patrick.net

OWS failed because protests don't work, and nobody identifies with college neo-hippies. Also, OWS attracted a lot of RadFems, Pacifists, Green primitivists, and Marijuana Legalizer groups that have very little interest in curbing Wall Street, and tried to make it all about their pet causes.

This video is both enlightening, and hilarious.

http://youtu.be/bs2AFulQNTA?t=15m22s

Bullshit 90% of them wanted some of that Arab Spring magic that made people international super stars for being at the receiving end of a very public canning.

We're a nation that feeds on 11 minutes of fame, regardless how one gets that fame.
Which is why gun control in any capacity will do nothing to stop a rising International News star. And for these people, the deader the more immortal they'll become.

I'm sure that in a hundred years, "Flappers" will still have a larger write up in the History books than the OWS will. Unless the story gets rewritten, which is often the case.

Maybe it's because they are, just like David Graeber, a bunch of anarchists and Marxists.

thunderlips11 says

OWS failed because protests don't work

Quick, someone call Gandhi and MLK and tell them their strategies won't work.

P N Dr Lo R says

Maybe it's because they are, just like David Graeber, a bunch of anarchists and Marxists.

Bankers are the true anarchist because, as the Dept of Justice says, they are beyond the law.

OWS just wasn't able to obtain that critical mass of supporters to force and enact the necessary policy changes. I suspect that the 99% vs 1% messaging was not very effective. People don't want to feel as though they are part of the masses and 99% feels like "the masses." Clearly someone at the 95% does not want to feel as though he has much in common with someone at the bottom 10% percentile psychologically and lifestyle wise. In fact they are very likely to desire to join the upper 1%. For the percentage messaging to have been effective, I feel that 80% vs 20% would have been a much more effective approach and it is probably more truthful as it is embedded in a pareto principle.

It failed because it didn't have the huge amount of corporate backing that some of the infamous right-wing "Grass roots movements" get. I'd say right wing movements are far more successful because they are often times originated from various corporate umbrella groups whom then get on various forms of media, touting this new "movement" and with cash greasing the works, they take off and work great, having a large number of supporters acting as cheerleaders for their corporate benefactors. No such system was setup for OWS and without money these days the chances of success is far less likely.

C Boy says

Quick, someone call Gandhi ... strategies won't work.

Actually, the British Empire was bankrupted by two major world wars. Britain was in no position to maintain a standing army on the subcontinent by 1945. Thus, starting with India in '47, all major colonies (sans the tinier ones like Hong Kong/Falklands/Gibraltar), were independent with Bahrain's departure in '72, a 25 year period of full collapse. And finally, during independence talks, Jinah got what he wanted with a divided India, getting his slice of the pie, modern day Pakistan. Thus, one can argue that Gandhi was in fact a failure. At least under the British Raj, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Burma were politically united. When the Brits had left, all out war broke out between India & Pakistan. Even the Burmese junta initiated an ethnic cleansing of Indians living in their borders, a decade & half after independence.

thunderlips11 says

OWS failed because protests don't work

Nope, they don't. The last time a generation managed to get reforms passed was the progressive generation of the 1910s and 1920s. They got a lot of reforms passed, although I'm not sure that protesting was a significant cause of their success.

Modern day activists should look towards the early 20th century progressives as a model for change, not the stinky, worthless hippies of the 1960s. Turns out that those progressives knew what they were doing. It's a shame we didn't capture that information while they were still alive.

thunderlips11 says

http://youtu.be/bs2AFulQNTA?t=15m22s

I especially like the ending part where he exposes the deceivers trying to make out their rational opponents as violent, disturbing creeps. It's a perfect example of creep shaming, and reminded me of Marcus. Those two women should be ostracized by any community they try to enter for such a despicable act. It is impossible to respect such malevolent liars as human beings.

