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tealinI wrote this a few weeks ago, in an attempt to get my thoughts about, doubts on, and suggestions for the Occupy movement down in some sort of concrete form rather than buzzing around in my head. I sent it to a friend of mine who's involved with the movement for feedback and/or clarification, but she hasn't gotten back to me – understandable as it is bloody long and she has a world to save. History continues rumbling along apace, though, and I figured if I was going to share it at all, sooner was better than later. It's a little bit out of date but I hope the theory parts still stand...
I'm leaving comments open for now, because I want feedback, but the minute it starts getting hot in here I will not hesitate to lock them. I am really amazingly busy at work these days and do not have time to respond in a thoughtful way to anything, but I still read everything, so please don't let that stop you from having a say.
Before I get into the meat of the issue, I feel that I should explain myself. I have been watching the Occupy movement with a certain amount of interest since it first came on my radar. Usually I sit back and piece together information on such things as it comes my way from a number of sources, but until very recently this particular movement has been less than forthcoming in such regards. I get most of my news from international sources (the BBC and CBC, mainly) as I find American media distinctly uninformative even when it's not actively annoying me or throwing up red herrings. There are worldwide Occupations, but the movement's core is in, and will have the most effect on, the United States – foreign media doesn't have as much incentive to cover it in depth, so for the most part I've missed out on that end of things.
Growing up in a house that had Rush Limbaugh and his ilk spewing from every media orifice, I have a deeply ingrained suspicion of impassioned or emotionally manipulative oratory no matter where it's coming from,* and prefer to have the views of the people distributing ideas filtered through either an objective (or trying-to-be objective) third party, or challenged by an intelligent and skeptical interviewer. There has been shockingly little of that in this area – I heard the first really serious discussion of this nature just this past Saturday on the CBC. I may work in the arts but I am a scientist at heart, and I will not accept a theory – scientific, artistic, or political – until it's been peer reviewed and thoroughly tested by the best challenges that can be thrown at it. The Day 6 interview was a good start, but there needs to be a lot more of that.
*This is also why I try to avoid anything remotely political on this blog, because I've had enough of that thank you, and I am only posting this very hesitantly because I can think of no better way to relieve my ignorance.
A benefit of watching from the sidelines is that I've been able to see the core message of the movement coalesce from a hundred songs to the tune of 'we're pissed off' to a much more focused 'get big business out of politics and return democracy to the people,' with a sub-motif of 'share the wealth'. Part of the reason I'm especially wary of the stirring rabble-rousing coming from 'the horse's mouth' as it were, is that, as far as I can tell, I am inclined to agree with their points. As far as I can tell, it's hard for any sane and informed person not to. But that is as far as I can tell, which at present feels like not very far at all.
On a personal level, knowing that my sentiments put me at risk of getting swept up causes me to put on the brakes and try to take a closer look. Due to the lack of third-party information and the huge amount of unfiltered noise that will greet any internet search on the topic, I decided the most effective way of sorting anything out was to put down my thoughts on the movement as I see it and invite clarification from any informed person willing to read them.
MONEY AND POLITICS
Anyone who pays any attention at all to American politics would find it hard to deny the actions of our elected representatives rarely bear much resemblance to the will of the people who elected them. Theoretically this is because a)their loyalty shifts from representing their constituents to winning points for their party, and/or b)they're in the pocket of whatever interest donated enough for them to run a successful campaign, or had the most influence over them while they were in office.
For the sake of this argument and my own sanity, let's take as given that we need to 'get money out of politics.' What does that mean, exactly? For my purposes here I'm going to stick to 'politics' as 'campaigning for political office' because it's the first step anyone has to take, before they even have the opportunity to be swayed by lobbyists, plied with swag, or put in the pocket of the business interest of their choice. Just campaigning.
Where does campaign money come from? As far as I know, its source is people (or perhaps 'entities' is more accurate) who have money to spare and, presumably, think they can gain something from this candidate's election, whether it's representation on their hot-button issue or special consideration when awarding government contracts.
Why is there so much money just in campaigning? It's been accepted wisdom for as long as I remember that the first requisite for eligibility for political office is that you have a personal fortune, because your campaign will never get off the ground without one. I think we can all agree that cutting out the majority of the population from running for elected office is a bad thing; my focus here is not on whether it's good or bad, though, but why it is. It's obvious why big business would want to invest in getting a politician in their debt into office, but why would that politician be willing to get into their debt in the first place?
Campaigning, especially in the USA, is really expensive. This is an incredibly large country, so if you're running for president and must campaign across the whole of it, your transportation costs alone are going to be astronomical. Most people eschew the idea of working gradually from one end to the other, preferring to hop from one battleground state to the next, stopping briefly to shore up support in places you already have on your side. For this, you need a dedicated private plane. Because you're always being shadowed by a shoal of reporters, and transit time is a good time for interviews, this plane has to be big enough to hold your campaign staff and the press. And those reporters need to be kept happy and your staff functioning, which means catering.
For those running for office on a more local level, transportation may not be such a drain, but you still have all the other costs that go along with getting elected. Primary of these is marketing: you have to hire a crew of competent and competitive (read: expensive) people to put you in a package that the public wants to buy. They must run studies to see how you are perceived, devise strategies to get their attention and/or convince them that you will represent them best, produce those ads, and buy airtime. To see if the ads had any effect, they go through the whole process again. And again. Until you either win or lose – and if you lose there'll probably be a post-mortem, which someone has to pay for ...
