Can’t say anything but agreeing completely. From the people at Tahrir square, Egypt and in Tunisia to those in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Qatar, from the 15-M movement in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, to the Occupy protesters on Wall Street, New York, in London, Frankfurt and Amsterdam, to those now marching against Putin in Russia: whatever the cynics, ‘realists’ and conservatives say, 2011 has been the year of the democratic protester.
Let’s hope it continues - in the Middle East, in Russia, and the West - in 2012. It’s still more than necessary.
And so the police officer at UC Davis who casually sprayed pepper spray in the face of unarmed, non-violent, sitting protesters, Lt. John Pike, is turned into an Internet meme. So at least this episode of American police state violence is turning into something amusing.
Here’s the original video (watch out, it’s sickening):
Meet Lt. John Pike casually violating people’s civil rights in everyday situations:
So the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg – who happens to be a former Wall Street banker and the 12th most wealthy person in the US – has evicted the nucleus of the Occupy movement from Zucotti Park, where they had been camping for two months. In that process, the NYPD has not shunned violating constitutional rights, including the right to free speech and the right to protest, in addition to preventing the democratic press from doing its job. Books were burned.
This process is likely to repeat itself elsewhere. In the Netherlands, local politicians of the conservative liberal (and, arguably, banking-aligned) VVD party are demanding the exit of Occupy protesters from public places throughout the country. Public attention has declined. So what’s next for the Occupy movement?
In all honesty, personally, while I am very sympathetic to a vocal social movement addressing the immense wealth and especially political power of global financial institutions, the injustices in that sector (such as exorbitant bonuses, the sale of intransparent financial products, and the power of credit rating agencies to almost topple entire economies), and rising economic inequality, I had become a bit disappointed with the Occupy movement. During my (admittedly short) visit to Occupy Amsterdam, what I saw was a shanty town with a lot of pot smokers and squatters, talking vaguely about the need to discuss, not have any organization, etc.
Of course any movement that starts out from a feeling of discontent needs time to organize and formulate demands, but the point of Occupy seemed to be to disavow any kind of organization or concretization. Again: I very much admire proto-democratic experiments, and disagreed with the choir of commentators who kept blattering from the very beginning that it was unclear what Occupy was about (that’s very clear), but even a die-hard communal hippie has to admit that a certain point, you need organization and representation.
Occupy has historical predecessors way earlier than the Tahrir Square protesters. The early labour union movement in the nineteenth century everywhere started out grass-roots democratically; but during the way, they learned to organize, formulate demands, and still keep an internal democratic process. You need a distinction between principles and concrete demands, for instance; or a distinction between a general assembly and working groups; and people who specialize in tasks they’re good at (like creating leaflets, organizing, negotiating, doing practical stuff, etc.). In that way, you can develop from an inspired, resounding but vague movement to an organization that actually works.
Once again, I completely understand the distaste of Occupy protesters for “standard” kinds of political organizaton, like political parties and trade unions, and wouldn’t want them to develop in that way. But any movement that doesn’t develop further than a general assembly that discusses every tiny little detail doesn’t get very far (the meeting reports of Occupy Amsterdam attest to that). And now, public attention has declined, the authorities have zoomed in and it will probably not take long before the physical manifestion of Occupy on squares around the world disappears.
So what’s next for Occupy? Opinion polls are showing that they have struck a nerve – in the US, but I imagine also elsewhere, economic inequality and financial malpractices are on the agenda, and opposed by a majority of voters. In that sense, Occupy has already been a success. Some people are arguing that the forced removal of protesters from squares may re-ignite the movement (it would have been wiser for the authorities to wait for winter). Others are saying that the Occupiers need to penetrate existing movements and organizations to address their (and our!) concerns.
Personally, I would like a vocal and identifiable Occupy movement to remain in existence, get its act together, and start thinking about ways to reform the system while continuing to exert pressure on the political-financial axis. This could be done by spreading awareness (the big pro of this movement) and keep protesting, even occupying places. After all, the big invention of the Arab Spring was the protesting technique of permanently occupying a place, rather than having your average one-afternoon demonstration. However, it is essential (I think) to develop an organization, first to make sure that encampments aren’t turned into shantytowns, trouble makers are fended off, and violence doesn’t spread; second to develop ideas, demands and rallying points, appoint representatives, and create a more focused media outreach.
Will this happen? Probably not, but I hope so. The Tea Party has shown that you can move from a vague movement to something approaching a working organization. For Occupy as well, it’s probably time to move from subcultural self-expression to a fight for political change.
[The] truth is, Bloomberg might have just done Occupy Wall Street a favor. Next week, temperatures are projected to dip down to the high 30s. Next month, they’re projected to dip into the mid-20s. The month after that, as anyone who has experienced a New York winter know, they’re going to fall even lower.
The occupation of Zuccotti Park was always going to have a tough time enduring for much longer. As the initial excitement wore off and the cold crept in, only the diehards — and those with no place else to go — were likely to remain. The numbers in Zuccotti Park would thin, and so too would the media coverage. And in the event someone died of hypothermia, or there was some other disaster, that coverage could turn. What once looked like a powerful protest could come to be seen as a dangerous frivolity.
In aggressively clearing them from the park, Bloomberg spared them that fate. Zuccotti Park wasn’t emptied by weather, or the insufficient commitment of protesters. It was cleared by pepper spray and tear gas. It was cleared by police and authority. It was cleared by a billionaire mayor from Wall Street and a request by one of America’s largest commercial real estate developers. It was cleared, in other words, in a way that will temporarily reinvigorate the protesters and give Occupy Wall Street the best possible chance to become whatever it will become next.
The question is what, if anything, comes next for Occupy Wall Street. The movement has already scored some big wins. As this graph by Dylan Byers showed, they have changed the national conversation. Income inequality is now a top-tier issue. Before Occupy Wall Street, it wasn’t.
