How the Occupy Movement's General Assembly Works

Agree or disagree with their concept and tactics, the Occupy protests are gaining momentum, and are going to be around, and growing, whether you, me or Goldman Sachs approves of them.  So I think it's important that people know what their process is.  It's really rather fascinating. Those familiar with open source software communities will recognize the ideas of Consensus, Consent, Stand asides, Objections, Block, etc. The video is long, but it really is worth viewing in its entirety, to fully grasp what works and doesn't.

Please see my discussion following the video.

 

And so…

Those familiar with democracy will recognize the problems of holding such assemblies on a city, state, or national level. You'd need "representatives" to attend them. And dang it all, those are so hard to appoint by consensus in some accountable way. It's been tried. Many times.

Thus, GAs, as they are known, useful on small scales for some kinds of actions or ordinances (like that one above), are lovely exercises in what we might call, a pre-representative democracy.

In practical usage, those often lead to the need for some form of representative democracy, often called a republic.  You remember those, right? They're kinda like the United States of America before someone broke it.

As things progress…

I will be blogging more of these concept posts as this movement gains steam. I was a skeptic, then a skeptical believer, and now I am a skeptical critic interested in helping the people of America, and the #OWS expression of rage, to find constructive missions and goals that might dovetail with the larger republic in which we are all pretty invested. Then it will either influence our debates and future, or perish into history as just another footnote of fail by those who felt it easy to casually change a system that was designed to resist change—no matter how much it needs to. I sincerely hope it will be the former.

@shoq: IN THE END, contempt doesn't make laws, and rage won't govern nations. The final frontier must be @OccupyCongress. #ows #p2 #tcot

See Also

See Update1

I am not going to go into my entire history of thinking about the Occupy Wall street movement (OWS). It’s too painful and annoying, but I want to get this out. It’s late, I am tired, and this will probably be filled with really bad typos and worse grammar. It’s going to go out anyway. I’ll have the cat edit it in the morning.

After first being contemptuous of what I saw as an ill-conceived vanity protest movement, about ten days ago, I sensed a tipping point in public and global attitude toward the OWS “movement,” and feared it would sweep all of our hard work to rebuild the President’s stature away.

Uncertain of its origins, questioning of its founders, and entirely doubtful of its fundamentals, I was nonetheless disturbed by how dismissive the Progressive community was being toward an expression of anger at what has become, unquestionably, a dysfunctional society that is on the verge of total meltdown. Sure, the kids banging drums and holding up dog-earred signs were disheveled and disorganized, but… they were also quite right.  The system our ancestors built for us has devolved into a vicious plutocratic fireswamp that is consuming almost everything and everyone, and they are damned  right to be scared and angry about it. We should ALL be scared and angry about it.  And at least they were doing what mainstream progressives should have done years ago: taken this fight to the streets.

But I was also conflicted. I know the value of organization and planning. I know the value of messaging. I know the value of inclusiveness and pluralism, and I also know that anarchist societal modeling is fun theory to talk about over coffee, but as a practical matter, its track record at governance is exactly nothing.  After poking around for 10 days, I came to the realization that the structural deficiencies of this “organization” were enormous. Not the logistics of the protesting; that was actually being handled fairly well. But rather, they had no real collaborative scheme to craft any kind of substantive policy goals or legislative missions. There was just no there there. It was, in the words of @JAMeyerson, “all about creating the crisis” and “letting *them* solve the problem.” (Them, I assumed, being the very people who had destroyed our country in the first place. Just not my first choice of fixers.)

Whether it had any real chance of success or not, I felt there would be three primary outcomes.  It would either peter out and die quickly, or reach a take-off point where it would be in a position to hurt of help Obama’s re-election effort.  The latter was something that I feel must happen, or such protests may never be likely to happen again. Call that hyperbole if you wish, but I believe it. This right wing has virtually no respect for people or precedent, and they won’t give total voter suppression a second thought from here on out. A second-term Obama veto is the ONLY chance we have of mitigating what is almost certainly going to be a Republican Senate. We may not have solutions to anything yet, but losing control of that body to these quite insane Republicans would be like trying to fix a hole in the hull of a sinking boat by first widening the hole.

