Month: November 2011

Mayoral phone tree

by digby

A little “if you build it” piece of evidence:

Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC (excerpted on The Takeawayradio program–audio of Quan starts at the 5:30 mark), casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . .”

Many witnesses to the wave of government crackdowns on numerous #occupy encampments have been wondering aloud if the rapid succession was more than a coincidence; Jean Quan’s casual remark seems to clearly imply that it was

I suppose it makes sense that they might want to share tips and insights. But if they are coordinating, we’re dealing with something else entirely. It would be very interesting to know if any government entity is coordinating this. It makes a big difference if it’s the National Conference of Mayors or Homeland Security.

Zuccotti Cleared
by David Atkins

The NYPD cleared Zuccotti Park early this morning, using pepper spray, LRAD sonic devices, batons, and ultimately bulldozers. As I write this at 1:30AM pacific time, the situation is still fluid, with protesters gathering and marching in various places around the city as the police corral crowds wherever they appear.

Watching it unfold has had the same surreal feel as watching the early days of Tahrir Square. As big as the story of the clearing of the park is, one of the interesting side stories is also that all the major news networks, cable and otherwise, were silent. They were showing no live video from New York. Only Raw Story had a live stream, still ongoing as of this writing. And as with Egypt, by far the best way to learn about events happening on the ground was via Twitter.

Per various twitter reports:

• Protesters were told to take their belongings and leave. Any belongings not immediately carried out by protesters were then tossed unceremoniously into a massive pile on the street and loaded into dumpsters. This included the tents, the entire 5,000 book OWS library, and the bike generators.
• Most subways and trains into downtown were blocked, including with cops at entrances
• The Brooklyn Bridge was shut down until 6am
• All media and press were not allowed within a block of Zuccotti Park
• Airspace over Zuccotti was blocked by police helicopters and legally blocked to prevent any media coverage
• Journalists gathered together to attempt to gain access were denied. According to one report, one cop tore a press credential off a journalist, while another responded to a journalist’s claim to be press by saying, “not tonight.”
• One New York Times journalist reported arrested, and city councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez reportedly arrested and bleeding from the head
• Multiple individuals injured, bleeding, including one carried out on a stretcher
• Doormen locking buildings around Zuccotti to prevent residents from exiting to witness events
• Counter-terrorism police units on scene

Media blackout? Check. Transportation shutdown? Check. Needless police brutality? Check. Mayor Mubarak is evidently in control of New York City, and pulled off this entire operation in early morning cover of darkness.

Ultimately, just as in Egypt, these moves will turn out to be counterproductive. The Occupy movement had been struggling to maintain traction. This will give it significant new traction and momentum. Word is that there will be a major march on Thursday. If you live in the New York metro area, now would be the time to get involved and show solidarity with the movement to help these brave people rebuild and maintain their momentum.

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Don’t try to dig what we all say

by digby

I’m hearing a lot of talk about how the older “generation” had failed and how it’s time to stop aside for the new generation etc, etc. I carry no brief for my own cohort. I’ve never identified as a “typical” baby boomer any more than a typical anything.

Newtie QOTD

by digby

Now that he’s the frontrunner, it’s probably time to remind everyone of his greatest hits. And there are so many.

This one’s from the 2007 CPAC conference:

How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane.

Now that’s what I call presidential.

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Newtmentum
by David Atkins

Don’t look now, but Newt Gingrich has taken the lead in the GOP Presidential race.

Two new national polls of the Republican primary race show very different results in the horserace, but do agree on one thing: Newt Gingrich is rocketing upwards.

The new CNN poll, among Republican respondents: Romney 24%, Gingrich 22%, Cain 14%, Perry 12%, Paul 8%, Bachmann 6%, Huntsman 3%, and Santorum 3%. In CNN’s previous poll from a month ago, Romney had 26%, Cain 25%, Perry 13%, and all others in single digits (including Gingrich at 8%).

And the new numbers from Public Policy Polling (D): Gingrich 28%, Cain 25%, Romney 18%, Perry 6%, Bachmann 5%, Paul 5%, Huntsman 3%, Santorum 1%, and Johnson 1%.

In the previous PPP survey from a month ago, Cain led with 30%, followed by Romney at 22%, Gingrich at 15%, Perry at 14%, and all others in single digits.

