Glenn Greenwald takes his Salon colleague Justin Elliott's summary of the police raid on Zuccotti park and runs with it:
Following similar raids in St. Louis and Oakland, hordes of NYPD officers this morning forcibly cleared Zuccotti Park in Manhattan of all protesters; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took “credit” for this decision. That led to this description of today’s events from an Occupy Wall Street media spokesman, as reported by Salon‘s Justin Elliott:
A military style raid on peaceful protesters camped out in the shadow of Wall Street, ordered by a cold ruthless billionaire who bought his way into the mayor’s office.
If you think about it, that short sentence is a perfect description of both the essence of America’s political culture and the fuel that gave rise to the #OWS movement in the first place.
And that presents both the challenge and the opportunity. The challenge: how do you stage resistance to elites who control the police, armies and courts? No matter how many people are occupying a public space, police clad in imperial storm trooper outfits will be available to 'clear it out'. The answers grow from the opportunity presented by the geographically dispersed, cyber-driven OWS movement.
* OWS has no location, no more than the internet does: while it relies on various sites, as a system, it is not simply the sum of its sites. It is widely distributed, and no single site is critical to its functioning. When one node falls, the system quickly rerouts its activities, with no noticeable effect on its functioning.
* OWS is a system, or network, of protestors. It has no central command and control, no hierarchy, no single message. It is self organizing network of resistance against the rule of the 1%.
* As a self organizing system, it continuously morphs into various subsystems, each with its own distinctive activities. These activities could be highly publicized mass movements, like the "Move Your Money" effort or the upcoming Nov. 17 shut down wall street event. Or they can be smaller acts of resistance which morph into something larger, such as the occupy the highway march from NYC to DC. The fact that there is no single activity, event or message is a sign of resilience, not weakness.
* As a self organizing system, anyone can become a node. Every blogger, communicator, worker, family member can organize little hubs of activity. True, at the micro level these efforts might be trivial. But reverse the perspective and think about this from the standpoint of elites, who now face the prospect of their servants sabotoging them at every turn: their waiters might spit in their soup, their drivers might ruin the car, their pilots might crash the plane, their accountants might call the IRS.
* The efforts to evict protesters from public spaces will soon exhaust the budgets and morale of the police. How much longer will they be willing to protect the people who have been playing games with their pension funds?
* The nation- wide police actions against OWS encampments around the country are reminiscent of the strategy the US used in Iraq---the ink blot strategy, to 'clear and hold' places around the country from 'the enemy'. It didn't work, however, because the people were 'the enemy' who just moved back in when the time was right. If this parallel is accurate, then the multiple expensive police actions around the country are futile---occupiers will be back, somewhere, everywhere, overt and hidden.
(cross posted at Possible Experience)