And yes, while it was helping the President’s re-election, it might also popularize some really good policy ideas which I’ve advocated for a long time, including campaign reform, financial reform, a short term capital gains tax, a stock share sales tax, and a return to a far more progressive income tax

Until Van Jones and Natalie Foster revealed the amount of planning that had gone into the Rebuild The Dream movement, I really had little faith in our fragmented Left doing much of anything by November of 2012, that could save the White House or the Senate.  Ironically, just a few days before they did reveal it at the Takeback11 conference, I decided to get involved with #ows and see if this “movement” was really as open and pluralistic as they were suggesting it was, and whether we could channel all that anger and energy in a productive way toward re-electing the President and enough progressives to actually reboot the nation.

Since I quickly learned that they needed server capacity at Occupywallst.org, I was able to get my friends at @alternet to underwrite it.  Doing this, and other good deeds for them, let me see some of the inner workings a bit closer up, and try to approach things as any good faith supporter might.

And I did see some good things. I saw an interesting process of formless, leaderless organizing, that, as with the Open Source Software community from whence it came, achieve some pretty interesting results in some cases. But I also so endless layers of disorganization and fail, and a Pollyanna vision of the world that seemed to suggest that revolution would be as simple as a first session of Angry Birds on an Ipad. I knew better.

Then came the John Lewis video. I had made many apologies thus far, but how in the fuck could anyone with any capacity to forge solutions or coalitions, not get that John Lewis wasn’t just another politician they could mute with their “no top down hierarchical leadership icons ever” dictum. He was the closet thing to a role model living today when it comes to  organizing and protesting for change. What the hell were they thinking?

And the disrespect of Lewis wasn’t even as hard to take as the uncomfortable squirminess I felt at the chanting and pop-psychobabble cum empowerment training seminar gooblygook I was hearing in this “General assembly.” While watching it, I was struck by just how unscalable the model really was. I mean, if it took six minutes to decide if one man should speak, what if there had been 50? And what if all of Atlanta wanted to be at this assembly? That couldn’t work, right? So they’d need “representatives.” And that would be like… like… a legislature! OMG! A “Congress.”

While all this is going on, my trusted “liberal friends” were abandoning me, because they felt I betrayed them by “cheerleading” for an angst-ridden, pro-left-pimped fantasy revolution without a chance in hell of doing anything but firing up the Paulites, the Fedbusters, and the general cadre of anti-government types who might completely undermine Obama and the chances of saving a Democratic senate with their amorphous concepts of a sleep-over rebellion.

Perhaps my friends were right all along. But I don’t do group think, and I could not know more unless I looked further. That’s just the way I approach everything. I am loathe to condemn things which I don’t understand. So I did look, and what I saw was not completely weak, but that is not the same as being very strong. Most disturbing?  While quite cordial and pleasant, the people were not particularly open, nor eager to explore alternative ideas for approaching our problems. They were mostly… well.. anarchists. And they do what most anarchists do:  they aspire, while sounding as if all human problems can be solved with enough seminars, high-minded theories which are not open to debate, a lot of personal self-actualization, and far too much economic hooey.

Long story short? I am now of the opinion that while I sympathize with the anger and frustration of the protesters, their chances of success are so spotty, that I am just going to wish them luck, and move on to what I feel are more productive interests, such as trying to get the President’s Jobs Act past, pushing to interest progressive billionaires in rebuilding our infrastructure, and preventing these insane Republicans form gobbling up what is left of my country.

I will focus my energies on the political process I still have some faith in. I will continue to support the 99%, as I always have, but do it by helping Van Jones and the more conventional players who are working tirelessly to change the system from within the system.

I have spent my life feeling that such change is possible without first completely burning down the house. I am not going to sell out that conviction, nor lose all my friends, over an intriguing, but ultimately romantic effort that seems to only capture anger in a bottle, but does not yet, and may never have a message to cap it with. I will not oppose them, but nor will I endorse them. I will simply watch them, cheer for my country,  and defend anyone’s right to be heard in what remains of this fetid Democracy.

I am sorry this journey has been so unpleasant for my friends who may not  always understand my process, and whom I may have been less than diplomatic with, as my views and insights fluctuated with my experience. I hope we can all get past it and be friends again.

