Protest and Direct Action
I’ve said very little about the “Occupy” movement because I don’t have particularly settled opinions about it. But one thing that struck me from the beginning is that one of the weaknesses of the movement politically was that it had almost no opportunities to engage in “direct action” – that is to say, protesting by actively obstructing an activity that their goal is to end.
The “gold standard” for direct action is the protests against segregation – lunch counter sit-ins and the like. These actions directly broke laws or rules that the protesters were arguing were unjust as such, and therefore forced the authorities either to back up injustice with force or back down. Most protest movements can’t do that. Anti-war protesters, for example, can disrupt military activities, for example, but such actions are generally much more difficult to achieve and, anyway, most such protestors don’t oppose the existence of the military, nor even all its activities, but rather object to a particular war as unjust. So there’s the real risk that such actions would be viewed simply as anti-military or even treasonous by observers. But protests without direct action lack comparable political impact.
Occupy Wall Street struck me from the beginning as more analogous to the latter case than the former. Few of those engaged in the protests believed that Wall Street – finance capitalism – should cease to exist as such (or, to the extent some did, they undoubtedly had incoherent ideas about what the end of finance capitalism would actually look like if it were to happen). The protests were in part aimed at economic developments (the rise of extreme inequality, mass unemployment) blamed, fairly or unfairly, on the operation of finance capitalism in our day, and in part aimed at specific failures of regulation. When I tried to think of possible direct action that the protesters could take, the only thing I could think of was trying to somehow obstruct the operation of servers used for high-frequency trading, which I suspect would be physically impossible without violence and, anyway, would be kind of an obscure target.
But Occupy Homes is a much better direction for the movement to take. While I suspect most people, and even most protestors, would agree that foreclosure as such isn’t unjust, there is a cogent argument to be made that the government should be doing more to prevent foreclosures right now. So obstructing that process would be the kind of direct action that I was wondering about.
Again, not making an argument about whether I agree or disagree. Just saying: from the standpoint of likely political effectiveness of the protests, this strikes me as a wise move on the part of the Occupy movement.
Occupy Homes is a much better tactic than rape, defecation on police cars, looting, anti-semitism, obscenity, hip-pocrisy, general cluelessness, and accidental moments of honesty.
Of course, Occupy Homes doesn’t preclude any resumption of the above “actions.”
Let us know when something happens that really offends you, Noah. Like all that disgusting stuff that happened at the Tea Parties.
— jd · Dec 8, 08:06 PM · #
How is being a Mets fan “anti-Semetic”?
— Chet · Dec 8, 08:16 PM · #
A lot of the motivation for the Occupy movement was to camp out in an expensive location with sympatico people and enjoy the pleasures of self-organizing a big campout — kind of like Burning Man, but in a much less remote spot. Of course, there is a reason Burning Man moved from a big city to the absolute middle of nowhere and charges hundreds of dollars for a ticket and only lasts one week per year …
— Steve Sailer · Dec 8, 08:39 PM · #
How is being a Mets fan “anti-Semetic”?
It’s spelled Semitic and his name is Danny Cline, Jew-Hater.
— jd · Dec 9, 12:05 AM · #
So OWS is anti-semitic because one anti-semite showed up?
Does that mean that the Tea Party is the same as NAMBLA because one of them is a pedophile?
— Chet · Dec 9, 05:16 PM · #
I believe that major injustices arise ultimately out of bad societal choices, and out of one specific bad choice in particular: the choice by one set of individuals to concentrate power in their own hands, and the decision by the rest of us to permit it. This applies to the European and later American system of colonialism and ‘White’ supremacy; it applies to the smaller scale concentrations of power, from the ‘nomenklatura’ fostered by ‘scientific socialism’ to the ‘masters of the universe’ fostered by the ‘Washington consensus’.
