#Occupy decides to join #banksters instead of beating them - #OWS exploitation

Sadly, my hopes are officially mistaken
My Photoshopping, in part

In less than 500 words, from the new issue of the Baffler, Chris Bray tells us how the "Occupy" movement has officially sold out to the hypercapitalist Wall Street it allegedly loathed.

Damn, Baffler really kicks ass and takes names on this:

Occupy, being loosely defined in its goals and its membership—a movement, not an organization—has long been a theme waiting for its marketing opportunities, despite the apparent withering of the brand. Not much is being occupied by Occupy, anymore, but it still looks good on a T-shirt. Or splashed across a debit card, with a low $1.95 fee for cash withdrawals, because fight the power.

Yep, it's all about the branding and marketing. "Thanks," Adbusters.

But, wait, that's not all. It gets better!

As the seminal 1967 book infamously stated, the poor pay more, and a transition from a big corporation’s prepaid debit card to a social movement’s corporate-supported prepaid debit card won’t turn off the darker realities of the socioeconomic bottom. Maybe it’s time for Occupy payday loans, Occupy check-cashing storefronts, and Occupy pawn shops. 

I couldn't have said it better myself.

But, I've said similar on the branding and other things from the start.

Adbusters? Strikes me as a bunch of graphic artists pissed off that they couldn't get jobs at top U.S. or Canadian graphics or advertising shops.

OWS? Strikes me as a bunch of rich white kids who got either MBAs or JDs precisely because they wanted to work on Wall Street, then the Great Recession hammered them.

No, really: Their own internal demographics prove the richer, whiter and better educated, as I've blogged before. I just took a guess that the "better educated" is probably those two degrees, and why. Most the Occupy folks probably had parents with three times the income mine had.

Meanwhile, proof that they've joined the banksters? Felix Salmon had that earlier this week, discussing this debit card in detail, while noting it had no Visa logo (at that time). He covers the details of the apparent exploitation angle, noting it's no better than any other debit card:

Occupy Money says in its FAQ that its card is “more than just a prepaid card since it features additional services. It’s our aim to make the card and its associated charges less expensive than other cards on the market.” But it doesn’t feature an explicit price comparison. And if you look down the list of fees ($0.99 per month, $4.95 to load cash onto the card, $3.74 to deposit a check onto the card at a store, 4% for instant check deposit via your smartphone, $1.95 to withdraw cash from an ATM, $2 to speak to an agent, $0.99 for a balance inquiry, etc) then it’s hard to come away convinced that the cost of this card is really going to end up being lower than the cost of its competitors. As for the “additional services”, there’s no indication of what those might be. I find it hard to believe that they include anything you can’t get from Simple or GoBank.

Bray says he'll stick with his credit union. If you want to go more private than that, there's other options. The whole Islamic private banking system has been around for centuries.

Meanwhile, per what I first blogged about this yesterday, this is also just another case of Occupy hypocrisy. The lack of transparency involving Rolling Jubilee on debt reduction is nothing new. Thomas Frank agreed with me and many others in nailing them for this "horizontal leadership" nonsense, though Frank failed to note that that too is a myth, or rather, a lie, as I blogged here. The creation of the debit card only underscores this. Because, now that you've got a money-making tool in hand, your leaders will become more visible. It may not be by choice, but they will become more visible.

Hey, Occupy douchebags, why don't you go beyond the Visa partnership and pretend to like actual poor people? You could partner with McDonald's on their debit payroll cards.

Basically, I'm at the point that NOTHING some tentacle or another of the Occupy octupus does will surprise me. It may still disgust me, of course, but even that's going to fade.

Or another way, per another bete noire? The Occupy kiddies, the ones who were Ivy League gravy trainers? They strike me like the Atheist Plus movement, the offshoot of Gnu Atheism. And, yeah, in both cases, there's "leaders." The Occupy folks who were actually serious? I feel sorry for you. Of course, you were warned by better and more famous people than me, about the need for organization, visible leadership, planning and more. And, this is why America could use some of old Europe's hard-hitting, occasionally jaundiced, social skepticism.

