Topic: The "Occupy" Movement

[Thucydides]

Wearing out their welcome:

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/01/31/occupy-support-drops-more-than-20-points-in-san-francisco/

Occupy support drops more than 20 points in … San Francisco?
posted at 8:40 am on January 31, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

One would think that the Occupy movement and San Francisco were made for each other.  Perhaps at one time they were, but a new Survey USA poll shows that even the City by the Bay has its limits.  The poll of 500 adults in the San Francisco area — surely the most progressive-friendly poll sample ever taken — shows that almost half of those who supported the Occupy movement in general now have changed their minds.

The topline results break down thusly:

    * Supported/Still do: 32%
    * Supported/Now oppose: 26%
    * Opposed/Now support: 3%
    * Opposed/Still do: 31%
    * Not sure: 8%

According to this poll, Occupy support in the Bay area would have been 58/34 at one point.  Now it’s 35/57, which is a flip of 46 points in the gap.  Combining support and opposition numbers, Democrat support for Occupy is now 40/56, and even among self-professed liberals, where 27% have switched to opposition, it’s only 52/35.  Among San Francisco adults.  Note too that the movement has not gained converts in anything like the numbers they are alienating, which means that the longer they go, the weaker they are getting politically.

In San Francisco.  Nancy Pelosi’s home turf.  The city that banned Happy Meals because parents were being held hostage by their children.  The mind boggles.

The notion of “occupying” vacant buildings for their operations as some form of social justice  also doesn’t go over as well as one might expect in the area.  Only 21% support the idea, eleven points lower than the movement’s remaining support, while 71% oppose it. Even the youngest demographic, which still has a very narrow plurality supporting the movement (43/41) opposes this idea by a wide majority, 32/59.

But the best is yet to come.  No one in this area is ever happy with the police.  Eric Burdon once hailed the city in “San Francisco Nights,” praising the Hells Angels while warbling, “Cop’s face is filled with hate; heavens above, he’s on a street called Love.” (Needless to say, the entire song is dreck.)  They’re not happy with the police in this instance, though, because the police haven’t been harsh enough with the occupiers.  Twenty-eight percent say the police have been too harsh, while 35% say they’ve been “just about right” … and 33% say they need to get harsher.

When the Great Progressive Event has a third of adults in San Francisco looking for a police crackdown, I’d call that nuking the fridge.

Of course their rhetoric is the same as the President of the United States, but Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) has pointed out how things are playing in the press:

You can tell that the movement has lost popular support because the press suddenly stopped the breathless coverage. As I predicted, once it became clear the movement was hurting the Democrats, the coverage dried up.

[Haletown]

They could revive their welcome by signing up these hockey playing wannbe's

http://cryptome.org/2012-info/femen-zurich/femen-zurich.htm


 * * *   NSFW * * *

[Thucydides]

An interesting summary of OWS like movements around the world. There are some interesting common denominators, including similar organization, theoretical underpinnings and outcomes:

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_1_tech-empowered-protesters.html

The New Rebellions

Across the globe, technology-empowered protesters seek to disrupt the political and economic order.

The media have drawn conservative fire for lavishing so much attention on the motley crew of young dropouts, half-educated college students, and older hippies who make up the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS). Yet the movement, though its numbers have been exaggerated, may deserve all the coverage as part of a much broader political shift. Across the globe—from Chile to the Middle East to South Korea—young protesters similar to Zuccotti Park’s unwashed have, like their American counterparts, aggressively used social media to organize and take to the streets, seeking to disrupt what they perceive to be the corruption and unfairness of existing political and economic systems. Rebellions, after all, can sometimes change the world—and not always for the better.

Occupy Wall Street’s demands are indeed inchoate, and, as many have noted, the movement lacks a clear organization and any kind of formal leadership. True, a few protesters are vying to become “first among equals,” but OWS is better seen as a rebellion than as a revolutionary movement, which requires clearly identified leaders with a definite political program and a proposed alternative to existing society. Few pundits or politicians saw OWS coming, doubtless because it existed virtually on Facebook pages and in Twitter feeds before it took physical form.

Some compare OWS with the Tea Party, but the comparison is inexact. Both movements do rely on social media to mobilize, and both are disgusted with the government’s bailouts of big banks during the financial crisis (the Wall Street Journal’s L. Gordon Crovitz has even called for an alliance between the two groups). But the Tea Party is a middle-class rebellion of the employed, while OWS is driven by the young and unemployed. And their philosophical orientations are fundamentally opposed: the Tea Party is pro–free market and embraces a muscular individualism; OWS is anticapitalist and communitarian.