Dan8267 says

thunderlips11 says

OWS failed because protests don't work

Nope, they don't. The last time a generation managed to get reforms passed was the progressive generation of the 1910s and 1920s. They got a lot of reforms passed, although I'm not sure that protesting was a significant cause of their success.

Modern day activists should look towards the early 20th century progressives as a model for change, not the stinky, worthless hippies of the 1960s. Turns out that those progressives knew what they were doing. It's a shame we didn't capture that information while they were still alive.

Have you forgotten about the civi rights movement of the 1960's?

Dan8267 says

thunderlips11 says

http://youtu.be/bs2AFulQNTA?t=15m22s

I especially like the ending part where he exposes the deceivers trying to make out their rational opponents as violent, disturbing creeps. It's a perfect example of creep shaming, and reminded me of Marcus. Those two women should be ostracized by any community they try to enter for such a despicable act. It is impossible to respect such malevolent liars as human beings.

Harhar - Mykeru's Law, fantastic! And so true.

Wall street is just a smokescreen. It is the govt that holds the reins-not wall street. Now our congress critters are bought and paid for-but anger must be against the govt for permititng all this -not against the players . There has to be a separation between corproate and state.

C Boy says

Have you forgotten about the civi rights movement of the 1960's?

The Civil Rights Act would have been passed in the 1950s had the ass Strom Thurmond not filibustered it. And Gen X did far more to end racism than the hippies simply by not buying into it. Hell, to us Gen Xer's the idea of gay marriage never seemed controversial. So, I'm going to have to give it to the Atari generation.

mell says

Harhar - Mykeru's Law, fantastic! And so true.

I know, that got me too! Pure genius.

lostand confused says

Wall street is just a smokescreen. It is the govt that holds the reins-not wall street. Now our congress critters are bought and paid for-but anger must be against the govt for permititng all this -not against the players . There has to be a separation between corproate and state.

Please tell me you're joking. International finance runs our government. The government may technically have more power, but the people in government are bought and paid for by Wall Street and their foreign counterparts.

C Boy says

Have you forgotten about the civi rights movement of the 1960's?

Communism used the treatment of Blacks in the South as ammo in the propaganda war. By the early 1960s only the US, South Africa and that other country in Africa that I forget still actively and officially practiced segregation by race.

Wiser Cold Warriors insisted it had to go, though most weren't happy about it.

Ghandi wasn't the only game in town. Hardly a day went by, that British authorities weren't shot at, bombed, and otherwise killed for more than two decades by violent Indian Independent movements, until the Brits realized they had neither the cash, the military, the prestige, nor the will to hang on anymore.

Dan mentioned why protests worked in the 10s, 20s, and 30s. It's because they weren't non violent. Send in the police and scabs and private detectives to bust a strike, and more often than not they would get the shit kicked out of them by the steelworkers and run away. That made politicians piss their pants and the wiser industrialists give concessions. Also, the Soviet Union was born that made Communism more of a threat in their minds.

it's also no accident that with the end of the Soviet Union, the politicians are busy eliminating worker protections left and right. Nothing to fear - some hippies that don't wanna work, but bang on the drums all day, and RedFem Lisa-Loeb glasses wearing Lit Crit chicks, don't inspire terror.

In order for the OWS to have worked the overall population should have had supported it wholeheartedly and believed in the cause. They did not at least not in the level that it takes to succeed. It had to take belief, heart and inspiration. None of which was present in the american population. It was a lot easier for them to dismiss OWS as hippie lazy bums and go to the mall to buy another pair of sneakers.

thunderlips11 says

Ghandi wasn't the only game in town. Hardly a day went by, that British authorities weren't shot at, bombed, and otherwise killed for more than two decades by violent Indian Independent movements, until the Brits realized they had neither the cash, the military, the prestige, nor the will to hang on anymore.