As for you of the young who weren't the richer, whiter and better educated? Most of us are naive at times when we're young. I hope you learned some lessons. And, don't deep too deeply into Euro-style social skepticism, but just a bit. That includes being skeptical about the Adbusters and Anonymous types who pushed for this movement, fueled it, exploited it and everything else.

To wrap this up: To any of my real progressive friends? If you talk favorably about the Wall Street original of the "Occupy" movement any longer, I'll kick you in the gonads.

#Occupy brands itself, could rip people off

Felix Salmon is the starting point for this discussion about an "Occupy" debit card that could be more onerous than what it would seek to replace, and various and other sundry things. From there, we go to lack of transparency and end at a capitalist sellout.

Salmon points to Naked Capitalism, where Yves Smith asks Rolling Jubilee: "Where's the money?" As in half a million of it, or more.

Rolling Jubilee answers in ... well, in typically barf-inducing Adbusters-type Occupy language.

As Yves notes, the "horizontality" that RJ and other Occupy groups trumpet is itself part of the problem:

But the big problem seems to be the lack of a proper governance structure. A board, be it for a profit-making organization or a not-for-profit, is not supposed to be identical to the people running the venture. ...

And there red flags even in what little we can see of what Rolling Jubilee has been up to. ... All Board members are authorized to individually sign checks up to $10,000....

To put it politely, a $10,000 signing authority for a board member is simply unheard of.

On this, one wonders if, again, some of Occupy is not more equal than the rest.

Back to Salmon, who talks about that would-be credit card:

Occupy Money says in its FAQ that its card is “more than just a prepaid card since it features additional services. It’s our aim to make the card and its associated charges less expensive than other cards on the market.” But it doesn’t feature an explicit price comparison. And if you look down the list of fees ($0.99 per month, $4.95 to load cash onto the card, $3.74 to deposit a check onto the card at a store, 4% for instant check deposit via your smartphone, $1.95 to withdraw cash from an ATM, $2 to speak to an agent, $0.99 for a balance inquiry, etc) then it’s hard to come away convinced that the cost of this card is really going to end up being lower than the cost of its competitors. As for the “additional services”, there’s no indication of what those might be. I find it hard to believe that they include anything you can’t get from Simple or GoBank.

Oy. Salmon also adds that this can't be an official credit card yet, because it doesn't have a Visa (or MasterCard) logo. But, scroll down on that.

This not only isn't cheap, it lacks the very transparency that allegedly is part of Occupy's core.

As for the 'branding" that catches Salmon's eye? Is not that part of the whole Adbusters background to Occupy?

Beyond that, Occupy and Adbusters-fluff are simply reinventing the wheel (while adding the fluff of "branding.) The whole Islamic private banking system has been around for centuries.

As Salmon notes, running a bank is hard work, and that's even for people who, whether as owners/operators, or investors, have less tendentious relations to capitalism or similar economics. As a fellow skeptical left-liberal, Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer, noted at the time of OWS, most of its non-leader spokespeople had myths in their minds about businesses in general and banks in particular, to boot.

Finally, out of pure snark: With "horizontal leadership," how can anybody claim that any one particular website is "THE" website for Occupy Wall Street? Doorknob, I love the sound of petards hoisting in the evening.

And, from the new issue of the Baffler, it's even worse: "Occupy" has addressed Felix Salmon's note that it doesn't have a Visa logo on its credit card and officially sold out.

Damn, Baffler really kicks ass and takes names on this:

Occupy, being loosely defined in its goals and its membership—a movement, not an organization—has long been a theme waiting for its marketing opportunities, despite the apparent withering of the brand. Not much is being occupied by Occupy, anymore, but it still looks good on a T-shirt. Or splashed across a debit card, with a low $1.95 fee for cash withdrawals, because fight the power.

Yep, it's all about the branding and marketing. "Thanks," Adbusters.

But, wait, that's not all. It gets better!

As the seminal 1967 book infamously stated, the poor pay more, and a transition from a big corporation’s prepaid debit card to a social movement’s corporate-supported prepaid debit card won’t turn off the darker realities of the socioeconomic bottom. Maybe it’s time for Occupy payday loans, Occupy check-cashing storefronts, and Occupy pawn shops. 