The biggest difference between the two movements, however, involves their stances toward existing institutions. The Tea Party is similar to European populist parties like the Northern League in Italy and the Progress Party in Denmark, which, though often denounced as illegitimate by their conservative and leftist opponents, fully belong to the democratic process, participating in regular elections and even winning seats. Their ambition is less to destroy the political and economic establishment than to transform it from within. Occupy Wall Street is far more radical in its hatred of current political and economic institutions, and it shares that trait with new rebellions breaking out in other countries.

Observing the nonstop debates on everything and nothing in Zuccotti Park, I was struck by the scene’s similarity to what I had witnessed during the summer in Madrid. The Indignados—the Outraged, who assembled at Puerta del Sol, the heart of the city, to protest—tended to be of the same age as most of their OWS counterparts: young but not as youthful as, say, student protesters were at Berkeley and Columbia during the sixties. Some were married with children and unable to find work. Like the American occupiers, they were nonhierarchical. Hundreds of thousands have participated in the Spanish protests over the last year, and the movement is spreading: though Madrid remains the epicenter, tent cities have sprung up in other major cities. In a country where the memory of civil war and dictatorship remains pervasive, the police have hesitated to crack down on the protesters.

For many of the rebels, the dominant issue is the country’s 20 percent unemployment rate, which climbs to 40 percent among those under 25. The Indignados think that this joblessness is a symptom of something larger: as in the United States, the protesters see the system itself as the enemy. Here, though, there’s a difference: for the occupiers of Wall Street, “the system” mostly means capitalism and the banks, while in Spain, the primary target is the political system. The Indignados contend that Spanish democracy doesn’t work because the major political parties—the Socialists and the conservative People’s Party—have coopted it for their members’ enrichment.

The alternative to party-based democracy that the Indignados propose seems to be some vague notion of consensus. At Puerta del Sol, the protesters, distributed in committees, speak at length about everything from cleaning the streets to changing the world. Resolutions get adopted only if all the participants on a committee approve. As one might expect, unanimity never arrives, and the debates repeatedly start from scratch. Interestingly, the protesters communicate through the same set of hand gestures that OWS uses. For instance, in both Madrid and New York, rotating your fingers over your head means, “You’ve been talking for too long.” The similarity of the gestures suggests that the rebellions are interconnected—not by any hidden political conspiracy but by the Internet, the movement’s leaderless, uncommitted organizer, crossing borders and connecting cultures.

Huge Facebook-facilitated crowds of young male and female protesters have also taken to the streets in Chile. The Chilean police won’t tolerate tent cities, so the upheavals look more like traditional street protests, with all the theater, chaos, and blaring loudspeakers that one would expect. Thanks to social media, the demonstrations have spread like wildfire from Santiago to other large cities in the country.

The protesters’ original goal was to stop the conservative government’s effort to build dams in southern Patagonia. That the dams are the only means of bringing electricity to Chilean cities—the country lacks other energy resources—was of no consequence. The rebels have since added to their demands; for instance, while visiting the country last August, I heard protesters demanding the elimination of the country’s school voucher program merely because it had been promoted, decades ago, by Milton Friedman– inspired economists. These reasons may be distinct from the pretexts for rebellion that one hears in New York and Madrid, but the Chilean rebellion is similar in other ways. The young Chileans, for example, don’t trust the nation’s democratic institutions, viewing them as controlled by self-serving political parties. They even make the absurd comparison between the current democracy—the least corrupt in Latin America, in fact—and the defunct Pinochet dictatorship.

On the other side of the world, in another democracy, the Indian government has been besieged for months by a massive, youthful, grassroots movement protesting political corruption. This movement has planted its tents on the vast lawns in front of the Indian parliament in New Delhi, though the protests take place elsewhere in the country, too. The Indian police can be brutal, but so far they have been reluctant to remove the occupiers, who have, in Gandhian fashion, rejected violence. In addition to the corruption charges—and Indian politics are certainly sleazy—the Indian occupiers express a more unformed objection to Indian political institutions, the party system, crony capitalism, and the unequal distribution of wealth that the country’s booming economy is swiftly generating. In these ways, too, the movement is the inheritor of Mahatma Gandhi, who placed the community above the individual and rejected the Western notion of progress.

Unlike the other rebellions, the Indian protests have a leader: a Gandhi disciple who goes by the name Anna Hazare. By starting a hunger strike last April, Hazare secured a promise from officials to create a special committee to assess the honesty of each member of government. This doesn’t mean that social media haven’t played a key role in organizing the protesters, most of whom are middle-class and well-educated. Indeed, without Facebook and Twitter—many Indian celebrities and spiritual leaders Tweeted their support for the anticorruption cause—Hazare would have remained a provincial community organizer instead of becoming a national figure.

