I've been back in LA for over a week, back in the hotel I stayed in last month. The day before I left Phoenix, LAPD dismantled the OccupyLA camp, and arrested a couple hundred folks in the process. My first few days here I walked past the now-empty park, empty that is except for the cement blocks and chain-link fencing put up to restrict access to that area, with signs threatening that trespassers will be arrested. With a couple of officers hanging around in front the first couple of mornings, the scene was a powerful symbol of the assertion of the will of the police state over that of a peaceful populist movement. I couldn't help but think that they may have won this battle, but the war is just beginning!
Since the Occupiers have been repressed in most every major city by now, it is interesting to see the shift in strategy that is now emerging. Instead of congregating in public places where it is easy to use force to disrupt their activities, Occupiers are now starting to spread out, to occupy foreclosed properties, to infiltrate into neighborhoods, in a sense to turn it into guerilla warfare. It will be much more difficult for Big Brother to figure out where they all are and devote the manpower needed to remove them from those places safely and securely. The foreclosed properties legally belong to the banks, so this is literally taking some of this property back from them. Assuming this idea spreads to the point that the number of occupied properties becomes annoying to the banksters, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. For now, at least, some people will hopefully find some homes for themselves that they wouldn't otherwise have. Even if they have to live off the grid, or pirate electricity somehow, it's better than sleeping on the streets as winter rolls around.
The other thing I kind of expect to see more of is the "flash mob" type of activity where a bunch of people suddenly converge on a particular place and cause a commotion by engaging in some kind of pre-planned activity. This can be something innocuous or even positive, say, singing a song or doing something amusing. A video of a musical performance in the Copenhagen train station that I saw awhile back is a cool example, although that was too orchestrated to really be called a mob. In contrast, Occupier mobs could be used to be disruptive, to engage in some kind of civil disturbance that was not destructive, messing up traffic flow being an easy example to think of. Imagine 15 people showing up at each of x number of intersections in a busy downtown area and stopping traffic in all directions. By the time cops got on the scene to try to deal with them, the mob could disperse, heading off in all different directions to make it hard to track all or even any of them down. Or picture a big department store, one of lots of big department stores in some city, where all of a sudden at a pre-appointed time a bunch of people scattered throughout the store surreptitiously pull a black mask over their face and start yelling at all the other patrons to get out of the store, herding everyone together, moving them towards the exit, clearing everyone out and then following them out, removing their masks, and quickly getting lost in the crowd as they disperse.
The point is this: if they are creative, the Occupiers could easily find ways to be annoying to the power structure without being destructive in any way that would warrant or justify a violent response from the authorities; if they are clever, they would find ways to do this that would garner the sympathies of the general public rather than causing alienation. I'm not sure it will get to that point, I really have no idea if the movement is strong enough to maintain some kind of coordinated action in the face of their physical dispersal. I remain optimistic, not just that there is enough momentum in the movement to keep it going, but that more and more people are getting a better understanding of what is going on in the world, such that more and more of them will see some reason and value in the Occupiers' positions and demands. If and when the general public gets on board with the major thrusts of the Occupy movement, then we might to start to see some concrete changes to deal with the issues they've raised. Until then, I guess we are left to appreciate largely symbolic acts like the unanimous vote by the LA City Council to support a constitutional amendment that would negate the "corporate personhood" ruling made by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case last year. There are rumblings in Congress now of such an amendment, but the process of getting an amendment ratified would likely take awhile, so there isn't much short-term leverage with that strategy. But it is certainly a step we should be taking one way or the other.
Despite all the above, my best guess is that the Occupy movement will in a sense be swallowed up by the enormity of the events that I believe are just beyond the horizon. The global financial/monetary system remains on the brink of collapse, with the eurozone still struggling to figure out how to deal with its immediate problems and the rest of the world waiting to see how Europe's problems are going to reverberate globally. Even when people compare our current situation to the Great Depression, I don't think anyone can really anticipate what the scale and impact of this collapse could be, and how it really could mean the end of the system as we know it, with a need to implement new approaches and mechanisms and rules for distributing resources around the world. It is really easy for humans to assume that the future will be more or less like the past, since it usually is. But that ignores the possibility of discontinuous change, which happens occasionally in all sorts of different types of systems. A main point of my teaching over the last 15 years is that we need to be getting ready for discontinuous change, because it is on its way. Whatever the bad news associated with whatever hardships result from the coming collapse, the good news is that humans will have the opportunity to make significant changes in the nature of our economic system, one devoted to enhancing the well-being of the other 99% along with that of the top one percent. Riane Eisler has written about the requirements for what she calls a "caring economy," and plenty of other folks have suggested useful steps to take to create a more life-affirming economy. So it's not like there aren't good ideas out there to try. It's a matter of having people in places of power being willing to put them into practice.