The ads themselves are invariably expensive, too. A poorly-produced ad will only be countereffective, so you have to have that professional flair and polish, which will cost you. A film crew is about a dozen trained professionals that must be paid as such, then you've got editors and all their post-production friends to pay. If you want any music or graphics in your ad, either you have to pay a hefty license fee to the owners of the rights, or hire people to create them for you.
Then there's the spectacle of the campaign itself. Americans like spectacle! Americans like video projections of waving flags! Americans like rousing anthems blasting from high-fidelity sound systems! Americans like to wave colourful signs with the candidate's name and a couple key words on them! Americans like fireworks and a hundred thousand balloons falling from the ceiling! Someone's got to set up the A/V system, print the signs, buy the fireworks, blow up the balloons ...
And if you say 'no' to any of this, your opponent, with their vastly shinier campaign, will wipe their butt with your face. So it becomes an audio/visual spectacular arms race.
How do you take the money out of this system?
Do you legislate free airtime for party political ads, so at least that expense is minimised? For-profit broadcasters wouldn't be very happy about losing paid ad time, but they might consent if the election period was brought down to a couple months, like it is in parliamentary democracies, rather than the amorphous over-a-year it is now.
Do you outlaw radio and TV ads? This might be a popular move for consumers of broadcast media, but I can foresee at least a couple of problems:
- How do you define a 'political ad'? Can special interest groups still get airtime? What if, for example, a pro-life lobby runs a public service announcement that simply outlines the dangers of getting an abortion, without linking themselves to a particular party, though it may sway people to vote for the anti-abortion candidate? Where do you draw the line?
- There is a grand tradition of free-market media in this country that will be defended tooth and claw by conservatives and libertarians if any sort of federal legislation is enacted against it.
Do you conduct your entire campaign online, through social networks and YouTube? That would bring the cost way down, and make you hip wit da youf as Obama proved in 2008, but the Internet lacks a certain strength of broadcast media when it comes to advertising: it does not wash over the audience in a constant one-way stream. They control what they see and when, so unless you embed your message in some sort of quasi-TV obligatory advertising such as that on Hulu, you're not going to reach a broad swath of people, only ones inclined to put themselves in the way of your campaign already; preaching to the converted, if you will.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU WIN?
So you've set up camp in a city park, made your placards, done your local nightly news video bytes, and sworn to the nation that you're in it for the long haul. Well done! Now what?
I have nothing but respect for the people who have dedicated their lives to this endeavour. That takes serious energy and commitment, the sort of energy and commitment I didn't think this sedated country had anymore, so major props there. But it makes it all the more frustrating to watch, because I'm seeing the passion and sacrifices of a generation potentially drain away as it spins its wheels simply occupying public spaces and being angry. Dear noble Occupiers: the corporations you decry have no incentive to change. They've got the system exactly how they want it, and a bunch of bodies in a park down the street aren't going to change their minds about anything. If you chain yourselves to their buildings they will just get Security to carry you away. The only thing that will get their attention is affecting the only thing they care about: cash flow.
There are two ways to do this. On the front end, cash comes in in exchange for goods and services. Stop that exchange with something like a boycott and the company, no longer getting the nutrients it needs, will start to notice. The only way these behemoths got to have the power and wealth they do is because we gave it to them by buying their goods and services. If we stopped our contributions, they would have less weight to throw around, and less cash with which to lubricate their way through government. On the back end, interrupting the flow of goods and services on their way to being exchanged for money, with something like a strike, may have a similar effect, though the fact such a thing is largely an internal matter may make the process less direct, especially if the company offers the jobs of the strikers to any of the millions of desperate unemployed.
Say whatever you do does have some effect, and Baddies Inc.'s revenue stream starts drying up. What happens? I suspect the first thing will be 'restructuring,' a.k.a. massive layoffs, and you can bet they're not going to start chopping at the top. The laid off workforce will have less spending power, which means less grease for the wheels of the economy. Other companies start to suffer because fewer people can afford to buy their goods and services, which prompts them to 'restructure,' etc etc as the ripples spread. Eventually, once the whole system collapses and is rebuilt in a better image, we may be in a better place – but at what price? Will the whole of the country come to hate you and your movement for the chaos you've caused, and vow to undo everything you've done, before the improvements start to show? One only needs to look at the last four years to see how easily this can happen.
Ideally there'd be a peaceful transition of money and power from giant corporations to smaller businesses, a sort of modern-day breaking-up of the 19th-century trusts and monopolies. If the spending public can do this with their own precious dollars, rather than having G-men go in with sledgehammers, all the better. Consumers will have to turn somewhere, and it'd be nice if they could turn to small local businesses and startups, but such enterprises need investment to get to the point of being viable competition for a ubiquitous megafranchise with massive economies of scale, and where does that investment come from? The people with money. Take away their money, and they can't invest, or at least can't afford to invest as much, or take any risks with their investments.
It is possible that whatever regulations come into force could be so subtly crafted as to leave big companies and individuals enough money to invest in smaller enterprises while still precluding megafortunes, though why they would want to invest anything if they weren't allowed to keep the returns is another question. Perhaps it is moot, though: I mean, how many corporations and billionaires actually invest in something that could one day be their competition? Where do startups get their money from, anyway? Oh, right, banks, those institutions that are apparently the cause of all our problems and should be razed from the face of the earth ...
Now, there have been two recent developments I know of that might provide an emergency exit from the paradox of the wealth/investment cycle: microfinance and Kickstarter. Microfinance has gotten famous recently because of the improvements it has made in the lives of people in the developing world, where the loan of a paltry US$100 can legitimately get a business off the ground – but can that business model work outside of a microeconomy? $100 isn't even enough to buy your nascent enterprise a decent website in the First World. $1,000 is just a drop in the bucket of starting up a viable business. There may be a way to use relatively small loans intelligently and effectively, but it's not the image of microfinance that has made the idea so successful internationally.
