By Arun Gupta
May 24, 2012

With the high-profile arrest of activists on terrorism charges in Cleveland on May Day and in Chicago during the NATO summit there, evidence is mounting that the FBI is unleashing the same methods of entrapment against the Occupy Wall Street movement that it has used against left movements and Muslim-Americans for the last decade.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

In Cleveland the FBI announced on May 1 that “five self-proclaimed anarchists conspired to develop multiple terror plots designed to negatively impact the greater Cleveland metropolitan area.” The FBI claimed the five were nabbed as they attempted to blow up a bridge the night before using “inoperable” explosives supplied to them by an undercover FBI employee.

Then on May 19, the day before thousands marched peacefully in Chicago to protest NATO-led wars, the Illinois State Attorney hit three men with charges of terrorism for allegedly plotting to use “destructive devices” against targets ranging from Chicago police stations to the home of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Defense attorneys for the Chicago activists claim their clients, like the Cleveland activists, were provided with supplies for making Molotov cocktails by undercover agents in an operation that included the participation of the FBI and Secret Service. This was followed up on May 20 by the arrest of two other men on terrorism charges in Chicago for statements they made, which critics say amount to thought crimes. The Chicago cases are also reportedly the first time the state of Illinois is charging individuals under its post-September 11 terrorism law.

To hear FBI officials describe it, “Law enforcement took swift, collaborative action…to eliminate the risk of violence and protect the public.” To many observers, however, the government itself is the overarching threat, systematically repressing peaceful dissent.

Will Potter, who analyzes FBI entrapment plots in his book Green is the New Red, says the two incidents are “a reflection of an ongoing pattern of behavior from the FBI of singling out political activists and having a direct influence in creating so-called terrorist plots for the purpose of proclaiming a victory in the war on terrorism.” Potter claims, “There have been many other cases like these in which the FBI had a role in manufacturing the plot itself. We’ve seen this time and again with animal rights activists, environmental activists and the anarchist movement.”

Simply put, the Cleveland and Chicago cases appear to be instances of the federal government foiling its own terror plots. Two days before the Cleveland plot was supposedly thwarted, David Shipler, author of Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America, presciently described in the New York Times the mechanics of the FBI trap about to be sprung. Shipler wrote that FBI terror stings typically begin by targeting “suspects for pure speech” such as comments, emails and “angry postings” on the Internet. The suspects are then “woo[ed] into relationships with informers, who are often convicted felons working in exchange for leniency, or with FBI agents” working undercover. Some suspects are “incompetent and adrift, like hapless wannabes looking for a cause that the informer or undercover agent skillfully helps them find.” Noting that the FBI is “cultivating potential terrorists,” Shipler asked, “would the culprits commit violence on their own?”

That’s what the FBI claims – that it thwarted the deadly plans of Brandon Baxter, 20; Anthony Hayne, 35; Joshua Stafford, 23; Connor Stevens, 20; and Douglas Wright, 26. The plot allegedly began last fall after Doug Wright discussed deploying smoke bombs as a decoy while individuals toppled bank signs from skyscrapers in downtown Cleveland, and evolved with FBI planning into using “C4 plastic explosive devices” to demolish a bridge connecting the Ohio communities of Brecksville and Sagamore Hills.

Stephen Anthony, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Cleveland office, claimed during the May 1 press conference “that at no time during the course of the investigation was the public ever in danger.” So if the public was never in danger, was there ever a threat?

To get to the bottom of the story I traveled to Cleveland shortly after the arrests and interviewed about 20 friends and family members of the “Cleveland 5,” as supporters are calling them. They describe a group of naïve, vulnerable and even desperate individuals that the FBI preyed on. A government informant provided the five with jobs, money, a place to live, a friendly ear, beer, pot, the prescription stimulant Adderall, and most significant, the ideas and means to carry out a plot conceived by the Bureau itself.

The Lost Boys

Friends describe the five – everyone calls them boys or kids – as “quasi-hobos” and on the losing end of society. Lea Tolls, a 46-year-old mother and self-described “Occu-mom,” says, “Except for Connor [Stevens] they were destitute. They are angry, some have mental illnesses, and there is alcoholism and abuse in their families.”

Kaiser, a Cleveland occupier, told me that Doug Wright, the alleged ringleader, was “like a big brother to me. He ran away from his parents when he was 12.” Everyone invariably mentioned Wright was a train hopper, an explanation that accounts for his mangled nose, missing teeth and abrasive manner. Ben Shapiro, 26, an environmental organizer who was active with Occupy Cleveland last fall, said, “Doug was poor. He was angry, had a hard time dealing with people and was short-tempered.” Nonetheless, numerous youth said Wright was protective of and cared about them and was a hard worker. Zachy, a lanky 21-year-old who hung out with the five, says, “Doug actually did shit. He was running logistics at the Occupy camp. He was the one that knew how to tie knots and put tarps on the tents.”

The story is the same for the others: lost souls wanting to help others. Most Cleveland Occupiers were wary of Anthony Hayne, the oldest of the accused, labeling him a “con man,” “swindler” and “schemer.” Lea Tolls defended him, stating, “Tony was an addict, and we treated him accordingly.” Others added that Hayne’s mother died a week before Occupy Cleveland began. Jonnie Peskar, 22, a member of Occupy Cleveland, says one night another defendant, Brandon Baxter, told him his life story, “He grew up in violence. He and his dad would fist fight. Brandon talked about how he was traumatized growing up.”

Gloria, a friend of Brandon Baxter’s, called him “an absolute joy to be around. He wants to help everyone he comes in contact with.” But he also suffered from “horrible depression” and tried to kill himself in February by jumping off a bridge before being talked down by cops, she claimed. “He spent weeks in the hospital from the suicide attempt.” As for Joshua Stafford, who is known as Skelly, his mother anonymously told the media of a troubled life, saying he had been “in and out of hospitals, prisons, jails. He’s just been a troubled soul since he’s been born.”

Joshua Stafford and Brandon Baxter are also described as highly impressionable. Tolls says Stafford, “would have done anything anyone told him to, just to have friends.” Peskar says Brandon Baxter admitted to him, “‘I’m easily brainwashed because I was pulled into being a Neo-Nazi.’ Brandon was in a very confused state. He always contradicted himself.  He didn’t know what he wanted.”

Of the five, only Brandon Baxter and Connor Stevens appear to be in contact with their families. Curious as to how Stevens was caught up in the trap, I sat down with his family in their modest ranch house in the suburbs of Cleveland to hear of a thoughtful and passionate young man trying to surmount life’s obstacles on the path to adulthood. Stevens’ mother Gail describes her son as “extremely intelligent” although “school didn’t engage him.” Connor Stevens dropped out his junior year. In his sophomore year, Stevens and some friends founded a social justice group called “Fighters for Freedom” that was quickly shut down by the school administration. He was also elected class president, but was not allowed to serve because of a low grade point average. When he was 16 he told his family he was gay, which his siblings said neither surprised nor fazed them.

Gail also spoke of family troubles that affected Connor and her other children deeply – her mother and sister passing away in quick succession, followed less than a year later by her husband James running afoul of the law in 2001, which resulted in more than two years in prison for him and the dissolution of their marriage. Gail went from a stay-at-home mom to the sole breadwinner and had to handle the stress of moving her family into her father’s house.

Occupy gave Connor Stevens a sense of belonging. Gail says, “I was excited for him. There was something he could actually be part of in Cleveland.” In early 2012 he began to say “he wanted to be a pastor. He felt he was being called.” She read a letter Stevens sent her from the Corrections Corporation of America facility near Youngstown, Ohio, where he is being held. He wrote:

“I am in good spirits and feel at the top of my game physically, mentally, spiritually. … I have great faith and do not underestimate the power of prayers. The bible I’m reading, the New American, in which I’ve been focusing on the Old Testament, speaks constantly of the Lord’s uplifting the oppressed, siding with the poor, the downtrodden, the widows and the orphans. I believe God is on our side. The scripture you quoted from Jeremiah is very fitting. And just before I came down to our last visitation … I read Psalms 27:1. This is my rock, this passage. It conveys everything.”

The Plot Begins

Cleveland 5 supporters claim that Connor Stevens and possibly others were threatened to participate in the plot. Others interpret as a threat a comment in the FBI affidavit in which the informant tells the group they are “on the hook” for the explosives. Interviews with more than a dozen Cleveland activists also provide evidence that a possible FBI asset by the name of Ryan is still floating around Cleveland and is cryptically mentioned just once as “Ryan LNU” (Last Name Unknown) in the criminal complaint against the five.

The FBI plot begins on October 21. On that day the city of Cleveland announced it was shutting down the two-week-old occupation in the downtown Public Square. Organizers say Occupy Cleveland held a rally on Oct. 21 more than 500 strong, including nonviolent civil disobedience, while choosing to roll up dozens of tents in the camp so as to save its equipment from imminent confiscation by the police.

Also on Oct. 21, the FBI’s “Confidential Human Source” (CHS), subsequently identified as Shaquille Azir, made contact with Douglas Wright. The affidavit states: “Based on an initial report of potential criminal activity and threats involving anarchists who would be attending an event held by a protest group, the Cleveland FBI directed the CHS to attend that event.” That night, the FBI report continues, while most occupiers were engaged in protest, a group of seven men “was constantly moving throughout the crowd expressing displeasure at the crowd’s unwillingness to act violently.”