A similar protest movement swept South Korea in October when a relatively unknown social activist, Park Won-soon, was elected mayor of Seoul, defeating the heavily favored conservative candidate, Na Kyung-won. Radical young bloggers and social-media activists, extremely energetic in South Korea, helped assemble anti-Na protests—rebels set up their tents and blared their music in front of Seoul’s city hall—and ultimately secured Park’s surprise victory. Not without reason, the protest movement finds South Korean society too hierarchical, too controlled by the older generation, and too dominated by an alliance between the leading political parties and the private economic conglomerates known as chaebol. The mayoral race was a testing ground for the protesters’ growing power to disrupt the system; their next target will be the 2012 presidential election.

Israel is another country recently struck by popular Internet-driven protests. In September, a young crowd gathered in the streets of Tel Aviv—taking political observers by surprise, just as in the United States and Spain. Once more, the demonstrations were enabled by social media, no organizational structure or clear leadership was to be found, and the protesters were young people who didn’t trust the system. But there was a significant difference between the Israeli protests and the other movements: not only did the Israeli demonstrators make specific requests, like cheaper rents and more public housing, but the government immediately took them into consideration.

In Cairo, the young sociology student Ahmed Maher, a recent graduate of the American University there, was one of the many instigators of the Tahrir Square demonstrations that ultimately toppled Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship last year. For months, he says, he had been inviting his Facebook friends to meet on Friday evenings and demonstrate against the regime. Typically, he managed to rally 100 or so students—not even enough for the police to notice. Then, in January 2011, massive protests in Tunisia forced that country’s authoritarian ruler out of office. The Egyptians, following the remarkable events closely on YouTube, Facebook, and other outlets, were galvanized. “If the Tunisians could do it, Egyptians could succeed even more,” Maher says, displaying the usual Egyptian feeling of cultural superiority over Tunisians. Maher’s weekly Facebook invitations now included images of the “Jasmine Revolution” in Tunisia. “From 100, we jumped to 1 million,” he says.

It might seem far-fetched to compare the Arab Spring, which toppled authoritarian regimes, to protests in democratic countries. But the similarities are striking. In the Arab world, too, the enemy was “the system”—in this case, one that combined political oppression with crony capitalism. And behind the rebellions were youthful crowds demanding change, jobs, and social justice. In the sclerotic economies of the Arab countries, the despair of the young was profound. Remember that the Arab Spring was ignited by the suicide of Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor who had been shaken down by corrupt police (see “Is Islam Compatible with Capitalism?,” Summer 2011). Millions of young Arabs, who had never taken to the streets when rallied by pro-democratic forces, identified with Bouazizi’s economic plight and revolted. Democracy may be an eventual consequence of the Arab Spring, but it wasn’t its starting point.

China has closely monitored the Internet-driven rebellions, especially those in the Arab world—the Communist Party has a tradition of learning from foreign protest movements so as to avoid them at home. After the collapse of the Soviet Union showed that allowing free expression undermined dictatorial political control, Chinese leaders have kept a lid on speech, including on the Web. The Chinese government’s Internet watchdog reportedly employs 100,000 experts who erase subversive blog postings and block politically provocative text messages. When Chinese bloggers began to call for a version of the Jasmine Revolution in their own country, a number of them wound up in reeducation camps. Of late, 300 million cell-phone microbloggers, sending their messages in 140 characters or fewer, have been keeping ahead of the censors.

The Chinese Communist Party’s fear of contagion by the new rebellions is probably justified. The social conditions faced by the younger generation in large Chinese cities are similar to those in the Arab world and, to a lesser extent, in New York and Madrid. Despite China’s fast economic growth, jobs for young, educated Chinese aren’t plentiful. While a manual worker can easily find work, a university graduate often needs two or three years to find a job commensurate with his education.

A constant criticism of all the new rebellions is their lack of a clear alternative vision. But for many of the protesters, the alternative to the hated system is the rebellion itself. Spontaneity, sharing, being together—these characteristics of the various occupations, the rebels believe, reflect how society should work. One might describe this communitarianism as new, but it does recall Romantic figures like John Ruskin, who reacted against industrialization, capitalism, and modern individualism and imagined an idealized premodern past. The nostalgia for some idealized communal past may even partly explain the political success of radical Muslim organizations in Egypt and Tunisia: in the time of Mohammed and his immediate successors, these groups claim, Muslims were a warm, unified community. Why can’t we bring that back today?

As with all political nostalgias, contradictions abound, just as they did when the antimodern Gandhi, who drew inspiration from Ruskin, happily used British-built railways to cross India. Today’s Chilean protesters want to ban electrical power plants but couldn’t imagine life without the Internet, any more than the occupiers of Zuccotti Park could survive without their cell phones and social-media apps—the latest innovations of the capitalist system that they despise.