It looks instead like those in power now are going to try to hang on to the old system as long as they can, including preparing for dealing with massive social upheaval likely to result from a sustained collapse. Three events that happened nearly concurrently last week are making plenty of people a little nervous. First, the Senate passed, with a vote of 93-7, the National Defense Authorization Act, S.1867, which apparently authorizes the military to detain indefinitely American citizens on American soil if they are deemed to be a terrorist threat. This entails a subtle but significant change to standing law, which may in fact violate the Constitution but at a minimum constitute further erosion of our Constitutional liberties. The Senate and House I guess are now working on their joint/compromise bill that they will send to the President for signing or veto.
Second, in the UK the City of London police included the OccupyLondon folks on a list of domestic terrorists they sent out. If the American government chooses to do the same thing, then Occupiers could be detained as such and turned over to the military to be held where, when, and for as long as they want. I've read that Obama has threatened to veto the defense bill, not because of any problem with limiting the Constitutional liberties of American citizens (one Senator has even claimed that it was the White House that wanted the "indefinite detention" part of the bill included), but because he didn't want to be bound by the Geneva conventions any longer! Wouldn't surprise me if that were true...
The third thing that had weird coincidental timing with the Senate vote on the NDAA was the fact that Alex Jones, one of the top "alternative media" guys in the country, maybe the world, was given a document which he then shared with his audience indicating that the company KBR - a subsidiary of Halliburton - had just put out a call for subcontractors to help staff and outfit a number of detention camps that the company had apparently helped build a few years ago, in five regions of the country:
http://siasatpak.blogspot.com/2011/12/alex-jones-show-7-december-2011-kbr.html
This corresponds to a recent job announcement by the Army recruiting for the position of "Internment Specialist," which includes responsibility for dealing with civilian detainees. In other words, there are little signs that TPTB are prepping for a situation in which they would need/want to detain lots of people for whatever reason. It could be they anticipate riots of the kind seen in lots of other parts of the world, especially if a collapse brings suddenly rising food prices, widespread loss of jobs, cash scarcity, and/or other likely consequences. Maybe they have contingency plans to round up all the dissidents they can find and make them "disappear," which has been a favorite tactic of fascists and other authoritarian regimes throughout the last century. (Radical academics are frequently included on those lists, so if I disappear someday, you'll know who "disappeared" me!) Who knows what their intentions are, what specifically they're planning for, but I think the relevant point is that they seem to be preparing for more rather than less instability and disorder, and like the repression of the Occupy encampments, they will inevitably use force and violence to maintain as much control as they can.
With all this craziness in the world, I feel a little like I'm watching the dramatic, climactic final scenes of a movie I've been watching for 15 years. When I started watching, I had a vague sense of how the movie is supposed to end but not really any clue as to how or when it will reach that predicted conclusion. While each day that passes advances the movie a few frames, it takes lots of frames to cover a scene of any length, so lots of days continue to pass even as we are in the middle of this scene and don't know yet how it is going to end. Having been watching the movie pretty carefully for awhile now, it sure seems like the plot line includes this economic collapse which now seems imminent, and that it would take some kind of extraordinary, miraculous even, intervention to avoid that ending. But this systemic collapse may not really be the end of the story, rather it may simply be the Director's set-up of the soon-to-be-released sequel, the next chapter in the saga telling the story of how the human race, in responding to the collapse, are able to transcend their limited consciousness to find ways of working together that enable them to develop a happier, healthier, more peaceful and just society. My best guess is that this sequel will be something like a sci-fi movie, in the sense that the action takes place on a galactic scale, involving creatures from more than one planet and star system. I have a feeling it will be a much more enjoyable movie than the one we're watching come to an end!
On the more mundane day-to-day level, things are getting busy for me now, as I am actively looking for an apartment to move into, aiming to buy a new car to replace my 15 year old Celica, preparing the syllabus for an undergrad class on International Development I'm teaching for the first time this spring, and generally getting ready to transition back into what is supposed to be something like "normal" life. I'm not really expecting life to be very normal for awhile, but I have to at least plan on getting into a routine that will enable me to face twenty undergrads at 10 AM two times a week with enough preparation to be able to lead an effective two-hour class session. My point is, I am distracted enough with other things that I will probably be posting more blog entries here only if/when events in the world warrant or compel a comment on my part.
So, this isn't really the end of this blog necessarily, but it is sort of the end of my own commitment to the original intention I had, to report on my experiences downtown as part of the OccupyLA movement. For that reason, this feels a bit like a closing entry to me, and thus I'm going to end with some words of wisdom I came across in something I read the other day. To my mind, it is as good a statement as any about the shift in consciousness humans need to make in order to move beyond our current problems and transcend into the better future that awaits us:
"Simply put, when you look for the purpose of life, commence from the fact that there is only the One God that all life exists within. That will, so to say, clear the decks where the different religions are concerned as no particular one as opposed to another, can correctly claim to be the only one holding the truth. That having been said, you have infinite life and are not your body but change your form each time you incarnate. However, your soul which is your godspark is indestructible and grows through evolutionary experience, and is forever reaching out to the higher dimensions and eventually the Source of All That Is. If you can accept that these are truthful statements, it will give you the basis to expand upon and become more enlightened."
Luz y amor para todos,
Pedro