These concentrations of power foster smaller injustices. The history of successful social change suggests that the chief vulnerability of power structures arises from the inability or unwillingness of the heads of any power structure in question to concede any injustice. This stems from both an emotional defensiveness and an intellectual incoherence. Thus, the leaders of the old Soviet Union could not countenance Jewish emigration to Israel, not because such emigration would have harmed them more than the consequences of refusing it, but because they had no basis for predicting the consequences of allowing it.
Recent reports I have read suggest that the most vulnerable point of the domination by ‘masters of the universe’ under the so-called Washington consensus does indeed involve foreclosures: in particular foreclosures backed by so-called robo-signed documents. In plain terms, these foreclosures involve the manufacture of fraudulent paperwork to back allegations of default. In most cases, the defaults have taken place and the occupiers of the property have not paid their mortgages, but the banks or other lending institutions have also defaulted their obligation to maintain a clear trail indicating who owe what, and to whom. Reports indicate strong evidence that at least some institutions have resorted to forging notes and affidavits. If the occupy movement starts obstructing and resisting foreclosure and eviction actions brought on that basis, they may well force the government to acknowledge the depth of disarray in the current system, which has the potential, at least, to force a conversation about basic reforms.
— John Spragge · Dec 10, 04:20 AM · #
So a bunch of looters squatting in someone else’s home is going to force something that the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression didn’t?
I understand the frustration and anger of the OWSers, but their anger is almost completely misdirected. This “foreclosure” disaster was caused by the federal government. The greed of the bankers has been there forever and ever, amen. But the federal prescription for lending to those who couldn’t afford it was new. Do you even acknowledge that?
And really Mr. Spragge, could you please be more condescending? We Yanks really appreciate being talked down to by Canadians who only wish their financial or social problems made a damn difference in the world.
— jd · Dec 10, 10:47 PM · #
Want to know the next phase, Noah?
Coming soon to a democracy near you.
Occupy the electorate.
vox populi, vox anon
— matoko_chan · Dec 11, 01:42 PM · #
Anyone who raises the question of American government efforts to promote home ownership as a political issue needs to clarify what part of the long history of social programs designed to promote ownership they mean. European settlement on this continent began as an effort to provide those who could not afford their own homes and farms, by stealing the resources from the First Nations. That process lasted through the homestead act (as championed by, among others, Thomas Jefferson). In more recent times, the American government has tried to promote home ownership by making the mortgage interest costs tax deductible. Various other measures, including the Community Reinvestment Act, have tried attempted to extend the benefits of both home ownership and the social programs that promote it, and to make up for past injustices.
When the issue involves social justice, the question of affordability thus loses its relevance, because the underlying assumption that people ought to only acquire things they can afford rests on a further assumption: that some just, or at least neutral, mechanism determines who can afford what. But the Occupy Wall Street movement, and from a radically different perspective much of the Tea Party movement, challenges precisely those assumptions.
— John Spragge · Dec 11, 11:22 PM · #
Only in JD’s world did this actually happen. In the real world, the Community Reinvestment Act promoted lending only to those who could afford it but were denied simply as a result of not living in the white part of town. As a result, CRA-promoted loans actually had a higher rate of repayment than private subprime loans.
The idea that the government created the recession is true. It did. It created the recession by unregulating the securitization of mortgages. When the people offering loans no longer had to bear the risks of default, they no longer had any reason to accurately gauge the repayment likelihood of the borrower. JD has simply succumbed to the natural conservative impulse to blame everything on black people.
— Chet · Dec 12, 01:14 AM · #
“A lot of the motivation for the Occupy movement was to camp out…blah blah blah”
hei, Steve…the occupy movement grew out of AnonOps and OpBart.
did you perhaps read about that?
Anonymous is a self-organizing system.
and i betcha the next phase is going to be occupy the electorate.
— matoko_chan · Dec 12, 04:09 AM · #
I remember getting a tutorial on mortgage securities at a technology conference I had presented at. I got the tutorial (in a bar as we waited for the flight home) from one of the heads of computing at Freddie Mac, a company which at the time I had not heard of. I have to admit that as the computer manager at Freddie put it, the idea of mortgage backed securities looked like a pretty neat invention.
