Tina Dupuy

Freshman Oklahoma state senator Ralph Shortey recently introduced a bill that would ban “the sale or manufacture of food or products which contain aborted human fetuses.” After a collective brow-raise over such a bizarre proposal, Shortey told the Los Angeles Times he got the idea “while doing some research on the Internet.”

So is there an issue with aborted fetuses ending up as foodstuffs? No. And there never has been.

Shortey’s bill is a wild overstatement of the latest front in the anti-abortion fight, one being prosecuted on an obscure Oklahoma anti-abortion website that has been trying to organizing a campaign to boycott PepsiCo because of a research contract it has with a company called Senomyx for beverage sweetener research that the anti-abortion activist charge involves using the HEK-293 cell line in laboratory tests. HEK-293 is a cell line developed in Holland in the early 1970s through the fusion a kidney cell from an aborted fetus and a virus that immortalized the cells, or allowed them to keep replicating in a laboratory. “Senomyx does not provide ingredients to PepsiCo, nor do they manufacture PepsiCo products. Our work with Senomyx is focused on beverage sweetener research to help us reduce sugar in future global products,” according to Pepsi.

But solving a problem is not the real goal of proposing a ban.

Shortey’s bill sits squarely in a tradition of vilification that’s existed longer than English, mass media, or even Christianity. It’s the timeless Blood Libel, the blood drinking straw man who’s been given different titles over the millennia. Not only do abortionists kill babies, the bill implies, they want us all to commit the most culturally repulsive of all offenses—cannibalism.

The first recorded Blood Libel is from 31 AD. It’s told by two Jewish historians, who lived in the first century in then-Roman Alexandria, Egypt: Philo, in his account of Flaccus the Lieutenant-Governor of Egypt; and Flavius Josephus, in his work, “Against Apion.”

Here’s what these sources tell us: Apion was a skilled hyperbolist and Lieutenant-Governor Flaccus was a desperate politician who tried to avert Caligula’s wrath.

Around 30 AD, Apion, a Graeco-Egyptian grammarian and writer, had spent a great deal of time spreading nasty snipes about the Jewish citizens of Alexandria. His motives for this pastime have been lost to history, but Apion claimed Jews worshiped weird gods and refused to have images of the emperor in their temples. Oh, and to make this all worse, he whispered to many a curious audience, that the Jews had been led out of Egypt because they were lepers.

Apion created a narrative. He wrote that it was a part of Jewish law to kidnap a Greek once a year and fatten him up and taste his entrails. Jews were cannibals.

Lieutenant-Governor Flaccus used the suspicions about the Jews as a wedge to curry favor with the new emperor. Since the Jews of Alexandria were against Caligula, Flaccus appointed himself as the guy to remedy the problem.

Thousands of Alexandrian Jews—men, women and children—were tortured and killed as a direct result of Apion’s defamations, a pioneering set of slanders that have proved to have real staying power.

Propaganda depends on things sounding vaguely familiar, lending a veneer of credibility to false claims. This is also why repetition is a popular tactic to sway public opinion—the creation of familiarity, which is then mistaken for truth. The Jews are not the only group to have suffered from slander campaigns; they also have been waged against alleged witches, gypsies and many other outsiders, often with equally dire consequences.

In the 19th century, Catholics were a popular target of sharp and false tongues in the U.S. The most widely read book of that century here was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Also widely read was a memoir by a woman calling herself Maria Monk titled, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed, published in 1836. The book claimed to be the first-hand account of a former nun in a Quebec convent, and to provide an insider’s view of Catholics. One of her claims was that there were libraries packed full of books and not one bible. Another allegation: Not only were the priests having sex with the nuns, the unsuspecting narrator had stumbled upon a room where the convent kept baby corpses. Yes, the Catholics, who already ceremonially drink the blood of their Savior, also were killers of babies. Piles of them. Because that way the illegitimate but baptized infants would ascend to heaven more rapidly—without any further sinning.

The book was a sensation—perhaps the most widely read book in America before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, according to Richard J. Hofstadter’s seminal 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” And its tale was, of course, false. Even basic facts about the convent where “Monk” claimed to live were not true. The book was totally debunked—but not before it had burrowed into the popular imagination. Most of the century’s immigrants, the 19th century underclass, were from Catholic countries, and any justification for scorning them was welcomed. The Nativist movement and the Know-Nothings thrived on anti-Catholic sentiment. And remember, the Klu Klux Klan was not just terrorizing black people in the south—they were also terrorizing Catholics.

An example closer to our own time was the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. That decade saw widespread allegations of very specific type of Satanic cult conspiracy which, in retrospect, had all the elements of a classic Blood Libel. On a 1988 ABC special, the channel’s then-resident schlock hawk, Geraldo Rivera, did his utmost to enlighten the general public about something evangelicals had held true for years. “Estimates are that there are over one million Satanists in this country,” Rivera declared in prime time. “The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secretive network. From small towns to large cities, they have attracted police and FBI attention to their Satanic ritual child abuse, child pornography and grisly Satanic murders. The odds are that this is happening in your town!”

The Satanic Panic was a whiplash from the cultural revolution of the 1970s, a cultural spasm that oddly united therapists and evangelicals. The Christian community had some self-proclaimed former Satanic Priests in their ranks dishing about all the children’s blood they used to drink and the therapists had some new and “innovative” (read: questionable) ways to “recover memories” of being the victims of the Satanic conspiracy. Both schools took over a decade or two to completely discredit.

A 1989 study by the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion published in the book Satanism in America: How the Devil Got Much More than his Due by Shawn Carlson, Gerald LaRue and others reported there were 33 organizations and 90 individuals who were actively promoting the Satanism scare. This was a conspiracy all right—just not the one depicted on talk shows with depressed-looking teenagers. Nevertheless, these Satan experts were not only on news programs and at conventions—they were teaching law enforcement seminars on how to spot and investigate Satanic crimes.

The Satanic Panic was barely mentioned in the recent release of the West Memphis Three, the three now thirty-somethings who have spent nearly 20 years in prison for little more than wearing black clothes in a small southern town in 1993. Three 8-year-old boys were murdered in May of that year. And because Jessie Misskelley, 17, Jason Baldwin, 16, and Damien Echols, 18, fit the profile of what was thought at the time to be a Satanist (as in someone who killed children for sport and listened to heavy metal), they were railroaded, found guilty and sentenced to life. Echols was sentenced to death. It took two decades and dozens of celebrities to get them out of jail. Blood libels are far reaching.

The point of rehearsing these historical episodes is this: When a junior senator from the same state that banned Sharia Law proposes to ban feeding Oklahomans aborted baby fetuses, it’s not just some wacky guy in a square state being eccentric.

There is a long and storied global history of demonizing groups of people with whom you disagree by tarring them with the charge of cannibalism—tapping into one of humanity’s deepest and most firmly held taboos. The consequences of such charges have often been deadly. Abortion service providers are already routinely harassed, threatened, shot at and even bombed. Casting them now as handmaidens to cannibalism is just the next extreme step in turning the decades-long effort to make them into pariahs.

This piece originally ran in Skeptic Magazine.

Buddy Roemer for President

Update, 5/31/12: Today, Buddy Roemer announced the suspension of his presidential campaign, noting that “the lack of ballot access in all 50 states makes the quest impossible for now.” He vowed to keep fighting “the enemies of reform” with a nonpartisan effort to “re-energize our republic.”

On an unusually balmy March evening in Washington DC, a crowd of polished Beltway types—consultants, advocates, lobbyists, and the usual politicos—listen attentively to former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer at a salon on money in politics at a historic row house. Roemer, (in the South it’s pronounced “roma”) dives right into his speech, his distinct Shreveport accent and Methodist preacher rhythm echo in the room. “Washington isn’t broken”—brief, effective pause—”it’s bought!” The slight, white-haired 68-year-old drops phrases like “Goldman-friggin’-Sachs” with fire-and-brimstone inflections. The crowd listens politely. “It’s not the White House I want,” Roemer roars in his final crescendo. “I want a free America!”

You could be forgiven for having missed it, but Roemer has been running for president. A Harvard-educated four-term congressman, one-term governor, and successful banker, he campaigned for more than a year. In a field light on Southern Republicans (Newt Gingrich was born in Pennsylvania and Rick Perry, well…), he once might have looked like a contender. But not in the eyes of Republican tastemakers. Roemer was not invited to a single one of the 20 primary debates, a fact he repeats with unmitigated animosity. Which is why, after 20-plus years as a Republican convert (he started his career as a Democrat), he quit the party in February.

His third-party run was based on a signature issue: not accepting any campaign contributions exceeding $100. In a political system awash in money, it’s a compelling concept, but then again, why $100? Why not $500? Why not the federally mandated maximum of $2,500 per donor, still peanuts compared to the million-dollar checks being written by superwealthy super-PAC donors? When you press him on this, Roemer defaults to folksy. “I hope people see past my farm”—a sly reference to his family’s 2,000-acre plantation—“into my heart and see what the future ought to be—a president who’s free to lead.”

It’s almost as if Roemer was proving that you can’t make headway running for president with a $100 contribution limit by…not making headway running for president with a $100 contribution limit. He raised more than $367,000 in small donations; in his last financial disclosures his campaign had $114,495 in the bank, and he told me he “lent” it $20,000 of his own money. According to Federal Election Commission data, he also gave his campaign another $25,100.

