Walker” attitude is so dangerous.  We can’t just oppose one person or one party.  We must fight the ideology that’s behind these attempts to divide and exploit the working class – an ideology and a strategy that’s shared by Republicans and Democrats alike.

The fight against fracking in Ohio comes at a time when the state is approving new wells at a rapid pace. Local activists are organizing in an environment where the ground is constantly shifting under their feet - sometimes literally.

Anti-fracking activism has been influenced by developments both inside the state and beyond. At a recent public anti-fracking meeting a representative from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) described the experience of activists in western Pennsylvania several years ago.

Residents there began seeing lots of drilling sites, processing plants and other fracking infrastructure pop up. Neighborhood opposition responded through the regulatory process. Drillers needed permits, so locals educated themselves on permit writing. They enjoyed some early victories as improperly written permits were thrown out.

The wins were only temporary though. Drillers came back weeks or months later with rewritten permits that fixed the problems in the earlier ones. The new permits passed regulatory muster and the frackers moved in. At one point counsel for the companies jokingly thanked a CELDF representative for its help in putting together a bulletproof permit-writing process. As you might imagine, this was not the intended outcome.

The regulatory process may not be a suitable one for anti-fracking activists for other reasons as well. For one, regulations are not ultimately about protecting citizens; they are about legalizing harm. Regulation on, say, arsenic in drinking water is not based on the maximum amount that humans may safely consume, but on the maximum amount the industry can get legislators to allow. If they allow an amount that is unhealthy for humans or animals, those who suffer as a result have no legal recourse. The harm was permitted.

If you do not want the fracking to occur at all - if you think it is too unregulated, too opaque, and generally too hazardous - then fighting over regulation is a sucker’s game. You are not fighting over whether or not your community will expose itself to the tender mercies of the oil and gas industry, but over how much damage the industry will be allowed to do to it; and since the oil and gas industry is flooding the statehouse with lobbyists how do you think that fight will go?

Which leads to the second problem with the regulatory process: it happens at the state level, where ordinary residents have precious little access. Aside from both the specific issue of fracking and the perennial issue of the will of the majority being frustrated by the powerful, wealthy and privileged, there are dynamics at play in Columbus that tilt the playing field against local communities.

The successful effort to implement term limits back in the 90s has born its expected fruit: Legislators do not have the opportunity to build up a store of knowledge and experience on how the legislative process works. Lobbyists, under no such constraint, can learn the system inside and out, and bring that to bear. (Incidentally, the inability of legislators to thoroughly learn how the machine works also - surprise! - creates demand for legislative chop shops like ALEC.)

Far from promoting good government, term limits have hobbled it - which is how the slow erosion of home rule began. It’s easier for industries to get their legislative agenda enacted once at the state level instead of multiple times at the local level. Term limited legislators aren’t around long enough to see the consequences, so why bother thinking long term? Add to that the current state government’s mania for selling off every valuable asset it owns - and the crippling of those public institutions that it cannot outright kill - and you are left with a statehouse that is content to let the private sector call all the shots.

Columbus has gone out of its way to kneecap local communities on fracking in particular. Governor Kasich, having failed in his first clumsy attempt to strip localities of the ability to negotiate road use and maintenance agreements with industry, now appears poised to slip it in through his new energy bill. (The bill includes other giveaways to industry as well.) Kasich has also stripped communities of jurisdiction over industrial construction. At this point there is little regulatory action that towns can take aside from zoning ordinances.

So if regulation was not a losing proposition going into the anti-fracking effort, the sellout to lobbyists in the capitol and virtual elimination of home rule seals the deal. What does that leave local activists? Trying for complete bans instead of tweaking around the edges. It may sound absurdly lofty for a one light town to adopt a bill of rights for its residents, but that may be the last (and best) ground to fight on. Don’t bother with processes that postulate harm and try to negotiate how much. Don’t fight neutered regulatory agencies or politicians in the pocket of the industry. (Or ex-politicians who have become industry shills, for that matter.)

Go big instead. Say that you simply want no part of it. Insist on the right to self determination. The fracking industry has already rigged the system; trying to get it to build safely, drill responsibly or disclose its hazards plays to its strengths. But what about a document that declares the rights of citizens to have full and final say on the most pressing quality of life issues that face their communities?

Would industry lawyers be eager to go into a courtroom and essentially say, “we know you don’t want us here but we’re forcing our way in anyway”? It doesn’t seem like a winning position. Trying to get a court to overturn such a fundamental declaration would probably be wildly unpopular. While a sympathetic judge might well go along with them - and that’s a whole other post - the process itself would smoke out the industry’s cold indifference to the communities it is endangering. That prospect might just get the industry to back off. And in any event, what else have we got? As one citizen put it: “The federal government has failed us. The state government has failed us. You are our last resort.”

Since its beginning in October 2011, Occupy Madison has evolved from a symbolic occupation of public space to a social experiement that fills an important gap in the services that the city of Madison provides for the homeless.  The site of the encampment has moved from a public park on the Capitol square to a vacant used car lot several blocks away.  Having a larger space that is less visible to city officials (and therefore easier to ignore) has allowed OM to develop into a small compound of tents and makeshift structures.  [photos]

Many of the residents I’ve spoken to have emphasized that OM provides something to them that the city’s shelter services don’t offer.  The Occupy site is not just a homeless shelter, it’s a homeless community that provides its members a sense of personal responsibility and self-determination.

I’ve never lived on the street, but I imagine that people who have find it lonely.  At Occupy Madison, there’s a fairly close-knit group of people who are always around.  There’s always someone to watch your back and listen to what you have to say.  There’s a place where you can keep your belongings instead of carrying them on your back all day.  There’s 24/7 free food and clothing, heat, bathrooms, and a place to hang out and sleep that’s out of the snow and wind.  There’s also the opportunity to take part in building the community and democratically make decisions about things that directly affect your life.

I could write a whole post on the city’s growing problem with homelessness and the striking inadequacy of the city’s homeless shelters, managed by Porchlight, Inc.  I’ve heard many complaints from people:  Porchlight’s shelters are not open during the day, there’s no place for people to store their belongings, there’s theft and violence, and people have been kicked out or banned for drunkenness or for having lice.  The biggest difference is that at the shelters, people feel isolated and powerless because they have no control over their environment.  Not everyone fits into the shelter system, and that’s why many of them have turned to Occupy Madison instead.

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, a Democrat, announced in February that when Occupy Madison’s permit on the current space expires, there will be no chance for renewal.  As of April 30 at noon, we are no longer permitted to be on the site and will be subject to arrest and confiscation (read: destruction) of property by the police.  Allen Barkoff, a local activist who’s been involved with OM, wrote a letter to Soglin requesting he either allow the residents to stay on the site or allow the group to find a new location.  Soglin’s response was a firm and emotionless “no”.

Last week, the Madison city council passed a resolution recognizing Occupy Madison’s efforts.  The resolution originally contained strong language arguing for letting us continue to exist as a homeless community, but that language was removed, leaving the resolution a toothless pat on the back.  The passing of the resolution may just be a symbolic victory, but the city council meeting itself was of great value.  A number of citizens, including many residents from OM, registered to speak at the meeting and testified about the importance of the Occupy site.

The first hour and 12 minutes of this video is a better testament to the value of Occupy Madison.  But since the video is so long, I’ll include some quotes from the testimonies here.

Dave Peters, a resident at Occupy Madison who organized 30-40 fellow homeless people from the streets of Madison to come stay at the site:  “When I saw people living in alleys and doorways… that’s just not gonna go.”  Dave believes that Occupy Madison has made a difference by giving its residents “a chance to buy time so they can figure out a way to get a job, to get money in the bank, to get themselves on their feet”

Lyle works as a flooring installer but recently became homeless when he could not find enough work to be able to make rent.  “We’re all displaced. It’s not like we wanna be there. ” But Lyle explained that Occupy is a safe place to be where people look out for each other.

Sofia Martinez said, “I am not homeless. I’m houseless, because I come home to a fantastic community… they welcomed [me] as nobody ever did  We don’t want to be labeled as misfits.”

Marcus Robinson is homeless and a student at MATC who is planning to transfer to UW:  “I’m not a waste to anybody, I haven’t done anybody any harm or wrong”.  Speaking about the Occupy encampment, Marcus said, “I’ve noticed that we’re self sufficient. That’s something.. I never had that hope. I always though that the city or state government or someone would always have to fund [the homeless], that we’d always have to beg… the fact is that we’re self sustainable.”  He spoke about how the homeless are losing hope, and one thing Occupy Madison has done for the homless is to restore that hope.

Robert Jones has worked as a cook and moved from Los Angeles to Madison, where he lives at the Occupy site.  “The homeless problem will not go away.  We are people who, for one reason or another, have become homeless.  Occupy Madison gives us a cause, self respect, and also gives us pride in what we do to help each other.  If it were not for Occupy, there would be about 50-60 people wandering around downtown right now.  People in Occupy are getting jobs.  They’re getting apartments… we’re not just sitting around and doing nothing.”

I think this is the first time the Madison City Council has ever seen homeless people come to one of their meetings as a group of this size.  Some council members may never even hear from their homeless constituents at all.  The testimonies given, not just by residents at Occupy but by other members of the community as well, were heartfelt and moving.  All of us are committed to keeping this going, and possibly expanding Occupy into a long-term housing cooperative for people who otherwise don’t have homes.

The resolution passed unanimously that night, and the formal recognition by the city that it provides is important and relevant.  But the mayor remains committed to eradicating the Occupy Madison encampment.  I believe he and other city officials are having a hard time accepting Occupy because everything we’ve done is outside of the established norms.  But as Dave Peters said in his testimony, “We’re part of a social experiment… that needs a chance to function, And we need time.”

As the eviction date approaches, site residents and supporters are working frantically to prepare and figure out what the next steps will be.  My hope is that this develops into an active homeless movement in Madison.  People who previously felt voiceless and powerless are becoming empowered and finding a voice.  Whatever may happen down the road, Occupy Madison is committed to fighting for its right to continue to exist and serve the needs of the community.

This was published with considerable feedback from affinis, JuliaWilliams, okanogen, and lambert. My sincere thanks to them for their help.

The purge of livestreamers and other transparency advocates at Occupy Oakland has been largely successful, and last weekend produced one of its predictable results. At the weekly Fuck the Police march there was a huge spike in vandalism (via) over previous ones, and there was a greatly escalated police response. The unilateral disarmament of livestreamers meant that, as Sue Basko (among others) pointed out, only the authorities were able to record the events of that night. If they choose to selectively edit or show only clips that support their side of the story, what will there be to rebut that?¹ (Basko also points out that livestreaming video can be used to rebut charges made by authorities, something the accused in this case might find handy. Her Occupy Symposium has been collecting really nice essays on this topic, incidentally.)

It actually is not strictly true that there were no live streamers at Fuck the Police. There were a couple, and they were physically threatened.² Because of that intimidation they radically trimmed their coverage. The resulting video is of some help, but not nearly as much as a full and open livestream.³ In an email exchange afterwards affinis noted that livestreamers have become afraid of covering the news, to which lambert responded: “Exactly. Since when is covering the news about respect? This is no different from the Washington Post!”

On the face of it that is just a little bit of snark, but there’s a very serious subtext. At its most ambitious Occupy represents an audacious leap of imagination, what some call prefiguration: Envision the world you want to see, and then begin to inhabit it. Model the behavior you want to see in the larger society. Or more colloquially, fake it till you make it.

Doing so takes time and patience, though. It takes a while for something that radical to sink in to people’s heads, even those people who are sympathetic. Matt Taibbi - a close observer of the movement and no friend of Wall Street - took a couple of months to come around, but he finally did: “People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something.”

Getting people on board with something so different requires openness and transparency. One very important aspect of openness that has either been only sporadic or entirely missing from Occupy is stated values. The consensus process at Occupy - which has been criticized for not being an authentic one - has largely prevented the adoption of broad principles that a minority object to. With something like a statement of nonviolence, a tiny minority with strenuous objections has shown the ability to frustrate the will of the overwhelming majority. A dynamic like that could ultimately cause the long term failure of Occupations that cannot resolve it, though as in science failures can be useful (lots to examine and learn from for those inclined!)

As for transparency, advocates need to not only expect visibility into others’ processes, but must willingly open themselves to that visibility too. If your new model does not allow for that - if, for instance, you want to plan violence in secret and carry it out anonymously (neither of which is transparent) - then you can’t very well expect to draw too many others to your cause. Why go to all that bother to trade one opaque, unaccountable elite for another?⁴ The prefiguration is crucial.

One type of prefiguration is media ecology. Big media outlets catering to power instead of challenging it have been a major source of dissatisfaction for nearly a generation now.⁵ That dissatisfaction may be driving viewers away, which opens up new possibilities - which Occupy is showing an ability to seize. The emerging sensibility of the new media environment is one of lightly mediated - or entirely unmediated - transmission of information. There are certainly hazards with this approach. For one, it means trying to take a drink from a firehose. A twitter stream or livestream can be hard to process; too much information, too much video to watch, too many links to click on, too many stressors maintaining online relationships. Consumers need to be their own quasi-editors, deciding which sources to rely on in order to be able to process what’s coming in.

Another hazard is epistemic closure, the condition where one only gets information from sources one trusts. The resulting echo chamber serves only to reinforce one’s prior beliefs, and causes people to retreat into rigid, sclerotic worldviews consisting exclusively of agreeable sentiments. There’s an entire book that can be written about that, though, so I’ll just note that it’s a phenomenon that predates the Internet.

For all the potential problems, though, there is no denying that Occupy’s media ecology is a very different model than legacy media’s. Which is the point! I don’t think most of the people who support Occupy do so because they want some new version of the Washington Post. I for one have had quite enough trembling deference towards those in power, and I’m not especially interested in seeing the same thing start to happen in this new context. As John Seal put it, “some Occupy supporters are now eagerly mimicking the high-security, everything-is-classified government they supposedly hold in such contempt.” And they are attempting to impose the same atmosphere of meek compliance on those who cover them. None for me, thanks; I’ve seen how that movie ends.

Lack of transparency leads easily to lack of accountability, and unsurprisingly that was what happened in the Fuck the Police march. In addition to the absence of livestreamers, those engaged in violence concealed their faces. This is a preferred tactic among violence advocates, but it has some obvious drawbacks that Jasper Gregory pointed out: One, a child could figure out how to infiltrate such a group, and two, the choice of that tactic made it irrelevant who did the actual violence. If you choose anonymity in advance, then anyone who uses it is one of your fellows - whether you want them to be or not.⁶

Some violence advocates tried to distance themselves by saying it wasn’t the real black bloc that did it (“no true Scotsman”), but a heretofore unknown imposter black bloc that is merely comprised of an immature group of transient kids who are only in it for the adrenaline rush of violent confrontation. Unlike the actual black bloc, of course! It’s hard to know where to even start with unconquerable ignorance like this, though Jasper captured its essential absurdity nicely. (Bonus stupidity: “if pigs want to smash capitalism by my side, i say let em.” Yes, capitalism was certainly dealt a death blow while you - and the pigs, naturally - engaged in petty vandalism against a Quizno’s and a local credit union. Well done.)

For as much as conformity, opacity and lack of accountability have become characteristics of elites that Occupy is rebelling against, it may be that their violence is the most objectionable - and therefore the most important not to reproduce. A country exhausted by endless wars (including of the death-from-above covert drone variety), militarized police forces, executive assassination programs and a brutally punitive criminal justice system is not going to rally around a movement that promises more of the same. Those who are rising up against the wholesale theft of ordinary citizens’ houses (a truly great act of violence) will not generally see justice in wild acts of retribution.

“Retribution” is the most charitable way to describe the rioting that violence advocates are so enthusiastic about. And yes, it is wild. While there are occasional lazy stabs at trying to circumscribe their vandalism, violence is a fundamentally chaotic act. It can veer out of control with little warning, and the destruction at the Fuck the Police march is just the latest example. Small wonder there has been so little discussion about it. People did not flock to Occupy to shift the locus of antisocial behavior in society from wealth-addled bankers in suits to twentysomething punks in black.

In order to have a chance at substantial and lasting change there has to be more to Occupy than some crude idea getting even. There has to be something that calls the overwhelming majority of people to something better. Part of that call is strategic. There is already a great deal written on the ultimate advantages to a nonviolent approach, with this being a great example. Lambert recently made the case in an email: “Rhetorically, I think we need to frame over and over again that [nonviolence advocates’] strategy has the greatest chance of success. That’s what we want, success. We want to look to successful movements.”

While that is certainly important (winning counts!), I believe the greater part of that call is moral (or ethical if you prefer). In an extended exchange (see footnote), Hugh wrote: “Change does not come from winning arguments but by changing hearts.”⁷ If you turn people off the way violence advocates do, then the only way to produce change is at the barrel of a gun. This would be the “neither hearts nor minds” approach. It is oppressive, and those under it will throw it off at the first opportunity. If you seek to persuade people to your cause, it is possible to win them over. You can then make more durable changes, though it can be reversed by a shift in the political winds or effective sophistry. This would be the “minds but not hearts” approach.