If things change, I will do what I have done all of my life: change my mind once again to fit the practical or moral dictates of the moment, as it happens, or as my conscience insists.

Thank you all for the support so many have shown me. I can only hope to repay you half as much in time.

Shoq

Update 1

As I said, I wrote this quite late. I imply above that the lack of clear policy goals and messaging were big issues for me. They never were. In fact, I defended OWS quite strongly in that regard. I do believe their primary role is to make a lot of noise, serving as that proverbial alarm clock to wake the 99%, and progressive America which aspires to serve them from their slumbers. But that doesn’t mean they can just leave all the policy making sausage to someone else and walk away. Because in fact, that’s simply telling the status quo “you made a fucking mess. Now please fix it with a bigger fucking mess.”

It’s politically immature to assume a serious movement can only be about the problem, and abdicate the solutions to some unseen force in the universe. So while they don’t need specific prescriptions for remedy, they should absolutely have clear ideas about what form the discussion to find them might take.

On the heels of some enthusiastic media response to President Obama’s aggressive posture on his new jobs plan, the professional left has been very busy pushing their latest vanity meme.  Quick to seize whatever media narrative is likely to generate the most blog traffic and broadcast audiences, they lit up the Internets with self-congratulatory high-fives and backslapping. Why? Because they have convinced themselves that it was their relentless carping about every rumor, allegation or political move that Obama has made for the past 2.75 years that was responsible for “pushing” him into what the media now trumpets as his new “get tough” stance with Republicans.

There is just no way, in their minds, that this might have been President Obama’s strategy all along — that he used issues like the debt ceiling negotiations in order to demonstrate  just what giving the country to the Republicans again would be like. Fortunately, not every blogger is batshit stupid. Salon‘s Steve Kornacki sees the forest around those trees:

It seems logical to conclude that President Obama’s sudden eagerness to pick fights with Republicans means that he’s realized the folly of his “reasonable man” strategy and junked it. But a better way to understand the president’s new confrontational posture is as an extension of that strategy.
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But the Professional Left, like most of the mainstream media, always seems convinced of both its rightness and its righteousness.  For a body of people who rarely have an economist among them, or any other expert for that matter, their opinions are always presented as skilled, knowing, and eminently correct. That’s why, except for the few at the top of the pyramid, most of them are often scrounging for meager ratings or page views just to stay alive. But minimal revenues doesn’t mean they have minimal impact. As I will show later, they can have a great deal of that.

On a related matter, over the past few weeks, Democratic strategist (or something or other), @DavidOAtkins (now working as wingman for the legendary Digby over at Hullabaloo), and his co-worker sibling, Democratic strategist (or something or other) @DanteAtkins, have been tag-teaming me on Twitter. They are diligently trying to convince me that Obama’s problems are all of his own making, and that “pro left” narratives have had little impact on voters, especially on those all important independents, whose votes Obama will need to win re-election and keep the plutocratic hit-squad of Republicans from making things that much worse.

@DanteAtkins: @Karoli, the problem is that @shoq has no nuance. it’s mostly telling people that everything would be fine if the emoprogs shut up.

Every few days, this dynamic duo throws at me so much of this “straw” that I could remake the Wizard of Oz a hundred times and never need to outsource the Scarecrow stuffing. In fact, I have never said anything of the sort.

What I have said, routinely, and in many forms (as anyone who follows my Twitter stream can attest) is that when faced with a GOP adversary far better-armed and better-positioned than the seemingly impotent Progressive movement is, and at a time when our entire democracy is teetering at the edge of a kleptocratic abyss, our political criticism should be measured and constructive. Irrespective of whether President Obama was ever a real tried-and-true “scratch ‘n’ sniff me to prove it” Progressive (which he neither claimed to be nor campaigned as), our criticism should not recklessly threaten the stature and electability of the guy we elected to drive the Progressive bus.

At the present time, through no small fault of our own, both progressivism and our nation-state are too fragile for us to be tossing out mindless invective, ad hominem insult, and deprecating and emasculating vitriol that is every bit as ugly and dispiriting as the worst of what the right wing noise machine puts out every day, and which, in effect, throws Obama under the public’s perception bus every time another real or ginned-up story breaks in the MSM.

