In Matt Taibbi's recent column, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests, he makes some very sharp points about the Occupy movement.
If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it.
That is the essence of it. He walks us through how he finally put this together:
He notes how this movement has baffled and frustrated both those on the left and those on the right:
the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."
Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands...Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego.
But, he finally sees what the Occupiers are really saying:
People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
Different values. Every single conversation I've had with anyone who really want to explore what this movement is about comes down to this: we need to establish what our real values are and design our society and our governance to reflect that. Right now, the values we are living look like this:
There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.
We are a society of Vulture, Inc. We're all circling around someone else's imminent demise to see what we can get for ourselves. That someone may be a neighbor whose foreclosure sale means you can get a lawnmower cheap or it may be the laborers in China who suffer under abusive conditions so we can "afford" a computer.
I knit. It takes about 15-20 hours of labor to knit a fairly plain sweater. I think about that every time I see a hand-knit sweater in a store or catalogue for $25. I refuse to buy said sweater. I can't afford how it makes me feel.
What the Occupy movement is saying is that we desire to live a more humanistic life where if you look in from the outside what you see is that people care about each other and do not accept a personal "win" when it means someone else's personal loss. This whole "competitive" mantra needs to go. Any time one person wins, someone else loses. When it comes to economies, we're talking about people losing the ability to lead a just and sustainable life. Are we really okay with that?
We have blatant examples of how far we are from real democracy:
If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state – like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar – the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO. Even if 40 million Californians vote tomorrow to allow themselves to smoke a joint, the federal government will never permit it.
When the government claims that they are considering health care reform and then proceeds to do nothing but force everybody buy into private health insurance companies and then nearly 70% of the people in this country say, "well then, we want a public option" but, no public option is included, we don't have a democracy. Every law generated is about supporting the predatory nature of our "competitive capitalism".
And the economy is run almost entirely by an unaccountable oligarchy in Lower Manhattan that absolutely will not sanction any innovations in banking or debt forgiveness or anything else that might lessen its predatory influence
This is what the Occupy movement is about. It's not just about accountability for a few Wall Street criminals. It's a rejection of everything our culture has become.
Taibbi captures what it is that makes the Occupations feel so refreshing:
People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.
What the Occupations provide is a place to re-spark the dreaming. A loving jolt out of the coma state. The Occupy movement isn't claiming to have the answers. It's reminding us that we are the answers. That we all have it in us if we work together. But, to get there we need to be reminded of how to dream and how to get back in touch with aligning our values to how we live.
Before returning to the bigger vision of the movement, Taibbi takes a brief moment to explain that while he, at first, thought it was a bad idea to focus on the police response to the protests, he has changed his mind on that, too.
This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.
What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive.
He's getting it.
What I note strongly is that it took Taibbi time to get it. Early in the article he says:
That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle.
If these protests were one-day events he never would have seen it. He's started out as what many would call a progressive thinker and still, it has taken 8 weeks for him to get here. So, how long before more and more people get the point? Is it reasonable to think someone with a more parochial nature might take 12 weeks? 52 weeks? We need to keep Occupying until we've occupied the minds of everyone long enough for the message to break through the lifetimes of previous conditioning.
We need more and more Matt Taibbis to tell us about their epiphanies and how they got from rejecting or pooh-pooh-ing this movement to empathizing with it.