The rebels’ refusal to embrace any realistic alternative to what they attack has perhaps been given its clearest theoretical justification by a French author, Stéphane Hessel. In late 2010, Hessel, a 93-year-old retired diplomat and longtime human rights activist, released a 40-page book called Indignez-Vous! In it, he repeatedly incites “the young” to be less passive and to revolt against essentially everything. What you protest, he maintains, is less important than that you protest. Few knew Hessel’s name before Indignez-Vous!, but within three months, the book had sold more than a million copies in France. It is now coming out in translations across the globe; its English translation is imperfectly titled Time for Outrage. The polemic was published just as Madrid’s Indignados appeared, and Hessel today receives a hero’s welcome in Spain, but there was probably no direct connection between the book and the protests. Similarly, though John Zerzan, the American anarchist author, is often cited as the inspiration behind the OWS-like protests on the West Coast of the United States, it seems unlikely that many of the protesters there have even heard of him.

So far, Hessel’s native country has not seen the eruption of similar protest movements, perhaps because of the strength of French far-left and far-right political parties, which help channel views opposed to the system. The same seems true of Italy, where far-left parties have unleashed street protests and strikes for decades and where no OWS-like movement has emerged yet.

Another guide to the spirit of the new rebellions is media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who was the first to understand that modern communications technologies were profoundly changing society. Television brought with it a fragmenting individualism: I alone choose my programs. Social media may be transforming society in a different way: any user has the power to create a social movement, to form a flash mob, to organize a boycott—if he or she seizes the right moment and captures something about the spirit of the time. Even as I write, I notice an article about a disgruntled bank customer who used Twitter to persuade half a million others to transfer their money from big banks to local credit unions.

Hegel famously observed that “the owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall.” Only in hindsight are we likely to know the full significance of these youth rebellions. The ferment could vanish without a trace, absorbed by politics as usual and by the free market, which has always shown a remarkable capacity to digest new trends; or it could dramatically transform our culture, our politics, our economic life. Remember, after all, how the hippie sixties reshaped Western behavior and institutions.

New media are often the drivers of such change, opening new worlds and giving birth to new worldviews, for good or for ill. Who would have guessed, as the fifteenth century waned, that the Gutenberg printing press would revolutionize Western civilization by giving millions of Christian believers direct access to the Bible? Or, centuries later, that radio would allow fascism to flourish?

The current rebellions could remake political institutions. Traditional party systems could collapse, replaced by more open fields of candidates, as we’re already seeing in South Korea. Democracy may be the big winner in formerly authoritarian regimes, even if the process proves long and messy. In December, as City Journal went to press, massive street protests broke out in major Russian cities, disputing election results—proof that authoritarian governments are less and less in a position to lie to the people and manipulate elections when any citizen with a smartphone can document examples of fraud and broadcast them to millions instantly. And capitalism may need to adapt, with the wealthy doing more to prove their usefulness to society—more than a century after the economist Thorstein Veblen asked them to renounce “conspicuous consumption” and act more ethically, anticipating the Occupy Wall Street movement’s slogans about the 1 percent. Those of us who believe that free markets have brought the world unprecedented prosperity and freedom, though, can only hope that the protests’ anticapitalism grows no more influential than that.

Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor, is the author of Economics Does Not Lie and other books.

[recceguy]

.

[cupper]

Too many big words too.

[Thucydides]

Sorry, I'll post in crayon next time 

[Thucydides]

This could equally go into the election 2012 thread, since class warfare is the ruling meme with the Democrats, but since it is also the key "message" of the occupy movement, it deserves a place here under #occupyfail:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/no-democrats-income-inequality-didnt-cause-the-financial-crisis/254057/

No, Democrats: Income Inequality Didn't Cause the Financial Crisis
MAR 6 2012, 12:42 PM ET 59

The theory makes perfect sense. But new data says it isn't true.

There's something intuitively compelling about the idea that America's growing income inequality helped fuel the 2008 financial crisis. The narrative, which got an official stamp from Congress' Democrat-led Joint Economic Committee back in 2010, goes something like this: As middle class wages stagnated, families borrowed more to prop up their standard of living. Banks, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, happily provided them with unaffordable mortgages, which they then skillfully repackaged and sold as securities. Eventually, the whole house of cards collapsed, plunging us into the Great Recession.

The story is downright elegant -- a sort of grand, unified theory of our present economic woes. But according to a new study, it's plain wrong.