The two polls also show Newt Gingrich currently having the best favorable ratings among Republican voters.

In the CNN pol, Gingrich’s favorable ratings among GOPers is 61%, to only 21% unfavorable. This is followed by Romney at 55%-27%, Cain at 47%-31%, Perry at 43%-37%, Bachmann at 41%-33%, Santorum at 30%-22%, and Huntsman at 19%-22%.

And in the PPP numbers, Gingrich’s numbers are 68%-23%, compared to 57%-31% for Cain, 48%-39% for Romney, followed by Bachmann at 40%-41%, Perry at 35%-49%, and Paul at 31%-52%.

The Republican base has been on a months-long search for the anti-Romney. They’ve courted, then dumped Trump, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, and Christie (who sadly declined the date.) I still think that Romney will be the eventual nominee, but kudos to former Hullabaloo and now FDL contributor Dave Dayen for calling the Gingrich surge over a month ago:

It’s going to be awesome when Gingrich surges to the lead next month.

Dave Dayen is one of the smartest political writers out there point blank, and even his jokes are more serious and have greater insight than most pundits’ most “serious” work.

Just as a thought experiment, it would be interesting to consider how the media would react to similar primary volatility among the Democratic base. Somehow I suspect it would be portrayed less as a values-driven soul search, and more as the waffling of a bunch of insecure hippies who can’t seem to make a commitment.

C’est la vie.

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The fact that one of these people is a congressional representative and the other has his own television show is the surest sign there is that we are a culture in very deep decline:

ALAN WEST: I would say this, the president is the benefactor of a lot of information that came from waterboarding and the most important thing is when you look at the precedent, non-state, non-uniform belligerents captured on the battlefield under the Geneva Convention are not afforded the same type of rights. We can make that determination. And as the president, you need to do those things which are necessary to make sure that the American people are kept safe. I see that when we continue to read Miranda rights to people such as the underwear bomber, we are using [sic] the advantage and leverage that we have. And furthermore in the movie G.I. Jane, Demi Moore was waterboarded and we do use that in military training and Survival, Escape, Resistance and Evasion training.

BRIAN KILMEADE (HOST): And she ended up with a much younger husband in real life.

WEST: That’s right.

They go on to discuss how West was court martialed and run out of the Army for torturing a prisoner. He’s proud of it.

But get this, (from Politicalcorrection):

West’s own experience using beatings, intimidation, and the fear of death to interrogate a detainee in Iraq actually illustrates the argument against torture: It just doesn’t work. West fired a gun next to the head of a detainee after letting his soldiers beat the man, who claimed not to have knowledge of the ambush West believed he had planned. Eventually the man described such a plan — not because it actually existed, but because it was what West wanted to hear.

No evidence of such a plan was ever found, and in a 2004 interview, West told the New York Times, “It’s possible that I was wrong about Mr. Hamoodi.”

Oh my God.

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Memories of Nixonland

by digby

Jesse Kornbluth featured this compelling bit of history in his piece today about the Berkeley brutality. It’s a good one.

I’m not a child. I’ve always thought of Berkeley as sunny and friendly, crunchy and stoned, but I also remember it as the site of one of the greatest political speeches I have ever heard. Mario Savio. Sproul Hall. 1964. The conclusion:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all…

The video is even stronger. It’s only a minute. Do watch:

I was reminded of something else that happened two years later:

As the Vietnam War expanded and the death toll climbed, students at Berkeley launched a determined and, at times, confrontational attempt to stop the war with demonstrations and protests that eventually spread to college campuses across the country. Years later, much of the public came to agree with the students but in 1966, those opposed to the war were a distinct minority in America. Candidate Reagan capitalized on this.

“Just show me one of them Beatnik varmints.”
(A political cartoon from the San Francisco Chronicle, reprinted in Clark Kerr’s “The Gold and the Blue”)

Smelser, assistant chancellor for educational development at the time Reagan ran for office, recalled that “Reagan took aim at the university for being irresponsible for failing to punish these dissident students. He said, ‘Get them out of there. Throw them out. They are spoiled and don’t deserve the education they are getting. They don’t have a right to take advantage of our system of education.'”

Reagan had two themes in his first run for office. The man who later became known as “The Great Communicator” vowed to send “the welfare bums back to work,” and “to clean up the mess at Berkeley.” The latter became a Reagan mantra.