I don't know much about Kickstarter but my impression is that it works as follows: You pitch your project on their website and crowd-source a bunch of pledges; if those pledges reach a certain amount, the funds are matched, and you get an investment. I do not know who does the matching, or if the Kickstarter enterprise gets any sort of kickback from the deal (a commission on your first three years' profits, for example). My mental image of this program is very much like a public radio fundraiser with a challenge grant, which usually comes from a wealthy benefactor. With public radio, though, it's relatively easy to demonstrate the returns on your investment (you put money in, you get radio out) but would the NPR/Kickstarter model work if you were trying to get a much less sexy or universal endeavour off the ground? What if you wanted to open a neighbourhood hardware store? How would you drum up pledges for that? It would be essential if WalMart went away, but it hardly grabs the imagination.
This is all a tangent, though. My point is, corporations will not change until it is in their best interest to do so, so you must make it their best interest. It is most profitable to follow the path of least resistance, so putting real resistance in their way and threatening to keep it there until changes have been made is one of the few ways the 'little people' can have any effect on a major institution. Interrupting cash flow is one way of doing it, and a hard one for the company to ignore. You can also make things really inconvenient for them, making the daily conduct of business more difficult (and thereby narrowing their profit margins) – depending what the company is, there could be hundreds of legal ways of doing this, and if you want to risk it, a hundred more illegal ways. The emergence of the internet as a vital marketplace offers a lot of possibilities in this regard as well. But something I think may be overlooked for its effectiveness is the power of bad PR. Companies will do anything to look good in the public eye and win the sentiment (and purse-strings) of consumers, and they invest a lot of time and money in doing so. Turn embarrassing revelations about their conduct into 'this is why you should boycott them' and you will really get their attention. To have all their hard work undone would at least annoy them, and ideally make reform (i.e. damage control) essential rather than optional. But all these strategies need more than just people camping in a city park: you can be as pissed off as you want but until their livelihood is affected they just don't care, and from what I'm seeing I'm not sure the movement has grasped this.
OKAY THEN, HOW WOULD YOU FIX IT, CLEVERGUTS?
Misgivings aside, I do genuinely want to see the Occupy movement have some success – as I said before, I find it hard to understand how anyone could not agree with their points on the broader level, and the sooner the political system corrects itself the easier and less painful it will be for everyone involved. It's just frustrating to see it spinning its wheels, when it could use the momentum it's gained in the last few weeks to branch out and start employing more targeted and effective tactics. Establishing tent cities in public places is a great way of getting people's attention long enough to tell them the message you want to spread, but once you've got the public ear and a swell in support, you have a very narrow window in which to channel that support into action, before the media loses interest or people start dismissing Occupy as ineffectual.
I don't have a problem with the movement being leaderless – we have the communications and connections nowadays to be closer to an instantaneous collective consensus than ever before, without the need of a single spokesperson to rally around. The message of the movement has managed to narrow itself down from a hundred different rallying cries to maybe two or three, all without a central leadership. The revolutions of the Arab Spring have proven how effective leaderless movements can be. The problem, as Tunisia and Egypt are discovering, comes after the success of the revolution's stated goal: when you no longer have the unifying force of a common enemy, groups start to splinter, and without a guiding force to channel their energy, with the frustration that comes from everything not being instantly solved, it turns to infighting. If you have some sort of central body that can set an agenda several steps in advance, and they are clever in doing so, the 'what now?' factor that opens up a window for disintegration might be less of an issue.
Another benefit of having some sort of core is that it can stop the movement from losing its focus. When the Tea Party started, it was all about outrage at the government for using taxpayer money essentially to buy (and thereby nationalise) the failing banks, but it has since turned into a club for people who are too neoconservative for the neoconservatives. How much potential support did they lose by doing this? If Occupy veers away from the universally sympathetic aim of getting big money out of the democratic process, what will it become, and what will it lose? There are already people who dismiss it as being the left-wing mirror-image of the Tea Party; going too socialist too quickly would only convince more people of this and the potential support base amongst centrists would dwindle. You need broad popular support to bring about the systemic changes in massive institutions that you want to see, otherwise either your momentum will be insufficient to effect change or people will feel like you're hijacking their government. Some sort of steering committee can keep the movement on one track until the job is done.
Regarding public message, an effort should also be made to direct it away from members' complaints about personal debt burdens – while there may be perfectly legitimate reasons why a person couldn't help but get $200,000 in the hole, in our sound byte culture they will never have time to go into the origin of their situation or its inevitability, so they come across as an entitled naif who can't take the consequences of their decisions. This paints the movement in a bad light and is an easy excuse for dismissal by people who think themselves responsible adults, rendering them imperceptive to the real issues you're supposed to be protesting. It is of course impossible to control what everyone focuses on, and everyone has their own reasons for being there, but some sort of popular pressure not to dwell on personal finances might be beneficial. I haven't heard much of that line of talk lately, though, so maybe this is already in effect, or maybe the collective subconscious is gelling, and people are becoming more tied to the cause than to their own personal narrative.
