By Esther Kreider-Verhalle, November 30th, 2011 
Event Recap
The third session of the Flying Seminar offered an opportunity to deliberate possibilities for the next phase of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Bill Zimmerman, a self-described veteran troublemaker, gave an account of his many experiences with progressive actions in the United States. Not unlike the two earlier sessions, in which OWS members compared notes with Polish and Japanese troublemakers, the current activists were able to compare and contrast their knowledge and their ideas with yet another out-of-the-box thinker.
Bill Zimmerman was in New York City to give talks and promote his book, a memoir that recounts a history of American political activism starting in the 1960s through Zimmerman’s personal experiences.
When it comes to organizing people, Zimmerman opened a box full of tactics that he and his fellow activists have used over the years to spur and demand change. He started off with letting us in on a lesson he learned early on. After having been active in increasingly militant protests against the Vietnam War, he realized that this kind of activism did not resonate with the public. The movement was forced to reconnect with people or otherwise lose its essential support. As it turned out, Americans responded to the call for humanitarian aid and Zimmerman was able to organize the international charity Medical Aid for Indochina, which brought humanitarian relief from American citizens beyond enemy lines. This prompted a serious discussion about the need to connect and stay connected with ‘your audience’ and how to get people who are sympathetic to a cause to participate.
Inevitably, this also brought back the more strategic question of wanting to work within the current capitalist system or striving for an alternative scenario through a systemic social-economic change. Most discussants were in favor of the use of creative instruments within our current system. Of course, Zimmerman’s experience lies exactly there. He was active in electoral campaigns, organized populist movements, produced political commercials, and worked on ballot initiatives, an instrument of direct democracy that is allowed in 23 states. As Jan Gross put it, “The framework is not your adversary, it can be filled with friendly initiatives.”
The systemic question reminded those around the . . .
Read more: Dec. 3rd: OWS Meets Bill Zimmerman (Video)
By David Howell, November 29th, 2011 
The headline on the front page of the Thanksgiving Day The New York Times: “Opening Day for Holiday Shopping Shows Divide.”
The next day – Black Friday – Bloomberg ran a story with the headline “U.S. Workers’ Pay Slide Poses Consumer Risk. ”
It may turn out to have been a “Black Friday” for top end retailers, but it’s a bleak season for low income America and the businesses that cater to it. According to the Times’ story: “Wal-Mart’s profits declined in the third quarter as it kept many prices low so its shoppers could afford them.” Michael T. Duke, Wal-Mart’s chief executive, told analysts that ‘There is a real sense that the economic strain is taking its toll.” Without the fuel of credit that had increasingly been required to power spending by low-income workers, Wal-Mart now has to resort to layaway plans for its shoppers.
As 10 percentage points of national income has been directed away from the bottom 80% to the top 1% since 1979, those paid the lowest wages have seen their buying power erode the most. While the quality and quantity of education force can explain much of the distribution of income within the bottom 99% (together with personal networks, effort and luck), differences in educational attainment have nothing to do with the transition of the American economy to extreme inequality since the 1970s. It is also quite clear that among developed countries, America is exceptional: only the UK comes close to US-style extreme inequality.
The lesson is that extreme inequality is the outcome of political choices that have empowered a tiny minority. It has to do with political choices, the way institutions function, and social norms; it is not a natural market payoff to investments in education. The shift of income to the top .1% (which has driven the growth of the top 1%) reflects the market power of a small number of CEOs and finance, medical and legal professionals.
Here are some metrics that focus on what has happened to the wage/salary earnings of American workers.
Employee compensation in the . . .
Read more: The Metrics of Protest: Black Friday and Low-Wage America
By Anna Paretskaya, November 28th, 2011 
The long-anticipated opening of the renovated Bolshoi Theater in Moscow last month was another sign that the country has transitioned from post-socialism to post-post-socialism. As one scholar observed, the post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s (not unlike its Soviet predecessor, I should add) was founded on a metaphor of “historical rupture and social rebirth,” of rejection of the past and construction of the new social, political, and economic realities. However, in the new millennium, which more or less coincided with political ascent of Vladimir Putin, a new metaphor, that of “civilizational continuity,” has emerged and the current Russian “vision of political history and social identity [is] based in continuities, at various historical depths, linking [its] present with the Soviet and pre-Soviet eras.” Such reconceptualizaiton of the distant and more recent pasts is “coupled with the reappearance of particularist ideologies that set Russia in explicit opposition to Western states, social norms, and geopolitical interests,” which no doubt is a reaction to the post-Soviet import of Western “experts” and their economic wisdom and political counsel backed by NATO troops encroaching on the Russian space.