But if you change people’s hearts as well, they are liable to do more than simply accede to your wishes; they might just join in the effort as well. In the case of Occupy is also allows for the greatest contrast with the ruling class. Convincing most that our bellicose foreign policy is making us more enemies than friends, or that rampant lawlessness by the people running our biggest financial institutions will prevent the housing market from finally bottoming out; saying that such things are bad policy for America and ultimately against our long term interests might get lots of head nodding in agreement. But convince those same people that these things are grave injustices and deeply immoral? That’s the stuff revolutions are made of.

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NOTES

1. “Marchers wearing black clothing and backpacks were captured on video committing acts of vandalism and retreating into the marching crowd, police said.” Also: “Several of these acts of vandalism and suspects were captured on video surveillance.” Way to go, dumbasses.
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2. See here for how violence advocates have intimidated livestreamers. In particular, jeffkloy, Josh and worthoftheworld were all present; Eiko Huh stayed away entirely. Josh appeared to be representing the Oakland Media Group, but no livestream of the event is available at their site. Jeffkloy avoided recording violence to “show respect” to those engaged in it (not that it won him any good will). Meanwhile, worthoftheworld - who appears at least somewhat sympathetic to those engaged in violence - announced a livestream, but as far as we know has not posted it. Interestingly, she had this to say about the suppression in a series of Tweets (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

every1 is so quick to confront the streamers for their accountability in capturing sensitive evidence… we should put same energy on holding ourselves accountable to our actions, helping comrades make wiser decisions in the heat of moments & ultimately, we need to put serious energy in holding the system (#SFPD, #OPD, #DEA, etc..) accountable!!! every1 attacks a streamer for their footage, who actually makes a physical effort to hold the System accountable? Beyond #Ftp marches? streamers are not the key element of arrest. an action of wrong doing has to happen first. this is The System failing,or comrade mistake. so on the topic of streaming, 3 elements of accountability. let’s spend equal time on all of them. and be fair

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3. Affinis: “The basic chronology is pretty clear. Watching what actually happened (or at least, what Kloy was able to capture) is very different from you’d infer if the OO twitter stream was your only source of info.”
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4. Here is where things start to get a little interesting. One sticking point among those working out prefiguration is, prefigured by whom? Or more precisely, excluding whom? In a movement of the 99% presumably the 1% would have no say, right? Are Wall Street executives kept out of the discussion? Violence advocates? There’s a whole slippery slope argument around that, as well as around who performs the gatekeeping function.

Without laying down any specific markers, I’d just say as a general principle that more inclusion is better. If the goal is to subvert existing pillars of the establishment, it seems to me that engaging with those who provide crucial support for those pillars - not antagonizing them - is the best way to win them over. If the prefiguration includes a rigorous process of harmonizing new groups and ideas with the stated values, there’s a pretty good chance it will be robust enough to resist falling into a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” trap.
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5. That’s provided you date your disillusionment with the start of the Clinton impeachment circus and the way the big outlets uncritically catapulted right wing propaganda during the entire affair. There are lots of different places one could put that marker down, though.
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6. Those fellows could include modern day Pinkertons, among others (emph. added):

Approaches more often used by intelligence agencies are needed to confront this threat. The creative use of intelligence officers, either developed internally or borrowed from the private sector, can afford police agencies the speed, knowledge and agility needed to counter these emerging threats and the chaos that they promote.

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7. Original exchange here. Here is a lightly edited (for readability) version:

By Hugh on Fri, 03/30/2012 - 10:42pm

Also I think people need to go back and study social movements in the past. I would suggest in particular Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. King and the movement were effective because they were willing to confront authority in the pursuit of justice and they infused their movement and actions with a moral purpose. This not only served to unify those involved and keep them moving together in the same direction but the morality of what they were doing and what they were willing to risk and sacrifice won over millions to their cause.

It wasn’t that they were intellectually right on the issues that swayed the country. That in itself was insufficient. Nor was it the justice of their cause. That might have won them a few converts. It was the moral purpose with which they imbued their struggle and which they were able to communicate to the general public that gave them their power. They did it in their words, their actions, and their sacrifices. They made millions care. They put their opponents on the defensive. They did this by focusing on the moralness of their purpose. People can dance around an issue for an age and still remain uncommitted. But by their example and sacrifice, those in the civil rights movement forced Americans to respond to them on a moral level. And on that level they were irresistible because a moral response is about who and what we are as human beings. It is the one place, if only for a little while, that we can cut through all the bullshit.

John Jay Chapman who belonged to a different era and another struggle said that reform movements to be effective must be religious in character. At the time when I read him, I wasn’t sure I agreed. But with time, I have come to see the wisdom in what he was saying. Change does not come from winning arguments but by changing hearts. Change someone’s mind, they may acknowledge the justice of your arguments, and do nothing. Change their hearts, and your struggle becomes their struggle. It is on the moral level that all this plays out. Words must fit actions and both must fit the moral purpose being invoked. If there is a dishonesty in any of that, then the battle is lost because people will be repelled by the falsity. They don’t need to know all the facts and arguments. They only need to see the flaw. But if these are true, suffused with a moral purpose, and tempered by real sacrifice, most people will respond to that truth and act according to its demands.

This is what I see missing from Occupy. Certainly you can see bits and pieces of this in particular actions but overall the movement remains strangely morally empty.

By RanDomino on Sat, 03/31/2012 - 9:26pm

I think I agree with the sentiment if not the terminology. “Morality” to anarchists means the morality of religion and society - personal restriction even when it would harm no one, for no other purpose than control of individuals by institutions such as the church and State.

If you mean something more along the lines of ‘vision’ that we certainly have.

By Hugh on Sun, 04/01/2012 - 12:24am

Yes, “vision” will win you 3 or 4 new converts at the least. Sorry for the snark, but it really looks like you have no interest in making common cause with the 99% because you reject right off the bat speaking to them in any way they are likely to respond to. Not only will you be unsuccessful but you will deserve to be because you are being incredibly disrespectful of those you want as allies. You can not expect them to set aside their prejudices for even a little while if you are not willing to do the same.

Most people are focused on their everyday lives. They have their plans and their schemes. It is a lot to ask them to set that all aside, but there are moments in life such as before a great cause when they will if addressed precisely on that moral level which you discount. And that is where the disrespect comes in. The moral level is inherently respectful because, as King understood and what he counted on, was that millions of Americans could be reached at that level because he did not just believe in his own morality but he also believed in theirs. That’s respect. He did not necessarily believe in their plans and schemes nor ask them to believe in his. This was not about doing away with difference. It was about finding the underlying similarity, and for that you have to go deep into a person. At that level if you ask them to stand shoulder to shoulder with you, you better damn well be ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. And if you are not even willing to go to that level, well the game is over before it is even begun. You are left on the level of everyday plans and schemes. And why really should they sacrifice theirs for yours?

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UPDATE: Two of the links in this post have been criticized for being misleading. I have changed them in order to clear up any confusion, and moved one of the original links to later in the piece for context. None of the text has been altered. Thanks to commenter anons for the feedback.

This was published with considerable feedback from affinis, Jasper, JuliaWilliams and lambert. My sincere thanks to them for their help.

A few weeks ago Occupy Oakland (OO) began to emphasize secrecy (or security culture) over transparency, which resulted in livestreamers being attacked as snitches or quasi-authorities. In addition, large group of transparency advocates have been ostracized as racists with little or no due process.

The attacks on transparency have become an ongoing effort; last week Kate Conger Tweeted her experience in running afoul of the secrecy police at OO. Interestingly, she is a freelancer who was more interested in the decision making process than whatever nefarious purpose the more conspiracy-minded saw in the shadows. And she also asked: “Explain to me why a movement founded on free speech principles doesn’t support freedom of press?” Which as far as I know has not been answered yet.

This week it has gone even further, led by the explosive charge that police used livestreaming video in the arrest of activists Nneka, Cincinnati and Teardrop - aka the Ice Cream Three.¹ There has been a great deal of comment on the piece; the key excerpt:

According to defense lawyer Dan Siegel, it was the livestream footage that allowed OPD to target and arrest the Ice Cream Three at subsequent demonstrations over a week later: “There would be no case at all if people were not taking video and posting it publicly, and if the defendants had refused to speak with police once they were in custody.” Patti, Nneka’s mom, commented, “The really sad thing is that the footage came from Nneka’s best friend. She would never have wanted this!”

Keep in mind these are the thoughts of a defense attorney employed to present his client’s case in the best possible light. Maybe his allegations are true, but then again maybe not. The eagerness with which anti-transparency advocates have swallowed those comments whole is striking, even taking into account the natural human inclination to believe those things that bolster one’s worldview and more closely scrutinize those that don’t.²

One of the, ahem, benefits of shutting down efforts at openness is that those who are calling the shots can hide in a cloak of anonymity and make decisions from behind the scenes. Occupations that have shut down what began with a robust culture of openness have constructed a neatly self-contained universe - one that permits them to wield substantial authority but disclaim ownership of anything produced by it. (It also tends to create its own self-reinforcing structures.) Decision making done by a few, responsibility shared by all. See here for an analogous dynamic.

Those who want to constructively criticize that dynamic are then left grasping at straws: with no transparency, there is no way to know who in particular is driving these unhealthy developments.

If it seems that, say, facilitation has turned into a power center where much of the direction is set, but there is no way to see or read exactly what is going on, how does one even begin to offer a critique? Those who are happy as clams with this state of affairs can simply demand to know who in particular is the source of the problem. With no transparency into the process, this is unknowable from the outside. So those who wish to be insulated from accountability get a free ride. A nice arrangement, if you can manage it.

Perhaps not coincidentally, opacity tends to work well in conjunction with violence advocacy. A culture of repression is very congenial to chaotic notions of autonomy, “no snitching” orders³, and an apocalyptic mindset that insists if revolution does not happen immediately then all is lost.

It also seems supportive of a certain moral vacuousness that stridently denies any responsibility for violence on the grounds that the violence had already been completed by the real villains (e.g. “anarchists don’t fuck up health centers. Corporations and the government does”).⁴ Cries of snitching and sexism in support of an attack on a clinic that serves the community are a bit hard to take.

Opacity works well with a certain kind of wilfully naïve view of the process, too. Consensus doesn’t mean “everyone agrees” or even “most people agree.” It is very involved, and some in the Occupy power centers seem largely ignorant of it⁵. Look at the contrast between this from one of the folks on an InterOccupy listserv:

The early facilitators seemed to believe that OWS invented the consensus process. Many of us who had training and experience in consensus decision-making were dismayed from the beginning, because what we were witnessing was not consensus, but a faux consensus. Many didn’t return. I stayed to see if I could persuade the facilitation working group to adopt other modes, e.g. breaking up into groups during GAs, allowing for debates during GAs, making sure that substance was at least as important than process.

We have had a big problem of late in that insisting on being “leaderless” has left a vacuum that has been filled by tyrants in the group. Until the various dysfunctions are dealt with, we’re unlikely to make significant progress. A few of us have identified the dysfunction rooted in lack of nonviolence training, including true consensus decision-making. And add to that a lack of vision of how it all fits together in horizontalism self-governance on a broader scale.

And this by an anarchist in the OWS Direct Action Working Group

This is just such an elementary understanding of the anarchic nature of occupy’s functioning. It disregards autonomy entirely. You don’t need “the movement” to do something. When you do something that is movement. Movements are more time than group. If this is a time of a peoples liberation movement then things that happen now in that vein are pieces of that movement. If what you are doing appeals to folks you will get their buy in and if not you will be doing it on your own. Those are both ok, so long as you’re not speaking for people other than those present to consent to what’s being said on their behalf.

The reason consensus would be a burden is if you’re trying to force others into something they don’t want. Nothing about other’s non interest keeps you from doing something with those who choose to participate.

The ideas expressed in the second excerpt strike me as shockingly immature. You cannot just say, do your own thing and if others dig it a hundred flowers will bloom! Nor can you say that whatever any subset of Occupy does is by definition Occupy; some actions - most notably violence - will be seen as representative of the entire movement. For those who want a nonviolent mass movement, a violence advocate’s “when you do something that is movement” ends up being the negation of the movement.⁶

None of this is merely academic. Maintaining the charade that Occupy is leaderless, preventing any sort of visible decision making structure from emerging, not implementing any sort of review or sanction mechanism for those who refuse to adhere to an authentic consensus process: these all come at a terribly high cost, and nowhere was that more obvious last week than in the The Million Hoodie March. Elon James White wrote about his experience with an Occupy movement that at least partially attempted to co-opt a protest against the murder of Trayvon Martin. His report is consistent enough with others’ (Esther Choi’s, for example) that it cannot be dismissed as the griping of a malcontent.

Saying that those who tried to use the protest for their own ends are just a few bad apples is - in addition to being pretty stunningly unaware of the term’s unsavory recent history - a nonsensical response if your position is “when you do something that is movement.” In the kind of amorphous culture being created by those opposed to transparency, everyone does their own thing and therefore no one can be held responsible for anything. “That’s not the REAL Occupy” isn’t terribly persuasive under those conditions. However much logic it might have to those locked into that solipsistic world, the view of those like White and Choi who encounter it from the outside is overwhelmingly negative.

An Occupy movement that becomes increasingly insular and suspicious will thus alienate larger numbers of people. It will insist on its rightness and purity, oblivious to how it looks to those who haven’t been marinated in its exotic narrative. It will be unwieldy, with uncoordinated arms each pursuing its own agenda, sometimes in contradiction. It will turn off all but the true believers. The backlash against the actions of some at the Trayvon Martin protest is a good snapshot of where Occupy goes if it does not become more open and yes, more organized.

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NOTES

1. Here’s a summary of the incident from the Oakland Police Department:

On February 22, 2012, at 6:00 p.m., the Oakland Police Department contacted a female victim after responding to a report of a robbery in the 4000 block of Piedmont Avenue. The victim told officers she had been walking down the street, across from the Wells Fargo bank, near a small group of Occupy Oakland protesters calling for a riot. The victim, who has been a resident of the area for over 20 years, suggested to the protesters not to riot in her neighborhood.

She was surrounded by three protestors and battered as they yelled vulgar epithets regarding their perception of her sexual orientation. Her wallet was taken during the crime. The victim broke away from the group, and called police who were able to arrest one suspect near the scene.

The Oakland Police Department prioritizes hate crimes for immediate investigation. A suspect who commits a hate crime aims not only to terrify or harm one individual, but to threaten and terrorize the entire actual or perceived group of people to which the victim may belong.

And a summary from a source more sympathetic to the defendants:

February 22nd was a day of arraignments for Occupy Oakland protesters at Wiley Manuel Courthouse in downtown Oakland. According to Nneka’s mother Patti, a group of approximately two dozen left the courthouse after the day’s proceedings for Fenton’s Creamery on Piedmont avenue and then convened a protest at the nearby Wells Fargo bank. An altercation took place later, around 5:45pm, in front of Dr. Comics & Mr. Games and was initiated by Stowers herself. In Stower’s testimony, she saw one Black woman, one Black man and one white man standing together on the sidewalk shouting the words “Let’s start a fucking riot!” As she passed them on her way to Piedmont Grocery she said, “I’ve lived in Piedmont for twenty years and I know you don’t belong here,” to which Nneka responded “that sounds pretty fucking racist to me,” and to which Teardrop replied “we need to talk about this.” In the confrontation that ensued, Stowers’ Obama pin was allegedly ripped from the outside flap of her purse. Then, she alleged, she saw Cincinnati’s forearm emerging from her purse. She did not actually see him remove her wallet.

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2. Note the assumption that live streaming being used to arrest violent insurgents is a bad thing. There are many possible objections to the arrest of activists in general. For instance: activists could just be removed and warehoused for extended periods without trial or in other ways denied due process; they could get shot through a judicial proceeding little more than a kangaroo court; put through a penal system that is heavy on retribution, light on rehabilitation, and that brands them as criminals long after they pay their debt to society.

Those are all perfectly legitimate points to raise. As a general proposition, though - and specifically without comment on the details of the Ice Cream Three case - I would regard the use of livestreaming to identify and arrest those engaged in violence as a ringing endorsement of live streaming, a vindication of its use and a victory for transparency.

Also: look at the contrast between this and a nonviolent mass movement like Otpor. They spared some energy to try to win over the police instead of taking a stance of unrelenting antagonism, took arrests in stride and included all walks of life (“Parents of the kids were informed, and we had a network of old ladies who called the police station continuously” etc.) Which approach is more flexible? More sustainable? Which is better able to subvert authority?
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3. The fact that conspiracies of silence are championed by gangs, the mafia, and those engaged in cover-ups tells you roughly where that tactic resides on the ethics spectrum. As David Graeber noted, one of the goals of Occupy should be to demonstrate an improvement on the existing culture and not merely to shuffle its privilege:

That’s why it’s key to have an effect that will genuinely benefit people’s lives. #Occupy certainly doesn’t contradict that revolutionary impulse, and helps move us in a direction towards greater freedom and autonomy, by which I mean freedom from the structures of both the state and capitalism. Now, to create broad alliances along those lines, you’d have to be very careful about your organizational and institutional structures. Because one of the things that is revolutionary about the #Occupy movement is that it’s trying to create prefigurative spaces in which we can experiment and create the kind of institutional structures that would exist in a society that’s free of the state and capitalism. We hope to use those to create a kind of crisis of legitimacy within existing institutions.