The working paper, from Professors Christopher Meissner of the University of California, Davis and Michael Bordo of Rutgers, looks at whether there is a consistent historical relationship between rising income inequality and financial crises, using economic data on fourteen countries, including the United States, from between 1920 and 2008. It finds that although big financial busts tend to follow on the heels of credit booms like the mortgage bubble, there is no statistical relationship between the expansion of credit and the share of a country's income going to it's top 1 percent.

What does drive loose lending? Low interest rates and an expanding economy. When credit is cheap and times are good, people borrow. Simple. (Interpolation: This is also the key to understanding Austrian School economics)

That pattern held true in United States, where the study examined the periods leading up to the Great Depression, the dot com bust, and the Great Recession. In a phone interview, Meissner said that, superficially, it seemed that there might be a correlation between rising inequality and the out-of-control lending that helped fuel each of those crises. As shown in the the graph to the left, inequality and bank lending in America seem to move hand in hand by the late 1980s. But once the researchers controlled for factors like GDP and interest rates, the correlation melted away.

"A lot of people have been skeptical that inequality could give us the terrible situation that we had in 2007 and 2008, and I think the evidence backs that skepticism up," Meissner said. "We're saying that if you want to push this story any further, let's see some real evidence that might be the case."

[Sapplicant]

Well, another university year is in the books. Finals are in full swing, and soon the students will have a LOT more free time on their hands. Like the TLDR article alluded to at points, these things are largely spearheaded, and misled, by the "youth".

They seemed to lead the way over here, then all the dropouts/grads/unemployed/underemployed came to join them in their chest poundings, photo-ops, and demands for, well, everything.

Last year, they started far too late due to the fact that they had to figure out what colour to paint their band-wagon. Way to go, Adbusters.

Once the winter of their discontent began, their spirits plunged lower than the mercury, and it all fell apart like a paper bag moistened with liquid nitrogen being dropped on the floor.

Should be interesting to see how the "re-occupation" goes, and if they can get their heads out of their asses before the true bottomfeeders of society completely sully their ranks and the whole thing turns into another disgraceful clustercoital bedstain, this time one which will call for the complete incineration of the mattress.

Difference is, this year they'll start gaining their momentum in the spring (I'm guessing it'll really begin to be noticed by around May) and have time to dig in and (maybe) continue to be noticed throughout the winter of 2012/2013. Let's hope for the best everyone, while holding hands and singing "God Save the Queen".

[Sapplicant]

And yes, two of the signs actually read "Powor is for 99% of the PEOPlE" and "Do Not Conseed to Greed! Occupy Wall St".

Absolutely stunning.

[PMedMoe]

And yes, two of the signs actually read "Powor is for 99% of the PEOPlE" and "Do Not Conseed to Greed! Occupy Wall St".

Absolutely stunning.

Personally, I wouldn't have expected different. 

[Jim Seggie]

Should be interesting to see how the "re-occupation" goes, and if they can get their heads out of their asses before the true bottomfeeders of society completely sully their ranks and the whole thing turns into another disgraceful clustercoital bedstain, this time one which will call for the complete incineration of the mattress.

 

Good one....well said.

No sign of the re-occupiers in the Peg thus far.

[RangerRay]

No sign of the re-occupiers in the Peg thus far.

They will probably show up when it warms up, and before the mosquitoes come out...

[PMedMoe]

 

[Thucydides]

Circular logic: the Occupy movement occupies a farm in order to turn it into a farm. The attached photo essay is pretty illuminating as well.

http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2012/04/29/meet-the-new-farm-same-as-the-old-farm/

BTW the actual owners of the farm are pissed, and since this is a research farm the science has been ruined for this season

[Jed]

Circular logic: the Occupy movement occupies a farm in order to turn it into a farm. The attached photo essay is pretty illuminating as well.

http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2012/04/29/meet-the-new-farm-same-as-the-old-farm/

BTW the actual owners of the farm are pissed, and since this is a research farm the science has been ruined for this season

Reminds me of the book "Animal Farm". A very appropriate observation on life.

[Sythen]

http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/30/news/economy/occupy-may-day/index.htm?hpt=hp_t2

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The Occupy movement is organizing a nationwide protest on Tuesday, asking Americans not to attend work or school on a day that's already a progressive holiday overseas.

In what Occupy organizers are calling "a day without the 99%," protesters are planning to participate in a "general strike" on Tuesday: no work, no shopping, no banking.

For some strange reason I don't think it will be hard for most of these guys to not "attend work or school". Guess they're trying a reverse Atlas Shrugged?

[Rifleman62]

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/hannity-destroys-occupy-wall-st-organizer-in-fiery-segment-about-movements-violence/

Hannity Destroys Occupy Organizer In Fiery Segment About Movement’s Violence

Watch video embedded at link.