Roemer had hoped to be on the 2012 presidential ballot in all 50 states. Getting there has been anything but easy. He was 4,000 votes shy of securing the nomination of Americans Elect (which is now in disarray after its failed attempt to recruit a third-party candidate). Roemer was also seeking the Reform Party nomination.

Roemer says he’s always fought the corrupting influence of money. As a congressman in the 1980s, Roemer claims, he never took PAC money. “Tip O’Neill used to laugh at me, ‘You can’t win, Buddy.’ I won every time.” Actually, according to FEC records, he took $8,600 from 19 PACs in 1980 and $49,200 from 112 PACs in 1982. He recently tweeted that he never took an earmark, yet he was happy to tout federal funds for an airport and parking garage in Shreveport in the early ’80s.

“Often wrong, but never in doubt,” is how Louisiana blogger and pundit C.B. Forgotston describes Roemer (quoting former Speaker of the House O’Neill’s characterization of Roemer). Louisianans practice the art of the euphemism—”That’s just Buddy being Buddy,” you’ll hear—but there’s a general consensus: Buddy is smart. Very smart. And Buddy is stubborn. Very stubborn. He’s brilliant and then without reasoning, immovably obstinate. It’s not just the donation cap. When he ran for governor he didn’t allow his campaign to use lawn signs. Why? Well, that’s just Buddy being Buddy.

Roemer won his first election for Congress as a Democrat in 1980, the same era when the South was turning solidly Republican. But Roemer’s tenure took an unpredictable turn when, in the middle of his first term, his father, Charles, was convicted in a federal sting known as BriLab, as in bribery plus labor.

Charles Roemer had served as commissioner of administration for Governor Edwin Edwards (who once said of bribes, “It was illegal for them to give, but not for me to receive”). Charles Roemer had arguably the most powerful position in the state, holding responsibility for millions of dollars in contracts. Charles, then in his 60s, ended up going to prison for 17 months, though his conviction was later overturned.

Buddy the dragon slayer: Roemer as governor of Louisiana Louisiana Secretary of StateEven as he ran a campaign built entirely around the issue of political corruption, Roemer didn’t mention his father’s legal troubles on the stump. But when I asked him directly, he didn’t flinch. “He served with the Master of Corruption as his right hand,” says Roemer, referring to Edwards. “Dad was the clean animal in the room, but corruption is a powerful thing. It imprinted on my soul—if corruption can get a guy like Dad…everybody is vulnerable.”

For his next three terms Roemer ran for Congress unopposed while Edwards was indicted for mail fraud, obstruction of justice, and bribery. (Full disclosure: I am Edwards’ second cousin, through marriage.) In 1987, Roemer entered a crowded gubernatorial field as a relatively obscure Congressman. He dubbed his campaign the Roemer Revolution, his devotees Roemeristas. The press dug it. He was asked in a debate if he’d endorse then-incumbent Edwards in a general election. “No, we’ve got to slay the dragon,” he said. “I would endorse anyone but Edwards.” Roemer went from last place to first in the polls in a matter of weeks. Every major newspaper endorsed the congressman from Caddo Parish. “Slay the dragon!” became his battle cry.

This experience of being catapulted into office has stuck with Roemer. It’s why he was optimistic about getting to a 15 percent showing in the polls, so he’d get an invitation to the debates in the fall. (He hit three percent in New Hampshire and South Carolina in January. His website cites a poll that shows him at seven percent nationally.) “The race is wide open,” he tells me. Naive? Yes, but stranger things have happened and they’ve happened to Buddy Roemer. Back in ‘87, due to Louisiana’s “jungle primary” process, in which the top two vote getters advance to the general election regardless of their party, both Roemer and Edwards ended up competing for the governorship as Democrats. Edwards ceded, and Roemer in effect won the highest office in the state with just 33 percent of the vote.

Roemer’s governorship was by all accounts (even his own) a storied catastrophe in a state with a high tolerance for disasters. His agenda was dead on arrival. He failed to reach out to his “coalition of reformers” after he was elected. He became the first governor in modern Louisiana history to have his own party override his veto. His wife divorced him. He sat alone in the governor’s mansion night after night, watching old movies. And then he switched parties and became a Republican.

When I asked him why, he said, “Of the 144 members of the legislature, 138 were Democrats. Would you call that a one-party state?” (Actually, 120 were Democrats.) Only Buddy Roemer would explain a party switch by saying he wished to be in the minority. Former governor Edwards, who released from prison in January 2011, put it to me like this: “Roemer is an unbelievable political opportunist who doesn’t pick good opportunities.”

Three years into Roemer’s term, Edwards announced he was running to win the governor’s mansion back. In the jungle primary, Roemer came in third, behind white supremacist David Duke. Governor Roemer left the state with a billion-dollar deficit. LaPolitics.com columnist John Maginnis reported that Edwards said to him during the race, “The best thing that can happen to me is to get elected and die the next day.”

Does Roemer feel a kinship with earlier third-party candidates—Ross Perot, say, or Ralph Nader? “A little bit,” he says, then quickly dismisses the comparison. “This is the Internet time—they didn’t have the Internet.” But third-party candidates tend to share certain qualities, chief among them a faith in the righteousness of their own beliefs, even when very few people agree with them. This appeals only to the very stubborn or the very rich. By Perot standards, Roemer—now the president of the Louisiana-based commercial bank Business First—is not very rich. But just like his predecessors, his mantra is simple: “My issue is change, but different than anybody else.”

Roemer had a pivotal moment in the months after Hurricane Katrina, one that hints that his run is less vanity project and more sincere rabble-rousing. While bodies were still floating down the street, the Wall Street Journal reported, a meeting of white business owners and old-line families plotting to keep New Orleans’ poor, black residents from returning. They saw the tragedy as an opportunity to remake the city.

Roemer at a tea party rally in Manchester, New Hampshire thebudman623/Flickr

Roemer came out against this idea. “I’ve heard conversations [among] those who would leave the poor out,” he told the AP. But, he added, “New Orleans goodness and decency” would win out. He bucked his party and his class and stood up for the disenfranchised. Roemer watchers think this was the seed of his current incarnation as an anticorporate populist.

If you ask Roemer now where he stands on the issues it’s like talking to a Republican from a pre-Fox News time capsule. Abortion? He’s pro-life, but the mother’s life comes first. Gay rights? Up to the states. China? Needs trade reform. Unions? Taft-Hartley is a good law (which is a Louisiana way of saying he’s not pro-labor.)

But his keystone issue remains money in politics. And it’s perhaps ironic, perhaps logical, that he appealed mostly to Democrats. There were no invitations to appear on Hannity, but Roemer has been on Rachel Maddow’s show more than once. NPR interviewed him. He came out in support of Occupy Wall Street. Some 45 percent of his donations, he told me, were from self-declared Democrats, 35 percent are from Republicans, and 20 percent are from independents.

He had the standard laundry list of what he’d do as president: Create a team across party lines to rebuild America, et cetera. But his goals soon started to sound more personal, like the things he admittedly didn’t do as governor: “Listen first. I will give credit to others.” It’s almost as if he’s seeking atonement. Usually when candidates talk of reform, they don’t mean themselves. Roemer, it seems, did.

“I’ll make different mistakes as president,” he pledges. And I’ll bet you $100 he’d be right.

Original piece is here.

Livestreamers are armed with a smart phone, an app and an audience of people at home watching every frame.

The first Occupy camp I went to was in Los Angeles at City Hall. On the corner there were communists standing next to Ron Paul supporters next to vegan activists next to those LaRouche people (who always seem to show up) — hanging out with some union guys all carrying signs saying they were the 99 percent. Yes, it sounds like the set-up to a political joke. I asked my guide, Cheryl Aichele (they had guided tours for the first couple of weeks at Occupy LA), to explain how this was possible. She said, “We’re not going to fight over what’s not the problem.”

But that was then. Now as Occupy has evolved, there seems to be lots of fighting over what’s not the problem. “It’s frustrating,” says DC occupier Rob Wohl. “We’re having the wrong discussion. Everyone wants to talk about whether or not to fight cops.”

Yes, it’s violence vs. nonviolence. White Bloc vs. Black Bloc. Diversity of tactics vs. “Fascisfists.”

And there’s no group of occupiers where this debate isn’t more pronounced than the “livestreamers.”

You can sum up livestreamers as those who came to protest and stayed to tell the story. They’re armed with a smart phone, an app and an audience of people at home watching every frame.

Occupy Wall Street’s Tim Pool left his home in Chicago to be at Zuccotti Park. He’s now become an innovator in livestreaming and has become a mini-celebrity within Occupy. He tells AlterNet, “I didn’t know I was a journalist.” Occupy Oakland’s Spencer Mills, or OakfoSho, has an MBA in international business and was under-employed at a gym before he became involved with Occupy Oakland. Now he calls himself an independent journalist. “I have an opinion, I travel around and I do bring people news,” he says.

Livestreamer Freedom LA (not her real name) says that she did “some journalism” before pitching a tent at City Hall and joining the Occupy media team. She calls what she does “new media.”

DC’s avid streamer is Andrew Metcalf, who was an intern for Congressman Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the financial meltdown. Metcalf, a journalism major, was interested in seeing the causes of the crisis put to justice. He thought he could be more useful as a journalist after a few days at McPherson Square.

Is livestreaming new? No. Minnesota-based UpTake has been livestreaming since 2007. Senator Al Franken credits them by name for his seat since they livestreamed every second of his recount against incumbent Norm Coleman in the spring of 2009.