As we know now, the notion of a mortgage-backed security involves both legal complexities and problems in investment psychology that made it a dangerous instrument. I do not accept, however, that the mortgage security concept, even as deregulated by the US government, created the housing-led economic meltdown. Over the period 200-2007, American housing developed a bubble, and bubbles burst, very frequently leaving borrowers severely exposed. If you look at the American economy as household management (the Greek οἶκος, for household, forms the root of both economy and ecology), the American economy has operated on an unsound basis, selling less than it buys, since the conservative ascendancy marked by Reagan’s election in 1980. The results have included frequent bubbles and attendant crises. In particular, given the large scale economic inequality that developed, the economy needed people to believe they could realize the value gains in their houses to sustain consumer demand. American governments, needing to sustain the prosperity of the economy (or the illusion of prosperity) accepted the risky behaviour of banks and other financial institutions. This policy differed substantially from that of Canada, where banks begged for the chance to follow their American counterparts down the rabbit hole, and the flint-hearted finance minister refuse, repeatedly, to deregulate them. As a result, Canada now has the most sound government finances, and the most solid financial sector, in the G-8.
— John Spragge · Dec 12, 04:11 AM · #
There’s an interesting article in this week’s New Yorker by Surowiecki in which he argues that many people would be better off intentionally defaulting on their mortgages (forcing foreclosure). By not doing so, homeowners who are so far underwater that they will never make a return on their homes are actually encouraging moral hazard: banks are benefitting despite their irresponsible lending practices instead of being punished by the marketplace. As Surowiecki points out, businesses do it all the time and suffer no shame. So De-Occupy your home and stick it to the banks! That’s direct action normal Americans should not be afraid to embrace.
— Brian · Dec 13, 04:01 AM · #
Better yet, default on your home and then do your neighborhood a favor by continuing to live in it. No need to inflict an abandoned home on your neighbors.
— Chet · Dec 13, 05:13 AM · #
It begins.
— matoko_chan · Dec 14, 02:23 PM · #
Spragge wrote:
You’ve got it backwards. (BTW, what the hell are “American governments?” Are they like the internets?)
The federal government did not accept the risky behavior of banks. They demanded it. All out of liberal guilt, economic equality, redlining, whatever real or imagined injustice there was. The feds required banks to loan to people who couldn’t afford it. That’s the fact, Jack. The only way the financial disaster could have been avoided was for banks to tell the feds to screw off.
— jd · Dec 14, 06:38 PM · #
The actual community reinvestment act has a relatively short text, so the facts about this law do not contain much in the way of ambiguity. The act says, in exactly these words
The Community Reinvestment Act spells the priorities out: a bank has no obligation to make loans not “consistent with the safe and sound operation” of the bank or other credit granting institution.
Of course, the interpretations do not end there, and they vary widely. Economists at the Bank for International Settlements, probably a fairly unbiased group on this subject, have this to say:
John Carney of MSNBC derides a focus on the verifiable facts, in particular the text of the law itself, as statutory fundamentalism, and compares it to
This telling comparison unintentionally exposes the huge deficiency in the case made by those who claim the government “forced” banks and financial institutions to foster a housing bubble and subsequent collapse that brought down the economy. We know the courts have convicted innocent people because the wrongly convicted appealed to the courts, produced evidence both in court and in public, they arranged for demonstrations and even protest songs. So where can we find evidence that banks, supposedly faced with a demand for imprudent and unprofessional behaviour from government regulators acting in clear contravention of their own laws, resisted or protested in any way? Where do we find the appeals to administrative judges, congressional testimony, even as much as an opinion piece, complaining that regulators under the Community Reinvestment Act had forced banks to make risky loans? We have seen plenty of attempts to exculpate Wall Street in retrospect, but who protested the risks in 1991 or 2004, when it might have made a difference? Like Sherlock Holmes’s dog in the night, they seem remarkably quiet.
