Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta

right, i'm not going to watch that movie, and nobody else seems to like it, so why do those masks turn up everywhere?

an anarchist revolutionary dressed in a Guy Fawkes mask, begins an elaborate, violent, and intentionally theatrical campaign to murder his former captors, bring down the government, and convince the people to rule themselves.

ugh seriously? embarrassing that people would wear those much less that it would be the "face" of OWS. you might as well give up.

can someone explain the point of the guy fawkes masks aside from generalized "rebellion" affect?

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, January 25, 2012 8:23 AM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yah the movie and then

Also in 2006, the mask began to appear in a popular 4Chan meme called Epic Fail Guy. According to Housh, the suggestion to use the Fawkes mask as protest gear was almost immediate. But some Anons weren’t convinced that the Fawkes mask was right, so they made a short list of alternatives: a Batman mask, classic masquerade masks, a few others.

“Then we called comics and costume shops, all over the world,” Housh says, checking availability and price, and the V mask won out: “It’s available, it’s cheap, and it’s in every city.” (The actual Fawkes had “nothing to do with it, for us,” Housh says.)

Thousands of people in various cities subsequently participated in a day of anti-Scientology street demonstrations, plenty of them wearing the mask. “Videos and images and photographs circulated almost immediately,” says Gabriella Coleman, the incoming Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University and author of the forthcoming Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. “It was just so powerful.” And it cemented Anonymous as, paradoxically, a recognizable phenomenon.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/design/2011/12/guy_fawkes_mask_how_anonymous_hacker_group_created_a_powerful_visual_brand.html

and now...

http://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/anonymous-global-protest-8.jpg

http://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/anonymous-global-protest-9.jpg

http://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/anonymous-global-protest-19.jpg

http://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/anonymous-global-protest-12.jpg

http://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/anonymous-global-protest-23.jpg

though that said if you can't hear the assonance between an anarchist revolutionary dressed in a Guy Fawkes mask begins a theatrical campaign to ... bring down the government, and convince the people to rule themselves. and the lots and lots of people running around in these stupid masks lately, i don't really know what to tell you

for my edification is it the "anarchist" part that rubs you the wrong way there or the "violent campaign to murder his former captors" part cause you've got me all http://amciv.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/iww-kat-2007.jpg?w=432&h=478 and i'd rather stand down at 4am frankly

i mean even though they are trolls the fact that "zzzz"/"so bored with this" rhetoric is like a thing in comments to articles on OWS is really telling.

also worth noting here btw that the president of the fucking earth said tonight that he would be cutting taxes "for the 98%," and starting a financial crimes investigation unit, and that there could be "no more bailouts, or handouts, or copouts"

it's rhetoric, maybe, and there's still an awful fucking immunity deal coming down the pike even if o claims to be starting CSI Wall Street--but it's rhetoric in our fucking overton window. we moved it, and the people who want the top job are now having to address income inequality, banking malfeasance, and unjust foreclosures. remember 6 months ago when all they gave a fuck about was the debt clock?

that's a win for us. fuck a park.

Otm and awesome job

Also V for Vendetta is pretty good.

It predicted the use of CCTV in the UK by something like a decade, which doesn't mean that it doesn't glamorize violence or that it's not cartoonish, but it's still something of an interesting text.

Not really a fan of Alan Moore though. Or the movie.

i agree that there are serious victories, i wasn't arguing that. i was just noting that it's possible for people to react with "zzzz" and this is only made possible by the ADD cable news cycle.

so was ows itself

it's rhetoric in our fucking overton window. we moved it, and the people who want the top job are now having to address income inequality, banking malfeasance, and unjust foreclosures. remember 6 months ago when all they gave a fuck about was the debt clock?

that's a win for us. fuck a park.

GO, A HOOS!

It also doesn't really matter if people in general know or admit that the new rhetoric is only there because of OWS...the movement is doing its job by getting the ideas into the conversation whether people acknowledge where they came from or not.

The problem isn't really financial "crimes" so much as a system that encourages financial recklessness. You're not going to find very many people that you could literally charge with a crime, and the ones you find will be an insignificant part of the overall problem. It's not about Madoffs. The system is Madoff.

