You Know, Occupy Wall Street Is Beginning to Look More and More Like Tunisia or Egypt…

And not just because Tunisians are drawing satirical comparisons with the Arab spring, making comments about "recognizing the American Transitional National Council," on Barack Obama's Facebook page.

It appears that law enforcement has been directed to crack down on the Occupy Wall Street movement, with the recent crack downs in Oakland, Portland, and Tulsa, with what was clearly brutality in the cases of Oakland and Tulsa.

Additionally, it appears that the NYPD, realizing that their previous thuggery has served to help the movement to go viral, has become more sophisticated in its tactics by herding drug addicts and the homeless to Zuccotti Park in an attempt to  disrupt the New York protests.

When this is juxtaposed with the general strike in Oakland today,  it really is beginning to seem a lot more like the Arab Spring, though whether it is Tunisia or Bahrain remains to be seen.

I will say that one protest, the occupation of Obama's chairman of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt's front lawn brings back memories of the protests on chancellor's Joe Duffy's front lawn at UMass over the maze.^*

I also came across an interesting take on the whole movement, that it is a proxy for a primary challenge to Obama:

Like a major national primary against a sitting-though-unpopular president, this movement is sending a signal to the existing elites. Change and deliver on a new social contract, or else. It isn't clear what "or else" means. Perhaps this is signifying a collapse of older institutional arrangements, or a breakdown in belief in existing authority structures. Perhaps this is the first of many large-scale civil disturbances, and a spark that will lead the establishment to solidify its authoritarian impulses. Maybe the training of tens of thousands of people around the world in nonviolent non-electoral means of challenging power, the legitimization of protest, the introduction of new areas of contention like the role of the Federal Reserve, and the re-mainstreaming of figures like Noam Chomsky and the promotion of people like Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges are signifying a larger shift in our political culture. It's too early to know.

One of the bitter ironies about the Obama administration is that they have successfully seized control of the Democratic Party apparatus to a degree that I've never seen, which makes primarying him, even as a symbolic gesture, is off the table, and, much like water finding a path of least resistance, Occupy Wall Street seems to an alternate path.

If this is the case, then what appears to be the strangely incoherent decision making process of Occupy Wall Street makes sense, because the Obama administration's apparatus is best defined as very bright control freaks, and this sort of decentralized decision making is something that is calculated to make their little hardwired politico brains explode.

The alternative to this unwieldy process would be the almost certain co-opting of the movement.



^*There was a chain link fence erected as a sculpture at UMass in the 1970s, and a frequent activity of students until the late 1980s was to get drunk and wander through the maze. After a decade of drunks bumping into the walls, it was falling apart, and the administration wanted to demolish it. This resulted in a storm of protests, culminating in protests on the Chancellor's lawn, and the administration agreed to replace the sculpture, rather than demolishing it.