[Larry Strong]

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/hannity-destroys-occupy-wall-st-organizer-in-fiery-segment-about-movements-violence/

Hannity Destroys Occupy Organizer In Fiery Segment About Movement’s Violence

Watch video embedded at link.

Amen

[Sythen]

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/hannity-destroys-occupy-wall-st-organizer-in-fiery-segment-about-movements-violence/

Hannity Destroys Occupy Organizer In Fiery Segment About Movement’s Violence

Watch video embedded at link.

I couldn't even watch the whole thing.. I felt embarrassed for that kid LOL

[Larry Strong]

Personally I thought he showed what a free loader the idiot was.........

[recceguy]

Couldn't get it to play on the Man Cave computer.

Redeye must've hacked the system

[recceguy]

Worked on my home computer.

******* Awsome!!!!

About time someone told these self entitiled assholes that nothing in life is free

Everything has a cost

Sounds like the push back against the Marxist model has started to take hold.

[Thucydides]

Occupy people get tossed from the farm, so real farming can get done. I don't suppose any of them considered that farming is hard work (even a small garden...). An interesting link on Instapundit's reporting on the story suggests the Occupy movement isn't either a mass uprising against the 1% or an evil, Soros inspired mob of Brownshirts, but rather the losing side of a "class struggle" within the upper echelons of society:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/police-raid-occupy-camp-on-uc-berkeley-land-after-protesters-fail-to-meet-deadlines-to-leave/2012/05/14/gIQAD6lxOU_story.html

Police raid Occupy camp on UC Berkeley land after protesters fail to meet deadlines to leave 
By Associated Press, Published: May 14AP

ALBANY, Calif. — University of California police raided a four-week Occupy encampment at a college-owned farm used for agriculture research early Monday, arresting nine people after protesters ignored yet another weekend deadline to leave.

About 100 officers clad in riot gear arrived shortly after 6 a.m. at the camp known as Occupy the Farm, but there was no violence, university spokesman Dan Mogulof said.

University of California, Berkeley police raided the Occupy the Farm encampment on university-owned land early Monday morning after protesters ignored another weekend deadline to clear out.

Officers moved in after issuing a dispersal order to about 10 protesters sleeping at the Gill Tract in Albany, a 10-acre plot used primarily by UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources.

Two protesters, both women, were arrested on trespassing charges while the other occupiers left voluntarily. Seven protesters were also arrested for unlawful assembly.

Monday’s raid allows UC faculty and students to begin planting their research crops.

“We simply could not wait any longer,” Mogulof said, adding, “If our faculty and students couldn’t get in this week to begin planting research crops, we would’ve lost a full year of work.”

Protest organizers issued a statement Monday saying they planned to reassemble at a nearby community center Tuesday afternoon.

“UC needs to let go of control and supervision of this land,” said Anya Kamenskaya, a spokeswoman for the protesters. “For decades, it has fenced off this land from use by the community.”

Demonstrators moved onto the tract on Earth Day, April 22, and began planting their own crops to encourage urban agriculture and protest planned commercial housing development.

University officials said they tried negotiating, and they allowed protesters to join them at a meeting to discuss the tract’s future if they agreed to pack up and disperse.

Last week, the university filed a lawsuit against 14 unnamed protesters, claiming they conspired to cut locks, trespass and establish an illegal encampment.

On Friday, university officials said it would drop the lawsuit if protesters left the encampment peacefully and did not attempt to re-occupy the land.

Mogulof said UC intends to preserve as much of the crops planted by the protesters as possible.

He also added that there’s a slight possibility university officials would still be willing to talk to the protesters about using the land, but only on the university’s terms.

http://volokh.com/2011/10/31/the-fragmenting-of-the-new-class-elites-or-downward-mobility/

The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility
Kenneth Anderson • October 31, 2011 11:27 am

Glenn Reynolds is correct in his weekend post to point to the social theory of the New Class as key to understanding the convulsions in the middle and upper middle class; I’ve written about it myself here at VC and in a 1990s law journal book review essay.  The angst is partly income, of course – but it’s also in considerable part, as Glenn notes, “characterized as much by self-importance as by higher income, and is far more eager to keep the proles in their place than, say, [Anne] Applebaum’s small-town dentist. It’s thus not surprising that as its influence has grown, economic opportunity has increasingly been closed down by government barriers.”

The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated (as we marxists say) from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing – and by the fact that it is actually, two distinct strands, a privileged one and a semi-privileged one.  It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else.  It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor.  So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do.  It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work.  Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google.