At the theater’s opening ceremony, Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev pronounced the theater to be “one of our grandest national brands” (bolshoi translates as big or great). The six-year-long and nearly 700-million-dollar renovation resulted in extensive upgrades to stage technology (it now has 3D and multimedia capability) and at the same time in the return to the 19th-century look of the theater’s décor. Frescoes, tapestries, chandeliers, mosaic floors were restored, while the Soviet hammer and sickle throughout the theater were replaced with a double-headed eagle, the symbol of both the tsarist and contemporary Russia.
The restoration and the opening performance attest more to Russia’s recent movement toward reconciliation with its various pasts. Guests at the invitation-only gala consisted of Russian beau monde: haute couture designers and television personalities, artists and designers, bankers and industrialists. But it seemed that whoever was issuing invitations wanted or, likely, was instructed to put together a guest list showing that whatever momentary political disagreements Russians might have, they can be . . .
Read more: Big Is Beautiful Again in Russia: The Return of the Bolshoi Theater
By Aaron Bornstein, November 26th, 2011 
The clearing of Occupations in New York and around the country has presented challenges to and new possibilities for the Occupy Wall Street movement. A particularly creative group, which I joined and have described here, The Think Tank, is creatively responding to the challenge. They continue to hold sessions in Zuccotti, as they are also moving to other city locations. The summary here prepared by Aaron Bornstein of a session he facilitated in the Park on November 20, 2011, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm, reveals the power of the actions. I received the report from Bornstein as an email to people working in the group. I publish it with his permission. -Jeff
Topic: “Policing and the movement: How to engage, whether to engage,and whether it’s a distraction” facilitator: aaron
This was a really spirited discussion of what police are doing, what they should be doing, and whether we are distracting ourselves by focusing too much on them. Participants seemed to have broad consensus on maintaining nonviolence, but standing our ground in the face of police aggressiveness, even if it meant they would use force on us. Multiple participants pointed to the immense value of widespread cameras and recordings, in both preventing police violence and transmitting images of it to the world. Participants seemed split on the question of whether the attention given to police aggression was distracting from the movement’s goals. Some thought it was an unfortunate focus, some thought it was part of the problem we were fighting.
One exchange in particular sticks out in my mind. Over the course of the discussion, several participants had suggested that police officers were just trying to do a job, and thus couldn’t shoulder the entire blame for their actions. When Richard got on stack, he delivered a rather passionate excoriation of this suggestion, and then took it further by posing the question of who exactly it is that takes that kind of job, which — please correct me if I’m wrong, Richard – I took as a suggestion (which seems to be borne out by experience) . . .
Read more: Policing and OWS: A Think Tank Discussion
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 23rd, 2011 
Thanksgiving is a special holiday, the great American secular celebration: a common ritual, eating of a turkey dinner, almost universally practiced, in all the nooks and crannies of the social landscape. Indians may not be very enthusiastic. The return on their historic hospitality was not very good. And those who are concerned about the Native American place in the national story may have their critical doubts, but still just about everyone takes part, or at least is expected to take part, including me. A conversation I had with a good friend earlier in the week reveals what it’s all about.
My pool at the Theodore Young Community Center will be closed from Thursday through Sunday. Knowing the pool would be closed, I made sure I went today and earlier in the week. I chatted with Beverly McCoy , the receptionist and social center of gravity there, about the upcoming holiday. She explained her preparations.
Today she is dri ving to her son and his family in Central Pennsylvania. Yesterday and Monday, she was preparing, doing her packing and making the cornbread stuffing, a must for her African American family. Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without Bev’s down home stuffing, a specialty of the South.
I have a similar but slightly different expectation at my Thanksgiving dinner at my sister in law, Geraldine’s, place in Brooklyn, across from the museum. She and her husband Bernard will cook the dinner, but one of the necessities is prepared by my other sister in law, Lana, the kugel (the traditional Jewish noodle pudding). As Beverly’s Thanksgiving requires her cornbread stuffing, ours wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without Lana’s kugel.