With vastly powerful institutions on one side and a largely apathetic public on the other, the challenges here are great, and while I may have misgivings about how the Occupy movement is moving forward (or, more to the point, is not) I don't think it's an exercise in futility. I am not a great expert in the labour movements of the early 20th century, but I do know that they managed to overthrow not just the robber barons in America, but to a large extent the power held by the aristocracy in Britain as well, which had centuries of entrenched tradition behind it. That is no small feat! They did it, though, not just by voicing their discontent but by taking action. There were tent cities, but there were also general strikes, and by inconveniencing the general population's daily life you make them get involved in one way or another. The trick is in communicating your motives well enough that they know which side they should be on, and why a little bit of bother for them now is worth it for them in the long run.
There is energy behind the Occupy movement now, as far as I can tell, but that energy will be wasted if it's just funnelled into tents. At some point, before you start losing steam and awareness, you need to focus that energy, identifying targets that are less nebulous than 'corporations in government.' Are there certain politicians you can prove are in the pockets of big business? Are there specific corporations that need to be taken down a peg or two? Can you back that up with cold hard facts that you can explain clearly and simply to the public, whose support is necessary to help you achieve your goals?
Having specific concrete objectives could help on the front of mustering broader participation as well. Not only would you look like you have a plan, which inspires confidence, but you could reach out to people who are currently ineligible to take part in what the movement 'is' at the moment. There are lots of people out there who agree with you and support you and might even want to get involved, but they have jobs they would like to keep and families to support, so can't spend all their time camping downtown or risk getting arrested. If you can give them solid concrete things to do, though, there's a whole untapped resource there. It could be as simple as giving them a selective buying agenda and the imperative to spread the word, or as complicated as doing some serious investigation, fact-checking to inform future policies or press releases 'outing' politicians or corporations.
The Occupy movement has been very successful at getting attention and spreading its message, and the image of protesters camped out downtown is effective and iconic, but it must be acknowledged that eventually it will have to evolve beyond occupation. If it keeps its identity centred on the issues rather than the act of occupying, this could be successful, but if it becomes more about the tent city than the abstracts of why the tent city was there in the first place, the movement will be much easier to thwart. Even since I started writing this thing, the attitude of the authorities towards several Occupations has changed, in some cases violently. While it is very easy to blame supposedly evil and corrupt politicians for this, I beg you to consider another possible viewpoint. As far as I have been able to gather, Occupy sites are mostly on city-owned land. Whenever I have heard any grumbling about the movement at all, it is only from city officials, and they are not disagreeing with the protesters, they are grumbling about how much it is costing, or will cost, for them to be there. Even the most peaceful sites need some extra policing if only to be readily on hand if something goes wrong; in L.A. the main focus seems to be the damage the campsite is doing to the lawn around City Hall and how much it will cost to replace. These are fundamentally trivial things and you may argue (with reason!) they are less important than The Cause, but the fact remains that the protest is costing someone money. The purse from which the bill will be paid is filled with tax dollars, but is not as full as it has been because municipal budgets are mostly funded by property tax and we all know what's happened to property value lately. Cities were struggling and cutting back before they had to pay a couple thousand dollars a day, indefinitely, for citizens to exercise their right to assemble. The fact that the only people annoyed at the Occupations so far are the city officials looking after their budgets is a testament to the predominantly peaceful, respectful, responsible nature of the movement, but it begs the question: are your actions targeting the right people? How rampant is bureaucratic influence in local government? Municipal governance has to be the least glamourous or profitable elected office in the land, but these are the people most affected by the protests. The only major institution that the Occupy movement has succeeded in shuttering has been St Paul's Cathedral – say what you like about organised religion, but I don't think the Church of England has been implicated in any government corruption lately.
If the movement allows itself to evolve beyond the campsites, then it will be possible to come to a peaceful resolution with the municipalities whose land it has been occupying. Perhaps some of the people with so much time on their hands could volunteer to take charge of cleanup, and replace Mr Villaraigosa's lawn, rather than making the city pay for these services, as a gesture of goodwill and gratitude for their hospitality. Think how much better it would look to pack up and clear out on your own volition rather than being driven out by riot squads and tear gas. It would also be a good chance to get the media's attention again, especially if it was synchronised nationally – and while you have their attention you could inform everyone what the next stage will be. It's very exciting and terribly romantic to have street battles with the cops and either come out bloodied and triumphant or be driven underground, but wouldn't it make an impression if there was no violence at all? Not to mention no uninsured people being sent to a hospital they can't afford. And if you took this tack but got beat up anyway, there could be no doubt as to who was in the wrong.
This is, of course, incredibly optimistic, but the point I'm trying to make is that hypothetically tying your movement so closely to the campsites means that any attack on the campsites is an attack on the movement, even when the motives behind it have nothing to do with the issues being protested. Occupying city land and annoying city officials isn't going to have an effect on the corporations and national governments you decry. In order to get the results you want, the movement will have to metamorphose from its larval stage anyway. I'm not suggesting the Occupations be abandoned immediately, because they're very effective PR; I am just worried that the conflict will be more about the campsites than about the issues, and the real fight will take so much energy that what is fundamentally a diversionary side-issue is not worth wasting time on.
My main worry, though, is that immovability on one side and frustration on the other will stew in the pressure-cooker of time until it inevitably breaks out in violence. If the clashes we've seen already, between protesters and city officials looking after their interests, are as bad as they are, what will happen if the centres of real power feel threatened, or if an Occupy splinter group goes rogue and starts employing far less respectful means of getting their message across? I fear that the insistence on identifying with the camp motif is preventing real effectual actions from being taken, and that the subsequent lack of results will frustrate or disillusion those involved and could have unintended consequences.
Eventually questions will have to be raised about the consumerist culture that permits capitalism to get so far out of hand that such protests become necessary, but that's a fight for another day ...