And that's a part of the point. There were separatists all over Victoria's former Empire. From South/East Africa & Nigeria, through the Middle East, Indian Subcontinent, & SE Asia, virtually every timezone. Thus, the faltering notion of a multi-continental global standing army, after being decimated in two world wars, setup all the former colonies for independence. The whole Gandhi thing was more of a feel good story about a poorly dressed underdog spiritual guru, perpetuated by American journalists.

Rin says

The whole Gandhi thing was more of a feel good story about a poorly dressed
underdog spiritual guru, perpetuated by American journalists.

Not really. Every movement needs a face or an event to rally around. Gandhi was that. Now if the British weren't decimated by the two world wars, he would probably be a footnote in history. But Britain was broke, in massive debt and had lost the illusion of being the most powerful nation on earth(Any parallels to modern day America??). They needed the help of America and other nations to defend their own nation and Germans bombed Britain itself. It was a multitude of events that all came together. In a way it was Hitler's evil madness that put an end to colonialism-though he never intended any such thing.

Too many people believe they have too much to lose by losing their pension/401k if Wall Street doesn't continue to use our own money to rape us. AF is right, we need a barbecue Wall Street movement.

lostand confused says

Every movement needs a face or an event to rally around. Gandhi was that.

For India, true, he was a symbol for the masses [ folk hero of sorts ] but he wasn't the face of Bahrain, South or East Africa, Nigeria, or Malaysia. As time went by, Indians slowly stopped giving him George Washington kudos, as his ideas and rhetoric were mostly impractical, in a post-partitioned subcontinent.

Earlier in his life,when his so-called equal rights marches in South Africa got him & his followers incarcerated, he'd agreed with the British govt that if the South African based Indians got a higher status than being labelled 'black', he'd agree with the soon-to-be Apartheid South Africa to halt immigration of Indians into the territory. Thus, to gain a bit of a *more white (but not quite)* status, he'd forever doomed the Indians living there, to be a dwindling minority, and now, socially & politically separated from both the blacks and the whites for the following century. This issue is still ongoing, even today.

Rin says

he'd agreed with the British govt that if the South African based Indians got a
higher status than being labelled 'black', he'd agree with the soon-to-be
Apartheid South Africa to halt immigration of Indians into the territory

The Apartheid govt did what it pleased and not because of some agreement with a then insignificant person. You can't argue he had no influence and then turn around and say his influence predominates the happenings for a whole century in another country.

lostand confused says

Rin says

he'd agreed with the British govt that if the South African based Indians got a

higher status than being labelled 'black', he'd agree with the soon-to-be

Apartheid South Africa to halt immigration of Indians into the territory

The Apartheid govt did what it pleased and not because of some agreement with a then insignificant person. You can't argue he had no influence and then turn around and say his influence predominates the happenings for a whole century in another country.

His protests in SA ended when he'd agreed to end Indian immigration to SA. That was the deal between him and the British govt. The end result, as time went by, was that the whites, blacks, and Indians were put into fully separated categories.

Rin says

lostand confused says

Rin says

he'd agreed with the British govt that if the South African based Indians got a

higher status than being labelled 'black', he'd agree with the soon-to-be

Apartheid South Africa to halt immigration of Indians into the territory

The Apartheid govt did what it pleased and not because of some agreement with a then insignificant person. You can't argue he had no influence and then turn around and say his influence predominates the happenings for a whole century in another country.

His protests in SA ended when he'd agreed to end Indian immigration to SA. That was the deal between him and the British govt. The end result, as time went by, was that the whites, blacks, and Indians were put into fully separated categories.

The term WOG (Worthy Oriental Gentleman) existed long before Gandhi.

lostand confused says

Rin says

The whole Gandhi thing was more of a feel good story about a poorly dressed

underdog spiritual guru, perpetuated by American journalists.