The New Class has always operated across the lines of public and private, however, the government-university-finance and technology capital sectors.  It is not a theory of the government class versus the business class – as 1990s neoconservatives sometimes mistakenly imagined.  As Lasch pointed out, it is the class that bridges and moves effortlessly between the two.  As a theory of late capitalism (once imported from being an analysis of communist nomenkaltura) it offers itself as a theory of technocratic expertise first  - but, if that spectacularly fails as it did in 2008, it falls back on a much more rudimentary claim of monopoly access to the levers of the economy.  Which is to say, the right to bridge the private-public line, and rent out its access.

The OWS movement against this social theory backdrop?  (Let’s leave aside the material reality of its occupation, so far as one can tell today from shifting reporting: geographies in which public order was deliberately withdrawn to indulge a certain class of youth and not-so-youth (and the aging generation of New Class professionals projecting its political nostalgia onto it). The result is theft, violence, sexual assault, and levels of filth that, absent the infrastructure of the world’s richest large society, would mean what it means in Haiti – dysentery, cholera, epidemic disease.  Epidemic disease is what happens when you crap your nest, unless there is a larger society that will clean up after you.  The culture industry averts its eyes in its effort to have its nostalgic dream intact.  But leave that aside, and leave aside, too, the folks who send in the organic beet root and goat cheese – for the consumption of the wanna-be New Class that, somehow, has notions of property and entitlement of an intensity that only a born regulator can have, and therefore fine-tuned notions of who eats organic and who goes to the soup kitchen.  This is further complicated by the confused politics of the protestors, engaging in confrontations with police, as Harry Siegel reports from New York, who seem to have responded by encouraging the homeless and disturbed to join them.  Ann Althouse is right to point to Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, on the decline of the Haight-Ashbury utopia.)

In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts.  The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites.  But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits – the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.

The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however.  For the upper tier, since 1990, it has come through its ability to take the benefits of generations of US social investment in education and sell that expertise across global markets – leveraging expertise and access to capital and technological markets in the 1990s to places in Asia and the former communist world in desperate need of it.  As Lasch said, the revolt and flight of the elites, to marketize themselves globally as free agents – to take the social capital derived over many generations by American society, and to go live in the jet stream and extract returns on a global scale for that expertise.  But that expertise is now largely commodified – to paraphrase David Swenson on financial engineering, that kind of universal expertise is commodified, cheaply available, and no longer commands much premium.  As those returns have come under pressure, the Global New Class has come home, looking to command premiums through privileged access to the public-private divide – access most visible at the moment as virtuous new technology projects that turn out to be mere crony capitalism.

The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been.  It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction.  The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem – they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state.  Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage.  The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide.   But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.

The upper tier is still doing pretty well.  But the lower tier of the New Class – the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies – with or without the benefit of law school – has broken down.  The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up.  The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS.  As Above the Law points out, here is “John,” who got out of undergrad, spent a year unemployed and living at home, and is now apparently at University of Vermont law school, with its top ranked environmental law program – John wants to work at a “nonprofit.”

Even more frightening is the young woman who graduated from UC Berkeley, wanting to work in “sustainable conservation.”  She is now raising chickens at home, dying wool and knitting knick-knacks to sell at craft fairs.  Her husband has been studying criminal justice and EMT – i.e., preparing to work for government in some of California’s hitherto most lucrative positions – but as those work possibilities have dried up, he is hedging with a (sensible) apprenticeship as an electrician.  These young people are looking at serious downward mobility, in income as well as status.  The prospects of the lower tier New Class semi-professionals are dissolving at an alarming rate.  Student loan debt is a large part of its problems, but that’s essentially a cost question accompanying a loss of demand for these professionals’ services.

The OWS protestors are a revolt – a shrill, cri-de-coeur wail at the betrayal of class solidarity – of the lower tier New Class against the upper tier New Class.  It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money.  It’s a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine.  The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well.  It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites.

The downward mobility is real, however, in both income and status.  The Cal graduate started out wanting to do “sustainable conservation.”  She is now engaged in something closer to subsistence farming.

[Thucydides]

Quebec has gone to the next level of "Occupy", with brownshirts roaming the universities and disrupting classes (how many of these people are actually students is unclear). As one blogger pointed out:

So, they "own" an existing institution they didn't pay for in the past, and think they have a right to free tuition in the present and future. What does that make the rest of us, who actually pay for all of this? Slaves. Their slaves.

Which is entirely consistent with the basic instincts of socialism: my rights at your expense.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/05/16/masked-protesters-hunt-for-scabs-in-montreal-university-classes/

Masked protesters hunt for ‘scabs’ in Montreal university classes
Myles Dolphin, The Canadian Press  May 16, 2012 – 12:19 PM ET | Last Updated: May 16, 2012 4:11 PM ET
   
MONTREAL & QUEBEC CITY — Protesters stormed into a university, many of them with their faces covered by masks, moving through the hallways in a hunt for classes to disrupt.