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4. Tina Dupuy makes the connection between transparency and nonviolence explicit:

A true nonviolent movement can have its plans known – the cops can know, the public can know, it can be on the livestream for everyone to see – because you can’t thwart civil disobedience by disclosure. Vandalism, property damage, graffiti, sabotage, throwing rocks and bottles at the police and petty criminal acts are not what the perpetrators want on UStream.

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5. For as important as consensus is, though, it shouldn’t be fetishized. It is a means, not an end, and if not monitored carefully it can obstruct the achievement of the ends it is being used to further.
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6. For just one example of how violence is inimical to a mass movement, look at how Canadians reacted to the use of it during protests. When the public views you as a terrorist maybe you aren’t some romanticized revolutionary vanguard as much as a common criminal.
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This was published with considerable feedback from affinis and lambert. My sincere thanks to both of them for their help.

The Occupy movement has already had a positive impact in many areas, but potentially the biggest one is rescuing concepts of public rights and the understanding of what is public. The very idea that there could be a common good, that there are things that belong to all of us and that in fundamental ways we are all in this together seems to have been under attack for a long time now.

For example, part of the right wing assault on the right to vote has included the talking point that since you need a license to drive why wouldn’t you need a photo ID for something as important as voting? Which actually gets the logic backwards. Driving is a privilege, so setting a more stringent standard for it makes sense. When it comes to the right to vote there ought to be a presumption that the individual requesting a ballot is eligible. The law should bend over backwards to accommodate voters, not erect barriers. Of course, on the rare occasions when fraud does happen it needs to be prosecuted vigorously.

Similarly, the idea of the public has been under assault. The fight for a public option in the health care debate a few years back is one prominent example. The idea of the government offering a basic menu of elementary health services to everyone seemed terribly provocative. It ended up being left out of the final bill despite the fact that it was a very modest (compared to, say, single payer) reform. This despite the fact that a similar model for banking has been a demonstrable and phenomenal success for nearly a century.

Meanwhile, things that currently are public are being spun off like crazy to the private sector. Here in Ohio I’ve watched John Kasich push to privatize prisons, the turnpike, the lottery, and more - while turning down federal funds for public transportation. Residents of other states have seen their own versions of this process.

Occupy has pushed back on those dynamics. In the environment sketched out above, a group of citizens simply becoming physically present in a public space over an extended period is provocative - and has the potential to produce change. Anything that would work against Occupiers’ ability to continue to hold public space ought to be considered antithetical to the spirit of the movement. Nothing would degrade that ability faster than violence, and having already posted extended thoughts on that subject I’ll just link to both and leave it there for now.

Occupation sites that have successfully endured without too much interruption have eventually had to answer the question, now what? Seizing and holding public space is significant, but how is it then put to use? Here is where the struggle over what Occupy means becomes most pressing. There seems to be a general agreement in using it to fight against systemic problems, but there seems to be a split as to how to express it. Some favor a nonviolent mass movement, others a smaller and violent insurgency. Which has more to recommend it?

One way to answer that is to ask: Which approach does the status quo favor? Because the answer favored by the establishment might not be the one for activists to embrace. A systemic critique by definition is at odds with established power. What might authorities favor?

A movement that puts an emphasis on social justice is at least antagonistic towards those in power, and potentially is outright hostile to them. Staging a protest against, say, stop and frisk policies is necessarily a critique of the system. This is really just a nice way of saying to those in charge “you are not doing your job well enough.” That is not a welcome message. Similarly, keeping people from being thrown out of their homes or pressuring banks to make real efforts to modify loans are implicit criticisms of those who are running things. (Note also that social justice is concerned with preserving or building up, not tearing down.)

If Occupy takes the approach above it will be hard to discredit and destroy. Nonviolent social justice is open to all and transparent, and it has an immediate, direct, and meaningful impact in the lives of those it helps. Those who want to see that approach fail cannot go the direct route. Instead of trying to persuade everyone that such activity is bad, it’s much easier to either bog the group down in other matters or redirect the group’s energy into activities that will discredit it.

Looking at how governments have subverted political movements in the past, discriminatory behavior and advocating violence feature prominently. Presumably that is because it tends to discourage and splinter members of the movement, but in a way that leaves no obvious footprints. Those engaging in either of those are doing the work of those who want Occupy to go away. They may express deep antipathy towards it and may in fact feel that to the very depth of their souls, but as a practical matter they are assisting authorities. As Charles put it in relation to violence, “if the police are paying people to smash windows, why are you doing it for free?”¹ The same is true of those in Occupy who engage in harassment, racism, misogyny, homophobia or other kinds of bullying.

Similarly, look at the effects of the direct political action linked above: Nonviolent challenging of police procedures that infringe on civil liberties is far more provocative to the system than throwing a bottle at a cop. Violence causes public support to drop and also excludes those who are not in a position to engage in a “might makes right” gesture of spectacular futility towards officers. This too supports the state in its effort to discredit the movement in the public eye.

Finally, anything that tends to take discussions into long-winded esoteric territory (like arguments over semantics) should be viewed with extreme skepticism. This is obviously a much more subjective measure; My brevity might be your long-windedness, and your esoteric might be my essential. Looking at the effect of the discussion might be a good rule of thumb, though. As Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers recently wrote about an extended discussion of finances at Occupy: “Whether paid or not, the impact is the same — it takes the Occupy off its political agenda and turns people off to participating in the movement.” Those things that tend to take Occupy away from the activities considered most threatening by the state will eventually subvert the movement.

I have tried to be careful not to assume motive in anyone in the above. I take those who claim to be passionate supporters of Occupy to be just that. But political movements are often targets of government subversion and provocateurs. We know enough about how these agents work to identify their most common tactics. To the extent that true believers engage in the same tactics, they act as the state’s volunteer auxiliary unit.

Whether intentionally or by accident, from the outside or within, they have the potential to do great damage to Occupy. For that to happen to a movement that is reclaiming public space, challenging injustice and dedicating itself to the common good would be a tragedy. We have enough testimony from those who once advocated pro-government subversive tactics and have since had the opportunity to watch the reverberations echo over several decades; we do not need to repeat the mistakes that they themselves now see as catastrophic with Occupy.

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NOTES

1. Affinis recommends the documentary If a Tree Falls for a good example of activists who grew frustrated and felt powerless, then turned to violence. The common refrain from activists on the long term impact of those decisions (Paul Soglin: “When school reopened a couple of weeks later, it was as though the life had been sucked out of the anti-war movement.” Mark Rudd: “Assuming we weren’t in the pay of the FBI, we should have been.”) is that they damaged the movement they were claiming to help, and helped those they claimed to oppose.
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Last month, Occupy Portland put out a national call to action on February 29 to other Occupies around the country.  Dubbed “Shut Down the Corporations”, the idea was to target corporations that are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) with creative, non-violent actions.

The Occupy Madison Direct Action Committee, an autonomous offshoot of the larger Occupy Madison group, put together a modest action of our own.  From the long list of some 300 corporations that are involved with ALEC, we chose Kraft Foods, Inc., a member of ALEC with a representative on the corporate “Private Enterprise” board.  Oscar Mayer is a subsidiary of Kraft and one of Kraft’s leading brands, and operates a large factory right here in our town.  That’s right, the formerly family-owned business known for that cute hotdog-festooned vehicle we occasionally see on the streets of Madison has been assimilated into the mega-corporation that markets processed junk food to children and is pretty evil in lots of other ways too. 

Our plan for #F29 was to stand on a visible, high-traffic street corner next to the Oscar Mayer factory holding signs that exposed Kraft’s ALEC ties and make a video.  Pretty innocuous, right?  Not from the perspective of a major corporation whose parent company has something to hide. 

When I showed up at Oscar Mayer that afternoon, the first thing I noticed was the strategically placed cop car directly across the street.  Not only were Oscar Mayer apparently tipped off that we would be protesting that day, but whatever information they gleaned must have made us sound much more frightening than we actually were.  In reality?  About eight people braving the freezing rain and 25+ mph winds to stand on a public sidewalk with signs while passing cars honked.  But in the minds of Oscar Mayer’s management…

 

Throughout the course of the hour or so we managed to tolerate the weather, I noticed various police cars drive by at least seven times.  Some were Madison PD while others were unmarked cars.  It seemed overkill, to say the least.  Oscar Mayer’s own security team even made an appearance at one point and yelled at us to get off their lawn.

The overreaction to our event by the local police and the Oscar Mayer management who no doubt called them in really made me wish we could have done more.  With limited time and resources available to our committee, this small yet apparently intimidating action was all we had planned.  If they were expecting us to break into the building and shut down production, perhaps we should have escalated our protest beyond sign-holding!

Actions like this one, while small and seemingly ineffective in the grand scheme of things, do serve at least one important role.  We had no idea how terrified Oscar Mayer management was of us peaceful protesters until we showed up at their site.  In doing so, we helped expose an example of how one-percenters (and some 1% wannabes) live in constant fear that the rest of us who make up the 99 percent will someday move and begin to notice our chains.

Other #F29 actions resulted in riot cops kettling and arresting protesters, and even a standoff with police in California (photos from shutdownthecorporations.org).  My assumption as we were planning our event was that what we were doing was so tame in comparison that the cops wouldn’t bother, and that Oscar Mayer probably wouldn’t even notice us.  As it turns out, even smiling and waving at cars while holding signs is enough to warrant a police presence at least the size of the protest itself.

 

Oh, and here’s what scared the pants off those wieners at Oscar Mayer:

 

This was published with considerable feedback from several bloggers at Corrente: DCblogger, affinis, lambert and okanogen. My sincere thanks to all of them for their help.

Occupy has seemed to be in a bit of a winter hibernation. There are still encampments, meetings, decisions, protests, and so on, but it seems like there has been a relative lull in its activity level. This is fine; you can’t stay cranked all the way up to 10 all the time. A little pause to regroup, rethink and recharge is a good thing. There is a chance that the some occupations that emerge might have a very different character than the one that began to recede from public consciousness towards the end of last year, though.

Some recent developments have prompted me to refer back to my experience with the No on SB5/Issue 2 campaign in Ohio last year. For instance, there was tremendous outreach by supporters and organizers to the general population, and the umbrella group We Are Ohio went to great lengths to accommodate anyone who showed an interest in being part of the effort. Those who could only participate on a limited basis were given the opportunity. Whether it was a walk list for education or phone banking for those who couldn’t get around so easily, anyone who wanted to help was found a way to do so in whatever capacity they could. A low barrier to entry is very mass movement friendly.

The fact that SB5 centered around an issue and not a candidate made it very different from the usual election year political campaign, too. On the surface it might not have looked much different from a Vote For Me effort; the logistics of mounting it, connecting with voters, and turning out support were all probably lifted from some strategist’s playbook. But the spirit animating it was very different. It SB5 was driven by those who cared most about the issue, with elected officials generally falling in behind. As a direct democracy action it gave citizens the chance to work for an issue they cared about and, if successful, vote on the issue in the next election.

Putting together an effort like that (and winning, of course - which we did) is far more satisfying than working to elect someone who, given the labyrinth any proposal usually must travel to become enacted, will at best be able to offer the change and whip up support for it. That kind of open, issue-oriented campaign is not just a template for other direct ballot actions like tax hikes on the rich or card check for union membership (to name just two issues that have been paid extravagant lip service by politicians and somehow - darn the luck! - continue to resist being enacted anywhere). It is something activists in general could learn a lot from.

For instance, in the last week or so the issue of transparency at Occupy has become very contentious. Perhaps the most prominent examples have been in Chicago and Oakland. Occupy Chicago adopted a resolution that sharply limits streaming of the General Assembly, and a number of folks there voiced their disappointment, perhaps none more than occupiechicago. Meanwhile in Oakland a proposal for what was called a “principle of solidarity” called for, among other things, not posting “potentially incriminating video footage or photos of our comrades.”¹ This was described by Kit O’Connell as a security culture meme, while Jasper Gregory correctly noted it was a “self-censorship proposal” and its “logic would lead to total social media boycott.”

Now, you could say: Disagreements happen, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. The proposal was submitted through the General Assembly process and passed². That’s how the process works.

However, this disagreement goes directly to the heart of Occupy’s ability to keep and attract participants. Lack of transparency leads to information asymmetry; those who are able to hoard information gain a large and artificial advantage over those who don’t.³ As occupiechicago put it: “Livestreaming forces people to be accountable and weeds out infiltrators. Why would we allow people to make a decisions that affect our community without our community knowing who they are?”⁴ The degree to which Occupy is visible is the degree to which it has the potential to be a mass movement. As the movement nears its six month mark it each occupation seems to be developing - in some areas, anyway - its own subculture. Some of these subcultures are familiar, too. While the initial exhilaration of a leaderless movement was driven by a deep disillusionment with leadership over the past decade or so, the current narrative seems to be transitioning to a much less contemporary one - and one with an abysmal track record.

Lack of transparency leads to lack of formal procedures, which in turn produces unstructured networks. Jo Freeman examined this dynamic in relation to the women’s liberation movement in the early 70s and noted: “The more Unstructured a group is, the more lacking it is in informal structures, and the more it adheres to an ideology of ‘structurelessness,’ the more vulnerable it is to being taken over by a group of political comrades.”⁵ Freeman’s article is long, but provides a thorough examination of related social and small group dynamics: The (impossible) claim of structurelessness, the rise of an unaccountable elite, the opacity of decision-making processes and the inevitable marginalization of the groups that embrace those qualities.

Freeman writing in 1972 may well be describing the coming future for Occupations that embrace elite privileging proposals like shutting down live streams:

The criteria of participation may differ from group to group, but the means of becoming a member of the informal elite if one meets those criteria are pretty much the same. The only main difference depends on whether one is in a group from the beginning, or joins it after it has begun. If involved from the beginning it is important to have as many of one’s personal friends as possible also join. If no one knows anyone else very well, then one must deliberately form friendships with a select number and establish the informal interaction patterns crucial to the creation of an informal structure. Once the informal patterns are formed they act to maintain themselves, and one of the most successful tactics of maintenance is to continuously recruit new people who “fit in.” One joins such an elite much the same way one pledges a sorority.⁶ If perceived as a potential addition, one is “rushed” by the members of the informal structure and eventually either dropped or initiated. If the sorority is not politically aware enough to actively engage in this process itself it can be started by the outsider pretty much the same way one joins any private club. Find a sponsor, i.e., pick some member of the elite who appears to be well respected within it, and actively cultivate that person’s friendship. Eventually, she will most likely bring you into the inner circle.

All of these procedures take time. So if one works full time or has a similar major commitment, it is usually impossible to join simply because there are not enough hours left to go to all the meetings and cultivate the personal relationship necessary to have a voice in the decision-making. That is why formal structures of decision making are a boon to the overworked person. Having an established process for decision-making ensures that everyone can participate in it to some extent.

Freeman’s structureless tyranny would produce two pernicious effects in Occupations where it takes root. First, the conformist and increasingly insular culture she describes ends up becoming more and more about charisma and force of personality. Charisma is a really rotten basis for making decisions, though. Demagogues will tend to have the most charisma, and they will tend to drive groups toward strategically ill-thought-out actions that reinforce their charisma. And given a lack of formal structure, there are no restrictions or checks and balances on their power. Without structure, the de facto leaders are unaccountable.

Which leads to the second problem. In the absence of structure, and with consensus decision making in large open GAs, meetings last forever and can make few decisions. That means that even separate from the time required to cultivate relationships and gain political capital - to be allowed into the “in” group - those with other commitments such as work or family are deprived of a way to meaningfully participate. Those who can’t sit through hours of meetings simply won’t have a vote. For occupations that adopt this model, barriers to participation are very high. The people who gain power in these situations are the most stubborn and the most militant. They’ll hold out forever, while everyone else goes home. Others either leave or capitulate (to get the meeting over with or live to fight another day).⁷

For as important as the Occupy encampments are, they total in the low thousands nationwide. In a country of 330 million that is a rounding error of a rounding error, and a movement that claims to champion all but the very richest has to find a way to connect to that much larger portion - the 99% of the 99%. Those with obligations that prevent full time participation or that have no convenient way to regularly visit Occupy need to have some way to connect to it. Making the activities of the camps as available as possible is a crucial part of scaling Occupy out to the whole country and all walks of life. (So is being receptive to feedback from outside the camp!)

Maybe some of the Occupiers arguing against transparency don’t much care for a mass movement. Maybe they like the direction Occupy is going and would very much like to take ownership of it (while maintaining the fiction that it is a leaderless movement, of course). That means those of us who want to see it continue as a mass movement and believe that Occupy belongs to all of the 99% have to raise our voices. We need to do our best to persuade everyone else that Occupy must be visible to all and available to all walks of life. It must, in short, embrace a radical openness.