Not really. Every movement needs a face or an event to rally around. Gandhi was that. Now if the British weren't decimated by the two world wars, he would probably be a footnote in history. But Britain was broke, in massive debt and had lost the illusion of being the most powerful nation on earth(Any parallels to modern day America??). They needed the help of America and other nations to defend their own nation and Germans bombed Britain itself. It was a multitude of events that all came together. In a way it was Hitler's evil madness that put an end to colonialism-though he never intended any such thing.

Yeah, except the Government of India Act 1935 occurred in, well 1935, prior to WWII.

The UK kept many colonies long after WWII. Bahrain was still a colony until the 1970's and Hong Kong until 1997.

The UK still owns 14 colonies, although the are called Overseas Territories nowadays. In the case of the Falkland Islands, the UK has gone to war to maintain them.

Occupy Wall Street was a very big tent. It thus included many diverse elements. Enough of these elements calling for free this or free that could be targeted as representing the entire movement. They made a mistake by not having an agenda that cooler heads could vet for acceptance by the public at large.

What Occupy Wall Street needed was a simple agenda that the 99% could easily buy into. Criminal prosecution of the people responsible for the crash would have worked as item number 1. Ending “Too Big To Fail” would have worked as number 2. And removing corporate “personhood” would have worked as number 3.

Rin says

Thus, the faltering notion of a multi-continental global standing army, after being decimated in two world wars, setup all the former colonies for independence. The whole Gandhi thing was more of a feel good story about a poorly dressed underdog spiritual guru, perpetuated by American journalists.

Agreed. This is a very interesting subject and a point that more people need to understand. Most people outside South Asia have just seen the Gandhi movie and that's where their knowledge of Indian history begins and ends.

From the horses mouth, Clement Attlee:

An extract from a letter written by P.V. Chuckraborty, former Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court, on March 30 1976, reads thus: "When I was acting as Governor of West Bengal in 1956, Lord Clement Attlee, who as the British Prime Minister in post war years was responsible for India’s freedom, visited India and stayed in Raj Bhavan Calcutta for two days`85 I put it straight to him like this: ‘The Quit India Movement of Gandhi practically died out long before 1947 and there was nothing in the Indian situation at that time, which made it necessary for the British to leave India in a hurry. Why then did they do so?’ In reply Attlee cited several reasons, the most important of which were the INA activities of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, which weakened the very foundation of the British Empire in India, and the RIN Mutiny which made the British realize that the Indian armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British. When asked about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s 1942 movement, Attlee’s lips widened in smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, ‘Minimal’."

fedwatcher says

Occupy Wall Street was a very big tent. It thus included many diverse elements. Enough of these elements calling for free this or free that could be targeted as representing the entire movement. They made a mistake by not having an agenda that cooler heads could vet for acceptance by the public at large.

Yep. Basically Mykeru's law. The moment the public saw pictures of camps dominated by Drum circles, Anarcho-Feminist Teach Ins, Hackey Sack kicking, and signs supporting the Revolutionary Committee for the Spartacus League, they lost all interest.

If instead the public saw pictures of the same number of everyday people in everyday clothes protesting bailouts, without the Free Tibet, MIM-RAIL, and Legalize Marijuana signs that have bupkiss to do with financial reform, it may have been a different story. People might have actually pulled up and joined in here and there, and it may have grown exponentially.

C Boy says

Yeah, except the Government of India Act 1935 occurred in, well 1935, prior to WWII.

And was only partially implemented, did not devolve control of India to Indians, but merely set up a weak federalism where some day-to-day administrative decisions would be left to the provinces, but overall control was solidly retained by the Empire. Each province would still have a British Imperial Governor with actual final say. Think Star Wars and the Imperial Senate.

In fact, the Act of 1919 eventually called for the creation of self-governing institutions, the 1935 Act said nothing about this.