The chaotic scene, which made some international news reports, was orchestrated Wednesday by protesters determined to enforce their declared strikes. They resented the fact that some students had used legal injunctions to return to school.

With a list of scheduled classes in hand, about 100 protesters marched through pavilions at the Université du Québec à Montreal and stopped at a few choice spots along the way.

Making noise with drums and whistles, they moved through the main UQAM building, splitting up on a number of occasions as they searched for ongoing classes. A masked protester would yell out marching orders for the next target, such as: “Pavilion M!”

Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
A few of the 100 or so protesters who marched through the Université du Québec à Montreal on May 16, 2012, disrupting classes and yelling “Scab!”
A few dozen entered a contract-law class at one point.

Having marched upstairs to that ninth-storey classroom, the group began flicking on and off the lights; they repeatedly yelled, “Scab!” at the stunned group of students seated inside.

A few men even grabbed two female students by the arm, telling them to get out. Some of the intruders jumped on desks and tables.

The teacher and students shouted at them to leave. But during the 10-minute standoff, most of the students eventually gave up and left the classroom, as did the teacher.

By the time it was over, there were chairs and tables knocked over. On a wall of the classroom there was a spray-painted message, written in red: “On strike, dammit!”

The protesters then worked their way toward another class. They had marched east on De Maisonneuve Boulevard for a few minutes before they found their target: 1001 De Maisonneuve East. They chanted, “Who owns UQAM? We own UQAM!”

None of the protesters were carrying weapons. They did, however, get into students’ faces, shouting at them, shoving their books and climbing on desks.

Protesters make their way through the hall of a Montreal university to disrupt classes, May 16, 2012. “They’re trying to make us afraid to go back to class,” one student said.
There were clearly differences of opinion among the protesters. When one masked man grabbed a desk and flipped it over, another looked at him and said: “You’re an idiot.”

Some annoyed students reported the incident to police. Others snapped photos of the intruders with their cellphone cameras.

At one point, while a student was talking to a police officer outside the school, several demonstrators who were watching shouted: “Scabs!” But she kept chatting with police.

“They’re trying to make us afraid to go back to class,” UQAM law student Celina Toia said after talking to the officers, who were sitting in a van.

“Teachers are more than willing to give their classes, so they’re trying to make it extremely inconvenient. They’re threatening us and they’re creating a hostile environment for us.”

The student unrest has lasted 14 weeks. Only one-third of Quebec students are actually on declared strikes, but the conflict has created considerable social disorder.

Wednesday’s events were notable — in that they were actually taking place inside classrooms, in face-to-face confrontations.

The social conflict so far has consisted of different sides fighting in court, and in the court of public opinion. It has also seen scuffles between police and protesters, but the events inside the classrooms Wednesday came as a shock.

The crisis appears headed for a crescendo.

The provincial cabinet was meeting Wednesday to discuss the possibility of adopting emergency legislation — a law reportedly laden with financial penalties for people who have played a role in encouraging the ongoing disruption.

Premier Jean Charest and his ministers were assembled in Quebec City. On her way into the meeting, new Education Minister Michelle Courchesne said she had noticed a hardening of demands from student leaders.

That remark came as a surprise to the student groups, who had emerged from a meeting with Courchesne the previous night saying they had had a constructive dialogue.

POSITION ‘HARDENING’

While student representatives seemed optimistic that a tuition hike moratorium was possible after meeting on Tuesday with Michelle Courchesne, Quebec’s new education minister, the minister had another reading.

“On their side I sensed a hardening of their position,” Courchesne told reporters Wednesday. “That was very clear.

“I will report to the cabinet soon. The government will judge what decision to make then.”

In a Twitter message, the Coalition large de l’association pour une solidarite syndicale etudiante (CLASSE) replied to Courchesne, “It isn’t the position of the students that has hardened, it is the position of the government that has hardened.”

Asked if a legislated end to the tuition-hike conflict was possible, Courchesne replied, “Don’t conclude on any scenario.”

The minister was on her way to National Assembly question period, to be followed by a meeting of the Quebec cabinet.

Asked for an indication of what he would do, Premier Jean Charest joked with reporters: “Are you lacking affection?”

The student representatives told reporters their meeting with Courchesne went well and that she listened to them.

“The tone was correct, honestly,” Courchesne said. “Their position didn’t really change. I didn’t have a view of any kind of compromise.”

With files from Kevin Dougherty, Montreal Gazette, and a file from Andy Blatchford, The Canadian Press