My daughter Brina felt this deeply when she was spending her junior year abroad in Paris. When the program director organized a potluck Thanksgiving dinner for the Brown students studying there years ago, Brina immediately thought of the kugel, which was a big success, even as it puzzled the French Thanksgiving guests, a sweet dish that wasn’t dessert. And as it happened, Brina met her future husband that year, and . . .
Read more: Thanksgiving, Kugel, and Cornbread Stuffing
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 22nd, 2011 
In my last post, I argued that Occupy Wall Street had clear, present and positive goals. I made my argument by focusing on one part of the New York occupation, the Think Tank group. I highlighted its principled commitment to open discussion of the problems of the day, based on a radical commitment to democracy: social, cultural and economic, as well as political. This is serious business. It can be consequential as OWS figures out ways to not only speak in the name of the 99%, but also in a language that the 99% can understand, so that it can respond and act. I promise to analyze directly the challenges involved in a future post. But I’ve been working hard these past weeks, and don’t have the energy to do the hard work required. Today, I feel like something a bit lighter, and will be suggestive and less direct about the big challenges, reviewing the Republican Presidential field, and some other more comic elements of the present political landscape in the United States in the context of the opening that OWS has provided.
Commentators broadly agree: the Republican field for President is weak. The likely nominee, Mitt Romney, appears to be cynical to the core. Making his name as a reasonable moderate Republican Governor of Massachusetts, he is now running as a right-wing ideologue. Once pro-choice, he is now pro-life. Once for government supported universal health insurance, now he is violently opposed to Obamacare. Once in favor of reasonable immigration reform, now he is an anti-amnesty radical. David Brooks, the conservative columnist we of the left like to quote most, supports Romney with the conviction that he doesn’t say what he means.
After Romney, things get even stranger. If these people mean what they say (and I think they do), we are in real trouble, because one of them could be the next President of the United States, insuring its decay as the global power. Perhaps this is a reason for radicals to support Republicans? But then again, . . .
Read more: Republicans, Revolutionaries and the Human Comedy
By Gary Alan Fine, November 21st, 2011 
 One of my first contributions to Deliberately Considered was an essay on Glenn Beck (“Beck and Call”), a commentator who at that moment (February 2, 2011) was riding high. But who hears Glenn Beck today? He has a website that requires a subscription. In the past year, Mr. Beck has become marginal to the public debate, and perhaps in becoming marginal, the sharp fringe of the Tea Party has become so as well. He was the tribune for the aggrieved during the Tea Party Summer.
Last winter – back in the day – Glenn Beck was a roaring tiger. His claws were thought so bloody that when he attacked Frances Fox Piven, one of the leading activist scholars of social movements, a string of professional organizations rose to the lady’s defense, including the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. After the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, many progressives concluded that Professor Piven was next in line for assassination from the rightists roiled and boiled by Beck.
Today we frame Glenn Beck’s symmetry as less fearful. Those who worried that Professor Piven was walking on a knife’s edge might be surprised that her latest book, published in August, is entitled Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven: The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate. Glenn Beck has become Professor Piven’s marketing tool. Without Glenn Beck’s opposition, Piven’s writings might seem less essential. (As a fellow former president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, I am pleased that her deservedly influential writings have become essential. I am attempting to find someone of equal stature to hate me. The placid readers of this flying seminar know that I try my best.)
However, my point is . . .
Read more: Glenn Beck, Prophet?
By E. Colin Ruggero, November 18th, 2011 
I spent the early evening of November 8th wandering around the Occupy Philadelphia (OP) encampment. I was trying to clear my head before a scheduled talk by well-known social movement scholar (and one of Glenn Beck’s “most wanted”), Frances Fox Piven.
Ten minutes before the talk was scheduled begin, I moved to the stage area and found a surprisingly large group of people had begun to gather. I was immediately struck by how out of place they looked based on my experience. They lacked the all-weather, busy or exhausted appearance that characterizes a lot of people I encounter at OP. But they also didn’t seem curious or confused. Their gaze took in the camp with understanding. They were nearly all white, young, and dressed similarly, most likely, college students.
I found a spot off to the side of the crowd as Piven was introduced and began to speak. Moments later, I was approached by a black couple, a woman and man, both in their late teens or early twenties, standing arm-in-arm, carrying shopping bags, with glowing faces. They appeared to be on a date and were clearly happy to be together, even in love.
