I unofficially joined the Occupy Wall Street movement on August 2nd of 2011, not because I wanted to demand anything from the government, but because I wanted to use what I had learned over the past several years as a data analyst at a global advertising agency to somehow attack the system. I had, and still have I suppose, an agenda to somehow turn corporations upon one another, make them divide and conquer themselves so that we (I) can stop working for them and so that they’ll start working for us. Many of my comrades abhorred my ideas and proposals, like the one I had discussed in a private email to Micah White about having corporations actually fund us while we camped out. However, no one told me I was unwelcome, and I actually have met other individuals who found my ideas appealing. I, furthermore, have yet to be told that I am unwelcome at camp in spite of the fact that the same email thread was publicly leaked, and I have since been accused of being a corporate stooge by several conspiracy theorists with blogs. The movement is tolerant of diverse and extreme opinions, which is its strength as well as the reason why there isn’t a coherent message. Or is there?

I’ll confess that I never really imagined that Occupy Wall Street would actually happen. I knew the turn out wouldn’t be anywhere near the 20,000 that Adbusters had called for. There had been 200 at most at the New York City General Assembly meetings leading up to the 17^th, and the occupywallst.org website didn’t even begin receiving more than a few thousand visitors until the 17^th. I didn’t bring my sleeping bag to Wall Street. I ran home and returned to the park with it. Waking up in Liberty Plaza on the morning of Sunday, September 18^th, was surreal. I thought the cause was lost on the morning of September 20^th while in my office cubicle I typed out an unanswered email for help from the New School community as I helplessly watched on www.livestream.com/globalrevolution an acquaintance being thrown to the ground, cuffed and dragged off in the rain for pitching a tent. However, the camp was teeming by the time I returned after work. I wasn’t the only person who thought that the police would sweep through and arrest the entire camp on the night of Saturday, September 24^th, after the brutal Union Square march, but then a photograph from the march made the cover of the Sunday morning edition of The Daily News, the police backed off and sometime shortly after that moment I and others I had talked to began to seriously believe that something much bigger than any of us was beginning to happen.

I also began to feel completely useless to the movement after that first week. It felt like every problem that arose at camp seemed to be addressed before I could even try to help address it. This wasn’t at all a bad problem to have. The camp seemed to grow on its own. Two others and I, using hand clickers, counted an average of 163 people sleeping in the camp on the morning of October 3^rd. The count was up to 603 the morning of October 10^th as news of occupations springing up in other cities continued to pour in. One of my closest comrades from Arts & Culture put it this way in a group email he sent out on October 12…

“For the sake of keeping your head sane and your heart still engaged, be aware: we are not in control. You are not in control. We at the NYC occupation are not in control. The website hosts are not in control. No one is in control of this hurricane. This realization is liberating. Think about this thoroughly.”

Why is Occupy Wall Street growing? No one in the media at least seems to even know what it is. The NYPD may have been the movement’s primary antagonist the first week, but the media took that role the next. Much like early Christianity, however, this movement has grown every time it’s been persecuted. Antagonistic news sources such as Fox, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal were so intent on framing the movement as a failure due to a lack of a single soundbyte goal that they were oblivious to the ways in which their derisive coverage actually stirred interest in the movement. This same coverage failed to resonate with the masses as well as the social media coverage we produced and which had beaten the mass media to the story by over a week.

Mainstream political attention came with mainstream media attention. Fox and others have tried to portray Occupy Wall Street as a liberal answer to the Tea Party. But it’s definitely not a political movement. A fellow member of the Occupy Wall Street PR working group told me to throw the term “post-political” around a lot and that our “goal” was to see as many people as possible attend General Assembly meetings across the country and globe while prepping me for a tense interview on Fox this past Monday on the occupenial of October 17^th. My senior colleague Hector R. Cordero-Gusman of CUNY Graduate Center and I found that 70% of 1,619 responses taken from a nonrandom survey sample of occupywallst.org traffic on October 5^th identified as politically independent as opposed to Democrat, 27%, and Republican, 3%. 93% of this sample supported the movement. 71% of 3,076 respondents from our latest survey, which is currently collecting data, identify as politically independent, which suggests that the finding is no fluke. A comrade I have yet to meet wrote this in a working draft of a non-cooptation statement sent to the Arts & Culture email group list…

“As the world continues to be galvanized by this movement, we wish to clarify that Occupy Wall Street is not and has never been affiliated with any established political party, candidate or organization. We are not a mouthpiece for any political organization. Our only affiliation is with the people who make up the 99%, those individuals who suffer from the exploitation by and collusion between the 1% and the representatives of their government, those individuals who are neither left-wing nor right-wing, conservative or liberal, but both. We are the economic 99%, joined together to re-establish the people as the authentic voices in democratic societies ab initio.”

