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
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 11th, 2011 
What do these people want? What are they advocating? In the opinion of many, including Gary Alan Fine in his last post, it is easy to discern what OWS is against, but unclear what they are for. They know how to say no, he knows, but he wonders if they can say yes. He thinks this both about OWS and The Tea Party, as a detached but sympathetic observer of both.
Looking at OWS up close, taking part in a small but significant activity, I think the positive commitments of OWS are actually quite clear, and in marked contrast to The Tea Party. As I maintained in The Politics of Small Things, the democracy is in the details. I had an opportunity to look at some details in a corner of Zuccotti Park, joining the OWS Think Tank.
Many of the OWS activists who have taken part in The Flying Seminar sessions are active in the Think Tank. We started working together at The New School teach in. They have been among the active members of the seminar. I have visited them a couple of times in Zuccotti Park, and earlier this week, on Monday, I joined them in their work there. It was an illuminating afternoon.
From noon to 6:00, the Think Tank conducts discussion sessions of a special sort on a variety of topics. Many different people facilitate the discussions. I responded to an email call for help and volunteered to do my part. The workshop topics range from the quite general, to the immediate and practical. They hope to inform decision-making in the park and to further understanding of problems of broad public concern, and even contribute to the formulation of policy positions and recommendations. It’s one of the spaces where the big questions about the occupation are being answered in daily practice, a striking case of the politics of small things. It confirmed for me that in politics the means are a significant part of its . . .
Read more: The Clear, Present and Positive Goals of Occupy Wall Street
By Kei Nakagawa, November 9th, 2011 
Contingency is of the essence for creativity. The Flying Seminar session with members from Shiroto no Ran (Amateur Revolt), an anti-nuclear and counter cultural social movement group from Japan, and Occupy Wall Street, I think, was not an exception. What started as a rash decision by the Shiroto no Ran to come to New York to show their support to the OWS protest and to experience the heart of the occupation first-hand took an unplanned change after a chance meeting. Through a New School effort to create the time and space for deeper and meaningful dialogue, a valuable Japanese – American encounter occurred.
I heard the news about Shiroto no Ran’s visit just a day before their arrival. During their short stay at the Liberty Square, we met and talked about OWS. From our conversations, I began to realize how difficult it was for them to actually get the opportunity to really meet and get to know the people who are most engaged in the OWS movement. The activists in Zuccotti Park were too busy and things were changing too rapidly there. I realized that there was a need for creating a space that would facilitate a dialogue between these two groups of activists. A teach-in session organized by two New School professors, Jeffrey Goldfarb and Elzbieta Matynia, not only opened a door of opportunity, but also gave a concrete structure to my vague idea. From listening to their ideas about the Flying Seminar, I realized that we could have a serious conversation between these movements from different cultures. Just two days after I proposed the event, we all met, and my sense that it could be worthwhile, proved to be correct.
As a participant in both movements, I see my contribution in creating a space for dialogue as a modest one. But on the other hand, as a researcher who is working on the Japanese 1968 movement from a transnational perspective, I am especially interested. I am fascinated how such a dialogue is now possible in . . .
Read more: Toward Sustainable Occupations by Amateurs: Reflections on the OWS – Shiroto no Ran Flying Seminar
By Gary Alan Fine, November 4th, 2011 
 Grievance is the electricity of the powerless. It energizes masses. Yet, lacking bright vision, cursing the overlords cannot become a political program. Cures need calm confidence. Complaint awakens protest, but it is insufficient for transformation. Escaping dark plagues begins collective action; spying Canaan must follow.
In our dour moment in which citizens of all stripes are taking to the streets, the plazas, and the parks, we see accusing placards, but no persuasive manifestos. As sociologist William Gamson has pointed out, the first step is to demonstrate an “injustice frame” as a precursor to action. Point taken, but it is a start.
Despite their manifold and manifest differences, the polyester Tea Party and the scruffy Occupy Wall Street protests have at least this in common: palpable anger and resentment. We feel at the mercy of distant puppet masters, and elites in pinstripes and in gowns have much to answer for.
Neither the Partiers nor the Occupiers are wrong to recognize the sway of elites, even if they are not sufficiently aware of those powers that stand behind their own movements: David Koch, the Alliance for Global Justice, and FreedomWorks. Anti-elites are the playthings of the powerful.
Yet, despite their backers, both the Partiers and the Occupiers are solidly 99%’ers. Both radicals of the left and upstarts of the right think that there is not so much difference between the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration. The oil establishment and the financial services establishment could share breakfast of caviar and champagne, discussing whether their interests are better served by this president or the last one. Peasants with pitchforks are on no guest lists, whether they dress in denim or dacron. Despite partisan bickering, it is easy to feel that on the basic issues of security and capital the gap between competing establishments is small. I am struck by how little fundamental restructuring, hope and change has brought. The same powers will control health care, energy development, and financial services.
The fatal illusion of the Tea Party Movement is that America could . . .