^

http://assets0.ordienetworks.com/images/GifGuide/clapping/1292223254212-dumpfm-mario-Obamaclap.gif

otm ^

this is what defines the bob woodwards and the josh marshalls of the planet - who are otherwise not very close together on any continuum - that they are hellbent on unearthing a very explicit, incontestable kind of corruption or malfeasance but they have 0 to say about actual politics; they work entirely within whatever overton window they're given

otm

along those lines (guess who):

Noam Chomsky said that Watergate demonstrated how the system polices itself. Woodward and Bernstein weren't all that interested in COINTELPRO, the FBI's program of surveillance and disruption of dissident groups and figures. They probed Nixon's spying on the Democratic National Committee, an action that stepped on numerous elite toes. Nixon and his henchmen overreached with that operation and paid the political price.

Lesson: Don't fuck with those with serious political power. It's a reason why the Reagan gang got away with Iran/contra. Or Bush/Cheney with the Iraq war. Or Obama with the NDAA. I doubt that Romney or Gingrich will be elected; but if one of them is, he has a lot of ground to cover.

The problem isn't really financial "crimes" so much as a system that encourages financial recklessness. You're not going to find very many people that you could literally charge with a crime, and the ones you find will be an insignificant part of the overall problem

Yes and no. It bugs me that there is a rumor that the Justice Department is going to announce next Monday a settlement on the mortgage industry autopen signing fraud case that was opposed by the NY and California attorney generals as being too lenient.

Also, too many people still insist that most Wall Streeters have become successful solely through hard work, and therefore it would be nice to be able to say the Justice Department is indicting people, rather than saying, well Clinton signed off on a Republican prepared bill to get rid of Glass-Stegall and that new looser atmosphere, plus the development of derivatives and post-crash TARP bailouts have allowed Wall Streeters to unfairly profit blah blah blah.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~commodity futures modernization act~~~~~ hi dere

I mean even robosigning strikes me as kind of a red herring tbh, not that it should go unpunished, but (feel free to direct me to corrective links if I'm wrong) my impression is that there are very few cases of actual baseless foreclosure and mostly this is just about bad documentation procedures, whereas the real problem is how the fuck these loans got originated in the first place.

i don't think those two things are separable

punishment for the malfeasors is one aim, but for everybody else, pushing the housing market toward cleanliness is essential for getting out of the economic mess we're in. since these companies wrecked the legal underpinnings of the whole thing via robosigning, there has to be some kind of legal action to unbreak what was done.

madoff went to jail cuz he stole from rich people

hoos is totally right that the speech last night as well as lots of other speeches and interviews and casual remarks by all sorts of politicians not to mention the big to-do over romney's income tax returns demonstrate that the OWS issues really are becoming the national issues, and as soon as it gets warm enough for people to get back on the streets you are going to see OWS leaning more and more effectively on the 2012 circus

the masks drive me crazy but what are you gonna do

(obv there are still people on the streets even in the cold, such as our very own hoos, but the movement's taken the hit we all knew it would from the weather and if it's still relatively alive and active in january, which it is, imagine what this summer's gonna be like)

at least in nyc the movement's taken as much damage from its inherent unwieldiness as it has from the weather / the man

xps i don't really have any interest in sending people to jail when the entire culture of high finance is designed around teaching each new wave of MBAs how most effectively to make a frightened and obsequious government work for you while inventing the most boring and obfuscatory words you can think of for predatory gangsterism; i guess it would be nice to set a precedent but i worry that the sheer labor that would go into prosecuting basically anyone would create the impression that we had fixed the problem

xp oh no doubt, and here in pdx too; i think the relative downtime has been good for us.

that is, the camp here became harder and harder to administer because we couldn't be an effective political movement AND an art installation AND a soup kitchen AND a self-policing extralegal community (for more than a few months; we actually did a pretty good job of being all those things for much longer than i expected) but the winter retreat has i think kept hold of and even gotten better at the first thing, which was the most important thing to me, and when it stops fucking raining and the serious crowds come back we'll have plenty for them to do.

another couple data points: davos elites are freaking out

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/davos-man-trembling-his-armani-boots

morgan stanley chief feels the need to appear a hardass about bonuses

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/01/morgan-stanley-ceo-to-bonus-whiners-just-leave.html?