And perhaps that will be the legacy of Occupy Wall Street. That would certainly be more than most protests achieve. If they are to go further, however, they are going to have to figure out a way to wield power in a more direct and directed form. The movement has always been uncertain on whether it wants to do that, and if it does, how to do it. It requires a willingness to work with the system that is, in certain ways, inimical to the founding of Occupy Wall Street. The good news, if they choose to make that transition, is that they don’t need a park to do it. The bad news is that, in most cases, it requires more hierarchy, clearer leaders, a more obvious agenda.
Back in October, I asked Rich Yeselson, a union researcher and a scholar of social movements, what he thought Occupy Wall Street would need to do to survive and succeed. “Whether they will grow larger and sustain themselves beyond these initial street actions will depend upon four things,” Yeselson said. “The work of skilled organizers; the success of those organizers in getting people, once these events end, to meet over and over and over again; whether or not the movement can promote public policy solutions that are organically linked to the quotidian lives of its supporters; and the ability of liberalism’s infrastructure of intellectuals, writers, artists and professionals to expend an enormous amount of their cultural capital in support of the movement.”
I still think that’s right. So then: Can the post-Zuccotti Park incarnation of Occupy Wall Street furnish skilled organizers who are able to keep the protesters involved, come up with solutions — or at least problems — they’re willing to agree on and fight for, and attract the sort of media attention that they need if they’re going to be able to continue forcing their issues into the national conversation?
The odds are probably against it. The odds are against any social movement, always. But it’s probably likelier under these conditions, where the occupiers were cleared from the park all at once, under sympathetic conditions, and so all of them can agree that this is the moment in which to decide what comes next.
Supporters of the Occupy movement are gearing up for a national day of protest and direct action across America, taking in dozens of events from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles.
Thursday has been declared a day of “solidarity” with the Occupy Wall Street activists in New York after their camp in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park was raided and dismantled by police. But it is also aimed at highlighting several of the movement’s broader aims in terms of income inequality and a desperate need for job creation in America’s floundering economy.
The Occupy movement, which began two months ago with the occupation of Zuccotti Park, has since spread to scores of cities and towns across the country, with varying success. It has often rejuvenated left-leaning political activists but also brought down a heavy police response, frequently at the behest of city mayors.
In recent days, police evictions and crackdowns on protesters in New York, Seattle, Berkeley, Portland and other places have caused widespread condemnation of alleged heavy-handedness by police.
In New York, protesters are planning actions all day in each of the city’s five boroughs. A potential early flashpoint will be a rally planned to begin at 7am that will target Wall Street itself, as the protesters seek to disrupt the operations of the New York Stock Exchange before the ringing of the opening bell that signals the start of trading at 9.30am.
Since the protests began, Wall Street has become a virtual permanent protest zone, ringed by steel fences and heavily policed. Later actions are planned to take place across the city’s subway system, as marchers will enter at 16 different stations and begin protesting.
Finally, the day will end with a rally at Foley Square, near New York’s Town Hall, and then a march to the Brooklyn Bridge, where hundreds of protesters were arrested in a previous headline-grabbing mass action.
Bridges will be the focus of some actions in other cities too. In Boston, Detroit, Washington DC, Portland and Seattle, protesters, some allied with union workers and community groups, will march on high-profile bridges in order to highlight the problem of America’s crumbling and underfunded infrastructure.
(…)
The range of activities across America spans a spectrum from the dramatic to the small-scale, including teach-ins, rallies and direct actions aimed at banks and corporations. In Portland, Oregon, protesters plan to target a city bridge and then try to organise flashmobs to go to local banks. In Detroit, protesters are marching from their camp downtown to the city’s municipal centre, where they aim to highlight the brutal impact of government cuts on ordinary citizens.
Ok, so I am still sitting at the heart of the Occupy Amsterdam protest at the Beursplein. It is getting pretty chilly here as I am sitting in front of the laptop at an improvised outdoor media center… we got electricity, internet, cameras and people have been dropping off films, photos and so forth. From where I sit I see people putting up tents, playing music, sitting on blankets, discussing, debating, singing. Those cynics who expected the turnout to be largely composed of hippies, “krakers” and anti-globalisten could not have been more wrong. When I arrived at the Beursplein around 12h in the afternoon, I saw people from all walks of life: families with their children, students, bus-drivers, basically the people next door. With an open podium, many different people of all ages and backgrounds took to the stage all throughout the day, some prepared, some improvising, venting their frustrations, sharing their concerns and thoughts, sharing why they took to the stage on this day.
There we some critical comments regarding the fact that it wasn’t entirely clear what it is the protestors are raising their voice against and that the protest needs to be more focused in order to be effective. Fair point. The issues mentioned here today vary broadly from criticism against the financial system with regard to equality, corruption, lack of transparency, to issues of cut-backs in the area of culture and education and so forth. But people are waking up and that is what matters. I think that there is nothing wrong with that.
At least standing here, raising a voice to ascertain that you actually have a voice, takes it a step further than sitting in front of your computer bitching that it ain’t gonna lead anywhere anyways…what are you achieving with that?
The atmosphere was positive all day, peaceful and definitely something that can be called a beginning. “Power to the people”, the phrase I heard most frequently today, shows that people are concerned -- and these are people from all walks of life as I mentioned above. The feeling is one of “yes, we have been screwed over but remaining silent about it is just not an option anymore”. What can these protests achieve? There is no definite answer, but just keeping quiet and waiting won’t get you anywhere.
I am shivering a bit and my fingers are frozen and it is a bit crazy around here, so my excuses in advance for any typos. I am glad I came, that I got a chance to speak to people, to share in the enthusiasm. Some people are camping at the Beursplein and I admire that commitment because it is getting pretty cold, pretty quickly.
Solutions have to be found. Will they be found here today? Probably not. However, protests like these (the turn-out of which absolutely exceeds my expectations, and probably not just mine), might be stepping stones towards more organised and focused protest. There were many info stands here today where people made an effort to provide information on why they were here, what they are worried about, what they think needs to be done. I hope that we will see more of these protests, gaining more momentum and reaching more people.
Update
The small acts of kindness I have been witnessing tonight are what solidarity is about. Individual people have been bringing blankets, soup, bread, salad, tea, coffee and hot chocolate, fruit etc to take care of all those who have been out on the Beursplein all day and those that are out camping there right now.