Talk about lack of nuance? Do these brothers read the papers? Since Obama’s first month in office, the so-called professional left has gone off on some new bender of vicious discontent, pushing barbs and bullets to their friends, followers, or sycophants among both MSM and alternative broadcasters, producers, bloggers, journalists, as well as all those pro- and semi-pro please-sign-our-petition-and-send-us-your- money grifters and carpetbaggers like Adam Green and Jane Hamsher. And most members of the professional left are all too happy to use the free ink to bulk up their content offerings, which, naturally, carry the requisite Google ads and pre-roll videos.

The collective “#ObamaFail” narrative — which has been the professional left’s stock in trade for years now – satisfies the seemingly pathological emotional need to wax miserable, lose elections, and blame it all on any convenient scapegoat; and many readers and viewers mindlessly nod along with this narrative as the professional left’s page views and impressions pile up. Never mind the facts and analysis that might speak otherwise. Facts, in our meme-of-the-moment era are for the little people.

In my view, the arguments of the Atkins boys and their lot boil down to the following: “Don’t blame us, criticism in a democracy is healthy,” as if all good and progressive change in America came about because Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, and Clinton were called “spineless, pussies, wimps, compromisers, cavers, and Wall Street stooges” every day for the first 3 years of their terms by a 24/7 news media juggernaut that also wore a Fox News top hat. Moreover, these so-called Emo Progressives are almost entirely of the consensus that anyone critical of such criticism must be a spineless Wall Street stooge. Never mind the fact that there are plenty of educated and thoughtful progressives who forcefully push back against such destructive myth-making, often eloquently pointing out that there is much more to the history of progressive victories than a magical “bully pulpit” from which rainbows and unicorns will always flow like a river of mercury whenever a Democratic president up and “shows a little backbone.”

With a lot of encouragement from people like me, a growing chorus of pragmatic progressives have been speaking out about these and other defensive postures of the professional left. These pragmatic progressives reject the notion that criticizing the critics somehow enables compromisers, sell-outs, and spineless centrist appeasers. Moreover, these pragmatic progressives have begun to chronicle the manner in which Obama has outmaneuvered the Republicans at almost every step, and has deftly maximized whatever leverage a president could have in a democracy that chose to give its Congress to a gang of marauding lunatics. As Nicholas Wilbur (aka @MuddyPolitics) brilliantly noted in a recent post,the Emo Progressives are illustrating a simple concept: political wars are not won by investing all your emotional energy in the daily postures and predicaments of your commanding general, nor are they won by squandering all of your vital resources in each battle that you fight or get sucked into along the way:

One individual cannot rebuild a crumbling nation. Change does not come overnight. Without the Left in his corner, understanding the big-picture strategy and backing him once again as he fights for a little “equality” in this debate over income equality, President Obama will lose not only the battle of 2011, but also the war of 2012.
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Meanwhile, these emotionally-charged firebrands – these Emo Progressives — continue to deaden and demoralize the electorate. The evidence is everywhere. Voters don’t just make up the words and expressions they voice. These words and expressions are assimilated from friends and family, most often from memes and messages gleaned from the popular media.

For example, a piece in today’s Miami Herald, almost gleefully extols Florida independent voters’ complaints that “Obama hasn’t gotten anything done, compromises too much, sits on the fence.”

“He’s super intelligent but he’s terrible at getting things done,” said Greg Peters, 42, a restaurant owner in downtown Orlando and independent voter who said he’s already moved off the fence and is hoping a better Republican candidate emerges.

“They want one thing — they want results, and when they don’t get results they change their minds and go the other way,” noted Democratic pollster Tom Eldon of Sarasota.

Obama’s attempts to reach the middle have often frustrated his Democratic base. He backed off on efforts to repeal the Bush-era tax cuts (he’s since renewed the call), pursued a less aggressive drawdown of the wars than promised in 2008 and has offered up changes to entitlement programs.

“I have hard-core Democrat friends who don’t think he’s forceful enough. I like that’s he made strides to work across party lines,” said Tonya Simmons, an environmental consultant and independent voter

By contrast, Amanda Stroup said Obama has tried to placate Republicans too much. The Tampa independent voter was angered by his decision earlier this month to abandon new EPA standards for smog pollution. “He buckled under the Republican Congress,” said Stoup, 31, who may vote for a third-party candidate if one emerges to her liking.

