A lot of my friends and acquaintances have been circulating Naomi Wolf's recent editorial in the Guardian about Occupy Wall Street. The editorial is entitled "The shocking truth about Occupy," and it purports to expose a Congressional conspiracy to defeat OWS through brutal police crackdowns. As you might expect, most of the people who've been reposting the article are OWS supporters.
My reaction to the piece is split evenly between hope and frustration. Let's deal with the frustration first.
Wolf has a tendency to exaggerate and obfuscate by turns in defense of her point. Most people who feel strongly about a divisive issue do so, but it's still annoying. For instance, she calls the recent crackdowns "unparalleled police brutality." Some 50s-era civil rights activists may disagree. The NYPD and other police forces have horribly botched their responses to these protests, but perspective still matters.
She attributes this botched response to directives from the Department of Homeland Security:
"The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.
To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping."
I'm no European, but I still fail to see the enormity of this breach. It is misleading to suggest that local and federal law enforcement are completely separate. Local cops enforce federal laws and receive federal support on a regular basis; they've done so for most of the past century. The sources she cites don't say whether the mayors in question asked for federal advice or whether it was imposed from without, as she implies (one of the links is broken, in fact). And even if the feds butted in without invitation, it's unclear that offering such unwanted advice would be illegal or unconstitutional.
Her claim that "our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping" is also inaccurate. The United States has a federal police force; it's called the FBI. And to return to the civil rights era, Dwight Eisenhower deployed the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock in 1957 to enforce Brown v. Board of Education. If that doesn't constitute "federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping," then I'm not sure what does. Somehow I doubt that Wolf finds that intervention so objectionable, though many opponents of integration did so on similar grounds.
All of this being said, the increasing militarization of American police forces is quite disturbing. But it's disturbing because turning cops into soldiers is a shitty idea, not because of jurisdictional issues.
Then there's this claim, at the end of the piece:
"Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us."
Wolf wrote a book called Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, and I'm sure she'd like to see anarchy in the streets here. But until American cops start spraying OWS types with rubber bullets, this comparison is a pretty serious exaggeration. America, even in its cruddy current state, is a much nicer place to live than Egypt under Mubarak was.
Now for the hopeful part:
"The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.
The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors."
Somehow I doubt that the journalist who gave us such hard-hitting masterpieces as "How Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw did as much to shift the culture around certain women's issues as real-life female groundbreakers" was able to single-handedly determine OWS's 'real' platform where others have failed. But these are realistic, actionable demands, not utopian dreams. They're the kind of thing you can build an electoral campaign on. And if someone did, I'd vote for'em. Here's hoping someone goes through with it.
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