I asked their founder and director Jason Barnett, who’s trained hundreds of “citizen journalists” (they call themselves UpTakers), if it’s unusual for protesters to morph into journalists because they downloaded a smart phone app. He explains, “It’s the natural byproduct of livestreaming. You’re forced into the role of the person handling the truth.”

There are no edits. There’s only what’s happening at that moment and maybe some commentary or explaining, says Barnett. If sunlight is a disinfectant, livestreaming is a laser.

“People are tired of being lied to by the media,” says Tim Pool, who adds, “Transparency is paramount.”

But here’s the rub: As Occupy tries to find itself, transparency and more specifically livestreaming has become a double-edged sword. Yes, all occupiers love when the police are being filmed. But not so much when they are caught on livestream doing illegal acts.

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.

So as Occupy shifts from totally nonviolent, you can almost look to the livestreamers as the canaries in the coalmine.

Freedom LA had her camera stolen at the #J28 Occupy Oakland dust-up where over 400 protesters were arrested. It was the same night city hall was broken into and vandalized. Spencer Mills has been called a snitch more than once. “A dry snitch,” he specifies, meaning not an intentional one but a snitch nonetheless.

The documentary, While We Watch, directed by Kevin Breslin about the media revolution at Occupy Wall Street, portrays a showdown with masked “anarchists” and Tim Pool. Caught in the act of letting the air out of the tires on police vehicles, they try to take away Pool’s camera and threaten him. He defiantly keeps on filming. “Everyone deserves the truth,” he says.

Later, Pool said to me privately he regretted in the heat of the moment calling them “anarchists.” “They weren’t anarchist, they were just vandals.”

Structurally, Occupy doesn’t have a way to deal with these “autonomous actors.” Yes, they agreed to nonviolence by group consensus and that can include property damage. But they also don’t have any leaders and decided to be in absolute solidarity with their comrades. So when Occupy Oakland steals an American flag and burns it or throws a bottle of urine at a media van, it’s not denounced. Instead there are solidarity marches against police brutality.

It’s a design flaw.

Then there are opinion writers like Chris Hedges, who proclaim Black Bloc to be a cancer in Occupy after celebrating that same cancer when it was in Greece in 2010.

It’s complicated further by arguments over nuances in definitions. Property damage, according to some, doesn’t hurt anyone so it’s therefore not violent. Attacking the police after they attack you is just self-defense, they say. Noting this is a PR war and not an armed conflict, OakfoSho tweeted, “The public doesn’t care about the semantics of what violence is or isn’t.” Indeed, a riot looks like a riot and Americans don’t like riots.

Occupy DC’s Rob Wohl says, “Well, tactics should be determined by your goal.” Which really does sum up the problem: It’s one thing to put the cart before the horse, another to put both before a destination.

The livestreamers now feel they’re holding the torch for truth but also nonviolence as a way to build a broad coalition movement. This means they get attacked online and threatened as part of their vocation. You know, just like real journalists.

The UpTake’s Barnett says it best: “It’s always the fault of the messenger.”

The original piece is here.

The Occupy Movement, “the 99 percent,” has, ironically, been hijacked by a small minority within its ranks. I speak of a small percentage of Occupiers who are okay with property destruction. As we saw in Oakland over the weekend: They’re okay with breaking windows, trashing city buildings and throwing bottles at the police. In short: They are not nonviolent. They are willing to commit petty criminal acts masked as a political statement.

These are Black Bloc tactics and they’re historically ineffective at spurring change. The now Gingrich-vilified Saul Alinsky in 1970 said the Weather Underground (the terrorist wing of the anti-war movement) should be on the Establishment’s payroll. “Because they are strengthening the Establishment,” said the “professional radical” Alinsky. Nothing kneecapped the call for the war to end quicker than buildings being bombed in solidarity with pacifist sentiments.

Here’s the key point: Occupy is not an armed conflict – it’s a PR war. Nonviolent struggle is a PR war. Gandhi had embedded journalists on his Salt March. He wasn’t a saint. That was a consciously cultivated media image. He used the press and its power to gain sympathy for his cause. What he didn’t do is say he was nonviolent “unless the cops are d*cks,” a sentiment voiced at Occupy. Nonviolent struggle has nothing to do with how the cops react. In actual nonviolent movements they welcome police overreaction because it helps the cause they’re fighting for.

At some General Assemblies this issue is referred to as “diversity of tactics.” It means basically if you’re not okay with property damage, but if someone else is, you’re not going to stand in the way. To a liberal ear it sounds like affirmative action or tolerance. It sounds like diversity of opinion – it’s not. It’s 3,000 people peacefully marching and two *ssholes breaking windows; which becomes 3,000 people breaking some windows in news reports.

Violent tactics taint everyone involved evenly – consenting or not.

Property destruction is not only a bad PR move (it costs taxpayers and small business owners money) it’s not constitutionally protected Free Speech. It’s also not what democracy looks like. The First Amendment specifically states the right to peaceably assemble to redress grievances.

Moreover the destruction of property is exactly what Occupy is protesting against; it’s what the banks took from us. Occupy has pointed out the criminality of the banks and the seeming collusion with government to take wealth and property away from working people and give it to the wealthy. So protest property crimes, by committing crimes against property? It’s nonsensical.

Destroying property destroys moral authority. You can’t rail against Bankaneers while trashing a City Hall. You can but you lose. Then the cops look justified in their show of force. Being quiet is seen as consent and being in solidarity with Oakland is standing with their well-documented embrace of “diversity of tactics.”

Occupy should denounce violence and property damage. There should be a statement that Oakland doesn’t speak for the movement as a whole. Holding solidarity marches against Oakland police brutality is exactly what that sounds like. It sends the message that Occupy is happy to cost the Oakland taxpayers millions in damages. If Occupy is to succeed it has to purge the extreme (read: ineffective waste) elements now commandeering the movement.

Some have emailed me and asked if the people who autonomously did these acts of vandalism and violence were “undercovers” or extreme anarchists. My response has been their goal is the same and their tactics are the same, so why does it matter? If they’re undercovers trying to undermine the movement then disavow them. If they’re anarchists who believe they are a part of Occupy, disavow them. The distinction means little if the endgame and the solution are the same.

It’s not true that no one speaks for Occupy. Those using violence are speaking far louder than the “people’s mic.” They need to be purged, or the the entire movement will be marginalized.

The plan for the four month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street was the first national direct action by the movement thus far, a protest called Occupy Congress or #J17. Activists from all over the nation were to convene on the West Lawn of the Capitol for a National General Assembly (GA), followed by some teach-ins, a visit to the Rayburn House Office Building (where congressmen work) and a march to the White House. The plan was to speak directly to their members of Congress about the issues that brought them to D.C.

Not exactly radical. And far from revolutionary.

And that’s really the thing with Occupy: Yes there have been nearly 6,000 arrests in the last four months — a much higher concentration that for other movements in recent American history, such as the anti-nuclear power protests that resulted in around 2,000 arrested over a two year period in the mid-1980s. And yes, some demonstrators wear handkerchiefs over their faces, like early celluloid bank robbers (or anarchists). And yes, they chant, “mic check” and yell, getting people like Karl Rove to say things like: “Who gave you the right to Occupy America? Nobody!” But what they want at this point seems a piece with what any number of goo-goo D.C. worthies work for each day: a more representative democratic government.

“It’s not a coincidence that Congress’ approval rating is near 1 percent,” read OccupyDC’s Twitter feed. Indeed.

The Occupy movement argues — and has tons of evidence to back it up — that the U.S. government is overly concerned with the needs and desires of the wealthy and corporations and has less regard for, well, the little people.

Around 2,000 Occupiers from all over the country showed up on a soggy Capitol Lawn on Tuesday morning. Depending on who you asked, this was either way bigger than they expected or utterly disappointing. At one point last year, a call went out for an ambitious encampment of 1 million tents to be staked down on the National Mall, but that plan appeared to have been largely abandoned by Tuesday. For a movement inspired by the stagnant economy, getting that many activists on buses was always going to be a challenge, for simple monetary reasons, leading to some push-back against the idea of a mass national event at all. SEIU organized an Occupy Congress type of event last month called Take Back the Capitol. That action, according to attendees, had more people, more people of color and less energy. They had buses and numbers; just not the enthusiasm. One reason is that it was, well, organized, and it’s hard to accuse Occupy of being…well organized.

After an afternoon of large GAs on the lawn of the Capitol building, the Occupiers made their way to the doors of the Rayburn building. They briefly took the exterior balcony, hanging signs on a railing only to be quickly chased away by Capitol police. They chanted and cheered and hollered…then all stood in line patiently to get through building security. Once inside the building, the previously boisterous group split apart, becoming suddenly deferential inside congressional offices. Raucous on the outside; concerned average citizen on the inside. One California Occupier I followed walked into his congresswoman’s office and asked quietly, “We’re doing this correctly right? Asking these people to represent us?” He then went on to tell the staffers that his parents cannot retire and will have to work until they die.

I would describe most left-leaning activists as having the angst of artists, the interests of policy wonks and the emotional state of your average 7th grader. Which means all social movements at moments feel chaotic, like they’re about to detonate or implode. The Internet only makes this worse. There’s a near constant trickle of fear, rumor and hype among the protesters. They worry about everything and have control over none of it. For Occupy Congress, the big concern was that “autonomous anarchists” would show up and cause property damage. They’d break windows or do something that would stain the entire movement as vandals…or worse.

