Falling into Laps

The Forward provides a brief profile of the most notorious anti-Semitic sign-waver at the Occupy Wall Street protests. Basically, he's a homeless man who long did things like hurl anti-Semitic abuse well before OWS started. So it was easy for him to stand around with his signs in Zuccotti Park. Fortunately, other members of OWS have taken to holding up signs next to him calling him a dick. Since the man has the same right to protest as anyone else, that's really all anyone can do.

Elected Officials FTW

The proposed "eviction" of Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park (which -- and I didn't know this -- is apparently privately owned by a company called Brookfield Office Properties) is off after a change of heart from the company. And what caused this change of heart? Pressure from elected officials:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said earlier Friday morning that Brookfield Office Properties -- the real-estate firm that owns Zuccotti Park, considered a home-base for protesters -- made the decision not to clear them out after the company was "inundated" with threatening calls from elected city officials.

The mayor said during his weekly commentary on New York's WOR Radio that he didn't know which officials allegedly made the threats, but that the company decided to work out some form of a negotiated settlement with protesters in the coming days.

Bloomberg added that while he lacked first-hand knowledge of the conversations, he was told the officials generally threatened to "make life more difficult" for the real-estate company.

"Threatening" seems a bit hyperbolic -- when I think "threatening phone calls", I think bomb threats -- but the point is that elected officials stepped up to exercise leverage over a corporate actor on behalf of OWS. Which is a signal that OWS is recognized as an at least potentially powerful voting bloc, of the sort elected officials have to pay attention to. And thus OWS gets a victory.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how the game is played. It's Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's basic story about how to move from the margins to the mainstream of political society. Show you've got some muscle behind you, and the politicos will listen. OWS is starting to show that and, lo and behold, folks are listening.

The New Peasant Class

One of the major questions that has floated around the "Occupy Wall Street" movement is the simple "what do they want?" Obviously, we can answer this in abstract terms: economic justice, easing of burdens on the lower and working classes, and (slightly more concretely) accountability for the people who got us into this mess in the first place (namely, Wall Street). But there has been very little in the way of specific policy proposals. Indeed, even the overall ideology is fuzzy -- supporters range from Ron Paulites (they are everywhere, aren't they) to socialists and communists, to mainstream unions, to some Democratic politicians, to relatively apolitical Americans who are simply overcome with frustration. My friend Matt Cole makes a decent defense of this mode of operation -- not making "demands" of the system but rather expressing itself in a more "aesthetic" or expressivist sense.

But Rorty Bomb has done some interesting work parsing the "We are the 99%" tumblr to try and figure out what the movement wants. And the results are sobering. OWS is not about mid-twentieth century liberalism -- increasing unionization leading to the suburban house and the two-car garage. Nor is it about socialist revolution -- smashing the capitalist state and redistributing power and dignity to the workers. What the 99% want, RB argues, is decidedly pre-modern -- bearing most in common with historical peasant revolts. They want to be free from the burden of crushing debt, have access to enough resources so they're not consistently living hand-to-mouth. That's it.

To people who think OWS is the first step to the opening a new horizon, this is profoundly demoralizing. There is nothing bold about these desires. They are ancient and basic; if anything, they are the result of people too downtrodden to dream of anything more.

But at the same time, the very simplicity of what is being asked for here also gives it greater moral punch. Surely, in a country as rich as ours, with the bounty we possess, we can give them this much.