[Vision2020] The Occupy Movement’s Next Move: Retaking the Offensive in the Battle of the Story

[Ted Moffett]

http://www.calaborfed.org/index.php/site/page/the_occupy_movements_next_move_retaking_the_offensive_in_the_battle_of_the_story/

The Occupy Movement’s Next Move: Retaking the Offensive in the Battle
of the Story

by Steve Stallone, Pacific Media Workers Guild

For the Occupy movement, as in battlefield of the narrative, whose
story is being told, whose perspective is the dominant frame, who are
perceived to be the heroes and villains, the criminals and victims, is
crucial.

Remember when the stock market crashed in late 2008, how it was talked
about around the office printer, in newspapers and on talk shows?
Remember when Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Bernie Madoff were
household names spoken with disdain? When there were outraged cries
for justice, televised Congressional hearings, and calls for
accountability and restitution?

The mainstream media, spurred on by its journalistic tendencies,
actually covered the real story of what happened—for a while. Then the
right-wing spin machine fought back.  Somehow the crisis was now all
the fault of the greedy public sector unions, with their outrageous
salaries and pensions that were bankrupting local and state
governments everywhere, causing cuts in services, lowering living
standards and expectations, putting popular programs like Social
Security and Medicare on the chopping block again.  No more mention
that most all those pension funds were doing fine until Wall Street
speculators and the big banksters lost so much of the money in them.

That version had some success for almost a couple of years. Then a
handful of brave souls in New York City did something bold, sort of
silly in its symbolism really, certainly unrealistic as a tactic. They
pitched some tents, created an urban campsite and said there’s
something dreadfully wrong here.  So they were going to “occupy” Wall
Street and refocus attention on the real culprits of the crisis.

The call to hold the masters of the economy responsible for the mess
they created made a comeback, this time with a deeper understanding
born of the bitter experience of the last three years.  And that
shared experience brought a new consciousness of the sharp class
divide in modern American society, simply but effectively expressed in
the “99%” slogan.

The clumsy repression of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the NYPD
broadcast the occupiers’ voices throughout the national and global
media, inspiring and provoking echo demonstrations in cities
everywhere, just as the Madison, Wisconsin Capitol occupiers had
called forth spontaneous actions supporting public employees and
services earlier this year.

The message of the “99%” resonated with working people everywhere and
“normal” folks started occupations in their hometowns.  Mainstream
media began doing stories about heartland white people losing their
jobs through no fault of their own, having their homes foreclosed on
and their dreams crushed. On national TV news and in daily newspapers
around the country phrases like “income inequality” and “corporate
greed”—code for class society—were being constantly repeated.

Natural allies like unions saw their concerns being voiced by workers
outside of the official labor movement, and joined in. Liberals and
leftist clamored to be part of the new dynamic movement.

We defined the terms of debate so thoroughly that even the Oakland
police, after violently trying to evict the occupation there, are now
claiming to be part of the “99%.”

The right-wing spin machine was caught off guard again, but, reworking
their mainstream media sources, began a new offensive.  They painted
the encampments as public health and safety problems, and the
participants as an unruly, leaderless and unfocused mob.

The mainstream media keeps trying to say the Occupy movement has no
message. What part of 99% don’t they get? The message is that America,
and the world, has a highly stratified class structure and is becoming
more so all the time.

But class consciousness is precisely the message the right needs to
suppress most. While camping laws are minor infractions, and health
and safety issues have been addressed by the occupiers organizing
themselves, the fear of violence is the right’s greatest
message-diversion weapon.

In Oakland the police were all too willing to oblige with that. Like
the NYPD, the Oakland police attacked the campers with an unprovoked
and over-the-top violent response. Nearly killing an Iraq War veteran
set them back enough for the General Strike to gain momentum and the
movement to claim the moral high ground.

But the mainstream media reported a few broken windows as the violence
of the movement they had predicted. Somehow smashing windows was
equated with bashing heads. Then the shooting death of one young
African American man on the perimeter of the encampment, related or
not to the occupation, seemed to confirm the right’s narrative and
gave Mayor Jean Quan her excuse to evict the occupation again, as if
the city had ever cared about the other more than 100 deaths in
Oakland this year.

So now we are no longer talking about the 99% or the crimes of the 1%.
The talk is all about violence and evicting an encampment that is both
dangerous and a drain on city resources. Now the movement is all taken
up with defending a batch of tents.

This has become a political liability, distracting from our real
message and real work. Occupation as a tactic has outlived its
usefulness. It was meant to get attention, and Occupy has certainly
done that. It’s time to move on.

The vast majority of people who have participated in Occupy events,
who have been moved by and echoed its core messages, have never slept
over in an encampment. More than 10,000 people joined in on the
General Strike activities in Oakland Nov. 2, but the encampment has
never even had 200 tents there.

Which is not to say we give up on holding public space, especially
Oakland’s significantly symbolic Oscar Grant Plaza. But if everyone
went home at night and returned the next day to plan and carry out the
continuing actions of the movement, the enemy would be disarmed—no
more camping law infractions, no more health and safety issues, and
hopefully the violence can be corralled. We eliminate the distractions
from our core messages and focus on the real work ahead of us.

The only ones among us who would lose out are the truly homeless, who
have found a relatively safe place to crash and eat. Perhaps one
demand the Oakland Occupiers could make in talks with Mayor Jean Quan
and the city should be for sufficient housing and services for them.
It would both be practical, especially with winter weather moving in,
and in line with the movement’s goals.  We could claim a victory, and
indeed it would be one for the poorest of our 99%.

If the Occupy movement and its resonating messages of class division
and corporate accountability are to regain the offensive in these PR
wars, we have to recognize when the enemy has won a battle, and
readjust to the changed field of engagement. We need to rethink our
tactics and perhaps reinvent them.

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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett