propositions press... 2.0

wi uprising @ year one

It was one year ago that the outward ripples of the Tunisian uprising were felt across borders and through unlikely differences in context. One of those places that saw a righteous outrage directed at a local tyrant in early 2011 was Madison, Wisconsin. Beginning on the day Mubarak fell, Wisconsinites opened their Friday after work routine with the surprise announcement that Scott Walker's so-called budget repair bill, set for a vote early the next week, would end the collective bargaining rights of the state's public sector union. As citizens read the fine print, they found that the bill contained other controversial measures, as well, such as a provision to sell off some publicly owned energy facilities on a no-bid basis. A variety of constituencies found reason to mobilize.

Thanks to the grassroots info-activism of individual citizens from all quarters of the state, the rapid circulation of information through social media, and the prevailing global mood of ya basta (and in this sense, Madison has long been a very global town), within a matter of hours our governor crossed the all-important line of perception, going from harmless amateur to despotic, venal, and dangerous egomaniac. Then, as Walker dug in his heels, the movement to criticize, resist, and now to oust him, gained traction through months and months of renewed outrages committed by him and his Republican lieutenants. Right up to, literally, this very moment. As I type this post, the Republican-controlled Assembly are preparing to ram through yet another of their controversial, poorly-written bills. This one would effectively gut Wisconsin's regulatory apparatus that has successfully conserved wetlands across the state, giving in wholesale to the well-financed interests of irresponsible short term wealth-generating development. It would also have the effect of heaping additional unworkable duties on the DNR, setting that agency up for failure. This is a prime example of T.C. Frank's wrecking crew in action. 

So at the one-year mark, what does it look like going forward? The many subplots and numerous controversies of the last six months have recently been reduced to three main storylines, each with its own actors, antagonisms, and possible outcomes. Now fully developed as political narratives, how they play out from this point will shape the contours of the Wisconsin movement for at least the first half of 2012 and possibly the second. The three stories are 1) the massive grassroots recall effort and election, 2) the battle over new mining up north, and 3) the ongoing FBI John Doe investigation into illegal activities in Scott Walker’s office when he was Milwaukee County Executive and running for governor in 2010. 

The overwhelming enthusiasm of the petition-phase of the recall campaign shocked even the optimists. Gathering over a million signatures means that two of every five would have to be invalidated, an insanely unrealistic prospect, thereby crushing the Republicans' first defense. As well, in absolute numbers, the total comes very close to the 1.2 million votes that Walker received in 2010, indicating how widespread the disapproval really is. Most importantly, given the grassroots nature of the recall effort, this contest is being written as a David vs Goliath story, and therefore a possible turning point in electoral strategy beyond this one election. The David (the WI movement, leading the Democrats and not the other way around) and Goliath (Walker, Koch, ALEC, WMC, money, money, money) story, helped along by citizen reporting on the forces organizing behind Walker, has opened this struggle to a possible outcome in keeping with the idealism that has fueled the movement thus far. If the movement capitulates to the conservative tendencies that are already emanating from within the Democratic Party and union leadership, it will have been another opportunity lost.   

Up north, anticipating what would be in effect a ground invasion, the tribes and their allies are ready to defend their lands, through the courts, and physically if necessary, in the hills. There are successful treaty rights and environmental defense campaigns within the recent memory of a great many Wisconsin activists; organizers are confident in their abilities to form strong native/settler, urban/rural coalitions and use all tactics, from lobbying and media work to civil disobedience and direct action. The state’s strong environmental constituencies (remember, Wisconsin is the state of Aldo Leopold and Gaylord Nelson) are already on the same page in opposing the proposed new mining, and the strict regulatory regime that ranks Wisconsin one of the states least friendly to mining is a legacy of the victorious grassroots-led anti-mining/land preservation struggles that happened fifteen years ago around the proposed Crandon mine. Are the Republicans really anxious to go to the ground in the face of people who are willing to sacrifice their own lives before seeing the ruin of their land and culture? Are they that foolish? Yes, they are. When the invasion begins and the struggle takes a turn toward the dramatic, if the movement articulates its moral, scientific, and economic positions wisely, the chances are good that in one way or another Scott Walker's image and reputation will take another lasting hit. With any luck it would be politically fatal, career-wise.

And, finally, the drip-drip-drip criminal investigation that has placed a chokehold around Walker's inner circle raises the possibility that the other dogs are willing to cut him loose to save their own future ambitions (remember, Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus have their own delusional plans). Walker has retained a legal team, now that the John Doe investigation has the feds breathing down his neck, and I'm sure even his corporate backers are beginning to formulate their own Plan B. As far as I can tell no arm of the WI movement has a contingency plan should Walker be indicted before a recall election is scheduled, even though at this point it seems like a real possibility. I am not even sure what happens. Is he removed from office? Does an indictment trigger any sort of impeachment process? Or will the state's Republican cabal of the Fitzgeralds, JB Van Hollen, and the David Prosser state supreme court work to protect him? Our theocratic lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch is also the target of the recall campaign, and will likely stand for early election along with Walker. But could there be a situation in which she assumes the office of governor and thereby invalidates her recall? Given the tangled plots and unprecedented nature of this whole thing, the legal minutiae yet to be wrangled over cannot be underestimated. How we, as the grassroots engine of the movement, write this narrative is the question. Above all, we must continue to find ways to keep the stories open enough–through both well-timed political offensives and the attendant shaping of the mediated narrative–for a possible outcome that definitively reduces the present and future power of the regressive forces. 

Though a wooden performer in public, we know that through it all Walker's been shaken. He has attempted to spin himself a softer image in recent weeks, miserably, baldly dishonestly, and unsuccessfully. (Playing the compassionate card is not his forte; neither is being honest). But the tone deaf narcissists our careerist political system produces–and Walker is precisely such a product–never really comprehend the message, even if they sense an external threat. Scott Walker is an embodied example of what Debord wrote more than a generation ago: the spectacle is incapable of thinking strategically. And we knew this as early on, when he made a calculated move to play the role of Dairyland Dictator on the very day that Egypt's Mubarak ended his career with a literal escape for his life. Can you say political blind spot?

Blundering his way through, with all the resources that large amounts of cash can buy him, but with none of the kind that don't come with a price tag, Scott Walker now faces a crisis every which way he turns, each one of his own making. Whether Walker realizes it or not, he can never go back. Apart from the hardcore ideologues, his support has evaporated, even as his people lamely manage his deteriorating image and reputation, as exemplified by this sorry effort at staging, and then spinning, a pro-Walker event. It is safe to say Walker's done. Only the ending has yet to be written.

The relevant sign you'll see in this video, shot earlier today at the tail end of the noontime rally (after most of the people left, and before the larger afternoon rally that happened later), is the one held up by the firefighter, first at 3:36 and then at 7:18 with interaction.

    

And one year ago? Let's remind ourselves of what the mood was. Anxiety, disbelief, and a vague hopefulness in a movement yet to fully blossom, tempered by the depressive expectations of a collective lifetime of cynicism. The video below is from noon on Tuesday, February 15, 2011: the occupation of the Capitol began about fourteen hours after it was recorded. Massive demonstrations went on for weeks afterward, generating a whole culture of activism, resistance, and grassroots leadership. John Nichols' review of notable actors and events is only the very tip of the iceberg.

The movement continues, with arrests of activists being tweeted from the Capitol as I compose this, and the disgraceful dead-of-night passage of the wetlands destruction bill as I edit. 

 

 

 

 

mic check'd! the best from america, 2011

By the one-month mark Occupy Wall Street had gone from a ragtag activist question mark to a movement tying together all parts of the left spectrum that changed the national political conversation from a vapid argument over Democrat and Republican debt ceiling posturing to a substantive one about income inequality, financial industry irresponsibility, and freedoms of speech and assembly. Over those same crucial weeks from the middle of October to the end of November, the movement grew and mutated, spread across the country, and evolved as a culture of political engagement.

One of the hallmarks of the Occupy culture—and one of the first indicators of OWS as a new political culture—is the human mic, identified early on as an innovation by necessity, a creative technique born of and against the absurd amplification restrictions placed on the Zuccotti occupation. It is therefore accurate to say that every time the human mic is used, it is a performance that reproduces what makes OWS its own political creation, that is to say, a political reality. That partly explains why the mic check was readily spun off by activists from its native milieu of the General Assembly and deployed as a technique of confrontational intervention in hostile spaces. Even as a tool of confrontation and invasion into the spaces of the 1%, as opposed to a device used for internal organizational communication, the human mic reproduces the movement whenever used. As a virally transferable technique of Occupy, combined with social media as the democratically available channel of disseminating documentation, it brings particular locations that otherwise have only affirmative capitalistic connection to each other (You have a Starbucks over there? We have one here, too!) into common resistance. In its aggressive form, the mic check is practical a way to momentarily occupy an unfriendly space.

For me, the first attention to the mic check as a protest tactic came in a post to the nettime mailing list dated Friday, November 11, 2011:

Dear nettimers, 

It seems like the MIC CHECK, the ritualistic practice of amplifying a speaker's voice in public space through call and response, is now migrating from cities and squares to public (or semi-public) events held by the authorities in various venues. Basically, protesters bring with themselves a text and engage in call and response so as to overcome the amplified voice of authority. A very simple tactic, but quite effective, as you can see from the videos below.

The first powerful action that I know of was held at the Panel for Education Policy in New York on October 26:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbmjMickJMA

Then Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (the union-buster) was mic-checked at the Chicago's Union League Club on November 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oHRdiklTlU&feature=share

And yesterday Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann was mic-checked by a group of students in Charleston, SC:

http://mountpleasant-sc.patch.com/articles/bachmann-talks-foreign-policy-at-yorktown#video-8403501

I can see this spreading so as to become one of the favorite forms of contestation of the Occupy Movement. It would be interesting to know whether someone is working on a social history of the Mic Check.

Enjoy,

Snafu

I have not worked on the said social history, but I have been keeping an inventory of incidents in which activists have “mic check’d” political opponents, corporate heads or representatives, or even the consumer public.

Now that more than two dozen such interventions have been carried out, recorded, and circulated via Youtube, from all parts of the US, it is time to make some distinctions on how these events went down, and how well the documentation communicates. In general, what I find interesting is the use of the open source tactic, combined with the lo-tech versatility in terms of where and when it is used. The recognizability of the form makes for a unified movement culture no matter the different kinds of content, even if the verbiage is very particular to that target, event, or locality. Precisely because the content is changeable, even more importantly, affect and emotion is largely unified across all the events. Righteous outrage, monopolized in idiotic form not so long ago by Tea Party-types, belongs to the left once again, along with a small and just right dose of true pain exposed (see the Lindsay Graham and the John Stumpf actions, below). Because the content is tailored to the particular event, the outrage is genuine, and after watching a few of these, that is really what gets communicated.

That said, through all these actions I can see the limits of the mic check as an effective action. The events featuring well-protected, well-practiced figures of national stature speaking in front of large audiences are difficult to hijack. The action becomes a disruption rather than a takeover, an illustration of how unreachable, insulated, and repressive they really are, as with the mic checking of Karl Rove. On the other hand, functionaries who have no public role, who rarely get confronted by the 99%, who probably don’t even think of themselves as doing the work of the 1%, are less quick to defend themselves from the lectern, and thus are easier targets for a full human mic takeover.

It is difficult to generalize about the venues and spaces. One might think that the more elite the institution, the more tightly controlled the event space, and the quicker the demonstrators will be tossed out. Not true. Probably the most beautifully complete takeover of an event occurred at Princeton University—about as elite as it gets in the world of the 1%. There the mic text was based on the university’s motto and includes a searing self-critique of the school’s privileged campus culture. Three cheers. 

As the calendar year turns, the Occupy movement seems most likely to grow in at least two directions. First, that of housing activism, anti-eviction campaigns, and foreclosure occupations—ie defending and making our homes in a small and personal sense. And second, in the direction of stopping the Keystone pipeline, anti-fracking, and on other environmental fronts, ie defending our home on an ecosystemic level. If this be the case, then new elements of the Occupy culture are bound to emerge. But to send off 2011 and bring in a New Year of ever better and greater occupations, here are my annotated favorite mic check action videos. Visitors, comrades, and fellow citizens, enjoy.

9. Karl Rove Get Mic Check’d at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlko7nweb4k

Unlike the politicians he influences, Rove is not under any pressure to respond decorously. Even so, Rove proves himself unbalanced and quick to anger, leading a grouchy one-man counter chant. Apparently he still suffers from the instant defensiveness of being held responsible for two failed wars on foreign lands and the tens of thousands of needless deaths that resulted. If the mic check works sometimes only as a disruptor, this was a good one of those. Make them drag you out. Even though the action is not a successful takeover, the marriage of form (war at home) and content (wars abroad) satisfies.

8. Minnesotans Confront Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsybOu8VJ28

This group gets kicked out pretty fast by some pushy business school security workers. The intervention turns into a human mic rally outside the venue featuring an impressive young woman who tells her story of Wells Fargo’s treatment of her parents as homeowners who had never missed a payment for over twenty years, including for two years after they lost their jobs. It is heartbreaking. Also of note, John Stumpf may be the only person who has thus far been mic check’d at two separate events (the other in North Carolina).

7. Occupy El Paso Mic Checks Walmart on Black Friday, El Paso, Texas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9lamTknxnw

I for one did not know that there was an Occupy El Paso. I love the emphasis of this mic check: low pay, poor working conditions, and important everywhere but especially in El Paso, the poverty rates in the Hispanic population. And c’mon, to have the human mic take over the ambient media voices of an electronics department in a Walmart is just great on the face of it. The Occupy El Paso brigade looks to be an anarcho-youth posse, the presence of which always makes a corporate retail environment more interesting.

6. Chancellor Gets Mic Check’d at University of Oregon Statutory Faculty Meeting, Eugene, Oregon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uvA8u5WDww&feature=endscreen&NR=1

The mic check brigade makes a point specific to a UO governance and hiring controversy here, but links it to the wider trends of corporate culture invading the public universities. I love that the amplified voice of authority sounds both more hysterical and less understandable than the human mic. The activists remained seated, seem to have not been escorted out, and finished with a courteous “Thank you!” Also notable is the space, a major conference university basketball arena. Only 249 views of the video as of Xmas night? Let’s change that.

5. Senator Lindsay Graham Mic Check’d at Private Fundraiser, Washington DC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmEiREqvUMg

This is probably the most intimate confrontation of an elected public official in my portfolio of bookmarked videos. I hate to give it up to Lindsay Graham—he’s such a slippery player—but he went for the dialogue and that is way more than most of the politicians have done. Of course, he was essentially captive to the group as this intervention was something close to a genuine temporary occupation, so he did not have much choice. Along with the whole idea of crashing intimate gatherings to begin with, the personalized confrontations are an excellent strategy when the target is this close because it leaves the man no room for hiding behind platitudes. Compared to the videos listed here that have none, the basic text intro and outro are helpful. Activists ought to take the time to add them.

4. Gas Industry Event Mic Check’d at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9jQXop_6RiU

Ah, here we go, a complete takeover. Industry flacks are defenseless in the medium sized lecture hall. Student activists deliver an uninterrupted speech calling out the industry for its lies, and condemning it for the environmental damage and cyclical economy the millenial generation refuses to accept. The speech seamlessly ends in a militant chant, to which the students march out. The text intros and outros are more informative than in #5 above. Excellent on all levels but one. I would have liked to hear the speech tie in some public university funding or governance issues.

3. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Mic Check’d at Union League Club, Chicago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oHRdiklTlU&feature=related

This was a contentious intervention on a couple of levels, but exemplary in its success. On the intramovement level, the action was designed and carried out by the labor activists of Stand Up! Chicago and the teachers’ union, but not by Occupy Chicago. Occupy Chicago activists refused on principle to buy the entrance tickets to this private event, but many Occupy partisans expressed solidarity by protesting Walker’s appearance outside the building. The activists inside also had to deal with a shouting battle against the governor’s regressive supporters, and the activists won. The video is edited down to an effective narrative and captioned in full for total communication. The language of the event’s human mic brings together Chicago city and Wisconsin state austerity politics, and even gives voice to the Occupy Chicago arrestees. The tag team lead voice technique is also used here to great tactical effect, seeming to confuse the security people. Finally, it is not just me who despises Governor Walker. Stand Up! Chicago knew that mic checking Walker would guarantee the video an audience, since there are now many thousands of Wisconsinites working to rid their state of him. The views stand at 320k-plus.

2. Occupy DC Mic Checks Big Insurance at Chamber of Commerce Event, Washington, DC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ1_Pebu5Tc

I love this first woman, playing lead voice while shooing away the big security guard giving her chase. Note that the tag teaming is performed to the prolonged maximum here. The language of the intervention is a great example of the conversation-changing spin of the Occupy movement. They don’t speak solely of big insurance as parasite, but specify Scott Serota’s bloated salary as proof of the broken healthcare system. And not least, this was apparently broadcast live on C-SPAN. Probably not a huge audience, but I am sure there were a lot of surprised viewers. The middle aged activists play right into the sympathies of what I imagine to be the middle aged and older viewership of C-SPAN. And the Chamber of Commerce? Talk about taking the intervention to the heart of the beast!

