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How the 99% Won in the Fight for Worker Rights

by Andy Kroll (via TomDispatch)

Twelve hours after Mayor Bloomberg’s cops evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment from Zuccotti Park, the space had been scrubbed down and repopulated with police and private-security types, up to 150 of them. In essence, since September there had been two occupations in the Wall Street area and the second of them, the massive one the police were running, had now quite literally replaced the first. Odder yet, by mid-afternoon the police, barricaded in the park, were ringed by the returning protesters, awaiting a judge’s decision on whether they could again set up camp. It was as if in a single night the situation had somehow been turned inside out.

As Occupy Wall Street’s website wryly put it: “NYPD Occupying Liberty Square; Demands Unclear.” That caught the strangely high-spirited post-eviction moment. But something else caught my eye that afternoon. The “park” itself, demonstrator-less, filled with bored cops, had morphed into a bare and pitiful space. It wasn’t a park at all, but a thumbnail slab of concrete with lights embedded in it, trees with yellowed leaves, and scattered, plinth-like stone benches, cold as death.

What more reminder did anyone need that the zeitgeist-inspired Occupy Wall Street protesters had brought a mythic quality to a postage-stamp-sized bit of privatized public property? They had made it, tents and all, larger than life, bigger than anything specific that happened there. They had somehow put it on a world stage. If they head elsewhere, that mythic quality goes with them. The police have now, as is their wont, turned the park into something like an open-air prison. It’s the only thing they evidently know how to do, just as they tried to imprison in metal barricades the giant march from Manhattan’s Foley Square across the Brooklyn Bridge on Thursday night — with far less success than expected thanks to the effervescent, surging power of the crowd.

As a crew, the OWS protesters are no slouches. By the afternoon of their park eviction, some were already carrying around signs that said: “You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.” It’s a rousing instant slogan, and who can deny that there are ideas aplenty swirling around in the OWS ether? As for myself, though, I don’t think Occupy Wall Street is an idea. To me, it seems more like an embodied feeling, as hard to pin down, yet powerful and all embracing, as that 99% label.

Along with its hope and high-spiritedness, OWS has, I suspect, caught and crystalized an American feeling of loss, of a world going down (which always has the possibility of the new somewhere inside it). The outrage that it has transformed into activity is over those who are still living high and profiting off that world’s demise — the privateers, looters, subprime hucksters, corporate grifters, Wall Street gamblers, and all those willing to take a buck to shill for them, to make sure in every way that they thrive as other Americans crash and burn.

All of this, by the way, was available for anyone to see in clear, even cartoonish, form in the crony-capitalist version of the occupation of Iraq with its urge to privatize everything, make money off Iraqi suffering while the going was good, and stick the Iraqis with a subprime “reconstruction” program so shoddy that nothing would work and no services would ever be delivered, while the companies hired to reconstruct took home the cash.

As it happened, while few Americans cared what befell the Iraqis, a subprime crook’s version of the occupation of Iraq was heading home. So here’s the truth of it: before anyone decided to “occupy” any park, we wuz occupied! And the truth of now is perhaps this: a feeling embodied is even harder to suppress than an idea, no matter how often you play whack-a-mole with its encampments. A feeling embodied, as TomDispatch associate editor and Mother Jones reporter Andy Kroll makes clear, can have genuine on-the-ground political power. It can deliver the goods. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Kroll discusses Occupy Wall Street’s unlikely first political victory click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

How the 99% Won in the Fight for Worker Rights
The Unsung Victors in the Hottest Election of 2011

By Andy Kroll – Posted  at 5:50pm, November 20, 2011.

No headlines announced it. No TV pundits called it. But on the evening of November 8th, Occupy Wall Street, the populist uprising built on economic justice and corruption-free politics that’s spread like a lit match hitting a trail of gasoline, notched its first major political victory, and in the unlikeliest of places: Ohio.

You might have missed OWS’s win amid the recent wave of Occupy crackdowns. Police raided Occupy Denver, Occupy Salt Lake City, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Portland, and Occupy Seattle in a five-day span. Hundreds were arrested. And then, in the early morning hours on Tuesday, New York City police descended on Occupy Wall Street itself, fists flying and riot shields at the ready, with orders from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to evict the protesters. Later that day, a judge ruled that they couldn’t rebuild their young community, dealing a blow to the Occupy protest that inspired them all.

Instead of simply condemning the eviction, many pundits and columnists praised it or highlighted what they considered its bright side. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote that Bloomberg had done Occupy Wall Street a favor. After all, he argued, something dangerous or deadly was bound to happen at OWS sooner or later, especially with winter soon to arrive. Zuccotti Park, Klein added, “was cleared… in a way that will temporarily reinvigorate the protesters and give Occupy Wall Street the best possible chance to become whatever it will become next.”

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman wrote that OWS “should be grateful” for Bloomberg’s eviction decree: “By acting so badly, Bloomberg has Read more…

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