Occupy Wall Street has nothing to do with empowering politicians, it has everything to do with empowering ourselves. But what is Occupy Wall Street if not a political movement? Social struggle perhaps? The bankers have expressed their prejudice towards us by attempting to pour champagne on us from the balcony of Cipriani on the afternoon of the 17^th. I was informed that they were prevented from doing so by the NYPD from a reporter from The New York Times. I happened to meet the reporter at a counter-protest he was covering, which the bankers had organized and foolishly advertised on Facebook for the afternoon of September 23^rd at the corner of Wall and Broad Street in order to sip champagne to our “good-riddance.” They thought we were about to leave due to an incoming storm. We called legal observers from the New York National Lawyer’s guild in the hopes of having them arrested for violating open container laws, but the bankers never showed due to some light rain, which never managed to stop us from continuing our protest.

It seems to me that the level of dissatisfaction with the country’s and the world’s political, financial and mass media systems has finally become so pervasive that respondents who are white (83%), male (62%), straight (85%), single (48%), full-time employed (47%) with a college education or better (92%), yet who make less than $24,999 (46%), have come to fully embrace and support the actions and ideas of a new revolutionary community of people. They do in fact strike me as a group of ethnically diverse and sexually adventurous anarchists who smoke marijuana on a habitual basis such as myself, but who would never actually jeopardize the movement by giving the NYPD a reason to arrest us by doing any of this in front of them or the media. I’ve heard reports from a couple that arrived at my apartment around 5:00am on October 16^th after being released from jail that they overheard members of the NYPD direct other detainees not with the movement that they could eat and sleep at Liberty Plaza.

Occupy Wall Street is not a mainstream political movement in spite of the fact that it is now a mainstream social movement. It began with a relatively small group of people who all must have read the same books at one point or another, and it has quickly become an autonomous social organism with a deceptively sophisticated electronic collective consciousness whose mass has grown in increments of individuals from morning to night and from week to weekend. It is a leaderless, directionless, self-regulating community, with independent media capabilities now powered by solar and bio-diesel energy. Food and space to sleep are free for anyone, and everyone is always welcome to freely come and go as they please. It strikes me as a community built on values which demand that that we do our best to embody the sort of changes we want to experience rather than demand them from a politician from the failing capitalist system that surrounds Liberty Plaza. Similar camps have been autonomously established across the country and globe, and I can’t imagine them growing any smaller over the long term as our global society enters a second global recession.

My tentative hypothesis is that Occupy Wall Street isn’t a social movement as much as it is the beginning of a social change, a forward return to form of communal social organization that is beginning to re-exist now that the capitalist social system, which supplanted it, is no longer willing nor able to meet the needs of the masses.

President Obama offered a critique of Fox News in an interview published in an issue of Rolling Stone.    This absolutely shocked and appalled Fox shock jocks Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity the evening of Obama’s speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on Tuesday.  They were shocked by any suggestion that they were anything but “fair and balanced,” providing the alternative to the kowtowing liberals of the mainstream media.  They were appalled by Obama’s criticism.  (link)

Their response is cynical.  They pretend to be what they are not, news commentators on a news network. Obama’s critique on the other hand is on firmer ground, even if it is not clear that it was wise.  Isn’t it below the President’s dignity to engage in polemics with partisan press criticism?  Doesn’t it enlarge them and belittle him?  These are the questions of the talking heads on cable and on the Sunday morning shows.

But actually in the interview Obama was quite careful, offering a measured serious answer to a provocative question:

Rolling Stone: “What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?”

President Obama: “[Laughs] Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.”

Obama placed Fox in a tradition of opinionated American journalism, and noted he disagreed with the Fox opinions and doesn’t think they are good for America.  While I don’t see how a reasonable person, either pro or anti-Obama, can find fault with his response, I also don’t think that Obama went far enough.  Serious media innovation is occurring at Fox, with potentially deep political effects.  It is probably the reason why Obama feels compelled to criticize it from time to time.

Fox News is a truly innovative media form, particularly for television.  It purports to present news, but actually it is in the business of political mobilization.