Day three of the protest at the Beursplein is coming to an end and still the plein is buzzing with activity. The livestream has been much more reliable – I have been checking it frequently today as I am not in Amsterdam anymore. Reporting in the media leaves much to be desired but the livestream is a good testimony to the activity of Occupy Amsterdam so go check it out!
Morgen is het zo ver: de Nederlandse vertakking van de Occupy-beweging slaat haar vleugels uit te Amsterdam. De Occupy Wall Street-beweging in de V.S. is al wekenlang bezig, in groeiende getale en onder toenemende media-aandacht, een progressieve protestbeweging van formaat te worden. Een linkse variant op de Tea Party.
De concrete doelen zijn wellicht nog onduidelijk, maar het van de Arabische Lente overgenomen permanent kamperen op de heilige grond van het financieel kapitalisme blijkt een succesvolle innovatie in protestmethodes te zijn. Evenals in Caïro, en daarna in Madrid en Barcelona, wordt geëxperimenteerd met directe vormen van democratie en participatie, als alternatief naast de vertegenwoordige democratie. Men maakt bovendien – eindelijk - een vuist tegen die sector die de Westerse maatschappij nu al jaren in haar greep houdt: de financiële industrie. De door haar veroorzaakte financiële crisis wordt betaald door de belastingbetaler, die er het oprollen van de verzorgingsstaat voor terug krijgt. Ondertussen worden de bonussen nog steeds uitgedeeld. Gek genoeg zijn het alleen de meest linkse partijen in het parlement die hiertegen ageren.
Er bestaat regionale variatie – in de V.S. staan drommen politici op de loonlijst van Wall Street, in Griekenland is de staat mede debet aan de ellende – maar overal in het Westen kan de financiële sector uiteindelijk verantwoordelijk worden gehouden voor de huidige economische ellende. In de meeste landen buiten Nederland is de (jeugd)werkloosheid afschuwelijk opgelopen; er groeit nu een ‘verloren generatie’ op zonder uitzicht op een baan. Speculanten houden de eurozone bovendien nog steeds in hun greep. Maar ook in Nederland zijn onder dit kabinet, met haar domme mantra van ‘achttien miljard‘, de gevolgen groots: eliminering van zorg voor (jong)gehandicapten, sociale werkplaatsen, speciaal onderwijs, korten op hoger onderwijs, het verdwijnen van openbaar vervoer, bezuinigingen op kunst en cultuur, en ga zo maar door. Terwijl er tegelijkertijd wél een extreem kostbare subsidie voor rijken in stand wordt gehouden: de hypotheekrenteaftrek.
Ik hoop dan ook dat de Nederlandse Occupy-beweging dáárover zal gaan: de Nederlandse issues, die niettemin niet los van de internationale financiële crisis kunnen worden gezien. Het kabinet-Rutte staat evident niet aan de kant van gedupeerden in de crisis. Er is Nederland meer, meer dan genoeg om massaal tegen te protesteren, waarbij het overkoepelende punt zou kunnen zijn: de onrechtvaardige maatschappelijke verdeling van de kosten van de crisis. Dat geldt in alle landen, en dat is waarin in Nederland die waardeloze, onnadenkende bezuinigingen vandaan komen, terwijl de financiële sector op oude voet verder gaat en regelingen voor het niet-hulpbehoevende deel der natie in stand blijven.
Occupy Amsterdam heeft potentie. Tradionele media als Nieuwsuur, 1Vandaag, DWDD, BNR en AT5 hebben er al aandacht aan besteed. De Twitter loopt, en de Facebook-pagina telt bijna 3500 aanmeldingen. Het is te hopen dat men een algemeen aansprekende, op Nederland toepasbare boodschap weet te formuleren; en het is te hopen dat de boel niet, zoals in Nederland vaker gebeurd, door krakers of andere links-radicale figuren wordt overgenomen. Kritiek op de uitwassen van een doorgeschoten kapitalisme en haar vervlechting met politieke systemen isniet per se links of radicaal; het is pure common sense die iedereen aan kan spreken, wat hij of zij ook stemt.
Volgens mij bestaat er onder veel mensen die zich niet vertegenwoordigd voelen door dit kabinet – en met name onder jongeren – al tijden een grote behoefte om de straat op te gaan. Misschien wordt dit ‘m dan…
Check out Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman in the NYT on the response of both Wall Street financiers and Republican politicians to the Occupy Wall Street protests, aptly titled ‘Panic of the Plutocrats’:
It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.
And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.
And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”
The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
(…)
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.
This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
What I think the best thing of Occupy Wall Street is is that it finally puts the financial malpractices of an industry very much related to the actual top 1 percent of super-rich people in the US, in combination with their rescue by 99 percent of tax payers (i.e., the public), on the democratic agenda.
But the fundamental injustice in pretty much the entire Western world nowadays is the fact that the welfare state, a scheme for the public good, is being dismantled as a result of costs made to save the financial industry. An industry that through its own corrupt schemes, not beneficial to anyone but themselves, has itself created the greatest economic recession since the nineteen-thirties. They should not be awarded bonuses. And poor, sick and unemployed people should not have to suffer for them. There is nothing ‘left-wing’ about that. It’s common sense. That’s why I would love to see these protests spread to Europe, even though I myself am in favour of a regulated form of capitalism.
Finally – not from Paul Krugman – to point out empirically how disparagingly vast the gap between the top 1 percent and the lower 90 percent in the US is, check out these stats from Mother Jones. The first shows the composition of the top 1 percent; the second shows their wealth.
I mean, seriously. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of wealth inequality. But you don’t need to be a socialist to understand that such a huge gap between rich, middle class (if not already vaporized) and poor is not beneficial to any society, let alone a democratic one. And this gap has widened exponentially in the last thirty years, it wasn’t there before. The most fucked up societies are the ones with sudden, huge material inequalities. With the exception of the UK, Europe’s not as bad as the US in this respect – but getting close.