Earl Cheit, dean emeritus of the Haas School of Business, was executive vice chancellor at Berkeley from 1965 to 1969. Like many at Berkeley, he remembers being at the wrong end of Reagan’s political broom.

“Incidents of campus disruption and reports about what was going on here – often exaggerated reports– became a standard part of his campaign rhetoric,” said Cheit. “Reagan also argued that the faculty was too permissive, or supportive, of the students. One of his great skills was to understand popular feeling. He really tapped into the discontent people felt about what was happening on the campus. I have no doubt that this was a big factor in his election as governor.”

Rick Perlstein reported that all of his advisors told him it was no big deal and he overruled them. His great gift wasn’t being a “communicator.” It was having excellent political instincts.

Wall and bridges

If this happens it really is the worst of both worlds:

With a little over a week left to reach a deal, members of the Congressional deficit reduction panel are looking for an escape hatch that would let them strike an accord on revenue levels but delay until next year tough decisions about exactly how to raise taxes.

Under this approach, the panel would decide on the amount of new revenue to be raised but would leave it to the tax-writing committees of Congress to fill in details next year, well beyond the Nov. 23 deadline for the panel itself to reach an agreement. That would put off painful political decisions but ensure that the debate over deficit reduction stretched into the election year.

There’s no mention in the article of putting off agreement on the cuts, so presumably those would happen for sure while they work on “tax reform.” After all, slashing the hell out of the safety net is the easy part. Both parties are eager to get that done.

If that’s the idea, they can get all those pesky cuts to entitlements done first so that the Democrats can fall on their swords and the Republicans can stealthily attack them for it during the election season. But the Republicans can run as the people who are saving the nation from higher taxes. Good plan.

But most people think there’s still almost no hope of getting a deal. Greg Sargent reports:

As of yesterday, doubts were growing that differences can be bridged, given the latest status of the talks:

Republicans have offered a $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction package that would cut spending by about $750 billion over the next decade while raising about $500 billion in revenue, including about $300 billion in new taxes. Democrats have offered to trim borrowing by $2 trillion, with that sum equally divided between spending cuts and tax increases.

If I’m reading this correctly, Democrats are offering a deal that includes significantly more in deficit reduction, and significantly more in spending cuts — two things Republicans want. The Dem condition for this deal is that spending cuts and tax increases be equal in amount. But that’s a nonstarter.

So, punt on the revenues? I wouldn’t be surprised. Remember how the conservatives see these negotiations:

[Y]ou don’t have to compromise if both parties want the same thing. The Dems represented that they wanted, or at least were willing to accept budget cuts. Great, our team wanted budget cuts too.

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Militarized policing in the age of dissent

by digby

Here’s my latest op-ed for Al Jazeera from the “if you build it they will use it” files:

What happens when a government builds a massive, unaccountable police apparatus to thwart infiltration by a foreign menace, only to see the society it’s supposed to protect take to the streets for entirely different reasons?

It looks as though we may be about to find out. The Occupy protests have been mostly peaceful, with a few fairly dramatic exceptions. But the sight of a huge police presence in riot gear is always startling, and tactics that have been honed in Europe (such as “kettling”) against anarchist actions have not been as common in the United States as elsewhere. More standard forms of crowd control, such as the aggressive use of pepper spray and “rubber” bullets have so far been the outer limits of the police use of force. But it is hardly the outer limits of the possibilities.

The US has actually been militarising much of its police agencies for the better part of three decades, mostly in the name of the drug war. But 9/11 put that programme on steroids.

read on …

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The Dark Side of Inclusiveness
by David Atkins

The Occupy Oakland camp is being corralled and taken down by police as I write this, with 20 arrested so far, singing “We Shall Overcome” as they are put in handcuffs:

Police have arrested about 20 protesters so far and have begun dismantling the camp. Hundreds of protesters remain on Broadway and 14th. While they can’t return to the camp, police are not ordering them to leave.

In the camp, police are taking down tents and making arrests. Everything remains peaceful.

Police arrested 14 protesters who had been praying all night in the interfaith tent all night amid by candles.

The protesters, who had planned to peacefully resist the raid, sang “We Shall Overcome” as the police arrested them.

Rev. Kurt Kuhwald had told reporters, “Our plan is to remain here.”

Several individual protesters also chose to get arrested.