Numerous friends of the five dispute this account, saying violence was never raised. Because there is no audio recording of the encounter, as there are for many others, the FBI claims could easily be fabricated, which would mean the basis for the investigation was spurious. People present say there was a tactical dispute between “do-it-yourself” punk kids, which the five identified with, who wanted to keep the camp going, and more mainstream, college-educated occupiers who agreed to take down dozens of tents while staging a nonviolent civil disobedience action to demonstrate support for free speech rights. Zachy and Natalie, friends of the five, say the punk kids were disillusioned with both the decision to end the occupation and what they saw as an ineffectual protest, but no one discussed violence.

‘Silly Kid Things’

Zachy says, “About a week after the collapse of tent city on Oct. 21, we created a group called the Revolutionary People’s Army. We were being romantic. We were drunk and high … Doug, Connor, Brandon, Joshua and Tony were all involved in the RPA. There were a couple of serious meetings and it turned into spray painting Guy Fawkes masks, ‘Rise Up’ and ‘RPA’ and ‘circle A’ anarchist symbols around town. We also plastered ‘Wake Up’ with circle A and Occupy stickers. RPA was real tongue-in-cheek. It was silly kid things.”

Tolls calls them “boys playing cowboys and Indians with fireworks and spray paint,” adding, “They were trying to empower themselves and passionately wanted to change their world. Occupy gave them hope. They were targeted by the FBI and culled from a peaceful group. They were guided toward this by individuals who provided the means and motivation. They didn’t have these violent actions in them.”

It was from these childish antics that the FBI claims that Doug Wright conjured up the initial plot – deploying smoke bombs as cover as while toppling bank signs from buildings such as the Key Bank tower. Friends of Doug Wright laugh at the allegations. They mention that with Wright’s smashed-up face and punk attire he would not even be allowed into the building, much less be able to scale the 947-foot-tall skyscraper and blast off the enormous red key affixed to the outside.

Ben Shapiro, who is highly regarded in the activist community, says he noticed suspicious activities he interprets as police disruption. “Certain people were actively trying to isolate the Cleveland 5 from other organizers last fall by spreading rumors they were FBI agents.” Additionally, says Shapiro, during the first few weeks of the occupation at the centrally located Public Square, “We saw people in strange white vans circling around the square, conducting surveillance. They were parked in an area downtown where anyone else would have been towed or ticketed within minutes.”

After the encampment ended, Shapiro says he was concerned about the punk kids and cautioned them against engaging in unsafe behavior. “They had every reason to be frustrated – there were poor group dynamics and an inability to reoccupy the square.” At the same time, he adds, “They were good kids and were coming up with elaborate plans on how to hide their tents in backpacks.” Shapiro says the activity wasn’t a strategic answer to the loss of space, but “it was very spirited.”

In hindsight, says Shapiro, there was “evidence of narcs … People spreading rumors, isolating members of the community, providing money, transportation and space.” He emphasizes he is referring not only to Shaquille Azir, but to the shadowy Ryan as well. When he heard news of the arrests, Shapiro says, “I saw the list of names. I saw this group of kids that had been targeted was now entrapped. It seems so fabricated.”

Zachy says during the next few months the five except for Anthony Hayne (whom he said was serving a jail sentence) would regularly stop by the one remaining tent downtown to pull night shifts. Zachy adds that in early November Ryan tried to recruit him to meet Shaquille Azir, telling him, “This guy is buying us breakfast and will give us a house with no strings attached.” Zachy says he was suspicious and declined the offer. Despite multiple claims that Ryan is in contact with Azir and even recruiting people to meet him in the fall, Ryan is only mentioned once in the affidavit in February 2012.

Over the winter, according to the FBI affidavit, the contact between Shaquille Azir and Doug Wright is sporadic. Azir and Wright reconnect in mid-February at the same time Occupy Cleveland rents a warehouse as a crash pad for occupiers who were maintaining a presence at the tent.

Anarchist Romper Room

In mid-May, I ventured to the red-brick warehouse dubbed the “fortress.” Entering the decrepit building was like walking into an anarchist Romper Room: tents pitched indoors, graffiti, belongings strewn about, people dozing mid-day, dirty dishes and pungent toilet odors. It was here that Brandon Baxter, Connor Stevens, Tony Hayne and Joshua Stafford reassembled. I joined half a dozen people around a table as they puffed hand-rolled cigarettes incessantly. They were clearing out as the lease was up the next day. Right off the bat, Zachy said, “A lot of us had never lived in a communal situation. This was the first time living away from our parents. Dishes were always a fight. We’re a bunch of uneducated kids.”

When the topic of cleaning came up, Rachel jumped in, “I got the name ‘mother hen’ for always complaining. ‘Come on guys, clean this trash up.’”

The discussion repeatedly circled around to Ryan. The warehouse crew expressed suspicion because Ryan appeared in mid-October, saying he drove up from Florida, but soon had connections to Azir, whom virtually no one ever met outside the five. They also mentioned Ryan would take regular road trips in his car and claim his steady source of income was via his parents wiring money to him.

In April everything comes to a head. Jonnie Peskar said Doug Wright seemed excited one day in early April. He says Wright told him, “Today is going to be a really good day. My boss has some joints waiting.” Peskar continues, “Shortly thereafter Doug asked Connor if he wanted work. They told me multiple times, ‘It’s a really cool job. He gives us beer. He smokes us out.’”

Gail said this is the first job her son ever had in his life, the first time he made money – five bucks an hour. She showed me text messages Connor Stevens sent her at the time:

“A long day of labor for me. Made $60, long day 9:30 am to 9:30 pm … If I wanna do it again, I gotta get up at 9 tomorrow. Lifes rough.”

“I kinda feel like an ant”

“My friend doug got me the job. The $ goes fast. Turned out not to have work today. Still needa get footwear.”

As the alleged plot to blow up the bridge takes shape, the warehouse members say Shaquille Azir would swing by the warehouse in the morning to pick up the boys to do home repairs, but he would sit in the car and never interact with anyone else. Rachel says she asked Doug Wright for work with Azir, but was rebuffed, as were others who offered their services. Friends of Baxter’s say Wright hooked him up with work with Shaquille April.

Peskar says jobs weren’t the only thing Azir was hooking them up with. Baxter admitted to him that he was taking Adderall, a widely abused prescription stimulant. Peskar says, “Connor was also taking it, and mentioned, ‘I have a connect for Adderall.’ Both Wright and Baxter said the connection for the Adderall was Azir. I asked Baxter where he got it from, and he said ‘Doug’s boss.’”

The warehouse was also buzzing with rumors that something was afoot. One individual told me that someone asked him, “Did you hear that Doug is trying to blow up a bridge?” The individual said, “I literally laughed it off. I said Doug is a moron. He doesn’t know how to do anything like that.” Another person fingered Ryan as the source of the rumors. Ryan allegedly told them in early April, “The warehouse is going to get raided. There are people who are going to do something dangerous with explosives. It’s sitting at a house.”

I pointed out to the warehouse group that after such a dramatic incident like the arrest of the five on terrorism charges, there is a tendency to see everything that happened over the previous months in a paranoid light. Julia Boyd, who is active with Occupy Cleveland, says, “A lot of the detrimental effects of this is everyone is suspicious of everyone else.”

I suggested maybe Ryan is just crazy, not an FBI operative. One person got Ryan on the line and put him on speaker phone. After a minute of small talk, Ryan claimed someone they all knew had been arrested. Everyone was concerned this signaled a wider sweep of activists on terrorism charges. Except hours later I met up with the person in question who was never arrested and was adamant that Ryan is an FBI operative. I was able to find Ryan’s number and called him. A male answered who claimed he wasn’t Ryan and hung up after a minute. Subsequent attempts to contact Ryan by phone were unsuccessful.

It remains to be seen if Ryan is on the FBI payroll or just mentally unhinged, but lawyers told me that at minimum Ryan would be of interest for the defense lawyers for the five and it might be possible to determine if he is a paid agent. Another lawyer, who has been handling high-profile political cases like the Cleveland 5 for nearly 40 years, mentioned that in addition to the use of undercover agents and informants, the FBI employs “agent provocateurs” to infiltrate and discredit political movements, changing the name of programs to make it appear as if it has reformed its underhanded ways.

In the case of the five Chicago activists who have been swept up on terrorism charges, defense attorneys charge that two police informants nicknamed “Mo” and “Gloves” were the masterminds. In the post-9/11 era the FBI has up to 60,000 informants and spies around the United States, according to an expose by Mother Jones. The FBI cut its teeth as a repressive police force during the Red Scare after World War 1, raiding homes and deporting thousands of legal foreign-born radicals in the labor, anarchist and socialist movements. After World War II, the FBI destroyed thousands of lives and decimated the left during the McCarthy Era. The FBI famously spied on Martin Luther King, Jr., during the 1960s and at one point thousands of agents were devoted to disrupting and sabotaging the anti-Vietnam War, student and black liberation movements.

During the 1980s the FBI spied on Central American solidarity activists. Since Sept. 11 the FBI has snared hundreds of Muslim Americans in cases involving informants who supplied the ideas, motivation and means for a terrorist plot. In recent years the FBI has termed “animal rights and environmental extremists,” as well as anarchists as some of the main domestic terrorist threats. It has used infiltrators, most infamously one code-named Anna, to entrap environmental activists. In 2008, the FBI sent a snitch by the name of Brandon Darby on a fishing expedition, and he managed to cajole and push two Austin, Texas youth into agreeing to make Molotov cocktails at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. These were all political cases as are the two against the Cleveland 5 and the Chicago group.

