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Occupy Baltimore Day 18

by Donal 10/22/2011 - 11:54 pm   |

Friday night I went to Occupy Baltimore (OB). OB's website had a Gender and Race Equality Rally scheduled for 6:30 PM and the usual General Assembly at 8:00 PM. I hadn't been there in the evening before, and thought it was about time to actually see a General Assembly.
 
I walked down Light Street and just past the MD Science Center, crossed to the Inner Harbor walkway and cut diagonally next to the Baltimore Area Visitor's Center - a high roof overhanging four glass walls. Through the glass I could see two old, bearded craftsmen fussing over a model ship. I heard someone singing "Billie Jean" as I approached the NW corner of the Harbor. A tall black man in a suit had set up his act in the small amphitheatre between the shopping structures. Sometimes you find jugglers or magicians there. He had a decent crowd, and as I passed by he began singing something by Marvin Gaye, but I was already focussed on traffic.
 
McKeldin Fountain is separated from Inner Harbor by the NorthEast bound lanes of Light Street. The triangular site is bounded by Pratt Street on the North and the Southbound lanes of Light Street on the West. The actual fountain is tucked into the South corner. I walked past a big Yellow Submarine tarp and saw Cory, the fellow with the colorful hair, walking away. He was wearing a lot of leather. He glanced at me but probably didn't remember me from Day One. 
 
The sign-painting area remained in the center of the plaza, but there had been several changes. Twenty-odd tents, mostly on the grassy area in the West corner of the plaza, had replaced the cluster of sleeping bags and blankets that I saw at the edge of the fountain on Day Three. The empty fountain itself now seemed to be the domain of half a dozen very active small children. Most of the stations were still backed up to the fountain. The big suggestion board had been replaced by a short metal tower with clips to attach notecards. The food station had been expanded into serving, cleaning and recycling areas. A lot of people were eating. There was a large tent made of many tarps that seemed very private. People would go in and out and shut the flap carefully behind them. Several feet from the large tent was a podium with a microphone connected to an amp/speaker on a table.
 
Shorty's famous toilet that had been left in front of the former courthouse was near the media table. Police had suspected it of being a bomb and arrested Shorty, but he was cleared.
 
There was some activity, but again no central focus. I arrived after 6:30, but the Race and Gender Equality Rally hadn't started yet. A very cheerful young blond woman started the rally, which consisted of carrying signs and chanting slogans. After a few minutes about twenty people marched and chanted in a circle. Feeling a rush of introversion, I moved away. A young man was inviting people to speak their pieces before the GA, so I headed over to the podium. A black man took the mike and said that if OB didn't resolve the problems between blacks and whites, that they were just wasting time. Another fellow spoke about his love for the Lord Jesus Christ. I fought back an instinct to step up and get equal time for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. More people spoke.
 
I noticed a young Asian woman fiddling with a bike lock cable. She smiled at me, and somehow we started talking. She had stopped by on Day One, and was coming back to see if there had been any progress. We compared our impressions of the media coverage. I told her about some of the main issues discussed here. She had come to see the Race/Gender business and I told her that they had gone marching off somewhere while I was watching the open mike. Eventually they came back and headed to the busy corner of Light and Pratt. Amanda very politely excused herself, told me her name and went over to watch the rally.
 
I stayed with the podium crowd, and a young black man named Jimmy came over to ask me if I supported the movement. In business dress with a tie and all, and toting my insulated lunch bag, I didn't exactly fit in with Occupy chic. I told him I did, and he said, "All the way, or halfway?" I told him I was there to learn more. At 8 PM, the fellow running the mic announced that GA wouldn't start until 8:30. I moseyed up to the rally. They were playing to the evening traffic, and cheered loudly whenever vehicles, mostly trucks, would honk in solidarity. 
 
Looking back towards the podium crowd, I saw three bike po-lice in their yellow-topped jerseys talking sternly to a fellow dressed in black. I tried to listen without being too obvious. I was thinking about Heisenberg's theory in which observing changes the situation, so I tried to be more of a neutron than a photon. Seems that the fellow in black was OB security - he had a comm device on his collar. The po-lice were there to remove two black men, one of whom had smacked his wife yesterday. He was assuring another guy with a comm device that he hadn't called the cops, and didn't know who had. One bike officer had taken one fellow across Light Street already, and another two were removing the second one from the tent area. OB folk were glad to be rid of these two, who looked homeless rough, but they were not happy to have the police called in. The wife showed up with some other men and women and they all put their heads together.
 