This did not happen last night. No windows were broken. There were six arrests. The “Black Bloc” threat didn’t show up.

And Occupy Congress did manage to pull off a massive protest on the steps of the Supreme Court. This was not planned and had it been, it likely wouldn’t have happened. It’s illegal to demonstrate on the steps of the highest court in the nation. In October, Cornel West, on the day of the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, held a sign reading, “Poverty is the worst form of violence” and was swiftly arrested in “solidarity with the Occupy Movement.” Tuesday, with only a handful of Capitol Police around over a thousand Occupiers rushed the steps of the Supreme Court. There was no way for the police to arrest that many people in a massive act of civil disobedience. The protesters then stood on the steps, cheering and chanting for a few moments, before just as swiftly leaving for the White House.

Had they known what they pulled off by accident was so unusual in the post-9/11 world, they might have stayed longer on the steps of the building where Citizens United was decided, facing arrest and forcing a point about the Court. Instead, the “leaderless” movement traipsed down Pennsylvania Avenue to the current home of President Obama.

It’s an apt metaphor for Occupy: Their tactical victories are, as they admit not “overly planned.” They don’t have paid linguists who study framing with focus groups to target key demographics. They are just convinced they’re right about the extreme wealth inequality (the worst in the industrialized world) in America and don’t know what else to do about it.

So, the nation’s problems have them occupied at this point … just not overly organized.

Original piece is here.

Nov 21 2011, 4:22 PM ET

Women may be the 51%, but the Occupy camps and General Assemblies look as gender-imbalanced as Congress

“I’m called ‘that white bitch who gets everything she wants’ at the GA’s,” says Elise Whitaker, 21, adopting a bit of a defiant posture. She’s been at Occupy LA since the second week of the encampment. A now former-assistant director for indie films, Whitaker is good looking in a vaguely familiar, probably-an-actor kind of way. She looks like just the type who moves to Los Angeles every day to “follow their dreams,” but she’s sleeping in a tent at City Hall. She tells me she has figured out what she wants to do with her life: activism. This is it for her. She loves this stuff.

It’s early November and helicopters are hovering over our heads as the Los Angeles Police Department arrests a guy who is thought to have attempted to light a woman’s hair on fire at the camp. He was kicked out and has been causing problems ever since. Nearly 20 police officers are gathered at the corner of the park. This interrupts my conversation with Whitaker and delays her next interview with a YouTube channel called Inside Out News.

During the very first week of the Occupation in LA I noticed that the gender breakdown in its General Assembly (GA) and various committee meetings was roughly the same as the within the U.S. Congress. In other words, about one-fifth of those who were participating in the (small d) democratic part of this Occupy encampment were women. It was the same with the people who slept in the camp.

This is pretty consistent throughout the movement in general.

Thus far I’ve visited eight Occupations in the U.S. and Canada, four on the West coast and four on the East: Toronto, New York City, Baltimore, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley and Oakland.

The only GA that had anywhere near gender parity was the largest one there’s been yet — the GA on the day of the general strike at U.C. Berkeley. The largest GAs will only turn out 500 people max; Zuccotti Park is a tiny granite slab in lower Manhattan and can’t fit many more than that. But the Mario Savio Steps at Sproul Hall at Berkeley held more than 4,000 students and activists — and half of them appeared to be female. (Go Bears!)

This is not an expose of the Occupy movement’s outlook toward women or to suggest attitudes within it are radically different from those found elsewhere. I was also screamed at and called “bitch” at Occupy LA, but frankly I’m called worse in my fan mail on a daily basis. Yet as this movement has been in the media at a near constant rate for now two months, the story telling about it has not evolved. There’s either the agenda “journalism” whose practitioners show up to paint the protesters as violent or stupid or its equally useless counterpart, a virtual livestream of reporting on every detail, no matter how trivial. Everything else is crime reporting: How many arrests? Who’s pepper sprayed? Who’s died? No wonder we still hear the question: “What do they want?”

This movement is complex — how the members define themselves, how important the tents are (or are not) and what they’re doing is still being worked out in marathon meetings and through endless committee votes. This process of identity-formation is made only more complicated by police raids, and by the tear gas and pepper spray that have greeted protest in some cities. Occupiers all viscerally sense the problem: extreme economic inequality. They all cite a lack of fairness — a lack of opportunity. They also agree that the status quo is failing.

But when it comes to women, Occupy is really a microcosm of the greater culture at large. This should give comfort to those who find Occupy’s dynamics puzzling — and greatly embarrass those in the movement who see themselves as revolutionaries. America’s gender conflict fault-lines are making a familiar reappearance inside Occupy, with results both predictable and novel.

I’m not the only one to notice the Occupy gender gap. This issue is talked about at GAs, I’m told, a lot. Nearly every night at Occupy LA, the question comes up: “What can we do to get more women out here?”

Of course there are women out there — and they are in the line of fire. Brandy Sippel, three-months pregnant, was clipped by a car during a protest with Occupy D.C. The driver sent three others to the hospital that night and was released by police. At a press conference the next day, the Metropolitan Police Department implied she and the other victims were “drunk diving” on cars. Another pregnant woman was pepper sprayed by police at Occupy Seattle. The police said pepper spray wasn’t harmful or they wouldn’t be using it. Susie Cagle, a journalist covering Occupy Oakland, says that when she was arrested during a raid by police, there were a higher percentage of women arrested on the roster than who were normally at the camp.

For an absurd contrast to these facts, last week a year-old Maybelline ad campaign for “Baby Lips” lip gloss resurfaced online. In a display of tone-deafness as to what it would take to make women protest, it shows models taking to the streets demanding softer lips, confronting cops with kisses and parading around with a banner reading “no more basic lip balm!” over the Brooklyn Bridge. Liberal bloggers immediately dubbed it L’Oreal’s attempt to co-opt Occupy, until the upload date on YouTube was noted. To me it was more like an ironic half-right foreshadowing; the majority of the Occupy protesters are not the target market for lip gloss.

There have been a couple of alleged rapes reported in encampments. One was in Occupy Baltimore during the first week of their encampment. Police said the victim’s claim lacked credibility and dismissed it. Another was at Occupy Philadelphia and is still being investigated by police. One protester was arrested in New York for rape. There’s this volatile mix of those waiting to pounce on anything to discredit Occupy and an open public space where female protesters are sleeping that absolutely anyone can wander into. There have been no reports of men being raped at Occupations.

Sadly, many responses have been much like the ones in the wake of correspondent Lara Logan’s sexual assault in Tahrir Square while covering their revolution: Yes, it’s tragic and awful, but you know you’re vulnerable so why are you out there?

Why are they out there? Why sleep in tents and risk being confronted by police only to be slighted by fellow revolutionaries at the same time? It’s simple: these women believe the country is broken and they see the Occupy movement as a the solution.

What is Occupy’s solution to its gender disparity problem? Occupy LA has a code of conduct and a zero tolerance policy for any violence or assault. Of course, it also lacks the ability to keep people out of the public space the camp is in. Occupy D.C., a more stable camp because it has not been raided, is able to work out intricate documents like a Declaration of Occupation (leaked last week), has set up a women’s tent. At first the idea was resisted because the men felt that inequality meant special treatment for one gender and equality meant equal treatment. Then the group consensus came around. Women needed a safe place. Some women have said its purpose is for “group menstruation.” (Shades of The Red Tent.) “There’s a legitimate reason and then there are fucking hippies,” said one male Occupier who’s proud of the new development. But it’s really an effort by the women there to make women feel more at ease at McPherson Square. Men there also have agreed to self-police other men and remind them sexist language makes women uncomfortable. Will that bring the numbers of female Occupiers up? Like everything else with Occupy, it’s all too soon to tell.

Back in LA, Whitaker tells me about a movie she worked on, Zombie Apocalypse: Redemption. She also played several background roles in it. “It’s good, have you seen it?” I tell her I regret having missed it. After our interview, I see her on Countdown with Keith Olbermann talking about an attempt to occupy Bank of America Plaza in downtown LA, which is owned by Brookfield Office Properties, the owners of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. It brought to mind something she said to me before I left. Her moniker “that white bitch who gets everything she wants” struck me as demeaning and belittling — yet she sees as a challenge and almost a compliment.

She smiled coyly and informed me, “You know they’re right … I do get everything I want.”

The original piece is The Atlantic is here.

Nov 16 2011, 2:09 PM ET

After their tents were pulled by the university, UC Berkeley students turn the school’s celebration of a ’60s icon into massive Occupy meeting

Mario Savio was a UC Berkeley student in the ’60s and a key member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He’s become an activist icon; Mario Savio Youth Activist awards are given out by his memorial fund. By the ’90s, the steps of Sproul Hall on the UC Berkeley campus where he gave his now famous “put your bodies upon the gears” speech were renamed the Mario Savio Steps. It was there last Wednesday that police raided an hours-old Occupy Cal protest and pounded student activists with batons. Yes, the chancellor of the university that celebrates Savio in its brochures, Robert J. Birgeneau, waited mere minutes before setting in motion a response that saw students beaten on the very steps bearing Savio’s name … just for setting up tents.

As the massive Occupy crackdown unfolded nationally, students facing yet another tuition hike — in a UC system that has seen its tuition triple in 10 years — took note and took to organizing.

In less than a week the campus had a general strike. Tuesday most classes were cancelled. And it just so happened to be the day the annual event Mario Savio memorial at Sproul Hall was going to take place. Which in turn led to the largest General Assembly (GA) in the history of the Occupy movement.

