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| James K. Galbraith |
The
clearing of various Occupy Wall Street camps around the US reveals a double
standard, writes James Galbraith. Legal protesters are hit with the full force
of the law, while criminal bankers remain scot-free.
James K.
Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government-Business Relations
at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at
Austin. His next book, Inequality and Instability, is forthcoming from Oxford
University Press.
Occupy Wall
Street (OWS) is the first street protest I've known of to state its values not
with a manifesto but with a library. The People's Library held a corner of the
encampment at Zuccotti Park in New York City, and consisted by the end of over
5,500 books, neatly maintained and cared for by volunteers.
The
movement's other stylistic innovation is the General Assembly, a daily meeting,
at which the crowd relays each speaker's words by repeating them, phrase by
phrase. This started out as a way to
counter a ban on megaphones.
But it has
morphed into a political syntax, for two reasons: it engages the audience,
since they must listen in order to repeat, and it disciplines the speakers, to
keep their sentences pithy and their interventions short. In consequence more
people take the floor.
Ideas and
discourse
The
People's Library and the General Assembly convey that OWS is about a politics
of ideas and discourse. It is in plain opposition to the prevailing politics of
money and force.
Nobody has
to say this; it just is – a small model of
middle-class organization, with a field kitchen, medical station, cleared
pathways and clean-up crews. By its forms, the movement asserts the claim of
republicanism and democracy against the ethos of markets and empires.
For this
reason, and unlike past movements that sought to provoke and outrage the middle
classes, OWS tapped into a well-spring of public goodwill. Though the actual
protesters were few, they were fed and sustained by many more, treated well in
the press, visited occasionally by the famous, and could call people into the
streets to back them up if they were needed. And the movement began to spread
around the country.
Rattled
bankers
This
disturbed the quiet world of the bankers. Unlike in Europe where the most
serious stresses from the economic crisis – in Greece or in Ireland, say – are
highly visible but remote from the bank headquarters, in America they are
mostly invisible but close at hand.
Bankers
here are used to going about untroubled by the people they've harmed – and yet
they are conscious that those people are not far away. When the victims surface, right outside the
office window, it's distressing. The very sight of the encampment, disciplined
and clean and legal though it was, was an affront.
New York's
Mayor Michael Bloomberg made two efforts clear to OWS from Zuccotti Park. The
first time he gave fair warning, the campers mounted an effective mass
resistance, and the police backed off.
The second
one came at night, on November 14, without warning. It was widely and correctly
compared to a military operation. While the level of brutality did not reach
that of 1968 in Chicago or Paris, methods were rough and people were hurt. The
tents, kitchen and personal belongings were trashed. And the library was
destroyed.
False claim
The raid
was lawless. Before they moved in, the police read a statement declaring that
the city had "determined" that the site was a health and fire safety
hazard. This was false – no such determination had been made.
At his
press conference the next morning, the mayor took "personal
responsibility," saying that the raid met the demands of the
"owners" of the park – a development corporation which had agreed to
maintain it open 24/7 in return for a zoning variance on a nearby building, and
on whose board the mayor's girlfriend sits. This was, indeed, the ugly truth.
Elsewhere
in the country, 18 mayors coordinated their attacks on Occupy encampments. In
Oakland and Berkeley and Portland and Seattle there was police violence,
including the pepper-spraying of an 84-year old woman, and a pregnant teenager,
who was kicked in the stomach, has now miscarried.
At the
University of California, Davis, a police officer pepper-sprayed an entire row
of seated, non-violent students. Photos and video quickly went round the world.
Reports that the Federal Government played a role in all this remain
unconfirmed so far.
Prosecutors
asleep
Meanwhile
as the journalist Matt Taibbi said, in the skyscrapers above, "anything
goes." While a few state-level prosecutions have started, the Federal
Department of Justice remains to all appearances fast asleep.
This is
despite official reports, including that of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
(which made criminal referrals) and that of the Senate Permanent Committee on
Investigations, which laid out a road map for prosecutions in certain high
cases.
Thus we
have extra-legality in two dimensions. One is the use of force against unarmed,
nonviolent protesters who have committed no crime, pose no threat, and uphold
the political values of the middle class. The other is the failure to enforce
existing law against those who have committed vast crimes, for which millions
have paid with their jobs and their homes.
That's the
state of law in America today. But the People's Library is being rebuilt, book
by book.
Editor: Michael Knigge
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