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NOTES

1. Fuller statement:

We enact this principle of solidarity with one another by recognizing our individual and collective responsibility not to incriminate our fellow Occupiers, and hereby agree that:
1) We will not talk to the police about our comrades (This includes all levels of local, state and federal law enforcement, jail staff, Immigration & Customs Enforcement, Internal Affairs, and the Citizens Police Review Board.).
2) We will not post potentially incriminating information about our comrades on the internet and social media (This includes any forms of information posted on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, email, etc.).
3) We will not post potentially incriminating video footage or photos of our comrades (This includes being attentive to the fact that even minor and unintended incidences can be used as the basis for criminal prosecution.).

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2. Affinis, re: Chicago (via email):

Based on what’s on the forum, it’s not exactly a complete block. Stack lines can’t be streamed. There’s an “opt-in” where a speaker can consent to be streamed (and a speaker who opts-in will then stand in a specially marked “stream” zone while speaking). Based on a couple of the comments, there was an amendment so that a GA participant can ask for a complete GA blackout. The GA will then be blacked out and discuss whether to proceed with a full blackout for the entire proposal discussion/vote.

It seems that most OC GAs currently are not streamed. Even though the proposal is apparently not a complete prohibition on all streaming, with all these restrictions, I doubt anyone will bother to try to continue to stream (and any stream produced would be swiss cheese).

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3. Lambert, via email: “When a march is organized and the participants haven’t been told where they’re going, that’s information asymmetry.” An example of this from outside Occupy:

The problem is that the financial system has been allowed to get so complicated and so rigged in favor of the people with information, that normal people, including homeowners, credit card users, politicians, and regulators have been left in the dark, and many of the little guys are still stuck in ludicrous contracts left over from the outrageous securitizations that took place in the CDO market.

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4. Full comment:

After being giulted non stop about how i should not stream i set things up at Cermak so that people were comfortable. I also agreed with this proposal when it was presented, because the “dangers” of livestream were beaten into my head (not literaly…we are non violent).

Remember when we used to call ourselves a transparent movement? This proposal ensures that we are no longer a transparent movement. This allows people to make decisions about Occupy Chicago and not be held accountable. This allows people to hide… I will not hide things like our government does. Livestreaming forces people to be accountable and weeds out infiltrators. Why would we allow people to make a decisions that affect our community without our community knowing who they are? I urge people to vote NO on this tomorrow so that we can preserve the transparency of Occupy Chicago. I will present a counter proposal in the next couple days

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5. Note the similarity in language: Freeman describes the fellow feeling among the group taking control as that of comrades - and that word is repeatedly invoked in the OO principle of solidarity.
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6. In his book The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America Richard J. Ellis describes (p. 10) how Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] started as a genuinely democratic group and an unaccountable elite. (Note the use of “solidarity, comrade!” type bromides.)

Chapter 6 addresses a paradoxical development that is central to all radical egalitarian movements but that is particularly acute in the case of SDS. In the beginning, SDS was organized along fairly conventional parliamentary lines: majority rule, Robert’s Rules of Order, and national conventions that elected a president, vice president, and national executive committee. But as egalitarianism became increasingly strong within SDS, these representative structures were dismantled in the name of participatory democracy and antielitism. “No leaders, no structures” was the egalitarian theory; elitism and arbitrary, unaccountable power were increasingly the reality. At national conventions decision making by consensus replaced majority vote, which in practice stripped conventions of their decision-making capacity and thereby transferred decision-making power to the permanent National Office. Annual rotation in office for elected leaders meant concentrating power in the hands of unelected staff, a concentration of power that was furthered by the decision to abolish the offices of president and vice president. These “democratic” reforms produced a leadership that became steadily less accountable to the SDS membership, which in turn made it easier for the leadership to destroy remaining democratic forms. Reforms in the name of democracy produced less democracy; antielitism produced its opposite.

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7. Three secondary problems of structurelessness: When decisions get made, given structurelessness, there’s no way to enforce the decision. So democratic decisionmaking (as in making decisions that actually mean anything) is lost, and in practice power devolves to autonomous actors - particularly those actors who are the most charismatic (where others will follow their lead).

Also, the clubiness of the elite would cause individual Occupy encampments to become increasingly isolated from other ones. An idiosyncratic and personality-driven Occupy is an Occupy largely disconnected from the Occupy movement as a whole. While there’s much to be said for the model of independent nodes in activism, the implementation of the model matters. Having it in place and elaborated on from day one is not the same as an unarticulated drift into a cult of personality. Context matters.

Finally, loss of transparency leads to loss of potential corrective input and perspective. It’s the opposite of crowdsourcing. It basically cuts off the possibility of valuable “outside” input (e.g. someone recognizing a potential fatal flaw in a plan of action).
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Petter from Francis let me know that their new EP This Must Be Blood is out.

Have a listen to the single “Traktor:”

This was published with considerable feedback from several bloggers at Corrente: DCblogger, affinis, lambert and okanogen. My sincere thanks to all of them for their help. Note: this post was updated shortly after publication.

When writing about violence at Occupy there seems to be a great deal of controversy over what the word itself means, so I’ll lead this post with what I hope is an unobjectionable definition. Since it comes from Google (via) it may well be the most-read definition of violence in the English speaking world:

violence - noun - Behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.

Now, some don’t think that’s what violence is. Some strenuously object to the last two words and insist violence can only be done to someone, not something¹.

For purposes of a public discussion, though, it’s best to go with the commonly understood definition. That common understanding may be wrong, and you may think the vast majority of people are credulous fools for believing as they do. That’s fine! Do your best to persuade them that violence cannot be done to some thing, only some one. (Or, if you want, that violence is really an ice cream sandwich.) Make that your project. Language evolves; do your part!

Until you reach that critical mass, though, you can’t just redefine a word and then insist that your new definition be the one everyone uses. This is an example of the kind of frustration okanogen was referring to when he wrote “debating violence advocates [VAs] is like nailing jello to a wall.” So once again, just to be extra clear, the definition of violence in this post is the common one: Behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.

VAs often seem to edge right up to approving of violence, but never take that last little step. For instance, Graeber writes: “While I have never personally engaged in acts of property destruction, I have on more than one occasion taken part in Blocs where property damage has occurred.” He has the opportunity to disavow the violence (keeping in mind that under the novel VA definition property destruction is not violence), yet chooses not to.²

“While I have never personally engaged in acts of property destruction” is a curious construct. It reads as though he understands such violence would be widely disapproved of, so he does not want his own name actually attached to it - but that he is sympathetic to it. So he splits the difference; doesn’t condemn it, but says he’s never done it. Try that in another context and see how convincing it sounds: “While I have never personally engaged in [insert crime here], [finish sentence as best you can.]”

Then there is the conflation of objecting to violence with turning the violent over to police (or vigilante policing by activists). Much of the discussion by nonviolence advocates (NVAs) objecting to violent tactics has centered around finding ways to disassociate themselves from VAs. Violence advocates most often refuse to acknowledge that NVAs have any right to be considered separate from them. Again and again, attempts by NVAs to say “no, this is not us; no, this is not what we stand for” is flipped into a call for violence against the VAs themselves (and through the looking glass we go).³

One interesting result that has emerged from our conversations: The deep reluctance of VAs - who claim to really be in favor of nonviolence, just their own proprietary definition of it - to even theoretically endorse the idea of nonviolence as others have. Look at the thread that starts here. The talking point that there has only been one incidence of Black Bloc violence in 800 occupations quickly emerges. It’s not true, incidentally - see below - but let’s allow it for the sake of the argument.

Two responses: One, the time to speak out against violence is before it becomes common, and two, if it really is that rare then why not keep it that way or eliminate it altogether? VAs seem reluctant to address these points. This one commenter attempts to, but badly. “Let the throwing under the bus begin!” etc. These kinds of probably unrepresentative individuals are the best we seem to be able to find, though. Overall VAs are not interested in even paying lip service to nonviolence; they are more interested in erecting elaborate constructs to justify we-don’t-call-that-violence.

Doing so reduces violence to but one item on a menu. In VAs formulation smashing windows is right there along with, say, a drum circle in terms of acceptability. If you think smashing windows is violent, though, and you are forced together with those with a, shall we say, more expansive view of acceptable behavior, then you have to make some choices. You can remain silent and risk having that silence be taken as approval, or you can speak out.

NVAs speak out with the goal of encouraging all like-minded individuals to voice their opinions, show what an unrepresentative minority VAs are, and (hopefully) isolate them from the larger group. Graeber insists this inevitably leads to either the dreaded snitching or the even more dreaded Peace Police (yes, he actually uses that term). Objecting to violence equals attempting to police VAs, and policing them equals violence. So if you object to someone trashing a local establishment, you’re the real thug and oppressor.

Entering into that kind of Twilight Zone logic obscures what would otherwise be very clear: That there are irreconcilable differences between the approaches of VAs and NVAs. The strategy of nonviolence has certain qualities that cannot coexist with violence advocacy in general or Black Bloc tactics in particular.⁴ The most obvious quality is transparency. General Assembly and other meetings are open, actions are publicly discussed and debated, minutes are kept and posted, and participants show their faces. The consistent message is, we have nothing to hide. As affinis put it: “Straightforward honest communication builds trust and support.”

Another difference is the spirit of inclusion versus exclusion. A nonviolent mass movement is open to all walks of life - from strollers to walkers. Introducing violence will keep away most of those with young ones who (rightly) would fear for their safety. It would also keep away many older people for whom a fall is not something they can just spring up from. And furthermore, the prospect of arrest is going to keep away many people of color. While arrest is a possibility with nonviolent civil disobedience, an arrest on violence charges is much more serious. Sachio ko-yin put it this way: “By making protest space even more unsafe for folks from communities of color, people who can’t afford an arrest record, and working class people generally, the Black Bloc has always frustrated me.”

Which leads to yet another difference: the willingness to be arrested. NVAs undertake direct action and civil disobedience with the understanding that they may be detained by police, perhaps unreasonably so and in poor conditions. VAs, on the other hand, regard the prospect of arrest as abhorrent. Now, there may well be stiffer penalties for property destruction than for a sit down strike, but the principle is the same either way: If you have the courage of your convictions you should be willing to pay the civil cost of your disobedience. NVAs have that courage; VAs do not. Look at the way one NVA movement approached it (in the context of a peaceful mass movement):

Towards the climax of their uprising in Serbia, the police started rounding up activists wearing Otpor! T-shirts and hauling them into the police stations. Naturally the kids were terrified. Otpor! set about defusing their anxiety.

“First we debriefed our people when they came out of the police station, then we briefed the people who were at risk of being arrested. We told them, you will be handcuffed, then if you are male you will be put in a cell with drunk people; if female, with whores. They will separate you from your friends, then after a few hours they will come and take your fingerprints and they will remove your belt and shoelaces and you will feel embarrassed because your trousers will fall down. Then after a few hours they will take you to an interrogation and this is the list of questions they will ask you and these are the answers you will give them.

“Meanwhile, we invited people to gather in front of the police station; everybody at risk of being arrested had lined up a lawyer in advance. Parents of the kids were informed, and we had a network of old ladies who called the police station continuously to ask about those who had been arrested. And now you are sitting there, and everything is happening as predicted, and the good detective is offering you a cigarette and the bad one is hitting you on the head and it looks like a bad joke. And the phones are ringing in the police station and nobody can do anything. And my question is, who is under siege now? This is not the most comfortable situation for the police: they deal with criminals. You block them from doing their normal job, traffic, looters, the things they should do instead of interrogating an 18-year-old kid for wearing a T-shirt…” And gradually that particular pillar of tyranny, the police, is weakened, one policeman at a time.

(Also note the conclusion of the piece: “He quotes Jorge Luis Borges: ‘Violence,’ the great Argentine writer put it, ‘is the last refuge of the weak.’”)

Which would you rather be a part of? And is it any wonder VAs are trying to blur the lines between themselves and NVAs? Even beyond the immediate case of arrest and detention, trace out the implication of NVA strategies versus VA tactics. One is sustainable, one is not.

For instance, what would VAs say to the woman who alleged to have been sexually assaulted at Occupy? She went to the police; was she a snitch? Should she have gone to VAs instead of authorities? Would they have handled it in-house, so to speak? Have VAs articulated some sort of neo-feudal code of chivalry by which its members will voluntarily restrain themselves - without resort to the legal system or the (eek!) Peace Police? ⁵ For those which such rosy dispositions, Willem Buiter: “Self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance.”⁶

VA tactics don’t work as a model because they are not designed to work as a model. Their main function is to shield those engaging in violence from the consequences of their actions. Whether it’s the high minded “One expresses what solidarity one can with others who share the same struggle, and if one cannot, tries ones best to ignore or avoid them” or the much bolder “snitches get stitches,” the result is the same: those who object are silenced. In fact, by playing directly into the media and political elites’ preferred theme of violent confrontation, VAs are arguably more naturally allied with authorities than NVAs.

Identity versus anonymity; openness versus secrecy; direct action as preservation or improvement (i.e. Occupy Our Homes) versus direct action as destruction; mass movement versus insurgency; invitation versus exclusion. The two approaches could not be more different.

VAs want the halo effect. They want to force an association with a much larger group: one that enjoys much broader popular support; one that embraces values in many ways opposite from theirs. If they can do that, some of the shine of Occupy’s good reputation might reflect on them. More probably, though, they will drag support down to their own unpopular level (via) - and will sharply reduce the number of people participating (via)⁷

I began with a definition of violence. There are other definitions obviously, and I have no desire to get into a game of Dueling Dictionaries with VAs. So I’ll close with a multimedia illustration of what I consider violent. It focuses on events at Occupy only and is not comprehensive. It is simply a way to show what I’m thinking about when I’m thinking of violence. These examples are not characteristic of Occupy; so far incidents like them have been exceedingly rare. I’d love to see them stay exceedingly rare, or even better go away completely.

So, do the examples below contain violence? My answer precedes or is embedded in each link.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Hell yes.

Pay particular attention to that last video. Around 1:05 a protester - wearing a helmet but otherwise with his face clearly visible - tries to put himself in front of the ones smashing windows and pleads “No violence! No violence!” As he does so he is pushed and then surrounded by a masked, black clad group of, ahem, activists. This is not nuns protesting nukes.

It’s a measure of how thoroughly inverted VAs have made the narrative that they claim in this scenario it’s the man saying “no violence” and being menaced by a swarm of anonymous vandals who is the one doing violence - and the vandals here are the victims!

VA claims simply do not survive contact with reality. They are parlor tricks intended to be considered without reference to what is actually happening. And as far as I am concerned they are presented with the intent to deceive.

By my lights, anyone who thinks the linked content above is not violent acquiesces to violence at a minimum. They can more properly be called apologists for violence. The refusal to denounce it in the current context - namely, its imminent danger of discrediting a popular mass movement - could arguably (but less generously) be called advocacy. I don’t feel especially charitable towards those who I think are lying to me about such a serious matter, so I have called and will continue to call them violence advocates.

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NOTES

1. I’ve mostly used quotes from Graeber to argue against for two reasons. One, his original piece and prominence as a spokesperson make him one of the more important voices out there in this discussion. Two, he stopped by my cross post on Daily Kos and shared some thoughts with the Kos community. This post is in part an extension of the dialog that began there. While I’ve used his arguments as the main ones to address, I’ve tried to keep the focus on principles and not personalities (“YOU’RE AN IDIOT” etc.) I’ve made an effort to keep this from reading as an attack on Graeber; it’s his objectionable ideas I’m more concerned with. I’ve tried to write the post so it reads that way, and I hope it shows.
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2. This is from the “I never inhaled” school of argument. Also note the passive voice “has occurred”, as in “mistakes were made.”
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3. In his rebuttal to the previous piece in this series, Graeber claims to be compiling a list of violent actions taken by NVAs. Purely on the basis of making Occupy transparent and holding it accountable, all should welcome such a list, if and when it is presented. We look forward to its release.

However, such a list would prove the very case made here: (1) that violence as a strategy does not work - in this case, putting NVAs in a poor light (even if VAs going against GA NV commitments turns out to be the instigating factor) and (2) the need for explicit commitments to NV by Occupations, which all should adhere to.
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4. See here for a good discussion of strategy vs. tactics - among other things.
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5. Consider also the potential that such an honor system has for further exclusion. Women have learned to not set too much store on the purity of men’s motives, and an environment where things are informally “worked out” seems much more prone to cover ups and conspiracies of silence. So you can add women to people of color, the very young and the elderly to those excluded by VAs tactics. Do the demographics seem to be narrowing towards a particular group here?
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6. For those who think Anarchism is the answer, what kind of relevant real world examples can they supply? Because the tendency in the kinds of environments under discussion - socially unstable, developing and volatile - is for what Rachel Luft called disaster masculinity to emerge. See her Searching for Common Ground [PDF] for a useful case study. The experience described here seems much closer to reality than the utopian dream world VAs are trying to sell people on:

American individualism, exacerbated by men’s sense of entitlement to autonomy, in the context of the pervasive [New Orleans large grassroots relief effort Common Ground Collective] CG do-it-yourself culture of decentralization, was deployed to resist accountability in the name of rugged freedom. As one white male volunteer with an anarchy symbol on his shirt retorted in response to the facilitator’s suggestion about gender caucuses, “So you think homogenization is the key to antiracist growth?”