An amazing coincidence. One of those historical ironies that should make the school administration cringe indefinitely.

Some 4,000 (if you were to be really conservative) participated in a massive direct democracy meeting, now commonly referred to as the GA. The sea of students was tutored in the now identifiable consensus hand signs used by the movement. The facilitators laid out the ground rules: They were going to vote on whether or not to bring back the tents and set up an Occupation on campus. Yes, it was against the rules. Would they all (80 percent anyway) agree this was the right course of action? The GA attendees broke up into groups of 20 to discuss. That’s right: 4,000 people broke up into groups of 20 with at least three helicopters hovering just above to discuss the merits of the action. And then the facilitators clarified: just because you vote “yes” doesn’t mean you’re obligated to sleep there.

This came the day of Zuccotti Park being cleared by NYPD at the request of Mayor Micheal Bloomberg. In Oakland, embattled Mayor Jean Quan let it slip that there was a coordinated effort with 18 cities to clear Occupy movements in their cities. Occupy Oakland was raided for a second time this week. But police arresting and in some cases brutalizing Occupiers hasn’t made them go away. It’s made others more interested in the movement and made their struggle more sympathetic. Occupy Oakland made a march into UC Berkeley to support Occupy Cal. “I saw a revolt sign,” one protester remarked. “And I said ‘Oh shit, Occupy Oakland is here.’”

Oakland as a city and as an Occupation have their own very unique, very Oakland problems: One is their city government, two is their police and three is with the distrust of one and two. Oakland was the only city in America to have had a solidarity riot for Rodney King in Los Angeles. It’s a tough town. Oakland fell during the crack epidemic three decades ago and has never been able to fully pick itself back up. Of all the cities in America with an Occupation, the message of economic justice for the 99 percent should have been welcomed there. It wasn’t. At the end of October, the mayor went on vacation while over a dozen different police agencies accompanied the Oakland Police Department and moved in on the camp in front of the mayor’s office at city hall. The melee ended with multiple protestors injured, including a former Marine, Scott Olsen, whose skull was fractured after he was hit with a tear gas canister. Oakland has been a focus of the Occupy Movement ever since. It’s members came to Cal in a show of solidarity with the students.

In the largest GA history has ever seen (larger by at least 3,500 than similar meetings in New York) the group consensus was that they would, in fact, bring tents and set up an occupation on the Mario Savio Steps.

Berkeley professor Robert Reich, who was already slated to speak at the memorial tribute, offered the massive crowd these words: “Moral outrage is the beginning. The days of apathy are over, folks. And once it has begun it cannot be stopped and it will not be stopped.”

After he left the microphone, half a dozen tents slowly paraded through the crowd and up the Mario Savio steps to rest at the top. The PA system played the first song of a promised dance party. The first tune? Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

Of course.

The original piece is here.

We’re in a coffee shop near McPherson Square, the location of Occupy DC, and Michael Patterson, 21, and I are having hot cocoa on a cold November night. He’s wearing an Iraq Veterans Against the War sweatshirt and baggy shorts. It’s freezing outside. “I’m from Alaska,” he offers as an explanation. He’s been sleeping in a tent in D.C. for over a month now. I’ve traveled to five Occupations in two countries. In every demonstration (including the one in Canada) I’ve found a vet to talk to:

In Zuccotti Park, Army Specialist Jerry Bordeleau, 24, was sitting next to a table of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) literature. On his sweater were two buttons: an Iraq Campaign metal and one from the IWW. He served two tours in Iraq and now says he’s unemployed and can’t find work for over $10 an hour. And he can’t live on $10 an hour. When I asked him why he’s at Occupy Wall Street he says, “I went and fought for capitalism and that’s why I’m now a Marxist.”

At Occupy Baltimore, I met 21-year-old Justin Carson, who tells me he served in the Army National Guard in Iraq from 2009 until this February. His nickname is Crazy Craze. He says he has PTSD and is bipolar but won’t “do pharmaceuticals.” Then he told me I should look into the Illuminati since I’m writing an article.

It was a surprise to meet Iraq war vets at these protests. There are only, after all, around a million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan in what was once dubbed the War on Terror.

Their presence became national news when Iraq vet and former Marine Scott Olsen’s skull was fractured by a non-lethal round fired by police in Oakland in late-October. A week later in New York, around 30 vets held a solidarity march from Zuccotti Park to the Stock Exchange. They had a rally at the park afterward where Bordeleau spoke. “This is the first major movement for social change we’ve seen in this country since the ’70s,” he said to me.

At Occupy DC, a painting of Scott Olsen in uniform is draped on the side of a tent. He’s become a symbol of the Occupation Movement — he fought overseas only to be injured when exercising his “freedom” of peaceful assembly at home. His name has become a shorthand to talk about why so many vets are at Occupy Wall Street.

“There’s a reason Scott Olsen got shot in the head,” says Patterson, looking down at his chain-restaurant hot cocoa. “Because he was out front.”

Patterson still sports a military haircut and a bit of the Army swagger. He also has a touch of that telling hyper-awareness war vets sometimes display; he’s a little twitchy, a little intense. He tells me he has PTSD and has been self-medicating with weed. He says it helps. What’s also helped is being a part of this protest movement. “This is the only peaceful solution,” he says. “If this movement doesn’t work, our country is not going to make it … We’re just not going to make it.”

Patterson became an interrogator in Iraq straight out of high school. His mother had to sign his enlistment papers. He turned 18 in Basic. “We’re an industrialized nation who’s a third world country. The super wealthy elite pretty much control our democratic process and everyone here is pretty much fighting for scraps and that’s not right,” he says.

I ask him what was the switch for him and when. He explained that it was WikiLeaks. It was the footage of the Apache helicopter gunning down Iraqis released by WikiLeaks in April of 2010. Up to that point he had been interrogating Iraqis and using what he describes as psychological torture. He was 10 years old when the World Trade Center was hit. He wanted to fight terrorism in Iraq. He bought into the whole thing, he tells me. He had been looking forward to signing up ever since the 5th grade and then, suddenly, last November, he found himself watching a video of his fellow soldiers gunning down Iraqis on the street and it all changed for him.

The Apache video, to a civilian, makes war look like a video game, but to Patterson, it was the first time he saw Iraqis as real people. Random people, with children and families who care about them. He tried to get out of the military as a conscientious objector after that. He was told it wouldn’t work because he’s an atheist. “So I just smoked a bunch of pot and got kicked out,” he says. He was officially discharged on June 7th of this year. He went back home to Alaska, where he read about Occupy Wall Street on Reddit.

He then went to D.C. to sleep in a tent a block away from the White House.

Patterson speaks in sound bites. He’s had a conversion and like those who find religion, the awakening has given him fervor. He’s witnessing: “Combat at Arms and Military Intelligence all come to the same conclusion: War is a business!”

He interrogated people who were later put to death in Iraq with no appeals process, he says. It haunts him. He didn’t fulfill his contract so he’s not eligible for the GI Bill. Even if he were, he explains, he still couldn’t afford to go to school without loans. He’d be wracked with debt just like so many other students who are down at their city’s Occupations. “I just want to go to college and teach high school,” he says.

For Patterson, like the other vets I spoke to, the Occupy Movement has provided a way to channel their outrage and their energy. Their involvement has been a plus for the movement, too, because vets are extremely helpful if you are planning a tent city in a park — they can get things done, and they are used to living in tents. It’s worth noting the anti-war movement during Vietnam was given legitimacy after the vets became their voice (John Kerry for example). But the vets themselves take solace in the act of being useful.

Or as Patterson puts it: “I haven’t had one nightmare since I’ve been here.”

Image credit: Tina Dupuy

Original piece is here.

LOS ANGELES — I had just taken the hour-long tour for those new to Occupy LA, a solidarity demonstration sparked by Occupy Wall Street in New York. My husband had been visiting the encampment, centered on the lawns around Los Angeles City Hall, in solidarity with me, snooping around the mini-gatherings that pepper the building’s grounds.

“You have no idea what’s going on here!” he declared after finding me on the corner of Spring and Temple Streets listening to an elderly Hispanic man standing on a box telling a captive audience how the bank took his home.

“Civics,” I answered.

“Then you do know what’s going on here,” he said.

Well first off: there’s a tour. There’s nothing more inviting and informative than that. It’s given primarily by Cheryl Aichele, a medical cannabis advocate who looks like the person you’d seek out at any event for answers; she’s non-threatening, sincere and most importantly knowledgeable. When I first meet her she’s in a large tent with a production company logo on it (this is how we roll in LA). It’s like a reception area for a community center. There’s a whiteboard with the schedule of a dozen or so committee meetings that day. They use words like “outreach” and “liaison” and combinations thereof for their committees (and sub-committees). There’s an “objective and demands” box that a middle-aged man stuffs a letter into. A woman next to me is inquiring about the AA meetings. She’s immediately paired up with a fellow 12-stepper within earshot. There are flyers and maps and notices. It’s Day Seven of the encampment — they have AA meetings.

“All of the problems we are facing are legal. They’re laws. We need to pass the right laws,” says my tour guide Aichele.

These are terrible anarchists.

A few days ago some LAPD officers came by to donate bags of clothes; they’re made available to anyone who needs them. The Occupiers offer free food, also provided by donors. There’s a lending library and a first aid tent. I’m told the health department came the day before. They told everyone to wash their hands and not to eat melon, but Occupy LA generally passed inspection.