Now that they’re growing, spreading and getting some more serious attention, here’s a couple of news articles and blog posts that I thought were worthwhile to get some insight into how the Occupy Wall Street movement developed, what the background is, and what they seem to express. There’s also some stuff that compares them to the Tea Party (as a progressive variant, of course), and people speculating at how this might help Obama and the Democratic Party. In short, it provides some perspectives that might be interesting or useful.
The Occupy Wall Street protests, for their part, shine a spotlight on an industry that has attracted mass disgust yet escaped accountability. Almost everybody hates Wall Street, but the anger at Wall Street was deflected to the financial bailout, and thereby (even though it preceded him) to Obama. In a development that may have appeared shocking three years ago, Wall Street has resumed its place of privilege in Washington. Politicians are courting the financial industry, its barons speaking out with pre-crisis confidence. The Republican Party has openly pledged to kill the Dodd–Frank regulations.
The protests, for all this incoherence, restore Wall Street to a central place in the economic narrative. Here is the financial industry, not just as recipient of taxpayer funds but as originator and aggravator of the crisis. The protests may not have an agenda, but they do not need an agenda other than to return political focus onto Wall Street.
The larger role of the protests, should they continue, ought to be to reestablish the terms of the political debate. Historically, liberalism best succeeds when compared against a radical alternative. In the thirties and sixties, fear of extremism and mob violence made business elites eager to accept liberal compromise designed to preserve the system. Since 2009, the question of how to respond to the economy has been framed as a debate between meliorative liberalism and vicious reaction. In this climate, Wall Street has been howling about Obama’s mild verbal scolding of the industry, his plans to impose some measure of regulation upon it, and ever-so-slightly raise the tax levels of the very rich.
The protests can usefully re-center the debate. When Wall Street CEOs are expressing even tepid fear for their personal safety, terms like “class warfare” might start to be reserved for more stringent measures than the return of Clinton-era tax rates
It’s not the arrests that convinced me that “Occupy Wall Street” was worth covering seriously. Nor was it their press strategy, which largely consisted of tweeting journalists to cover a small protest that couldn’t say what, exactly, it hoped to achieve. It was a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other.
(…)
These are not rants against the system. They’re not anarchist manifestos. They’re not calls for a revolution. They’re small stories of people who played by the rules, did what they were told, and now have nothing to show for it. Or, worse, they have tens of thousands in debt to show for it.
(…)
Let’s be clear. This isn’t really the 99 percent. If you’re in the 85th percentile, for instance, your household is making more than $100,000, and you’re probably doing okay. If you’re in the 95th percentile, your household is making more than $150,000. But then, these protests really aren’t about Wall Street, either. There’s not a lot of evidence that these people want a class war, or even particularly punitive measures on the rich. The only thing that’s clear from their missives is that they want the economy to start working for them, too.
(…)
But you look around and the reality is not everyone is suffering. Wall Street caused this mess, and the government paid off their debts and helped them rake in record profits in recent years. The top 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation’s income and 40 percent of its wealth. There are a lot of people who don’t seem to be doing everything they’re supposed to do, and it seems to be working out just fine for them.
(…)
But this is why I’m taking Occupy Wall Street — or, perhaps more specifically, the ‘We Are The 99 Percent’ movement — seriously. There are a lot of people who are getting an unusually raw deal right now. There is a small group of people who are getting an unusually good deal right now. That doesn’t sound to me like a stable equilibrium.
The organizers of Occupy Wall Street are fighting to upend the system. But what gives their movement the potential for power and potency is the masses who just want the system to work the way they were promised it would work. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans are really struggling. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans want a revolution. It’s that 99 percent of Americans sense that the fundamental bargain of our economy — work hard, play by the rules, get ahead — has been broken, and they want to see it restored.
I’m embarrassed to admit my first reaction to Occupy Wall Street was cynicism. Along with some other folks on Twitter when it began Sept. 17, I wondered aloud why it started on a Saturday, when Wall Street was quiet. I couldn’t find a list of its goals. Visiting New York a few days later, I walked along Wall Street in the rain trying to find protesters, but though there were barricades all along that dark canyon, and cops everywhere, nobody was protesting; I later saw a few dozen people among tents at Liberty Plaza, but by that time I was running to catch my plane home.
The next day, the New York Police Department cruelly pepper-sprayed female protesters, and suddenly the movement came alive. Ever since, I’ve been struck by the good sense the protesters have used in dealing with the police (in contrast with the poor sense of some of the cops): They are not making them the enemy. In fact, as 700 people were being arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday, they were chanting at the cops: “We’re fighting for your pensions!” It didn’t keep the protesters from getting arrested, but it kept them on the moral and political high ground.
The over-reaction of the police, the restraint of the demonstrators and the irresistible enthusiasm of the Occupy Wall Street crowd now has powerful allies streaming to support the movement. On Wednesday evening, major New York unions, including SEIU, the American Federation of Teachers and the Transit Workers Union, will join what is likely to be the biggest protest yet. TWU head John Samuelsen filed a federal injunction to stop the police from using city buses to transport protesters, the way they did on Saturday. “We intend to stop the NYPD from pressing our people into service to transport people who shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” Samuelsen told the New York Daily News.
MoveOn is backing the expanded Oct. 5 Wall Street protest, and national union leaders, including the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka, have endorsed the movement. Trumka’s “been publicly supportive and I know a number of local unions are getting directly involved,” says AFL-CIO spokesman Josh Goldstein. “As for our direct involvement, we want this to continue in the organic way it has. How we can be supportive and not overshadow it is important.” The federation’s executive board will vote Wednesday on whether to make a formal endorsement.
Even some politicians are beginning to express support for the demonstration. The co-chairs of the House Progressive Caucus, Raul Grijalva and Rep. Keith Ellison, released a statement supporting it on Tuesday. “We have been inspired by the growing grassroots movements on Wall Street and across the country,” the pair wrote. “We join the calls for corporate accountability and expanded middle-class opportunity.” Asked whether President Obama is following the protests, press secretary Jay Carney said he was sure he was, although they hadn’t spoken about it. Then he added, “to the extent that people are frustrated with the economic situation, we understand.” Don’t expect more from the White House, but it’s almost certain other liberal Democrats will begin to speak out to support Occupy Wall Street, unless the Wednesday protest goes awry.
