Cold weather and clean-up sweeps by armored riot police are shifting the Occupy Wall Street movement from literal occupation of public spaces to other forms of political action.

On balance the literal occupation of public space has been successful. The focus of public attention has been shifted from the single issue of national debt to the fact that our financial and political systems have become so dysfunctional  that they are resistant to reform or problem solving.

A commenter to an earlier post observed that the number of people actually in tents was a vanishingly small percentage of the nation’s population. True enough, but immaterial. The same was true of marchers for women’s suffrage, active protestors to the Viet Nam war, Mahatma Gandhi or Rosa Parks.

Those protestors were symptoms of a dis-satisfaction with underlying social and political conditions and they would soon become the centers  for general protest and reform.

It is hard to ignore the fact that OWS quickly spread from coast to coast. The conservative press tried to characterize the occupiers as a kind of children’s crusade aided by drummers, pot smokers and the unwashed. It is certainly true that a majority of the tenters were young…although not all…but there were plenty of older folks on hand, too.

Some conservative pundits are apparently heaving a sigh of relief now that OWS is “dead.” They equate the removal of the physical occupations with a removal of the movement. They are, of course, wrong; and apparently blind and deaf to the impact of the social media.

OWS has simply moved to another level of political action and different bits of real estate. We should expect to see flash mobs, organized protests, marches, and other forms of guerrilla consciousness raising keeping on the pressure for reform.

These actions will be very annoying to the establishment. Good.

Less annoying, and possible more effective, will be a technique borrowed from a more traditional campaign book: The campaign  coffee gatherings in private homes.

Occupy Your Living Room is a way to take part in OWS without camping in the park. Simply invite your friends and neighbors to your home for an “Occupy Coffee.” Explain why you are sympathetic to the movement and be ready to point out facts about the way (for instance) the financial industry, left unsupervised, was responsible for the nation’s economic near collapse.

There’s no telling what you might learn. At a recent social gathering a friend mentioned something that he thought was outrageous: Apparent legal insider trading by members of Congress. It was new to me. Is it new to you?

Have a look.

Critics of OWS seem to be obsessed with the notion that the movement needs to move on. “Okay,” they say, “You’ve made your point. It’s time to fold your tents and get organized politically.”

What these critics seem to want is traditional politics. Support candidates, run for office, vote. Something along these lines is certainly one way of being “political,” and the progressive movement is already ramping up to support candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

But one point that the Occupy movement has made is that the political system has become so dysfunctional that we need to broaden the definition of ‘political action.’ This has already happened. In two months OWS has shifted the nation’s debate away from the single issue of the deficit and, at least in part, refocused it on jobs and the reform and control of the financial system.

It would be a political act to hold marches and teach-ins the goal of which was to force the main stream media to expand its coverage of the influence of lobbying on legislation and the way in which our tax laws have been skewed to facilitate the flow of tax benefits upward to benefit the giant transnational corporations.

Critics of the OWS movement assume (or want us to assume) that the complaints of the occupiers are all personal, because so much of the messaging has taken the form of individual tales of hardship. Underlying all that (and some really amusing signs and slogans) is a very clear message:

This nation’s financial and political systems have become so dysfunctional that they no longer function to promote the general welfare.

So what is to be done? Certainly we should keep up the marches and General Assemblies; they are excellent tools for pointing out problems that need to be corrected and individual legislators do respond when their feet are being held to the fire of public anger.

We should support individual legislators at all levels of government, but we should be wary of being co-opted by any political party. The Obama administration would be enchanted to have the Occupiers leap upon the re-election bandwagon, but they tend to be more skeptical now than they were four years ago..rightly or wrongly. There’s still a year to go.

Financial markets are booming. The Dow is up 11% this month.  Financial institutions are delighted. (The jobless are, well, still jobless.) Who is responsible? Well, indirectly, or maybe directly, it is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who dragged the Euro-Zone banks into agreeing to take a fifty percent haircut on their Greek bonds. The markets cheered.

In this morning’s NY Times  column Paul Krugman puts it all in perspective. (Italics are mine.

 It’s worth stepping back to look at the larger picture, namely the abject failure of an economic doctrine — a doctrine that has inflicted huge damage both in Europe and in the United States.

The doctrine in question amounts to the assertion that, in the aftermath of a financial crisis, banks must be bailed out but the general public must pay the price. So a crisis brought on by deregulation becomes a reason to move even further to the right; a time of mass unemployment, instead of spurring public efforts to create jobs, becomes an era of austerity, in which government spending and social programs are slashed.

This doctrine was sold both with claims that there was no alternative — that both bailouts and spending cuts were necessary to satisfy financial markets — and with claims that fiscal austerity would actually create jobs. The idea was that spending cuts would make consumers and businesses more confident. And this confidence would supposedly stimulate private spending, more than offsetting the depressing effects of government cutbacks.

You all know how successful that has been. The banks are hoarding money that might be leant to business start-ups and the jobless are still jobless. Nothing has trickled down.

Now the results are in and the picture isn’t pretty. Greece has been pushed by its austerity measures into an ever-deepening slump — and that slump, not lack of effort on the part of the Greek government, was the reason a classified report to European leaders concluded last week that the existing program there was unworkable. Britain’s economy has stalled under the impact of austerity, and confidence from both businesses and consumers has slumped, not soared.

 

Pow! Take that, Confidence Fairy!

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