“In LA, disasters tend to bring us together,” explains Professor Wendel Eckford, a historian with Los Angeles City College who’s been coming down to the Occupation everyday after class.

And it is a disaster: One of out of every five U.S. foreclosures this year was in California. The unemployment rate in Los Angeles is 13 percent. State budget crisis after city budget crisis has taken its toll.

There’s a boiling point and currently it’s expressed in the 253 tents surrounding City Hall. Its part Peoples Park, part low-budget film set and part civics crash course.

Due to a city ordinance they can’t sleep in the park surrounding City Hall. So every night all the tents move to the sidewalk and every morning they move back. They also recycle and have signs reading “Zero waste station” on all four corners of the park. I see a guy scrubbing a graffiti tag off of the wall of the landmark marble building. The group has a non-violence policy which includes graffiti. But their big concern: wheelchair access. It’s a new goal to make the whole occupation accessible to those with disabilities.

“We’d like to be an example for other cites,” says tour guide Aichele.

And by “cities” she means Occupations. Which are growing in number everyday.

Los Angeles City Council members make frequent visits to the tent city encompassing the building where they work. City Council President — and soon-to-be mayoral candidate — Eric Garcetti, who holds an annual Government 101 seminar at City Hall to help citizens make better use of the system, has been down at Occupy LA recruiting participants for next year’s tutorial. Councilmembers Dennis Zine and Bill Rosendahl also are staunch supporters of the Occupation.

But it was Councilmember Richard Alarcon who was approached by one of his constituents, a member of the City Liaison Committee for Occupy LA, Mario Brito, to support this demonstration. Alarcon tells The Atlantic, “[Occupy LA] is exhibiting the frustration of people throughout America.”

Alarcon’s resulting City Council resolution in support of the demonstrators reads like an Occupy Wall Street manifesto: “WHEREAS, the causes and consequences of the economic crisis are eroding the very social contract upon which the Constitution that the United States of America was founded; namely, the ability of Americans to come together and form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense of, promote the general welfare of, and secure the blessings of liberty for all, allowing every American to strive for and share in the prosperity of our nation through cooperation and hard work;.” It’s a three-page resolution mentioning Citizens United, foreclosures, wealth inequality, Egypt and corporate personhood.

“I’ve never written one that long before,” says Alarcon.

Alarcon’s resolution was expected to pass Wednesday morning with a wide margin of support, giving the Occupiers the blessing of the council.

Sure, there are hippies dancing. And yes, there are drum circles. It’s LA, so there’s also “medicinal” marijuana wafting about. But mostly the crowd looks like LA: Half Latino, a quarter African-American and Asian and mostly middle-class. And that’s who is in the meetings, not the hippies. In the meetings, people discuss things like Glass-Steagall, plans of actions and politicians to reach out to. There’s a general sense that this is something big and they need to figure out what to do with it. All is reported at the General Assembly or GA every night at 7:30 p.m. Participants use Quaker consensus decision-making hand signals in all meetings. Participants can indicate if they agree, disagree, kind of agree or oppose vehemently — all non-verbally. So speakers get to see the reaction of the crowd in real time. It’s public polling and it’s painfully slow and tedious. Meaning: this is what democracy looks like. Everyone has a voice and not all of them are poignant. Some of them are repetitive — and there’s a hand signal for that, too.

What about being on message? At the encampment, there are communists next to Ron Paul supporters next to vegan activists next to those LaRouche people (who always seem to show up) — even a couple of union guys. I’ve always called this liberal “micro-cause-ism.” Will they stay on point? “We’re not focused on the thing that’s not causing the problem,” says Aichele. Message cohesion is not the rigged system they’re rallying to change.

The cumbersome process and cacophany of messages is all about honoring the First Amendment to them. Everyone gets to be heard regardless of someone else’s opinion. As long as you’re the “99 percent” — which the vast majority of are — and are respectful and peaceful, you’re welcome at Occupy LA.

What are they doing there? Teaching people who are angry what to do about it. “The sense of building something together — that experience is empowering,” offers Aichele. They are occupying, yeah, but they are organizing. And that means teaching.

Eckford tells me Occupy LA isn’t leaderless — it’s “leaderful.” When asked when this demonstration will end, he says, “When we feel like our democracy is working for the 99 percent.”

How are they going to do that? This is how it starts.

LA Democratic Congresswoman Karen Bass, who describes herself as a long time activist, quietly showed up with bags of El Pollo Loco for protesters last Saturday. “I just wanted to show my support.” She says the role of elected officials is to show their support for this movement she describes as organic.

Local civic leaders, union leaders, police, councilmembers, a couple of celebrities and members of Congress have all made their cameos at Occupy LA. It’s a hotspot.

Other cities have run into conflicts with the police. Occupy San Francisco had its demonstration quashed by police in riot gear. There were 700 arrested in New York on the Brooklyn Bridge. Boston’s occupation led to the biggest mass arrest in recent city history. LA? There were arrests at a Bank of America and at a Fannie Mae, it was rumored to be Occupy LA members. However the actual groups involved were the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the Service Employees International Union. Beyond a few who have tried intentionally to incite something, the LA protest has been peaceful and kid-friendly. Most importantly, it’s been effective.

How long is it going to be out there? I ask around. They are in it for the long haul, protesters say. “We’re not going fast, we’re going far,” is a phrase they use. The time between the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 gets mentioned.

I ask my tour guide how long she’s going to be out here. She pauses: “I don’t know. I’ve never revolutionized before.”

The original piece is here.

Jul 27 2011, 7:00 AM ET 68

The debilitating debt ceiling debate is par for the course — instead of compromising, House Republicans keep pushing bills they know can’t become law

House Republicans have been known to sneer at government red tape. Before becoming speaker of the House, Ohio’s John Boehner dismissed Obama’s health-care overhaul bill as “1,990 pages of bureaucracy.” But now that the GOP holds the majority in the House and therefore sets the schedule, House Republicans have been embracing a lot of pointless busy work and ideological signal-sending.

One quarter into the 112th Congress’s two-year term, only 14 pieces of legislation originating in the House have become laws (12 bills and two house joint resolutions). Fourteen. Compare that with the House in the 111th, which claimed 254 laws (plus 11 house joint resolutions) over two years. The 110th had 308 (plus 10 house joint resolutions). Even the often-derided do-nothing 109th Congress’s House controlled by the GOP passed 316 (with 16 house joint resolutions).

If the current House continues with this trend it will have produced a mere 48 laws by the end of the chamber’s full term.

Quick math: The last three Houses have by this time in their tenure produced an average of 76 laws each.

But when House Republicans are actually in session, it’s not exactly like they’re doing nothing. They’ve made a point of passing bills that “send a message.” Over and over, they’ve brought legislation to the floor that was doomed to die in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Why? To put taxpayer money where Republican congresspersons’ mouths (and votes) are. Yes, the House Republicans of 112th Congress are having a love affair with the symbolic vote.

Below you’ll find a list compiled by The Atlantic of the go-nowhere votes House Republicans have made. On the list are some repeat GOP bogeymen. The House majority has voted to defund Planned Parenthood, EPA and NPR multiple times — in riders, in amendments, in emergency bills — none to ever become law. They’ve also voted at least twice to override President Obama’s moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. And of course they’ve voted several times to defund and block the dreaded “Obamacare.”

Call it grand standing, posturing, or GOPeacocking — in the 112th Congress it’s the new normal.

The following are bills the House of the 112th Congress has passed even though the bill will die in the Senate or face a presidential veto:

1. H.R. 2, Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, Jan. 19

2. H.R. 1, Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act (amendments include: defunding the EPA, czars, Obamacare and Planned Parenthood.) Feb. 18

3. H.R. 3, No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, May 4

4. H.CON.RES.34 Ryan Budget Bill (lowering taxing for wealthy, dismantling Medicare), Apr. 11

5. H.R. 1363, One-week budget bill (with Planned Parenthood, EPA and NPR defunding riders), Apr. 7

6. H.R. 910, Energy Tax Prevention Act (a.k.a. Stop EPA bill), Apr. 7

7. H.R. 359, Eliminate public finance, Jan. 26

8. H.R. 217, to Defund Planned Parenthood, Feb. 21

9. H.R. 1076, Defund NPR (this was an emergency vote), Mar. 15.

10. H.R. 1230: Restarting American Offshore Leasing Act, May 5

11. H.J. Res. 37: Disapproving Net neutrality, Apr. 9

12. H.R. 861, Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) Termination Act, Mar. 16

13. H.R.1214, Block Money for Constructing School-Based Health Centers, May 4

14. H.R. 1229, the Putting the Gulf Back to Work Act, April 13

15. H.R. 2560, Cut, Cap and Balance Act, July 19

16. H.R. 830, FHA Refinance Program Termination Act, Mar. 10

17. H.R. 836, the Emergency Mortgage Relief Program Termination Act, Mar. 14

18. H.R. 839, the HAMP Termination Act, Mar. 29

19. H.R. 1213, To repeal mandatory funding provided to States in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, May 3

20. H.R. 1217, to repeal the Prevention and Public Health Fund, Apr. 13

21. H.R. 1255, the Government Shutdown Prevention Act, Apr. 1 (This bill had language in it claiming if the Senate didn’t pass H.R. 1, then it became law)

22. H.R. 1315, Consumer Financial Protection Safety and Soundness Improvement Act (gutting CFPB), Jul. 21

Honorable mentions (brought to a vote by the majority only to be voted down by them too): Light bulbs!; clean bill for debt increase; defunding the Libyan conflict.