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Thomas Frank nails why #OWS failed

With one failure, discussed below, Thomas Frank, in the new issue of The Baffler, has a great essay that largely agrees with me, and other critical observers such as Alexander Cockburn about why Occupy Wall Street failed as a movement. That’s along with taking well-earned potshots at people such as Chris Hedges for the massive amounts of ink spilled over a “movement” that hasn’t really … done anything! In fact, Frank semi-snidely compares OWS to the tea party. 

First, Frank says here’s what Hedges and other uncritical babblers were missing:

What we need to be asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why did this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the promise of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts of the Left come to be mired in a gluey swamp of academic talk and pointless antihierarchical posturing?

His answer? It focused on horizontal organizing, i.e., the “we have no leaders,” etc., while not actually focusing on what’s traditionally considered as “organizing,” and refusing to see the need for it.

More on that from Frank here:

To protest Wall Street in 2011 was to protest, obviously, the outrageous financial misbehavior that gave us the Great Recession; it was to protest the political power of money, which gave us the bailouts; it was to protest the runaway compensation practices that have turned our society’s productive labor into bonuses for the 1 percent. All three of these catastrophes, however, were brought on by deregulation and tax-cutting—by a philosophy of liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was in real life.

(Frank emphasis, not mine.)

Another way of phrasing this might be that the “eternal youth culture” many an old conservative feared would happen after Woodstock might be more likely post-OWS.

That said, by ignoring the presence of a security force guarding selected insiders, and other things, Frank fails to note that OWS had a “leadership” all along. And, so, he fails to answer the question of why this leadership eschewed traditional organizing.

For the reason that it has since the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, which Frank does mention elsewhere as a precursor, though failing to draw the appropriate lesson.

These folks wanted, and got … anarchy for anarchy’s sake. And, by not admitting to being, or showing themselves as being, leaders, and by not striving for vertical organization, they couldn’t be challenged on this except by the ground-level OWS rubes, who had been successfully diverted into the task of horizontal organization.

Frank has another opportunity to dig deeper on the whole “no demands” issue:

This was an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was a great success. But it also put a clear expiration date on the protests. As long as demands and the rest of the logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to the next level. It would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticized—way back in 1973—as the “cult of participation,” in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all about.

But he never asks if, just maybe, OWS’s leaders, since we know it had them, wanted the movement to stay in arrested development.

Frank does tangentially tackle this, as part of discussing OWS’ failure in more detail:

Unfortunately, though, that’s not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left, but it’s also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists did. It didn’t lead a strike (a real one, that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a takeover of the dean’s office. The IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison.

With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. “The process is the message,” as the protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The aforementioned camping, the cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: that’s what Occupy was all about. Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no agenda to transmit to the world.

But, again, he leaves it there with only a “what” himself, and no “why.”

That said, Frank fails to note the whiter than average, better-educated by far than average, and presumably richer than average demographics of OWS, as I have done.

If Frank had noted the demographics more readily, he would have had more to explain why OWS “cadres” readily fell for the pomo academia — they’d heard it spouted for years and probably spouted some of it himself. He’d also have more explanation for them believing the cant of leaderlessness and more. See the “lazy libertarianism” below.

He does, though, note their strongly academic background, and how this lead to the postmodernist diarrhea we heard in general, not just the “horizontal organization.” Stuff like this:

And dear god why, after only a few months of occupying Zuccotti Park, did Occupiers feel they needed to launch their own journal of academic theory? A journal that then proceeded to fill its pages with impenetrable essays seemingly written to demonstrate, one more time, the Arctic futility of theory-speak?

So, to all the OWS fluffers still out there, call me back when there’s a real movement.

He finishes by noting that OWS had a lot of similarities with tea partiers … even similar quasi-Randian ideas. He adds this observation:

The reason Occupy and the Tea Party were such uncanny replicas of one another is because they both drew on the lazy, reflexive libertarianism that suffuses our idea of protest these days.

Agreed. With the tea partiers, it seems a conservative version of “The Secret,” mixed with get-rich-quick ideas that Rick Perlstein, in this same issue of The Baffler, says regularly get peddled by the rich. 

With OWS? Per my link above, I’ll venture it’s a mix of helicopter moms and some vague sense of “entitlement.”