Brandon Walsh, an Oakland bike mechanic, said that he was “passively occupying” despite police orders to leave the camp.

“I have the privileged of having a voice and the luxury to do something with it,” he said.

Protesters continue to affirm that the raid will not hinder the movement.

“The campers are going to be back in a day or two,” said engineering student Mark L., who identifies as a Republican.

This has happened before, and it’s true: the protesters will be back within a few days. Unfortunately, the storyline of peaceful persistence at Occupy Oakland has been overshadowed of late with continued convulsions being caused from within. Occupy Oakland isstill trying to come to grips with how to deal with black bloc “anarchists”, whose tactics threaten to discredit the movement in Oakland, hand easy fodder to the right-wing media machine, and who have been disrupting the General Assemblies as well.

Newly minted Occupy Wall Street mini-celebrity Jesse LaGreca had an impassioned post over the weekend urging forceful rejection of the black bloc and its tactics. I would imagine that Jesse speaks for the majority of Occupiers across America.

Unfortunately, this is not an easy problem to solve. The movement’s openness is at once its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. In more structured situations, such individuals would simply be denied a voice or the ability to cause the sort of disruption to the movement that they have. The very structure of meetings is an example of this: most organizations conduct themselves according to Roberts Rules of Order. Roberts Rules are staid and arcane, and extremely intimidating for a newcomer. Worse, they tend to be fairly stifling to speech if strictly construed, with time and frequency limits to speech from any individual, multiple avenues for limiting and ending debate, and a rigid vertically oriented approach to building and enforcing consensus. While I’ve gotten very comfortable navigating the Roberts Rules process over the last few years, I would never say it’s anything but dysfunctional, and actively exclusionary to those who have not had significant experience with it.

Occupy general assemblies, on the other hand, work according to the much more horizontally structured “Consensus” model, which is far simpler. Anyone can talk at any time so long as they aren’t actively interrupting anyone else, and there are no time or topic limits to speech unless approved by the entire body. But that simplicity and egalitarianism has a huge drawback: it allows a few bad apples to essentially wreck entire meetings, which isn’t normally possible under more rigid structures.

Having experienced both models, I can say with some confidence that each system of conducting a meeting is dysfunctional in its own way, and mirrors the specific weaknesses of the organizations that use them.

In the case of the Occupy movement, the primary challenge will be to mitigate and minimize the negative actions of vandals and those prone to seeing romanticism in violence against small business storefronts.

This isn’t a new problem for popular movements on the Left. Sara Robinson has a great piece on the “asshole problem” that has been an issue for movements such as this since the 1960s at least:

I wish I could say that the problems that the Occupy movement is having with infiltrators and agitators are new. But they’re not. In fact, they’re problems that the Old Hippies who survived the 60s and 70s remember acutely, and with considerable pain.

As a veteran of those days — with the scars to prove it — watching the OWS organizers struggle with drummers, druggies, sexual harassers, racists, and anarchists brings me back to a few lessons we had to learn the hard way back in the day, always after putting up with way too much over-the-top behavior from people we didn’t think we were allowed to say “no” to. It’s heartening to watch the Occupiers begin to work out solutions to what I can only indelicately call “the asshole problem.” In the hope of speeding that learning process along, here are a few glimmers from my own personal flashbacks — things that it’s high time somebody said right out loud.

1. Let’s be clear: It is absolutely OK to insist on behavior norms. #Occupy may be a DIY movement — but it also stands for very specific ideas and principles. Central among these is: We are here to reassert the common good. And we have a LOT of work to do. Being open and accepting does not mean that we’re obligated to accept behavior that damages our ability to achieve our goals. It also means that we have a perfect right to insist that people sharing our spaces either act in ways that further those goals, or go somewhere else until they’re able to meet that standard.

2. It is OK to draw boundaries between those who are clearly working toward our goals, and those who are clearly not. Or, as an earlier generation of change agents put it: “You’re either on the bus, or off the bus.” Are you here to change the way this country operates, and willing to sacrifice some of your almighty personal freedom to do that? Great. You’re with us, and you’re welcome here. Are you here on your own trip and expecting the rest of us to put up with you? In that case, you are emphatically NOT on our side, and you are not welcome in our space.