The original piece is here.

Jun 20 2011, 7:30 AM ET 687

Conservative filmmaker Stephen Bannon thinks his film can win hearts and minds — and maybe even, one day, votes — for the former Alaska governor

MINNEAPOLIS — He says his publicists didn’t think he should meet with me. “Why?” I ask. “They said you wrote something bad about Palin or something.” I tell him about the list I compiled of all her media feuds, with people like Dave Letterman and some former McCain staffers. Currently there are 86 names. My interviewee, filmmaker Stephen Bannon, shrugs, dismissing it, then goes about asking me questions about myself. This is a charming trait of his.

The night before I had viewed his latest film, The Undefeated. The original title was Take a Stand: The Stewardship of Sarah Palin.

“What did you think of my film?” Bannon asks. I smile. This was his opening question and he’s now asked it three times. I relent.

“I thought there were a lot of GOP dog whistles in it,” I say.

He says he has never heard that phrase before. Never? Really? He asks me what I mean.

The two-hour film is peppered with keywords. It’s like SEO (search engine optimization) for movies: the words “ethics,” “principles,” “threat to the establishment,” “CEO,” and “kitchen table” are repeated several times during the film. So when you walk out of the theater suddenly you think, “Sarah Palin’s ethics and principles are what make her a threat to the establishment.” And everything wonderful and wholesome on this planet is summed up in the phrase “kitchen table” — a table Palin chairs as its executive.

“Was that intentional?” I ask. What only can be described as a wry smile comes across Bannon’s face. “‘Dog whistles.’ I like that,” he says.

“It’s highly structured and very thought through,” he offers, then uses the word “sub-textual.” He says there’s a sub-texual understanding with those slogans.

He says he made the film for me. He didn’t make the film for what he calls “Palinistas.” He made it for people who don’t know that she is, according to Bannon, a woman of accomplishment. Yes, he believes the problem with the former governor of Alaska — the nearly three year object of the national media’s obsession and author of two books about her life — is that we don’t know her. And for Bannon, to know her is to love her.

At the 9:30 pm screening Friday at the RightOnline conference in Minneapolis, he told the less than two-thirds full room that we were viewing the “unrated version.” He said he’ll have to do another cut to avoid an NC-17 rating. Spoiler: in the beginning of the film there’s a picture of someone with a T-shirt with Palin’s name and the word cunt. Other than that, the film was pretty G-rated. Or if we’re being candid — it’s GOP-rated.

The themes and images are designed to make Republican-minded people react. There’s an entire (estimated) 15-minutes of the film devoted just to re-capping Palin’s 2008 Republican National Convention speech, along with reactions from her staunchest supporters (others of whom are interspersed throughout). The RightOnline crowd got fired up at the screening just like they did at the RNC the first time when Palin spoke of people in small towns: “They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America who grow our food, run our factories and fight our wars. They love their country, in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America. I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town.”

And also when Barack Obama appeared in the documentary, making this April 2009 statement, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” That was, as Bannon would put it, “very thought through.” And effective. Someone in the screening shouted, “Terrorist!” at the images of the president of the United States during this scene.

“I don’t believe that. I’m not calling you a liar, but that didn’t happen,” says Bannon, told about the comment. It happened. I was sitting just two tables down from the shouter. “Did anyone say anything to him when he said it?” Bannon asks. I was too far away to see, I tell him. He later says that he is disappointed by that report. He says he doesn’t feel that way about the president, who he says made the right decision on taking out Osama bin Laden.

Bannon keeps on insisting he made this film for me. And I keep asking him what his goal was. “I want to drive a stake into the heart of ‘Caribou Barbie,’” he says. He wants to paint a picture of Palin as a frontier woman who, as he put it, “is Wal-Mart nation.”

There’s a lot of elite bashing in the film — and also just in talking with Bannon. He rails against elites with the same regularity the rest of us check to make sure we haven’t forgotten our cell phones (meaning: more than we want to admit to). Bannon worked at Goldman Sachs in the ’80s. He has two homes in nice Los Angeles zip codes, and he’s a Harvard Business School grad. “What’s an elite?” I ask.

“An elite is someone who’s for themselves and not for the country.”

Are polluters elites? Companies that frack? Wal-Mart? “Under your definition aren’t the Walton’s elites?” I inquire.

“I don’t know enough about the Walton’s to say that,” Bannon answers.

When pressed, he says that Mitt Romney, the current frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary, is an elite. Bannon served in the military, he tells me. I tell him I’ve always thought Romney’s weakest point was his five able-bodied sons and not one of them signing up for service. He mentions former governor Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich — also elites, in his calculus. Bannon says he wants this film to show people that Palin is better than Romney. Yes, he doesn’t even mention a general election. This film is to re-vamp her image in the eyes of Republicans, so they will leave the theater and have a newfound “begrudging admiration for her.” It’s not for the general population.

“So your film is a primer for her in the primary?” I ask.

Bannon knows how to answer this question. His cheerful face stretches into an ear-to-ear smile. “I’m a commercial filmmaker,” he says.

“So she’s going to run for president?”

Same smile. “I’m a commercial filmmaker.”

The final 10 minutes of the film are spent comparing Sarah Palin to Ronald Reagan. People said that Reagan was too extreme, too conservative, and that he’d never be president — and they were all wrong, according to The Undefeated. “Why do you think I did that?” Bannon asks.

For the power of the association, I tell him. So people will think the two politicians have similar qualities. He says the tea party movement is like the Reagan Revolution. I tell him I disagree. Palin is much more like Barry Goldwater, if anything. Goldwater supporters stormed the San Francisco Republican convention in ‘64, lots of them “never having been involved in politics before.” Just like we hear about the tea party. There was also the belief among Goldwater supporters that if there was ever a true conservative, the large bloc of dormant true conservatives would turn out to vote for him. Goldwater’s opponent, Lyndon Johnson, won in a historic landslide in the ‘64 election.

Bannon ponders this for a second and says Goldwater was Reagan’s John the Baptist.

Why is the film called The Undefeated? Bannon feigns insult at the question. He declares he thought I was smarter than that. Basically, he starts busting my chops and it looks like he’s filibustering. “I know she’s lost elections! See her at the end of the film in Madison and it’s like water off a duck. She’s not down. She’s undefeated.”

Isn’t that technically “not defeated?” Sports teams who’ve never lost in a season are undefeated. But being undeterred is not defeated, not undefeated. I suspect another dog whistle. A phrase that at this point in the interview Bannon likes tossing around with a chuckle.

Is the film just glazing over failures in order to magnify the good parts of Palin’s history? I mean, the New Testament is more critical of Jesus than The Undefeated is of Sarah Palin. I asked Bannon why he thinks people don’t like Sarah Palin. He says it’s because they don’t like her politics. That answer satisfies him absolutely. They just disagree with her and that causes all the vitriol hurled at her.

When Bannon says he made the movie for me, he means women. He calls them “new agenda women.” Women whom Bannon describes as being still mad about how Hillary Clinton was treated during the primaries. Yes, Steve Bannon is trying to capture the PUMA and feminist vote by rebranding Sarah Palin.

If Palin were more competent she’d be far less controversial to women. Women don’t like how Palin is treated, but for some, it’s not because she’s criticized by the media or scrutinized — it’s because she’s held to a lower standard than other politicians. If a man had given any of her answers to Katie Couric or in any of her interviews since, no one would think to make a movie highlighting all his accomplishments while being governor of one of the least populated states in the nation for a fraction of a term. It feels condescending to women who are actually smart and accomplished that Palin gets called smart and accomplished.

But The Undefeated’s director and writer admits his project is about subtext. And the intended subtext of our chat: Palin intends to run for president because she’s not defeated.

Principles. Ethics. A threat to the establishment. Kitchen table. CEO.

The original post is here.

Jun 18 2011, 3:45 PM ET

Why is there a giant Koch-funded conservative gathering at the same time and in the same city as Netroots Nation, anyway?

Over the last couple of decades plenty of women have thought they were going into a medical clinic to get a free pregnancy test only to enter what’s know as a crisis pregnancy center. Few of them offer actual health care, instead proselytizing against abortion, birth control and pre-marital sex to women at their most vulnerable. But these establishments often look like and are adjacent to Planned Parenthood or other women’s clinics. They mimic these institutions to press their political agenda in the most confrontational way they can. The right-wing Americans for Prosperity Foundation is using a similar tactic for — wait for it — blogger conferences. RightOnline describes itself on its website:

The RightOnline initiative was launched in July of 2008, with more than 600 activists and bloggers attending our first ever RightOnline Conference in Austin, Texas. It was the first conservative event to ever counter the leftwing Netroots Nation Convention … an annual gathering of what the media called the most concentrated gathering of high-profile progressive bloggers to date.

Yes, Netroots Nation, founded as Yearly Kos in 2006, has for the last four years had to compete with a counter-conference in the same city and on the same weekend it’s been held. While no one would ever mistake the conservative confab for the liberal one, the presence of a mimic conference with registration blocks in the same hotels insures that the Netroots crowd doesn’t get a media and messaging weekend to itself.

RightOnline remains smaller than Netroots Nation. It boasts 1,500 attendees in Minneapolis this year to Netroots’ 2,400. It’s cheaper to attend RightOnline, too: $120 for registration, meals included, compared a staggering $355 per registration for Netroots. But that’s partly because the two conferences, while both targeted to a blogger and online activist audience, are far from “opposite equals” (to use a math term).