This does not mean no American government bears any responsibility. From Ronald Reagan to George II Bush, American presidents accepted an unsound model of the economy, and all to some extent allowed or encouraged some risky “creative” financial practices to sustain consumer demand, from the Savings and Loan scandal of the eighties to Enron to the housing bubble. Bill Clinton actually signed some of the most irresponsible financial laws. However, the argument that the federal government required the banks and other financial institutions to lend to borrowers who could not repay the loans rests on interpretation, and given the dearth of the supporting evidence I would expect, it seems a remarkably tenuous one.
— John Spragge · Dec 15, 03:34 PM · #
Sorry Spragge:
You are wrong. I don’t expect to change your mind, but here goes.
You focus on the Community Reinvestment Act. That was enacted way back in 1977. I don’t know if it had any effects, either good or bad. But one thing is certain: it really had no teeth until 1992 when the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act was enacted.
From Reckless Endangerment:
You blame Reagan and Bush II. There is one name, if there can be just one, that should be associated with the financial crisis: James Johnson, huge Democrat Operative, Friend of Bill [Clinton]. Oh, and one more, ACORN. They were there at the beginning and throughout.
I am not saying there is no culpability on the part of “greedy” bankers. But it’s pretty clear this crisis would not have happened without government intervention in the “affordable home” business.
— jd · Dec 15, 09:08 PM · #
The total bailout cost for the GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac added up to $154 billion, less than half the money spent in mortgage bailouts alone. But the failed mortgages did not do most of the damage: the arcane, highly speculative investment products based on securitized mortgages did. The total bailout costs have so far added up to close to two and a half trillion dollars for the United States alone. It makes no logical sense to blame this economic devastation on a law passed under George (I) Bush addressing only the obligations of Government Sponsored Entities.
The root of this problem goes back to the unsound policies developed under the Reagan administration and in place for almost thirty years. For most of twentieth century, the United States had developed a consumer economy based on workers whose wages enabled them to buy what they made. Despite the growth of inequality and consequent stagnation of real wages that developed in the subsequent three decades, the economy required workers to consume. Banks, corporations, and to some extent the government responded by inventing new ways to produce and market debt. Even before we address resource depletion and environmental degradation, we have for the last three decades run a profoundly dysfunctional economy. The movement known loosely as Occupy Wall Street has at least a collective commitment to search for solutions, something that placing the blame on a now defunct service organization and a single Democratic party staffer will certainly not accomplish.
— John Spragge · Dec 16, 03:52 PM · #
I knew you wouldn’t accept the fact that this crisis would not have happened without government intervention. Your response ignores that fact completely. I showed you in 1992 where the kinds of things that caused the crisis were enacted, and you want to go back to our treatment of Squanto for our “dysfunctional” economic system. I’m done with you on this topic.
But you ended with one real howler:
So occupying someone else’s property, shitting on police cars, sex acts in public, rape, throwing bricks at cops is a commitment to search for solutions…? You are obviously an intelligent person, painfully nice, but you lack discernment.
Because the first long and painfully tedious discussion I had with you was when you were excoriating the tea party for not being effective (at least I think that was your point). That’s an interesting counterpoint to your reaction to the filthy bunch of losers known as OWS. The Tea Partiers had a huge impact on the 2010 election and they cleaned up after themselves.
That is one of the most outrageous things about this whole OWS thing, and one of the reasons Millman’s non-reaction is so maddening. The Tea Partiers behaved decently, their numbers dwarfed the OWS numbers, and they continue to be influential. However, their press coverage was relentlessly negative.
The OWSers on the other hand, have been disastrous for almost every location, they have been violent, destructive, filthy, clueless and just plain ugly. Yet they are made “Persons of the Year” by Time magazine.
It’s incredible. Your support for them, Millman’s tolerance for them, and the media’s glorification of them. Absolutely incredible.