The fact that the FBI sprang cases during the biggest Occupy events this year – May Day and NATO – indicates it has the Occupy movement in its sights. They are hardly the only ones. Reams of federal government documents secured by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund reveal widespread government surveillance and information gathering on the movement ranging from the Department of Homeland Security to the Pentagon. The public interest legal organization asserts that the documents regarding Occupy Wall Street “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

For now the Cleveland 5 are languishing in jail. Connor Stevens and Doug Wright have been on suicide watch according to those who visited them. Brandon Baxter wrote in a letter dated May 19, “So Skelly was just dragged out of his cell a bit ago, He wrote ‘They all want me to DIE’ all over his walls, They said they’ll bring him back, but he may be a suicide watch for awhile.”

Their trial has been set for September 17, 2012, the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, after the defense objected to Sept. 11, which was originally scheduled as the trial start date.

Summing up the feeling of many supporters, Lea Tolls says, despite their hard backgrounds the five “all have good hearts and souls. I tried to give them comfort, guidance and stability. I used to call them my lost boys, and now they’re very lost. The richest country in the world can’t support them, give them healthcare, a proper education and they end up falling through the cracks. Instead of helping them, the FBI targets them for something nefarious and violent. It’s just disgusting that the government uses them towards this end.”

This article originally was published by AlterNet.

Arun Gupta is a founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper. He is writing a book on the decline of American Empire for Haymarket Books.

Related articles

• Cleveland Occupy arrests are the latest in FBI’s pattern of manipulation | Arun Gupta (guardian.co.uk)
• Police Entrapment of Nonviolent Movements (counterpunch.org)
• How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing ‘Terrorists’ (rollingstone.com)

Police cleared New York’s Zuccotti Park, and the movement has reportedly struggled to find more organising space [Getty Images]

The mainstream media are eager to administer last rites. CNN declared “May Day fizzled”, the New York Postsneered “Goodbye, Occupy” and the New York Times consigned the day’s events to fewer than 400 words, mainly about arrests in New York City.

Historians and organisers counter that the Occupy movement needs to be seen in relative terms. Eminent sociologist Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Poor People’s Movements, says:

Brooke Lehman, a central figure in the anti-corporate globalization movement a decade ago, says:

Others note that protests did take place in more than 110 cities on May Day in recognition of worker resistance and solidarity, no mean feat given the hostility to labour among the ruling elite i the US. At the same time, only shameless partisans would deny that the Occupy movement is struggling to reclaim the heights it had last year, and many activists admit this in private. Some argue that police and media hostility act as a one-two punch that can knock out movements such as Occupy, and this is all too true, as explained below. But other movements surmount these obstacles. North of the US-Canada border, hundreds of thousands of university students in Quebec have maintained a militant strike for three months against tuition increases in defiance of whip-cracking politicians, pundits and police.

Lack of ‘space’

The real stumbling block for the Occupy movement is also the reason for its success: space, or now, the lack thereof. Understanding the significance of political space and Occupy’s inability to recapture it reveals why the movement is having difficulty re-gaining traction.

In-depth coverage of the global movement

Americans have become so enmeshed in the transience of work, life, housing, play, finance and the proliferation of virtual spaces that it is easy to forget taking collective action in a shared physical space is how social change happens from below. Take the labour movement. The history of industrial workers’ struggle starts with the insight that capitalists are their own undoing, by amassing workers in a common space – the factory – where they become aware of their common interests, as well as their potential power to stop the machinery of capital. The same is true of student movements. The shared educational space can unite students around common grievances and goals. And for the civil rights movement, black churches played a pivotal role.

Now, Occupy Wall Street differs in that it appropriated a private-public park and reconfigured it as a political space. It was a manifestation of the central concept of the Occupy movement: there can be no political democracy without economic democracy. Its potency sprang from the same source as the Arab Spring, Spain’s Indignados and the Wisconsin labour uprising – peacefully liberating public space and governing it through participatory democracy.

Before this social contagion first surfaced in Tunisia in late 2010, the previous moment of a mass global outburst was Feb, 15, 2003, the day of protests against the impending US invasion of Iraq. That was the problem: it was only a day with no bottom-up democratic essence. Not only could Bush shrug it off as a “focus group”, the protests could be twisted as legitimacy for aggressor states - because they allowed space for democratic dissent in contrast to the terror of Saddam Hussein.

Colonised by consumption

Anti-war protest has little impact anymore, because it has devolved into gathering on a weekend in the political capital, marching around empty streets with pre-printed signs, mouthing toothless chants and listening to cliched speeches. It is too predictable and too easy to ignore, by rulers who are insulated from the ruled by dollars and truncheons. On the other hand, occupying space in the heart of a city without end is a challenge to state power.

One activist said of the encampment on Wall Street: “At any moment, you could call for an impromptu march on Goldman Sachs and a hundred people would join you.” The night of October 5, 2011, was a spectacular example of this. After a union-led rally in downtown Manhattan, thousands of people surged through the financial district in breakaway marches for hours. With so many people in the streets feeling the wind of public support at their backs, Wall Street felt fragile and the New York Police Department was under siege.

Keeping a space continually, and using democratic forms of self-governance recreates the commons, which has been colonised over decades by full-spectrum consumption – shopping, eating, drinking, entertainment and paid spectacle. Occupy Wall Street attracted throngs of journalists and the curious because it was a completely different spectacle. It was a miniature society that rejected the private, individualism and capitalism. The scene of hundreds of people exchanging food, art, music, knowledge, politics, healthcare, shelter, anger, ideas, skills and love was unlike anything else in our consumer societies – because not one exchange was lubricated by money (of course the goods were paid for at some point). Within the occupation, thousands shared the experience of having a direct democratic stake in a society they were helping to build from scratch.

These democratic societies, more than 300 of which popped up around the United States by October 2011, propelled Occupy by enticing a huge number of political neophytes to join an organic movement. The real power of a social movement, from the 1960s to the Tea Party, is not to recombine existing activists in a new formation but to bring in the previously non-political. At occupations, experienced organisers marvelled at the ability to have meaningful conversations with people of radically different backgrounds and politics. Having visited nearly 40 occupations across the US, I encountered many self-identified conservatives and Republicans and even a few Tea Party members who said they were part of the 99 per cent.

Media blackout

It was the Occupy movement that created the people – “the 99 per cent” – not the other way around. The range of politics and issues ran the gamut, but having the space for collective discussion gave occupiers the time to coalesce around the idea that society’s problems stem from the concentration of wealth and power among “the one per cent”. Thus, those who lack healthcare, had homes foreclosed upon, are unemployed, stuck in low-wage jobs, are homeless, subject to repressive immigration laws, burdened with student debt, opposed to destructive energy extraction or angered by corporate personhood and a political system corrupted by money could find common cause and unite against a common enemy.

But it wasn’t just anger. Different visions of society blossomed in the space. As Michael Premo of Occupy Wall Street, puts it: “You don’t know how to dream unless you see it sometimes. The occupation unlocked the creative, radical imagination.” Seeing different ways of organising work and community has kick-started innumerable projects around the country, such as urban farming, community centres, workers cooperatives, free schools and housing reclamation.

That’s all changed. While a few scattered occupations remain in the political hinterlands – cities such as Little Rock and Tallahassee – every other one has been booted out of the collective space over the past six months. In many cities, most prominently New York, the general assemblies have disintegrated, because the democratic practice becomes a floating abstraction without the space to anchor it. The space glued the various tendencies together because the decisions were conducted within and concerned the alternate society growing up around them. In cities where the assemblies continue they often draw perhaps one-tenth of the numbers who attended at the peak. Ruth Fowler, a writer who works with Occupy Los Angeles, says: “Occupy is very odd right now. The people who have stayed are the cream of the crap, and the brilliant. The rank-and-file in between are at home.”

Despite new activists drifting away, Occupy has hardly disappeared. Nationwide, it is defending homeowners from evictions and disrupting auctions of foreclosed homes. There is a national campaign to force the government to break Bank of America into regional banks. Students are fighting against tuition increases and school cuts and for a moratorium on student debt. Occupiers are working with unions to battle corporations cutting wages and benefits. And many Occupy groups have joined movements for single-payer healthcare and against environmentally destructive oil and gas drilling.

David Solnit, who works with Occupy San Francisco, indicates one reason why the Occupy movement appears to have faded away, “Any movement has its mass mobilisation and its in-between times… We need a better measuring tape than numbers and public space and whether it’s amplified through media owned by the one per cent.”

Simply put, corporate media are inclined to dismiss a movement that wants to chop up corporations – if not eliminate them entirely. A study by two sociologists backs this up. Surveying more than 2,200 US newspapers, Jackie Smith and Patrick Rafail found coverage of the Occupy movement has dwindled to a trickle since November, despite hundreds of active Occupy groups, thousands of organising projects and extensive May Day activity. Even more telling, newspaper coverage of inequality has shrunk by nearly 70 per cent since autumn.

State repression

One can debate whether or not Occupy is still effective, but there is no way to deny income and wealth inequalities have reached historical extremes or that two-thirds of all in the US – and 55 per cent of Republicans – say “there are ‘very strong’ or ‘strong’ conflicts between the rich and the poor,” according to the Pew Research Center.