Gesturing toward the stage, the young woman asked me, “What’s all this?” I began to reply that she, Piven, is an academic, but I was interrupted. “No,” the woman corrected me, “all this,” sweeping her arm across the entire encampment. I told her it was Philly’s answer to Occupy Wall Street, “You know, in New York.” She stared back at me, shaking her head slightly. The young man quickly said, “Oh, yeah, I think I heard about that, but I didn’t realize it was here too. Well, this is good because there are problems. I just didn’t know about it cause I didn’t see it on the news or anything.” I asked where they lived. “North Philly, like 21st and Cecil B. Moore.” This is less that 2 miles from where they stood now. Indeed, they live only blocks from Temple University, where Piven had spoken earlier in the day.
That evening, I . . .
Read more: Spirit of ’76: Occupy Philadelphia, Voicelessness, and the Challenge of Growing the Occupy Wall Street Movement
By Erick Ihlenburg, November 17th, 2011 
The expansion of natural gas drilling in the Finger Lakes region of New York State poses a significant threat to vital water, land and air resources. Large scale, widespread drilling operations would permanently alter the landscape and cultural heritage of the region. The drilling and extraction processes, known as horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, are currently under review by the State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). In the near future, DEC is expected to finalize regulations for the fracking industry and to begin processing new permit applications, amid plenty of controversy. Public comments on the proposed regulations, and accompanying Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement, can be submitted to DEC through December 12, 2011.
Proponents of fracking assume that an inevitable economic boom will sweep through the region as soon as the first new wells are permitted. While some property owners have already entered into lucrative leases to their underground mineral rights, many others are being left out of the leasing bonanza, by choice or by chance. This is a map of Finger Lakes properties with gas leases (in pink):
The map does not indicate the number of new wells that could be sited in the region, but it is obvious that the gas industry anticipates a huge expansion of drilling in the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes. While a gas lease does not equal gas drilling, it is a necessary precursor.
Multi-well pad and horizontal drilling technologies enable a single well pad to produce gas across numerous surrounding leases. Beyond the 2-3 acre drilling sites, fracking requires an extensive network of pipelines, compressor stations and trucking routes. All of these fracking components pose distinct threats to human health and the environment in the region.
There are numerous documented examples of well water contamination from fracking operations. The issue is not the injection of fracking fluids deep underground. It is what happens to those toxic fluids once they are used up and pumped . . .
Read more: Fracking in the Finger Lakes
By Daniel Sherwood, November 15th, 2011 
“Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.” -M. Bloomberg
I find this to be the most interesting component of Bloomberg’s statement today. On its face, it appears to be an appeal to the virtues of public discussion and critical public debate. Bloomberg suggests that if the Occupy Wall Street movement is in possession of the most truthful account of our current collective predicament, then it will be proven in the so called marketplace of ideas.
Yet, in my judgment, Bloomberg’s appeal to the tenets of deliberative democracy is nothing more than cynical, and, in fact, a strategic attempt to silence protest and squash democracy. At the forefront of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is a critique of the inequality of voice within the public sphere. The kinds of arguments members of the political elite, such as Bloomberg, are even capable of hearing is precisely what is at issue. Take, for example, Bloomberg’s recent critique of the association of Wall Street Bankers with the 2008 economic collapse. Bloomberg blames the collapse on government housing policy that encouraged the expansion of the home owning class in the United States. In Bloomberg’s mind, the federal government put pressure on lenders to lend to unqualified borrowers. Yet, as Michael Powell of the New York Times points out, all available evidence proves this argument to be baseless. Bloomberg cannot even imagine that Wall Street banks could possibly be at fault for the great ongoing economic calamity we are all suffering through.
A fundamental critical point of OWS is that political elites have difficulty even hearing certain kinds of arguments. The fact that the elite commentators and politicians continuously prove their myopia by misunderstanding the basic structure and symbolics of OWS movement demonstrates the movement’s ongoing critical importance. Some, such as the Times’ David Brooks, acknowledge that the OWS movement has successfully “changed the conversation,” but they still decry the movement’s lack of leadership and what they perceive to be its . . .
Read more: Mayor Bloomberg versus Occupy Wall Street
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