And please spare me the “anarchism cannot fail, it can only be failed” replies. An ideology that has no mechanism for restraining senses of entitlement or checking aggrandized egos is not one suited for planet Earth.
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7. Much, much more from Chenoweth here and here.
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This was published with considerable feedback from several bloggers at Corrente: DCblogger, affinis, lambert and okanogen. My sincere thanks to all of them for their help.

The issue of violence at Occupy flared up last week when Chris Hedges used violent rhetoric to make the case for nonviolence. It was not the first time, either; he’d approvingly written of Greeks rioting - his protests to the contrary notwithstanding. (Lambert has been using the “own goal” metaphor to describe Hedges’ clumsier efforts.)

This is a big problem because of his prominence. When he writes something, people notice. Someone like David Graeber is moved to respond, spending a good deal of time on the theme of “whatever your intentions, it is very hard to read your statement as anything but an appeal to violence.” If violence advocates (VAs) feel the need to answer language like that (or are simply clever enough debaters to seize that rhetorical opening), it crowds out discussion of other issues, and there’s plenty else to discuss.

For instance, the idea that NVAs should emphatically disassociate themselves from VAs seems terribly provocative to Graeber. He writes (emph. in orig.):

Successful movements have understood that it’s absolutely essential not to fall into the trap set out by the authorities and spend one’s time condemning and attempting to police other activists. One makes one’s own principles clear. One expresses what solidarity one can with others who share the same struggle, and if one cannot, tries one’s best to ignore or avoid them, but above all, one keeps the focus on the actual source of violence, without doing or saying anything that might seem to justify that violence because of tactical disagreements¹ you have with fellow activists.

First, there’s a world of difference between condemning violence and attempting to police it; lumping these together is careless at best and a sneaky tactic at worst. Second, condemning VAs loudly is important because, as Graeber himself shows later in that same piece, the absence of explicit denunciation is taken by VAs as an implicit endorsement (“Gandhi made it clear that while he was opposed to murder under any circumstances, he also refused to denounce the murderer.”²). If NVAs want to avoid that kind of unwelcome association they have no option but to be crystal clear about their stance.

Also, Graeber’s framing is a false choice where condemning violent reactions to police brutality is somehow excusing and further, even inviting police brutality. One can believe both kinds of violence are wrong, and it is a mighty cynical kind of solidarity that requires those who believe in nonviolence to ignore those who practice violence. Silence equals approval. If you employ a tactic that you know goes against my deeply held beliefs, why is it my beliefs which must be suppressed? In that formulation, violence trumps nonviolence, because only the former is granted a full spectrum of expression.

The calls for silence among NVAs has taken a particularly sinister turn recently as VAs have begun to also insist that no (potentially inconvenient) live streaming be done of events, lest they show Black Bloc tactics in action without the aid of a painstaking explanation by an apologist. So Black Bloc now comes full circle to embrace precisely the same mindset of brutality and suppression that they claim to find so objectionable in police. And since Black Bloc is relatively easy to infiltrate during an action, we aren’t necessarily just talking about an ideological merger, either.

These tactics are spectacularly wrong-headed; as Charles commented:

[Hedges] would have done better to point to the long history of the police inserting their agents into demonstrations to commit crimes and thereby tar the demonstrators. The logical question then is, “if the police are paying people to smash windows, why are you doing it for free?”

Why indeed? As DCblogger remarks in mail: “No snitching cries are a good indicator of a police informer. Bringing in the police is very dangerous to informers, so they don’t want anyone to do that.” As for the suppression, I initially considered likening it to the infamous Stop Snitchin’ campaign, but refrained because I thought VAs might find the unsavory connection objectionable. Well, turns out they’re going there themselves³. What’s next, omertà?

Perhaps VAs, like Mitt Romney, believe some things should only be discussed in quiet rooms. That would be very convenient for VAs, to have gentle talks in dulcet tones out of the spotlight while chaos is stirred up on the streets, and the public views the entire movement through the lens of violent activism.

Those opposed to violent actions (no matter how you define them) do not have that luxury, though. They need to voice their opposition strenuously and publicly, because literally everyone else — VAs, authorities, and the wider citizenry — will assume they approve of violent tactics otherwise.

Finally, there’s a dynamic that both sides are coming to grips with. Susie Cagle describes it thus:

While previous criticisms came from the right or center of the political spectrum, these perspectives are arising from the left and mainly from journalists who have not been in the field to witness these tactics in action and within context.

And Graeber (again):

I am also writing as someone who was deeply involved in the early stages of planning Occupy in New York. I am also an anarchist who has participated in many Black Blocs.

There are two points being made. First, Cagle is right that those who are actually on the scene are best qualified to report on what is happening. God knows there has been enough shoddy reporting from those who blandly pass along press releases from City Hall or who parachute in for a day or two and presume to write their authoritative accounts. There’s no substitute for long term, on-the-ground reporting, and the accounts from those folks should be taken to be the most credible unless they demonstrate otherwise.

But as valuable as that experience is for a reporter, it can be hazardous for an activist: There’s a certain “I was there” snobbishness that can creep in. Arguing from authority has been one of the major complaints of those frustrated with insular, self-referential and power privileging reporting from MSM outlets. Seeing it from activists is particularly disturbing, and seeing it from anarchists like Graeber is mind-boggling.

While, those on the inside are better positioned to give a front row story, they are also susceptible to the myopic perspective that causes relatively small or inconsequential elements to be wildly distorted. VAs may have an elaborately constructed paradigm to justify their tactics, and may have meticulously selected a regional franchise’s windows to break, instead of a “locally owned” coffee shop⁴ (curated vandalism, if you will), but guess what? The uninitiated observer will just see destruction⁵.

The position of VA that destroying property and physically confronting police is some kind of sublime critique requires an almost complete level of self-absorption. It takes a resolute and willful ignorance to not see how obviously repellent such tactics are to the population at large⁶. VAs might respond by saying they disregard the delicate sensibilities of the bourgeois pigs, which is fine. But those who characterize the populace like that have no place in a movement that strives to represent — or at least get approving forbearance from — the bottom 99% of the economic scale.

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NOTES

1. VAs are notoriously slippery in their arguments. They insist that they never, ever be criticized over what they call tactical disagreements — but refuse to make themselves distinct from those who want no part of their tactics. NVAs tried to make that distinction plain from the very beginning in Oakland and violence advocates prevented it. In effect, the groups were associated against one of the groups’ will. Yet VAs remain extraordinarily touchy about being criticized. So they force themselves on those who strenuously disagree with their tactics and then act like aggrieved victims if there is any objection. And incidentally, that disagreement is foundational. VAs like to pretend its some sort of minor semantic difference, but in fact it goes to the very heart of what Occupy represents: VAs consider it an insurgency; NVAs a mass movement. Those two are mutually exclusive.
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2. Any veering off into What Would Gandhi Do is an unhelpful distraction as far as I’m concerned. Occupy is happening right now; we need to focus on what’s happening right now and give our arguments for or against it in terms of what’s happening right now. Hypotheticals, theoreticals, thought experiments and other flights of fancy are as counterproductive as eliminationist rhetoric.

That said, Graeber misrepresents Gandhi. His claim that Gandhi refused to denounce the murderer by a radical is simply not true. The passage comes from here (via affinis in email), and Gandhi clearly denounces it: “I must say that those who believe and argue that such murders may do good to India are ignorant men indeed. No act of treachery can ever profit a nation. Even should the British leave in consequence of such murderous acts, who will rule in their place? The only answer is: the murderers.”

Affinis also sent along this; see particularly the last part: “Do you not tremble to think of freeing India by assassinations?” etc. Perhaps violence advocates require a certain amount of historical revisionism to make their ideology palatable for the masses. I wonder why that would be?
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3. There’s at least an equally long post that can be written about suppression, bullying and sexism by violence advocates. While they bristle at any suggestion they are animated by a hypermasculine mindset, it’s pretty clear that women are overwhelmingly (but not unanimously!) turned off by the kind of glorified hooliganism VAs champion. If they don’t lose their voices entirely they will only be heard if they manage to become sufficiently appealing to a powerful male.
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4. The romanticized notion of targeting a national coffee chain over a locally owned coffee shop might be some more historical revisionism. Affinis, via email:

Graeber:

I doubted this when I read it, since most Black Blocs agree on a strict policy of not damaging owner-operated enterprises, and I now find in Susie Cagle’s response to your article that, in fact, it was a chain coffee shop, and the property destruction was carried out by someone not in black.”

This is a reference to Tully’s coffeeshop. I tried digging into this a bit. Individual Tully’s coffeeshops explicitly advertise themselves as locally owned and operated. But Tully’s is a franchise. Across firms, franchises vary in their level of central control. Apparently with Tully’s the individual shops are pretty much independent in operation and style (unlike say a McDonald’s franchise), but all sell coffee from the mother firm, etc.

Whether or not the property destruction was carried out by someone in black (and I’ve not seen any evidence of this outside of Cagle’s article, where she was arguing against Hedges) might be a bit besides the point. In the Nov 2 evening events, in the videos, the people carrying out the trashing seemed to be predominantly be young men wearing bandannas, and it seemed that they clearly knew each other and were acting in a coordinated fashion, but many were not wearing black. Incidentally, in Oakland, both Tully’s and that Starbucks that later had its windows smashed had donated food to OO before getting their windows smashed.

As far as BB respecting owner operated businesses - I’ve seen little evidence of that.

So take the lofty claims with a grain of salt.
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5. One of the few resonant points VAs make is that those who go into the legal system face a very hard time. America’s onerous and punitive criminal justice policies not only warehouse people for excessively long periods, but brands them for life after release. But that is just one part of the issue. DCblogger in an email: “[P]utting someone into the criminal justice system is a very serious matter. it is life altering. But then, so is smashing the window. The bank can replace the window. Or they can shut down the branch. Washington DC’s riot corridor was a ghost town for 30 years. The damage of a riot lives a long time after the riot. I hate to think what business insurance is in Oakland right now.”
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6. In a way, getting bogged down in VA arguments is counterproductive because it distracts us from looking at what kind of actions are inclusive and inviting. This is an extension of the “insurgency vs. mass movement” dichotomy in footnote 1. Via email, activist Joseph Anderson:

Occupy Oakland, and the Occupy movement, cannot both have a diversity of people and a “diversity of tactics” at this time — and the movement can’t shortcut the process of attaining, and retaining, the first by jumping to the second.

Via email, lambert:

The object IMNSHO should be to get as many people as possible supporting Occupations with their physical presence. This is what the Egyptians did. “All walks of life” must participate. One can also think of this as “safety in numbers.” Only NV can do that.

As a corollary, transparency and accountability are key, because if the GA decides that an event will be NV, and a bunch of parents bring their kids in strollers, and a lot of old people come with their walkers, and then a black blocker heaves a bottle at the police and the police charge the crowd, then (a) you’ve put innocents at risk, (b) you’ve lost a ton of people, who not only feel fearful but betrayed, and rightly so, and (c) you make it harder for part of the country that are not yet Occupy-friendly to become so.

And as a corollary to that, Occupy is pre-figuring what a transparent and accountable public process looks like. Where else have you seen one of those lately? But if, in the name of autonomy, you’ve got black blockers doing violence, then nothing is transparent and accountable at all (unless you want to make the assumption that random violence is always possible). So the pre-figuration gets destroyed as well.

[snip]

And I don’t think that the idea is that the state will respond with illegal violence. A child of six knows that. The lesson is in the prefiguration. The libraries, the kitchens. Doing something.

And finally this from activist Soul:

We are being killed economically especially small businesses and all resources for our children. We have schools closing down, we have murders daily. That needs to be addressed, but we’re trying to teach our children not to use violent measures, to use restorative justice and things. And then we have this violence and madness. Whether the police do it to them or they do it - both sides need to stop, I feel. The police and them, and let us get busy to try and build and create in a positive manner.

So that is why I’m standing; I’m not with the Chamber of Commerce. I’m representing West Oakland community - the children that are voiceless, the poor, the disabled - that will not have a voice with that group…I think [black bloc] has been infiltrated by police infiltrators, by provocateurs and stuff, and they’re falling for it.

Because see there’s this game in Occupy. As soon as any violence or any type of aggression happens it’s the anarchists. And then when they do their call out, that’s who they’re calling to go front lines, and then they deny it…I think a lot of them, especially those that are always in the camera - you can see the one over there - are protest prostitute media whores. They look for the camera, they look for the sensation, rather than be busy daily in the community like many of us are. Daily. They’re going to tear down our infrastructure. Well it’s not going to be allowed…I want them to go home, they’ve overstayed their welcome. Many of them aren’t even from this city, and I can start pointing at who don’t live here. But I don’t want to do that. I send them much respect and love, but enough’s enough. You know, enough is enough.

There’s no direction, no demand. They talk about foreclosures. Why the hell aren’t they standing in front of a bank all day every day, jamming the engines? No no, we’re gonna tear up city hall, we’re gonna tear up whatever.

Preventing Wells Fargo from foreclosing on a house may not provide the adrenaline rush that smashing shit up provides, but it is actually far more provocative and subversive. To the extent that VAs prevent that kind of more productive activity it is deeply damaging to Occupy.

Also, the “There’s no direction, no demand” critique has traction that initial “why don’t they have demands?” cries against OWS didn’t have. Occupy has begun to formulate demands via direct actions like Occupy Our Homes and supporting local strikes. The first charges were specious because they were leveled against a mass movement just beginning to articulate its beliefs. In the early days, what Charles Pierce called shouting at the right buildings was enough. Once activism started it became more reasonable to expect protesters to have some kind of message. So “no direction, no demand” is a fair charge to level against VAs.
(Back)

Economics is a closed system; internally it is perfectly logical, operating according to a consistent set of principles. Unfortunately, the same could be said of psychosis. What’s more, once having entered the closed system of the economist, you, like the psychotic, may have a hard time getting out.

- Judy Jones and William Wilson

The Occupy movement has largely been relegated to the margins of mainstream coverage lately - big outlets may mention something in a news capsule but generally have ignored it beyond that. It is still very much alive though, and one aspect of it has become the subject of intense debate recently: The use of violence, or what proponents call diversity of tactics.

The controversy flared up over Chris Hedges’ piece on Monday sharply critical of “Black Bloc anarchists - so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property.” Hedges believes there is widespread disapproval of violent tactics, and that attaching them to Occupy is a cynical attempt to legitimize them. But because the two tend to be conflated in popular opinion (to the extent that anyone is paying attention) the primary effect is the discrediting of Occupy generally - both in Oakland and beyond.

The debate can take a downright philosophical turn as people hash out what violence means to them. Some don’t view property destruction as violence at all, but only the destruction of living things. Susie Cagle posted a response to Hedges and described a couple different kinds of property destruction. The first:

There was a dispersal order, but no means of escape. Protesters with shields attempted to push the police line, which responded with several volleys of tear gas into the crowd, still trapped. Instead of enduring the gas, the crowd pulled down chain-link fencing that separated them from the street and safety.

Another:

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.

Were both of those violent? Neither? I tend to think violence can be done against property, though it is less objectionable than violence done to living things. But context matters too - I wouldn’t consider Cagle’s first example violent because people were trying to get away from police teargassing them. The second, though? While I don’t have any particular love for Whole Foods or the big banks who have caused such misery, I don’t see where video of seemingly random acts of vandalism help the Occupy movement. To this point Occupy has largely - and rightly - been seen as nonviolent.

If that perception changes pack everything up and go home, because it will not achieve anything more of value. We can debate all day long about what’s really violent; about whether Black Bloc is a part of Occupy, an offshoot, an infiltrator or a welcome counterpart; about whether actions taken during demonstrations need to be understood within a longer historical context. In the end such fine distinctions will mostly be lost on those watching what little coverage is available. In order to get the support of that group - the steelworker union member, the unemployed recent graduate weighed down by debt, the nervous professional dreading word of the next round of layoffs - an unambiguous reputation for nonviolence is essential.

And yes, perceptions matter here. The 1999 Seattle WTO protests have been cemented in the popular imagination as violent, and as being overrun by thugs looking for a respectable veneer for the crime spree they wanted to embark on anyway. I know that isn’t what really happened so please don’t leave comments “correcting” me! The narrative long ago came to consensus on that, however, just like it did on the (ahem) fact that Al Gore said he invented the Internet, and any other number of breaks of reality that were improperly set into casts and hardened into a deformed historical record.