And finally, because I can only remain earnest for so long:
Seriously, people, THEME SONG. Do I have to spell it out for you?
I'm leaving comments open for now, because I want feedback, but the minute it starts getting hot in here I will not hesitate to lock them. I am really amazingly busy at work these days and do not have time to respond in a thoughtful way to anything, but I still read everything, so please don't let that stop you from having a say.
Before I get into the meat of the issue, I feel that I should explain myself. I have been watching the Occupy movement with a certain amount of interest since it first came on my radar. Usually I sit back and piece together information on such things as it comes my way from a number of sources, but until very recently this particular movement has been less than forthcoming in such regards. I get most of my news from international sources (the BBC and CBC, mainly) as I find American media distinctly uninformative even when it's not actively annoying me or throwing up red herrings. There are worldwide Occupations, but the movement's core is in, and will have the most effect on, the United States – foreign media doesn't have as much incentive to cover it in depth, so for the most part I've missed out on that end of things.
Growing up in a house that had Rush Limbaugh and his ilk spewing from every media orifice, I have a deeply ingrained suspicion of impassioned or emotionally manipulative oratory no matter where it's coming from,* and prefer to have the views of the people distributing ideas filtered through either an objective (or trying-to-be objective) third party, or challenged by an intelligent and skeptical interviewer. There has been shockingly little of that in this area – I heard the first really serious discussion of this nature just this past Saturday on the CBC. I may work in the arts but I am a scientist at heart, and I will not accept a theory – scientific, artistic, or political – until it's been peer reviewed and thoroughly tested by the best challenges that can be thrown at it. The Day 6 interview was a good start, but there needs to be a lot more of that.
*This is also why I try to avoid anything remotely political on this blog, because I've had enough of that thank you, and I am only posting this very hesitantly because I can think of no better way to relieve my ignorance.
A benefit of watching from the sidelines is that I've been able to see the core message of the movement coalesce from a hundred songs to the tune of 'we're pissed off' to a much more focused 'get big business out of politics and return democracy to the people,' with a sub-motif of 'share the wealth'. Part of the reason I'm especially wary of the stirring rabble-rousing coming from 'the horse's mouth' as it were, is that, as far as I can tell, I am inclined to agree with their points. As far as I can tell, it's hard for any sane and informed person not to. But that is as far as I can tell, which at present feels like not very far at all.
On a personal level, knowing that my sentiments put me at risk of getting swept up causes me to put on the brakes and try to take a closer look. Due to the lack of third-party information and the huge amount of unfiltered noise that will greet any internet search on the topic, I decided the most effective way of sorting anything out was to put down my thoughts on the movement as I see it and invite clarification from any informed person willing to read them.
MONEY AND POLITICS
Anyone who pays any attention at all to American politics would find it hard to deny the actions of our elected representatives rarely bear much resemblance to the will of the people who elected them. Theoretically this is because a)their loyalty shifts from representing their constituents to winning points for their party, and/or b)they're in the pocket of whatever interest donated enough for them to run a successful campaign, or had the most influence over them while they were in office.
For the sake of this argument and my own sanity, let's take as given that we need to 'get money out of politics.' What does that mean, exactly? For my purposes here I'm going to stick to 'politics' as 'campaigning for political office' because it's the first step anyone has to take, before they even have the opportunity to be swayed by lobbyists, plied with swag, or put in the pocket of the business interest of their choice. Just campaigning.
Where does campaign money come from? As far as I know, its source is people (or perhaps 'entities' is more accurate) who have money to spare and, presumably, think they can gain something from this candidate's election, whether it's representation on their hot-button issue or special consideration when awarding government contracts.
Why is there so much money just in campaigning? It's been accepted wisdom for as long as I remember that the first requisite for eligibility for political office is that you have a personal fortune, because your campaign will never get off the ground without one. I think we can all agree that cutting out the majority of the population from running for elected office is a bad thing; my focus here is not on whether it's good or bad, though, but why it is. It's obvious why big business would want to invest in getting a politician in their debt into office, but why would that politician be willing to get into their debt in the first place?
Campaigning, especially in the USA, is really expensive. This is an incredibly large country, so if you're running for president and must campaign across the whole of it, your transportation costs alone are going to be astronomical. Most people eschew the idea of working gradually from one end to the other, preferring to hop from one battleground state to the next, stopping briefly to shore up support in places you already have on your side. For this, you need a dedicated private plane. Because you're always being shadowed by a shoal of reporters, and transit time is a good time for interviews, this plane has to be big enough to hold your campaign staff and the press. And those reporters need to be kept happy and your staff functioning, which means catering.
For those running for office on a more local level, transportation may not be such a drain, but you still have all the other costs that go along with getting elected. Primary of these is marketing: you have to hire a crew of competent and competitive (read: expensive) people to put you in a package that the public wants to buy. They must run studies to see how you are perceived, devise strategies to get their attention and/or convince them that you will represent them best, produce those ads, and buy airtime. To see if the ads had any effect, they go through the whole process again. And again. Until you either win or lose – and if you lose there'll probably be a post-mortem, which someone has to pay for ...
The ads themselves are invariably expensive, too. A poorly-produced ad will only be countereffective, so you have to have that professional flair and polish, which will cost you. A film crew is about a dozen trained professionals that must be paid as such, then you've got editors and all their post-production friends to pay. If you want any music or graphics in your ad, either you have to pay a hefty license fee to the owners of the rights, or hire people to create them for you.