Sponsored by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, RighOnline benefits from the Foundation’s annual budget of $10 million, overseen by board chairman David Koch, of Koch Industries-fame. Netroots’ filings to the IRS show a budget of less than $1 million.

In short, the foundation putting on RightOnline has more than ten times the cash of the liberal tweeples two blocks away, making it easier to attend. You’d think then its attendees would be happy. But by the look of those at the gathering, they’re a brooding bunch. And yes, the crowd with very few exceptions is entirely white. Netroots is a Benetton ad by comparison.

Tweeter @Mulletmanandy69 laid out some expectations for it as the conference got going, “Hoping for some good conservative fun at RightOnline. #ro2011″

What is conservative fun? Apparently it can be summed up in two words: Andrew Breitbart. Friday afternoon, on the first day of RightOnline, right-wing agitator Breitbart marched the block and a half to Netroots Nation in the sweltering heat with what he called an entourage. Some were left-wing bloggers there to record his annual blogger-con stunt. Yes, he’s done this before at Netroots and with the same result. He shows up at the liberal gathering and cameras are put in his face. There’s yelling. It’s put on YouTube. And the Loki of RightOnline goes back to his conference being the undeserving victim of hippie hate. As Slate.com reporter Dave Weigel said to me the moment the news broke, “Every conference has to have a Breitbart moment, the last one that didn’t was CPAC 2009.”

The two staple speakers every year at RightOnline are Andrew Breitbart and his equally incensed blogger colleague, Michelle Malkin. It sets the tone. Provocateur James O’Keefe was celebrated by the crowd during his speech on Friday afternoon. His talk was curiously titled “The Left Exposed: Where Investigative Reporting Meets Online Activism.” (It should be noted the 27-year-old is on probation for his antics.) Herman Cain was invited to speak, along with the two local Republicans hoping to secure the GOP presidential nomination for 2012, Rep. Michele Bachmann and former governor Tim Pawlenty. Most tellingly, there’s what looks like a shrine to Sarah Palin, a 5-foot tall painting of the governor in the hallway of the event space. The documentary about her was screened for attendees Friday night but the media superstar herself is not on the list of speakers.

It’s a conference about being online but the attendees haven’t been tweeting very much. It’s maybe one every ten minutes on their chosen hashtag #ro2011 — compared to the Netroots twitter stream which has been a reliable geyser. Inside the meeting hall (on a stage that would be the absolute envy of an over-the-top Texas episode of “Toddlers and Tiaras”) Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) gave a speech opening with the phrase “we share the same fear” and repeated it twice. She railed against Net Neutrality, the poorly named issue Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) has called the most important free speech issue of our time. But they don’t need a conference to be against something Franken is for.

Perhaps that’s why the conference has to be held next door to where Franken spoke. It’s mainly to create the illusion of there only being two sides. You can find more than one opinion on every single issue imaginable at Netroots Nation. The attendees there agree absolutely on very little save the overwhelming compulsion to hand-wring. So why hold RightOnline so close by? Probably for the same reason pro-life groups set up fake clinics — mimicking the other establishment at close range is about confronting their political agenda in an in-your-face way.

You could even call it conservative fun.

The original post is here.

Jun 17 2011, 11:27 AM ET

Progressives have often suffered for what can be called “micro-cause-ism.” Meaning when you arrive at anti-war rally or the like, suddenly there are people clamoring to save the whales/polar bears, stop sexism/racism, free Tibet/Mumia and go raw/vegan/organic/local, etc., etc. Each of these causes believes it is the most important and should be accomplished first before anything else.

Which means everyone is always a little unhappy and not much ever gets done.

Every year at Netroots Nations, this takes place in miniature. There are booths in the exhibit hall vying for blogger attention and commenter praise. Every year the online liberal base of the Democratic Party (and self-professed independents) get together and argue over what issue is the biggest issue and how they’ve failed to win at said issue. Then they strategize how to do better. Then they do it the next year.

This year there is hallway chatter about “tea partying” President Obama: Make enough of a fuss to pull focus so that Obama is forced to move to the Left. There are calls to “primary” people. Primary Democrats who aren’t liberal enough, primary Obama — basically threaten Democrats with a force like that of the tea party, the GOP on caffeine. Mike Milkovich, the CTO of WareCorp attending Netroots, declared, “It would show that Obama really is a pragmatic moderate.” The self-proclaimed small business owner added, “I don’t know about you but I don’t want a radical as president.”

Is there a real call to primary Democrats for not being loyal enough to liberals? Could this be something we’ll be hearing about in the next couple of months? “It’s probably blogger hubris,” said Crooks and Liars blogger and prolific author Dave Neiwert. “Political naiveté. That gives us energy but it also blinds us to cold hard political reality of the world.”

So there’s not an actual get-off-the-couch effort to primary the president or act like the tea party in any way. That’s not what progressives are really talking about at Netroots this year.

It’s not really about the president right now, anyway. It’s not an election year. The GOP primary is barely ramping up. This time all micro-causes have fallen under the same “root” issue: Unions. Not only have union leaders descended on the conference. The gruff plainspoken Leo Gerard, President of the United Steelworkers, was on a panel about combating corporate power in the wake of the Citizens United decision. Union leaders are out in force talking on a variety of subjects.

Suddenly, “like Wisconsin” is a phrase thrown around. It was in Madison this past spring where the press reported 70,000 people turned out on one cold Saturday to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) stripping collective bargaining rights away from public workers. And that 70,000 figure doesn’t even count the families who showed up first thing in the morning to walk around the capitol with their signs showing their support for the unions before going about their regular errands. It was in Madison where the prized “youth” turned out. It was old and young people who work for a living. Firefighters and elevator operators, teachers and students. It’s where all progressives got together as one voice saying one thing: Shame, shame, Scott Walker!

In the early 1900s, the labor movement was the primer for a range of progressive pet causes: Women’s suffrage, temperance and the New Deal. It’s only recently that liberals got branded as latte-sipping arugula eaters. Now the attack on the unions translates into an attack on all progressives. Reproductive rights, environmental issues, corporate personhood, media consolidation, election finance — they all seem to identify that they are at some point “like Wisconsin.”

It appears the attempt to bust the unions was just the thing to actually unify Democrats and dole out a knockout dose for their micro-cause-ism.

The original post is here.

Jun 16 2011, 10:57 AM ET

The sixth annual Netroots Nation (nee Yearly Kos) is being held in suddenly swampy downtown Minneapolis, Minn. The pre-conference events Wednesday consisted of two all-day marathon strategy sessions for two largely separate groups who both just so happen to have breaking news this week: the LGBT community and the labor movement.

In California on Tuesday a federal judge dismissed the challenge of a ruling made by Judge Vaughn Walker on Proposition 8. The appeal was based on the known fact that the judge is in a long-term homosexual relationship and therefore, according to the challenge, is unable to rule on the merits of the case. Judge Walker’s ruling against Prop 8 now stands. And in New York, the state legislature is debating making gay marriage legal in the state. A final vote could happen as soon as Friday.

In adjacent generic conference rooms at the Hilton were these progressive powwows. The (closed to the media but bloggers were invited) LGBT session was boisterous. Loud. It spilled over and through the partition into the open whisper-level labor meeting. They weren’t celebratory — they were energized.

They’re winning … duh.

Labor, however, is not having as good a time … really at anything. High unemployment makes unions easy targets. The under-employed resent those with pensions and health plans. And management is by definition not in line with the unions. Ditto owners and Republicans. And a higher court ruled this week that Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s law to strip public unions of collective bargaining now stands.

So, where does labor stand with progressives?

The AFL-CIO has always participated in Netroots Nation. It shows up every year with a booth and hands out spiffy union-made swag. But this year it’s different. Labor has taken some hard hits under a wave of new Republican governors in Michigan and Ohio. Union membership in the private sector is down below seven percent. To everyone’s surprise, it’s down even in the last two years with a labor-backed Democrat in the White House. “This is our chance to get out of the booth at the exhibit hall and have a deeper conversation,” said Joseph Geevarghese, Deputy Director at Change to Win, a coalition of American labor unions.

The labor movement now talks about Wisconsin in the same way people talk of 9/11: It changed things. Geevarghese notes Wisconsin where the labor movement was born — and now it’s seen as the best place to kill it.

But now, like 9/11, it’s also become a rallying cry. Progressives and liberals (the distinctions and differences have never been clearly explained to me) have largely not paid attention to organized labor. They weren’t out supporting unions and union interests, notes Geevarghese, “Before Wisconsin from progressives it was largely indifference.” Communications Director at Change to Win Paco Fabian uses the word “ambivalence” to describe progressives’ attitude toward labor. “They have no familial relationship with unions. They don’t know what unions do,” he said.

“It’s not that progressives forgot about labor until Wisconsin,” said Firedoglake blogger David Dayen, who was invited to the session. “Everybody did.”

So that was the goal of the all-Wednesday cabal — remembering why labor used to be important. The solemn group of organizers, activists and bloggers aired their grievances with labor being “demonized.” They talked about messaging. They discussed strategy. They in short: They communicated.

Is this going to make a difference? Will this save organized labor? Did the hosts of the event feel like they got out of this what they were hoping for? Did something start here in the Marquette III room today?

Fabian seemed optimistic in his resolve, “It’s really all about the follow-up.”

Original post is here.