The media indifference extends to downplaying state repression. Ironically, force is a measure of success because it’s recognition that the movement is a threat:

• In Oakland, police rolled out a tank on May Day.
• Chicago has increased penalties for protests and made it more difficult to secure permits in advance of the anti-NATO protests
• University of California officials are pushing for charges against 11 students and one poetry professor that carry 11 years of prison time and million-dollar fines for nonviolent sit-down protests against Bank of America
• Most ominously, the FBI, which was forged in the crucible of the post-World War I Red Scare, is up to its old tricks. Relying on the same techniques it uses to ensnare Muslims in “terrorism” plots, the FBI arrested five anarchists in Cleveland for allegedly plotting to blow up a bridge
• Most recently, one activist in Salt Lake City claimed three FBI agents showed up at his home, unannounced, asking for names of people planning on attending the anti-NATO protests in Chicago

The repression is aimed at preventing Occupy from reclaiming a space, which novelist Arundhati Roy predicted months ago: “Holding territory may not be something the [Occupy] movement will be allowed to do in a state as powerful and violent as the United States.” Since March, Occupy Wall Street has tried to retake public spaces in Lower Manhattan four times, and four times the police have cracked down. The most recent attempt, the night of May Day, was met by a massive police presence in Wall Street, with cops threatening anyone who looked like a protester with arrest.

Let it marinate

“Cinematic” is the only way to convey the image of public sidewalks and streets blanketed with thousands of riot police, surveillance units, snatch squads, detectives, beat cops, community police, white-shirted commanders, phalanxes of scooter police, four police helicopters overhead and cars, SUVs, buses, trucks and command vehicles flashing emergency lights. All to clear out a few thousand people, mainly youths, who gathered for a democratic assembly and the faint hope they could recreate the magic of Occupy Wall Street.

Even though I spent hours in the area with other journalists, and was threatened with arrest five times, I did not see one mainstream media account describing the opulent display of police force. Nonetheless, despite the unveiled fist of the state that is written out of the media narrative, movements sometimes do find a way to triumph. As shown by Egypt’s democratic uprising, numbers and organisation can force the state not only to back down, it can cause the ruling edifice to fatally crack. This is what happened on October 14, when Occupy Wall Street gathered enough people, allies and media pressure to force Bloomberg and the police to abandon their threat to oust the occupation.

The big question for Occupy is how it can build a dual system of power, as Egyptian activists did over years with revitalised labour organising, a national anti-police brutality movement and politicised youth and women in micro-enterprises that populate urban areas. This requires organisation, but it also gets back to the question of space. Alienation, fragmentation and suspicion is so pervasive in US society that people need secure areas where they can take the time to share stories, to listen and debate, create bonds, forge trust and take action.

The places where Americans can and do gather in large numbers, such as parks, squares, factories, shopping centres, the workplace, stadiums, schools and places of worship are almost all privatised and subject to strict legal and physical regulation. Nonetheless, Occupy’s future success is based on finding forms of space where it can reproduce itself.

Until then, Frances Fox Piven is right that movements take a decade or more to have an effect. It took 22 years from A Phillip Randolph’s aborted 1941 March on Washington to Martin Luther King Jr’s 1963 march that signaled the end of Jim Crow. It was a decade from the first national anti-war march in 1965 to the end of the Vietnam War. It’s taken more than 20 years for the LGBT movement to succeed in getting a sitting president to endorse marriage equality.

And just as it took years of labour organising prior to the 1937 sit-down strikes (another form of occupation) that secured collective bargaining rights for unions, the Occupy movement has barely begun.

Arun Gupta is a co-founder of The Indypendent and The Occupied Wall Street Journal. He covers the Occupy movement nationwide for Salon.

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(Photo: Dana Deskiewicz / Flickr)

By all measures the Occupy movement is a powerful brand. It has thousands of spin-offs such as Occupy Our Homes, Occupy Money, Occupy the Hood, Occupy Gender Equality and Occupy the Food System. It has powerful name recognition, snagging “word of the year” honors in 2011. And now, ardent supporters are manning the ramparts to defend its integrity.

Adbusters, the culture-jamming magazine that helped spark Occupy Wall Street (OWS), is accusing unions and liberal groups clustered under the banner of the 99% Spring of tarnishing Occupy’s sterling name. Launched in February by groups like Greenpeace, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream, the 99% Spring announced it would train 100,000 people in April for “sustained nonviolent direct action” against targets like Verizon, Bank of America and Walmart.

These groups, bellowed Adbusters in an online missive “Battle for the Soul of Occupy,” are “the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades.” Adbusters fingered MoveOn as one of the primary saboteurs of Occupy and linked to an article in Counterpunch that claims the 99% Spring “is primarily about co-option and division, about sucking a large cross-section of Occupy into Obama’s reelection campaign, watering down its radical politics and using these mass trainings as a groundwork to put forward 100,000 ‘good protesters’ to overshadow the ‘bad protesters.’”

It’s a fiery broadside, but there’s little evidence to back it up. I queried occupiers from San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Little Rock and New York, who joined 99% Spring trainings, and not one witnessed election-year politicking. Others stressed the coalition includes organizations that would bolt if it were promoting the Democrats. One core organizer of the 99% Spring, who preferred to remain anonymous, blew his stack when I asked if there weren’t legitimate reasons for occupiers to be suspicious of the effort. “Why don’t people look at the fact that MoveOn, this huge organization that has set much of the tone for the progressive movement for the last 10 years, is now trying to engage in a radical culture shift by moving its members from clicktivism to getting them to put their bodies on the line in nonviolent street protests and militant eviction defenses in their neighborhoods. Maybe Occupy is worried about its own viability.”

Some observers go further, claiming that Occupy is the one co-opting MoveOn. Josh Harkinson in Mother Jones writes: “It seems that America’s best-known progressive fundraising organization is now taking its cues from Occupy Wall Street.” Nathan Schneider, writing in Waging Nonviolence, takes a more nuanced approach by concluding that while the 99% Spring is indeed co-optation, there is also an opening. Because the thousands who participated in the 99% Spring are a juicy target, He argues that Occupy should be asking how to “turn these people’s attention to structures of oppression, rather than to stump speeches and delegates?” Schneider gives voice to the many Occupy activists who want to engage with broader forces. As one activist observed, “The worst thing we could do right now is make Occupy Wall Street into a small ‘radicals only’ space.”

But the real story is how the main groups behind the 99% Spring – such as MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream – have created a meta-brand known as the “99% Movement” that encompasses a product line that includes 99% Power, 99% Candidates, 99% Uniting, a 99% Voter Pledge and events like All in for the 99% and 99% Spring Bank Protests. (Rebuild the Dream, MoveOn and SEIU are sponsors of nearly every formation.) Broadening the coalition to include radical left organizations that reject electoral politics is a sophisticated way to enhance the overall brand. Such groups can feel confident they are maintaining their independence from elections by participating in the 99% Spring, but they are still building the 99% brand, which will then be used in forms like the 99% voter pledge and 99% candidates to boost the Democratic Party’s fortunes come fall.

Additionally, MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream are not being entirely forthright about how they are using the 99% Movement to rebrand existing projects. The 99% Candidates are repackaged “American Dream candidates” that were rolled out last October. The voter pledge “has been based in part on the Contract for the American Dream,” according to Justin Ruben, the 38-year-old executive director of MoveOn. Same with the 99% Spring. Ruben said some actions are new, but he acknowledged to Salon it’s mostly old wine in a new bottle. “There is a bunch of groups that have been actively involved in putting the 99% Spring together and these are the actions that they … have been planning since the summer before Occupy.”

The question of engagement for the Occupy movement involves both form and content. Given the form of the 99% Movement, it is wishful thinking to believe that Occupy can co-opt MoveOn. Sayrah Namaste, an activist with (Un)Occupy Albuquerque, said, “There is a real concern about what MoveOn is doing and if it is co-optation…. People from (Un)Occupy see MoveOn as heavily part of Democratic Party politics and question what their motives are and how they operate.”

Much of the suspicion toward MoveOn stems from its role in the Iraq antiwar movement. Some antiwar leaders said their relationship with MoveOn was marked by opportunism and undemocratic dealings. Storied sixties activist Tom Hayden wrote in an email, “I think they dramatically expanded the [antiwar] base … But it’s fair to say they were driven by Democratic strategy and the desire to jump on issues which would bring in more members.” Leslie Cagan, co-founder and former national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, said, “MoveOn is very top down…. As best I can tell, they have never developed a democratic structure that allows the members to vote on who the leadership will be or how decisions are made, let alone have serious input into the positions that MoveOn Takes.” What this top-down structure means, said Bill Dobbs, a member of the Occupy Wall Street press team and longtime antiwar activist, is “Groups like MoveOn can walk into any Occupy movement and engage in the discussions, but we can’t participate in their strategy discussions.”

I pressed Ruben on the issue, specifically the charge that MoveOn undermined the opportunity to end the Iraq War in 2007 when the Democrats took over both houses of Congress and he would only concede, “What happened in 2007 was complex and the narrative around MoveOn’s role is not accurate.”

How the 99% Movement came into being is a prime case of top-down decision making. While the 99% Movement by all evidence is an exercise in branding, Ruben denies this. “It’s not a rebranding strategy. It’s an effort to give this movement a name,” he claimed. Though Ruben does refer to it as a brand: “No one organization controls the 99% brand.”

Ruben said the story of the 99% Movement began in 2011. “When we partnered with Rebuild the Dream early last year it was based on the idea that there were the conditions for a new movement to come forward in American to take on economic justice and inequality…” Ruben said they eventually decided, “The American Dream movement was our best name for this phenomenon that nobody had named. Some people were calling it the Main Street movement. We said we have to give this thing a name otherwise it doesn’t exist in the eyes of people watching. We were seeing it was a real thing.”

