This Is Not News

OK, so maybe I’m a little sensitive since I just wrote my piece on why the Occupy movement needs an electoral strategy. (And yeah, Occupy a Voting Booth does not really appear to be a unique title on my part, but sometimes the obvious choices are good ones.) But this piece in the Philadelphia Daily News putting down the idea that Occupiers should care about voting really aggravated me. It came off as ax-grinding, and poorly-researched and poorly-thought-out ax-grinding.

Will Bunch sets up the question like this:

The main kiosk at the west entrance to Occupy Philly is plastered with fliers for a “die-in” later today at PNC Bank and a Tuesday night event,”Why Does the Curfew Matter to Occupy Philadelphia?” but not one reference to Election Day.
Indeed, when it comes to the anti-corporate-greed Occupy movement that has blown open the national political dialogue in just six short weeks since it debuted on Wall Street, the main election debate is this:
Do elections even matter?

Bunch then dismisses those voices saying that Occupy should be part of the electoral process by calling them “voices of the Establishment” before approvingly quoting Michael Moore:

Michael Moore, the left-wing filmmaker and rabble rouser who has spoken at Occupy rallies from New York’s Zuccotti Park to Oakland, says that an emphasis on voting is tantamount to an endorsement of politics as usual.
“This movement is so beyond just, ‘Hey, let’s get behind this candidate, get them elected to office,’ ” Moore told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last week. “Those days are over. You know, we’ve all worked for candidates. We’ve all voted. We’ve all participated. And what have we gotten out of it?”

OK, here’s the thing. Since 1968 there have been 11 presidential elections. Call 2000 a split, and Republicans have won six and Democrats have won 4. So if Moore’s wondering why it doesn’t seem like voting has gotten him and the left very much, it’s because they’ve lost more than they’ve won. So one possibility is that the public doesn’t agree with Moore and the leftward tilt of movements like Occupy – in which case it’s pretty silly for Occupy to say “We are the 99%” when they’re not even 50% plus one. Another possibility is that Occupy does represent a majority of Americans – but that majority can’t enact its preferences because, despite Moore’s claim, they’re not participating.

Bunch then goes on to cite a common justification for not-voting:

“If elections changed anything, they would be important,” said C.T. Lawrence Butler, a founder of the Food Not Bombs movement, who was visiting Occupy Philly from a commune north of Baltimore. “But most of the time it’s between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.” Surveys have shown that a majority of Occupy protesters voted for Obama in 2008, but are fed up over his coddling of Wall Street or the unending war in Afghanistan.

I’m going to put aside the reference to “his coddling of Wall Street” because that’s an entire topic on its own, but are we really still going with “There’s no difference between the candidates” in 2011? Are there people who think that Al Gore would have pursued the same policies that George W. Bush did? Are there people who think that John McCain would have signed any kind of law expanding access to health insurance or any kind of law regulating Wall Street or setting up a consumer finance protection bureau?

Go ahead and say these measures aren’t enough. Go ahead and demand more. But recognize that the conservative movement has been pushing its agenda since 1980. They didn’t get it all when Ronald Reagan was elected. They didn’t get it all when George H.W. Bush was elected. They didn’t get it all when George W. Bush was elected or re-elected. But they’ve kept pushing and they’ve kept turning out to vote. The only way to push back is to vote against them.

Bunch quotes an independent party candidate for a local office who is frustrated that she can’t get more support from the Occupiers, who don’t seem interested in voting at all. Then he turns his fire at the “pundits” again, including his own bosses who, apparently, envisioned a different article from Bunch and share my good taste in titles:

To the “grown-up” punditry class – including even the Daily News editors who assigned me to this article to match a front page picturing a voting booth with the words “Occupy This!” – a move into elections will be a much-needed sign of maturity for the Occupiers.
Here’s why the political pundits (including Daily News editors) are wrong, in my opinion.
Remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the guy with the national holiday and that big statue on the National Mall. Do you know how many political candidates or parties King endorsed in his career? Zero.

OK. The entire piece was bad, but now we have just gone horribly, horribly wrong.

First of all, so far, the entire article has been about voting. Not endorsements, not running candidates, but voting. Does anyone want to claim that King and the civil rights movement didn’t care about participating in the voting process? Does anyone want to claim that King didn’t want people to vote because it didn’t really matter? Do I have to write a few hundred words about the Voting Rights Act, or the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s attempt to seat African-American delegates to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, or the voter registration drives, or the confrontations with Southern sheriffs provoked merely by an African-American attempting to register to vote? No? Good.

But let’s go to the larger point about King and endorsements. OK, King never said “I endorse so and so.” But in 1960, when he was in jail due to a traffic ticket, John F. Kennedy called his wife Coretta and Robert F. Kennedy worked behind the scenes to get King released. King’s father endorsed Kennedy over Nixon. King himself came out with effusive public praise of Kennedy even though he said he needed to remain officially neutral. King knew that he was helping Kennedy, and he thought that was a good idea. In 1964, King was not as fond of Lyndon Johnson, but he denounced Barry Goldwater and urged people not to vote for him. That doesn’t sound like someone remaining neutral in the electoral process.

