Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

not sure where slitting throats comes into the picture

yesterday i had to take the day off of work so that i could go down to court. i was being sued by VISA's collection service. 7 years ago i used a card to pay for a semester of community college because my full time front desk guy income disqualified me from a need-based loan, and i'd been working to pay the card off in fits and starts and around minor financial disasters ever since. prior to the hearing i called the collection service's lawyers, who told me that essentially the collection agency had decided it was more worthwhile to try to obtain summary judgement against me than try to wait on my negotiated repayments any longer. i was stunned, mostly because it seemed to me that the collection agency's court costs would hardly make dragging me to court worth their while given that i didn't even owe 5 digits. why were they chasing me for so little?

then i got to the hearing room. after a 2 hour wait i heard the name of the collection agency "versus..." and i stood, expecting my name. instead there was someone else called. she was an older korean immigrant, and they didn't have a korean translator to hand, so they sat her down while they went to get one. they called the next name. it was a honduran immigrant who didn't speak english either, but they had a translator in the room--he was being sued for $800. the judge asked if he agreed he owed the money. he answered through the translator that yes, he did. there was a judgement. the korean translator showed up. the woman was being sued for $900. yes, she owed the money. neither the judge, nor the translator, nor the legal aid across the hall, had explained to these folks that if you want to avoid wage garnishment on something like this, you have to 'disagree' that you owe the funds and request a trial date. by putting on the theatre of fighting the case, you show the collection agency you're a real person, and they're more than willing to negotiate with you again. i knew this because i know a handful of lawyers that gave me free advice. a half dozen more people went up with the same story. most of them were being sued for under $1,000, most of them didn't speak english. i was called. i said my magic words, then met the agency's lawyer outside the courtroom, where he told me "just call the number on your summons and they'll work something out."

i looked at the other people milling around outside the courtroom, lots of whom seemed upset that they'd just very quickly had a judgement made against them, some of whom didn't seem to fully understand what had just happened. the lawyer scrammed. i went over to the honduran guy who'd gone up after the korean woman and asked him if that had gone the way he thought it would. he said he thought he would have a chance to make a case for his inability to repay. he said no one told him that it would all happen so quickly. he said he thought his boss would fire him once the wage garnishments started. i told him i didn't think that it was legal for him to be fired for a garnishment, he said "you think he cares about legal?"

the slitting of throats comes into the picture when we have to maneuver through a system of relations that ultimately values stacking dollars over the human cost of accumulation. when collection agencies target immigrants, or bankers like the kind i used to be are told to push loans on people who we can see can't afford them ("fuck it," my boss said more than once, "we need the sales"), or multinationals work to maintain ultimately dangerous working conditions in--say--bangladesh because it lowers their capital & labor costs, and lives are ruined or families are evicted or a thousand workers are killed, the slitting of throats comes into the picture. but matt fuckin yglesias is all good with that, because hey, a little bangladeshi blood is worth it for a tee on sale at GAP.

i'm not good with that. i don't know how we might do better at a global scale. maybe we can't. but i feel like i have a responsibility to hope we can, and to do the work of imagining and experimenting with what that might look like.

a lot of radical left stuff is i find it doesn't really take to task a lot of the assumptions that uphold the system, like for example the actual justifications for existing inequality (implications for growth, effect of redistribution on incentives & equality of opportunity, globally "development")

― flopson, Sunday, July 7, 2013 4:53 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

suggested readings on these subjects include the working papers umass-amherst regularly publishes, kevin carson's windy and crappily edited but valuable studies in mutualist political economy (he's got a few gems in markets, not capitalism too iirc), mike konczal's rortybomb, gavin mueller at jacobin (and the ongoing seminar on the making of global capitalism going on there), and various folks associated with those listed here.

hoos dude we read the same blogs my post was rly just reaffirming what u said upthread:

Our real challenge, I think, is creating an organizing culture that lays bare the radicalism and feminism and anti-oppressive class analysis while maintaining space for people to come in who might not have MDC patches on their jackets or Huey Newton posters on their walls.

my point was just that too much radical left stuff is written for an intended audience of... people already on the radical left. stuff like jacobin engaging & arguably pushing liberals like krugman to the left is cool but how to bring about the kind of popular radicalization you're talking about is a much harder problem. & i think part of the problem is they're not slitting anyone's throats, if they were it would be a lot easier to get everyone riled up

& i think part of the problem is they're /not/ slitting anyone's throats, if they were it would be a lot easier to get everyone riled up

That's NOT part of the problem.

ha. unfortunate phrasing, i imagine.