Evidently this decision was prior to the “Take Back the American Dream” conference held in Washington, DC, from October 3-5. The conference web site states “a new movement is energized! Thousands came to Washington … to help plan the take-off of the American Dream movement, building on the momentum of the Wisconsin workers’ rights protests and the Occupy Wall Street actions to build an independent movement for change.”

Ruben continued, “And then Occupy Wall Street happened and crystallized a lot of the frustration. It engaged millions more people and captured the imagination of the whole world. It had this 99% frame that did something that nobody else had managed to do yet, which was to tell this whole story through characters and unify these twin problems of political and economic inequality. It was just an amazingly powerful frame. We said, okay, this is the name for it because people were walking around with signs saying ‘I am the 99%.’” Ruben said the goal was to name a movement that included Occupy, but was bigger than it. “The 99% Movement is the broad wave of folks who’ve been coming together over the last 14 or 15 months in increasing numbers to fight for economic justice and against inequality…. Within that Occupy is one powerful, amazing and important part of that movement, but it is not limited to Occupy.”

Despite Ruben’s denial of the 99% Movement being a rebranding of the American Dream movement, he said, “We didn’t have the right name for it.” This statement reveals that the renaming is a branding strategy decided from on high. Another inside source with the 99% Spring, who wished to remain anonymous, said, “My hunch is they are branding the Rebuild the Dream candidates as 99% candidates and are leveraging the language used by Occupy.”

While MoveOn and other organizations praise Occupy Wall Street for shifting the political terrain to the left, they are forging ahead with creating a movement that presents itself as Occupy’s successor. Writing in The Nation, Ilyse Hogue, who serves on the board of Rebuild the Dream and is the former director of political advocacy and communications for MoveOn, described occupying public space as nothing more than a “tactic” that is now “dead.” Hogue wants to “make way for the new,” namely the 99% Spring and the 99% brand. Also writing inThe Nation around the same time, Van Jones, the former Obama administration official who co-founded the Democratic Party-allied Rebuild the Dream, stated, “This spring 2012 will mark the long-awaited re-emergence of the 99 percent movement.”

I told Ruben that I have visited nearly 40 occupations in 25 states in the last six months and have talked to hundreds of occupiers, but no one ever told me, “I am part of the 99% Movement.” Ruben responded, “Occupy is the most visible at the ground level piece of it, but I’m going to push back at you saying [the 99% Movement] doesn’t exist. I talk to those folks all the time. They are in our membership. Those are the people who organized nonviolence training, a thousand of them.”

Yet, this appears to be a ploy to confuse cause and effect. Ruben said MoveOn has seven million members, with a “couple million” having joined since 2011. If MoveOn is relentlessly flogging the meme it helped create – “the 99% Movement” – then is it really a bottom-up movement like Ruben claims?

With the 99% Spring kicking into full gear, with the help of MoveOn’s PR firm, BerlinRosen, the 99% Movement brand is suddenly appearing everywhere. MoveOn is promoting weeks of protests at upcoming corporate shareholder meetings. Two of the biggest protests were at Wells Fargo in San Francisco on April 24 and General Electric in Detroit on April 25. A search on Google News for the two protests turned up dozens of references to “the 99 percent movement” in outlets including CNBC, Reuters, The Chicago Tribune and The Detroit News, overshadowing mentions of the Occupy movement. (One report labeled the 99% movement the “Ghost of Occupy Wall Street.”)

For anyone involved in Occupy Wall Street, the menu of upcoming corporate targets is an appetizing line-up, such as Walmart, Bank of America, Peabody Coal, Amazon, WellPoint and Occidental Petroleum. Noticeably absent are politicians, however, which is probably intentional. The 99% Movement employs the ideas and language of Occupy Wall Street toward ends diametrically opposed to it: support for Democratic Party candidates up to and including President Obama. Protesting corporations, but not the politicians who work hand in hand with them, is a crafty way to redirect Occupy’s energy away from the Democratic Party, which is as much an object of Occupy Wall Street’s ire as the Republicans.

Ruben does not deny this is the strategy. “We are the 800-pound gorilla and we work very actively on elections, including supporting Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates. If you think that is a terrible idea and you’re worried about energy from the movement that you love going into elections then MoveOn is an obvious target.”

Ruben claimed The 99% Voter Pledge also drew inspiration from Occupy Wall Street, but the pledge is so watered down from the original OWS declaration – “Make the wealthiest one percent pay their fair share”; “Create good jobs now”; “Stop cuts to vital services”; and “Represent people, not corporations” – that Obama could endorse them, which, again, is probably the point.

Van Jones has been leading this push to rebrand candidates. Days after Occupy Wall Street was evicted from Zuccotti Park last November he claimed the next phase of the movement was “recruiting 2,000 candidates to run for office now under this 99% banner.” (More recently Jones said we should pitch talk of class war overboard because it is dragging down the movement. He claimed, “The real enemy is not the 1 percent,” while skirting the reality that it was class politics from below that filled the sails of the Occupy Wall Street movement, propelling it onto the national stage.)

This unified brand strategy of the 99% Movement is evident in a media advisory dated April 24-25 from BerlinRosen, a “communications consultancy” based in New York. Announcing a “New Wave of 99% Activism To Hold Big Corporations Accountable Over CEO Pay, Tax Avoidance, Jobs,” the advisory explains, “protestors in the 99% will risk arrest to disrupt Fortune 100 corporations’ shareholder meetings nationwide in the coming weeks.” The release noted, “the protests are being organized by The 99% Spring,” and stated, “For more information, visit www.the99power.org and www.99uniting.org.”

According to its web site, BerlinRosen’s clients include SEIU and MoveOn.org Political Action, which describes itself as a “one of the largest Political Action Committees in the country.” This may present legal problems for MoveOn because MoveOn.org Civic Action, the force behind the 99% Spring, is a 501 (c)(4), meaning it is supposed to steer clear of any activity involving the endorsement of political candidates. Ruben took pains to make this distinction, saying, “Our work through the 99% Spring specifically is done through our C4 and we do almost all of our political work through our PAC, which is MoveOn.org Political Action.” This crossover may cause problems as a number of people say MoveOn is distinguishing between its two arms to get people on board with the 99% Spring who are otherwise wary of electoral politics. To top it off, BerlinRosen’s client roster includes Brookfield Properties- the “owner” of Zuccotti Park.

This double dealing reeks of inside-the-beltway power brokers who play both sides of the aisle, which stoked the popular outrage that fed the Occupy Wall Street movement. Four years ago Barack Obama vowed to repeal the Bush tax cuts, make union organizing easier and put America back to work. Instead his administration has attacked teacher and autoworker unions, the real unemployment rate is close to 15 percent, social services are being throttled nationwide as non-financial corporations hoard $1.24 trillion in cash, one in 69 homes was hit with a foreclosure filing in 2011 and not one Wall Street or bank executive has been jailed for perpetrating the biggest economic crime in history.

The demise of the Iraq antiwar movement is a warning for the Occupy Movement. Obama the candidate wrapped himself in the antiwar mantle. By 2011, Obama the president was waging war on six countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Yemen); asserting the right to assassinate US citizens without due process; and continuing policies of indefinite detention and warrantless surveillance. Many liberals now celebrate Obama as “one of themost militarily aggressive American leaders in decades,” while liberal groups like MoveOn have fallen silent on the issue of illegal wars and war crimes. Glenn Greenwald observed this hypocrisy turns “right-wing radicalism into robust bipartisan consensus,” making it ever more difficult to build a principled antiwar movement. For Occupy, the danger of being sucked into the Democratic Party as its end goal becomes supporting a party that is in the pocket of Wall Street, instead of ending the tyranny of Wall Street.

Referring to Mitt Romney as “Mr. 1%,” Ruben said of the 2012 presidential contest, “There are real elections happening where people are choosing between candidates who want to cut taxes for billionaires and candidates who want billionaires to pay their fair share. And that’s a real choice.”

Many occupiers beg to differ. Sure, plenty say they will hold their nose and vote for Obama, but few think it will make a real difference. Perhaps, more significantly, economists beg to differ. None – left, right or center – think making billionaires “pay their fair share” by passing Obama’s Buffet rule will do anything meaningful to reduce inequality. But calling Romney Mr. 1 percent is a subtle way to imply that Obama represents the 99 percent. Bill Dobbs said, “If Obama is fighting for the 99%, I’m Greta Garbo. He’s running around the country selling the presidency to raise $700 million.”

The Occupy movement has created an opening in which millions of people in unions and organizations like MoveOn are receptive to the idea that only radical changes can solve America’s social and economic crisis. But Dobbs cautions, “We need a resistance movement, not more Democratic Party-aligned advocacy. This kind of relationship needs to be approached with healthy skepticism. There are benefits but also perils because … social movements often wind up in the Democratic Party junkyard. That’s where contemporary feminist organizing has ended up. That’s where civil rights struggles have ended up.”

For the Occupy movement, the question is where it ends up this November.

This article is a Truthout original.  A version of this article was originally published by Salon.com.

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By Arun Gupta, Truthout | Report

Occupy Wall Street demonstration on March 15, 2012. (Photo: Sunset Parkerpix)

I met Nomi on a bus in Baltimore. She was from Wisconsin and had been involved with Occupy Wall Street. She was part of Occupy Judaism and fondly recalled the Yom Kippur services she attended at the Wall Street occupation with hundreds of other people. Nomi said that, for the first time, she and her friends felt like they could combine the religious and radical dimensions of Judaism. The conversation fell silent as the bus rolled along. Suddenly she turned to me and excitedly announced that she met her girlfriend at Liberty Plaza. I smiled and responded, “That’s why Occupy Wall Street matters.”