In the case of the Tea Party protests, this is most clearly the case.  Glenn Beck announces a mass demonstration, the 9/12 rally.  On the Fox News programs and discussion shows, the developments leading up to the demonstration are reported, and their significance is discussed.  Together with Beck’s agitation for the event, these reports and discussions bring the planned event to the attention of a large audience.  Even if the event was initially the result of grassroots organization, as were the Tea Party Protests called for “tax day,” April 15, 2009, the attention of the public to the event now goes well beyond its original planners and their capacity to mobilize the population.

The French media theorist and sociologist, and my friend, Daniel Dayan, who I hope will join us in a future post, highlights the importance of this showing in his work on “monstration. ” In his research he is particularly interested in how the experience and expressions of a particular social circle moves beyond a delimited public, and is brought to the attention of a broader public.  This act is of primary political significance in media politics, something Fox has done very well, helping the previously marginal to become part of the mainstream.

Then the event happens.  Fox is there giving it full coverage. It is the major event of the day, the story that is given wall to wall coverage, while the other news sources tend to report it as one story among many.  The fact that only Fox “properly” reports on the event is said to reveal the bias of the “lame stream media,” to use the language of the American media critic and Fox commentator, Sarah Palin.  The format applies to major happenings, but also to the trivial, from the Islamic bias of textbooks in Texas, to the booing of Palin’s daughter Bristol on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Fox is not just biased as it reports the news.  It produces the news from beginning to end.  Its competitors in broadcast and cable journalism may lean left, MSNBC, or center, CNN, but they are not in the news making business in the same sense as Fox, and to a greater extent, its parent company, News Corporation.

To be sure, this form of media organization makes money.  Murdock’s number one concern may be to be successful, as President Obama maintained in Rolling Stone, but it is notable that the success is political as well as monetary.  Rupert Murdock and News Corp makes money, while America is given a strong coordinated push to the right.

Barack Obama gave a campaign speech yesterday on the campus of the University of Wisconsin which was largely absent from last night’s newscast. (link) Now, I will take a closer look at the content of his speech.

Obama made his points cogently, identifying the problem and the obstacles:

Think about it, when I arrived in Washington 20 months ago, my hope and my expectation was that we could pull together, all of us as Americans — Democrats and Republicans and independents — to confront the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. I hoped and expected that we could get beyond some of the old political divides between Democrats and Republicans, blue states and red states, that had prevented us from making progress for so long because although we are proud to be Democrats, we are prouder to be Americans.
Instead, what we found when we arrived in Washington was the rawest kind of politics. What we confronted was an opposition party that was still stuck on the same failed policies of the past…

He criticized the opposition:

Understand, for the last decade, the Republicans in Washington subscribed to a very simple philosophy – you cut taxes mostly for millionaires and billionaires…You cut regulations for special interests, whether it’s the banks or the oil companies or health insurance companies. Let them write their own rules. You cut back on investments in education and clean energy and research and technology.

So basically the idea was if you just put blind faith in the market, if we let corporations play by their own rules, if we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America would automatically grow and prosper. But that philosophy failed…

He highlighted Democratic accomplishments

And over the last 20 months — over the last 20 months, we’ve made progress… We’re no longer facing the possibility of a second depression — and I have to say, Wisconsin, that was a very real possibility when I was sworn in. We had about six months where the economy was teetering on the edge, and we could have plunged into a second depression.
Now the economy is growing again. Now the private sector has created jobs for the last eight months in a row. There are about 3 million Americans who wouldn’t be working today if not for the economic plan that we put into place. Those are facts.

To rebuild this economy on a stronger foundation, we passed Wall Street reform to make sure that a crisis like this never happens again, so that these reforms are going to end the era of taxpayer-funded bailouts forever –reforms that will stop mortgage lenders from taking advantage of homeowners, reforms that’ll stop credit card companies from hitting you with hidden fees or jacking up your rates without any reason.

But we didn’t stop there. We started investing again in American research and American technology and homegrown American clean energy because I don’t want solar panels and wind turbines and electric cars of the future built in Europe or Asia. I want them built right here in the United States of America with American workers.

To help middle-class families get ahead, we passed a tax cut for 95 percent of working families. I want to repeat that: We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families, because if you were listening to the other side, you’d think we raised taxes.

But, again, we deal in facts. And the fact is, we cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We passed 16 different tax cuts for America’s small business owners, who create the majority of jobs in this country. We passed health care reform that will stop insurance companies from denying you coverage or dropping your coverage because you’re sick.