1. JP Morgan-Chase Mic Check’d at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ0J_HUsRaI

Another beautiful takeover, from the 1% to the 1%. The corporate shills never stand a chance. It cannot but tap at the heart when seeing the youth of the privileged class demanding that the institutions of the 1% live up to their billing as the standard bearers of service and stewardship. It is the beginning of their radicalization. And 49k views cannot be sneezed at.

 

art and crime in beijing

When I come to China I am always struck by how safe the streets feel. Of all the places I’ve been to in China, and walking the streets at all hours, I never get the Fear like I always did when living my years in, say, Chicago. Nobody is going to suddenly pull a gun on me, demanding cash and a wallet—this simply does not feel like a possibility. It also seems that women feel pretty safe walking alone at night in the cities. The threat of violence from strangers seems much less a factor here than in the US. I have no statistics or studies; it is just a feeling, but borne out by observing the relatively carefree behavior of people out and about. And knowing that I move about without the same look-over-the-shoulder caution I always have late at night when in Hyde Park.

That said, there are dangers of scamming everywhere in China. On this trip, the very first person I talked to, whom I took to be a legit cabdriver because he was standing with the official drivers at the airport taxi queue, turned out to be a scam artist. He asked me if I needed a taxi, I told him where I needed to go, we negotiated a price, and he grabbed my bag and headed out of the queue. That’s when I knew this was not right. And he was in a hurry, running to a van that pulled up. I questioned him, he reassured me. A guy got out of the van, and he took the driver’s seat. We took off and within three minutes stopped at a gas station very close to the airport. Another van pulled up, with a young man and a young woman in it. My guy got out to transfer my stuff to the new vehicle. That’s when I demanded that he take me back to the taxi queue. He tried to convince me that the young driver was his son, but knew the jig was up when I was adamant. When I made it clear that I'd soon throw a major fit and get physical, he shuttled me back to the proper place. So I got back in line and ignored all further offers of rides until I actually reached a taxi. That first guy went back to scamming others, right behind me.

So the standard crimes in China—and what visitors and residents alike need to know about—are petty scams that have you giving over cash willingly, only to be second-guessing yourself later on, and finally realizing far too late that you’d been taken for your hard-earned money by some smooth talking and sympathetic seeming performer. These scammers exist in the US, too, of course, but seem to be less often encountered, at least not on the street. I think most Americans who turn to petty crime are simply less willing or able to use their wiles and end up stealing outright. (I am not talking about the white collar fraudsters, whom I do not really consider ‘petty.’) There is something quaintly performative about the scam.

So I loved the current project, Public Service Announcement—The Art of the Scam, up at Arrow Factory, a tiny storefront project space about halfway down the alley Jian Chang Hutong, near the Confucius Temple in the northeast center of the city. They have two monitors running looped videos all day, facing out on the street. The local public security bureau provided the videos. They were made by a media and public education branch of the police. They feature actual scam artists performing their best lines, with voiceover from the narrator, with the purpose of educating people about the typical schemes used by these cheats.

astrid wege, pauline j. yao, and rania @ arrow factory

 

the fake ginseng scam

Rania Ho, one of three principals of Arrow Factory, along with Wang Wei and Pauline J. Yao, speaks about the project and how it came about here:

 

The project made me think about a conversation I’d had once with my fellow keyholders-to-be when Mess Hall was still nameless and just coming together. I expressed reservations about operating a space that subscribed to any kind of political orthodoxy. I wished, whatever Mess Hall would become, that it remain open to all arguments for hosting projects by people or entities with perceived political differences. Given the politics of those involved, as an extreme example, I suggested that I could entertain a project proposal offered by an anti-abortion group. Not least for the simple reason of better learning how an anti-abortion group operates.

The hypothetical situation never presented while I was an active keyholder. But at Arrow Factory the situation of working with an entity that might conventionally be thought of as an antagonist, or at most a presence that exists in a situation of mutual tolerance, here becomes a friendly exhibition partner. The best part is that the relationship grew organically out of a neighborhood milieu, and came to fruition with neither a compromised integrity on the part of Arrow Factory nor a resort to brute imposition by the police. It is new media, law and order, community service, cultural experimentation, and collaborative art all rolled into one project. Everybody gets to be who they most want to be. By no means is that an easily achieved result given the divergent experiences and agendas of the players involved, but shared membership in a human-scaled locality is a foundation that makes it possible.