By enabling people to find fulfillment in all parts of their lives, whether romantic, spiritual, political or cultural, the Occupy movement is more than a movement. It is life-changing. People experience themselves as complete social beings, not just as angry, alienated protesters. Nomi said she was no longer involved in the movement, which I thought was more evidence of why the actual occupations were so important.

The emergence of every mass movement makes sense in hindsight, but no one could have predicted hundreds of occupations and thousands of groups would pop up across the United States just weeks after a ragged encampment secured a tenuous foothold on Wall Street last September. Sure, anger was boiling over prior to the takeover of Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, but the occupation crystallized who is to blame for the economic crisis and who are the legitimate people. Anyone could walk into the public space, share their stories, find people with similar grievances and help build micro-societies. Occupy wasn’t just a rejection of Washington and Wall Street. It revealed the failings of liberals, unions and the left. New activists didn’t first have to master volumes of social and cultural theory, attend grueling anti-oppression workshops and learn how to pepper their comments with academic jargon before joining. Nor did the movement require consultants, focus groups or polling to occupy the center of American politics with a radical left message. And the form was not the same old rallies with canned chants, pre-printed protest signs and preaching to the choir.

It’s worth considering why Occupy Wall Street was such a smashing success last fall, as well as where it is headed. While the media lens has shifted away, Occupy has spawned a menagerie of energized movements and ambitious plans. Veteran organizer David Solnit, who is involved with Bay Area Occupy movements, sums up the current state: “The numbers showing up at GAs have dropped. Any movement has its mass mobilization and its in-between times. The organizing a lot of people are doing around housing and education are less visible but go much deeper. We need a better measuring tape than numbers and public space and whether it’s amplified through media owned by the 1 percent.”

Like plants that lay dormant for the winter conserving energy, many occupations are blossoming anew with ambitious plans now that it’s spring. Solnit says in San Francisco the movement is defending a dozen families in foreclosure, and is working toward a citywide moratorium on bank foreclosures and evictions. In Los Angeles, organizers say May Day plans include large-scale marches by immigrants and unions, rolling street blockades and even an attempt to disrupt the main airport. In New York and around the country, a campaign has been launched called “F the Banks” to force the government to dismantle Bank of America, which is still receiving taxpayer subsidies. In Chicago, after the G8 summit set for May was moved to Camp David because of fear of large-scale protests, activists are moving forward with large-scale demonstrations to coincidence with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meeting the same month.

Challenging the status quo comes with costs. As the Occupy movement struggles to effect radical social change, it faces persistent police attacks and co-optation by Democratic Party forces from the outside and divisions over identity politics, militancy, localism and diffusion from the inside.

Rethinking Democracy

Occupy Wall Street is foremost a democratic uprising from the left because it advocates for the downward and outward distribution of wealth and political power. Tying political democracy to economic democracy has made class relevant again for millions of people. As for the form, occupying public space is an old tactic. Since the early 20th century, examples include the Wobbly free-speech campaign, the automobile factory sit-down strikes, lunch-counter sit-ins, the Columbia University student takeover and Cindy Sheehan‘s vigil outside of Bush’s Texas ranch. The need for democratic forums is greater than ever as public space is ever-more surveilled, regulated and commodified.

Occupy also challenges the notion that workers are the sole agent of revolution. Clearly, labor’s power is unmatched in potentially bringing capitalism to a halt, but in actuality, collective action on the shop or office floor has been crippled by a lack of working-class consciousness, timid and self-serving union bureaucracies, and the legal and repressive tools of the corporate-state hybrid. Occupations of public space by activists, intellectuals and marginal workers – as shown by Egypt’s Tahrir Square, Oakland’s November 2, 2011, general strike and the December 12, 2011, West Coast port blockades – can attack capital from unexpected directions, creating space for organized labor to take more militant action.

In terms of development, the Occupy movement has gone through a series of stages, though they are not so much distinct phases as overlapping and intermingling trends where one stage may take prominence over the others at different times. First, the occupation created an awareness of a group that could be called “the people,” which is often invoked with the now-ubiquitous chant, “We are the 99 percent.” The flipside of “the people” is those who are not a legitimate part of the community: “the 1 percent,” in this case. Both categories are social and psychological concepts that mobilize rather than analytical terms that accurately describe social forces. Segments of the 99 percent, such as white-collar managers, small-business owners and the police, generally act as the social and physical enforcers for the elite, while the real owning class is perhaps the top .01 percent. But “We are the 99.99 percent” is hardly a catchy slogan. In this respect, Occupy Wall Street is similar to the Tea Party, which invokes its legitimate community with slogans like, “We the people,” “Take back America” and “Founding Fathers.” For Tea Partiers, however, nearly everyone else is illegitimate – unions, immigrants, Muslims, liberals, welfare recipients (code for blacks and Latinos), feminists, environmentalists, socialists, and gays and lesbians.

Combine a public organizing space with “the people,” and the second stage follows: assault the citadels of illegitimate power. As one organizer told me about Zuccotti Park, “At any moment, you could call for an impromptu march on Goldman Sachs and a hundred people would join you.” The night of October 5, 2011, was an exhilarating example of this. After a union-led rally in downtown Manhattan, thousands of people surged through the financial district in breakaway marches for hours. With so many people in the streets feeling the wind of public support at their backs, the police were taxed to hold the line. Wall Street was no longer an impenetrable bastion and the New York Police Department (NYPD) was no longer omnipotent. They felt fragile and under siege.

The occupation was a focal point for the media as well, and, surprisingly, many corporate media outlets gave the movement favorable press at times. Some observers have suggested that one lesson is not to see the corporate media as the enemy. Rather, it should be treated as a battleground, albeit one that is tilted toward the interests of the wealthy and the imperial state. The physical occupation also served a valuable role in making, “politicians realize there are people watching what they are doing,” says Anne Gemmell, political director of the labor-backed community group Fight for Philly.

“You Have to See to Be Able to Dream”

The third stage is carnival. After years of clichéd protests bearing witness to power, street politics had become futile and predictable. Leaders of the anti-Iraq War movement excelled at polite marches on weekends with no risk and little impact, and adjusted its politics to the election cycle, leading to its demise by 2007. Occupy Wall Street hit the big time because it is innovative political theater, a quality shared by the civil rights movement, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), the global justice movement and the Arab Spring before it. I would stand on the steps of Zuccotti Park and watch as hundreds of people below exchanged food, art, knowledge, books, politics, health care, bedding, anger, ideas, skills and love. Not one exchange was mediated by money (of course, the goods were paid for at some point). It felt like being able to breathe for the first time, because relations were being forged according to human needs and concerns, not according to the logic of the market. Revolutionary consciousness was being born through collective, democratic political action, which is essential to igniting a new era of activism and organization.

The occupation made a different world real, one without corporations, authoritarian politics and the police state. As Michael Premo of Occupy Wall Street’s housing group, puts it: “You don’t know how to dream unless you see it sometimes. The occupation unlocked the creative, radical imagination.” Seeing new and different ways of organizing work, family and community drew throngs of first-time as well as wayward activists to the movement. If it was the left organizing the left, Occupy Wall Street would have failed because experienced activists, no matter how well intentioned, come bearing heavy allegiances, ideologies and interpersonal baggage that inevitably sink left re-foundation projects. A movement must coalesce around the previously nonpolitical to forge meaningful social change.

Whose Community?

The fourth stage is creating genuine community. The cultural life of occupations and the experience of working and living together bonded occupiers together. What community involves is thorny, however. For example, at the occupation in Portland, Oregon, organizers say the encampment diverged from the general assembly because those sleeping in the park, many of whom were homeless, were not present at the general assembly meetings, also known as GAs. As a result, the GA was approving decisions about the occupation with few actual occupiers present. A related case occurred in Austin, Texas, where one organizer told me that, by December, the GA was trying to end the encampment on the steps of Austin City Hall, while the occupiers, again mainly homeless, blocked the action because they said they had no other safe place to live. (Eventually, the city of Austin shut it down by force in early February.) Other cities encountered a similar phenomenon, and frequently enough that “home-based occupiers” is now a common term used to refer to those who are active in the movement but do not sleep in the camp.

The idea of community is also a proxy for long-simmering debates over whether the goal is to take over the system or to build a new world in the shell of the old. As occupations and enthusiasm spread, many activists yearned to construct sustainable economies to meet the needs of daily life. Occupations ran on their communal stomach, so community gardens, recycling and grey-water systems were often first on the agenda. It didn’t take long for the dreams to outrun reality, however. Last fall, I was approached by occupiers looking to form a printing cooperative. They planned to start with photocopies and progress to newspapers such as The Indypendent and The Occupied Wall Street Journal, both of which I co-founded. I was stunned. Photocopying flyers is one thing, but printing 50,000 copies of a four-color newspaper is another. I explained it would require a warehouse-sized space, millions of dollars in capital, sophisticated press equipment and digital technology, experienced workers to run the facility and business savvy to survive in a printing industry with razor-thin margins. I never heard from them again. Currently, many occupations are pursuing small-scale projects such as urban farming and communal living, but this runs the risk of utopian separatism. The dream of gathering the righteous and starting anew in uncharted territory or creating a new social space is the story of America, after all. Withdrawing from society is tempting, but a sign of defeat.