OK, we’re in the home stretch now. What else does Bunch have to say?

In six remarkable weeks, the movement that began with Occupy Wall Street has changed the national conversation so that foreclosure, student debt and the lack of jobs are no longer taboo words on cable-news shows. Everyone should vote, and there will surely be some 2012 campaigns – consumer-advocate Elizabeth Warren’s Massachusetts Senate bid is a template – that stir this movement.

Side note – hey, you know who else started talking about the lack of jobs and student debt back in August and September? Some guy named Barack Obama. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

But look at that last sentence. “Everyone should vote.”

Everyone should vote? Really? You’ve just spent how much time questioning whether elections really matter and arguing that it’s between Tweedldee and Teedledum but in the end you’re going to say that everyone should vote? Which, by the way, is the point of the newspaper cover you mocked your editors for using?

Who’s the more foolish, the fool or the fool who spends two hours critiquing his foolishness?

Yesterday I suggested that without an electoral strategy, the Occupy movement would probably need to focus on economic and social disruption in order to achieve their goals. I’d like to return to that idea of an electoral strategy for a moment. I understand that the Occupy movement taps into sentiments across the political spectrum, and I don’t want to lump them all together as some kind of left wing Tea Party. So I am not surprised that there are no candidates jumping up to run on the Occupy party line the way many conservatives jumped to run on or under the Tea Party banner. But I still think that the shortest line between the present and the desired future of the Occupy movement runs straight through the voting booth.

If “We are the 99%” were the literal truth and not a slogan, there should be no way that anyone could stand in the Occupiers’ path. Yes, there are all sorts of problems with voting access and counting in this country. But if 99% of the eligible voters showed up all over the country with a common agenda, one of three things would happen: 1) they’d win; 2) they’d stage a revolution to overcome whatever obvious rigging prevented them from winning; 3) they’d roll over and prove that no one should care about what happens to them because they don’t. Since one-third to one-half of eligible voters don’t bother to vote for the president, let alone Congress or governors, we’re a long way from that point. Either people are happy with the way things are, or they’re not bothering to change them in the easiest way that we have.

I mean, let’s face it. Occupy can talk about being inspired by Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring, but those movements had one straightforward demand: “Guy who we don’t like, give up power.” We don’t have to stand around in crowds for weeks to make someone do that. We just have to stand in a voting booth (and whatever line is waiting to use it) on one or two days a year. That’s why Occupy doesn’t have a simple message like “Guy we don’t like, go away.” We have a system that would allow the people to send that simple message, and quite often the people don’t bother to use it.

Indeed, the Adbusters post that suggested Occupy Wall Street during the summer said that Occupy’s simple “simple, uncomplicated demand” should be:

we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.

Because presidential commissions that have no power to change any laws are the clear paths to enduring social change.

Maybe you’re saying, “Dave, we tried the electoral strategy in 2008. Remember Change You Can Believe In? Remember Hope? Remember Change We Need? We tried it. We elected Obama, we elected a Democratic House, we even had a 60-vote Democratic majority in the Senate. Where’s the change?”

It’s a valid complaint, even though I’m one of those people who think President Obama and Congress accomplished a lot of things from 2009-2010 within the constraints of the system. If I were to try to make a reply, I would say that the big problem is that even while voters were electing a president who campaigned on change, they were electing a lot of Representatives and Senators who didn’t. Whether you support Obama or not, it’s quite clear that he was not able to enact whatever part of his platform that he wanted. This is one reason why I rarely pay attention to presidential platforms and proposals. You have to ask what the Congress will pass.

And let’s look at Congress. One of the Democratic leaders in the Senate is Chuck Schumer from New York. That makes sense, since New York is one of the most reliable Democratic states in national elections. And Schumer is able to get a lot of campaign donations not just for himself but for other Democratic candidates, which gives him a fair amount of influence in the caucus. What else is in New York?

Oh yeah. Wall Street. Guess we know where a lot of that campaign money is coming from. So raise your hand if you’re surprised that Schumer might be a little hesitant to really sock it to Wall Street and other financial companies. Yeah, I didn’t think so.

So what’s the alternative? Vote for the Republican? He or she would have lots of corporate support too. Vote for the Greens or some other third party? I tend to think that third party strategies don’t help move policy in the third party’s direction, because of Duverger’s law. But before Schumer can run against a Republican or a Green, he has to run against any other Democrat who thinks he or she can do a better job. He has to run in a primary.

Now, in the world we live in, this is no big problem. Schumer will raise a bajillion dollars, some protest candidate will raise $20.67, Schumer will win handily even if there’s a protest vote and everybody looks ahead to November.

But what if the 99% decided “Not this time”?

