it's vacation time!

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." ~ E.B. White

Week 6 of mentally decamping from Occupy -- not going to GA, not responding to email, hiding out in the virtual presence of Facebook, heading 3000 miles west to Portland to drink coffee, hike about in the rain, go shopping, and hang out with friends and their babies.    Hippie-comfort!   Here's a video that seems appropriate to the times:

publishing old emails.

Back in January, we spent four weeks learning about rape culture at Occupy, after realizing that one of our die-hard  OB folks was a level-3 sex offender.   What followed was pretty predictable near-total breakdown of public discourse--- but it wound up being a useful opportunity to think about how to deal with real affinities in a big community space.    I just found this email -- I was exasperated and annoyed at the time, so didn't send it, but I think there's some useful stuff here.

Here it is!

****************************************************

[some introductory stuff here - relating to a proposal being blocked]

 In three months of doing outreach work at OB, it has become very, very clear to me that OB is a big group of people. When facilitation does a role call on a room of 200 people and asks who is here for the first time, *very few people raise their hands.* That's amazing, and it's a credit to how big this movement actually is. When I look around the room at community gatherings, I don't recognize most of those people -- but I am absolutely persuaded that they are as much a part of OB as I am, and that many of them are as involved as I am, and that our paths have simply never crossed.

 This level of dissonance - the way our sense of cohesion within the group can be changed at a moment's notice -- can be very traumatizing. It's awful when someone you don't recognize, who has never tried to have a conversation with you or know you personally, gets up and is able to call a halt to the whole process.  Likewise, it's awful when a bunch of people who don't know any better clap Martin on the back for all his good work (not knowing just. how. many. women have been systematically talked down to and verblly attacked) It's hard not to want to be angry at the wider group, or to resent individuals for not taking the time to get the whole story.

 But in a movement this big, no one has time to get the whole story. We'd never get anything done, if everyone read every email, or went to every working group meeting. We are, in a very strong sense, still getting to know another, and getting to know each other requires a lot of trust. If we only define OB as "those we go to Biddy's with" or "people who show up at the same WG meetings we go to," we're missing an astonishingly large number of people who are nevertheless *part of this movement* Knowing this, it's quite important that the first reaction NOT be to assume the worst of someone, or to shout people down, just because they are not immediately recognizable as allies or friends.

 This relates to Paul Shannon's block, and how people respond to it and to him. It also relates to Martin (there are, after all, dozens and dozens of people who *don't* know that he systematically talks down to and attempts to manipulate women, who haven't observed this, and so are rightfully confused when he's called out on it). It relates to Jason's email, and why certain emails are taken seriously, when others are dismissed. It also relates to why, in the face of what seem to some like, others are completely confused and take aback in a world in which OB is large and no one can possibly know everyone else, it's really, really important that --- and that the first reaction NOT be to assume the worst of someone, or to shout people down, just because they are not immediately recognizable as allies or friends. 

 2. Safe spaces, power dynamics, who gets to call the shots, etc etc

People regularly ask "Who's in charge" and "who do I talk to to get shit done at OB?" (if you're me, they usually ask this in an exasperated tone, having already spent a long time trying to find someone who will answer their question, which is usually a procedural one about how to get stuff up on the calendar. That's another story) If you're me, this question can be answered pretty simply: on one level, it's the people who have access to Twitter, who are able to post to facebook and the website. On another level, it's people who have time and space to be involved across working groups, or who play a large role in specific groups (facilitation and media are two big ones that come to mind). On another level, it's the folks who go to Biddy's together, or who get invited to go to meetings after the fact. Anyone who falls into that category counts as someone who can "get shit done."

 In a world in which the OB community is large and diverse, it's important to *recognize this* -- to realize that you may be talking to someone who has been around for three months, who just showed up yesterday,
 There are some individuals who are more central, who are more connected -- who are more visible -- and there are others (individuals and working groups), who are less so.   It's important that people who are at the center, so to speak -- who are connected to a bunch of different people, and who have the ability to talk to many people at once  (through twitter, facebook, what have you) not be deliberately obtuse and pretend that this power doesn't exist -- or worse, use it to push through a self-serving version of "safe spaces" that doesn't acknowledge the ways in which one person's voice can marginalize and silence another's without attempting or meaning to.    That's dishonest, and it's a poor use of one's influence.