Then there's the spectacle of the campaign itself. Americans like spectacle! Americans like video projections of waving flags! Americans like rousing anthems blasting from high-fidelity sound systems! Americans like to wave colourful signs with the candidate's name and a couple key words on them! Americans like fireworks and a hundred thousand balloons falling from the ceiling! Someone's got to set up the A/V system, print the signs, buy the fireworks, blow up the balloons ...
And if you say 'no' to any of this, your opponent, with their vastly shinier campaign, will wipe their butt with your face. So it becomes an audio/visual spectacular arms race.
How do you take the money out of this system?
Do you legislate free airtime for party political ads, so at least that expense is minimised? For-profit broadcasters wouldn't be very happy about losing paid ad time, but they might consent if the election period was brought down to a couple months, like it is in parliamentary democracies, rather than the amorphous over-a-year it is now.
Do you outlaw radio and TV ads? This might be a popular move for consumers of broadcast media, but I can foresee at least a couple of problems:
- How do you define a 'political ad'? Can special interest groups still get airtime? What if, for example, a pro-life lobby runs a public service announcement that simply outlines the dangers of getting an abortion, without linking themselves to a particular party, though it may sway people to vote for the anti-abortion candidate? Where do you draw the line?
- There is a grand tradition of free-market media in this country that will be defended tooth and claw by conservatives and libertarians if any sort of federal legislation is enacted against it.
Do you conduct your entire campaign online, through social networks and YouTube? That would bring the cost way down, and make you hip wit da youf as Obama proved in 2008, but the Internet lacks a certain strength of broadcast media when it comes to advertising: it does not wash over the audience in a constant one-way stream. They control what they see and when, so unless you embed your message in some sort of quasi-TV obligatory advertising such as that on Hulu, you're not going to reach a broad swath of people, only ones inclined to put themselves in the way of your campaign already; preaching to the converted, if you will.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU WIN?
So you've set up camp in a city park, made your placards, done your local nightly news video bytes, and sworn to the nation that you're in it for the long haul. Well done! Now what?
I have nothing but respect for the people who have dedicated their lives to this endeavour. That takes serious energy and commitment, the sort of energy and commitment I didn't think this sedated country had anymore, so major props there. But it makes it all the more frustrating to watch, because I'm seeing the passion and sacrifices of a generation potentially drain away as it spins its wheels simply occupying public spaces and being angry. Dear noble Occupiers: the corporations you decry have no incentive to change. They've got the system exactly how they want it, and a bunch of bodies in a park down the street aren't going to change their minds about anything. If you chain yourselves to their buildings they will just get Security to carry you away. The only thing that will get their attention is affecting the only thing they care about: cash flow.
There are two ways to do this. On the front end, cash comes in in exchange for goods and services. Stop that exchange with something like a boycott and the company, no longer getting the nutrients it needs, will start to notice. The only way these behemoths got to have the power and wealth they do is because we gave it to them by buying their goods and services. If we stopped our contributions, they would have less weight to throw around, and less cash with which to lubricate their way through government. On the back end, interrupting the flow of goods and services on their way to being exchanged for money, with something like a strike, may have a similar effect, though the fact such a thing is largely an internal matter may make the process less direct, especially if the company offers the jobs of the strikers to any of the millions of desperate unemployed.
Say whatever you do does have some effect, and Baddies Inc.'s revenue stream starts drying up. What happens? I suspect the first thing will be 'restructuring,' a.k.a. massive layoffs, and you can bet they're not going to start chopping at the top. The laid off workforce will have less spending power, which means less grease for the wheels of the economy. Other companies start to suffer because fewer people can afford to buy their goods and services, which prompts them to 'restructure,' etc etc as the ripples spread. Eventually, once the whole system collapses and is rebuilt in a better image, we may be in a better place – but at what price? Will the whole of the country come to hate you and your movement for the chaos you've caused, and vow to undo everything you've done, before the improvements start to show? One only needs to look at the last four years to see how easily this can happen.
Ideally there'd be a peaceful transition of money and power from giant corporations to smaller businesses, a sort of modern-day breaking-up of the 19th-century trusts and monopolies. If the spending public can do this with their own precious dollars, rather than having G-men go in with sledgehammers, all the better. Consumers will have to turn somewhere, and it'd be nice if they could turn to small local businesses and startups, but such enterprises need investment to get to the point of being viable competition for a ubiquitous megafranchise with massive economies of scale, and where does that investment come from? The people with money. Take away their money, and they can't invest, or at least can't afford to invest as much, or take any risks with their investments.
It is possible that whatever regulations come into force could be so subtly crafted as to leave big companies and individuals enough money to invest in smaller enterprises while still precluding megafortunes, though why they would want to invest anything if they weren't allowed to keep the returns is another question. Perhaps it is moot, though: I mean, how many corporations and billionaires actually invest in something that could one day be their competition? Where do startups get their money from, anyway? Oh, right, banks, those institutions that are apparently the cause of all our problems and should be razed from the face of the earth ...
Now, there have been two recent developments I know of that might provide an emergency exit from the paradox of the wealth/investment cycle: microfinance and Kickstarter. Microfinance has gotten famous recently because of the improvements it has made in the lives of people in the developing world, where the loan of a paltry US$100 can legitimately get a business off the ground – but can that business model work outside of a microeconomy? $100 isn't even enough to buy your nascent enterprise a decent website in the First World. $1,000 is just a drop in the bucket of starting up a viable business. There may be a way to use relatively small loans intelligently and effectively, but it's not the image of microfinance that has made the idea so successful internationally.