The key part of the Government of India Act is the bit about corporations; it said all UK corporations have full rights in India, but Indian based corporations have only the rights the UK wishes to give them. In other words, UK-based businesses could do anything in India without local restrictions by Indian Governments, but India-based businesses would be subject to any and all special restrictions by the UK government.

fedwatcher says

What Occupy Wall Street needed was a simple agenda that the 99% could easily buy into. Criminal prosecution of the people responsible for the crash would have worked as item number 1. Ending “Too Big To Fail” would have worked as number 2. And removing corporate “personhood” would have worked as number 3.

again, you point to some mortgage and the banks as the culprit, but you still leave the guilty party off the hook ( the 99%).

try to explain to a person back in 2000 to 2008 prices of RE only appreciate at rate of inflation.

or you could say, has there has ever been an instance where prices would appreciate 10% or more for a long period of time in the future... just compounting rate after several years would be off the chart as we seen.

either way, you would have been ignored and called some crazy nut job...

Robert Shiller - On Home Prices Always Going Up

http://www.youtube.com/embed/d__GPqOVNbE

"too big to fail" was related to AIG and underwriting of insurance policies held by companies in many industries including transportation industry. No insurance policies on many transportation companies would have frozen the food shipments for example. So you can forget food being shipped to markets so you could eat. Or who will underwrite the Fuel shipment contracts. You get the picture.

But hey.. as long as you beat on a drum all day, the logistics dont cross your mind.

C Boy says

It failed because the police and bankers worked together (as reported by the NY Times bakers manned police emergency bunkers).

I am not so sure about this. I have family in law enforcement. I am also about as liberal as they come. I think OWS was not as effective as it could have been because it did not organize around a purpose. The police have to get involved when something is conducted in such a way to threaten public safety. I don't think the police were colluding with bankers. THe police that I saw were doing their jobs.

In my opinion, there were some good ideas behind OWS. Unfortunately public protests not only attract those who are ideologically in agreement with an issue, it also draws out antisocial people who just use it as an opportunity harm people. The police were there for the second group, not the first.

The police that I knew who had to work the protests were in agreement with the ideas behind much of OWS. They had to intervene when crowds threw bottles, threw rocks, made the public unsafe or destroyed property. I don't think it was about colluding with the banks.

OWS failed, IMHO, because it did not focus the seething sea of public anger onto one of two easy to understand points. I think that anger is still present so it's not too late to reorganize.

pdg says

I think that anger is still present so it's not too late to reorganize.

That will never happen before 2016, not with the love fest going on with Obama. And the thought detention on the freedom of speech. Where one party is free to spew vile and anger against the other, but the other party are vile racist and bigots when they do the same.

bg says

don't think the police were colluding with bankers. THe police that I saw were
doing their jobs.

“The Midtown Manhattan Security Initiative will add additional cameras and license plate readers installed at key locations between 30th and 60th Streets from river to river. It will also identify additional private organizations who will work alongside NYPD personnel in the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, where corporate and other security representatives from Lower Manhattan have been co-located with police since June 2009. The Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center is the central hub for both initiatives, where all the collected data are analyzed.”

Press Release from Mayor Bloomberg and Police Comissioner Kelly
October 4, 2009

CaptainShuddup says

And the thought detention on the freedom of speech

You overlook that your beloved Bush made the largest strides in that department with his Patriot Act and Homeland Security nonsense. If you conservatives weren't so damned obsessed with Us versus Them, maybe you'd see who We are.

Obama is not having a love fest. The only one obsessed here seems to be you, the way you invoke him for everything under the sun. Myopic ignorance of recent history.

I find it ironic that a Boomer wantsta bitch and moan about OWS, but forgets about the sell-out Flower Power hippie "protesters" that had their peyote beans and Canned Heat records and were happy to move on in the '80s and buy Bimmers and gated homes and engage in one of the most egregious credit swindles of the 20th century.

Philistine says

You overlook that your beloved Bush made the largest strides in that department with his Patriot Act and Homeland Security nonsense.