It's also incumbent on those who *aren't* as well-connected -- and who realize it -- to take the time to figure out what's going on, to not take the Twitter feeds as the final word, and to make a good-faith effort to situate themselves in the conversation before jumping feet-first into it  (or alternatively, throwing up their hands and walking away)   When Jason sent that email, my first response wasn't about safe spaces or sexual violence -- it was a sense of deep anguish, that it seemed like members of the anti-oppression WG were only now looking up and realizing that there was a problem. It was anger, that this group that seems so important and important to have connected here, to provide guidance, to help us through this, was two or three GAs late in realizing there was a problem. Only secondarily was it a response to him personally.

 Similarly, when Martin writes long, dramatic emails about how he's leaving, there are many people who receive those emails and respond sympathetically, who don't realize the ways in which he has consistently spoken down to and denigrated women in this movement. Those people, when they see him called out publicly in GA, are not sexist or malicious -- they are confused, and largely out of the loop. It is very, very important that as we work to create safe spaces in this movement, we do so with an understanding of how these social dynamics work -- and, rather than just kicking the can down the road and failing to engage, make a good-faith effort to meet people where they are.

Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens

"Mr. Bucket, my Lady."

Mr. Bucket makes a leg and comes forward, passing his familiar demon over the region of his mouth.

"Are you waiting to see Sir Leicester?"

"No, my Lady, I've seen him!"

"Have you anything to say to me?"

"Not just at present, my Lady."

"Have you made any new discoveries?"

"A few, my Lady."

This is merely in passing. She scarcely makes a stop, and sweeps upstairs alone. Mr. Bucket, moving towards the staircase-foot, watches her as she goes up the steps the old man came down to his grave, past murderous groups of statuary repeated with their shadowy weapons on the wall, past the printed bill, which she looks at going by, out of view.



This is my favorite print from Bleak House. It's not the most memorable scene -- but it's the one I love best. Cheers to Lady Dedlock, who never missed a meeting, and kept all her affairs in the best of order until they finally collapsed.

loose definition of terms

David Graeber has this great page-and-a-half screed, in Direct Action, about the difference between hippies and punks. Really, he's interested in talking about Situationism, post-68 divergence, and the loss of the traditional terms like "alienation" and "ennui" in lieu of new terms like "aporia" and "detournment" -- but in the process, he gives a quick breakdown of terms:

No one would ever use these terms to describe themselves. I've never heard anyone say "I am a punk" or "I am a hippie." They are terms you use to describe someone else. In East Coast circles, to call someone a hippie is always to make fun of them, at least slightly...("when you're proposing we organize a drum circle, are we talking *good* drumming, or just bad hippie drumming?" The term "punk," in contrast is almost never pejorative. It tends to be used in a more simply descriptive fashion: i.e., "I'm talking about Laura. You know, that kind of punky girl with the green hair?"

Most people, he notes, are an idiosyncratic combination of both. Still, the terms are mostly used to differentiate. "Hippie" in fact regularly becomes a synonym for "pacifist," and "punk" for "youneger, militant anarchist." At Occupy, you see that pretty clearly in the breakdown of different working groups -- between say, facilitation (interested in the rigorously structured principals of a just conversation) and direct action (fuck the police, let's go party).

I was listening to this song, the bit about "the hippies and the punks and the skinheads and the skaters," and I realized, "Fuuuuuuuuck! The hippies? They're all my friends." They're probably your friends too -- you know, the ones eking out a highly privileged existence running food justice trainings in boxcars, editing magazines, running school garden programs, and otherwise safely embedded in the world of real professionals. They're probably YOU, and everyone you know. Hardworking. Ethical. Hard to get to know.

The punks, on the other hand -- they remain beautiful and obscure -- a lot like David Graeber. John Darnielle is a punk -- a friendly, nerdy dude with a preference for boxing and death metal. Parts and Crafts is full of them: the nerds and the freaks, the folks who are ill at ease. "DIY became the basic punk credo. Make your own fashion. Form your own band. Refuse to be a consumer. If possible, become a dumpster diver and don't buy anything. If possible, refuse wage labor. Do not submit to the logic of exchange. Reuse and redeploy fragments of the spectacle and commodity system to fashion artistic weapons to subvert it."

Sound familiar? Sound silly? Sound romantic? That's you and everyone you know.

old haunts

I spent all day yesterday biking up Myrtle Ave, all the way to the overpass of the JMZ line at myrtle and willoughby. Last time I was at this intersection I was pissed off and breaking up with [this asshole]. Not being one to lay a grievance behind, I stand for a minute and take it in.