(…)
Yes, young people are on the front lines of protest again, but this time, they’re more intrinsically sympathetic, and emblematic of what’s gone wrong in our country. Youth unemployment is the highest in decades. Only 55 percent of Americans aged 16 to 29 are employed today, compared to 67 percent in 2000. A third to a half of African-American youth, depending on the under-30 subgroup examined, is unemployed. College educated students are leaving with unprecedented levels of debt; about 15 percent of student loans are currently in default. On the movement Tumblr blog, “We are the 99 percent” – the 99 percent of the country left out of the prosperity monopolized by the top 1 percent – the voices and photos of unemployed and underemployed young people are some of the most riveting.
Political action on the ground can (…) lead to increased presence at the polls. The Tea Party mobilized so many voters because of its activism prior to the 2010 mid-terms. Asking a political group to go back in time to get voters to the polls is absurd. Telling people to just shut up and quietly vote for one of the two parties is to misunderstand democracy. It’s more than just voting.
Furthermore, as Matt Yglesias convincingly argued, the lack of a mobilized left and a mobilized youth movement is largely the fault of Democratic leadership, including president Obama. Matt writes, that in light of the Occupy Wall Street protests “it’s hard not to be reminded of the lost opportunity to mobilize a left-wing popular movement back in the winter of 2008-2009 and the spring of 2009. That was a time when Congress was psychologically prepared to address the issues of joblessness, the availability of health care and education, and the ecological sustainability of the global economy.”
(…)
Writing off protesters because they’re young, because they weren’t politically active before, or because their demographic didn’t hit the polls as hard as the already-organized conservative base is really off-base.
This sort of condescending nonsense was hurled at the Tea Party. That movement has effectively pushed the entire national conversation the right, and the Republican party along with it. I respect the activism and drive that they drummed up to achieve that. They didn’t do it by just voting either.
After Tunisia and Egypt, we were mightily inspired by the fact that a few smart people using Facebook and Twitter can put out calls and suddenly get huge numbers of people to get out into the streets and start giving vent to their anger. And then we keep on looking at the sorry state of the political left in the United States and how the Tea Party is passionately strutting their stuff while the left is sort of hiding somewhere. We felt that there was a real potential for a Tahrir moment in America because a) the political left needs it and b) because people are losing their jobs, people are losing their houses, and young people cannot find a job. We felt that the people who gave us this mess — the financial fraudsters on Wall Street — haven’t even been brought to justice yet. We felt this was the right moment to instigate something.
(…)
We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote “The Society of the Spectacle.” The idea is that if you have a very powerful meme — a very powerful idea — and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come out of.
1968 was more of a cultural kind of revolution. This time I think it’s much more serious. We’re in an economic crisis, an ecological crisis, living in a sort of apocalyptic world, and the young people realize they don’t really have a viable future to look forward to. This movement that’s beginning now could well be the second global revolution that we’ve been dreaming about for the last half a century.
(…)
Originally we thought that the idea of one demand was very important. There’s been a debate going on between the one-demand vision and this other vision that is playing itself out right now on Wall Street. I think it’s a wonderful debate and there are good pointers on both sides. Currently this leaderless, demandless movement — that is still growing in leaps and bounds — I think it is fine the way it is. After these assemblies have been conducted and debates have been had in cities all around America, demands will emerge. These demands will be specific things like reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act or a 1 percent tax on financial transactions or the banning of high-frequency trading. We will get into specifics, just give us time.
(…)
The political left has always had problems with this. All my life I’ve been sitting in meetings where loony guys get up and talk, and eventually very little happens. This is the kind of weight that is dragging the political left down. We don’t seem to have the clarity of vision that for example the Tea Party has. This may be our undoing again. This whole movement may fizzle out in a bunch of loony lefty kind of bullshit.
Then again, at the same time, I’ve been in daily touch with dozens and dozens of people in cities all around the world who are involved in this. And I have a feeling that because of the Internet and a different kind of mentality that young people have, a horizontal way of thinking about things, this movement may not just come up with some really good demands and put incredible people pressure on our politicians, but a more beautiful thing may come out of this movement: a new model of democracy, a new model of how activism can work, of how the people can have a radical democracy and have some of their demands met. This new model may well be a new kind of a horizontal thing that in some strange way works like the Internet works.
The Occupy Wall Street protests have now grown large enough to attract the attention of the Right Wing Distortion Machine. The guy above, pressed by a Fox News interviewer, nevertheless provides some brilliant rhetorical opposition to the propaganda channel. If the movement’s in need of a spokesman, they might solicit this hero.
The We are the 99 percent tumblr, collecting hundreds of stories of people suffering in the current economic depression, may illuminate some of the sentiments behind the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Here in the Netherlands (the country that we write this blog out of), people may be largely oblivious to it, as a dictatorship may take over here tomorrow and all Dutch people will still sit outside on terraces enjoying their drinks. But in the rest of the world, Western and non-Western, mass demonstrations have for months been at the order of the day. These demonstrations -- whether it is in Egypt or Madrid -- are primarily attended by the young. This is Generation F*cked -- a generation already suffering from mass unemployment, that is now also hit by the financial crisis.
It is a grave injustice that, for instance in Europe, massive budget cuts are made and the welfare state is pretty much done away with, to save a capitalist financial system that was wreckaged by a few corporate elites. I’m no socialist, but you can’t ignore the structural wrongness of the current neoliberal political-economic structure that has been in the making for thirty years and now seems to be at its apex. Why, really, should the public at large suffer to save free-for-all financial capitalism? There is something rather wrong with that.
It is therefore heartwarming to see that throughout the Western world, inspired by the Arab Spring, young people have taken to street to semi-permanently occupy public spaces and form something of an alternative, proto-democratic movement. The main examples are the acampadas in Madrid and Barcelona, of course, inspired by Tahrir Square. People here are camping out, debating, discussing, having fun, united by a shared loss of trust in the system. And since two weeks, the global heart of financial capitalism, Wall Street, is also subject to a similar youth movement: that of Occupy Wall Street.