Now that nearly every occupation that popped up last fall has been evicted from their common space, it’s tempting to say that “Occupy 2.0″ is underway. There are energized movements around housing, finance, labor, food, art, gender and ecology. Nonetheless, the loss of public space is an undeniable setback: it glued the movement together.

Nathan Schneider, who has chronicled Occupy Wall Street from the pre-planning stages, says that, since the occupation was routed from Zuccotti Park, decisionmaking power has devolved from the general assembly to the spokescouncil to working groups to campaigns. In March, I queried about 15 Occupy Wall Street organizers, and not one had been to a GA meeting in the prior month. Some rolled their eyes at mention of the GA and told of constant disruptions and occasional fistfights. A few claimed paid provocateurs were stirring up the pot. No one could offer any proof of government agents, which is admittedly difficult to come by, but the infighting is all too real. When hundreds were living on Wall Street’s doorstep, the target was obvious: banks like Goldman Sachs and their lapdogs in the media and politics. Without an occupation as an anchor, vessels like the general assembly and spokescouncil can drift aimlessly, making it tempting to turn on your fellow crewmates.

With the occupations over, most newcomers have wandered away. Ruth Fowler, a writer who works with Occupy Los Angeles, says: “Occupy is very odd right now. The people who have stayed are the cream of the crap, and the brilliant. The rank-and-file in between are at home … It’s an interesting dynamic. Not entirely comfortable. Lots of loonies floating around.”

The lack of community means struggling with who is the subject and what is the purpose of the decisionmaking bodies. Michael Premo of Occupy Wall Street says organizers understand there is a need for physical space, “to build on the things that worked and think about what didn’t work.” He adds that Occupy Wall Street is, “planning on creating a clearinghouse for people to come together, build community and organize actions.”

The Roads Ahead

New York is a showcase for the possibilities and pitfalls of Occupy Wall Street, which still bubbles with creativity. On March 28, Occupy Wall Street (claiming support of transit workers) took credit for chaining open 20 subway stations, allowing thousands of straphangers to ride for free so as to call attention to Wall Street’s profiteering off of the city’s perpetual mass transit follies. On March 15, a few hundred people outfitted with songs, banners and facades of foreclosed homes and costumed as bankers and police joined “F the Banks.” At turns festive and angry, the procession snaked through downtown Manhattan, halting at bailed-out banks to deliver a dose of displeasure. The highlight was an attempt to occupy a Bank of America branch with furniture. It being New York, police pounced as sofas, tables and bookcases were arranged outside the bank. Within minutes, scores of cops had quarantined the area and were carting away a handful of smiling protesters in cuffs.

The police strategy is to suffocate any outbreak of democracy, and it shows signs of working as long as the rank and file has vanished. Elites want images of heavy-handed policing because the narrative shifts from inequality to streetfighting, scaring off potential supporters. On March 17, the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, a completely peaceful attempt to re-occupy Zuccotti was aggressively evicted. The occupation shifted to Union Square, but after a few days, hundreds of police swept in to enforce rarely employed restrictions on overnight activity. Other than a protest against the killing of Trayvon Martin, most recent Occupy Wall Street events have attracted less than 500 people. (In the case of the Martin protest, criticism was rife that some occupiers tried to turn it into an Occupy event to retake space, rather than focusing on police violence against and profiling of communities of color.) The protest-a-day mode can backfire because police swarm smaller protests, however peaceful and theatrical they may be. The antidote is greater numbers, but because any working group or campaign can call a protest, the movement risks spiraling downward into diffusion, unsustainable activity, burnout and shrinking crowds.

Occupy Comes Home

Despite these problems, Occupy has an enviable brand, significant public support, a plethora of movements and an unqualified success in reorienting the national debate from austerity to inequality. The secret of Occupy Wall Street’s strength is disrupting power in ways both simple, such as the “mic check,” and grand, such as by occupying public space. Even if that space is now a rarity, Occupy Wall Street retains a disruptive capacity that defies prediction. It can be seen from Occupy the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), which released a stunning 325-page critique of the Volcker Rule (which seeks to curb banks from gambling with government-insured money), to Occupy Our Homes, which has successfully engaged in dozens of successful foreclosure and eviction defenses nationwide since November.

These are symbolic victories that put financial regulators on notice that they are being watched, and they are real victories that keep families in their homes. Victories are essential because they sustain the movement. Occupy Our Homes has pioneered singing demonstrations to disrupt public auctions of foreclosed homes, having closed down two in Brooklyn in recent months, and the tactic is spreading throughout the city and country.

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, artists and social justice activists who describe themselves as “eco-sexual domestic partners,” have made their Bay Area neighborhood of Bernal a model of the anti-foreclosure movement. Their movement began out of “neighborly love” for a 72-year-old African-American homeowner and veteran who is facing eviction. They say David Solnit was the catalyst, introducing them to two dynamic organizers – Buck Bagot and Stardust (in Human Form) – who helped them found Occupy Bernal to defend homeowners. Stephens said: “The heart of the group is door-knocking. We have a list of foreclosures, and once a week, members go out to these homes and tell them we will help.” Stephens says 85 households, mostly of people of color, are facing foreclosure in their area, and Occupy Bernal explains they can assist them with free legal help.

“We are trying to mitigate the shame in this,” Stephens says. “If they don’t feel shame, they can understand where the blame is. They’ve been taken of advantage of by the banks.” She adds that Occupy Bernal is actively defending 13 homeowners against eviction, has disrupted auctions and protests regularly – including in a group called “wild old women” who are in front of the banks every week – but the threat of eviction remains. So Occupy Bernal is pushing the San Francisco City Board of Supervisors “to pass a resolution calling for a moratorium on all foreclosures until the big banks are investigated” for fraud in lending and foreclosure activity. Sprinkle emphasizes that while the work is “deadly serious, we are also having fun doing it.”

Nonetheless, the anti-foreclosure movement has a long way to go compared to the scale of the problem today, with 4 million families having lost their homes to foreclosures since 2007, and compared to the scope of resistance in the past, with some historians claiming that, during the first eight months of 1932 in New York City, 77,000 evicted families were moved back into their homes by activists.

Laboring for Victories

To notch far-reaching victories, the Occupy movement needs allies with millions of members and access to resources. In short, the beleaguered labor movement, which has found a lifeline in Occupy. Organized labor seems to understand that laws and court rulings have blunted its most potent weapon: the strike. Labor organizers across the country are unbridled in their support for the movement, saying occupiers can take risks unions are unable or unwilling to. Gemmell of Fight for Philly says, “There are no leashes holding the energy of the Occupy movement back.” She says it has had a “positive spillover effect,” and cited two instances where workers settled contracts on better-than-expected terms while Occupy Philadelphia was entrenched outside City Hall. Occupy Wall Street was a factor in the repeal last fall of Ohio’s law that would have decimated public-sector unions, though the tens of millions of dollars labor poured into the effort did not hurt.

By moving beyond the workplace as the locus of struggle between labor and capital, Occupy has introduced creative tensions that benefit unions even if they feel their toes are being stepped on. The December 12, 2011, West Coast port shutdowns organized by the Occupy movement generated friction with leaders of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), who opposed the blockade attempts from Long Beach, California, to Vancouver, Canada. Occupiers then began organizing flying pickets to help the ILWU block a union-busting ship scheduled to come into Longview under military escort. Paul Glavin, an Occupy organizer in Oregon, says various occupations were “going to send hundreds of people, if not more.”

“It was going to be very big,” said Glavin. Before the confrontation occurred, grain export terminal operator EGT blinked and signed a contract with the ILWU.

The next test for labor and Occupy is May Day, with Occupy Los Angeles calling for a general strike. Michael Novick, a retired school teacher and anti-racist organizer, says, “There is a bunch of labor actions for May Day in LA,” including one by recycling workers in San Fernando Valley and possibly at attempt by workers to disrupt traffic to LAX, the most active airport on the West Coast. Students are discussing shutting down a freeway, and Novick says there will, “be two different immigrant rights marches in downtown, which reflects a lot of historical divisions in the movement.”

“Occupy is doing a car and bike caravan moving slowly across L.A. from four different directions,” said Novick.

One troubling development is the formation of a “99 percent table” by Los Angeles labor organizers who are allegedly siphoning unions and faith-based groups away from the Occupy movement while also excluding some members of Occupy Los Angeles who have criticized as what they see as attempts to poach the movement. Novick says Occupy’s strategy is to work with everyone, and the day will end with an occupation of some sort in downtown Los Angeles.

Many other cities are gearing up for a range of marches and protests on May Day, though anything approaching a general strike seems highly unlikely.”Occupy Portland is planning for a spring offensive with May Day as the focus,” said Glavin. “The Portland Liberation Organization Council is organizing to take over a building May 1. May Day will be part of a longer struggle. The strategy is to get organized in working-class neighborhoods to work toward a general strike.”

Austin, Texas, is a different story. Dave Cortez, a community organizer whose focus is on energy and jobs, is part of Occupy Austin’s working group on banks. Since Occupy Austin was cleared off the City Hall steps in early February, activities include organizing local, small businesses and nonprofits to move their money from Wall Street banks to community institutions.