To be sure, the article also outs the economy as a major, across-the-board factor in independent voters’ discontent; but it is the specific gripes that put the wind in the sails of these voters’ disgruntlement.

Articles like the one above are appearing all across the country, mostly as a result of routine Obama-bashing which may have reached its zenith this past weekend.  The NY Times, Washington Post, Politico, and others decided it was time to pile on with stories about how how “panicked” the Democrats were over Obama’s political future, largely because of the almost completely unrelated defeat of a Democrat in a New York special election to replace the disgraced Anthony Weiner.

These outlets are always more than eager to distribute any story that demoralizes Democrats. And where do they get much of the story ledes and much of the content for these train wreck stories?  From the daily output of the Greenwalds, Hamshers, Marshes, Moores, Greens, Uygurs, Schultzes, and countless other professional critics, carpers, and perpetual malcontents who are now quite renowned for their morose commentary and butter-soft analysis on any topic that strikes their daily fancy.

These corrosive raconteurs, some of them not even living in America, seem to be in a spirited competition to seek out and expose faults in anything and everything the Obama administration does, whether it actually did it, were said to have done it, or someone suggested it might be thinking about doing it. Whatever it was, is, or might be, it’s bound to be wrong. Period. Because that’s what they’ve conditioned their readers and viewers to expect: non-stop #Obamafail. Even when he delights the base with something like his jobs speech, you can count the seconds before the negativity will ooze from the pores of every dour face on the professional left.

In our cultural three-ring political carnival of TV dancing bears and clown acts — where all that bloggers and pundits seem to care about is firing up people’s emotions with whatever contrived headline brings in link traffic — we can’t afford to keep producing the messages that keep the masses of low-information voters grousing about their many disappointments.

Most voters just care about their jobs and their families. They don’t have the time, knowledge or skills to parse all the nuances of our political maelstrom and make informed choices. Most voters rely on family, friends, co-workers and the media to tell them what to think and feel about the options before them. The right-wing has perfected how to reframe those choices to a few simple ideas, while Progressives continue to mix and muddle their messages with such frequency that most voters can’t clearly understand what Progressives and/or Democrats want to accomplish in the first place. And it is all the more confusing to voters when they see a team that appears all too eager to piss Haterade all over its coach on every play of the game.

This pattern must change, or we are simply doomed.

Yes, criticism matters. But so does winning elections. Why? Because if we lose this Senate and White House (and in so doing, probably any chance of a liberal Supreme Court in your lifetime), we simply may not get another chance to win any others.  It is convenient to argue that such claims are “fear-mongering” and to claim that such statements are the akin to Fox News’s modus operandi.  It isn’t fear-mongering, however, to point out certain inevitabilities.  For example, President Romney or Perry or Bachmann will attempt to strip the LGBT community of all rights which slowly but surely have been acquired, and saying so is not fear-mongering.  Comparatively, Fox News claims that Obama wants to “pull the plug on grandma” is fear-mongering because it has no basis in fact.  In short, when you’re about to be hit by a train, someone screaming WATCH OUT! is not your enemy.

For a few hundred years, presidents were criticized without overt hatred and contempt from their own side.  Progressives have a duty to disseminate messages that say “Yes, this is hard. Yes, we need to be firm. But we have a long way to go, and compromises are sometimes expedient, not evil. Change is about moving forward, not backwards. We’re all on this plane together. We can educate our pilot about where we want to go, and criticize his rudder and stick actions that might take us off a preferred course. But he’s an honest man, he works hard, and we elected him to lead this flight crew for 4-8 years. Shooting him in the back while the plane is in the air is just not really in the national interests of the passengers on board.”

With Republicans brazenly and recklessly redistricting Congressional representation, suppressing votes, cracking down on union membership, money, and outreach, and exploiting the Citizens United ruling so they can spew any corporatist propaganda that they can get some conservative or business interest to pay for, the issue is not just about “sit down and shut up.” It’s about “be constructive, or you may never get another chance to stand and speak at all.”

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