The funny thing is that it’s almost completely being ignored by most established media. Of newspapers, only The Guardianpays serious attention to it. While the goals of the movement aren’t really clear, everybody at least wants to show signs of protest to the system that through sheer irresponsibility and recklessness is causing continuing mass suffering. Wanna know you manages your pension money? Who finances, in the US, every politician that wants to get elected? Who through malpractice has brought the entire Western economy to a halt? Occupy Wall Street.
So here’s how to inform yourself on the movement, that is gathering more crowds everyday (I read this morning that the unions are planning to join in) and keeps demonstrating. These are not only young people, by the way. Check out:
Check out The Guardian‘s live blog. Glenn Greenwald -- neither, as far I know, a utopian, “leftist” or radical but like many people in the wake of the financial crisis simply concerned with the structural injustice of the current financial system, and happy that at least someone is sending a message - has the following commentary:
Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power -- in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions — is destroying financial security for everyone else? Beyond that, criticizing protesters for the prominence of police brutality stories is pure victim-blaming (and, independently, having police brutality highlighted is its own benefit).
And before that, about Wall Street’s hold on American (in this case, Democratic) politics:
Sharp is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, who in 1973 published a book about methods of non-violent revolution called The Politics of Nonviolent Action. In the book (which I didn’t read), Sharp presents an analysis of the state as a power complex designed to keep citizens subservient, through a variety of political and administrative institutions (courts, policy, regulatory bodies) and cultural norms (religion, leadership cult, moral norms).
If that doesn’t sound too original (think Foucault and every theorist concerned with despotism and state power since Hobbes), what’s special about Sharp is that he presents a whole list of possible methods of nonviolent resistance. From boycotts to strikes, to using colors, to sit-ins, to empowering women and children, to employing peaceful symbols, Sharp seems to draw on methods and techniques of protest and revolution from Louis Blanqui to Gandhi to the New Left.
Now, I’m a bit hesitant to say that this person was “the brain” behind all those complex revolutions, and have the idea that Sharp’s influence is exaggerated a bit much by Western commentators (like as usual at the NYT). Yet, his ideas have been denounced by dictators ranging from Hugo Chavez to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Sharp’s other important book From Dictatorship to Democracy, moreover, seems to have influenced civic youth movements from Serbia (during the overthrow of Milosevic) to Ukraine to Belarus, who again are said to have taught nonviolent revolutionary skills to each other and to the Arab youth protesters.
So anyway, check the trailer below, interesting stuff!
HOW TO START A REVOLUTION is a new documentary film revealing how one man’s work has helped millions of people achieve freedom in the face of oppression and tyranny.
Gene Sharp is a shy, modest and little-known man. But his work has inspired a generation of people to challenge dictators through non-violent action in a tidal wave of revolutionary spirit and reform that has swept from Eastern Europe, though Asia and to the Middle East and North Africa.
18 months ago we started work on this feature-length documentary. Through the candid and intimate testimony of the people responsible for non-violent revolutions our film seeks to tell the story of how people power can be used topple dictators.
To make this film our director (Ruaridh Arrow pictured above) slept overnight in Tahrir Square in Cairo at the height of the February revolution. He’s met the leaders of the Syrian pro-democracy movement and the people responsible for overthrowing dictators in Serbia and Ukraine. He has spent time with Gene and his colleagues as they spread their message of effective non-violent revolution.
The film reveals how the leaders of an uprising in one country train the participants in the next and how social media now threatens dictators and tyrants around the world in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago.
Not only is this documentary an important film of record of the civil uprisings that have shaken the world in the last decade but we also hope it will help inspire future pro-democracy movements develop their strategies for non-violent revolution in the face of apparently overwhelming odds.
Stuff like this gets the historian in me very excited. The Guardian has a cool, interactive, quasi-3D timeline about the events in the Arab world ever since the Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on December 20, 2010. Scroll joyfully along everything that happened since then, like on a rollercoaster.
I’m thinking about how to expand this… Moving images, documents, links, connections. And imagine such a thing for other historical events, like the French or Russian revolutions.
After mass demonstrations (and weeks of mass demonstrations before that), the regime of President Saleh is crumbling from within: the second most important man of the country, General Mohsen, has defected and is joining the protesters, taking large sections of the army with him. Ambassadors around the world are standing down, and the French – apparently the French have something to make up for, being very busy rebranding themselves as at the forefront of revolutions – have said the departure of President Saleh is ‘inevitable’.
After 32 years in power Yemen‘s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, looks destined to become the next Arab leader to be toppled as 11 military commanders, including a senior general, defected from the regime, promising to protect anti-government protesters in the capital.
General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, a long-time confidant of the president and head of the Yemeni army in the country’s north-west, announced he would support “the peaceful revolution” by sending soldiers under his command to protect the thousands gathered in the capital demanding for Saleh to step down.
“According to what I’m feeling, and according to the feelings of my partner commanders and soldiers … I announce our support and our peaceful backing to the youth revolution,” Ali Mohsen said via a video statement released before noon.
Ali Mohsen’s pledge opened the floodgates to a stream of defections from the regime. Scores of ambassadors, regional governors, editors of government newspapers, prominent businessmen and senior members of the ruling party are among those who have either quit or announced their allegiance to protesters in the past few hours.
Within hours, seven Yemeni ambassadors – to Japan, Syria, the Czech Republic, Jordan, China, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait – announced they were standing down.
“The regime is crumbling, there is very little support left for the president now,” said Mohammed al-Naqeeb, head of the ruling party in Aden who resigned this afternoon.
Minutes after Ali Mohsen’s defection, tanks belonging to the republican guards, an elite force led by the president’s son Ahmed Ali, rolled into the streets of Sana’a, setting the stage for a standoff between defectors and loyalists.
Republican guard tanks took up a strategic location across the city at Saleh’s residence, the ministry of defence and at the central bank. Meanwhile, tanks of Ali Mohsen’s 1st armoured division took positions elsewhere in the city.
At first protesters gathered at Sana’a University were unsure what to make of the general’s pledge, with many fearing an increased military presence might mean further attacks.