If Occupy doesn’t get it right starting now the same kind of distortions will take hold. It will be presented as the nihilistic rage of a bunch of uneducated criminals and it will be marginalized. No respectable person will be permitted to endorse it - and no amount of strenuous objection will overturn that judgment. The decisions and strategies Cagle reports on may well have their self-contained logic, but like the economist and the psychotic their world might end up inscrutable to outsiders. If Occupy loses its simple, obvious and visceral appeal to the 99% - remember them? - then get ready for a full retrenchment of the status quo.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

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Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

This report (very graphic) on the effects of depleted uranium (DU) is absolutely horrifying. Reports on the effects of DU from other sources here and here. Older report from the Guardian here. DU and white phosphorous are new munitions in our wars and haven’t gotten much attention (in the US anyway), but it’s hard to imagine reports like this - if true - remaining quiet forever.

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Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Army Brig. Gen. Terence J. Hildner, 49, of Fairfax, VA.
2. Marine Lance Cpl. Edward J. Dycus, 22, of Greenville, MS.
3. Marine Sgt. William C. Stacey, 23, of Redding, CA.

Via.

Days since Washington Post has updated its Faces of the Fallen site: 17.

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US military bases aren’t really popular outside of the US. Drones don’t appear to be popular anywhere.

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US terror drone crashes in Somalia. Here is your updated drone crash scorecard:

• US terror drone crashes in Somalia
• US spy drone crashes in Afghanistan
• US spy drone crashes in Somalia
• US drone crashes in central Somalia
• 2 US terror drones crash in Somalia
• Two US drones crash in south Somalia
• Two US drones crash in south Somalia
• Three US drones crash in Somalia
• US drone goes down in Afghanistan
• Another US drone crashes in Pakistan
• US drone crashes in Pakistan
• US spy drone crashes in Afghanistan

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Signs of the times.

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Via Avedon, Anglachel:

My interest in Apple is as a signifier of a particular mentality among the cultural elite - let’s call them Whole Foods Nation - that wants others (like me) to ratify their consumer purchases (phones, canned beans, presidents) as markers of cultural, moral and intellectual superiority.

Use whatever gadget you want, but don’t lie to yourself about the very brutal world of global manufacturing where it was produced.

Some thoughts from Molly Wood. My own proposal, posted at Corrente.

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digby: “I’m glad the president finally realized that he was trying to govern a nation that didn’t actually exist.”

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Bipartisanship is dead! Long live bipartisanship!

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blogroll amnesty day is here again!

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This week in Oakland. Hannah:

Last week, a special inquiry into the Oakland, California Police Department’s operating procedures concluded that they had been grossly inappropriate, especially in their dealings with citizen protesters. So, the casual observer might expect that a chastened OPD would react to a sense of guilt with restraint and institute some reforms. That’s not, however, how guilt often works. What happens more often is that individuals and corporations “double down” or do it again, as if to prove there was no wrong in the first place. I think that’s an example of the deadly sin of pride - obviously self-defeating.

Via lambert, this:

The fact that all of these “journalists” repeat the same ridiculous crowd number, march times, etc isn’t just an indication of their tendency to downplay activist mobilization; its an index of their basic and fundamental worthlessness as news sources. . They’re just copying and pasting.

[snip]

It isn’t just that there are errors, or that these errors are small and pointless; it’s that the level of non-knowledge required to produce these texts is huge: these articles are what they are as a function of the total distance and disconnect from what actually happened and a total dependence on being told what happened by the Police press officer (and an inability to do anything more than write that down, and slightly change the word order to cover their tracks).

Susie Cagle:

Best post-mortems I’ve seen of #OO #J28 #moveinday — so far at least — have been done by occupiers, not journalists. #newsdesert

I know it’s considered beyond laughable to suggest that someone like Cagle - whose primary medium is Twitter - be considered for some kind of journalism award, but that says more about the debased quality of mainstream journalism than Cagle. She’s been reporting from the scene for weeks, even getting arrested once. One would hope the Pulitzer committee would be impressed by such passionate commitment to the trade!

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Also from lambert, this on Europe’s lost generation.

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At Balloon Juice, something serious from DougJ: “It’s a tragedy, plain and simple, one that has real victims and real perpetrators.”

Some snark from mistermix: “Isn’t it about time for one of Scheiffer’s kids to take over that show?”

Sarah Proud and Tall singles out this from National Review:

(For the uninitiated, Gawker’s imperative role on the Internet is that of the mother bird, partially digesting the work of others with the enzymes of bored irony and the gastric juices of sarcasm, and regurgitating stub articles fit for the consumption of the shrieking, featherless hatchlings that comprise my doomed generation.)

Which is actually pretty great.

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Your weekly Pierce:

Mike Lee, the Tea Party rookie from the Beehive State, a Tenther extremist whose views on the Constitution dead-end somewhere on the wrong side of Cemetery Ridge. Which, of course, doesn’t prevent him from waving the document around as though he picked it personally at Ollivander’s two days ago. (“The Constitution chooses the senator, Mr. Lee.”) The New Republic sees Lee as the amiable intellectual face of the Tea Party. Among his other amiable intellectual pursuits, Lee wants to do away with the federal income tax and with birthright citizenship. He does so, however, in a way that, as TNR puts it, “doesn’t scream crackpot.” This is true. Rather, it says “crackpot” in clearly audible, measured tones.

Now, though, the senator is having a bit of a snit over the president’s recess appointments, which the president made because the Republican party has abandoned government entirely for a career in legislative mime.

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ECONNED EXCERPT from pp. 272-3:

It should come as no surprise that the exams were roundly and deservedly derided by anyone who knew much of anything about banks and was not in on the con job. Bill Black, former senior bank regulator, put it bluntly: “There are no real stress tests going on.” The “adverse” scenario that determined how much dough the bank might need if things turned out badly was far from dire enough. Mainstream economists increasingly came to the view that the downside case looked like a middle-of-the-road forecast. The process also made insufficient allowance for the just-starting avalanche in commercial real estate.

Not only was there not enough stress in these “stress tests,” they were not much of a test either. The normal practice in a regulatory exam is for the supervisor to sample loan files. The authorities made no review of these documents. In the past, it has taken well over a hundred examiners months to go over a single loan portfolio of a large bank. But here, roughly 200 examiners were allotted to 19 banks, a mere ten examiners on average across a broad range of businesses. Moreover, the authorities punted on evaluating the exposures most likely to cause havoc if the economy weakened further, meaning the trading books of the big capital markets players, Citigroup, Bank of America (the reluctant new owner of Merrill), J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman. They were simply asked to run scenarios using their own risk models, the same ones that had performed to dismally and were the very reason they were in this fix!

Today is Blogroll Amnesty Day (BAD) [UPDATE: Link changed to skippy’s 2012 post. Jon said Feb. 3, skippy says Super Bowl weekend. I believe this is how schisms happen. I plan to keep to Feb. 3 in Jon’s memory, but as official keeper of the tradition skippy’s roundup is the one to link back to every year.], the day where bloggers promote their lesser trafficked bretheren (and sisteren(?)). Here are my 2012 selections:

• Hannah’s Blog
• Under The LobsterScope
• The Adventures of Fat Cat and Everyman!
• The Confluence
• FALKLANDS
• Elle Varner - Conversational Lush

I’ve BAD linked to Hannah before, and will likely continue to do so. She very quietly runs a terrific blog.. The Confluence probably gets lots more traffic than this site but not nearly as much as it deserves.

The last two are music links, which may not be strictly part of BAD but neither are household names so I think it’s in the spirit of the thing. Falkands is a band in Edmonton that ought to be huge. Conversational Lush is a new, free mixtape, and Elle Varner is an exciting newcomer.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

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Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

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Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Army 1st Lt. David A. Johnson, 24, of Horicon, WI.
2. Marine Cpl. Christopher G. Singer, 23, of Temecula, CA.

Via.

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Drones have started to bomb Somalia. PressTV report, with caveat. Maybe they were just early to the story.

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Chaos in Oakland. MSNBC botches report of it.

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Lots of reports on possible movement on Wall Street fraud. The new working group gets cautious approval from the normally skeptical David Dayen and Matt Taibbi. Stay tuned!

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More ex-Murdoch employees arrested. Via.

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Bruce Dixon on the industry we lionize and the slaves it employs. Built by the poor but designed by the smart.

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Yvette Carnell looks at a parallel with an earlier time.

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Leftover links. SOPA proponents have an irritating habit of insisting that all you need to do is read the legislation and you’ll see it’s all perfectly fine. There’s Richard Cotton’s “if you’ve read the legislation you know it applies only to foreign web sites” and Lamar Smith’s “It’s easy to engage in fear-mongering and it’s easy to raise straw men and red herrings, but if they read the bill they will be reassured.” One of the reasons for all the opposition is that it’s a terribly written law that leaves all kinds of room for interpretation. Another is that folks who are aware of the recent past and are capable of connecting dots, drawing clear inferences, and looking at context have arrived at the obvious conclusion that SOPA will almost immediately begin harming a whole range of sites not mentioned by the legislation. Those who want to quarantine discussion to only those sites mentioned in the bill are either willfully blind or have an ulterior motive.

At least one music blog took part in the protest:

If the Blogger fiasco from a few years back taught us anything, it’s that there really is no such thing as a legal mp3 blog. No matter how much permission you have or from whom it came from (including the bands themselves) all it takes is for one faction of the machine behind an artist to take qualm with an mp3 on your site and you’ll be getting a take down notice from your hosting company (if they’re nice enough to not just shut you down).

Includes a link to this article, which looks at the headaches and pitfalls of the existing system, forget about a draconian new one:

Take the case of Masala, co-founded by Guillaume Decouflet in mid-2005. Together with his partners, Decouflet has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to underground genres such as kuduro and funk carioca. Masala’s writers weren’t typical music bloggers, waxing lyrical about Neon Indian and the new Phoenix remix: mostly DJs, they shared South African electronica, Japanese dancehall, UK funky and Senegalese hip-hop. “We haven’t been posting any Whitney Houston or anything,” Decouflet explained. He only recalls receiving one DMCA notice - ever - from Blogger. As this email did not name the offending song, he says he doesn’t know what caused the complaint. Masala’s bloggers responded to Google’s email, Decouflet insists, but never heard back. That is, until their entire site - and more than four years of archives - were deleted this week.

Sean Michaels posts at Said The Gramophone and is an occasional correspondent of mine on strictly music-related matters. I’m sure he agrees completely with all my political views though.

The anti-SOPA blackout should have been a teachable moment for Democrats, but probably will not be. If you want to know how Republicans ever get to successfully position themselves as populist champions against indifferent, out of touch elites, this is a handy example.

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Digby hasn’t lost anything off her fastball: “This has all the hallmarks of Mitt’s compassion chip misfiring.”

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ECONNED EXCERPT from pp. 217-8. After noting two weaknesses with the floating currency system Smith details the last one:

And the third is that “floating” rates can be influenced by central bank interest rate policies. For instance, the Bank of Japan kept dropping its call rate, its overnight interest rate, starting at the end of 1990. Although the relationship is loose, the yen did weaken considerably over the 1990s as interest rates fell, helping Japan have a robust export sector even though its domestic economy was a basket case. Conventional trade-oriented theories of exchange say that the currencies of countries running large trade surpluses ought to rise, thus making their exports more costly and reducing their competitiveness. However, these models ignore the role of the financial system. A country like Japan with low interest rates can see its currency become a funding vehicle (recall the discussion of the yen carry trade in chapter 7). Foreigners will gamble on exchange rates, borrowing in the low interest rates and investing at higher interest rates elsewhere. This activity suppresses the price of funding the currency because the speculators must sell the low interest rate currency to buy investments of the country offering higher returns, and the sales of the currency borrowed will keep its price down.

And Japan was soon to have company in the “cheap currency” club, albeit for different reasons.

China pegged its currency at 8.28 renminbi to the dollar in 1994. The initial motivation for setting a fixed rate was to give exporters greater predictability, and this is not a trivial issue. Volatile exchange rates can wreak havoc with planning and profits. Hedging costs money, and even sophisticated players can wind up worse off from trying to protect against exchange rate movements than if they had done nothing.

But as the Chinese economy performed well, China maintained its peg, which increasingly looked to be at an artificially low level (as economies become more successful, their currencies usually rise in value). Like the Japanese before them, China saw trade surpluses with the United States grow and started acquiring U.S. assets. But for many years, this pattern looked benign, since the Chinese surpluses, although sustained, were not large by global standards.

And then the Asian crisis hit. The causes are debated, but external debt has risen sharply in many Asian economies. Many had set interest rates high to attract foreign investors and had currency pegs. Unfortunately they were too successful. The influx of hot money stimulated their economies and produced trade deficits. High domestic interest rates and a fixed exchange rate made borrowing in foreign currencies like the dollar look like a smart move. Thailand in particular went on a debt binge. But that put borrowers at risk of much higher debt-servicing costs if the home currency fell versus the dollar.

Speculators, seeing Thailand’s precarious position, started to attack the currency. Thailand wound up depleting its foreign exchange in mounting a defense and was first to let its currency float in 1997. As the baht plunged, many banks and companies that had borrowed in foreign currencies suddenly saw the debt payments skyrocket, pushing them into insolvency.

Although the Asian countries wanted to organize a bailout, the move was beaten back aggressively by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, his deputy secretary, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner, then at the IMF but about to assume the role of assistant secretary for international affairs at the Treasury. The IMF provided a rescue package in August, using the same template it had in Mexico in 1995, requiring structural reforms, such as cutting entitlement spending, letting insolvent institutions fail, and raising interest rates. Note that this is almost the polar opposite of the approach advanced economies used to fight the current crisis.

So who knows, maybe we got lucky. For as right - and delicious - as it would have been to see Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and others go belly up, the price might well have been the evisceration of Social Security and Medicare.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

In the middle of 2010 I wrote a post titled “ACTA and the Overblown Threat of Piracy” that discussed the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA is basically an attempt by legacy media companies to leverage their hyperbolic rhetoric and wildly inaccurate math into an extralegal framework that would allow them to dictate which web sites are permitted to exist.

It appears to be off the table - at least for the moment - so the existing US framework is largely based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA definitely has its problems, sometimes hilariously so, but contains one important protection: Safe Harbor provisions. Safe harbor means, if you host infringing content unknowingly, and respond in a timely manner to DMCA takedown notices, you cannot be held liable. This makes it possible for a site like YouTube to be a “dumb pipe” and allow users to upload whatever they want. If YouTube had to vet every single clip, the site would be unusable in its current form; few would bother uploading a video and then waiting until it eventually got cleared by the censor (or not).

That, along with the occasional random and specious seizure by the Feds, is the current practice. But when the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) started making its way through Congress I thought I was going to have to write a “SOPA and the Overblown Threat of Piracy” post. In fact, I might just need a “[Insert wrongheaded bill or trade agreement acronym here] and the Overblown Threat of Piracy” template ready to pull out every year and a half or so until the copyright extremists break the Internet or are defeated once and for all.

Happily, though, this time around there were a number of really thoughtful posts covering the deeply problematic technical, legal and commercial problems with SOPA. So instead of just echoing points made better and with more detail elsewhere, I’d like to address something raised somewhat tangentially in several places: The viability of existing legal music and video services, in particular Hulu.

Chris Hayes raised this on his January 15th show. Perhaps channeling just a bit of his inner grumpy old man, he compares today’s file sharers to those of a more innocent time (i.e. when he was in college):

But let me respond to that quickly because people make that argument, and that argument seems dubious to me for this reason: In the era of…when file sharing first exploded with college dorms downloading, I think there was a case to be made that a lot of what was happening was convenience, right? It was, I don’t want to buy CDs and burn them, and I am just sitting here with a high speed connection, and I can get it. But what has happened since then with Netflix and iTunes and all these things is that you can get most of what you want on the Internet, right? That convenience aspect to me seems greatly reduced in a world in which we do have Hulu, so I think there’s been some innovation on the part of big media companies, right? You can watch “Lazy Sunday,” the iconic Saturday Night Live video that was downloaded, that was viewed seven million times on YouTube, which is what I think is what precipitated your [NBCUniversal Executive Vice President and general counsel Richard Cotton] interest in this topic.

Hulu is an incredibly important player in the online piracy discussion, and here is why: Unlike Netflix or iTunes, it is a creation of legacy media companies. So the way Hulu works is very instructive of how these companies approach online content.

They have approached it with roughly the same mindset that the US auto industry approached competition from Japan in the 1970s. Remember that? Low mileage cars with planned obsolescence baked in suddenly had to contend with fuel efficient and reliable compacts in the showrooms, and they looked pretty shoddy in comparison. So executives lit upon the brilliant approach of not offering a competing (or heaven forbid superior) product, but of producing really crappy versions of the vehicles that were eating their lunch. Then when these inferior products inevitably tanked the geniuses in the boardrooms could claim that the public didn’t want fuel efficient, reliable cars, and they doubled down on gas guzzling rust buckets.

Hulu is basically the Ford Pinto of video sites; it isn’t a minor player because it’s the best kept secret on the Internet but because it sucks. (In fairness, unlike the Pinto there are no reports of Hulu bursting into flames, though I believe it also has yet to sustain a rear impact so who can say.) It appears designed to fail so that Hollywood could point to it, say consumers prefer piracy to a legal alternatives, and attempt to shoehorn the online media experience into an unworkable pre-Internet model. This in turn is very convenient for an industry that has so stubbornly resisted coming to terms with new technology.