I don't know much about Kickstarter but my impression is that it works as follows: You pitch your project on their website and crowd-source a bunch of pledges; if those pledges reach a certain amount, the funds are matched, and you get an investment. I do not know who does the matching, or if the Kickstarter enterprise gets any sort of kickback from the deal (a commission on your first three years' profits, for example). My mental image of this program is very much like a public radio fundraiser with a challenge grant, which usually comes from a wealthy benefactor. With public radio, though, it's relatively easy to demonstrate the returns on your investment (you put money in, you get radio out) but would the NPR/Kickstarter model work if you were trying to get a much less sexy or universal endeavour off the ground? What if you wanted to open a neighbourhood hardware store? How would you drum up pledges for that? It would be essential if WalMart went away, but it hardly grabs the imagination.
This is all a tangent, though. My point is, corporations will not change until it is in their best interest to do so, so you must make it their best interest. It is most profitable to follow the path of least resistance, so putting real resistance in their way and threatening to keep it there until changes have been made is one of the few ways the 'little people' can have any effect on a major institution. Interrupting cash flow is one way of doing it, and a hard one for the company to ignore. You can also make things really inconvenient for them, making the daily conduct of business more difficult (and thereby narrowing their profit margins) – depending what the company is, there could be hundreds of legal ways of doing this, and if you want to risk it, a hundred more illegal ways. The emergence of the internet as a vital marketplace offers a lot of possibilities in this regard as well. But something I think may be overlooked for its effectiveness is the power of bad PR. Companies will do anything to look good in the public eye and win the sentiment (and purse-strings) of consumers, and they invest a lot of time and money in doing so. Turn embarrassing revelations about their conduct into 'this is why you should boycott them' and you will really get their attention. To have all their hard work undone would at least annoy them, and ideally make reform (i.e. damage control) essential rather than optional. But all these strategies need more than just people camping in a city park: you can be as pissed off as you want but until their livelihood is affected they just don't care, and from what I'm seeing I'm not sure the movement has grasped this.
OKAY THEN, HOW WOULD YOU FIX IT, CLEVERGUTS?
Misgivings aside, I do genuinely want to see the Occupy movement have some success – as I said before, I find it hard to understand how anyone could not agree with their points on the broader level, and the sooner the political system corrects itself the easier and less painful it will be for everyone involved. It's just frustrating to see it spinning its wheels, when it could use the momentum it's gained in the last few weeks to branch out and start employing more targeted and effective tactics. Establishing tent cities in public places is a great way of getting people's attention long enough to tell them the message you want to spread, but once you've got the public ear and a swell in support, you have a very narrow window in which to channel that support into action, before the media loses interest or people start dismissing Occupy as ineffectual.
I don't have a problem with the movement being leaderless – we have the communications and connections nowadays to be closer to an instantaneous collective consensus than ever before, without the need of a single spokesperson to rally around. The message of the movement has managed to narrow itself down from a hundred different rallying cries to maybe two or three, all without a central leadership. The revolutions of the Arab Spring have proven how effective leaderless movements can be. The problem, as Tunisia and Egypt are discovering, comes after the success of the revolution's stated goal: when you no longer have the unifying force of a common enemy, groups start to splinter, and without a guiding force to channel their energy, with the frustration that comes from everything not being instantly solved, it turns to infighting. If you have some sort of central body that can set an agenda several steps in advance, and they are clever in doing so, the 'what now?' factor that opens up a window for disintegration might be less of an issue.
Another benefit of having some sort of core is that it can stop the movement from losing its focus. When the Tea Party started, it was all about outrage at the government for using taxpayer money essentially to buy (and thereby nationalise) the failing banks, but it has since turned into a club for people who are too neoconservative for the neoconservatives. How much potential support did they lose by doing this? If Occupy veers away from the universally sympathetic aim of getting big money out of the democratic process, what will it become, and what will it lose? There are already people who dismiss it as being the left-wing mirror-image of the Tea Party; going too socialist too quickly would only convince more people of this and the potential support base amongst centrists would dwindle. You need broad popular support to bring about the systemic changes in massive institutions that you want to see, otherwise either your momentum will be insufficient to effect change or people will feel like you're hijacking their government. Some sort of steering committee can keep the movement on one track until the job is done.
Regarding public message, an effort should also be made to direct it away from members' complaints about personal debt burdens – while there may be perfectly legitimate reasons why a person couldn't help but get $200,000 in the hole, in our sound byte culture they will never have time to go into the origin of their situation or its inevitability, so they come across as an entitled naif who can't take the consequences of their decisions. This paints the movement in a bad light and is an easy excuse for dismissal by people who think themselves responsible adults, rendering them imperceptive to the real issues you're supposed to be protesting. It is of course impossible to control what everyone focuses on, and everyone has their own reasons for being there, but some sort of popular pressure not to dwell on personal finances might be beneficial. I haven't heard much of that line of talk lately, though, so maybe this is already in effect, or maybe the collective subconscious is gelling, and people are becoming more tied to the cause than to their own personal narrative.
With vastly powerful institutions on one side and a largely apathetic public on the other, the challenges here are great, and while I may have misgivings about how the Occupy movement is moving forward (or, more to the point, is not) I don't think it's an exercise in futility. I am not a great expert in the labour movements of the early 20th century, but I do know that they managed to overthrow not just the robber barons in America, but to a large extent the power held by the aristocracy in Britain as well, which had centuries of entrenched tradition behind it. That is no small feat! They did it, though, not just by voicing their discontent but by taking action. There were tent cities, but there were also general strikes, and by inconveniencing the general population's daily life you make them get involved in one way or another. The trick is in communicating your motives well enough that they know which side they should be on, and why a little bit of bother for them now is worth it for them in the long run.