Yes and when it failed to protect us,(see Boston TERRORISTS) of course it wasn't no fault of the Homeland Security and the Patriot act, this administration is looking for more ways to rob freedoms from its Citizens to mask their own ineptitude. They Fucked up, and now WE have to pay. But make no mistake, as long as they wont admit when or where they dropped the ball, then Terrorist will continue to strike with "Nothing but Net" while we are on the pavement with Obama's boot to our necks.

Excellent piece that explains much better the point I am trying to make about OWS messaging and the problem of the "activismists".

One of the most frustrating things about being on the left is the profound number of clowns who situate themselves beside me. We’ve got generational warfare clowns. We’ve got New Age gibberish clowns. We’ve got conspiracy theory clowns. We’ve got clowns that smash storefronts in costumes, terrifying and alienating the public. And of course, we’ve got hippie drum circle clowns.

I call these, and others, clowns because they’re behavior seems primarily aimed at personal performance and tends to be accompanied by self-marginalizing lifestyles and costumes. While they seem to retain a broad thematic interest in left goals and can even occasionally explain them to you, their actions are more about personal lifestyles than about any principled interest in success.

This is especially true among the often-ridiculed, privileged, college student radicals. You know the type: the white kid going to an expensive private school on their parents’ dime, just wanting to learn how to lead The Good Life. These individuals are not generally interested in the kind of boring, long, and often unsuccessful work of running campaigns and winning. They are interested in their own personal purity, ridding themselves of the toxicity of living wrongly, oppressively, with unchecked privilege, and so on.

That is, the concern is inward towards themselves and their own “souls” if you will, not outwards towards others who are suffering. While I think this tendency exists broadly in the student left or in circles of immense material privilege, perhaps it is best found in the wheels-off concept of allyship.

In theory, allyship refers to those with privileged identities being deferential to and supportive of those with oppressed identities without telling them what to do. In these privileged student circles however, allyship is a competitive social justice sport where people try to rack up what I would call ally points. Allies buzz around learning how to be the best ally, chiming in about this or that privilege, this or that erasure, this or that marginalization. Self-appointed allies do this stuff never, it seems, to actually push things forward in meaningful ways, but generally just to salve their own discomfort, and purify themselves of badness.

People interested in purity leftism are ultimately selfish. When purity leftists do actions and organizing, their interest is not in reducing oppression as much as it is in reducing their own participation in it. Above all else, they want to be able to say that they are not oppressing, not that oppression has ended.

OWS did not fail. Liberals think that we live in some magical fairy land of instant radical political gratification. Political reality shifts so slowly in this country that most liberals cannot even perceive what actual victory feels like. In some ways OWS was more successful than the TEA movement.

OWS was successful in precipitating a shift in popular perspective. Prior to OWS, all economic discourse centered around GDP growth. Today, disparity is routinely also discussed. OWS did nothing less than open up a new dimension in how we perceive the economy. The winning Presidential candidate in 2012 made wealth disparity ("strengthening the middle class") a major issue of his campaign. Creating a notion that wealth disparity is a thing that government should be worried about is a huge ideological coup for a country like this.

Furthermore, OWS did nothing more than that. That is a virtue. Contrast that with TEAism, which attempts to coopt and extort the GOP into adopting its agenda by running radicals in primary elections. Without TEAism, there is simply no way the Democrats could possibly have held the Senate for the last four years. Karl Rove just founded an organization to combat the threat TEA poses to the GOP's Senate aspirations through open and organized infighting. Perhaps even more significantly: with real power has come real scrutiny on their batshit extremist ideology. If Mitt Romney hadn't been forced to cover himself in that stinking taint during the Republican primary, he might be President today.

The wheels of politics turn slowly, but wealth disparity is a serious issue in national politics today, and OWS did nothing to sabotage its chances of leading to real policy changes. The only sense in which the movement was a failure is a simple artifact of the fact that liberals don't have the good sense to know when they're winning. Or, at least, not yet losing. See also: pretty much all liberal critiques of Barack Obama's first term.