“We are working toward getting the city, the county government, the transportation and school board to shift their money from the big banks to credit unions, and local banks,” said Cortez. “Since October, we’ve tracked $1.6 million moved from largely personal accounts into credit accounts.” But as for May Day, “We are one of the few Occupy movements not calling for a general strike on May Day. We’ve built a large coalition of immigrant rights, socialists, students, communities, faith, anarchists and environmental groups.” Cortez says union members support Occupy Austin, but it does not have any official union support. “It was clear from the get-go we would not be able to get buy-in for a general strike. It’s difficult for workers to participate because Texas is a right-to-work state. If they called in sick and participated, they could very easily be fired.”

Occupy and organized labor may also find themselves on opposing sides as unions throw money and troops into President Obama’s re-election battle while Occupy Wall Street mobilizes to occupy the Democratic National Convention, and the Republican counterpart, as well as making its presence known on the fall campaign trail.

Occupy the Election

When Occupy became a national sensation, Obama and the Democratic Party tried to co-opt it, which failed. At this point, the liberal strategy is more sophisticated. Democratic Party front groups like MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream have glommed on to the “99 percent,” trying to steal Occupy’s thunder while distancing themselves from the movement. Obama, meanwhile, is running even farther away by employing squishy language about “economic fairness” while Democrats are delighted that Mitt Romney is all but assured of the Republican nomination. Organized labor and liberals are already branding Romney as “Mr. 1 Percent,” as if Obama isn’t a gold-plated member of the 1 percent or been their greatest benefactor during the last three years.

Having interviewed hundreds of occupiers across the country, it’s fairly safe to say they fall into three camps regarding the 2012 election. There are those who didn’t support Obama in 2008 and certainly won’t this time; those who voted for him last time, but say they will not this time; and the plurality, those who say they will hold their nose and vote for Obama. Few occupiers, if any, will join Obama’s campaign, because all agree that the electoral system is broken, which is exactly why they flocked to the movement as an alternative method of building and leveraging power. But at the same time, the Occupy movement needs to create a compelling counternarrative to the electoral process. It could be sidelined if it adopts a knee-jerk “pox on everyone’s house” response and tries to occupy the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in the face of certain police thuggery.

There are some in the movement who do want to enlist in policy battles and electoral campaigns, but visiting an active occupation affirms that the heart of the movement is about creating societies that embrace the limitless possibilities of everyday life instead of allowing our passions to be manipulated into support for a venal system and our desires to be ground into grist for cheap trinkets.

In February my partner, Michelle Fawcett, and I heard Occupy Fullerton in Orange County was holding an “Occupalooza.” It was a warm, sunny day, like it almost always is in the O.C., so we cruised Fullerton’s banal architecture until we happened upon an incongruous tent village. It was a familiar scene: about 40 tents, most shielded by blue tarps, and small knots of people playing music, smoking and lounging in the afternoon sun. The party was on top of the hill overlooking the Occupy Fullerton Camp, we were told.

Before hiking up the hill we met Wolf, a 25-year-old transgender native of Fullerton. Wolf was new to the movement, yet already immersed in it. He explained how Occupy Fullerton is lobbying the City Council to pass resolutions on issues ranging from Citizens United to predatory debt. His cool-headed explanation of how credit card companies trap unsuspecting college students in a cycle of debt gave way to a passionate embrace of the Occupy movement as a welcoming space for him and his intersex partner.

As we interviewed Wolf, John Park hung on the edge. When we turned to talk to Park, a Korean-American with two children in college, he launched into a blistering critique of the ideology of free trade, expertly citing the academic literature on the subject. That a middle-aged, immigrant computer programmer who is organizing around the outsourcing of jobs has found common cause with a transgender youth activist speaks to the raw ideological and emotional power of the twin slogans, “We are the 99 percent” and “Occupy Wall Street.”

When we clambered up the hill, we found a bowl-shaped grass amphitheater fringed by palm trees, a house band jamming with a few dozen people grooving to the music. True to the California setting, there were frisbees, sun bathers and stoners. Since it was winter, kids were sledding, even though that meant bouncing along a dirt gully gouged from the hillside. Lupe Barrios, eyeing our camera and notepad, sauntered over to talk. He said he was from Tucson, his right calf proclaimed “Hecho en San Diego” and he was here for “fun, not politics.” But within a minute, he was talking about how, “immigrant rights are workers’ rights,” and told us, “My mother lives in a cage wherever she goes because of social and class oppressions.”

The party was festive and giddy and unpredictable. The left is abundant in anger; the Occupy movement has turned that into joy. This country is floundering in despair; Occupy has given countless people hope. Within the Occupy movement, questions of inclusiveness, cooperation, compassion and democracy are foremost on people’s minds. People want work, but they want it to be meaningful. They want the good life however they define it: liberatory, intellectual, libidinous or spiritual.

These emotional and philosophical truths make all the difference. If the movement becomes predictable, the faces all look familiar and the organizing feels like drudgery, then it will have lost. For now, no one knows what will happen next. And that’s a wonderful thing.

Arun Gupta is covering the Occupy movement nationwide for Salon. A version of this article is being published in the May 2012 issue of Z Magazine

This article is a Truthout original.

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• Occupy Wall Street isn’t dead (mathbabe.org)
• Jodi Dean: #OccupyWallStreet as a Necessary Call for Collectivity (p2pfoundation.net)

Photos of Occupy Wall Street on Day 20, October 5, the day of the big march with unions in solidarity with OWS. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The few remaining occupations aren’t easy to find, but visiting one reminds you why Occupy set the imagination on fire. At a late-February “Occupalooza” organized by Occupy Fullerton in Orange County, we talked with Wolf, a 25-year-old transgendered activist, who explained how the group is lobbying the City Council to pass resolutions on issues ranging from Citizens United to predatory debt. We also met John Park, a Korean-American with two kids in college, who launched into a blistering critique of the ideology of free trade. That Wolf has found common cause with a middle-aged immigrant computer programmer speaks to the raw ideological and emotional power of the twinned slogans—“We are the 99 percent” and “Occupy Wall Street.”

Related articles

• Strategic Directions for Occupy Wall Street: Foreclosing Banks, Defending Homes, Making History (alternet.org)
• Open thread for night owls: Occupy’s May 1 general strike not following the old rules (dailykos.com)
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Dear Friends,

As we were leaving Tucson last week after three days filled with meetings, interviews and debates about the Occupy movement, a local activist came up to us and said, “Your visit has energized the movement here.”

That one statement was the highest praise we could have ever wished for. When we started on this journey last fall, we didn’t know what to expect. What we discovered was the inklings of a new world in the unlikeliest places: from the Deep South and inner cities to rural plains and crumbling suburbs.

Now we are criss-crossing the country again to report on the Spring Awakening, and we have found a movement that has taken root in many places and which is growing in unexpected directions, whether it’s by attracting older activists who’ve been at it for decades or giving working-class people hope in a hard world.

We’ve just begun our trip, and there are so many tales to tell, but we need your help to make it happen. Please donate today so we can keep bringing important stories to light.

We strive to give life to the deeply moving words and images of people like Guadalupe Barrios, who is organizing Mexican-American youth in an immigrant-hostile Arizona; Amalia, an indigenous lesbian who is part of a resistance movement more than 400 years old in New Mexico; and Beth Stephens, an artist in San Francisco who has turned her neighborhood into a model for the anti-foreclosure movement.

For more than six months we have been telling stories like these in outlets like Salon, The Nation, The Guardian, The Progressive, Truthout, Free Speech TV, Al Jazeera and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. We’re reaching millions of people, and many occupiers have made a point to tell us that our reporting has brought them favorable attention and new activists.

But we can’t do it without you. Every bit matters, whether it’s $15, $50 or $200. Your support enables us to publish the words, ideas and images of the 99% from the bottom up across the country.

Many editors tell us because we have visited more than 35 occupations in 24 states (and counting), no other reporters can offer such a combination of sweeping analysis and on-the-ground observation.

We are not backed by corporate dollars or wealthy benefactors. We edit videos and write articles in coffee shops, sleep in backwater motels and eat sandwiches out of a cooler. But we love it. Reporting on this amazing social movement is the most inspiring thing we have ever done. And despite the perils and pitfalls on the road ahead, we have great hopes that the Occupy movement can profoundly change our society for the better.

Please help make that happen by contributing today!

Thank you,

michelle and arun

P.S. Make this a 99%-powered campaign by forwarding this message to your friends and encouraging them to donate as well!

Last week we went to Southern California’s Inland Empire to report on an Occupy action to shut down Walmart warehouse distribution centers. If you have never been there, it’s where the American dream degenerates into a landscape of mammoth sprawl, endless highways and rank consumerism. A few hundred people from five different occupations showed up at sunrise in support of hundreds of low-wage workers enduring abusive conditions in Walmart’s gigantic warehouses.

We were with protesters the whole day, and it was a moment where you can see the idealism of a new social movement crashing into the harsh reality of workers scraping by in a crumbling society. You can read the article here: http://occupyusatoday.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3e3faca56242aece8e20ba5bb&id=29cef8daa6&e=930dda90cf

We’re going to have plenty of new articles coming out, most of which will be on Salon. Next week we have an article coming out in The Nation. All our articles, films and updates are available on our website, occupyusatoday.com.

Best,
Arun Gupta and Michelle Fawcett

BY ARUN GUPTA AND MICHELLE FAWCETT

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• Criminal working conditions at megawarehouses in California’s Inland Empire (boingboing.net)

Occupy Tampa protest Oct 2011 (Photo credit: Sasha Rae Photo - Shanna Gillette)

After a wave of shutdowns, about 20 Occupy camps still stand. What do they tell us about the state of the movement?

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Occupy Wall Street protesters demonstrate on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 17. (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

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