I went to a concert performance of Marc Blitzstein's lefty '30s popera The Cradle Will Rock at City Center last weekend, and the white backdrop had on it in a cursive font:

In the Rich Man's House
the Only Place to Spit
is in His Face

Septuagenarian woman in front of me, to her husband: "Don't worry, we don't have a house."

lolll

i mean flop bro i know you're down you just made a statement i thought was kinda eliding some facts about how all this stuff works

and then you asked for resources on specific topics, so i tried to be helpful, thassall

it's cool we cool i appreciate it regardless, i am actually currently reading that panitch & gindin book and while it's not quite what i was referring to it's p tight

all i meant re slitting of throats is that u can't *just* point to existing inequalities or injustices and expect everyone to be radicalized. americans love inequality, dgaf about a lot of injustice & the reason is they have a sealed tight ideological set of explanations for not caring, ppl who abide capitalism don't see it as the slitting of throats... maybe what i should have said is that's the problem

I know. :) I just read that last line and pictured some nutcase going "ah-ha!" and coming up with a really bad plan.

Haha

hoos you need to be watching this season of newsroom it will make you so angry i swear.

but angry laughing astonished angry, not necessarily just worthlessly angry.

newsroom left me consistently worthlessly angry, ymmv

yeah ppl on twitter keep talking about 'the newsroom's portrayal of ows' and i sorta can't be arsed as the folks say

but i suppose if you think so

don't know if its actually worthwhile. i was just watching sorta jaw open and wanted to spread the dumbfoundedness

On Bill Maher's last show he had ax-Wall Street and pro-Occupy activist Alexis Goldstein.

*ex-Wall Street

I watched that ep just for her. She was always great on Chris Hayes. Got a good zing about wall street bankers, cocaine, and stop and frisk.

alexis is awesome! also good taste in beer

the gif of her throwing shade at barney over her glasses was instant classicq

I really hated how they put her on the spot by having her defend the success of OWS vs the power of Tea Party. A pro-corporate pro-Republican AstroTurf funded by billionaires and promoted by sensationalist politicians has been more successful than the genuinely grassroots OWS? No way!

imo her line about 'we were never about getting people into office, it's about changing our culture' is the real killer in that whole segment

from email

After an almost year long fight, we're elated to announce that Jacqueline Barber has worked out a deal that will keep her and her family in their home for good! Jacqueline, a retired police detective who has been fighting a rare form of bone marrow cancer, was facing eviction when she first reached out to Occupy Our Homes Atlanta last October. Jacqueline was dual tracked and her mortgage documents were filled with forged signatures, and like millions of Americans she was now faced with losing her home. But after fighting for a year, Wall Street backed down and agreed to let Jaqueline and her family keep their home.

the previously ballyhooed 'cop facing eviction'

lewis wrote abt that hard hat thing from upthread the other day in jacobin, just incidentally

anti-Syria-strike action in Zuccotti Park this Sunday, apparently

happy birthday.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OWXt4W68w4g/Uh-orXCB-DI/AAAAAAAAAEg/PhSE2majolo/s640/001a.png

http://greatmomentsinleftism.blogspot.com/

omg at this one. really its the text of the 2nd poster that makes it

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-javR-OzLcWs/UijN8sGURwI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/PmGn1FhY4bk/s640/001.png

yes

lol

inside the tent pissing into the tent

with fire

i love that dude has a riseup email

the mother jones one is lol (and otm)

i dont think these are funny or well drawn

no...

max, does the Working Families Party send you cartoons?

i'm with max on this

not especially funny or well drawn. just the pain of recognition.

narrowcasting

ugh, jacobin

every article i've read is just full of the kind of hyperbole (ALL THOSE WHO ACCEPT TIPS ARE SLAVES!!) that the authors no doubt picked up from all the French theorists they've been skimming.

often there are really good ideas in there but then I just hit a wall of self-righteous, snooty, condescending bravado and it's like nuh-uh, i'm out of here

that said that cartoon is a little wittier than some but I get the same flattery-is-not-humor hives that i get when reading tom tomorrow or whatever

i mean flattering-your-audience

also the cartoon is so pervasively cynical that it makes me said. in one comic, mainstream unionism is ridiculed. in another, the wobblies are ridiculed for imaging themselves to be a viable alternative to mainstream unionism.

sad

I get the same flattering-your-audience-is-not-humor hives that i get when reading tom tomorrow

flattering? these horribly formed "jokes" are largely mocking the subsets of people who'd know the reference points at all

really, you think so?

i guess it depends which cartoon

ok yeah this is just stupid and offensive. what an asshole.

http://greatmomentsinleftism.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2013-08-23T10:04:00-07:00&max-results=1&start=8&by-date=false