Read more: The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street: Unhappy Warriors
By Harrison Schultz, November 1st, 2011 
I first heard reports of police sending released “vagrants,” for lack of a better term, to Liberty Plaza from two protestors who showed up at my apartment early on the morning after they were arrested on 10/15/2011 at the Times Square rally. The media now seems to be aware of this phenomenon as well. Harry Siegel reported in The New York Daily News:
“And there’s the rub: The ‘model’ civilization that’s sprung up at Zuccotti is itself increasingly divided between the stakeholders in the nascent movement who feel invested in the emerging economic, social and cultural causes of ‘the 99%,’ and hangers-on, including a fast-growing contingent of lawbreakers and lowlifes, many of whom seem to have come to the park in the last week with the cynical encouragement of the NYPD.”
But why would anyone interpret the presence of “lowlifes” at Liberty Plaza as in any way representative of OWS or even as a shortcoming of OWS, when it is now common knowledge that the NYPD has been sending these people to Liberty. Like many in the general public, Siegel has been duped by the fully legal yet fully underhanded tactics of the NYPD. He criticizes OWS when he clearly should criticize the NYPD, not to mention the entire criminal justice system of this nation.
OWS is not the source of this controversial issue within OWS, our nation’s criminal justice system is. The cynical tactic on the part of the NYPD demonstrates yet again that our justice system does nothing to “reform” individuals such as these. It reveals that our justice system, contrary to its expected purposes, takes no responsibility for protecting the public from the non-reformed, seasoned “lowlifes” they send to live among the general public, as well as at Liberty Plaza.
The presence of “vagrants” and the problems that they create at Liberty Plaza are not indicative of a failure of the occupation. It clearly represents a spectacular failure of a significant part of the system the occupation is directed against.
By David Howell, October 31st, 2011 
Occupy Wall Street protests have spread across the country behind the rallying cry that the “99 percent” have been left behind. There is a sense of outrage that the “system” is not just rigged in favor of the elite – something like the top 1% – but has spun out of control, leading to an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the very few.
Wage stagnation, the explosion of health and education costs as the American welfare state shrinks, and above all the financial manipulation of debt has generated extraordinary profits on Wall Street and massive indebtedness and housing foreclosures on Main Street. Losses from outrageous risk-taking by too-big-to-fail financial institutions are made good by the taxpayer, who is told there is no alternative.
This new gilded age political-economic system can be thought of as the interlocking trifecta of a mostly degraded and increasingly dual educational system, a financial system that became mostly unregulated by either law or social norms, and a political system increasingly corrupted by money.
The educational system has promoted a meritocracy of cumulative advantage. The vast majority of American students experience primary and secondary schools during which they fall far behind their peers in much of the rest of the developed (and even less-developed) world, and then face costs of post-secondary education that produce a level of debt that cannot possibly be repaid out of earnings. But the elite reproduces itself with an ability to pay for college and graduate school educations whose superiority has steadily grown, while at the same time feeling entitled since the educational process has also become extraordinarily competitive.
The financial sector was systematically deregulated as free market orthodoxy took off in the 1980s. This deregulation served to extract resources from the “real” economy and concentrated it in the bank accounts of a tiny elite, who are increasingly those same victors of the Darwinian educational competition. As the concentration of income at the very top of the distribution proceeded in the 1990s-2000s, . . .
Read more: The Metrics of Protest: “99 Percent”
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 28th, 2011 
Over the past week, big changes have occurred in the little virtual world of Deliberately Considered. We have put up a changed format that has been on the drawing boards for months. You will note that while now the text of only the most recent post is to be found on the home page, the titles and images of many more posts can be viewed and easily accessed. We have been thinking about doing this for quite some time, but rushed this week to get it going in response to events just south of my New School office in lower Manhattan, in Zuccotti Park and its neighborhood. We are part of the neighborhood and seek to have neighborly discussions.
The new format provides easier access to more of the unfolding reports, analyses and debates on our site, and allows us to bring forward posts past that continue to address pressing problems, particularly in the editors picks. And most important now, it will permit us to highlight more intensive investigations of pressing political issues, hoping to inform debate about those issues. Thus, now you will find the continuing posts on Occupy Wall Street.
Elzbieta Matynia and I find the occupation movement to be of great interest. For her, it is a case where her ideas of performative democracy apply. For me, the occupation is a clear case of the power of the politics of small things. We proposed and are now coordinating the Flying Seminar with our intellectual interests and our previous work together on the Democracy Seminar in East and Central Europe and beyond in mind. As we have already reported, it is off to a quick and extraordinary start. Occupy Wall Street and Shiroto no Ran on Tuesday, Adam Michnik on Saturday. And Deliberately Considered now has a space for the announcement of upcoming sessions of the seminar, for reports on the seminar sessions, including videos of the events, and for what I hope will be sustained ongoing discussions . . .
Read more: Deliberately Considered 2.0: The Flying Seminar, Occupy Wall Street and Our New Format
By Anette Baldauf, October 27th, 2011 
Last Saturday afternoon, as I was walking through Soho, I imagined the people marching on the street carrying cardboard signs instead of shopping bags. For a moment, the signs of this massive procession did not read “H&M”, “Gap” and “Uniclo” but “People, before profit,” “We are the 99 percent” or “I’d rather be working.” The rush and urgency in their expression did not concern the next bargain, but the future of America. I was on my way to the Tribeca Architecture and Design Film Festival, where our documentary film was going to be screened. “The Gruen Effect” is the story of the Austrian born architect Victor Gruen, who attempted to recreate Vienna’s urbanity in the sprawling suburbs of postwar America and invented the shopping mall.