But confusion soon gave way to jubilation as hundreds of soldiers from the 1st armoured division arrived on foot, greeted by protesters who kissed them and hoisted them onto their shoulders.
Soon a line of policemen, soldiers, and businessmen had formed each waiting their turn to step up onto a huge stage and announce their resignations to a roaring crowd of thousands.
“We’ve bought you a birthday present ya Ali, it’s a plane ticket to Saudi,” shouted Haeman Saeed, a leading Yemeni businessman after announcing his resignation from the ruling party.
“The army are with you,” roared Abdallah al-Qahdi, a senior military general from Aden who was fired from his position last week for refusing to put down a peaceful demonstration.
Al-Qahdi said many regime insiders had been waiting for someone like Ali Mohsen to lead the way, and he expected most of the army to have defected by nightfall.
The outcome remains unclear. Analysts say there may soon be a violent standoff within the military between those who have defected and the significant portions of the army still under the president’s control.
“Unfortunately the president and his sons still have control over powerful sections of the military including the republican guard and the air force,” said Yemeni political analyst Abdul Irayani.
“We are all praying that Saleh leaves quickly and quietly to prevent the situation deteriorating rapidly.”
Others suggest the resignations may have been negotiated behind the scenes.
“I believe this is a step towards a transitional military government in Yemen,” said Abdullah Al-Faqih, a professor at Sana’a University.
The army split followed Saleh’s decision to sack his entire government after tens of thousands of mourners flooded the streets of the Yemeni capital on Sunday in a mass funeral for the 52 protesters killed on Friday in a sniper attack by loyalists.
The president asked the cabinet to serve as a caretaker government until he forms a new administration.
Piling further pressure on Saleh, the country’s most powerful tribal confederation also called on him to step down.
Sheikh Sadiq al-Ahmar, the leader of Hashed, which includes Saleh’s tribe, issued a statement on Sunday asking the president to respond to the people’s demands and leave peacefully. It was co-signed by several religious leaders.
Ali Mohsen is between 50 and 60 years old, and is generally perceived to be the second most powerful man in Yemen.
Most reports indicate Ali Mohsen is the cousin of Saleh’s two half-brothers, although there is much confusion on this matter, with some claims that he is himself a half-brother to Saleh.
It’s gone a bit unnoticed because of the catastrophic events in Japan, but just a few days ago, Saudi Arabia actually invaded the tiny country of Bahrain. The Sunni Bahraini Al-Khalifa royal house called in the help of their religious brethren from across the border to suppress the Shiite majority in the country. In other words, the despots of one country are invited to squash the nascent democratization of another country. Iraq, Kuwait anyone?
And it’s not just symbolic: Saudi Arabian troops and tanks are sweeping the streets of Bahrain’s capital Manama, causing casualties and destruction. Isn’t this about as big an event as the civil war in Libya?
I am old enough to remember the days when the entire world stopped dead in its tracks as one Middle East autocracy invaded a tiny neighboring state, and the US corralled a massive coalition to repel it. From that moment on, because in part of the threat Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait posed to the Saudi oil fields, the US was far more deeply enmeshed in the Middle East’s military and political equation than ever before.
Now fast forward to a thousand troops with tanks streaming over the causeway that connects Saudi Arabia with Bahrain. Now, obviously this is different in as much as the Sunni Bahrainian royalty invited the troops to come in to protect them from the protests of the Shiite majority. But to my mind, that makes it just as bad. A military from one Sunni country has invaded another to suppress democracy, because it might reflect, for the first time, the wishes of the Shiite majority, rather than Sunni despots.
(…)
This strikes me as more significant regionally than Libya’s internal revolts. Since when does the international community stand by as one country’s military invades another and kills some of its citizens? The answer is a pretty simple one: when the invading country controls 25 percent of the world’s oil supply.
Opposition groups in Cameroon are planning “Egypt-like” protests Wednesday to call for the president’s ouster after almost three decades in power.
President Paul Biya is running for re-election later this year.
“People yearn to see a change in government. He’s been in place for 28 years,” said Kah Walla, 45, an opposition member who is also running for president.
Walla, one of the main organizers, said protests are planned in Douala and the capital, Yaounde.
“Our main reason is to ask for free and fair elections,” she said. “We also have other demands … Cameroon has a lot of resources yet our people are living in poverty.”
(Colonel Gaddafi, Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Yemeni president Saleh in for them better days)-
- For reports on the situation in Libya on March 2, go here -
- Update: Al Jazeera’s liveblog of Wednesday February 23th: here. Al Jazeera’s liveblog of Thursday February 24th: here.
- Update: Canada’s The Globe and Mail has put together a solid infographic summarizing the sources of some of the influence Gaddafi enjoys in other parts of Africa:
- Update: A group calling itself with Libya Outreach Group is calling on the international community to undertake a series of concrete steps to show solidarity with the Libyan people in the face of what they are calling “war crimes against Libya”. They “ask all nations to stand with the Libyan people by”:
1. Establishing a no-fly zone to prevent Gaddafi from using the air-force against the Libyan people.
2. Calling on the United Nations Security Council to take decisive action and invoke Chapter 7 to stop the massacre of innocent civilians, and deployment of International Peace-keeping troops.
3. Facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid and relief supplies such as medicine, blood, food, and other basic provisions to the people of Libya.
4. Freezing the international assets of the Gaddafi family as well as senior officials.
5. Indicting Gaddafi for crimes against humanity and trying him in the International Criminal Court.
6. The immediate deployment of U.N. troops to confirm reports of crimes against humanity.
Will the western world respond? While the Europe and the US have been much quicker to condemn Gaddafi’s murderous ways, they have been reticent to move beyond that, falling far short of any action under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Meanwhile, reports of violence and killings continue.
- Update: Gaddafi is now speeching (watch on Al Jazeera). Like many dictators, he is known for his long speeches, so it could take a while. Among a lot of jibberish, he has said “I will die as a martyr”.