It's really dark, for one thing. There's five or six roads that come together, so crossing the street is incredibly treacherous. And under the subway tracks, there's this proliferation of commerce -- it's like being at Yankee Stadium, with fourteen different bodegas and people standing out at every corner hawking incense and necklaces. Really fucking beautiful.

I turn up and around the side streets, looking for Surreal Estate. Not finding it, I look for Troutman (out of a bizarre desire to rehash old wounds). Luckly, I don't find that either.

I met this woman today who really hates Occupy Wall Street. She's the resident artist at Proteus Gowanus, and was convinced that everyone living at the camp was an ivy league student. "Of course they can take off work! They have all this money!" I don't think that's true, but I didn't really want to argue with her about it.

I do wonder how she managed to get to Zucotti Park and only speak to academics -- if it's anything like Boston, it would have been hard to take one pass through the park without stumbling over two drunken fistfights and one completely sober and intentional threat to physical violence.

Sometimes I wish I was not so bitter about the site. I turn left up Bushwick Ave and make a mental note of buildings that are boarded up, empty lots, open gates. I wonder why they opted for tents. Why Zucotti? Why that space, over any other? Did they expect it would last -- or did they expect to pitch tents for three days, and then find themselves with a long-term occupation? Passing by St. Mark's church, I make a note of the intersection and wonder idly whether I'll pass the big condo conversion anytime soon (I read about it: I know it's here somewhere).

People are so quick to shake off misalignments, small hypocrisies, to try to separate themselves for the sake of calling shit out and holding people accountable. I remember when Darrin drove up to the site in a BMW -- or when AFL-CIO called me up and said, "yes, we're making hats especially for occupy" My thought was, "what the fuck, you don't get this at all." But Darrin spent a couple of years organizing prisoners before he got snapped up by SEIU and is grateful to make it to thirty -- so what if if he has a nice car now? It's so hard to know people, to know where they come from.

Sometimes you go on a couple of bad dates -- sometimes the union calls up and wants to make you hats. Sometimes you find a building and fall in love with it, and sometimes you find yourself in the middle of an occupation, and just have to go with the flow.

hippies || punks || skinheads || skaters

I was in a conference call this afternoon to talk about Oakland. Inevitably, the question of violence was at the heard of the conversation -- what is violence, what do we think about it, and how does what happened in Oakland affect the wider movement?

For context, Occupy Oakland tried to do a big move-in this past weekend, taking a vacant building and throwing a festival to initiate stage 2 of the occupation. It didn't go well. Lots of arrests, lots of protesters beaten up, a non-negligible number of felony charges stemming from police violence. Some protesters broke into City Hall and vandalized some stuff. Stupid shit, and a pretty awful display of militarized police force. The press, on the other hand, has been writing about nothing other than the "violent turn" the protests have taken.

The call was pretty heavily mediated, and seemed like more of an opportunity to just give people space to talk about this, rather than to develop movement-wide strategy for how to respond to Oakland. Midway through the call, Starhawk, a longtime activist who has been involved in just about every major mobilization over the last thirty years, got on the line to talk about her experiences at Seattle, and about broken windows.

What she said is, I think, pretty true -- which is that it doesn't matter what you think about violence -- or how you define it -- or even whether you choose to define it at all. When people break windows or throw things at police, it immediately distracts from *anything else that could possibly be happening at that moment.* It becomes about the spectacle, rather than the act - and because it is in may ways quite a romantic spectacle - the brick through the window, cobblestones pried up - it sucks the air out of the room for any other tactics that might register on the collective radar.

I bring it up because, in the differential spectrum between "hippie" and "punk," the vision of the militant young anarchist throwing a brick through a window is about as romantic as you get.

It's mostly a fiction, of course -- most of the anarchists I know at occupy work in the library, and are peacefully fucking shit up doing childcare for militant housing organizations or putting together theatrical programs for teens. Violence or nonviolence also takes a whole different resonance when put up next to non-Occupy cases of police brutality -- like Ramarley Graham, the Bronx teenager who was shot to death in his bathroom after being chased into his house by a phalanx of New York's finest.

And yet, the stereotypes hold -- when we talk about violence, we're still, to date, mostly talking about Seattle, bricks, black-clad anarchists, black blocs, punks, and their differentiation from hippies. I wish I knew how to push this conversation in a more productive direction -- to take into account a definition of violence, to talk about people vs. property, to get beyond the paradigm of marches, and to talk - really talk! -- about the systemic violence of capitalism, which is supposedly why we're all here.