— jd · Dec 16, 06:14 PM · #
Arguments about the cause of the recent economic meltdown depend on the data. I suspect most of the “Occupy” protesters, have less interest in the supposed inducements given to people to buy homes they could not “afford”, and more interest in the process that leads people who work all their lives to find themselves unable to afford a home or the perks (tax breaks, credit) the go with it. All of which goes to say one simple thing: if anyone has an argument based on the data, I suspect most of us will accept it. Show how it makes sense to claim legislation aimed at entities that cost less than 7% of the total bailout somehow “caused” the whole mess. But it makes no sense to suggest anyone has a closed mind because we don’t accept claims without evidence.
Nor ad hominem arguments make a lot of sense. If people tolerate, support, or just pay more attention to the occupy movement than the tea party, that may have something to do with the nature of the policy prescriptions put forward by each. Cherry picking photos and news reports doesn’t change that.
— John Spragge · Dec 18, 10:03 AM · #
jd, this may be completely unfair, but it might be a case of a tail-wagging puppy who is eager to prove to the abusive brutes who occasionally throw him a scrap that he is housebroken and fit to live in their presence. I don’t know him (or his writing) well enough to say for sure, but there are a lot of cases like that.
— The Reticulator · Dec 18, 06:33 PM · #
Policy Prescriptions? Quick, name the top three policy prescriptions of the Occupy Movement. Don’t count “Eat the Rich” or “I want what’s yours” or “Get me a job.”
And really, it’s now Dec. 19, 12:56pm EST. You should be able to come up with something off the top of your head without consulting the Occupy Wall Street Manifesto.
Depends on who’s doing the cherry picking. If the dominant media is doing the cherry picking, it’s pretty obvious to any reasonable person that the perception of the movement will be slanted.
I remember the previous discussion with you regarding the tea party. You were trying to tell me all about the ineffectiveness and general negative influence of the tea party. You totally bought the negative picture of the tea party, in spite of the fact that none of the negative things (racism, threat of violence) they were accused of were true. I challenged you to name the guy who was responsible, more than any other single person, for igniting the tea party, and you didn’t know. If you knew so much about the tea party, you would have known the answer.
The ugliness of the Occupy Movement has been hard to hide (though the press has done its best). But instead of the filth, violence and envy on parade, you see policy prescriptions. Just what kind of person are you?
— jd · Dec 19, 07:07 PM · #
Three of the top policy prescriptions associated with the occupy movement:
Some policy prescriptions associated with members of the tea party:
Once again, words like ugliness, filth and envy, as well as melodramatic questions such as “what kind of person are you?” amount simply to ad hominem. If you believe the tea party correct, you can explain why the policies they propose will lead to prosperity, and why the policies proposed by the occupy movement will not.
— John Spragge · Dec 19, 09:15 PM · #
So I guess my perceptions of the tea party AND the OWSers are just wrong. I must be getting my information from all the wrong places.
— jd · Dec 20, 03:33 PM · #
Not wrong — irrelevant. Given a mass movement like the “occupy” movements and the tea party, anyone can cherry pick an incident or photo, of a racist placard or a homeless person at a protest or an act or threat of violence. I believe that looking at the movement’s shared goals and perceptions offers the best way of figuring out whether incidents reflect mainly on the individuals directly involved or on the movement as a whole. So again we come back to the question of ideas. I have already listed some ideas associated with the occupy movement, and some associated with the tea party. Which of these ideas make sense, and which do not. Which ideas can you defend, and which can you not?
A side note on “envy”: an accusation of envy does not sidestep the question of justice. The lifestyle of Kim Jong il may have had a certain crude attraction, with good food, power, luxury, and a harem. That does not make anyone who sees the monstrous evil of a dictator living in luxury while his people starve guilty (if we can use that word here) of envy. Likewise, a protest against bankers and other economic leaders who use government money to insulate themselves from their own failures while millions of Americans struggle deserves an assessment on its merits, rather than denigration as “envy”.
— John Spragge · Dec 20, 06:12 PM · #