In addition to the once again striking setup of this speech – a brownish gold robe, a model airplane above his head, and a crumbled bathroom-like setting – what’s notable are the long, seemingly nervous silences as he’s gathering for words. The great dictator Gaddafi looks pretty stricken to me.
- Update: Lol, a technical fault, and some employee comes in! What a weird, rambling speech.
- Update: Ok, that was it. That stuff about drugged youth inciting protests seems like a bit of projection on the part of Gadaffi to me. Compared to this guy, Mubarak was an example of sobriety.
- Update: Ben Wedeman, the only foreign journalist in Libya, reports the eastern part of the country is in the hands of the opposition. Parts of the army have defected to the opposition and government troops have retreated, burning ammunition depots on their way.
- Update: Al Jazeera reports a Libyan naval ship has been spotted on the coast of Malta. Italian and Malta marine are monitoring the ship. No information on what kind of ship it is or what it’s doing on the coast of Malta.
- Update: Apparently Gaddafi is soon going to address the people of Libya again. Watch Al Jazeera’s livestream. We will take wagers in the comments here as to 1) is it shorter or longer than the 15 second appearance of last night; and, 2) what video will today’s appearance be most easily mashed up with?
- Update: Libya’s ambassador to the United States Ali Aujali has defected from what he calls a ‘dictatorship regime’ among what Al Jazeera are now calling ‘en mass defections’ of Libyan foreign diplomats. In addition to the US, diplomats have Libyan diplomats have resigned from posts in the United Nations, the Arab League, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Poland, India and Bangladesh and reportedly other countries. Al Jazeera has complied some of their statements about their resignations here. Some of the best include the Ambassador to Malaysia stating plainly: ”We are not loyal to him, we are loyal to the Libyan people”. The Ambassador to Indonesia has also weighed in forcefully: ”Soldiers are killing unarmed civilians mercilessly. Using heavy weaponry, fighter jets and mercenaries against its own people. It is not acceptable. I have enough of it. I don’t tolerate it anymore.” They worth a look to see just how strongly these close allies of the regime have turned against, including calling for Gaddafi’s prosecution.
- Update: Ben Wedeman from CNN is the first Western journalist to cross the border from Egypt to enter Libya. Follow his tweets here.
The scene on the Libyan side of the border was jarring. Men – and teenage boys – with clubs, pistols and machine guns were trying to establish a modicum of order.
Hundreds of Egyptian workers were trying to get out, their meager possessions – bags, blankets, odds and ends – piled high on top of minibuses.
Egyptian border officials told us that 15,000 people had crossed from Libya on Monday alone.
“Welcome to free Libya,” said one of the armed young men now controlling the border.
- Update: Check out this mash-up of Rihanna and Gadaffi, who, by the way, in that clip according to Stephen Colbert looked like a ‘worn out Lionel Richie imitator’.
The Qaddafi regime has made several strategic errors since (…) 2006. The most obvious has been the retreat from Seif’s plans for reform. (…)
A second mistake has been the lack of attention to the poverty of the population. (…)
A third mistake has been to ignore the needs of the young. When a third of the population is under fifteen and a further large proportion is under twenty-five, the young become central to coherent governance. (…)
It is striking that the protests began in the eastern part of Libya. The area around Benghazi has always been the one least under Qaddafi’s thumb, and most of his problems have originated there. (…)
A post-Qaddafi Libya could easily be roiled in internal battles, ultimately dividing into several smaller countries, each dominated by local tribes. (…) Modern Libya is an artificial construct, a remnant of colonialism. The glue holding it together is failing, and the warnings of chaos are real. (…)
We all understand that there is strong opposition to Qaddafi, but it’s not clear whether there is any internal coherence to that opposition. (…) Libya does not have any real opposition leaders; it hardly has any internal opposition as we generally define the word. If these protests are successful, and if Qaddafi flees, as there are already rumors he has, then who will take over? Libya has another important difference from Egypt: it’s a tiny country, with a population of just over six million. Even Tunisia has a population of over ten million. All the educated and competent people in Libya know one another, and most of them have worked in one way or another with the Qaddafi regime. If Qaddafi goes, there are not enough trained bureaucrats or statesmen to construct a new Libyan government that is not an extension of the old one, and this fact alone could propel Libya back into some form of tribalism.
- Original post: After a Monday of protests and an extreme crackdown by Colonel Gaddafi employing fighter jets, marine vessels and armed thugs, bordering on genocide, the Libyan uprising continues today. Diplomats and senior officials have defected, army officers as well, and important tribes have joined the protests. Check yesterday’s liveblog here. Today, we’ll continue to cover events as time allows it by providing links and posting remarkable happenings here.
For the best, up to date coverage, however, check the following links:
Liveblog Al Jazeera here, livestream Al Jazeera here, Al Arabiya here
Live/protest blog Libya February 17th here, Twitter hashtag #feb17 here
Liveblog The Guardian here, livestream BBC here, CNN here
The NYT reports that the protests – which could perhaps now better be called civil strife – are continuing today.
Libya appeared to slip further from the grip of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi on Tuesday, as opposition forces in eastern Libya moved to consolidate control of the region, arming themselves with weapons taken from security warehouses, and fighting continued in Tripoli, witnesses said.
In Tripoli, the capital, the government was striking back at protesters challenging Colonel Qaddafi’s 40-year rule. Security forces and militiamen backed by helicopters and warplanes besieged parts of the city overnight, according to witnesses and news reports from Tripoli.
Fighting was heavy at times on Monday night, witnesses said, and the streets were thick with special forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi fighting alongside mercenaries. Roving the streets in trucks, they shot freely as planes dropped what witnesses described as “small bombs” and helicopters fired on protesters.
Hundreds of Qaddafi supporters took over the central Green Square in the capital after truckloads of militiamen arrived and opened fire on protesters, scattering them. Residents said they now feared to leave their houses.
(…)
With pro-government security forces either absent or defecting to join the opposition in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city and the center of the week-long rebellion, citizens armed with guns organized into informal security committees, a resident reached by telephone said. Supermarkets and warehouses were open, as were local hospitals, caring for hundreds of people wounded during the government crackdown of the weekend, before defections to the people from the military brought a lull in the violence.
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