It's a nonstarter. Masks and bricks. Punks and hippies. That's where the conversation is invariably going to stall out, and it's where we'll be for awhile yet.

I discovered Dean Baker, and it rocked my world

I've been trying to get a handle on the foreclosure crisis and the argument for principal reduction (I know housing activists love it -- but don't have a solid sense of why). Attorney generals across the country are stepping up to demand principal reduction as a just solution for homeowners, and a way to hold banks accountable for crimes committed during the mortgage crisis.

Embedded in the wider question of how banks steered housing prices upward -- driving prices upward, gaming the system, dropping all pretense of market regulation -- is the question of how they were enabled (and continue to be enabled) by government policies designed to funnel money upward into the hands of the wealthy few.

This article from Talking Points Memo, especially, which captures how the high and the low-level points connect to each other -- the low being something like "Wait, waht? Interest modification? Principal reduction? Say I have a house - what do I want to ask for?" the high being, "What are the systemic pretexts for income inequality, and how are they replicated in foreclosure?"

Here, he's explaining the Home Affordability Modification Program -- a program which aims to modifying interest rates slowly and incrementally over time, but largely leaves principal untouched -- is actually just a deeply cynical ploy to drag out the process as long as possible, to keep accruing checks.

Those who believe that is the role of government to redistribute income upward and help the banks want the government to get people to keep paying on underwater mortgages as long as possible. While this may make little sense for these homeowners, since they will never accumulate equity and are likely paying more in ownership costs than they would pay to rent a similar house, it does help the banks' bottom line. Each additional month that underwater homeowners stay in their homes paying the mortgage the banks are getting money they would not otherwise receive.

This explains the value of a program like the Home Affordability Modification Program (HAMP). Only a small fraction of the people who enter this program will end up with a permanent modification that will actually allow them to accumulate equity. However, the entire time that they work with the program, they keep sending a mortgage check to the bank -- and the government kicks in some taxpayer dollars as well. This is a real win-win from the standpoint of the banks as they get more checks from the homeowner than would otherwise be the case, plus the subsidy from the government for stringing homeowners along.

HAMP has come under a lot of criticism, in part because of the fee-for-service nature of the loan adjustments (loan servicers are paid for each modification, not for the whole package) and poor oversight which opens the door to scam artist and predatory lenders (predatory loan modifiers?) Here's what the National Taxpayer Union has to say about it:

HAMP has proven a colossal failure that has done more to harm than help debt-laden homeowners. Having only achieved slightly more than 500,000 permanent modifications, 40% of which the Treasury expects to default, HAMP has fallen dramatically short of its goal of helping 3 to 4 million homeowners avoid foreclosure. To date, far more borrowers have dropped out of the program than successfully achieved permanent loan modification. These borrowers, along with those who later default, will often be left with larger outstanding debt, worse credit scores, and less home equity. Congress should pass legislation that eliminates the HAMP program, to put an end to these counterproductive outcomes while saving taxpayers billions of dollars.[17]

The time piece is interesting, because it's not unlike what homeowners do when they've had enough and decide they're going to defend their homes -- they try to draw the process out, to buy themselves time. In this case, from the banks' perspective, they can wait as long as they want -- time turns into money, and in a world where there is no value left in the market, the easiest and best thing they can do, by this estimate, is to wait it out and keep collecting checks.

There's more to the article -- little bits and pieces, leading to a fuller picture. Bit by bit, article by article, we will defend these homes, and figure out how the process actually works...

occupation (preoccupied)

Huh! This blog still exists!

In two years, I've left graduate school, gotten married, joined a coop, started a kid's hackerspace, joined an occupation, temporarily housed two dogs, and made some solid plans about how I think my life should go. Two hundred percent of what I've been thinking about for the last three months has had to do with Occupy Boston, and it's relationship to everything else in my life. It's hard to make space, or have patience for conversations which aren't urgently involved in this project. No more lying in bed and bitching about the deficit. Shit is real, and it's tim to get organized.

At some point, though, it became clear that fewer meetings (and fewer emails) are in order. Got to tame that shit down, otherwise you'll never get anything done. Got to get less angry about the world, so you can actually start changing it.

There's more to say, but it's the first day of a new year, and I'll leave it at that for now.