The General Assembly started around 8:25 with a mike check. MIKE CHECK! There were three or four people behind the mike. Tonight's GA was heavily procedural. A fellow explained the hand signals - point of information, approve, meh, disapprove, block, etc. - and asked that questions be held until after committee reports. Someone questioned that, but it stood. Committee Reports amounted to very little to report. One committee reported that a Statement of Purpose was due the next day, but that discussion was virtually closed. There was some complaint over offsite people commenting on the livestream. They had nothing big to discuss, and wanted to break into smaller groups for discussion. A woman who had been videotaping all evening was incensed. First she stormed away, but she came back and offered a comment that breaking us into small groups was how we had been enslaved, and that everything should said be in front of everyone. Another woman countered that giving everyone time on the mike meant that fewer people were able to be heard.
 
I was feeling pretty cold, and a bit numb, by this point so I left, but it seems that they did break into smaller groups of 6-8 persons, answering, "Why are you here?" "What have you learned/experienced since you've been here?" and "Where do you want to see the movement go?".
 
The Statement of Purpose is on OB's site today:
Through the transformation of this public space Occupy Baltimore is expressing solidarity with other Occupy Movements throughout the nation and the world who are forcing attention to the issues of political and economic injustice. Our purpose is to open for all people a lasting, transparent, and honest Democracy organized in a consensus model. Our goals will be defined by that consensus of our General Assembly. We offer to the people what corporate privilege and political complacency in out [sic] nation has taken from them.
 
One reason why the Occupiers are so white is their anarchic culture, which may seem like the luxury of the winners, but another is hopelessness of the poor, disproportionately black and brown.  On the big marches, at any rate, the emphasis is on “the 99 percent,” who are mostly not poor, and on “the middle class,” which marchers want to get into or stay in.
OB tends majority white in a black majority city, but there are a lot of black and brown faces, and a lot of homeless have been welcomed, and fed. I suspect that has led to some friction, but it may pay off in the long run. 
It’s quite interesting that here we are, four weeks into this rising, and some reporters are beginning to grasp that this phenomenon has its novelties and that if they are to grasp it, they have to get the novelties.

I think early on, journalists tended to do the obvious. You send a reporter down, you pick the photogenic, colorful – who are generally marginal-looking – people, freakish-looking, and/or you ask people that you’ve picked more or less at random what they’re about and they give you disparate answers.

That is exactly what I saw on Day One.

The fact that social movements are standard features of a modern society has not been absorbed. In other words, a social movement is not something that fails to be a political party or an organization or, on the other hand, a fad. Every time a social movement erupts, it’s as if there’s never been one before, and then there emerge predictable stories that might as well have been pre-programmed by computer algorithm about freakishness and incoherence and querulousness, as if the movement’s not being an incorporated organization were a failure, rather than simply a sign of what it is – of its identity. So, that’s where the Occupy coverage started.
I think we've read some of that here at dag.
I think Brooks thinks – and people like Brooks think – that somebody who bought a subprime mortgage and thought he could get rich quick, or somebody who is involved in flipping houses in the suburbs somewhere, is as much to blame as the lobbyists who overthrew Glass-Steagall, as the big banks that were merrily creating pyramid schemes of derivative bundles and credit-debt swaps and obligations and so on. Just as one hears over and over and over again from those that defend bankers – investment bankers, particularly, or hedge-fund operators – one hears over and over again how hard they work. There’s a banker quoted in the New York Times today to this effect.
Weren't Trope and I discussing this?
This particular self-flattery drives me wild, because the implication is that the nurses, janitors, teachers, firemen, ironworkers, farm workers and others who are hurting don’t work hard. Underneath this falsely egalitarian distribution of blame, there is an abdication of responsibility that is the ideological accompaniment of the impunity with which those who actually made these decisions have gotten away with it. And when I say ‘made these decisions,’ I mean the game in which the ratings agencies were paid by the same people they were rating. I mean the lobbyists who either undermined regulation or inhibited the enforcement of regulation—and when I say ‘the lobbyists’ here, I’m also including those figures who were administering agencies like the SEC while all this stuff was piling high, the pyramid of debt, rising like the Tower of Babel, and the would-be sophisticates were crooning about how all the rules had changed.
 

 

Thank you for a very interesting read.
by trkingmomoe 10/23/2011 - 2:47 am

Thanks. It certainly is interesting to go see things for yourself.

by Donal 10/23/2011 - 10:04 am (re: trkingmomoe)

I started commenting here and it got too long so I blogged it.

Definitely sounds like there is a lot of expression going on. 

Boulder was interesting today.  Boulder is a college town with a lot of wealth.  I recently moved to a nearby city but prior to that I lived in Boulder for 20 years mostly in the suburb type areas. But it makes the occupation of Boulder interesting...