Hulu has become such a mess that its owners are desperate to unload that turkey attract a buyer, but no one is dumb enough to offer anything for it. So it limps along. Yet when NBC and News Corp. launched it in 2007 it actually had a ton of promise, and a lot of its early users loved it. The joint owners seemed committed to getting lots of content out there, and it looked like what was emerging was a real winner: A place where viewers could watch any of the shows on two of the four major networks, along with a wealth of other clips, older shows, trailers and so on.

More importantly, it offered full runs of content: all episodes of all seasons. This is huge because that is one of the main ways people like to watch shows now. Late to a popular NBC show like “The Office”? Go to Hulu and catch up! Start with the pilot and work your way up over a few weeks. Hulu abandoned that quickly; it seemed like weeks or maybe months to me, but in any event they started screwing with content well before they had any real traction in the marketplace - which, as Netflix can testify, can be hazardous to your bottom line even if you are established. Doing it before is suicide.

So they were randomly yanking content. Then they launched a paid version, which is fine if it allows access on more devices or more throughput - more simultaneous streams, high def options, stuff like that - but will only sow confusion if it offers different content. Guess which route Hulu took.

Moreover, it has different interfaces, most of which are about as appetizing as garlic ice cream. You just never know what you’re going to get when you go there. It all comes across as a half-assed mess.

This is what the studios have come up with; this is their alternative. The wheels were meant to come off, the engine was supposed to fry. It was never intended to be competitive with anything, it was meant to be a scapegoat.

Which is a shame, because there are lots of people who want something like what Hulu initially looked like it might be. If anyone from the MPAA or RIAA is reading this, please take away the following sentence before anything else in this post: It is not in any company’s immediate or long-term interests to presume its customers are criminals. Folks are willing to pay for quality; here’s just one note of despair from a message board: “Alternatively, does anyone know of (legal) alternatives to Hulu? I have no problem with paying for a good service, just can’t find someone to give my money to.”

Yes studios, that’s right - people want to give you money! In exchange for a quality service, sure. Some will game that system, some will stay outside it, but there are enough people out there who want to give money to you to make it profitable. But you have to actually put some effort into it. Quality offerings, along with outreach, education, and well placed reminders - think fences, not walls - can get lots of people into your orbit and happily parting with their hard earned cash.

Will the profit margins be as fat? Probably not. But lots of professions, from programmers to travel agents, have faced that future without trying to make the Internet unusable while fighting it. Even within the industry there are plucky startups like Bandcamp finding ways to make money delivering entertainment to people. Draconian copyright schemes would either shutter or neuter sites like that, because the cost of fighting even a specious liability claim would be prohibitive. While many of them are successful now, they operate on razor thin margins. The prospect of huge legal bills would be enormously chilling to them. (Sarah Lane pointed this out in a Tech News Today podcast last week; that episode’s discussion on SOPA is well worth a listen.)

And incidentally, if you think running these upstarts out of town on a rail might be considered a fringe benefit - at a minimum - of the proposed legislation, well, you may just be on to something. Legacy media companies don’t want the competition, and they certainly don’t want living, breathing counterexamples to their empty claims. But if the major studios spent as half as much time and money trying to deliver a decent product as they did conjuring up monstrosities like ACTA, SOPA and PIPA, maybe the future wouldn’t look so terrifying to them.

“I Was Never Bored at All” from Francis made my best of 2010 list.  Petter Nygårdh from the group sends word of their new single, “Traktor.”  Give it a listen at Spotify or Soundcloud.  Or both! (The B-side contains a Simian Ghost remix.)

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

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Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

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Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Marine Cpl. Joseph D. Logan, 22, of Willis, TX.
2. Marine Cpl. Kevin J. Reinhard, 25, of Colonia, NJ.
3. Marine Cpl. Jesse W. Stites, 23, of North Beach, MD.
4. Marine MSgt. Travis W. Riddick, 40, of Centerville, IA.
5. Marine Capt. Nathan R. McHone, 29, of Crystal Lake, IL.
6. Marine Capt. Daniel B. Bartle, 27, of Ferndale, WA.
7. Marine Cpl. Phillip D. McGeath, 25, Glendale, AZ.
8. Army Spc. Keith D. Benson, 27, of Brockton, MA.
9. Marine Lance Cpl. Kenneth E. Cochran, 20, of Wilder, ID.
10. Marine Cpl. Jon-Luke Bateman, 22, of Tulsa, OK.
11. Army Sgt. 1st Class Benjamin B. Wise, 34, of Little Rock, AR.

Via.

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Comment from Doc (and see the main post as well) on a tremendous accomplishment in Wisconsin. Good for them, and best of luck on the recall.

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The president turned down the existing Keystone XL proposal, so it will at least be delayed. (Also, Robert J. Samuelson: Still a dumbass.) But Canada’s wingnut PM isn’t giving up on it. Meanwhile, fracking is wreaking havoc in communities unfortunate enough to be on top of big shale deposits. And it’s happening in part because short-sighted term limit laws help to make sure it’s only the lobbyists - and not the legislators - who know how government works.

Term limits are one of those conservative agenda items masquerading as reform. A balanced budget amendment is another. The goal is to cripple, constrain, shrink, stupefy and impoverish governments to the point that they provide no useful service, at which point the public gives up expecting anything and the dystopian laissez-faire project can proceed with a minimum of friction. Twenty years ago, when I was much more gullible, I was a big fan of these bad government initiatives.

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Very nice long piece from lambert on the occupations in winter.

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It’s kind of funny that the nominally liberal Think Progress would post something like this, wherein the good old US of A is rescuing stranded Iranian sailors and those ungrateful Persians respond by being mean. Maybe the US-led sanctions have them feeling less than warmly toward America? Or maybe the string of assassinations of their scientists has them feeling a little jumpy and suspicious? It’s a Fox News-worthy presentation; no context, no complexity, just catapulted propaganda.

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This week in ick. (CBS coverage.)

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Yves Smith with the week’s headline win, and the body lives up to the title. Also: she is not impressed with those who substitute the invocation of white male privilege for persuasion.

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The move to end corporate personhood begins to pick up some steam.

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Union buster promoted to White House Chief of Staff.

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The hi tech gadgets we so dearly love are made by slaves.

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Atrios pointed to this report that the Attorney General worked at the law firm which gave the legal go-ahead for MERS. MERS, potentially the most fraudulent actor in a story stuffed to bursting with fraud. Cynthia Kouril calls it a bombshell and writes:

Even if Holder and Breuer are not planning to return to Covington after their stint in public service, their pensions are presumable tied to the viability of the firm. This isn’t a “did you work on this particular matter” kind of conflict of interest, this is more existential.

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I know I quote Charlie Pierce a lot, but seriously is there anyone else out there who can put together a paragraph like this?

And come on now, John King: First you throw out that first question down here on Thursday night and then, when the adulterous hypocrite responds the way everyone on the planet knew he would respond, you stand there like a cigar-store Indian without standing up a quarter-inch for your profession until David Gergen stands up for you two hours later. Of course, having David Gergen stand up for you is rather like building your seawall out of Maypo, and, anyway this isn’t the kind of high-and-mighty dudgeon that we should have to take from a staff-banging megalomaniac who has spent his career saying things about his political opponents that weren’t merely “close to despicable.” They were the very living, breathing definition of it.

Also, did any other analysis of that debate go where Pierce did in the part that concludes: “This was an argument that Santorum is uniquely situated to make, and he made a strong case of it”? He’s more than a great stylist.

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ECONNED EXCERPT from pp. 271-2:

Putting banks into receivership, and reprivatizing them down the road, is actually a well-established practice, but the FDIC can usually find takers for their assets and deposits on a short timetable, so these interventions do not raise complex procedural or political issues. Even though history shows this approach is the fastest path out of a financial crisis, it was clearly off the table as far as large financial players were concerned. Instead, another of the four measures, the so-called public private investment partnerships (PPIP), billed as a way to remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets, was clearly a back-door subsidy.

Another move taken during this period was the relaxation of “fair value” accounting rules. That gave the banks considerable latitude in valuing supposedly illiquid securities, in effect enabling them to not mark them down. The big problem here was the bogus “illiquidity” claim, oft repeated in the media as gospel. It wasn’t that the vast majority of the toxic assets weren’t trading; investors like hedge fund manager John Paulson said there was “plenty of liquidity,” even in “opaque areas.” The real impediment was that banks were carrying these positions at prices well above the bid in the marketplace. Claiming “illiquidity” was a pretext for banks to maintain fictitious valuations and thus avoid recognizing losses.

The effect of this change was that it represented a form of what is called regulatory forbearance, which is a fancy way of saying the regulators give waivers for known problems on the assumption that now is not the time to impose tough requirements. Holding banks to their normal capital requirements, which the now-phony accounting finessed, allowed them to pretend they were in better shape than they really were, and thus raise less equity.

But this sort of move was the polar opposite of what history had shown to be the best approach. An IMF study of 124 banking crises concluded:

Existing empirical research has shown that providing assistance to banks and their borrowers can be counterproductive, resulting in increased losses to banks, which often abuse forbearance to take unproductive risks at government expense. The typical result of forbearance is a deeper hole in the net worth of banks, crippling tax burdens to finance bank bailouts, and even more severe credit supply contraction and economic decline than would have occurred in the absence of forbearance.

As the stress tests moved forward, it quickly became clear that they were an exercise in form over substance. Ben Bernanke had remarked that the fall in bank stock prices was “detached from real US economic fundamentals.” No one had a problem with “detachment” from sanity when lenders were on a risk bender charging way too little for the possible downside, with the result that asset prices, ranging from houses to commercial property to corporate takeovers (which helped boost equity markets) were inflated as a result. Recall that in the late 1990s Greenspan had gone from worrying about “irrational exuberance” to becoming a stock market tout.

I wanted to write about SOPA this week and thought Chris Hayes had a very nice segment on it. Since MSNBC doesn’t provide transcripts of his show I had to provide my own - which crowded out the blogging time. I’ll do a SOPA post next week, referencing this as needed.

I did my best to get what everyone said correct and omitted most of the verbal padding (“you know?”, “right?” etc). At times there was cross talk or something was hard to make out, but obviously any spelling, grammatical or other errors ultimately belong solely with the host of the show. Please send any complaints or requests for correction to upwithchris (at) msnbc (dot) com, or to Twitter handles @upwithchris or @chrislhayes. Thank you.

Via.

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[HAYES]: Our story of the week: the most important bill in Congress you may have never heard of. Right now on Capitol Hill some of America’s biggest industries are waging an epic battle over the future of the Internet and the future of American commerce with big money and long-lasting implications. The founder of Google has said of this legislative issue, “it would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world,” while dozens of international human rights organizations wrote that it “sends an unequivocal message to other nations that it is acceptable to censor speech on the global Internet, and the circumvention technology that they use to access information under oppressive Internet regimes would be outlawed.” Prominent Constitutional law scholar Lawrence Tribe says the legislation “will lead to the silencing of a vast swath of fully protected speech, and to the shutdown of sites that have not themselves violated any copyright or trademark laws.”

Large tech companies like Google, Facebook eBay, and Yahoo are so opposed to the legislation there is even talk of shutting down their sites for a day as an act of protest, and the battle lines that have been drawn confound almost every traditional political category. On the side in favor of this legislation you have Al Franken and John Conyers lined up with Tea Party Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL-CIO; while opposing the legislation you have Nancy Pelosi, Michele Bachmann and Justin Bieber.

And what is perhaps most remarkable is that while this epic battle wages, while money pours into lobbying and advocating, most Americans have absolutely no idea it is going on. A report from Media Matters surveyed all the major networks’ and cable networks’ prime time coverage - this one included - and found exactly zero coverage of the legislation with the exception of a single segment on CNN.

As it turns out the company I work for, NBC Universal, is not at all neutral in this legislative battle. They are very, very supportive of the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act [SOPA] and its Senate counterpart. In fact, we will be hearing from a representative from NBC in just a moment, but in the meantime you can get a sense of how my employer feels from this mug that was sitting in my office kitchen. “Steal this mug,” it says cheekily, “but not our content.”

And stealing, or more precisely piracy, is the problem SOPA says it attempts to solve. Now, as a copyright holder myself, as someone who creates intellectual properties, such as it is, for a living, I’m not in the “information needs to be free” techno-utopian camp. I think people should be paid for their work, so I understand sites like Pirate Bay, where people can go and download the latest films and TV shows for free, are a big issue.

The problem is that sites devoted to massive file sharing of copyrighted works are smart enough to headquarter themselves in countries with loose jurisdictions. So the solution this legislation proposes is effectively to make third party intermediaries - search engines, user-generated sites and Internet service providers - the enforcers of copyright.

Facebook and Google and Twitter would have to zealously police copyright infringements or face legal sanction from copyright holders, up to and including being shut down and having their access to credit card processing companies cut off.

Think about it this way: What the US government was able to do to Wikileaks private parties would be able to do to each other with the help of the courts. And not just that. Individuals who stream copyrighted material could face criminal prosecution and prison time. And if you don’t think this applies to you at all, think again.

You ever upload a YouTube video with a song playing in the background or a video of your kids’ birthday party where you sing “Happy Birthday”?

[Video of home movie with people singing “Happy Birthday”]

That right there with the squirming kids and mouse costume is in fact a copyright violation. The copyright for “Happy Birthday” is fiercely protected. That’s why you rarely hear it sung in movies, why we can only play five seconds, and there’s much, much more where that came from.

Now, under the legislation it is very unlikely that that family there would be prosecuted. The surface problem may be unlicensed copying but the deeper problem is that computers and the Internet are one big copyright infringement machine. Files can be copied, downloaded and distributed, and the technology continues to outpace attempts to squash it. The technical infrastructure of the Internet is complicated, and sometimes its democratizing potential can be vastly oversold.

But the fact remains that over the past ten years, as everything else in American life seems to push towards more concentrated power in fewer hands, the Internet has been the one development mitigating against that. It is disruptive and empowering in a way few things are in 21st century American life, and it won’t stay that way on its own.

The history of technology, dating back to when we had literally thousands of movie studios in this country and do-it-yourself radio stations, is that what starts out as disruptive and democratic becomes concentrated and co-opted. As long as there are sites that empower users to create and re-purpose and even copy, there will be some piracy.

The question is, if that’s the cost, is it still worth it? There’s been a lot of news on SOPA this weekend. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is slated to hold a hearing on SOPA Wednesday, but Republican chairman Darryl Issa decided to postpone it, saying that he didn’t want flawed legislation to be taken up by the House. Also the bill’s author, Republican Lamar Smith, decided not to include one of the most controversial provisions which would have allowed essentially private parties to get the government to block sites using technical means, and yesterday there was some pushback against SOPA from the White House, as they released this statement on their blog:

“Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.”

Here’s a response from Rupert Murdoch that he sent out as a tweet: “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy. Plain thievery.”

All right, right now I could like to bring in Alexis Ohanian [OHANIAN] who is the co-founder of Reddit.com; and Richard Cotton [COTTON], Executive Vice President and general counsel for NBCUniversal. Thank you for joining us.

[COTTON] Glad to be here, Chris.

[HAYES] Richard, you have been working on this issue for quite a while, I mean, in Internet terms ([COTTON]: yes). I want you to explain, and you’re coming from a different place than I am I think, but I want you to explain what do you see as the core issue? Particularly because we have legislation right now, the DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that does provide some protections for copyright holders. YouTube has to have an employee - right? - whose job it is to supervise copyright infringement. Something that’s put up that’s a copyright infringement, that person is contacted, they have to take it down, if not they can face sanction. What is is about the current regime that you think is insufficient that necessitates new legislation?

[COTTON] So let’s take a big step back. What is it that we’re talking about? We’re talking about jobs. We’re talking about web sites that are wholesale, and I repeat the word wholesale devoted, to theft, to stealing content that is the production of our creative industries, distributing illegal counterfeit goods that are produced by iconic US brands who have devoted themselves to researching and producing innovative products. These sites are exclusively that this legislation is devoted to outside the United States. So what this legislation is addressing are web sites, as I say, wholesale devoted to illegal activities that if they were in the United States would be subject to criminal prosecution and to shutdown. This legislation would not effect a single site in the United States. So to mention a US site effected by this legislation is wrong, and it is totally wrong to say that a single post or a small amount of legitimate activity would be threatened by this legislation. So the difficulty with the policy debate is that we have to separate out what the legislation actually does and what is an extraordinary amount of disinformation that has been distributed about the…

[HAYES] Sure, but in terms of what the legislation actually does, I mean, saying this wouldn’t effect a single US site, there are, Alexis you run a US site and there are all sorts of people that run, there are a bunch of companies that run US sites that say: Of course this would effect us. Part of this…

[COTTON] But Chris, seriously, that is wrong, and the problem with this debate is that this legislation…

[HAYES] So they’re making it up?

[COTTON] Yes, this legislation…

[HAYES] But then why are they making it up?