There is energy behind the Occupy movement now, as far as I can tell, but that energy will be wasted if it's just funnelled into tents. At some point, before you start losing steam and awareness, you need to focus that energy, identifying targets that are less nebulous than 'corporations in government.' Are there certain politicians you can prove are in the pockets of big business? Are there specific corporations that need to be taken down a peg or two? Can you back that up with cold hard facts that you can explain clearly and simply to the public, whose support is necessary to help you achieve your goals?
Having specific concrete objectives could help on the front of mustering broader participation as well. Not only would you look like you have a plan, which inspires confidence, but you could reach out to people who are currently ineligible to take part in what the movement 'is' at the moment. There are lots of people out there who agree with you and support you and might even want to get involved, but they have jobs they would like to keep and families to support, so can't spend all their time camping downtown or risk getting arrested. If you can give them solid concrete things to do, though, there's a whole untapped resource there. It could be as simple as giving them a selective buying agenda and the imperative to spread the word, or as complicated as doing some serious investigation, fact-checking to inform future policies or press releases 'outing' politicians or corporations.
The Occupy movement has been very successful at getting attention and spreading its message, and the image of protesters camped out downtown is effective and iconic, but it must be acknowledged that eventually it will have to evolve beyond occupation. If it keeps its identity centred on the issues rather than the act of occupying, this could be successful, but if it becomes more about the tent city than the abstracts of why the tent city was there in the first place, the movement will be much easier to thwart. Even since I started writing this thing, the attitude of the authorities towards several Occupations has changed, in some cases violently. While it is very easy to blame supposedly evil and corrupt politicians for this, I beg you to consider another possible viewpoint. As far as I have been able to gather, Occupy sites are mostly on city-owned land. Whenever I have heard any grumbling about the movement at all, it is only from city officials, and they are not disagreeing with the protesters, they are grumbling about how much it is costing, or will cost, for them to be there. Even the most peaceful sites need some extra policing if only to be readily on hand if something goes wrong; in L.A. the main focus seems to be the damage the campsite is doing to the lawn around City Hall and how much it will cost to replace. These are fundamentally trivial things and you may argue (with reason!) they are less important than The Cause, but the fact remains that the protest is costing someone money. The purse from which the bill will be paid is filled with tax dollars, but is not as full as it has been because municipal budgets are mostly funded by property tax and we all know what's happened to property value lately. Cities were struggling and cutting back before they had to pay a couple thousand dollars a day, indefinitely, for citizens to exercise their right to assemble. The fact that the only people annoyed at the Occupations so far are the city officials looking after their budgets is a testament to the predominantly peaceful, respectful, responsible nature of the movement, but it begs the question: are your actions targeting the right people? How rampant is bureaucratic influence in local government? Municipal governance has to be the least glamourous or profitable elected office in the land, but these are the people most affected by the protests. The only major institution that the Occupy movement has succeeded in shuttering has been St Paul's Cathedral – say what you like about organised religion, but I don't think the Church of England has been implicated in any government corruption lately.
If the movement allows itself to evolve beyond the campsites, then it will be possible to come to a peaceful resolution with the municipalities whose land it has been occupying. Perhaps some of the people with so much time on their hands could volunteer to take charge of cleanup, and replace Mr Villaraigosa's lawn, rather than making the city pay for these services, as a gesture of goodwill and gratitude for their hospitality. Think how much better it would look to pack up and clear out on your own volition rather than being driven out by riot squads and tear gas. It would also be a good chance to get the media's attention again, especially if it was synchronised nationally – and while you have their attention you could inform everyone what the next stage will be. It's very exciting and terribly romantic to have street battles with the cops and either come out bloodied and triumphant or be driven underground, but wouldn't it make an impression if there was no violence at all? Not to mention no uninsured people being sent to a hospital they can't afford. And if you took this tack but got beat up anyway, there could be no doubt as to who was in the wrong.
This is, of course, incredibly optimistic, but the point I'm trying to make is that hypothetically tying your movement so closely to the campsites means that any attack on the campsites is an attack on the movement, even when the motives behind it have nothing to do with the issues being protested. Occupying city land and annoying city officials isn't going to have an effect on the corporations and national governments you decry. In order to get the results you want, the movement will have to metamorphose from its larval stage anyway. I'm not suggesting the Occupations be abandoned immediately, because they're very effective PR; I am just worried that the conflict will be more about the campsites than about the issues, and the real fight will take so much energy that what is fundamentally a diversionary side-issue is not worth wasting time on.
My main worry, though, is that immovability on one side and frustration on the other will stew in the pressure-cooker of time until it inevitably breaks out in violence. If the clashes we've seen already, between protesters and city officials looking after their interests, are as bad as they are, what will happen if the centres of real power feel threatened, or if an Occupy splinter group goes rogue and starts employing far less respectful means of getting their message across? I fear that the insistence on identifying with the camp motif is preventing real effectual actions from being taken, and that the subsequent lack of results will frustrate or disillusion those involved and could have unintended consequences.
Eventually questions will have to be raised about the consumerist culture that permits capitalism to get so far out of hand that such protests become necessary, but that's a fight for another day ...
And finally, because I can only remain earnest for so long:
Seriously, people, THEME SONG. Do I have to spell it out for you?
no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 04:09 am (UTC)(I <3 Madison too! Went to HS there, many of my former teachers were protesting at the capitol in the early days, and I did go up a few times to protest - ran into Jon Erpenbach twice on State St, OMG BEST THING EVER)