I made a new sign for the rally today and I bought a piece of wood at Home Depot for it.  When I checked out and the cashier asked me what I was going to do with it I told her.  She  said funny that I would buy it at Home Depot.  I said something to the effect that I wasn't going to cut down a tree myself and that I don't think all corporations are bad... just the corruption and abuse of power.  I don't know... was I wrong are we to boycott everything at this point?

Occupy Boulder had their GA scheduled for 9AM on a Saturday... not exactly begging for participation lol.  But that was changed during the GA for the future.  Occupy Denver had a big all day event with music and speakers today at the Civic Center Park.  Boulder is competing to have people come to their march and rally on the same day that Denver has their big rallies... not sure if it works?  For example, next Satirdau is global Occupy your capital day...  

We have two GA's before then to discuss that.

I am undergoing Occupy facilitator training this week.  Should be fun:)

by synchronicity 10/23/2011 - 5:36 am

http://www.christianpost.com/news/over-540000-sign-home-depot-boycott-over-gay-activism-53907/

wink

by kyle flynn 10/23/2011 - 10:52 am (re: synchronicity)

Well I do own a saw....

by synchronicity 10/23/2011 - 11:02 am (re: kyle flynn)

A fellow from Altoona visits Occupy DC:

My group was quickly stumped on the first question.  What change do we want? I, being the educated history teacher, spoke up immediately and said, "We need to reinstate the Glass-Stegall Act, break up the banks that are larger now than before the 2008 crisis, and hold President Obama personally accountable for not prosecuting the bankers and banks who defrauded the American people out of billions of dollars."  Instead of resounding applause I was met with dead silence. I clearly did not understand the movement. These people were looking for an all out revolution.

Another participant suggested the entire decolonization of the United States. Were we not in fact occupying space that had belonged to someone else even before Columbus set sail? She went into great detail as to what she meant but to be honest with you I still didn't get it. A young man piped in that perhaps a good start would be getting the 99% group to actually reflect the 99% of Americans.  Afterall the majority of the crowd in the park was under 30 and white. Finally an exasperated girl remarked that she had heard plenty of people speak and she'd read lots of articles online and how she couldn't help but feel frustrated that no one was making a coherent argument. No one could agree on anything.

I think that's when I had my first "ah, ha" moment. No one could agree on anything. The goals of the 99% were not clear and the movement was fairly small. If a goal were too narrowly defined the movement would lose support, but without a clear purpose the movement would also lose support. What to do? What to do?  Rather than focus on the Unted States at large it was decided to focus specifically on the change Occupy DC wanted for Washington, D.C.

by Donal 10/23/2011 - 6:15 pm

I feel that.  As I talk to people to wide varying views are overwhelming at times.  I was just getting gas noticing that every vehicle in the place was positioned the opposite of the way direction I needed to face to get gas and it reminded me of how insignificant one view point can be.  I have been able to find people that agree with me that we should not come up with 'demands' but instead vision, mission, goals, steps etc.

There is the constant push back of we'll have to do that later after more people join us...

And there is some agreement as in working to help the majority to reclaim their political power with some agreement that we need to get big money out of our elections/government, and to undo the affects of Citizens United.  But much less agreement as to how we would go about doing that.

So my counter to waiting until more people join us, is that it could take years for us to agree on anything in the first place so maybe we should start now;)

by synchronicity 10/23/2011 - 7:57 pm (re: Donal)

I agree that the opposition ot Citizens United seems to be one of the few areas on which there is broad agreement.   The liberatians don't like it because they think only individual human beings with human rights are people.  The lefties don't like it because they think the last thing the power of concentrated wealth needs is even more teammates on a playing field that is already unequal.

Neverthelesss, some people hold out their opposition to Citizens United as though it's the key to the whole problem of the dominance of the 1% in politics, and as though there was no problem with wealthy contributers, wealthy backers and wealthy lobbyists in politics before Citizens United came along.   Obviously, Citizens United is just one small piece of the puzzle.  It has important symbolic significance, but I hope people continue to refelct on what it's a symbol of.

by Dan Kervick 10/23/2011 - 8:39 pm (re: synchronicity)

I don't think anybody has to feel intimidated by the processes and attiitudinal preferences of OWS.  Its great that people without much of a voice in our society have found a movement that appears to give them a voice.   And its great that there is finally a noticeable mass movement calling attention to inequality, greed and corruption in the US.

But if one already have fairly definite ideas about what kinds of things one wants to push for, there is no reason to feel you have to wait around for something the to congeal from OWS, so that you can take the lead from them.  Instead, find some like-minded folks and go out and start your own movement.  Among other things, you can pool your talents and energies to educate the folks in the OWS movement.  They seem quite open to suggestions.

by Dan Kervick 10/23/2011 - 8:48 pm (re: Donal)

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