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Occupying Creeping Bureaucracy

"OccupySF follows consensus process. Peoples Reserve CU and OccupyMission are not organs of OccupySF,

as they exist out of process."

That's a recent tweet communication from someone regarding the organizational structure of Occupy San Francisco. The statement is both twitter-speak and Occupy lingo. I will translate:

As with many non-hierarchal meeting structures, most of the Occupy groups use some form of consensus building process in order to reach decisions. For one such process you can view this short youtube video. The intention is not to get stuck in the old leader/committee/elite decision making process. Everyone should be involved with an equal voice no matter who you are or when you joined the movement. So ...

"OccupySF follows a consensus process." There are often local tweaks and twists to the process but the basics are usually the same and Occupy San Francisco uses just such a decision making process in the General Assembly (GA) meetings and in sub-groups created by the GA.

"Peoples Reserve CU and Occupy Mission are not organs of OccupySF." The Proposed People's Reserve Credit Union and the new encampment in the Missions District are not extensions of the original Occupy San Francisco @ Justin Herman Plaza organization. They are separate entities functioning under their own forms of decision making arrangement.

".. as they exist out of process." These are the key words that prompted my post today. The author means that both of these offshoot organizations weren't not created via the consensus process within OccupySF, therefore they exist outside of that process and are not authorized nor formally condoned by Occupy San Francisco.

Fine. I do not disagree with the content of this tweet and I acknowledge the difficulty of communicating anything in 140 characters or less. So I have no issue with the original author. I do, however, have a big concern about that queasiness anyone including myself felt upon reading "as they exist out of process."

Insider speak is necessarily exclusive of those who don't know the secret handshake and don't have the decoder ring. We can excuse that in a twitter communication or a brief email but there is a more serious hidden agenda here, I would be interested if you had the reaction I did.

Did you find the communication strident? Did it sound vaguely like - "we have rules and if you don't follow the rules you are out." Should the 99% already be broken into ten groups of 9% or ninety-nine consensus meetings of 1% each? Yes there does need to be some sense of order and some means of processing the hearts, minds and feelings of members but guidelines become rules, rules become laws and laws lead to exclusion not inclusion.

Recent Images from Occupy

"It's the Inequility Stupid!"

"Some people question the validity of the "rebelious" artists who made big money - they are accused by revolutionary purists of being a part of the system, and for being rich. I do not share that feeling - I think that it's OK to make big money - it's OK to become rich if it's based on creating a real value - art, inventions, services of products. What is not OK is a legalized systemic swindle - and that is what we are against..." - Roger Waters

I lifted the title for today's post from a Mother Jones article It's the Inequality Stupid! it has several graphic representations of just how large and pervasive is the wealth gap in the United States. You think you know because you feel it every day but when you see the numbers graphically you have to wonder why anyone in the 99% isn't with us on this.

Here's another interesting piece, this one from the Washington Post, they call it The Big Lie. The big lie is that our current financial mess was caused by Washington and not by Wall Street. Now the reasonable assessment is that there is plenty of blame to go around. But the perverse explanation goes like this - Congress made the banks lend to borrowers who could not afford to own those houses. What a lot of people seem willing to overlook is that it was not the home loans that brought on the financial crisis. No, it was the packaging of those loans into fifty and one hundred million dollar portfolios and selling them to pension funds and other financial institutions with false ratings. Then creating a secondary market buying and selling derivatives on those suspect loans.

Now when exactly did Congress passed legislation demanding that Wall Street banks create such risky investment products? What Congress did or rather didn't do was regulate. I know that is a dirty word for conservatives but you can't have it both ways. If government is the problem and they didn't do their job, then the problem was not enough regulation and enforcement. If Wall Street was the problem then who was supposed to stop them - the government? If so, how without regulation?

The Tea Party wants to blame it all on big government and Occupy Wall Street - well the name does say it all. But do we really want to have another good versus evil standoff here? Isn't the country already locked into inaction by the republican/democrat divide. Please take note that both Washington and Wall Street are promoting the divisions between conservatives and progressives, they want us divided because united we scare the hell out of them.

So hug a liberal, kiss a conservative or at least talk to each other. Keep your eyes on the real target - "It's the Inequality Stupid!"

The Truth About TARP

"The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing."

You owe it to yourself, your children, your retirement savings, your home and your sanity to take fifteen minutes to read the analysis from Bloomberg.com, which provides for the first time the details of the 2007-2009 financial bailout of the U.S. banks. Over 29,000 pages of documents were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. The U.S. Federal Reserve resisted releasing these documents, the government clearly does not want you to know the truth about how much of the taxpayers money was used. Remember the $700 Billion dollar number - that was how much Congress approved for the Bush Bank Bailout in 2007. Want to know the real number for all the bailouts under both Bush and Obama including the secret monies that neither President approved - $7.77 Trillion. What the heck, it's only one more zero.

No more grumbling about Obama's spending or the Fed's 'Too Big to Fail' policies until you read this article.

Here's another little teaser:

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, Democratic Senator from Ohio. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and OccupyWall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now [on bank regulation].”

The Attack on Occupy

I'll bet there are some Occupy campers who are a bit tired of having old hippies telling them stories about the Vietnam War protests. But there is a subtle distinction I have not heard voiced yet - here is it. When we were protesting against the war in the late 60s and early 70s most of our parents were not with us. For them the United States at war meant World War II, pretty hard to be against that war when on the other side was Adolf Hitler. My father's reasoning on Vietnam was - "our boys are fighting and dying over there and we need to support them." In my late teens I was protesting a war, at that same age he was in one, so was everyone else in the country.

But in the 60s the "adults" did not make a distinction between the fighting on the ground in Vietnam and the insane policy in Washington D.C. which was also based on WWII mentality. The flag waving obscured the questions of policy and any rational basis for what we were doing in Vietnam.

Flash forward to today, we are all part of the 99%. We are on your side, marching with you against some incredibly over the top reactions on the part of local police, mayors and governors. But listen carefully to your elders about this because it really has very little to do with what the local mayor wants. These marching orders are coming from Washington. The good news is that you have struck a nerve, they are afraid we will wake up too many of the 99% and it will cost them their places of privilege.

For anyone who doesn't believe Washington, the Department of Homeland Security and yes, Barack Obama are not behind the militant crackdown on Occupy. Here is an article from the Guardian for you. For those who believe as I do that this is an organized repression, the article is most enlightening.