Anybody who feels the need to put their own personal crap ahead of the health and future of the movement is (at least for that moment) an asshole, and does not belong in Occupied space. Period. This can be a very hard idea for people in an inclusive movement to accept — we really want to have all voices heard. But the principles #Occupy stands for must always take precedence over any individual’s divine right to be an asshole, or the assholes will take over. Which brings me to….

3. The consensus model has a fatal flaw, which is this: It’s very easy for power to devolve to the people who are willing to throw the biggest tantrums. When some a drama king or queen starts holding the process hostage for their own reasons, congratulations! You’ve got a new asshole! (See #2.) You must guard against this constantly, or consensus government becomes completely impossible.

4. Once you’ve accepted the right of the group to set boundaries around people’s behavior, and exclude those who put their personal “rights” ahead of the group’s mission and goals, the next question becomes: How do we deal with chronic assholes?

This is the problem Occupy’s leaders are very visibly struggling with now. I’ve been a part of asshole-infested groups in the long-ago past that had very good luck with a whole-group restorative justice process. In this process, the full group (or some very large subset of it that’s been empowered to speak for the whole) confronts the troublemaker directly. The object is not to shame or blame. Instead, it’s like an intervention. You simply point out what you have seen and how it affects you. The person is given a clear choice: make some very specific changes in their behavior, or else leave.

This requires some pre-organization. You need three to five spokespeople to moderate the session (usually as a tag team) and do most of the talking. Everybody else simply stands in a circle around the offender, watching silently, looking strong and determined. The spokespeople make factual “we” statements that reflect the observations of the group. “We have seen you using drugs inside Occupied space. We are concerned that this hurts our movement. We are asking you to either stop, or leave.”

When the person tries to make excuses (and one of the most annoying attributes of chronic assholes is they’re usually skilled excuse-makers as well), then other members of the group can speak up — always with “I” messages. “I saw you smoking a joint with X and Y under tree Z this morning. We’re all worried about the cops here, and we think you’re putting our movement in danger. We are asking you to leave.” Every statement needs to end with that demand — “We are asking you to either stop, or else leave and not come back.” No matter what the troublemaker says, the response must always be brought back to this bottom line.

These interventions can go on for a LONG time. You have to be committed to stay in the process, possibly for a few hours until the offender needs a pee break or gets hungry. But eventually, if everybody stays put, the person will have no option but to accept that a very large group of people do not want him or her there. Even truly committed assholes will get the message that they’ve crossed the line into unacceptable behavior when they’re faced with several dozen determined people confronting them all at once.

Given the time this takes, it’s tempting to cut corners by confronting several people all at once. Don’t do it. Confronting more than two people at a time creates a diffusion-of-responsibility effect: the troublemakers tell themselves that they just got caught up in a dragnet; the problem is those other people, not me. The one who talks the most will get most of the heat; the others will tend to slip by (though the experience may cause them to reconsider their behavior or leave as well).

This process also leaves open the hope that the person will really, truly get that their behavior is Not OK, and agree to change it. When this happens, be sure to negotiate specific changes, boundaries, rules, and consequences (“if we see you using drugs here again, we will call the police. There will be no second warning”), and then reach a consensus agreement that allows them to stay. On the other hand: if the person turns violent and gets out of control, then the question is settled, and their choice is made. You now have a legitimate reason to call the cops to haul them away. And the cops will likely respect you more for maintaining law and order.

Clearing out a huge number of these folks can be a massive time suck, at least for the few days it will take to weed out the worst ones and get good at it. It might make sense to create a large committee whose job it is to gather information, build cases against offenders, and conduct these meetings.

And finally:

5. It is not wrong for you to set boundaries this way. You will get shit for this. “But…but…it looks a whole lot like a Maoist purge unit!” No. There is nothing totalitarian about asking people who join your revolution to act in ways that support the goals of that revolution. And the Constitution guarantees your right of free association — which includes the right to exclude people who aren’t on the bus, and who are wasting the group’s limited time and energy rather than maximizing it. After all: you’re not sending these people to re-education camps, or doing anything else that damages them. You’re just getting them out of the park, and out of your hair…

Sara’s last point goes on quite a bit longer, and is worth reading in full. These are pretty good guidelines for any self-organizing groups–including online communities as well. If one of the movement’s goals is to not only advocate for different public policy but a rethinking of the way society itself is organized, it will have to find an effective way of dealing with people whose only interest is in derailing the movement for their own whims.

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