And he was sure to link his specific audience, young people, to his programs and policies:

And by the way, Madison, let me just see a show of hands, how many people are under the age of 26 in this crowd? Every single one of you, when you get out of college, if you have not found a job that offers you health care, you’re going to be able to stay on your parents’ health care until you’re 26 years old, so you don’t end up taking the risk of getting sick and being bankrupt.

We finally fixed the student loan system so that tens of billions of dollars — tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies that were going to big banks, they were acting as middlemen, and the student loan programs were going through these financial intermediaries. They were taking billions of dollars of profits. We said, well, let’s cut out the middleman. We’ll give the loans directly to students and that means million more students are going to be able to take advantage of grants and student loans.

And by the way, we also kept a promise I made on the day that I announced my candidacy. We have removed combat troops from Iraq and we have ended our combat mission in Iraq.

But he also did not shy away from the challenges and limitations:

We have made progress over the last 20 months. And that is the progress that you worked so hard for in 2008. Now, we didn’t get everything done. Sometimes people say, well, you know, this item is not done and that idea — well, I’ve only been here two years, guys. If you look at the checklist, we’ve already covered about 70 percent, so I figured I needed to have something to do for the next couple of years.

Linking their stories and his to the issues involved:

I believe in an America that gave my grandfather the chance to go to college because of the GI Bill. I believe in an America that gave my grandparents the chance to buy a home because of the Federal Housing Authority. I believe in an America that gave their children and grandchildren the chance to fulfill our dreams thanks to scholarships and student loans like some of you are on. That’s the America I know. That’s the choice in this election.

Obama, of course, told the story of the last two years from his partisan point of view.  He celebrated the Democrats’ accomplishments, criticized the Republicans because they obstructed his attempts to address the pressing problems of the day, and he further criticized, even ridiculed, the alternatives they proposed as old and warn out, actually the policies that created the financial and economic crises.  He outlined the clear choice and linked his audience’s hopes and dreams to the choice he was presenting.

This is Obama the politician, not the Chief Executive.  He was doing politics, not governing.  But shouldn’t the news take note of this turn?  Shouldn’t they contrast his account of the last two years with the Republicans account?  Shouldn’t they analyze what each side is now proposing, including the way they propose it?

That the 24/7 news, of the left, right and the center, did not devote the air time to the forty-five minute speech indicates their interpretive frame for politics.  In fact, between the Republicans proposal of a Contract with America and the Democrats legislative accomplishments and direction, which Obama highlighted in Madison, there is a real substantive, Tocqueville might define it as big, principled politics going on.  Yet the media reports small.

Perhaps the difference between my students and me on politics in the United States (link) is that they accurately depicted the way the media reports, while I am responding to the parts of the political performance that often stands outside the cable news frame, but nonetheless is highly consequential in the long run.  In cable news frame, the commentary does not illuminate the alternative political principles and philosophies, the alternative marshaling of evidence to support the competing political positions, nor provide a guide for understanding the cogency of the alternatives.  It just works from preconceived ideas.  It misinforms, overlooking the fact that there is serious big politics now going on.

When I went to the television to watch the speech, I was surprised to see that only CNN was broadcasting it, and even they cut it. They skipped the opening remarks when the President thanked the notables present (significantly including Russ Feingold who was missing from Obama’s last full throated partisan address in Milwaukee on Labor Day), and broke off from Obama after about fifteen minutes into the speech so that their regular talking heads could analyze his remarks and the latest political gossip, proceeding with their usual nightly opposing talking point exchanges. I quickly ran to my computer to watch the remainder of the speech, which I found to be an impassioned and reasoned account of why it is important to vote for the Democrats in the upcoming elections.

Transcript

I was surprised the speech wasn’t covered by the news programs. I guess it was deemed to be too partisan, but it was strange. Fox was going on about why Obama is obsessed with them, celebrating the fact that a President has made negative remarks about their one-sided coverage. MSNBC commentators were continuing to fight last summer’s intra-party battles, exploring how the President had not adequately confronted Republicans, caving into Lieberman on the public option before it was necessary, getting less on healthcare as a result, and CNN turned to a Republican operative to balance the President’s partisan remarks. Instead of highlighting the political position of the President, as he carefully presented it to his supporters, the politics of the day was reduced to endless bickering from three different political angles.