[COTTON] This legislation is devoted exclusively to foreign sites. That…look at the legislation. It is devoted to foreign sites. Saying that it would effect a US site is categorically 100% wrong.

[HAYES] Alexis, I want you to respond to that since you run a US site and you clearly disagree with Mr. Cotton.

[OHANIAN] Yes, what troubles me is that for instance the anti-circumvention policies would lump a site like Reddit, really any site where users can post content that could potentially deemed illegal if, say, it is instructing someone as to how to get around some of these blocking…

[COTTON] That is simply wrong

[OHANIAN] …and furthermore the bigger problem I have here is that this legislation will not only break the Internet but it won’t even work to curb piracy. I’m a businessman, I’m an entrepreneur, my best interest as someone who’s working on a book to…who wants to protect copyright is to come up with a solution that actually works, and I believe that innovation not legislation is the solution.

[HAYES] I want you to pursue this, because I have read some legislation, I have been through the manager’s amendment which came out of the House. I’ve read interpretation by Harvard Law professors…

[COTTON] But if you’ve read the legislation you know it applies only to foreign web sites.

[HAYES] No, that’s not true, because…

[COTTON] That is true, that’s what it applies to.

[HAYES] But, so you’re saying that there is…when you say you’re going to cut off the DNS blocking or you can cut off MasterCard - right? - to a certain site, right?

[COTTON] After a judge has ruled that it is wholesale devoted to illegal activity. Only wholesale devoted to illegal activity and outside the United States.

[HAYES] But, OK, if that is the case, if your interpretation of the law - and I have read this legislation and I have read law professors writing about this legislation - if that is the case…

[COTTON] That is what the law says.

[HAYES] If that is the case, what is the nature of the massive, what is the goal of the disinformation campaign that unites all of the people I have cited, and Google and Facebook, and all of these companies that are, that might have domestic sites that are located in the US like Reddit, what is Alexis’ motivation to lie about this to get this stopped? I just don’t understand. There’s this contention about what actually the interpretation of the law provides. You’re saying it’s clear as day, it doesn’t apply to US sites. If that’s the case why is everybody wasting their time? It just makes no sense to me.

[COTTON] Well, I do think what lies behind it is, there is a policy disagreement, and the question, the big issue here is in fact about the rule of law on the Internet. The Internet is very young. It has grown up with a certain ethos that literally anything goes. And over time you cannot have something that is that is the pillar of 21st society be just rampant with lawless activity. And so what we’re, what the accurate policy discussion is how do you actually go about reducing the amount of illegal activity on the Internet. And what I would say is that there is a philosophical disagreement. The question is for a site that is wholesale devoted to illegal activity, should we allow easy access to those sites? And what I would say to you is, when they’re outside the United States and not subject to our criminal enforcement, we have to use technological tools. And those technological tools do involve, as you said, trying to cut off financial support to sites that are wholesale devoted to illegal activity, and trying to make it difficult to access sites outside the United States that are wholesale devoted to illegal activity.

[HAYES] And I think the question is, is making the change to the architecture to the Internet to prevent what you’re saying, what are the consequences of that architectural change? I want to get Alexis’ response to that right after we take this break.

[Commercial break]

[HAYES] As you can tell from our program here, this is a very hotly disputed piece of legislation. The White House has had some concern about it. Richard Cotton here from NBC and Alexis Ohanian from Reddit. Alexis, I want you to answer that question: Why…are you misinformed? Why are you…what is your concern about the legislation? If as Mr. Cotton says it only applies to foreign sites?

[OHANIAN] Yes, well, I first want to make a note. The Internet is not a lawless place. The DMCA has been used, has been working, in fact it’s been abused in certain instances where Warner Brothers for instance issued takedowns for files it never even saw. But what we’re talking about with this current legislation, with Protect IP and with SOPA, is the equivalent of, it’s the equivalent of being angry and trying to take action against Ford just because a Mustang was used in a bank robbery. [Taps desk on each word for emphasis] This is not the proper course for dealing with piracy and it won’t even solve the problem.

[HAYES] Why won’t it solve the problem? Because this is…there’s a bunch of arguments that people against SOPA make, right? And one of them is, there’s different levels at which the argument happens. The pragmatic argument is, OK, fine, we agree. And I think I’m just talking for myself here, it is a problem that there are web sites where you can go and download these things. That’s a problem.

[OHANIAN] Agreed.

[HAYES] They say it won’t solve the problem. Why will it not solve the problem?

[OHANIAN] Piracy is a service problem. Companies, a very successful game company called Valve solved the problem in one of the most notoriously bad markets ever: Russia. By offering a service that was more valuable to people than piracy. It is a service problem.

[HAYES] What do you mean a service problem? I don’t even understand that.

[OHANIAN] It is simply because pirates can deliver something easier than you could get it otherwise. When you have to wait three months to get access to something, when there is, when there are barriers to getting the information, to getting the content you want, people will go through other means. But if you can provide a service that is actually better you can win with business. And as an entrepreneur I see piracy as an opportunity.

[HAYES] But let me respond to that quickly because people make that argument, and that argument seems dubious to me for this reason: In the era of…when file sharing first exploded with college dorms downloading, I think there was a case to be made that a lot of what was happening was convenience, right? It was, I don’t want to buy CDs and burn them, and I am just sitting here with a high speed connection, and I can get it. But what has happened since then with Netflix and iTunes and all these things is that you can get most of what you want on the Internet, right? That convenience aspect to me seems greatly reduced in a world in which we do have Hulu, so I think there’s been some innovation on the part of big media companies, right? You can watch “Lazy Sunday,” the iconic Saturday Night Live video that was downloaded, that was viewed seven million times on YouTube, which is what I think is what precipitated your interest in this topic.

[COTTON] Yes. Correct.

[HAYES] You can now watch it on Hulu, and it’s, and so that convenience argument seems to be a little specious. Isn’t it a very different terrain right now?

[COTTON] And wholesale thievery will undercut the very innovation you’re talking about, Chris.

[HAYES] (To [OHANIAN]) Continue.

[OHANIAN] Actually, to go back to the earlier point. What scares me most about this legislation is that whatever they do is going to be circumvented anyway. And in fact the State Department right now is giving people the same tools that would be used to circumvent dictatorial regimes in places like China. The tools that people are using right now…

[HAYES] The technical tools, you’re saying, to get around DNS blocking…

[OHANIAN] …to get around DNS blocking in a country like China would be used in this exact same instance to circumvent this legislation.

[COTTON] Joe [Sestak, [SESTAK]], you wanted to…

[SESTAK] [inaudible] with this cup. You talk about losing jobs here. And yet the Government Accounting Office said last year that they looked at this, and they cannot substantiate any evidence that this has had an impact in jobs. In fact, the industry, the media industry, the entertainment industry, has grown since 2007 at 1% over the rest of the economy, and most of its profits come greatly overseas where piracy is rampant. In short, this piece of legislation is the right step in the wrong direction. If you look at another bill out there, the OPEN Bill by Issa, which really goes after those web sites overseas through the ITC, where both parties can go before it, for both to have their side listened to, and then strangles the money that goes to them like we did WikiLeaks, that is the way to begin to think about this, not this bill here.

[HAYES] Richard, I want to give you a chance to respond to that, we’re going to take one break, come back, Richard Cotton is going to talk more about this. Hope you’ll join us.

[break]

[HAYES] All right, we’re back with Richard Cotton from NBC Universal, Richard I want you to respond to what Alexis was just saying, and what former Congressman Sestak said about alternatives to this, and the efficacy, I mean, this efficacy problem strikes me as fairly fundamental, right? The economists when writing about this issue compared it to the war on drugs, right? That it’s sort of a “squeezing the balloon” problem, and you can, you know, we’ve increased the amount of money we spend on enforcing drugs, but the fact is there’s a demand for it and it just moves around. Particularly given the way the Internet works, is this, why is this going to be effective if other things haven’t been?

[COTTON] All law enforcement is cat-and-mouse. The fact is, the good guys do certain things, the bad guys try to evade it. That’s not a recipe for doing nothing. If you hear about a burglary in your neighborhood, your reaction is not: “Let’s shut down the burglary unit of the police department.” You want the burglary unit to get a little bit better. So all this is, it’s a first step, it’s not a silver bullet. By the way, piracy is never going to go away. But right now it is rampant, it is out of control, the web sites we are talking about are offshore, they’re 100% devoted to illegal activity, they’re undermining our jobs, our economy, our key businesses. What we need to do is to take some steps. In the Netherlands, by the way, there was a court order to block access to The Pirate Bay, traffic to it declined 80%. It didn’t go away, it declined 80%. So the fact is, there is no silver bullet. But we have to start down the path to make it more inconvenient to get stolen content while everyone is trying to make it convenient for consumers to get legitimate content where they want it, when they want it, and how they want it.

[HAYES] Alexis.

[OHANIAN] This analogy of the neighborhood is interesting, because I’m imagining it like we’re about to obliterate the neighborhood that just had a burglary. The tech sector right now…

[COTTON] Sloganeering doesn’t help.

[OHANIAN] …is one of the healthiest parts of the US economy. One of the healthiest parts. And whether it’s a startup like Google or Facebook or whether it’s a startup right now here in New York working on a General Assembly just getting started, they are creating jobs in this economy…

[COTTON] And this legislation would not have a single impact on all of that.

[HAYES] Well, there’s a lot of concern about liability costs

[OHANIAN] As an investor I would not want to touch that.

[crosstalk]

[COTTON] This legislation specifically says there can be no secondary liability. The only thing that can happen pursuant to a court order is that an ad network, a credit card company, or a search engine, has to respond with respect to a specific site that has been adjudicated by the court…

[HAYES] Right, but if they don’t respond…

[COTTON] To be wholesale, to be wholesale, no, the only thing they have to do is obey the order.

[HAYES] But then that’s an unenforceable provision, if they don’t have to respond then why is this going to solve the problem? If all you, if you raise it and you say: “Google, you have to de-list Pirate Bay and Google says “we’re not going to de-list anything…”

[COTTON] Well, they have to do that. But that’s a specific action required by a specific court order after a judge has made a full finding with all due process protections in place.

[HAYES] I want to return, I’m going to, thank you for your time Richard Cotton, really, I really do appreciate it [reaches across table, shakes Cotton’s hand] and Alexis Ohanian, thank you guys. I think this is a really important issue, it’s not getting enough coverage, I want to return to it in the future and maybe we can have you both back.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

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Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

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Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Army Pfc. Neil I. Turner, 21, of Tacoma, WA.
2. Army Pfc. Michael W. Pyron, 30, of Hopewell, VA.
3. Army Pfc. Dustin P. Napier, 20, of London, KY.
4. Army Spc. Brian J. Leonhardt, 21, of Merrillville, IN.
5. Army Spc. Christopher A. Patterson, 20, of Aurora, IL.
6. Army Spc. Robert J. Tauteris Jr., 44, of Hamlet, IN.
7. Army Staff Sgt. Jonathan M. Metzger, 32, of Indianapolis, IN.

Via.

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Domestic use of drones being questioned.

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Hannah pointed me to this story with this comment:

Just this month, Romney’s buddy down in Arkansas, Warren Stephens (erstwhile banker to Bushes and Clinton) acquired 16 regional newspapers from the New York Times (about $140 million) under the pseudonym “Halifax” (Stephens Media has acquired a bit of a bad odor since the Righthaven fiasco occasioned by the effort to sue bloggers for copy right infringements) and has put all the employees on notice that they must agree to be fired “at will” to keep their jobs initially.

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What I learned from Corrente this week:

• Military tactics being used by law enforcement (via).
• Occupy Congress on Tuesday (via).
• Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

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Also from Corrente, this from Mike Elk:

Yglesias does not provide any examples of how the so-called “destructive potential” of private equity firms leads to a company being successful over the long run. Unlike Creswell, Ygelsias does not interview economic experts or workers with varying or opposing views of the effects of private equity firm-ordered layoffs.

While they work at mainstream media outlets, wonk bloggers like Yglesias and Klein aren’t held to the same standards as the reporters working for the same outlets. Yet many young Americans view them as trusted sources of where to get news.

Like Klein, Yglesias has written on a wide range of healthcare, economic and foreign issues, despite not having done in-depth field reporting on these topics. Their stories are often centered on the debates of the day between other journalists and policy elites, and they don’t talk to workers or the general public.

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Also affinis and lambert both highlighted this:

“Fuck the Police” can carry negative connotations, and sugar-coating the booming chants of “Kill Cops” and “Fuck the cops, We don’t need them, All we want is total freedom,” isn’t going to clear up those feelings. From the announcement of this action, the discussion from non-approvers of the march has centered around a “PR war” instead of focusing on what the police are actually doing. While public opinion is vital for Occupy Oakland, catering the message for approval by corporate media and bought politicians will not help the people of Oakland.

Going after banks, fighting against school closures, demanding jobs, calling for better public service, fighting for equality, stopping foreclosures…these are all areas that need addressing and are being addressed by Occupy Oakland. The violence oozing from Oakland Police Department is also issue. Discussing bank fraud on Monday and police brutality on Tuesday neither diminishes the weight of the topic nor its overall importance.

It’s possible to discuss bank fraud on Monday and police brutality on Tuesday without calling for violence. Violent confrontation gives authorities home field advantage.

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I’ve got Clutch Magazine in my RSS feed (RSS is a great and underrated technology, by the way) and Britni Danielle seems to pick a lot of issues I enjoy reading about. Here’s one on how the recovery, such as it is, is not reaching the black community. (Or the public sector.) Then this on what colorblind might really mean. I grew up in a largely white suburb and thought I was colorblind. Then I went to college and realized how aware I was of the different races and cultures represented. Then, since I was a theater major, I did a part in Day of Absence with the university’s African theater and holy shit was I aware of race once I was the only white person in the room. (Also see this and the responses to it. “Their race and nationality doesn’t matter to me” certainly came off differently to the responders than to the commenter.)

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Paul Campos on the function of a gadfly.

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I’d say as a general rule of thumb a column devoted to unsolicited advice runs a higher than usual likelihood of producing dumb and offensive commentary.

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Two from Charles Pierce. This:

This guy was the budget director for George W. Bush, who fought two off-the-books wars, cut taxes while doing so, and pushed through a Medicare adjustment without the slightest idea how anyone was going to pay for it. The nation did not “plunge” into a recession, Mitch. You clowns pushed it off a cliff. Nobody “called off the prom.” You kidnapped all the class officers, poisoned the canapes, shot the band, and burned down the fking banquet hall. You’re the Carrie White of our national economic prom, Mitch.

And this:

Leave aside the fact that the whole column - if, by column, you mean mewling litany of Hallmark banalities better stitched on a pillow in your maiden aunt’s parlor - is hung on the notion that, by taking Tim Tebow’s ruptured duck 80 yards to the house, Demaryius Thomas - who grew up impoverished in Georgia, with a mother and grandmother presently doing hard time because our drug laws are insane - did not justify his own upward struggle against impossible odds but, rather, it is “really about faith.”

And John Cole:

it really is kind of amusing watching our nation’s elite journalists have a very public Admiral Stockdale moment - ‘Who am I and what am I doing here?’”

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ECONNED EXCERPT from p. 214: In fairness, the idea that high levels of international funds flows produce financial instability is still hotly debated among economists. Yet another approach suggests that a high level of borrowing, which generally goes hand in hand with high capital mobility (the destination country too often winds up having a debt party), can put a modern economy on tilt when debt levels get too high. Physicist Mark Buchanan describes the work of Yale economist John Genakopolous, and physicists Doyne Farmer and Stephan Thurner:

In the model, market participants, especially hedge funds, do what they do in real life - seeking profits by aiming for ever higher leverage, borrowing money to amplify potential gains from their investments. More leverage tends to tie market actors into tight chains of financial interdependence, and the simulations show how this effect can push the market toward instability by making it more likely that trouble in one place - the failure of one investor to cover a position - will spread more easily everywhere.

That’s not really surprising, of course. But the model also shows something that is not at all obvious. The instability doesn’t grow in the market gradually, but arrives suddenly. Beyond a certain threshold the virtual market loses its stability in a “phase transition” akin to the way ice abruptly melts into liquid water. Beyond this point, collective financial meltdown becomes effectively certain. This is the kind of possibility that equilibrium thinking cannot even entertain.

This model highlights a tradeoff ignored (at least until recently) by most economists. All the arguments for deregulation were those of greater efficiency, that less government intervention would lower costs and spur innovation. We’ll put aside the question of whether any gains would in fact be shared or would simply accrue to the financier class. Regardless, risks to stability never entered into these recommendations. But if we put on our systems engineering hat, stability is always a first order design requirement and efficiency is secondary.

More tightly integrated systems, such as the one produced by trade and capital markets internationalization, are less stable. And as ugly as the idea of capital controls sounds to those trained to believe that more open markets (that is, efficiency) should prevail, the fact is that buffers are precisely the sort of remedy called for to reduce the speed of transmission of shocks to the system. They do reduce efficiency and increase costs. Measures to engineer in stability are a form of insurance. Effective insurance is not free.