from the dailybeast soros profile that mother jones article links to:

Occupy Wall Street “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” but it will grow. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.” He reaches for analysis, produced by the political blog ThinkProgress.org, that shows how the Occupy movement has pushed issues of unemployment up the agenda of major news organizations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. It reveals that in one week in July of last year the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on major U.S. TV news networks. By October, mentions of the word “debt” had dropped to 398 over the course of a week, while “occupy” was mentioned 1,278 times, “Wall Street” 2,378 times, and “jobs” 2,738 times. You can’t keep a financier away from his metrics.

(the question of course is what are the numbers now, not half a month into the protests, and i don't watch cable news so i don't know, but judging from the SOTU and the republican primary i'd be surprised if they aren't pretty similar)

they're certainly down a lot less, but the major pop-messaging of ows -- most specifically "the 99%" and the "the 1%" -- is completely burned into the media's consciousness now.

At least that's how it seems from my casual cable news viewing.

once phrases enter the national dialogue they tend to stick around for a long time

hell I go to nba basketball games and there are people with handmade "OCCUPY THE [ARENA NAME]" signs at pretty much every one.

Which like, sure, whatever that means. But there's something of "this belongs to the people, we can take it back" in the national brain now maybe.

idk if you guys have noticed/heard, but students (not just in CA!) are adopting the occupation tactic and winning small victories

i'm not sure if the tactic has been deradicalized or if it means students are radicalizing, either way i'm good

I go to nba basketball games

^DEFINITELY the 1%

friend of mine left for turkey in early september to do research for his masters thesis on turkish youth movements; the night before he left we got drunk and i asked him if the reason he'd invested so much of himself in the study of radical movements abroad was because he'd despaired of his own countrymen ever tearing themselves away from their hallucinations long enough to do something about their own exploitation/loss of agency and he said yeah; like two weeks after he left occupy happened and i reported on it (smugly) to him via skype while he reported to me on what turned out to be the total absence of significant turkish youth movements; like a month after that the students at the university hosting him started occupying shit. so now he's happy. and then right after that my own academic sphere lit up -- russia, of all places, suddenly decides it's not gonna take it anymore. so yeah, the tactic/vocabulary/spirit spreads like crazy: from america just like it did to america.

/I go to nba basketball games/

^DEFINITELY the 1%

lol morbs upper deck tickets are ten bucks. it's cheaper than a FILM.

oh well, my only ref point is the Knicks so u know

TEN BUCKS? I can't even get into a soccer game for less than double that, and no one even LIKES soccer.

next ill tell you guys what rent is in portland.

Don't do that, I was having a pretty good day before I caught up with this thread.

x-post

So do you folks think Taibbi is being overly simplistic and just rabble-rousing when he implies these execs should be charged, convicted and jailed for fraudulent activity:

Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216

he may be overly simplistic, but that is overshadowed by him being wholly unrealistic; I can't think of anything short of a military coup that would result in those guys serving any jail time, regardless of your opinion on whether they deserve to be put on trial or not

I would like to see Taibbi get a little more specific about the case against any specific executive in terms of proving the actual elements of an actual criminal offense carrying jail time based on the evidence available right now.

I think he's done it other columns or articles...?

Taibbi may be unrealistic but obviously I would be thrilled if any of those folks were even charged.

hell I go to nba basketball games and there are people with handmade "OCCUPY THE [ARENA NAME]" signs at pretty much every one.

Which like, sure, whatever that means. But there's something of "this belongs to the people, we can take it back" in the national brain now maybe.

― Clay, Wednesday, January 25, 2012 1:09 PM (1 hour ago)

very OTM I think.

I would like to see Taibbi get a little more specific about the case against any specific executive in terms of proving the actual elements of an actual criminal offense carrying jail time based on the evidence available right now.

― frogBaSeball (Hurting 2), Wednesday, January 25, 2012 4:21 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the thing is, is it clear what laws they broke? i mean, the did some horrible shit, but do you think there is a law that you could demonstrate to a jury was unambiguously broken? if so, then full speed ahead.

O'Reilly-Cornel-Tavis video