What if the public decided that they would reject any candidate who opposed major structural reform of the financial system? Or that they would target the problem of money in politics by rejecting any candidate who raised more than, say, $100,000? (This is a ridiculous number, deliberately so. Major political campaigns cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.) Schumer would be gone, and whoever replaced him would owe nothing to Wall Street. Repeat the process across the nation and suddenly Congress would care a lot less about fundraisers and a lot more about constituent service.

Notice, there’s no new law required here. No major push for campaign finance reform. No need to try to get past a Supreme Court that equates money with speech and corporations with citizens. No feeble bureaucracy powerless to enforce its own edicts. We’d just have to decide that we wanted something different and vote accordingly.

Maybe you don’t want to deploy this strategy against Senators and Representatives right away. Maybe you think it’s too hard to attract good candidates for these jobs without promising them lots of party and financial support. Fine, let’s start small and build a farm team. Want to serve on City Council? Keep your campaign costs under $5,000 or go home. Mayor? We’ll let you spend ten grand. In five or ten years we’ll have some people ready to run for Congress or governorships on a budget.

But how will we find out about the candidates if they can’t inundate us with ads? News media, to the extent that you trust them. Facebook, social media, campaign volunteers and word of mouth, to the extent that you don’t. Is that a lot more work than just pulling campaign flyers out of your mailbox? Sure. But it’s a democracy, We get out what we put in. If we’re not putting in an effort and the 1% are, why be surprised when the government puts outs more effort for them than for us?

Do I think that this is going to happen? Not any time soon. But if you really think that we the people have lost control of the government and our society, then this is what I think we need to do to get it back.

November 5 is Bank Transfer Day, an unofficial effort to collectively stick it to the large banks by closing accounts and taking business to smaller institutions that, presumably, will not precipitate major credit crises while maintaining a very high salary and bonus structure for top employees. It’s a good example of consumer activism in a capitalistic system – let your wallet do the talking and try to hit the people whose behavior you want to change in the pocket book. It’s a tactic that has a long and proud history that includes the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the Indian independence movement.

I do have one slightly cynical question. Seeing as we’re three years from a financial meltdown that left no one happy with bankers with the possible exception of their mothers, why is anyone with the option just getting around the leaving the big banks now? What motivated people to keep doing business with people whose practices they seemed to abhor? (You can include me in this category if you want – my “bank” accounts have almost always been with credit unions, but the large banks have been making considerable profit from my credit cards and student loans for years.)

My guess is that for many people, the status quo offered some convenience or enhancement that they were not prepared to sacrifice. Maybe they don’t want to have to rely on Wawa and the cash-back checkout option for surcharge-free ATM use. (Maybe they don’t even HAVE Wawas. How terrible.) Maybe there’s a loan connected to that savings account that can’t easily be separated. Maybe people just hate the paperwork. Whatever the reason, there are a bunch of people who didn’t want to hurt the banks because they’d hurt themselves in the process.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while as the Occupy movement has gained steam. And one reason that I am not an enthusiastic supporter is that I don’t get a sense of what the Occupiers are willing to give up in order to create the changes they want, so I can’t tell if I am willing to do the same. I recognize that the Occupiers are making individual sacrifices of time, energy, money, and supplies in order to keep the movement going and visible, and some have been arrested or injured in the process. I’m not questioning the level of commitment. What I’m thinking of here is a sustained program of consumer boycotts or civil disobedience that makes cooperating with Occupy – at least in part – a more profitable option than continuing to resist. Without an electoral strategy, I don’t see any other path to change beyond armed revolution. A mass of people showing they’re unhappy doesn’t motivate the corporate world to change. I’m reminded of the insurance manager from The Incredibles, Mr. Huph. When Bob asks his boss if he’s gotten any complaints about Bob’s work, Huph just smiles and replies, “Complaints, I can handle.” A mass of people costing the corporate world money; now, that will motivate change.

The problem is, the corporate world gives us a lot of things we like and we, as a society, don’t want to give them up. Maybe I’m not happy about the way that the companies who supply parts for Apple treat their workers. Many websites, for example, have reported on problems and suicides at Foxconn’s factory in China. Sure, it bothers me that people would treat each other that way. But it doesn’t bother me enough to stop listening to my iPod while I type this blog entry on a MacBook. People complain about the price of cable television, but they keep paying because they don’t want to give up ESPN or HBO. The path from where we are to the world we’d like to see is very long, and I’m not sure how much I want to walk it.

I’ve seen a lot of people (mis)quote Gandhi about protest and social movements. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The part that I don’t see as often is that for that progression to work, a large group of people has to be willing to keep fighting, and losing, until the tipping point is reached. Otherwise they can just keep on ignoring you. A minority can not oppress a majority unless the majority cooperates. But the minority has a lot of tools at its disposal to try to motivate the majority to do just that. The majority has to be willing to ensure losses and sacrifices that it could avoid by giving in, in order to have a hope of a better future that might make up for the losses. As rough as the last few years have been, I wonder if enough people are close enough to the bottom that they’re willing to give up what it takes to turn things around.

I wonder if I am.

And I think that means that however much blame I want to give people above my pay grade who ought to know better, I need to save a little for myself.