Already in the late thirties Gruen and his then wife, Elsie Krummeck, promoted the building of “shopping towns,” which promised to combine commercial and civic spaces and counter the a-geography of the suburbscape with a cultural and social center. They claimed that the complexes would ease women’s lives, and integrate shopping into living. But as de-industrialization proceeded, the power of consumption began to drive the US economy, and shopping prepared the path to post-industrialism. The shopping mall became a blueprint for inner city re-development and an engine of the post-industrial economy. It integrated living into shopping. Looking back upon the translation errors and ironies of his life, Gruen argued at the end of his life that developers had high-jacked his concept of the shopping town. He “disclaimed paternity once and for all” and refused to “pay alimony to those bastard developments.” (Film on Gruen embedded below.)
Walking along Broadway and watching the crowd moving in and out of stores, I realized again how much the film was a story about the city of New York. I wished the voices from Zuccotti Park, located . . .
Read more: Occupy Mall Street
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 26th, 2011 ![Adam Michnik during "Kolorowa Tolerancja" in Łódź © HuBar (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons](../../../../wp-content/uploads/2011/10/450px-Adam_Michnik_Lodz-150x111.jpg)
Event Recap
The second session of the Flying Seminar presented the opportunity for a comparative historical dialogue about key issues of radical political engagement. Adam Michnik, a leading Polish dissident intellectual of Communist Poland and founding editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Occupy Wall Street activists compared notes. There was much that separated Michnik from the Occupiers, which gave the discussion its critical edge. But there was also much that connected them: a commitment to democracy and experimentation, a critical attitude concerning political elites disconnected from society, an understanding of the importance of creative social action.
Capitalism separated Michnik from the occupiers. They often invoked the term to summarize what they were against. This was also clear and shared at our last meeting between OWS and Shiroto no Ran. Michnik was quiet on this issue. Capitalism is a normal economic situation, what the previously existing socialist system was not.
There was also a difference in the assessment of utopia. Michnik spelled out three characteristics of Poland’s self limiting revolution. It was against violence. It was anti-utopian when it came to political ends. And it was geopolitically realistic, aware of where Poland is on the map. (Here he was referring to Poland’s proximity to Moscow and what then seemed in 1980 to be the solidity, overwhelming power and steadfastness of the Soviet Union.) The tension between taking up political activity versus remaining “splendidly isolated” from mainstream politics dominated the meeting, evolving in different directions – both pragmatic and philosophical ones.
Against his realism (he is the author of a brilliant essay “Grey is Beautiful”), an OWS activists asserted that being against utopia means accepting the unacceptable, rejecting the need for fundamental change. The struggle for imagination against realism, for achieving desirable change without new forms of tyranny provided a fertile field for discussion, with broad agreement.
Michnik recalled how the older generation was sure that the protests in Poland in 1968 and of the seventies lacked clear political goals and, therefore, was doomed to failure. But he and his fellow students and activists persisted. He told an interesting story about the rejection of a self appointed leader in a tram workers strike that occurred weeks before the emergence of . . .
Read more: Oct. 29th: OWS Meets Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution in Conversation with Adam Michnik (Video)
By Elzbieta Matynia, October 25th, 2011 
Like a whole lot of other people, I am trying to get a handle on Occupy Wall Street. It’s obvious that this is a very special movement, but I am trying to figure out what makes it so special. The one-month-old movement is being accused of being unclear, directionless, fragmented, vague, fuzzy. Indeed, it is not made up of disciplined cadres marching with mass-produced banners. It does not have a Central Committee, and though it is an expression of what one Zuccotti Park woman veteran calls an Economic Civil Rights Movement, it stays away from specific demands. These are there, too, but not easy to list or prioritize. It is not just about jobs, not only about mounting poverty, or student debts that now total more than all our credit-card debts; it is not only about corruptibility of the political system, and not only about accountability of the banks and bankers. It is – not unlike the Civil Rights Movement – about something much more fundamental. And I think it has something to do with the way we are locked in to rigid ways of thinking and talking about democracy.
There is nothing new in the observation that we are often imprisoned by language. Language is a conventional system of signs, and if we want to communicate we have to rely on its conventional usage. But there are dimensions and usages of language that, when tweaked a bit, have the capacity either to keep us captive, or to bring in some fresh air, helping us breathe. That we are captives of language, confined within a language that does not serve us any more, is conveyed vividly by Susan George when she says that “cost recovery” is the polite way of saying “make families pay to educate their children.” Indeed, we hear it all the time: education is a very good investment. On the other hand, a pleasantly surprising example of a more refreshing linguistic game comes from Occupy Wall Street: “Yes we camp!”
Something has happened to our thinking and talking about democracy, and we academics are not without guilt here. . . .
Read more: OWS and the Recovery of Democracy
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